[aprssig] OLPC $199 laptop again

[Scott Miller]

> If you haven't upgraded to 8.2.0 yet, you definitely should.  Several  
> rough edges have been smoothed off.
>    http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc-update

Thanks for the information.  The upgrade was relatively painless, and it 
seems to have improved several things.  The browser started in about 20 
seconds, and the screen rotated quickly without locking up, at least not 
yet.

The lack of a consistent 'exit' button drives me nuts, and the border 
menu thing constantly gets in the way.  Maybe there's a way around that, 
but it's not obvious.  Every other graphical OS I've ever used has had a 
close or exit button in the same place on every window.

My son is thrilled that it's got the Scratch programming language now, 
though I'm not sure how happy he'll be when he sees that it takes 
several seconds for any click on the 'open' file dialog to register. 
You have to have patience and assume that your click did something in 
the absence of any feedback.

As for ham applications, for the price, I think this would be a much 
cooler radio appliance:

http://www.mini-box.com/Mini-Box-M200-LCD_2

At least, if it had room for a radio interface add-on.  Even one 
low-profile PCI slot would be OK, but there's not much room there.

Scott
N1VG