Help improving the Smalltalk experience on the OLPC machine
11 April, 2007
As you may now, the XO laptops produced by the One Laptop Per Child project include a Squeak/Etoys image in the base software. The OLPC developers decided to hide the Smalltalk development enviroment and highlight the Etoys subsystem, since that’s the part that matters in a kids machine such as the XO.
But the power of a full-fledged Smalltalk system is still there, and you can help. As Bert Freudenberg writes to the Squeak Beginners mailing list:
So everybody interested in making the “Smalltalk experience” on the OLPC machine an enjoyable one, please help. The VPRI group focuses on etoys and system integration, but you are invited to contribute. And, in case this has not been clear, you do *not* need an OLPC prototype to run this. It’s Squeak, after all.
More info on how to run the OLPC version of Squeak and Etoys on your system may be found here.
Update: changed a misleading statement.
The Weekly Squeak 
12 April, 2007 at 08:01
I think the statement that “the OLPC developers decided to hide the Smalltalk development enviroment and highlight the Etoys subsystem, in order not to confuse the beginner users of the laptop” is (deliberately?) misleading.
OLPC is a kids machine, not a Smalltalk machine – the only reason Squeak is on there is that eToys are implemented in Squeak. If eToys were implemented in Lisp there would be Lisp on the machine and it would be equally hidden – because it is eToys that matter for the kids machine, not Smalltalk.
12 April, 2007 at 08:12
Hi Andreas, you are right of course. I mistakenly assumed the message to which Bert was replying (that contained the term “hide”) was from another Squeak OLPC developer. Thanks for pointing this out.
28 April, 2007 at 04:13
[…] about OLPC! The One Laptop Per Child initiative is a wonderful way for all smalltalkers to get involved and contribute to something that is really worthwhile! Posted by Ron Teitelbaum Filed in Seaside, OLPC, […]