/dev/random

Via Slashdot:
A teacher came upon a student demonstrating Linux to other kids and handing out LiveCDs. The teacher confiscated the CDs and wrote an angry email to HeliOS’s founder, Ken Starks: “Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to [...]

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Via Engadget:

During the recent Greener Gadgets Conference in New York, former OLPC CTO (and XO challenger) Mary Lou Jepsen discussed the real-world difficulties with using the kid-friendly laptops, including the creation of an XO “hospital” used to repair broken computers. Apparently, in the crowded conditions of schools in places like Nigeria, the little green laptops [...]

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Since I got my XO laptop, I’ve been frustrated by its incompatibility with WPA encryption for wireless connections, since I have my home network set up for WPA. Aside from reducing the security, changing it would mean changing the settings of my wii, Airport Express, and Slingbox, which isn’t too convenient.
Digging around in the OLPC [...]

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After using the XO laptop for a few days, my opinion of it is mixed. On the plus side, it’s small, lightweight, easy for kids to use, and seems to be a good way to help kids learn programming. It’s a real Linux system (kernel 2.6.9) and it looks like it will run GCC-built x86 [...]

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I got a developer key for my XO laptop, which enables booting into Open Firmware command mode and running unsigned development builds of the OS.

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As my readers know, my XO laptop arrived two days ago. However, I received this email a few minutes ago:

Your XO laptop is on its way.
We’re happy to inform you that your XO laptop has shipped. In order to help you get the most out of your experience with the XO and One Laptop per [...]

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Late this afternoon, UPS left a surprisingly small & heavy box at my door. It was my OLPC laptop! There are no printed manuals; instead a note directs you to a getting started page.
The laptop is much smaller than I expected. The keyboard is a little too small for adult hands to use it comfortably. [...]

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I just got an email from OLPC welcoming me to the community and letting me know that my XO Laptop is on the way.
Thank you for being one of the first to participate
in Give One Get One.
All of us at One Laptop per Child were inspired by the number of people who joined our Give [...]

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No, I didn’t get my OLPC yet, but I found a Sugar emulator that runs under Ubuntu (which I’m running under VMware on my MacBook Pro). When I run it, I can see other OLPC users on the internet.
Here are a few screenshots.
Uploaded with Skitch!
A Python programming environment
Uploaded with Skitch!
Turtle graphics to teach kids programming
Uploaded [...]

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I got an email update on the status of my OLPC “Give 1 Get 1″ order:

Thank you for participating in the One Laptop per Child “Give One Get One” program. Your donation of $399.00 will bring education and enlightenment to children of the developing world. $200 of each $399 “Give One Get One” Donation is tax-deductible [...]

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I just ordered an XO Laptop from laptopgiving.org. The way this works is by purchasing two XO Laptops for $400, you receive one and the other one goes to a child in a developing country. $200 of the purchase is tax-deductable, plus you get one year of free access to T-Mobile HotSpots.

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I downloaded gOS, the operating system for Wal-Mart’s $199 PC and found that I can run it nicely under VMware. Unfortunately the developer’s page is down right now. The OS is available for download as a torrent.
Uploaded with Skitch!
It’s pretty obvious that gOS is based on Ubuntu. Just before the desktop appears, there’s a quick [...]

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The guys moved the pipes behind the washing machine & dryer and did a lot of the electrical work. They do very neat work. Before they leave every day they pick up all of their stuff and vacuum.
The cats are pretty upset about it. They don’t like the noise and having things moved around.

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Via UNEASYsilence:

Scott McCausland was accused of and plead guilty to downloading Star Wars Episode III (Revenge of the Phantom Sith Enterprise Scotty?) and after serving five months in prison (Mind you Cocaine carrying Lohan got only hours) the court ordered that he must have monitoring software installed on his PC and that software is not [...]

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I was running Debian on my home server for a few years before getting disgusted with the lack of updates and switching to Ubuntu. There still hasn’t been a new Debian release in several years, while there have been two Ubuntu releases since I switched. Many people seem to be defecting from Debian as it [...]

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Today I installed new firmware on my Terastation which allowed me to add NFS support, iTunes library sharing, and Bonjour, which makes it a lot more useful. I found that Samba networking was extremely slow, had problems with files larger than 2GB, and the shares got disconnected when my Mac goes to sleep. NFS is [...]

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Today was one of those days when everything breaks. When I sat down at my computer this morning I discovered that my server was down due to a disk error on the boot drive. After a few FSCKs and several reboots it’s working without any problems, but I’m still concerned since there were I/O errors.
This [...]

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I’ve been using Parallels Desktop since the first public release. Although their Windows support gets better with each release – I love coherence mode in the recent betas, their Linux support remains abysmal. They still don’t have Parallels Tools for Linux, which keeps the virtual machine’s clock synchronized and lets you move the mouse in [...]

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The writer of degredo.net pulled a prank on his father by installing Ubuntu on his father’s PC instead of Vista, which he requested. He loves it and now brags about how much better Vista is than OS X.

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Via LinuxDevices.com: A self-described “world famous celebrity hacker” has managed to boot uClinux on Sony’s MIPS-based PSP (Playstation Portable). Chris Mulhearn’s port so far lacks support for key PSP peripherals such as the screen, but could interest hackers able to connect serially to the PSP’s “remote headphones” port.

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