[ One Laptop XO ]
One Laptop Per Child XO
Notes
I have in my posession one of the early XO units from the One Laptop Per Child Project. I got it by way of the Give One, Get One deal (November 12th to December 31st, 2007) where I bought two, one got donated to a child in the developing world, and the other came to me to give to some child I know. For now, that child is me.
The XO is a deceptively simple laptop running Linux (behind the scenes) that is intended for children in the developing world.
I can't resist fiddling with this little green thing. Its capabilities are remarkable. In the course of playing with it, I noticed that if it attempted to associate with my wifi network it would seem to connect fine. It got an IP address, DNS entries, and routing OK, but couldn't get to the internet. What's worse, when it was associated with my router (a Linksys WRT54GX2) all my other laptops would lose connection, and couldn't even find the router again. Dis-associating the XO from the wan let the other machines connect again. Not nice. Especially for a machine that has only wifi networking capability. (More about that below.)
This turns out to be a (recently) known bug:
G1G1 users complain that the XO affectst their local network (typo is not mine)
I was able to do a little testing with other routers and managed to sniff the association process in wifi monitor mode (using my old ThinkPad R40) and send the report along to the developer's site dev.laptop.org . Maybe it will help.
It is possible to use a wired nework by pluggin in a USB to Ethernet converter. I used an SMC2208USB/ETH USB 1.1 to Ethernet converter which came up with no additional driver installation and seemed to work fine.
links
OLPC wiki (kind of hard to navigate at this point)
[ One Laptop XO ]