Cheers

Read the “Case Study” of Arahuay Before Opinionating
ROC • Tuesday 22nd January 2008 04:00 GMT
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As posted by “Jansen”:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Peru/Arahuay

I find it impressive in detailing the XO’s impact, but it also highlights the importance of structural preparation and support within the country receiving the XO’s. There has to be some kind of educational infrastructure and context in which to integrate the XO. These machines cannot just be “thrown” at the students in hopes something magical will happen – it does take supporting effort, and it seems Peru is making that effort, as well as providing valuable feedback to OLPC to improve the XO, which it seems to have taken seriously.

My wife teaches first grade at a North Carolina inner-city school, and had her eyes opened a bit as to what “underprivleged” means in a non-American context. She has kids on welfare with no parental interest (or often even presence) who would be considered “wealthy” by the Peruvian kids who have received XO’s with a great deal of gratitude and keen interest.

I doubt a number of her students would be nearly as appreciative or motivated by an XO because they have been spoiled by ready access to technology for purely entertainment purposes even if they don’t have decent housing/clothing/medical care/etc by (US “standards”). It is all a matter of context.

We have ordered an XO with the “Give One, Get One” program to see if it could be of use in her context. I can provide the Linux support, and she uses Mint Linux at home on an almost constant basis (strictly as a “Gnome end-user” , so it should be “interesting”.

Think outside the box, but focus on the objective here of bringing the enabling technology to those who have not had any such exposure before. The Arahuay example is very instructive in how much can be accomplished when done right. It remains to be seen how sustainable the effort is, and how well it can be replicated in other locales. It needs CONSTRUCTIVE criticism to succeed, and not just nay-saying based on pre-conceived notions.

ROC

P. S. I sold my eee after trying it for a month. It seemed to thwart my efforts to make it “fit” my uses: screen and 4GB SSD smallness; difficulties with booting and porting wifi driver for setting up alternate boots on SDHC or USB flash/microdrives of XP, PCLinuxOS, Sabayon, Linpus, Puppy; tweaking Easy and full desktop modes to work with gpsd/gpsdrive/roadnav/Earthmate LT-20 (killed by Ubuntu(?)-broken cypress_m8 kernel module), touchpad overly touchy from heat (gimme a Thinkpad Trackpoint, and make the keys bigger). I just got tired of it being an endless “project”, but might give an 8- or 9-inch screen model another try if/when they come out, and maybe only if they have bigger SSD’s (and better not go over 500 U$D)…

“The best thing about the Eee is that it focuses on opensource s/w and webapps. Who is going to want to use photoshop on the go anyway? It couldn’t be that important, and if it is, then it means your a professional so wouldn’t you be using a normal PC with a bigger screen?”

Thank $DEITY for that! Totally agree with everything you say Beau, in fact I posted exactly the same thoughts to my blog half an hour ago. I thought I was alone in thinking this way My eee is a great travel/sofa companion, but I wouldn’t use it all day every day, and I really cannot see the point of installing Windows on it; it works perfectly as it is, for everything I want to use it for.

Do you read that the horizontal resolution is the same in the XO and in the eeePC?. It’s 800.

The only diference (and the one that requires that .5 inch more) is that the XO is 600 vertical and the eeePC is only 480.

The sensation of more resolution on the XO is because (is you look closely), the font in the XO is smaller that of the eeePC, and the XO render the page to fit on the screen; the Firefox don’t. Very convincing trick.

The 1200×900 resolution is a special monochrome one that is used for ebook mode.

Personally, I also doesn’t have problems with the eeePC resolution (nobody remembers when the computers used the big 800×600 resolution?).

An 8.9 screen with 1024×600 could made the font too small to my eye’s confort. But I will wait to try that display.

The big problem in the eeePC is Firefox, that doesn’t adjust to the horizontal screen resolution, but it appears that version 3 will fix that.

There is little to compare between the XO and EEE PC in my opinion. I have both.