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

[Dethe Elza]

On 30-Nov-06, at 5:39 PM, Tom Hoffman wrote:

> 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.

And OS X users too...

> 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 ;-).

At least they're not in Kathy Sierra's "Zone of Mediocrity."  As long  
as folks either love 'em or hate 'em, then chances are they're doing  
something important.

> 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.

Qool.  I haven't looked into running other emulators in a while.

> The main wiki page for OLPC emulation is here:
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation

Alright.  I didn't know about that.  I had seen a blog post (maybe  
yours, can't remember off-hand) that linked to images for VMWare.   
But the page you link to above has instructions for getting it  
running under Parallels, so I'll see if I can't get that working.

Thanks for the pointers!

--Dethe

"...coding isn't the poor handmaiden of design or analysis. Coding is
where your fuzzy, comfortable ideas awaken in the harsh dawn of reality.
It is where you learn what your computer can do. If you stop coding,
you stop learning."     Kent Beck, Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns