Hi,
Last Friday (17/04/2009) evening I presented the XO laptop to the
Shanghai Linux Users Group (SHLUG) in Shanghai, China. Despite the
laptop being manufactured in China, none of those in attendance had
ever had a chance to get their hands on one. Most everybody knew about
it however and the inevitable, "What is happening with OLPC and
Microsoft?", "Hasn't OLPC been a failure?" questions came up. ("In the
case of words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true,
beneficial, but unendearing and disagreeable to others, he has a sense
of the proper time for saying them.")
Intel develops the Classmate here in Shanghai, and the group had hands
on with that a few weeks ago. After my presentation, most everyone
agreed the XO was superior. There was great disappointment that the
product is not available for retail purchase. (Incidentally the guy
from Intel who did that prior demo was in the room too!)
The meeting was conducted in a Chamate (Taiwanese imported "teahouse"
chain) near People's Square. Chamate offers free Internet access via
WiFi but, all too typically, the XO running staging build 801 refused
to negotiate a connection successfully. To this audience, switching to
a virtual console, killing NetworkManager and using iwconfig and
dhclient to connect successfully actually increased interest in the XO!
I attempted to interest several developers who work on Linux device
drivers for embedded systems to help with the project of getting the
OLPC power management, DCON, GPIO, audio, etc. kernel patches accepted
upstream. I described the new "Fedora XO" community that is coming
into being to keep the hardware alive, and there was interest in
helping out. But I'm not holding my breath, after all these guys can't
even get an XO. Not to mention these guys are already working like
slaves 12 hours per day here. It's management style X in China I'm
afraid... (they even have developers punch time cards, which just
reminds me of the Flintstones...)
http://picasaweb.google.com/wuyongwei/SHLUG090417?feat=directlink#
http://picasaweb.google.com/cnxiaoma/SLUG#5325671483978787762
http://groups.google.com/group/shlug
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_theory_Y
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path#Right_speech
I lectured for about 30 minutes, and then I handed the XO out to the
crowd and answered questions. Please don't ask me to translate any of
the Chinese in the above links :-)
Scott
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