Forgive me if this has been discussed before, but has anybody considered porting OLPC's Sugar OS to the N tablets? Or even just some of its apps, such as the word processor? I believe they're all GTK and, of course, about as open source as its possible to be.

Have you ever actually played with the sugar window manager?

Yes, I downloaded the latest version a few weeks ago. It's available as a VMWare image. Prior to that I'd been keeping up with its progress.

I realise that Sugar has a specific goal in connecting students and allowing them to share their work. It's also built around a high-resolution display (not physically but DPI). But one man's "connecting students" is another's social networking -- it'd be pretty cool if the N800 was able to seek out other N800 users nearby.

Also, the OLPC's limited hardware isn't a million miles away from the N800/810.

But the main reason I raised the possibility of porting Sugar was to get its word processor, which is pretty neat, if basic. At the moment the Nokia internet tablets have an almost complete black-hole when it comes to *stable* office software, particularly word processors.

Okay, just making sure, I've been playing with the vmware image as well. Really don't like it.

A very cool thing though would be to port a compatible mesh networking system and have the N8X0, OLPC and OpenMokos of this world cooperate on a mesh networking standard...

True, this would be pretty cool.

What about adding Rendezvous/Bonjour/Zeroconf chat abilities to the built in messenger (or to Pidgin in the absence of the above)?

Isn't the Sugar word processor just Abiword? The journaling application might be nice to have, though.

It was, but it's been built upon quite heavily to share documents and tie in with the rather nice Sugar GUI effects. If you haven't already, try downloading one of the VMWare images. The OLPC is pretty impressive stuff.