They finally came! My friend Raj Bhargava bought my two sons laptops from the OLPC project around the holiday season. Unfortunately due to the high demand, the project ran out of laptops and we have been waiting 3 months for them to arrive. They finally came on Friday. This was part of the buy one, donate one program so two other lucky children in the world have computers now too thanks to Raj's generosity. For those of you not familiar with the project, this was born out of Nicholas Negroponte's MIT lab to bring a $100 dollar laptop to children the world over. While they have not quite hit the $100 dollar cost, they are under $200. The laptop's are called XO laptops.

The laptops use low power, are extremely rugged and kid friendly and run Linux. The interface is called Sugar and is very different than a Windows type of metaphor. It takes some getting used to, but my kids seem to have picked it up pretty quickly. The wireless networking is great. In addition to regular wireless access points, the computers network in a "mesh" network that allow them to share information and chat with each other with the pre-installed software. My kids discovered chat pretty quickly and now sit next to each other chatting away over the computer. Why they just don't talk to each other I guess is part of the magic of computers. It also has a nice Mozilla based browser, a word processor, video camera and a bunch of other software. The boys are having a blast using the machines and take them everywhere. All of their friends who see them want one too, so maybe it will lead to more folks joining the buy one, give one program.

My kids are also really into webkinz. One of the first things they wanted to do was get on the webkinz site with their new machines. The webkinz site uses flash extensively. The XO laptop though only comes with open software, free is not enough. So they use an open source flash plug in, but it does not play all flash files. You can download and install the flash plug in for Linux, but this takes a little behind the scenes Linux command line work. So Dad told them to go to sleep and when they woke up, their machines would play webkinz in the morning.

It has been years since I had to work on a Linux/Unix system in the command line. Actually since I first started TriStar Web hosting with my partners and a few nights a week, I was the designated graveyard shift technical support dude. Even then, I knew only enough to get myself in trouble. Kill a process, grep files, chmod permissions, stuff like that. These laptops, while they run Linux, have a different kind of file and directory structure as to where they keep and store files and the naming system is weird. Files are truncated into numeric named files that bear no resemblance to the file name that shows up in the Sugar GUI. You have to go by the date created and size to recognize the file you are looking for and then you can rename it. The script I was trying to run got messed up in the word processor that comes with the laptop, so I had to go into Vi and fix that. It has been a while since I have used Vi too. Than the script did not have execute permissions set, so I had to do that. Well I have to tell you that this all took a few hours, but when the boys woke up in the morning, they turned on their computers and went to webkinz world and just as Dad promised, everything worked fine. I wish all of their wishes and wants were solved so easily!