My own setup:

Sony Netplayer with subscription to Hulu Plus at $8 a month. 1/10th what I was paying for cable, and I get The Daily Show, Colbert, Korean dramas, Criterion collection movies, and tons of other stuff.

Wall mounted indoor antenna.

A DVD recorder with a hard drive for recording off the air programs. I can play them back from the hard drive or edit out commercials and burn to DVD.

A Mac mini with Eye TV. I can convert the recordings to MP4 and save them.

I'm getting more and better entertainment than I ever did with cable, and it's cheap!

I wrote an Activity for the One Laptop Per Child project that does this:

http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035

I don't claim to be the first one to do this. Who would? It is such an obvious idea that you would think it could not be patented.

I was and still am a fan of WindowMaker, for all the reasons others have given. Lately I've switched to GNOME because I find myself constantly mounting thumb drives and DVDs, etc. In the old days there was a wmmount app for the dock that did this, and you set up your fstab so the mount points were all defined. These days I don't configure fstab. I'll have multiple USB drives plugged in and GNOME will just assign the mount point a name based on the volume label and mount them. If WindowMaker could do this I'd give up GNOME and never look back.

WindowMaker also makes it really easy to create themes and backgrounds for your desktop and switch them. Switching backgrounds in GNOME is a much bigger deal to go through.

Booki was what there was before Booktype, and FLOSS Manuals used other software before Booki which I also used. The great thing about all this software is that many people can collaborate on a book online, then distribute in in multiple formats:

1). As a website
2). As a PDF that can be published as a print-on-demand book by Lulu or Create Space.
3). As an EPUB (which you can run Kindlegen on to create a MOBI for the Kindkle).
4). As a "newspaper".

Some examples of books I have created:

websites

http://en.flossmanuals.net/make-your-own-sugar-activities/

http://en.flossmanuals.net/como-hacer-una-actividad-sugar/

http://en.flossmanuals.net/e-book-enlightenment/

epub, mobi, and pdf

http://www.archive.org/details/MakeYourOwnSugarActivities

http://www.archive.org/details/ComoHacerUnaActividadSugar

http://www.archive.org/details/EBookEnlightenment

On the Kindle Store

http://www.amazon.com/Make-Your-Sugar-Activities-ebook/dp/B0050VAHKW/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1329414720&sr=1-2

http://www.amazon.com/Hacer-Actividad-Sugar-Spanish-ebook/dp/B0058DBRVA/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3

http://www.amazon.com/E-Book-Enlightenment-ebook/dp/B005BYST5I/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Times-Bhakta-Jim-ebook/dp/B00730HE54/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1329414780&sr=1-1

On Lulu

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/make-your-own-sugar-activities/12995552?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/1

And soon, The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim on Create Space.

The Spanish book was translated from "Make Your Own Sugar Activities!" by a team of volunteers, mostly in South America, who likely had never met in person.

Don't underestimate what this software can do! It isn't perfect, but in time it will change how we author and publish books.

I have no idea which navigation elements you are referring to. I have an XO, I test my Activities on an IBM NetVista running Fedora 10, and I have tried Sugar on a Stick. The one thing the XO does that my other computers don't is it it can rotate the screen image. Handy, but not indispensable. While the XO has special keys for moving between its different views, in fact they are just F1-F4 with different labels. The special keys on either side of the display map to the numeric keypad on a regular keyboard. IMHO Sugar works just fine on any PIII or better machine.

I'd like to correct the title of this post. What Sugar Labs is creating is NOT a fork of Sugar. It is the thing itself. There is no other version of Sugar being developed now. Sugar Labs is making Sugar available in all major Linux distros, as well as creating the version that runs on the XO and Sugar on a Stick. All this will make it possible for far more children to be able to use Sugar.

What the schools do is irrelevant. It's what the kids do. And what the kids can do with this software is:

Learn to program in Turtle Art (like LOGO), Smalltalk (EToys), or Python (Pippy).
Download and read free books from Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.
Write documents with a word processor that allows collaboration: multiple authors of the same document at the same time.
Draw pictures with Activities that support the same kind of collaboration.
Run the GCompris suite of educational Activities, which teach basic math concepts, etc.
Play games that develop thinking skills ...and a bunch of other stuff.

Plus, this software does not replace Windows. It runs off a stick. So the school can have a computer lab full of Windows boxes to teach the next generation of office drones, and the kids can still use SoaS on those boxes without interfering in any way with that important task.

Yes, you can use Sugar on a Stick with your old PC that doesn't support booting from a USB drive. In this case in addition to the thumb drive you need to make a "helper CD". Your system boots off the helper CD but all the data goes on the thumb drive. This is not just a Live CD to try out Sugar; it's a system children can actually use to do all their work. It's quite impressive and I encourage all Slashdot readers to try it out.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick

Serenity should be the name of a spacecraft, not a mere room on a space station. For a mere room "Colbert" is as good as any other name. It does, however, make me wish I had written in the name I thought of after the promotion was over:

"The Howard Johnson's Earthlight Room".

Now *that's* a name for a room on a space station. And you could probably get Howard Johnson's to pay something for the naming rights. If they're still in business, of course. The one I went to as a kid is now a Hooters.