Nick Nassar wrote:
PCF has an XO-1. I played with it when they first got it. “Sugar” runs on top of Fedora, so there’s no real reason to re-install unless you want Debian or Ubuntu. I’m too lazy to find instructions on how to get it to boot into XFCE instead of Sugar. I seem to remember you could basically “yum install“ your way to a full desktop. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_components
Yeah, I looked in to just installing xfce or even just keeping it at runlevel3 but the official repository doesn't have much. Not to mention I'm used to deb anyway. The XFCE instructions are on the olpc wiki, for those interested. It's an excellent resource for some things.
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it for adults-- it really is designed for children. Sugar has lots of awesome stuff for creativity and learning, but it’s not designed to let typical users do work. On the hardware end, the keyboard is child sized, the CPU is too slow to run a typical Linux desktop well, and there’s no support for hibernating to disk.
I think it's a great little machine, the display is definitely one of the best I've seen at the size. The keyboard is a bit small but it's not unusable, at least it's got the keys in sane places, unlike some small machines (dell mini). I think it makes the perfect portable terminal or ebook reader. Parts are very cheap and it's not difficult to work on. It's a bit like a more modern HPLX machine, though a little larger. Power management support- with the stock build is very recent anyway. I don't think it could even suspend to ram until earlier this year. I'm not certain how many more updates it'll get with the two new hardware versions (and windows) coming. That's one of my main reasons for sniffing around for alternatives. :) Take care, James