So after chopping fourteen onions and cooking a great French Onion Soup (I never realized how much wine goes into it) I am back at the OLPC offices trying to get a release out the door. This will be for our first prototype builds running on the actual hardware. At some point in time people will see me in the T with a bright green lunchbox looking machine. Feel free to ask me questions and have a look if you spot me.
It seems that OLPC has won the best of whats new award in the computing category. Pretty cool. More and more people I meet actually know about the project though there are still some common misconceptions that go around. I always love it when people say, “oh, the hand crank laptop”, which happened last night at the Peoples Republik bar. That was one of the first ideas thrown out the door. The laptop will not have a hand crank but will have some other way of generating power from movement. The design has yet to be finalized.
XO is the codename we have been using here for the machines and it suites the project well in many aspects (think of the olpc logo placed on it’s side). One place we are using it is for the file extension of activity bundles. For instance the TamTam bundle is called TamTam.xo. Bundles are self contained apps which can be run by simply unzipping them to the correct directory on the system. The idea for the future is to have these bundles be signed and able to be upgraded and installed in a peer to peer fashion. So, if someone has a newer activity or one that you don’t have and you wanted to participate in it, it will automatically get downloaded, checked and run. That is the goal at least and there will be a lot of issues we have to deal with but that is what makes working on OLPC so much fun.
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The application bundle concept sounds really cool. Presumably it will have dependency-handling built-in? I’m thinking something of this form:
App.xo
|– deps.xml
|– binary
|– icons/
|– libs/
|– share/
with the application directory monitored for changes; drop a new application in and Nautilus will scan deps.xml for any prerequisites that’s not yet installed and offer to install it.
That way we can have OS X-style ease-of-use without their application bloat (since a lot of the .app bundles there just ship all the libraries they can’t assume the user will have)
Comment by Michel — November 25, 2006 @ 7:42 pm
actually no, we are not looking to recreate RPM and DEB. Deps would basicly be depending on a revision of the base system. Of course if we find this is not working we could move to doing dep resolution but right now we think it significantly makes things more complicated.
Comment by J5 — November 25, 2006 @ 8:30 pm