One Laptop Per Child

[miriam_e]

A wonderful project begun by Nicholas Negroponte. He has left his position as head of the MIT Media Lab to concentrate on it. Latest is that 4 countries, Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand, are interested in buying 1 million of laptops for free distribution to children.

The $100 laptop will use Linux as its operating system and will be able to run on mains power, batteries, or windup (like some radios and torches are). They won't need a fan because their 500MHz processor (I'm typing this on an old 400MHz machine) will use very little power. Connectivity will be via peer to peer WiFi and shared internet. I believe they'll use RAM and FlashRAM and ROM -- no hard drive or CDROM drive. That's good, much more reliable.

This seems to be the latest design:


This is an older design:


Barry Kauler wants the OLPC project to use the fantastically small and fast Puppy Linux distribution he developed. I think that is a fantastic idea. Puppy Linux is very easy to use, is tiny (only about 60MB for operating system and full set of software for office applications, multimedia and internet use), is the fastest operating system I've used in a long while, and is simple to use. Unfortunately, at the moment it looks like OLPC will use Red Hat's Fedora Linux. I don't know how they intend to fit that enormous, slow distribution onto the laptop, but I hope they manage to without severely compromising the project.

Here are some links.
http://laptop.media.mit.edu/
http://laptop.org/
http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home
http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS7131519895.html

Puppy Linux:
http://puppyos.org/
http://dotpups.de/
http://puppyfiles.us/

Comments

Re: One Laptop Per Child

[(Anonymous)]

Do you think they'll sell these computers in *our* countries?

Many folks would appreciate a small, cheap, sturdy and useful PC, and there would be bound to be lots of opensource software developed!

The price we'd pay could also subsidise machines for folks overseas.

This could be a Windows Vista killer.

MFG

Re: One Laptop Per Child

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I'm sure hoping so.

The state of Massachusetts in USA is adopting the project and intends to send free laptops out to all the children in that state. (Massachusetts is where MIT is -- Massachusetts Insitute of Technology.)

If by some chance it doesn't spread like wildfire there are several open hardware projects on the go at the moment to produce machines that are probably more powerful that the OLPC machine.

And I began designing a machine myself recently intending it to be able to produced for less than AU$100. If I press ahead with it I'll be giving the design away and encouraging schools to take it up.

Also there are a number of neat machines around now. The NSLU (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/) machine was originally designed as just a network handler for homes and offices, but people have been putting Puppy Linux on them and using them for much more. The are very low power so don't require a fan, and don't take a monitor, but using Linux this isn't a problem because X-Windows (I curse the way Microsoft damaged that name by calling their own system "Windows") allows you to run a desktop from another machine. So you simply hook up some old crappy machine via a network link to the NSLU and run it that way. Of course that means you need 2 computers...

Another way is to simply run Puppy Linux on any old, slow machine. Puppy is so fast it breathes new life into old slow machines.