Keith Hopper at the January 2008 XO laptop meetup

We had our first XO laptop meetup at AS220 on Tuesday January 15. It was a small crew, only about seven people, some with XO laptops, some without. For those of you who aren't familiar with the XO, it's that little green laptop formerly known as the $100 laptop. Between November and December of 2007, you could donate to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation and receive a laptop of your own. For $400, you got a $200 tax deduction, a laptop was sent to a child somewhere in the world, and you got a laptop of your own. On top of that, T- Mobile kicked in one year of free access to their Wi-Fi hotspots.

The XO laptop is Linux-powered, so it's a lot of fun to hack. At the meetup, attendees poked around and explored everything from simple hacks like activity sharing and changing their ID, on up to using Tom Hoffman's xochat.org (a public ejabberd server that allows users to chat and collaborate with XO laptop owners from all over the world).

We're aiming to have another meetup soon, and expect to continue exploring the capabilities of these fascinating little machines!

Further reading:

• Geek.com: Hacking the XO laptop
• Hackszine.com entries on XO laptop hacks
• More information about the XO laptop
• XO laptop wiki