[Edu-sig] OLPC (was FYI: PataPata postmortem link)

[Tom Hoffman]

On 11/30/06, Dethe Elza <delza at livingcode.org> wrote:
> On 29-Nov-06, at 4:45 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>

> I'd love to write software for the OLPC, but I don't have one
> available.  The virtual version is distributed as a VMWare image,
> which is great as far as it goes.  The VMWare player hasn't been
> ported to my computer yet (Mac Intel) and the image doesn't load in
> Parallels (the VM I use for running Windows for testing).  I've
> signed up for the beta program with VMWare, but haven't heard back
> from them.  So unless I want to spend several hundred dollars on a
> computer to run a simulation of the $100 laptop, I'm out of the running.

Actually, the OLPC provides a standard disk image you can use with
qemu.  I packaged one of those up last week as a vmware appliance and
posted it to my blog, which has subsequently been downloaded an
zillion times, since it suddenly made it easy for average Windows
users to have a crack at it.

So yeah, on one hand, you could say the OLPC folks could be doing a
better job of marketing (like reaching out to those Windows users
themselves), but on the other hand, the main criticism of the project
is probably that it is all hype and marketing, so either way, they
lose ;-).

No matter how you slice it though, it does seem to be more tricky to
get an emulator for it running on the Mac.  qemu should work, albiet
more slowly than Parallels.

The main wiki page for OLPC emulation is here:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation

--Tom