Would OLPC work on my old PC?

Posted on May 3, 2007, 12:02 pm, by Mayank Jain (makuchaku).

If OLPC is designed to run on hardware which is very minimal – & considering my old chap PC is almost as minimal on hardware – 800 Mhz CPU, 256 megs RAM (though it sports a 100 gig hdd) – only Gentoo manages to run well, all other – FC/Ubuntu crawl – Giving a shot to OLPC’s images would be worth a try.

Though i’m bit oo much preoccupied with other things as of now, lets see when can I try writing these images to my overloaded USB… :)

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  • Rahul Sundaram

    OLPC is not just about low resource usage though. It has a UI and the whole system targetted to a very specific set of use cases involving kids and education. As a general purpose system it might not be what you think it is. Otherwise we could have just shipped something like damn small linux and be happy about it.

    Try it out which is well and good but keep this in mind anyway.

  • http://www.makuchaku.in makuchaku

    Yes, agreed – I’ve seen the UI running in screen shots only – & somewhere down the ilne, I also want to see its UI running in a PC…

    Moreover, I want a UI which is specifically targeted towards low end hardware. & OLPC i thought would fit the best.

    Thanks for the reminder though, Rahul :)

  • http://www.0xdeadbeef.com Christopher Blizzard

    Of course the UI would work on slower and older hardware. You would need to replace the kernel with a more generic one and you would need to replace the X video driver. But once you do that in the image you can just run it off the USB stick and it should more or less work.

  • Rahul Sundaram

    “Moreover, I want a UI which is specifically targeted towards low end hardware. & OLPC i thought would fit the best”

    Not necessarily. The thing is that many of OLPC optimizations are possible only because the developers working on it know the exact configuration of the system they need to work with. So they trim down the kernel, xorg etc to only work on that system and nowhere else. The UI just assumes that you have some special keys to start applications that are only found in the actual OLPC hardware. Think Apple hardware and OS X here.

    Like Blizzard says above if you have to use it on a generic system you have to replace the OLPC optimized parts of the core components with more generic ones. At that point you might as well as be running a regular Fedora system.

    If you look at the reviews of the UI itself it is usually not positive because these folks have been trying it on a emulated environment which does not give you a good idea on what the heck is happening and they are just conditioned to Windows, OS X, GNOME or KDE and freak out when they see that the system is completely different.

    I am still running sugar in Qemu for a long time and you don’t get the complete feel unless you work on the actual hardware. I realized this in the brief time I spend fiddling with OLPC in Boston courtesy of Blizzard driving me around.

    If you want something like Fedora but for low power systems then either install using text mode anaconda and run something other than GNOME or KDE or a more focused derivative or something like damn small or puppy linux

  • http://manujmohla.blogspot.com manuj

    OLPC can work on your computer but you might need to tweak the OS as the OS is designed to work on a specific hardware so i belive the drivers from x.org and the kernel will be a stripped down to work on OLPC. i will recommend you to upgrade your computer or the best thing you can do is get yourself a new system and you can run this computer on a network using LTSP and you can also play your favourate games on network.

  • http://gauravmishra.info Gaurav

    Few months ago heard of vectorlinux too, A boon kinda something for older pc`s , try that

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