Carl Hutzler's Blog

A box was sitting on my front porch around noon today. I opened it and inside was a cute little OLPC which I bought back around Christmas last year as part of the get one/give one program.

My first experience with the machine was like most people. The wireless drivers do not work very well. I was able to get on a neighbor’s open access point, but I had a lot of trouble getting on my network. Instead of re-programming my system, I just added another access point for testing. I had to upgrade the firmware in the Netgear access point and also upgrade the OLPC software to version 652 before I could get on my access point.

But from there it has been a fairly good experience. My son found SimCity (the original version) and installed it without much trouble. And I have been reading about how to install Java and Adobe Flash (it comes with an open source flash implementation but it is not current enough for many things).

Anyway, more to come but so far it looks like a neat little computer to play around on. And it has some nice opportunities for my kids to really learn about computers, programming, etc. It’s not an “easy, simple” machine….so it will require some learning which is not a bad thing!