Comparison of Windows XP and Linux/Sugar On the OLPC XO 203
griffjon writes "OLPCNews has a comparison of Windows XP to the Sugar/Linux OS on the One Laptop Per Child XO-1, based on the Microsoft Unlimited Potential video, touching on video recording, power usage, boot times, and mesh networking. An interesting, if saddening, read."
What's the real plan? (Score:5, Interesting)
Puzzling.
Re:What's the real plan? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if I put my tin-foil hat on, I figure that Microsoft hopes to make the OLPC dependent on XP. With XP no longer available anywhere else, people who really want it will have to get it from OLPCs, rendering them unusable. In this way, MS will satisfy customers who really want XP, while destroying the OLPC.
I have an olpc and would love windows 98' most (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Negroponte (Score:4, Interesting)
Amazing how one can take pieces of disparate information, couple it with nonsensical comments and very flimsy commonality and turn it into a conspiracy theory.
Remember, just because someone is paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get them ...
Biased Write (Score:2, Interesting)
The author of the article was clearly biased in his opinion. I won't take a position in the matter, but the author doing so made the facts more difficult to grasp when reading the article.
Re:I have an olpc and would love windows 98' most (Score:3, Interesting)
Note that this is only an outside opinion, but your whole paragraph equates to someone being served a a nice wet-n-sloppy dog-shit sandwich, and quickly getting back in line for seconds. Though myself a unix dev, I'm sure any Windows user would prefer Windows 2000 to a horribly coded frontend to DOS. Hell, I still use 2000 (either Windows 2000 or Windows FLP [wikipedia.org]) on a VM in OS X, *BSD, or Linux.
What am I saying? You would like Win2000/WinFLP more, since it's up-to-date and doesn't require heavy memory. But me telling you to use an NT OS instead of a DOS/9x one isn't really help at all; it's about as equivalent to telling a Heroin user to give morphine a try as a better alternative. ;)
nothing to see here, move along! (Score:5, Interesting)
now i really hate microsoft and wish them all the worst, but this article is just plain ridiculous! nothing to see here, move along!
Ubuntu on the XO (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:nothing to see here, move along! (Score:4, Interesting)
Well a video is all Microsoft has provided, while doing their best to push their operating system onto the XO. And a video is likely all they are using to convince people that Windows XP is the only thing that can make the XO work. I guess the author could have waited for an actual working instance of XP on the XO. But there is no reason to be confident that such will ever come to past. In the meantime, just being to claim that XP on the XO is better is all Microsoft need to achieve their assumed goals.
I personally use Linux as my OS of choice, however, I think that any operating system that can meet the technical requirements AND meet the "open" (as in open software) requirement would be a good choice for the XO. Assuming that the XO works, someday locals could be writing their own software, and customizing and maintaining the operating system and desktop environment. Unless things change radically in the future, this is an impossibility with Windows XP -- ie. owners of Windows XP on XO, regardless of geography, will be forever dependent on Microsoft.
Re:I have an olpc and would love windows 98' most (Score:2, Interesting)
I know xp drivers usually use the same resources as windows 2000, it's just that the installers might check to see what OS you are using, and freak out if you aren't using XP. I usually use WinRAR to pull these files out of the EXEs, and if i can't I run the installer and then copy all of the extracted files from your $TEMP folder before closing the installer app. I was checking out AMDs site for geode level support for windows, and it's pretty low, so I would personally depend on the drivers that came with the OS. There's always Windows FLP too, I prefer that over regular XP since its XP without the unneeded bloat. Also I feel bad for sounding harsh, just had a bad night so far; and putting it on someone else was wrong - so I apologize for that.
The main reason I suggested 2k is because the amount of memory that OS needs is considerably lower than XP; if you install it on an updated PC or laptop right now, you'll see a big difference. Same with Windows FLP, but not as much. Anyways, good luck with whatever your end goal with your Eee ends up being ;)
Re:Negroponte (Score:3, Interesting)
Tell that to the military then. As they say, "three times is enemy action". When death squads appear wherever Negroponte shows up, without exception, a reasonable conclusion -- not ironclad proof mind you, just a reasonable conclusion -- is that one is a consequence of the other.
And then linking two people together simply by an accident of birth takes it just beyond conspiracy theory in my opinion.
Yeah, you're probably one of those who believe George W. Bush earned his presidency by merit, not because he was the son of George H. W. Bush.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not dead yet! (Score:2, Interesting)
(Sugar says.)
Run over to the sugar and other OLPC mailing lists, if you're worried that somebody has killed sugar off.
Re:Sugar and XP accomplish different things.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Since a high proportion of the adults are functionally illiterate, they need to employ someone else to write for them. This applies most especially to those who control the money and power - and in the best position to pay for your services.
Furthermore, if you have plans to go to the big city and get a job with the government (who have stolen most of the money from the people), you will need a good working knowledge of MS Word to construct a credible CV.
Your post should be modded "-1 Rubbish"
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's the real plan? (Score:3, Interesting)
the dummies around here tested it on crappy old hardware for 5 seconds when it works perfectly fine on modern hardware made in the last 2-3 years.
Would that be the dummies that sold me a brand new low-end Gateway in 2007 that, because it was saddled with Vista, was literally the slowest personal computer I've ever used and that counts my floppy-based Amiga 500? Ironically, when I bought the machine I bought an extra gig of RAM, so I never even tried it with the meager half gig of RAM it came with. If you are calling Gateway a dummy, then I would have to agree. It is absolutely insane that they would saddle a perfectly nice sub-$500 machine with a really bright display (but a somewhat cheap-feeling keyboard) with the Vista boat anchor. I pity the poor people who don't realize there's nothing wrong with the product, just the abominable choice of software. Gateway foolishly caved in to the Evil Empire and made, by any objective standards, an insanely stupid business decision. They are dummies indeed.
However, the real dummy here is Microsoft. The fact of the matter is that Vista offers absolutely nothing for the insane amount of resources it consumes. An OS is a means, not an end, and when I have to upgrade my hardware for a new OS that doesn't do anything fundamentally new, something is very, very wrong. By your standards, finding this situation ridiculous is the fault of the user? Vista, in demanding almost an order of magnitude more power than would adequately run XP offers what? Eye candy? Meh. It's not half as nice looking what Compiz was doing a couple years ago. More security? I got hit by a virus once... in 1989. No problems since then... and you still need anti-virus software and a hardware firewall for the best protection. A new snazzy filesystem? No wait, that got cut. Support for new peripherals and media hardware? OK, that's the only significant thing Vista has to offer (don't forget the DRM performance penalty!), but that's not applicable to people upgrading their hardware... and consider yourself lucky if drivers exist in Vista for what you already have. Oh, and be prepared to upgrade a lot of your applications because a lot of big name, mainstream Windows apps from before 2007 don't work in Vista.
By the way, that Gateway laptop, which my wife uses, is perfectly usable and snappy running either Ubuntu or XP, and with those OSes, it can do everything that it can do with Vista, more really because it was literally not usable with Vista. For instance, I could double-click to launch Firefox, and 30 seconds would pass, not before the app would launch, but before I would even see an hourglass. This was on "modern hardware" not from the last 2-3 years but less than a year old.
It's funny. I've been using Linux on and off for almost 10 years, and in the last couple years, more on than off, and in the past couple months, exclusively. There are hot 'n' fancy new Linux distros showing up almost weekly, and yet every one of them will run adequately on a machine that is not 2 or 3 years old but 8 or 10 years old. You see Linux is modular enough that you can turn off the parts you don't need or can't use. If you can't run KDE or Gnome then there are a dozen or more windows managers that will get the job done, even on a 486. In fact, Linux runs on practically anything that has a processor. Windows, in its latest incarnation, being the great big monolithic loaf that it is, needs what would have been a supercomputer only a few years ago just to boot up. For what? So you can browse the Web, read your e-mail and write a letter? That's what 95% of people use Windows for... something I did perfectly well on a 486 back in the early 90's, and you could still do (minus things like Flash) today. XP was big and bloated compared to Windows 2000, and there was a performance hit, but it was nowhere near the quantum leap between XP and Vista.
I started using computers with Microsoft operating systems with DOS 1.1 out and I've used every non-server version