olpc

by <span class='p-author h-card'>gpotter</span> on Work

Sugar on a Stick

I updated my son’s XO laptop to the latest firmware 767 yesterday.  Reflashing the base system was surprisingly easy, but I found ‘sugarizing’ apps to be a bit more labor intensive.  To ‘sugarize’ an app is to place an app icon in the graphical interface called Sugar ( pictured left ).  Although the OLPC wiki has lots of sugarized apps available, OLPC’s Sugar is a branch of Fedora linux and can run a vast array of linux apps – from the command line.  Not so cool for a 7 year old.

I started poking around for a Sugar VM and found a few, but stumbled upon a gem called Sugar-on-a-Stick (SoAS).  This project packages up Sugar into a bootable USB flash drive allowing you to experiment with the OLPC operating system and user interface on the go.  Just what I needed.  The whole process took under 30 minutes, and now I have a 1 GB flash disk with a fully funcational OLPC installation to tinker with.  I have managed to install Skype on my son’s OLPC and sugarize the app so he can point’n’click to use – worked out the trial and error of this entire process on my sugar-on-a-stick.  The disk image and installation instructions can be found at the SoAS wiki.

 
by <span class='p-author h-card'>gpotter</span> on Play

OLPC Physics Jam

OLPC PhysicsI made a note in my ‘to do’ list to check out the results of the OLPC Physics Game Jam that took place at Cambridge, MA over two days in August.  The Physics Game Jam was devoted to producing physics-based games, levels and demos for the XO.  Participants broke into teams to do some fast and furious coding to test out the a new Physics engine available to the XO. 

It did not disappoint.  I installed Babel on my son’s XO and we had a blast building and knocking down creations in this simple, yet fun game.  Even more impressive was Bridge. Bridge challenges you to Join girders-to-girders and connect to edge girders on land using a simple joint tool. You click where you would like a bolt to drop in place.  Sounds easy, but is both fun and challenging.  To load test the bridge, you send a train across the structure to see if it will hold.  Weak bolts will change color to indicate flaws in the structure.  If the structure is unsound the train will plummet into the ravine.  All the sound effects were generated by the designers voices – something my son got a real kick out of.  If you don’t have an XO but would like to try these out, UnEasySilence has a great tutorial outlining how to run an instance of the XO in a virtual machine.

 Photo by: bcjordan