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Those things ought to be in bubble-packs at the local drugstore, alongside the cheap calculators, electronic dictionaries, and other low end electronics. This wouldn't stroke Negroponte's ego, but it would get the things out there in volume. Soon enough, they'd be available all over the world, purely on price.

They're doing pretty well on volume now. They have a brand-new factory, and last month they planned to ship 150,000, then 80,000-100,000 every month after (source).

Where are they going? I just did a bit of hunting. Uruguay ordered 100,000 units(see wiki) and Peru ordered 260,000 (see this post, near bottom). According to the "country news" section, Mexico's also placed some order; I think 100,000 is the minimum order size. 150,000 to 170,000 individual G1G1 orders and 15,000 for Birmingham, Alabama, for a total of around 400,000 G1G1 laptops (see interview), so I believe they have solid orders for 800,000 laptops.

Hopefully when they've had success with those 800,000, the other countries that originally intended to be part of the launch will get back on the bandwagon. So while I'm not a manufacturing expert, I would guess the difference between 1 million/year and 2 million/year isn't going to hugely affect the cost.

Here are some links:
http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1414
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-open/2007-December/thread.html#459

The general reason given for ending G1G1 was that it was a strain on the OLPC volunteers. See especially Nicole Lee's post http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-open/2007-December/000474.html

Here are some links:
http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1414
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-open/2007-December/thread.html#459

The general reason given for ending G1G1 was that it was a strain on the OLPC volunteers. See especially Nicole Lee's post http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/olpc-open/2007-December/000474.html

Watch this space........

Elsewhere in this thread, you will find a comment by jg (Jim Gettys). It has many things that at first I believed to be exaggerations, or just a glowing review from an OLPC staffer.

But, I found that all of what he said is present in detail, and pictures, on Carla Gomez's OLPC in Arahuay.

Really eye opening. Keep up the good work all.

I don't see why no one else has noticed this, but how about the XO laptop (a.k.a. the OLPC)? Besides being the same price as the kindle, (including giving one to a child in need with a $200 tax deductible donation) with a dual-mode display: one a conventional color LED laptop screen, the other a sunlight-readable, black-and-white e-book The software interface is truly incredible. The color display only uses 1 watt, and the e-book monochrome display only consumes 0.2 watts. It's rugged, has built-in wifi... It runs linux, there's python, collaborative music-making and writing...

The XO Laptop display is visible in full daylight. Its software is completely open. It can read and display open formats like plain text and PDF. It can download the files from the Internet using WiFi. It has extremely low power consumption and if you find yourself too far away from an outlet, you can charge it yourself. For the cost of a Kindle from Amazon you can buy an XO and donate one to a child.

From the specs page of the XO PC at One Laptop Per Child:

http://laptop.org/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml

        * Liquid-crystal display: 7.5" Dual-mode TFT display;
        * Viewing area: 152.4mm × 114.3mm;
        * Resolution: 1200 (H) × 900 (V) resolution (200 DPI);
        * Monochrome display: High-resolution, reflective sunlight-readable monochrome mode; Color display: Standard-resolution, Quincunx-sampled, transmissive color mode;
        * LCD power consumption: 0.1 Watt with backlight off; 0.2-1.0 Watt with backlight on;
        * The display-controller chip (DCON) with memory that enables the display to remain live with the processor suspended; the display and this chip are the basis of our extremely low power architecture; the display controller chip also enables deswizzling and anti-aliasing in color mode.

http://www.laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/highlights.shtml describes the power management/consumption pretty well. Very low power requirements compared with current laptops.

With clever engineering it should be possible to make a laptop exclusively used in low power mode solar powered if it's normally left out when not in use.

Why use this instead of the virtual version? http://dev.laptop.org/pub/virtualbox/

I want one for the child geek in me: (Plans abound already)

Flexible DC power: 11 to 18 V input usable, -32 to 40V input tolerated
'Geek Key' on keyboard to show source code of activity you are running.
WiFi card can run mesh network even when CPU powered down.
Screen can continue to display even when CPU powered down.
Screen can run in BW mode, disable back light and be visible in sunlight.
Built in camera can disable level and automatic gain and be used for measurement.
Built in audio card can be placed in mode exposing A/D converter for measuring some voltages.

Full details at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification

The kid is connecting to a central chat server via his home WiFi, and chatting to other people who are connecting to the same server via whatever network is near them. All he had to do was switch on the machine, enter the wireless key, and view the people in his 'neighbourhood'. What part of that is painted as "rosy"?

You can download an XO virtual machine and try this right now if you don't believe it: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/VMWare

Normally nothing else. But here is the main thing. Any student can request a developer's key. Once they have a developer's key they have full control over the computer and could disable the security system entirely. Now, how does one prevent a thief from requesting the key? Well to quote the spec: "The key-issuing process incorporates a 14-day delay to allow for a slow theft report to percolate up through the system, and is only issued if the machine is not reported stolen at the end of that period of time." To see the whole OLPC security specification see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Bitfrost especially the "P_THEFT: anti-theft protection" section.

The article doesn't make it clear where the laptop came from, but it probably isn't one of the production laptops (i.e. one sent to Give-One-Get-One recipients or to children in participating countries). This is supported by (1) the picture in the original article which doesn't appear to have the stippled texture that was added to the production laptop case and (2) the fact that the laptop came configured to point at a Jabber server shared between schools (afaik, production laptops won't do this). So it is probably a pre-production model, maybe used in the Nigerian pilot study or for development/promotional purposes.

The BBC has been covering the pilot study, so perhaps the reporter was already in Nigeria to cover the story and was given a souvenir from the phased-out machines?

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/VMWare

It's a modified Linux distro, you can get a live CD to play with it here.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation

Enjoy. It's a modified RedHat distro with a special WM called Sugar.

It runs a customized, stripped-down version of Fedora Core 7 (details here). There isn't an "XO emulator", but since it's s standard x86 system, you can emulate an XO using Qemu, VMware, Virtualbox, or another virtualization program. (It's not perfect, but it is close enough to see how the system works.)

It runs a customized, stripped-down version of Fedora Core 7 (details here). There isn't an "XO emulator", but since it's s standard x86 system, you can emulate an XO using Qemu, VMware, Virtualbox, or another virtualization program. (It's not perfect, but it is close enough to see how the system works.)

From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/News

Wolfgang Rohrmoser and Kurt Gramlich are proud to announce the initial version of their OLPC XO-LiveCD. This new project targets these goals:

  give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the Sugar educational software on a common PC;
  support demonstration of OLPC software to non-developers;
  provide an easy maintainable Live-System for developers to test activities on the sugar desktop, this could be regarded as an alternative to existing OLPC virtualbox and qemu images.

The technology they choose embeds an unmodified official Redhat build into a framework (LiveBackup), which provides everything needed to run a live system. Going this way we are able to minimize the work for updates as new OLPC builds get released.

The ISO image are available at:

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/

as: XO-LiveCD_.iso

Images will be mirrored to:

http://skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/

Wolfgang and Kurt encourage everybody to try it out and give them feedback for improvements; please send mail to:

XO-LiveCD@skolelinux.de. Further information is available in the XO-LiveCD.pdf document at:

http://skolelinux.de/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD.pdf

More to the point: Why did the parent poster get a five when (s)he misses the main point by a million miles?

It's not "... just aren't rich enough to provide computers for their students". It is "...just aren't rich enough to provide books for their students".

Let me add to the chorus: It's an education project, not a computer project. The little green computers are just terminals to enable the kids to turn the information presented thereon into knowledge in their brains.

If J. Dvorak had the wit to be able to do so, he would have at least experimented with the software by downloading an emulator from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads/ and the OLPC software from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/virtualbox/. The build OLPC-625.zip works for me. If J. Dvorak had actually installed it, he would have discovered that the said little green box is the work of a team of top level geniuses, instead he just confirms the fact that he is just an ignorant shill squeaking mindlessly for that (in)famous Harvard dropout.

Had he spent just a couple of hours doing that he would have discovered that Nicholas Negroponte et all really do deserve a Nobel Prize.

More to the point: Why did the parent poster get a five when (s)he misses the main point by a million miles?

It's not "... just aren't rich enough to provide computers for their students". It is "...just aren't rich enough to provide books for their students".

Let me add to the chorus: It's an education project, not a computer project. The little green computers are just terminals to enable the kids to turn the information presented thereon into knowledge in their brains.

If J. Dvorak had the wit to be able to do so, he would have at least experimented with the software by downloading an emulator from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads/ and the OLPC software from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/virtualbox/. The build OLPC-625.zip works for me. If J. Dvorak had actually installed it, he would have discovered that the said little green box is the work of a team of top level geniuses, instead he just confirms the fact that he is just an ignorant shill squeaking mindlessly for that (in)famous Harvard dropout.

Had he spent just a couple of hours doing that he would have discovered that Nicholas Negroponte et all really do deserve a Nobel Prize.

It's a hard point to argue if you had only two options, food, or a laptop, the food seems a better choice.

I'm sceptical about the OLPC programme for certain reasons, but I'm even more sceptical about Dvorak, whose crap is rarely anything more than trolling for readers and selling advertising. I also think it's gratuitous to give him credit for raising this issue -- people have been criticising the OLPC project about this for years.

As much as "absolute poverty" is a problem, there are more kids in the world than those living in absolute poverty. I was in Peru 6 months ago and I could easily see the demographics where the OLPC project might actually be beneficial. Distribution of food is a big problem in some places around the world, but in other places there are a lot of kids who'd benefit from decent education much more than they'd benefit from more food. Trying to suggest that we should solve all the problems of the lowest common denominator before even glancing at anything else is absurd.

I do have doubts about the merits of simply throwing laptops at children and expecting them to become more educated. Trying to use a laptop as if it's a teacher seems similar to trying to use a television as if it's a babysitter. Having said that though, I think it's worth noting that the laptops produced by the OLPC project are very different from typical Windows-running (or even Linux-running) laptops in western countries. I haven't been fortunate enough to have seen one, but it sounds like they're fundamentally designed both at the hardware and software level with teaching in mind, including encouraging kids to think about what's going on inside. The stated mission of the project isn't to teach kids about computers, it's to teach kinds about thinking, problem solving and creativity. They should really be considered their own category of teaching tool rather than confusing them with what people think of as day-to-day crappy crashing laptops.

With good teachers and good teaching programmes, it sounds like these laptops could be very beneficial for certain demographics of children in developing countries. I guess my own scepticism about the project is because so much media focus is on getting durable laptops to children, without necessarily giving them a good learning environment and useful teachers to go with it. Perhaps I'm wrong about this.

I'll have to ask if anyone's tried installing X, which would probably be insane, but it would be interesting at least.

Look, quit wasting your time asking questions and do something for yourself. Grab your favorite virtualization software (such as VMware), download a copy of the XO disk image, (or the Live CD) and see for yourself.

More info from the Emulating the XO page on the wiki.

And what have you got against insanity, anyway?

I haven't seen the email and don't know the context, but the first-hand history of why there is an SD-card slot on the machine is: (1) We needed to add an ASIC to improve NAND access; (2) We took this as an opportunity to add a video camera contoller at minimal additional cost; (3) At essentially no additional cost, we added an SD-card slot to give the kids more options re storing their videos (at the time, we were only planning on .5G of on-board NAND. While it is probably a cleaner solution for MS to take advantage of SD rather than USB, there was not and still is not room on-board for Windows and there has been from Day One external expansion capability.

• With Windows running on the XO, the XO can compete directly with other sublaptops on hardware alone. While this runs counter to the project's "education first" goal in the short term, it may lead to longer term success, since the XO is much more rugged than any other candidates (and Linux will probably perform better on the XO than Windows will).
• With Windows available on all platforms, Microsoft has less incentive to back any one platform and therefore has less incentive use its resources to derail the project.
• Windows on the XO means that the project can deflect the inflated expectations of individual first-world purchasers onto Microsoft, leaving the OLPC able to focus on the large educational systems that are its primary target.

This is very old news. The OLPC has a SD slot and should be capable of running XP as it is now. From the OLPC website:

Flash explansion: MMC/SD Card slot.

capacity to add another gig of flash, and XP could run on it. How much educational software would then fit in the machine?

If they need secondary storage, doesn't the laptop already have both an SD slot and a USB slot? (See the OLPC specs!) And if the SD slot is non functional, can't XP boot off of a USB flash disk?

So what's the problem?

This is old news.

The important part is to note the verb's tense. MSFT said "we asked OLPC to add a SD card". The OLPC folks complied, and the slot's been there for a while.

Since I develop some software that's made its way onto the laptop, I managed to pick up a B2 machine a few months ago, complete with SD slot (in the most awkward place - under the monitor but above the keyboard. almost impossible to get to).

See http://www.laptop.org/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml, under the "external connectors" section.

Can't the slot just be mounted before the bootloader? It apparently takes HCSD cards too.

http://laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml

• Flash Expansion: SD Card slot.

• Flash Expansion: SD Card slot.

You can get the vmware image here: http://dev.laptop.org/pub/virtualbox/ I haven't tried the latest one, but had success (minus the sound) with the next most recent when I downloaded it and ran it under vmware server. But you don't need vmware to play with etoys. Follow the instructions in the waveland tutorial (essentially install what's at the first link -- versions for windows, os/X and linux are there) and then fetch the second squeakland link to be executed by the program installed when you download the first squeakland link).

Try this -> http://dev.laptop.org/pub/virtualbox/

I haven't tried the very latest one, but the 625 image works for me on vmware server running on a Linux host. (Except sound).

Which do you want? LiveCD or emulation?

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation

is certainly your best bet. here's a screenshot.

Or you can try to boot off a usb disk:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_USB_disks

which I'm about to give a go now. Looks harder.

Which do you want? LiveCD or emulation?

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_emulation

is certainly your best bet. here's a screenshot.

Or you can try to boot off a usb disk:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OS_images_for_USB_disks

which I'm about to give a go now. Looks harder.

It seems to be a claim that a keyboard layout (i.e. which key goes where) is a patentable design. Of course in most of the world keyboard layouts are standardized, denying us the fun of learning a new keyboard layout whenever we buy a new keyboard -- but perhaps this isn't the case there.

What is even more amusing is that the keyboard layouts are not even the same!

Assuming Peru chooses to implement it, the XO laptop's anti-theft protections should be pretty effective at preventing much of that. The kids can sell the laptops, sure, but they'll soon shut themselves down and lock the new owner out unless they're regularly in contact with the school's server. So the unscrupulous geeks won't get much for their $20.

http://wiki.laptop.org/

And how does this relate to the Asus Eee laptop and GPL concerns?

As for your moaning - grow up! I applaud your directness in admitting you are too cheap to give OLPC a cash donation. As for the Buy 1 Get 1 offer, first off it would cost you $400 - $200 for the laptop you get and $200 for the one you donated. As for not living in either the US or Canada that is your own fault, we've left our borders to the US wide open for hundreds of years, that neither you nor your ancestors couldn't find time to make it over hear before we close the borders is your own fault.

The buy 1 get 1 deal is way to get some much-needed cash into their coffers ASAP (as their 1 million unit minimum is really cutting down on potential sales), and they really weren't looking to set up repair depots and support services around the globe.

Your problem is your ancestors didn't make it into US/Canada, and you happen to live in the developed world - this effort should really be called One Laptop Per Non-White Child...

As for your coding skills, I guess OLPC will have to get by with an infinite number of monkeys minus one (you) to craft their software...

The reason the XO laptops are being sent to these developing nations is because they don't have the facilities to run a computer lab (or library for that matter). It's essentially providing them with a portable computer lab that can be used without being plugged in. To put it simply: it's a cheap computer that can be used in the desert without an electrical outlet.

http://www.laptop.org/en/children/learning/
Seems like most of you need to do some research before responding.

1. Check the first keyboard layout released with the XO laptop before August 2006.
2. Take it from us that OLPC purchased our keyboards sometime in August 2006.
3. Now go to OLPC's http://dev.laptop.org/query and follow the development of OLPC's new set of keyboard layouts and driver. (Take note of the first day this development started.
4. Check for OLPC's new XO keyboard layout used at the CES 2007 show.
5. Now go to OLPC's wiki.laptop.org and again follow the postings of information about their keyboard layout development and key date changes were made.
6. Now when you have all these info collated, call OLPC and ask why they choose to remove the keyboard layouts used in the CES 2007 XO model after September 2007.
7. See if you can put together all the various versions of OLPC keyboard layouts and match them to events you discovered from their query database.

Here is the US international layout for OLPC:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Keyboard_layouts

Here is the Konyin layout for the US (you have to click on VIEW LAYOUT under UNITED STATES):

http://www.konyin.com/?page=home&menuitem=1

Maybe Konyin thinks that they invented making additional languages/scripts/special characters available via additional shift characters, but that's ridiculous; here is the Windows US International keyboard layout:

http://www.usna.edu/LangStudy/US-InternationalLayout.html

See, lots of special characters via AltGr.

There needs to be just a modular computer appliance for the other 99.999% of the population, the potential customer gets a checklist of normal apps with descriptions, "surf the web" chat with friends" "watch movies" play games", a "what would you like to do?" thing, that gets checked off and only that is what the appliance "does" with big fat buttons that work with one mash and that's it, even directly on the keyboard or better yet just a blank machine with plug in applications as hardware modules.

Good question, and the answer is that Negroponte's goal is NOT to get cheap laptops in the hands of poor children.

http://laptop.org/vision/index.shtml

                    "It's an education project, not a laptop project."

                -- Nicholas Negroponte

At least until a few of them have their leases expire and cease to function.

Yes, the OLPC folks have thought about this issue, as have several of their prospective customers. The big driver for the leases is to ensure that the laptops aren't worth stealing, but they address resale as well. Of course, the XO laptops that will be delivered to US and Canadian buyers under the current program will have perpetual leases and will be resellable, but this won't be the case where poor families selling their children's laptops is an issue.

What, exactly, do you believe his claimed goal to be? Because getting laptops in the hands of children is pretty darn close to the goal.

There are a number of things wrong with that statement. It's an extremest point of view that "we shouldn't worry about X until Y and Z are fixed". Similar statements are "we shouldn't try to cure aids until after we cure cancer". Yes, parts/most of Africa has a number of problems larger than "kids don't have laptops". But if you know anything about this project, it's not about giving kids laptops so they can bang around on MySpace all day like american kids do. I suggest you get educated about the project, goals, the technology implementations, etc. Download an emulated version. Try out the server version that teachers/schools will run. Understand the potential impact on education in Africa, which may accelerate forward progress of upcoming generations in Africa.