EiffelStudio and OLPC

by Manu (modified: 2007 Aug 22)

Have you heard about the One Laptop Per Child initiative (also known as the $100 laptop). If not, check out http://www.laptop.org for more information. The reason why I'm mentioning it is simple, EiffelStudio is running on it.

We received our test laptop last week and installed the standard delivery of EiffelStudio 6.0 for Linux-x86. See below for a picture of the laptop with EiffelStudio:

The OLPC laptop The OLPC laptop

The only thing that we had to do was to use another window manager (twm in place of the sugar one which truncates the visible screen a little bit too much to see the whole EiffelStudio environment) and have our own .gtkrc-2.0 file to use a smaller font than the default for GTK.

Note that to execute your systems, you also need to install a C compiler (tcc or gcc) as the laptop does not come with one. But you do not have to develop on the laptop, you can do like us, develop on Linux-x86 and simply copy the binary over the laptop.

The specs of the laptop are 1GB of flash memory for the hard-drive and 256MB of RAM which is good enough for compiling some relatively large projects (1000 or more classes).

Happy Eiffeling, Manu