I had long thought of trying to get the Gizmo Project working on my XO Laptop and finally decided to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was.

First I downloaded the RPM off of Gizmo's website. Since the XO doesn't quite handle files the same way a normal computer does, don't worry about where it's being saved just yet.

The Gizmo site says that it needs four libraries:

• GTK+ 2.6 or higher
• GConf2
• libstdc++ (v6)
• ALSA

As far as I know, all of those are installed except the gtk. I just opened a terminal, ran sudo su - and then ran yum install gtk+ to get that installed.

Now stay in that terminal as root and find the gizmo rpm in your /tmp folder. It'll probably be the only file in there with .rpm on the end, but will be a collection of random letters and numbers, like 23848qf84f8qwjef8jhf4.rpm. Find that file and run yum --nogpgcheck install /tmp/23848qf84f8qwjef8jhf4.rpm.

Now close that terminal and open another one and type gizmo. It might complain about some stuff but just the first time. Now you've got some gizmo on your XO!

There are a few UI problems, no windowing in Sugar, if you open the preferences you'll need to go to the local view and stop the pref pane from there (it's save fine).

I am able to use my Logitech USB headset with it and it runs great. I don't think I'll be able to do much else with the laptop, like browse, while I'm on the call and I don't know how long the battery will last (it doesn't last long as it is), but I plan on trying all of that out soon.

Amy and I decided to order an XO Laptop from the Give 1, Get 1 program. I'm kind of excited about it, just from a geek point of view. I also like that it's super rugged and I won't feel weird about having Kelly bang on it like I am with our other laptops. She really loves playing with the computers and if I can have a computer where she can use jacksonpollock.org without the need to really be supervised, then I'm all for it. Plus it's a ton of geek cred if she learns how to use the computer before age 2.

Another reason we got it is to help out with the OLPC program. I'm a firm believer that this program could really change things in countries where it's deployed and I think putting in Windows machines in these types of places could really hurt these kids' computer development education. These laptops remind me of older machines, like the Commodore 64s that I grew up on. They're completely open and available for programming and sharing. You just don't get that with today's focus on DRM and secure computing. And if these things can replace physical textbooks in these areas, the cost savings alone would be huge.

I also think, the more I've heard about it, that the OS on these things is revolutionary. Every program on the laptop has the source available to be hacked. You just push a button and an editor comes up that lets you code and test in real time. This is the kind of thing on the C= 64 that really got me into programming at such a young age. I'm really interested in trying it out myself. Mess it all up? Everything is version controlled, so you can just roll it back with no problems. Write a cool program you want to share? Anyone with an XO laptop can just download it and muck with it too. This is teaching real computer skills and not just how to sit in a box and use a computer's programs but really how to use the computer.

So that's why I'm getting one. How about you?

BTW, most of the people in this video have no idea what they're talking about. It actually is waterproof.