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Microsoft Looking to Run Windows on OLPC
pete314 writes "Microsoft has been provided with a number of test models of Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child computers and is trying to get Windows installed on them. The current design runs a custom version of Red Hat's Fedora Linux. Running Windows will take quite a bit of additional memory: the OLPC has 512Mb of Flash, where XP requires a minimum of 1.5Gb storage."
Why wouldn't they just try to run some variant of Windows Fundamentals on them?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Bundled with level of corruption in OLPC-buying countries it seems pretty scary.
The author of the article (and slashdot) quote the disk space required for XP, but why wouldn't they use XP embedded on a device like this? According to Wikipedia XP Embedded only needs "32MB Compact Flash, 32MB RAM". They should be able to get it running even without using the SD expansion slot (although that certainly wouldn't hurt).
As much as I hate Windows, I think it's unfair to imply that it requires so much more than Linux does. I've installed Fedora before and it isn't small - definitely not small enough to fit on a 512MB footprint. But RedHat altered it so that it would require less. Likewise, Microsoft could alter Windows to require less. The big difference is that anyone has the right to alter Linux whereas Microsoft is the only one that can do that for Windows.
I don't think that having Linux on them is prohibiting installing Windows. You just may not have enough memory for the last one, but that's the life. It's the 100$, not the 1000$ PC.
As a OLPC contributor (see this) and as a friend of an OLPC staffer, I have to say this is a pointless endeavour. The OLPC staff won't use Windows because it's too insecure, and isn't free.
Remember, they want to send MILLIONS of laptops into the field and avoid downtime caused by viruses, bugs, overflows, etc. The laptops are going to be hardened down quite a bit so even if a user app is exploited the laptop as a whole is still ok. They're using GNU/Linux for more reasons than the fact it costs $0 to license. They have to be able to recover from flaws in the field, of which they want to have precious few of.
And besides, even if Windows were secure, they would have to give away fully functional copies for FREE to make the budget. Even charging OLPC $1 for the license would hurt the budget ($1 * millions of laptops == no good). In short, there isn't really a "market" here other than trying to expose another generation to inferior software.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If Windows is installed on the OLPC laptops, then we'll have to also get antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-adware and perhaps a few system recovery apps. There will also have to be a Windows key on the keyboard, which in my view, may be a stopper right there.
I am afraid that if OLPC machines are distributed throughout the Third World and Windows is the OS, we may see a global conflagration. We better be prepared to train a few million of the world's poorest people to be Support Techs. Microsoft might be willing to donate a few million MSCE training DVDs.
If we took the cost of the Iraq War for six months, we might be able to improve these folks' situation enough that in a year or two they could afford to buy their own PC parts from Tiger Direct and put it together themselves, just like God intended.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They've already offered free Windows licenses for OLPC. I think it's a OLPC is a bit like Netscape, they basically want a product to compete with it, even if they don't see any money for the forseeable future. More generously, the Gates foundation pays billions to charity, and free Windows for the third world is probably worth it for the publicity.
I think they'll run Windows CE on it.
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS261936762
Though it's got a x86 compatible AMD Geode, so it could run XP or Win2K. Given the huge number of platforms NT&CE have run on (x86, x86-63, Itanium, Alpha, Mips, PowerPC, Alpha64, i860, ARM, Hitachi SH, Matsushita AM33, Mitsubishi M32R *) there are obviously some people inside Microsoft who are keen or porting things to new hardware.
These guys, http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html
say
And this is just hacking
But XP in 300MB is no problem even if you just hack inf files.
* OK, maybe not that huge but consider how many they absolutely needed to support. On NT, Mips, PowerPC and Alpha had negligable market share or support from applications and were eventually dropped. But despite that, someone in the kernel team decided to pay for the work to port to them. There's a document with the of PE processor types here
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/fir
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Wrong! Price is irrelevant; the only consideration is that the device must be hackable by the user. The developers of the OLPC are insisting on Free Software specifically because they want the kids to have the four freedoms; no more, no less.
By the way, if you don't believe me consider this: the OLPC people rejected Mac OS X even when it was offered for free (i.e., zero cost).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It seems amazing to me that you could pick up a hammer, use it to do things that are damn near impossible with your hands, and formulate no opinion on the value of hammers in the process. It's a basic part of human learning. This must be why this project is taking so damned long...
Negroponte is avoiding the kiss of death for charities: getting involved in the open market.
For example, imagine you are running the Red Cross, MSF, Salvation Army, or some other large charity that does large amounts of shipping. You may look at Exxon-Mobil's record profits and think, "this is insane...we're lining the pockets of this company's shareholders with money that could otherwise be helping the needy. Our mission burns tons of fuel, but there must be a better way." To fix this you start investing capital in your own not-for-profit private fuel suppliers, just to keep the costs in-house. A little later you look back and realize your suppliers are horridly inefficient because they never had to answer to the open market, all your working capital is tied up in wells, refineries, pipelines, and tankers, and your bureaucracy nightmare puts most banana republics to shame.
This example is excessive, but it demonstrates the simple trap of a good idea ("Lets feed the needy, not Big Oil Inc.") becoming a living hell ("Why are we drilling for oil in Greenland instead of feeding the needy?"). Charities constantly make this mistake on a smaller scale, especially in the printing, mailing, and call-center businesses. The siren-call of "let's keep this in-house" is so tempting, it's hard to realize it's the same as signing an exclusive contract with a supplier that has no competition and no experience.
Negroponte doesn't really care what operating system ends up on the OLPC, so long as it meets requirements. He does want to avoid getting into the operating system business.
Negroponte only cares about the nail getting pounded in. If you can do it cheaper with a different tool, you're hired.
Negroponte doesn't care about the hammer.
Well I can back you up on that. I ran Windows XP for nearly two years on a laptop at home to "keep up" with what was going on in the other camp. Much like you, I was behind a hardware based firewall, kept all the security updates going, etc... I NEVER installed an antivirus program on it and never got an infection (I scanned the system before I wiped it at the end of that period and it was clean) once. For the first eight or nine months I ran with the stock XP using IE. My wife used the system as well (she's not a techy and visited some sites that definitely introduced some spyware). After having some odd problems and cleaning the system with Spybot S&D and AdAware, I installed Firefox, removed the "blue E" and pretty much hid IE from the system. The interesting thing to me is that when I would run Sypbot and AdAware, the system was clean every time. To me, that was ultimate proof that IE was the main culprit for Windows security issues. Never went back to IE and never missed it. In order to make Windows XP more usable I installed Cygwin on it and started building up the suite of things I felt were necessary. I was able to be somewhat comfortable but there were so many niceties that I experience in Gnome/KDE apps and the Gnome desktop that I couldn't take it anymore and my experiment came to an end.
What did I miss? Mainly the ability to get an application for anything I wanted to do without having to pay an arm and a leg. Yeah... it was the "free beer". Even though I had to "brew" it, it was still better than having to pay premium prices to buy the premade stuff. The second thing I missed was how the apps in most Linux distros tend to have a lot more options (something that most users wouldn't care about) available for both GUI and especially CLI environments. I don't know how many people experience this in Windows, but I do all the time: "Hmmm.. I wonder if I can do action X with application Z"? Poke around a bit and find that you can't, or worse... you can but only if you upgrade to the deluxe version of the software meaning that you have to fork out more cash. And finally, the extensibilty of the OS itself. Unless someone writes a particular driver for something, you're pretty much out of luck if you're not an MS developer if you want the core OS (ie. kernel) to do something new. Again, to cite an example, I point to the Linux kernel's network block device support. All I had to do to enable it was compile the kernel/module and load the module, install a user space app for server and client and bam... I had new and amazing functionality. I was then able to export hard drives, CD-ROM and DVD drives as network block devices which could be imported to remote systems via TCP. This is NOT file sharing. It's basically like making a disk on one system appear as a disk on a remote system that can be partitioned, formattted or in the case of a DVD, played via the network.
As much as I wish it weren't so, I think that people like me are relatively rare. Most people have no problem paying out lots of money for new functionality, or worse, pirating software. I'm in a situation where my interest in computers and software exceeds my financial situation. So GNU/Linux is a natural fit in that way. The XP system I was using was provided by my employer so it was no cost to me. But after having drank of the FOSS well, I can't go back for reasons more than just the finances... I've nearly eliminated Windows from my life other than at work (only on the servers I have to deal with from time to time. My workstation is Gentoo) and the occasions when I use a virtual machine at home to access Windows only online media. Whatever fits your situation... use it.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o