I agree with Alex that it is sad that MS Windows are involved now. Are they ready for that?

My argument still stays, that I feel and see the need more towards providing kids with a safe school to go to, educated teachers to teach them and a meal in the morning to keep the hunger pains away. If we do have extra money or help to offer I would rather spend it towards those needs. I think I will see more appreciation in the eyes of the hungry kids on the street corners of South Africa when I gave them food to eat or a warm blanket to sleep under in their make shift house than handing them a note book.

It is not that I don’t want to help to educate the kids, but I was a teacher in South Africa myself and feel strong about teaching well fed, happy and warmly dressed children.

First of all, you must have had a dud, because I have had 6 XOs pass through my hands and have not had the difficulties you described. I find the latest build from just a few weeks ago to be awesome; the interface is much more intuitive and easy to use.

You know that I have had the opportunity to bring 4 of the XOs to Africa and recently just sent two more with embedded content from my own students. I hope that the Kenyan students will respond to the content that my students left for them. A very exciting thought!

These machines have brought hope to African teachers and students. While I wish I could have brought enough for all the students I met in Africa over the summer, just the thought that these machines exist and have dramatically lowered the cost of the availability of such technology have inspired many teachers. They were so amazed by the XOs!

You referred to the XO as “a piece of junk”. Therein lies one of its strengths! From what I saw in South Africa and Kenya, the fact that it looks more like a toy than a laptop means that it will not likely be stolen and sold for parts. In fact, there are no parts to be sold at all.

I have described the XO as a swiss army knife to my students. It has multiple uses and is low-cost. The vision behind it is remarkable and innovative.

With what I have seen from my visits to many schools in Africa, it is a great machine which could facilitate many uses. It is simply unfair to compare it to what we have available in North America.

Would I have sent over EEE PCs or Classmates given the opportunity? You bet! I will send over whatever I can; but would those laptops even exist without the XO push?

But I do share your grief about the MS Windows involvement. It is a very tough compromise.

One of my teammates on the Teachers Without Borders team to South Africa did not altogether grasp the XOs’ significance until he witnessed the “donation” of free desktops to a school in the Townships. When he saw every one loaded with Windows XP, it hit him. Yes, they were free now, but …. what was the cost over time?

Yes, like nicotine….

And just the other day, in a meeting with my own school’s IT staff, we examined the issue of webware vs OSS vs MS software. And most of us agreed, “why would we take a step back?” As if OSS or webware does not offer the quality of “industry standard”.

How can we address this? I am left frustrated and feeling impotent.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the project, and the turn to windows just reinforces what seemed more like a question of a project that was designed to get the project funding and less something that would work on ‘scale’. It depended on 3rd world countries spending a huge chunck of their educational budgets on tech when they could be spent in much better places.

I have an EeePC…one of the first models. Not a fan of the Xandros distribution and the screen and keyboard are way too small. But the new models are apparently better with a reasonable sized screen/keyboard. As well, I hear installing Ubuntu instead of Xandros is possible.

I also got a hold of the new Dell Inspiron Mini with Ubuntu 8.04 preinstalled. Good sized screen and keyboard. So far my only practical complaint is that Firefox is sluggish. It pauses a lot. Not sure why considering there’s 1GB of RAM. The more serious problem is the wireless chipset that requires proprietary software to function. I believe it is Broadcom. Hopefully Broadcom will release their drivers as free software or Dell puts Atheros inside their future models.

I’m getting my Eee PC tomorrow, I’m hoping this will be a much better experience.