http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/mtillinger/2007/06/28/a-surprise-visit-from-an-olpc/ My education.au blog Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:03:09 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.4 http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/mtillinger/2007/06/28/a-surprise-visit-from-an-olpc/#comment-9348 Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:13:40 +0000 http://blogs.educationau.edu.au/mtillinger/2007/06/28/a-surprise-visit-from-an-olpc/#comment-9348 [...] Like many others I have been watching with interest the development of the $100 laptop. At work we were even fortunate enough to play with one for a couple of days. The olpc is a great initiative with a fantastic vision and it is interesting to see that there are now companies seemingly building on that to make very affordable laptops for broader markets. Here’s one with a claim to costing about US$150. The Medison Celebrity has a 1.5GHz Intel Celeron cpu with 256MB of memory running the Fedora operating system. As a Linux home user with children wanting computers for personal and educational use this sounds great but…. here’s the problem for me. At home, in the past, we have had a PC and laptop running Linux. We now have a PC running Windows XP and Open Office. Unfortunately at the school our kids attend they use Windows and Microsoft Office. Consequently, the kids just aren’t interested in Linux/Open Office. It’s Microsoft or nothing with them. They do use Open Office for some of their homework but don’t like the differences and also report back some problems with compatibility at school. It looks like I am stuck with having to find more expensive solutions that can support bigger footprint operating systems and applications until the school starts considering Linux. [...] […] Like many others I have been watching with interest the development of the $100 laptop. At work we were even fortunate enough to play with one for a couple of days. The olpc is a great initiative with a fantastic vision and it is interesting to see that there are now companies seemingly building on that to make very affordable laptops for broader markets. Here’s one with a claim to costing about US$150. The Medison Celebrity has a 1.5GHz Intel Celeron cpu with 256MB of memory running the Fedora operating system. As a Linux home user with children wanting computers for personal and educational use this sounds great but…. here’s the problem for me. At home, in the past, we have had a PC and laptop running Linux. We now have a PC running Windows XP and Open Office. Unfortunately at the school our kids attend they use Windows and Microsoft Office. Consequently, the kids just aren’t interested in Linux/Open Office. It’s Microsoft or nothing with them. They do use Open Office for some of their homework but don’t like the differences and also report back some problems with compatibility at school. It looks like I am stuck with having to find more expensive solutions that can support bigger footprint operating systems and applications until the school starts considering Linux. […]

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