The first thing to try with any web-enabled device is to check if it can play back Youtube. Well, the XO-1 cannot, which I guess is because of the GNU Flash player (Adobe's official one cannot be included as it does not meet the open source criterion) lacking the codec that is being used. Even if it was there, I wonder if the CPU would be up to the task.

Not being able to watch Youtube is of course a decidedly First World Problem, and not really relevant to OLPC (or maybe it is, it seems the Internet is rapidly becoming an important alley for authentic individual voices that the traditional media outlets would just ignore). Anyway, there is a built-in camera and a Record activity (applications are called activities) that can be used to capture video clips of up to sixty seconds. Unfortunately, I could not make that work, either. I could record a clip and play it back again in Record, but after closing the activity could find no way to view it again. The video does appear in the Journal, but when trying to open it, the browser launches, shows a download dialog and then a blank page. Again, the software is not quite there yet.

It does not make matters easier that the XO-1 tries to get rid off the concept of a traditional file system: Rather than the user explicitly saving and loading files, the Journal is supposed to automatically keep track of everything you do (including older revisions of documents you change, but I am not sure if that is already implemented). Until that works reliably, it would be nice to know where the files actually are.

Update: The same problem hit me after writing this article -- first blog post from the machine itself! After finally finding the file I typed in the Write activity (based on AbiWord) as /home/olpc/.sugar/default/datastore/store/78dc0364-be9c-4886-8329-ee62063f28fb I decided to drop out of Sugar and into vi to finish it (praised be the person who agreed to keep the underlying standard Linux tools around and readily accessible).