Sugar on a stick!
The MIT Technology Review has published an article detailing the latest efforts on behalf of the Sugar Labs project. The newest version of the Sugar operating system is designed to install on a USB thumb drive or CDROM. If it is installed on a thumb drive then user files can be written to it and saved in between sessions.
The underlying operating system is built on Fedora 11, which was just recently released. It represents a significant improvement from earlier versions of Sugar. The educational software has greatly improved along with overall stability.
This is an effort that I have been following with great interest since it was part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. After OLPC decided to stop trying to use Linux in their revolutionary laptop, the main developers of the operating system left to pursue the project further. They have been busily improving the operating system and porting it to different architectures.
The best part is that a $200 computer can now be stored on a $5 USB key:
The open-source education software developed for the “$100 laptop” can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface and custom educational software.
“What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost,” says Walter Bender, former president of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. “It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines.”
It will be interesting to see if this incrementalist approach will be more successful long term than the original vision. Deploying massive amounts of cheap laptops to third world countries has not produced any outstanding successes yet. Time will tell how this works out. For now though, I’m going to try it out with my kids. I’m interested to see how they do with it.
You can find full details on the project in the Sugar Labs wiki.
Posted in Hardware, Linux, Open Source Software Tagged: fedora, Linux, olpc, open source, software, sugar
