OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world

A friend of mine bought an XO-1 via the buy one give one program.

It never worked, when he showed it to me the thing wouldn't boot due to storage errors and it was never fixed, DOA. I was seriously bummed out, as I really wanted it to be the laptop I could use for hacking outside in direct sunlight.

I had one which I got a "normal" distro running on. It was slow, but a bit better than Sugar, though it couldn't do any of the fun mesh-networking etc. Lots of the most interesting ideas for the OLPC never quite shipped, like the keycombo in to 'view-source' of the app you were in, which would let you hack on the UI nondestructively[1].

1: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/Th...