I’ve been investigating the OLPC quite a bit. I’ve also got back into reading about it. Due to the changes at the top, there’s been a fair bit of news coverage, including an article in the Guardian, which Stephen Downes pointed to. I’ve made comments on Stephen’s post, so won’t repeat those here.
Over the weekend, I read about Sugar Labs; due to the changes at OLPC, quite a few staff who have left have set up Sugar Labs, where they are intending to start to really look at the software, to see if it can be made available to other platforms (e.g. the Asus EEE), and so on. Via the Sugar lab & general playing, I’ve found out quite a bit more about Sugar; and some of the advantages. One thing that I’d sort of seen, but hadn’t quite appreciated is the journal. That, in essence, provides a record of everything that a user’s done. From what I can tell, rather than storing a file of, say, a Write document, it saves the current set up of the program. That means that if you go to Browse, you can see (as far as I can tell) you get back the history of where you have been. So, while the inability (as far as I can tell) to create lasting bookmarks could be a problem, this ensures that you can start to find things again. As the default home page is Google based, perhaps I had better investigate the Google Bookmark service (though it’s not possible, as far as I can tell, to install the toolbar)
I’ve had a few problems with the power cutting out without warning. It seems that others have this problem, however, I’m not quite sure how to fix it; as there seem to be several possible cures, mostly for earlier builds. I’ve set it up to keep a log file of the battery state anyway. At least the journal saves things regularly, so not too much is lost.