One Laptop Per Child is a go
Seems like only yesterday I was wondering what had become of One Laptop Per Child – but it’s a go! The XO laptop is targeted at a $100 per unit price point, with intent to provide one to every underprivileged child who needs one. The first countries on board to buy are Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan and Thailand, and test machines should reach children as soon as February. It has 512 megs of flash ram, no hard disk, and a 366 AMD cpu. It runs a modified version of linux called Sugar, which Negroponte says is so much more usable than Windows or MacOS that, “I will give up my real [laptop] very soon and use only XO.” Instead of information being stored along the organising principle of folders and a desktop, users of the XO machine are encouraged to work on an electronic journal, a log of everything the user has done on the laptop. “It doesn’t feel like Linux. It doesn’t feel like Windows. It doesn’t feel like Apple,” said Wayan Vota of GeekCorps. A demo of the Sugar operating system is available for download and comment. [GT]
$100 laptop project eyes launch
