From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-11-29T12:13:03+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby on OLPC??

Steven Lumos wrote:
> I was going to say "tough luck".  Was the original 2 week limit just
> hype or what?

It's been extended to the end of December. It's still only available in 
the US and Canada. There's another bonus -- T-Mobile is throwing in a 
year free wireless.

> Unless you have child-size hands, you may not enjoy typing on an OLPC.
> (Mine is for use by an actual child, though I seem to be in the
> minority in that regard.)

I heard that on another mailing list. As I noted in another post, I've 
got a Zaurus 6000, and that keyboard truly is unusable. I've also got an 
LG "ENV" phone and that keyboard I can use (more or less). I actually 
got pretty good at keyboard work on the HP-100LX Palmtop PC -- the real 
bottleneck was the tiny screen at 80x25, not the keyboard. And what I've 
heard about the XO/OLPC is that its screen is superior to the ones in 
the "professional grade" laptops, especially for monochrome document 
reading.

> Just download the developer image and boot
> on whatever random PC.  In fact, I suspect that if you then
> immediately type something like "yum install ruby", you'll be
> pleasantly surprised.

I'm about to do that, although it will be VMware Workstation 6, not a 
real machine. But I actually think I want Lisp (SBCL) before Ruby, 
because a lot of the other music software I like is in Lisp and there's 
virtually no music software in Ruby.