Quoting Gani.Bhagavathula

However, the experience of Netbook Remix was OK on the Qemu, not too good. Enough to give me something to look forward to. On the OLPC itself, the ume-launcher sucked big time! Every click would bring screen flickering, register 30 seconds after I clicked etc., Mind you, all the apps had acceptable response once launched, while ume-launcher response was beyond bad! Beta software and all that, but still I have come to expect better from Ubuntu. The end experience was bad enough for me to ditch remix and go to XfCE, which looks nice and polished.

Yeah, it's slower than molasses. It helps a lot to have hardware acceleration turned on in X but that requires you to hand-tweak your xorg.conf file or find someone else's that works. I posted mine earlier in this thread but ume-launcher is still pretty slow even with it. The mouse doesn't jump as bad though.

Quoting Gani.Bhagavathula

One query for those in the know: All the guides say I need a developer key for OLPC. There was one odd note buried somewhere in a google search that said I didnt need it. I decided not to get one. I am still able to boot into the SD card as long as I hold the game key when I switch on the OLPC. Does the developer key get me out of holding this key? Is there any other advantage to having it? (In other words, is it worth the trouble of getting one if I already have working Ubuntu?

Nice find! The developer key is used (in my understanding) to allow the XO to run unsigned code. I have one because it seemed like the thing to do at the time and wasn't a huge hassle. If you already have a working Ubuntu installation though and it doesn't require one, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

-drasnor