Linux, musical road-dogging, and daily life by Paul W. Frields
 
Santa strikes gold.

Santa strikes gold.

I knew that when we ordered a G1G1 XO laptop for my daughter, it would either hit it big, or go down in smoke and flames.

As I’m sure the OLPC folks could have guessed, it’s an ENORMOUS smash.

Evie hasn’t spent more than a few minutes away from it since this morning. I’ve been careful not to hover while she plays, but I’ve looked in on her from a distance, and she is busily exploring lots of the activities. The big hits so far seem to be the music program TamTam (which I think confirms the OLPC team’s observations) and the Paint program.

Super-good: My wife and I are both running Empathy 0.14 (from the Fedora 8 repos), and Evie pops up in our Contacts list automatically, and we appear in her XO’s Neighborhood. Not so super-good: Chat doesn’t appear to work even when she invites us. Hopefully I can find out how to fix that shortly without joining her to a Jabber server; the telepathy-salut that runs on the XO should allow that.

That aside, I can see that Evie is going to get countless hours of entertainment and education out of this “toy.” We had told her that Santa was bringing her “something special” because she generously and graciously — in a way in which we’ve tried to bring her up, apparently succeeding somewhat, to our surprise and joy — gave her LeapPad to her brother, who is equally enamored of his new computer.