had a lot of flashbacks going back 10 & 25 years, to unix & dos times. i never really felt comfortable with a system until i could graphically browse the directory structure. getting around with cd & memory (that's "change directory", not "compact disk", and the memory in question is my own) just isn't a whole lot of fun. luckily i remember some minimal stuff from an assignment ten years ago that bumped into unix a bit, enough to find my way around.
see, the xo's primary user interface (a graphical one) tries very hard avoid any sense of a folder or directory structure. the result is interesting, but not very helpful, especially for someone with gearhead tendencies like me. i found that i pretty much ignore most of the pre-packaged applications this thing came with, and instead - well...
i made some progress on that list in my last post, but not in any organized manner. the xo is supposed to be an ad-hoc learning tool, so i figured ok, i'll just play & do what i like. so i grabbed a few "activities" from the olpc wiki page of that name, almost all of the game variety. that just leads to trouble with me, resulting in a few lost days spent on golden moldies like doom and simcity and the like. yes, one of the xo packaged applications is a crippled version of doom. that'll teach those third world children what they need to know.
can't remember off-hand now what got me digging around in the os (maybe it was the hardware clock being off by an hour, or trying to get access to local dns server settings), but i got tired of the ls / grep / cd thing, found a mention of a linux based graphical file manager, and dinked around with that until i got it installed. that exercise took me through even more command line playing.
anyway, some stuff that isn't really obvious about this machine: it's got no hard drive, it's got some sort of flash memory instead. all 3.5gb 1gb[2] of it. only about 800mb of that is free when the box arrives. now, this is good hardware for its mission in terms of low power consumption & physical robustness, but it's, well - odd. peripheral storage is through usb connections & an sd card slot. i've seen no mention of it yet, but i wonder if this thing will work with a usb connected external hard drive, not just a usb thumbdrive.
hmm - i keep forgetting to look for how it uses ftp. i'm not sure their browser (something that sounds firefox derived, but stripped down) will handle this, and command line ftp is of limited use, so maybe i'll be looking for another linux application soon.
as for linux - that world, too, is odd. people actually seem to think it's an advantage to have to cobble stuff together from all kinds of bits & pieces found all over the web. i'll have to say, though, that i wouldn't have learned much about the nuts & bolts of computing, and what makes me a well rounded software developer today (relatively speaking), if i had only been exposed to gui's. the world needs both, but for very different reasons.
and the olpc undertaking itself has its own peculiar set of idiosyncrasies relating to what it thinks education is, its purpose & priorities. they are pushing a distinctly non-neutral worldview, whether they realize it or not, and it's often condescending & pretentious. however, there is a worthwhile kernel wrapped up in all of these technical & socio-political trappings. at the very least, the whole enterprise will provide a useful case study for future endeavors of a related nature. sure, they haven't been pulling it off as well as a big corporate machine, but that's the whole point. and their flaws, well, we've grown accustomed to the many serious flaws found in the status quo and no longer notice them. the fact that we're sensitive to new ones in a new approach only reveals our humanity, not (necessarily) something fundamentally wrong in the project.
so - i'm having some out of town visitors stop by tonight, and they have my 14 year old nephew with them. i'm thinking i may just secure the root account on this thing[1] and hand it to him, see what he makes of it while the rest of us go out on the town.
[1] yeah, it's wide open. there's mention that future os releases will have that account "disabled", but that's not completely acceptable either. it should just be appropriately secured, is all.
[2] the documented value is is 1gb, my mistake - see later post.