So last week was my spring break and I decided to go home for the duration. However, I only have a desktop computer… my laptop is only a frisbee now.

However, I had a huge physical media project due this week, and it required a lot of sewing. Like, 6 yards of sewing. As a result, a personal computer wasn’t all that necessary and would probably just feed my habit of procrastinating. I thought “great, I can just do some Arduino programming with this. It can probably handle at least that.” So I got to spend some personal time with this low-power laptop.

I learned a little bit about it. I had it set to GNU mode (rather than the educational and simple SugarLabs mode) so I could actually use it for some work. I had to install Java and the Arduino IDE, but I’m figuring we’ll do a wipe of these computers at the end of the semester. If not I’ll uninstall them myself. I don’t have a whole lot of experience with unix operating systems and their terminals, and absolutely none with Fedora in-particular, but I managed.

I didn’t do a lot with the laptop in terms of testing it, but it ran fine with the Arduino IDE, a web browser with a few documentation tabs, and an SSH client open. I did notice however that the power to USB ports is cut off if the mouse is not moving constantly, which was interesting. I can see some reasoning behind this, the laptop is designed to be used in places where power can be scarce, but it made testing a USB-powered Arduino annoying. The keyboard was also an unrelenting hassle. I thought I would get used to the tiny rubber buttons intended for gradeschooler’s fingers, but such was unfortunately not the case.

Overall however, I was rather impressed how well it handled. It was rarely slow and never froze. I came into it thinking all I could do was write text files in hopes I could actually do debugging when I returned to school, but not needing to wait certainly helped the project. I hope the OLPC initiative is doing well, I hadn’t heard anything about it in 4 years and had completely forgotten about it until my HFOSS course. I really feel these laptops could make a difference.