The One Laptop Per Child project is certainly divisive. The press has largely presented the project as one of big promises and few results. But the project's signature laptop -- the sturdily built, low-cost, resource-constrained XO-1 -- has never failed to capture the imagination of techies.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, for example, said last year that he is a huge fan of OLPC, and that its CEO Nicholas Negroponte deserved a Nobel Prize. He said he even intended to switch over to full-time use of the XO-1, but "didn't make it that far."
Similarly, husband and wife founders of free/open source software publishing house On-Disk.com Todd and Karlie Robinson intended to put their XO-1s to more practical use, but found the Sugar OS and its related apps too child-oriented, and the Fedora 10 live boot OS too slow for the device.
"I decided it was just time to have a real, viable, operating system alternative for these nifty little machines," Todd Robinson said this week. "This thought was powered, in part, by my growing frustration watching the Fedora-olpc developer mailing list, and waiting for the promised Fedora 11 release for the XO...a release which appears may never come."
"This isn't really the fault of the Fedora developers who are simply placing the priority where it should be, upon having the new OS ready for the next XO-1.5 hardware version," Robinson continued. "So I had two choices: delegate the XOs we currently have to simply being used for demonstrations, or build something that would satisfy our needs and enable us to actually use our XOs in a meaningful way...obviously I chose the second option."
So he came up with a new live boot Linux OS for adults to run on their unlocked XO-1s called Xtra Ordinary 2009. Built on top of the OLPC base system and Debian 5.0.2, Xtra Ordinary is designed to give the XO the feel of a netbook. Unlike the XO's built-in Sugar OS, Xtra Ordinary is equipped with communications software appropriate for "power use," support for different screen resolutions, a wireless connection manager, and USB Bluetooth support.
In addition to the Synaptic package manager, which lets users browse and install their own battery of applications, Xtra Ordinary comes equipped with Skype, Ekiga, Pidgin, Iceweasel (unbranded Firefox browser) and Icedove (unbranded Thunderbird e-mail client), OpenOffice.org 3.1.0, AbiWord, PDF Viewer, GIMP graphics editor, Pontamus music player, and more.
On-Disk.com is selling 4 GB, 8 GB, and 16 GB SD cards loaded with Xtra Ordinary for between $41-$85.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
