Schools Are Gobbling Up Chromebooks: 1 Million Sold in 3 Months

having the privilege of being able to use an OLPC XO 1.5 as my main portable device, i really wonder what the OLPC did wrong.

to my knowledge none of the alternatives have a dual-mode screen that can work without a backlight and is thus suitable for use outdoors in bright sunlight. no other model has a carrying handle (ok, i think the intel classmate also had a handle), which is very convenient when using the laptop in public transportation. none offer a battery that can keep its full capacity for as long as the XO. i am using the current one for several years now, and its battery life is still the same as when it was new. same goes for previous models. when i switched, it wasn't because of the battery...

i am actually afraid of the day when this device dies, because i will miss these three features dearly!

greetings, eMBee.

Backing by major corporations.

> i really wonder what the OLPC did wrong.

They failed to garner the requisite support of a mammoth corporate interest that was truly committed to pursuing its commercial success and popular adoption by a large market / the general consuming public...

The Google brand name.

Three replies, three ways of essentially saying the same thing. :)

Quoting:Backing by major corporations.

As opposed to the opposition of 1 major corporation.

> As opposed to the opposition of 1 major corporation.

Actually, two. Both Intel and Microsoft were opposed to the OLPC,

We were recently donated about 75 of the Classmate netbooks with the built on handle. They are actually nice if you bump to the max 2gb of RAM. You can find deals on the 2X2gb packages for about 40.00. We chose to use a few of these as fund raisers on our Ebay store at 75.00 and 9 of them sold out in 4 days. Many more people passed them up because they wanted to know if we could put XP on them and we couldn't do it. We used Mint Xfce for those installations.

And we will be using some of them as "perks" in our annual Reglue fund raiser starting next week.

I haven't looked at an OLPC in years but if I remember correctly, Sugar was quite a departure from "normal" Linux distros. I'm not sure that I agree with that but a lot of the kids we hooked up with OLPC machines made the the point that it was harder to use than Windows or even other Linux distros.

hmm, 2GB of ram? that's an upgrade to the XO.

i'll keep my eyes open for your fundraisers then. (not sure i can get one this time as the XO is still fine...)

as for sugar, having used it now for about 5 years, i agree with you. did you show them how to switch to the normal fedora interface?

one does need to consider that it is designed for first-time users. i'd actually still be using sugar if it weren't for the issue that upgrading packages can break it, and in my case at some points sugar wifi packages stopped working properly detecting access-points. i am pretty sure some rpm package update is to blame.

greetings, eMBee.

ken,

welcome back!

seems the time to upgrade has arrived and my XO is exhibiting random freezes.

do you guys still have some of these classmates? what's the best way to get in contact with someone at reglue to work out if you can send one of them to china for an appropriate donation?

greetings, eMBee.

the Chromebook is a consumption device, you have to be willing to wipe everything on it to go "developer". The OLPC was about teaching self reliance. Mesh networking, programming tools bundled with it. Heck, the whole UI could be modified without a compiler.

I find myself reminded of the Nokia N900. When it was first announced many inquired about the ability to gain root, much like they had on earlier Maemo devices. Nokia said this would be possible, but doing so would lock people out of certain app/content store purchases. This was apparently the compromise they had managed to get with big media.

Frankly the new generation of computing devices, by being centered around app/content stores, are giving big media a way to cram the PC cat back into the bag.

The Chromebook has all of those web-delivered Google services. What the free software community needs to do is focus on developing web-delivered services that anybody can run on their own server without the interference of a behemoth third party (read: Google, Microsoft).

OwnCloud is not enough.