OLPC operating system free on a stick

The One Laptop Per Child operating system is now available for free downloading for "any" PC or Netbook, according to its maker.

The XO-1 user interface

(Credit: Sugar Labs)

Sugar Labs, responsible for building the low-cost device's XO-1 operating system, released it online last week for loading onto any USB flash drive greater than 1GB.

Called "Sugar on a Stick v1," Sugar Labs hopes it will help spread the use of the OS in classrooms, without the need for the OLPC machine.

An IDC analyst said earlier this year that the OS would be one of the OLPC's more attractive aspects that vendors would be interested in copying for the Netbook market.

It is based on the Fedora Linux kernel and can be booted from the USB stick without needing to be installed over the hard drive's existing OS.

According to Sugar Labs, its OS is used by almost a million students ages 5 to 12 in some 40 countries. Its social-oriented interface recognizes other Sugar-based PCs around it and interacts with them without the need for Internet connection.

Sugar Labs was spun off a year ago after Walter Bender, now its executive director, left the OLPC initiative to start the nonprofit spinoff.

Victoria Ho of ZDNet Asia reported from London.

[codynews]

And someone would want this why? Seems like a disservice to train kids on an OS that isn't used in the business world. Since XP and Win7 are cheap (and run on these low cost/power machines), it would seem that having kids brought up on an OS used "in the real world" would be better for their chances at later success.

Cody

[Dalkorian]

Though it looks kinda Fisher-Price-ish, it's based on Fedora Linux. Linux and it's Unix brethren power the internet and have for years, as well as all serious businesses in "the real world". The company I work for has a bunch of client machines connecting to an AIX server, AIX being IBM's flavor of Unix. Dare I point out how many *nix distro's there are out there, including Ubuntu, Fedora, Solaris, Suse, and yes even Apple's OS X?

What would be a disservice would be to train kids on some inferior proprietary security mess, intentionally designed to play well with no one, foisted upon the public by a convicted monopoly.

[santuccie]

Unix is the inferior one, IMO. Unlike Unix, Windows doesn't have out-of-the-box problems. I recently discovered that Linux has the same sleep bug that Apple has, causing it to wake up from having so much as a browser open. Quite often, I have work to get back to; this to me is unacceptable and substandard.

Like Chihuahuas snarling and yapping at a St. Bernard, the Linux/Apple enthusiasts (including Dalkorian, who still hasn't decided which he likes; just anything but MS) will continue to scream at the top of their lungs that their platforms are MORE stable than Windows, and MORE inherently secure (which is another lie, given the state of Vista and the failure of drive-by downloads against it). And no matter how many times they get corrected, they push onward with the self-delusion they seek as disgruntled MS emigrants who threw up their hands because they couldn't figure out how to secure XP against malware. Tip: apply the instructions at Invincible Windows and get on with your life!

[Vegaman_Dan]

I would rather see kids learning to use services and general computer usage than anything that is limited to one OS. A more well rounded education in various OS options might work well, but since everything is slowly moving to online resources instead, then a better training in those services may be a more optimal solution.

[Crunchy Doodle]

My 5-year-old twin grandchildren each have their own XO machines. They use them interchangeably with notebooks running Windows 7 RC1. They have no trouble switching from one interface to another. They enjoy the XO machines because of their unique features and easily network shared applications. Their only complaint is that the XO takes longer to boot up than the W7 notebooks.