The new OLPC XO 1.5 laptop might not look very different from the first generation XO laptop. But it has a faster VIA processor, and at least one neat software trick: Users can switch between the Sugar OS and a GNOME desktop environment in just about 15 seconds.
Here’s what that means. Sugar was a custom user interface designed to provide children who had little to no computer experience with an easy way to interact with the laptop and its educational software. Sugar doesn’t really look like any other mainstream operating system, even though it’s based on Linux. GNOME is a desktop environment used by a number of popular Linux distributions including Ubuntu and Fedora. And since the new version of Sugar can run on Fedora, users can switch back and forth between Sugar and GNOME.
You can check out a video of the XO 1.5 making the jump from GNOME to Sugar and back again after the break.
via OLPC News
There has to be a business opportunity for shoving a real processor in an OLPC shell and making a decent computer.
Anyone notice the irony that the OLPC project spurred the creation of netbooks. Netbooks took off and are now 1/3 of computers sales (maybe more maybe less…that’s not the point.) The OLPC concept skids along like a turd thrown by an indigenous Pygmy Marmoset in comparison.
I know Nicholas Negroponte has a hard-on for trying to flip-off the computer ‘Wintel’ industry, but how long are they going to sell under powered devices to the third world.
Glad you like the OLPC dual boot video. The XO switched between Gnome & Sugar amazingly quick – 15 sec for Sugar to Gnome.
Hopefully there is not MONO in the Gnome Distribution.
Mono is a knock off of .NET and MS has licensed only Novell to use this patented tech.
I thought including open source software is good, and mono is one of them…