How OLPC's $100 Laptop Computer for Kids Turned Me on to Linux

After several months of neglect, I recently dusted off my little XO laptop, also know as the $100 Laptop. I can’t believe it’s been almost four years since it came into my life.

One evening in early November 2007, I saw a segment on 60 Minutes about OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), a nonprofit organization founded to empower the world's poorest children by providing them with educational laptops. Leslie Stahl was chatting with MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte while excited children explored tiny green and white laptops with little antenna ears.

These computers were going to change the face of education in the developing world. The cheap laptops would be given to children with few educational opportunities. Each child would own his own laptop to take home with him at the end of the day. They looked more like Fisher Price toys than computers.

He went on extolling it’s virtues, how the kids would teach themselves and each other how to use it, and it was built tough to withstand the rigors of their environment. It featured a charger with a wind up handle, a battery that was expected to last 10-12 hours, and a screen that was readable in full sunlight.

Here is a link to the 60 Minutes broadcast, it is 12 minutes long, but if you haven't seen it before it's interesting. Be warned it is a couple of years old and the Give One Get One program is no longer available so the only way to buy OLPC laptops is through a private party, like on Craigslist or Ebay. 60 Minutes OLPC Link

I immediately fell in love with the funny little machine, and with the dream of educating the world's poor children with the help of this “100 Dollar Laptop.” When the Give One Get One program was announced later that month I signed up for it the first day.

It did not bother me that it was not exactly $100. It was actually $400 to buy two of them. One to donate to a child in a third world country, and one to keep for myself. I’d like to say that my motives were charitable (and the “give one” part of it was nice), but honestly, I just had to have one.

I was one of the lucky ones and my little XO laptop arrived on my doorstep 3 days before Christmas. The first thing I noticed when I opened the box, no wind up charger. That was somewhat disappointing. I would later find that the battery only lasted about 3 hours, so it didn’t quite live up to all my expectations (perhaps I should say here that the sunlight readable screen is pretty special).

In fact, I really had not known what to expect. The sunlight readable screen looked nothing like any computer I had ever seen. My attraction the the XO was much more emotional than practical. I didn’t even realize that it had shipped with an operating system that was a version of Fedora Linux. In fact I didn’t even know what that meant.

Even though the XO is made for kids, it’s designed for kids who don’t have the kind of expectations we, in the US, have for what a computer should do, and how it should be used. It’s an educational tool for them, not a high-tech toy. It features a desktop environment called Sugar.

There were a lot of other people like me who didn’t know what to expect, and some who were sorely disappointed. The XO was not able to play videos from YouTube. In fact it did not come with Flash installed, and even after what seemed like a tedious process to install it, it still did not work that well. But I persevered, and my affection for my XO continued to grow.

The laptop has a chat activity that allowed me to meet other G1G1 recipients, most of them much more knowledgeable than I. I learned among other things that linux software is free and open source (free as in speech, free as in beer). So, it doesn’t cost any money to use, and the source code for it is available to be improved and modified by anyone who wants to. There is a large and enthusiastic open source software community, and I met some great people who generously shared their knowledge with me. I really owe them a debt of gratitude for their help and patience.

That was my first introduction to linux. I guess you could say I “drank the Kool Aid,” I was hooked, I became almost obsessed with my XO, and gradually, I learned to use my little laptop for a lot of things. Soon after that I installed Ubuntu (another ”flavor” of linux) on my main desktop, and now even my husband’s two year old Gateway laptop is running Ubuntu, so my home is Windows-free. It is not without frustrations and problems, but what operating systems is? My 10 year old Dell surfs the web much faster than it did with Windows XP and I don’t have to worry about viruses.

If I get a new computer, I may have to go back to windows, just for the sake of compatibility with the rest of the working world, but you’ll have to pry my XO out of my cold dead hands.