OLPC Cuts Staff, Sugar

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that his organization will be cutting half its staff
and ending in-house development of Sugar, the Linux-based operating
system that ships on its tiny XO Children's Machine laptops.

Even though the OLPC project has been praised by the mainstream media, the free software elite and humanitarian organizations for its goal to supply low-cost, educational computers to developing countries with little or no technology infrastructure, the project has been beset by a host of problems and delays. The worldwide economic downturn has slowed hardware orders, but the project was largely sidelined by the revolution it helped create -- a wave of low-cost, low-powered laptops built to run Windows, like Intel's similar Classmate PC. Now, even the OLPC project is transitioning to Windows after realizing it's what customers want.

Sugar is another issue altogether. I received an OLPC XO as a gift over the holidays through the Give 1, Get 1 program, and I was confounded by Sugar. It's a very simple operating system with a icon-based user interface that's designed to be universally accessible. Navigating around takes some getting used to, but that's expected. However, trying to get the machine to connect to a protected network was a three-hour ordeal.

The PDF book reader software is nice, but you need to learn how to install fonts using the command line before you can truly feel comfortable. The included RSS reader is practically unusable, so I've defaulted to Google Reader. In fact, all of the tools for working are a little weak, but if you stick to low-end webapps, you can get by just fine. There are other stumbling blocks, too, like managing system updates or setting up swap space on SD cards and USB sticks. Both of those required some serious digging on the OLPC's wiki manual.

In short, it's hacker-friendly and makes a great e-book reader, but I can't see kids getting too jazzed about it out of the box. Maybe the proposed hardware revision, a folding book with a touch screen, will be more impressive.

Sugar will continue to grow, thanks to Sugar Labs, an open community founded by OLPC-er Walter Bender dedicated to building up the OS.

If you have an XO laptop, what are your impressions of Sugar? Are you running another operating system? The laptops have been proven to be able to handle Ubuntu, XFCE and even Mac OS 9. How does your XO roll?

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