One Laptop Per Child

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/