olpc for backpackers

I bought an OLPC XO through the G1G1 program for several reasons, among them my theory that the requirements and use case of a travelling backpacker and developing nation child might be pretty similar.

This is my field report after three weeks in Australia and New Zealand.

I appreciated the ruggedness due to sealed keyboard, sealed I/O ports, and no moving parts. Made me feel confident when shoving it into my daypack and lugging it around hostels, bus stations, etc. Not having to worry constantly about a disk head crash was pretty nice.

The LCD’s sunlight mode actually came in rather handy quite often, as I commonly sat outside at a coffee shop enjoying my short black (aka espresso for the Americans) and the internets simultaneously.

I rarely used the XO in ebook / tablet configuration, although I did try once. I downloaded Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Python in pdf format, but couldn’t figure out how to get the interface to recognize it as an e-book. I ended up searching through the filesystem for the other pdfs on the disk and sticking my download in the same directory. I had to munge the HTML file to get a link to appear in the XO’s “library”. There’s gotta be an easier way, but I couldn’t figure it out.

The power consumption was a mixed story. Simply suspending the XO leaves the wireless on (this is by design) and I found that all the packet flinging really decreased the useful life of the battery. Doing a full shutdown was much better to conserve batt-life across sessions, but the XO takes a really long time to shutdown/boot. Bleah. I did attempt to use the dimmest possible LCD setting whenever possible, and that obviously helped increase batt-life. Doing a full recharge on the battery (when plugged in, duh) seemed to take quite a long time, but I was frequently “topping off” whenever I could, so that didn’t really matter.

The control key on my original XO had a defect and was stuck, but Jim Gettys was nice enough to just swap me a new one at LCA, and the replacement has been fine thus far. I can actually type at a decent rate (maybe 50-60 wpm vs my normal 90+ wpm), but it should be noted that I have nimble Asian fingers. ;)

The handle allowed me to quickly and blindly grope my XO out of my bag so that the TSA could helpfully scan it and keep our skies safer.

Ok, enough of the hardware, on to the software! Although I did install Debian on my XO, along the way I made the decision to stay entirely in Sugar to see what 99.9% of OLPC users would be experiencing.

The mechanism to pick a wifi network to connect to was dead simple. Heaps better than the piece of crap network manager that Ubuntu ships.

Unsurprisingly, much of my time was spent in the browser app (not much use for TamTam or Record or whatever ;), and as a technologist, I was frustrated with the primitive browser interface (note that website rendering was fine as the layout engine is gecko-based). No tabbed interface, no way to block ads, and my inability to understand the bookmarks were my main gripes. Now, I understand the KISS principle, so for kids, I say keep the existing browser. However, it would be great if a slightly better browser app was available too. Minimally, it would have to have tabs and better bookmarks; ad-blocking would just be a plus.

I also spent a lot of time in the console, ssh’ing both to my personal account and to my work account (had to manually find a tsocks rpm and install it to get to the HP net). Only two virtual terminals are enabled by default; I would have liked more, but was afraid to mess with the settings while on the road, so that one will have to wait until I get home.

So the software experience was decent for me; I didn’t push the system too hard and stayed away from youtube and other blingy websites, but Facebook works just fine. :)

And finally, the intangibles. I found that people everywhere were completely intrigued by my XO and wanted to touch it and talk about it. I used those opportunities to evangelize the OLPC program and people were pretty receptive. A bunch of other backpackers could immediately see the utility of the XO in their travels, but alas, I don’t think anyone ran out and bought one after talking to me.

In conclusion, I’d give the OLPC XO a 7/10 as a backpacker’s laptop, losing points on the browser and power issues during suspend.

Edit: most of the browser woes can be fixed by installing Opera, which is actually quite damn nice. Color me impressed. Check out these links:

• Make the OLPC useful
• Cat Moran’s OLPC tips

Also, I forgot to mention that just about every New Zealand blog entry I wrote was done on my XO. :)