Charbax has exclusive new videos of the XO-1.5 laptop narrated by key OLPC developers posted on OLPC.tv Here is is Chris Ball, OLPC Lead Software Engineer showing a fully working demonstration of the latest XO 1.5 motherboard fresh from the lab, running a new faster Sugar Linux OS and multi-booting into a full Gnome desktop version of Fedora.
You can see more videos at OLPC.tv:
- OLPC XO 1.5 in Taipei Part 1: John Watlington
- OLPC XO 1.5 in Taipei Part 2: Mitch Bradley and Richard Smith
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The XO 1.5 looks like it will be a winner. Does anyone know how about its power consumption? Projected battery life?
Will those of us with original XO be allowed to swap the new motherboard into the old XO?
How much Ram will be in it?
First let me say that having a full normal desktop experiance (Fedora+GNOME) availible is a very smart move. This gives the machine a wider appeal, more applicability for older students, and it will give the machine easier access to the huge library of software availible for Fedora.
Second this actually looks like it's trying to fufill some of the original claims. We were told that the project would offer lower unit cost and better technologies. This is offering that. Same cost and a substantially more powerful unit.
Now to address one of the elephants in the room. The people in the video were essentially laughing at how poor the XO-1 performed. The chat application demoed (that IMHO took too long to load) was reported as being much faster than the XO-1. It looks like the software isn't being developed very well for the hardware constraints. They spoke of how the system overall was substantially more responsive. Whatever happened to this super lean linux distro we were promised? Sugar still runs slower than Windows xP.
Speaking of WindowsXP, just like now a usable Linux experiance can be realized, likewise WindowsXP on this hardware will run great as well. Heck with a big enough drive Windows 7 would run good as well. It will be important to keep this in mind and keep the Sugar / linux platform ideal through the availibility of good educational content or you may see a resurgance of Microsoft trying to push XP on this.
Speaking of bloat, he was asked whether GNOME was optimized and he just responded by saying it uses some of the same libraries as Sugar. In my experiance GNOME isn't very economical on RAM. Has this been addressed at all?
Speaking of bloat, he was asked whether GNOME was optimized and he just responded by saying it uses some of the same libraries as Sugar. In my experiance GNOME isn't very economical on RAM. Has this been addressed at all?
As OLPC developer Chris Ball pointed out last month the OLPC OS release for the XO 1.5 that will include Gnome is due this fall/winter. The new release will be developed with the XO 1.5 in mind. It's much harder to develop/optimize a release without target hardware.
I hope somebody on here can address whether the MOBO can be upgraded. I really like my XO's form factor and I know it has more potential. And I'm willing to pay for improvements to it.
I think the app launch time is clearly faster than on the XO-1. I count about 9-15 seconds (or more) for launching apps on mine, and about 3-4 on this. That is a big deal. I've also never seen the battery life claimed, no where near it. Best I can get is a little over 3 hours. Which is nice, but no where close to the 12 hour originally claimed.
Does anyone get over 5 hours of battery life on their XO? I always think that the next upgrade will bring that battery's full potential but still I'm disappointed. And the structure of the G1G1 program didn't really allow for addressing grievances.
in some of the recent builds if you are willing to make some sacrafices you can get the machine to last substnacially longer. Just go to the control panel, go to power management, and turn off the wifi and use the extreme/experimental power saver. also turn off the backlight.
I don't know how much longer it will last...only that it will last significantly longer than without the power management and with wifi on.
Wow I have a thought, could developers just get the mobo. Eg. just let us build a dev system out of the bits on the bench. and of course upgrade my XO!
According to VIA, the VX855 chipset costs merely 2.3Watts.