YaFSUG: Projectz.

Project: OLPC Beta OS/SugarUI Review.

In a Virtual Machine:
By Vincent Angus Williams - scribe63

Screenshots: VIEW

As the PowerNomics saying says :
"If you take risks, you may still fail. But if, you do not take risks, you will surely fail."

Intro

Setup

Usage

Summary

Usage:
The OLPC beta OS booted up without any issue, so i first entered a name, choosed my color by clicking on the human looking button and logged in by clicking the > button. The screen is a bit small, but it will do for now.
I gleamed the User Interface to see how to go about navigating the initial interface. This was pretty intutitve for me, just had think a little to figure out how to get back to the navigation icons when an application was open. When an app is opened it takes up the whole screen, but realized one had to bring the cursor to the edge of the screen to get back the navigation buttons.

All of the applications I opened were functional. I was able to get online, type a basic message in write, did some calculations with calculator and so on. I was a bit puzzled by the camera application though, was not sure if it was for a web cam, a digital camera connected to the pc, or just a picture viewer.

The navigation icons were easily recognizable as to there function, plus a tool tip would pop up to display it's name. When an application was opened i had to think a bit to figure out how to close it, i became aware of the application's icon on the 'taskbar' and had to mouse over to get the close button on the drop down dialog.

Being a musician my favorite applications was tam tam, the organ sound in there is awesome.
Initially i didn't hear any sound, but went and configured the vmware sound adapter.
The other feature i was totally impressed with the the Classic GNOME option. It's icon needs to be a bit more prominent. This brought you a little under the hood to using the system via a regular gnome interface. I definitely see this being used a lot, after being weaned on the sugar user interface. I was able to do my usual with nautilus, configure Single Click and to use Browser Windows behaviuor. Hope konqueror can be used on it. Gnome terminal was usable, type in uname -a, ls the directory structure, opend gedit, etc.., etc....

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