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Mandriva Linux pre-installed on Intel's Classmate
boklm writes "Mandriva announced it will have a version of its Mandriva Linux 2007 pre-installed on Intel's new low-end laptop for students in developing countries, the Classmate PC.
This laptop comes with 256MB of RAM, 1 or 2GB of flash memory, 802.11b/g WiFi, 10/100Mbps ethernet, 2 USB ports, a 7-inch LCD display and 4 hours battery.
Produced in Brazil, shipping is expected to begin in the second quarter of this year, and will be available to Mexico, India, and developing countries."
Certainly looks like an OLPC Clone to me.
But what the hell, WHY NOT.
..::ALWAYS : watching::..
Bah, what part of "these aren't for the starving people instead of aid" do you not understand? these are for people who have food but lack a complex economy which would be needed to take advantage of the global world's purchasing needs. Maybe if they had these computers they could start to learn SKILLS which will be useful to them in generating money for themselves and their region.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
The school day around here is a lot longer than four hours. OLPC paid a lot of attention to the power supply. The spec sheet for this one just shows the battery and mentions an adapter. I'm presuming that the laptop would take the place of text books and as such it would be on all day.
The spec sheet also shows Windows XP pro as one of the operating systems. What up wit dat? I thought Linux was the os of choice because it could be stripped to just the essentials.
I wonder if some of you realize it's pretty *offensive to assume that everyone outside of your own affluent country is a barely-human organism subsisting on tree bark or whatever. But here's how laptops feed them:
With the right information, you can increase the yield of your agriculture industry, like much of the world did in the mid-twentieth century. You can increase it a *lot.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
These are not in place of food. They are meant to address a bootstrap problem. A good way to get a country from "developing" to "developed" is to introduce a skill-based service economy. There's no carbon emissions except from the power sources for the computers. There's no huge 8-lane highways needed to ship materials. Intel can sell more chips to them once they start buying higher-end replacement machines. ;-)
The problem is, you don't teach people to use computers, administer computers, build computers, repair computers, and program computers if you don't have enough computers to make these viable career choices. Once the people get their hands on these systems and learn to use them, there will be a market for higher-end systems, and a skilled workforce ready to use them. Much of the world skipped wired phone systems and went straight to cellular. This effort looks designed to skip the steno pool and the industrial manufacturing economy. If developing countries can go straight to lightweight manufacturing plus information economy instead of going through the heavy manufacturing phase most of today's big economies did, it'll be faster for them. It'll also be better for the world economy, less polluting, and maybe even cause fewer wars over access to resources.
Those same people spend $6.00 for a coffee with a fancy, nonsensical "foreign" name and a 500% markup on designer cigarettes that don't even come with designer cancer.
I doubt you will convince them that a $400 laptop == $4,000 laptop for their purpose. They are impervious to reasoning.
I for one, welcome our new acquired-myopia suffering young overlords.
TPM 1.2
:P
1.2: now with 50% more potentially restrictive evil!
Heh. Making them use RPM should keep them third world for a long time.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
When you compare the features and goals of the OLPC with the Intel Classmate PC, it's almost as if Intel is pushing it as an instrument of control. Don't forget that Mandriva Linux is only one of the available options and the unit comes with a TPM as standard, enhanced 'remote surveillance' and censorship software such as 'Teacher Control' and 'Parent Control'. The unit is a complete antithesis to the OLPC and appears to be nothing more than a cost-down PC with 'Big Brother' features. What a shame since I was praising Intel this morning over their new d80211-based open source wireless LAN driver for Linux - and now I see this.
I'm sure there are plenty of brits here who used Acorn Archimedes at school and know how useless it can be getting taught on an obscure OS.
>starving people in these countries,
Yeah! And what of these charities that teach them literacy and give them medicine? What the hell. They need food, not books and healthcare. They dont need condoms, or clean clothing either. Clean water? For what? Like you said they need food only! Schools are for overfed westerners only.
Obviously, the goal of the olpc and 99% of charitable donations in third world countries is not related directly to food. Lets not pretend that it is. Everytime I hear 'they need food' not -insert something they also need- jsut shows the ignorance of the person saying this. Maybe we westerners can do with some charitable donation to help with our ignorance problem. Like some kind of wiki thats also an encyclopedia. So we can look things up before we post about them online. Yeah, that would rule...
these are for people who have food but lack a complex economy which would be needed to take advantage of the global world's purchasing needs.
People in USA or other "developed" countries might just not be able to understand this. But I know the availability of these kind of computers is something beneficial for Mexico.
Take as an example something that happened some 4 years ago (more or less, around 2003). I was somewhere in Mexico in a friend's Internet Cafe who also sells and repairs computers (btw beige box PCs are prevalent in Mexico), when a person entered the shop and asked for a cheap 486 computer, he was looking for something *very cheap*, not the new Pentium 4, not even a P3, he was looking to pay something like $100 bucks ($2000 pesos) for a complete computer (PC + monitor). Unfortunately, my friend didnt sell used computers, just new ones so he could not sell one to him.
But this gives you a panorama for how is there people that do not have a computer but is also not *starving*to death, Unfortunately, it is the medium-class whose (in Mexico at least) economy is going down and do not have the money to spend in the top line computer.
I am really glad this opportunities are rising
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
If only they'd kill the toy-like design and fitted these 7" screens on grown up laptops, I'd be one happy email/OpenOffice user. And they even used NAND instead of harddrives for longer battery life.. must be a tease...
Why can't I get one (or five) of these! This would be perfect for a low end semi-thin client. Get a single powerful server machine for the house, and run CPU intensive tasks from there, and get one of these for each person in the family. It's still powerful enough to use on its own for tasks outside of the house, and it looks small and light enough to actually take places. If it just had a hand crank for power....
One important point: with such a small screen, it's unlikely the users will want to keep too many apps open at once.
There are virtual desktops.
KDe takes less RAM iff you use Konqueror iso FireFox, and KEdit iso OpenOffice. Mixed suites eats RAM.
Gold truth, but I'd have settled for something XFCE based maybe (Xubuntu comes to mind).
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
But on a serious note, these people don't need toy computers, especially when the actual cost of a real computer is not that much more.
(Note: I'm not sure if you're talking about the Classmate or the OLPC. I'm responding about the OLPC)
You need to learn more about what the OLPC is. It's not a toy computer, and it's certainly not just a scaled-down, limited version of the PC that you use. Unless you're still in high school, it's more powerful than the computer you learned on, and it's a computer that has been designed from the ground up as an educational tool for kids. It provides a toolset for kids ranging from those who can't even read yet (the basic UI is completely icon-based -- no text at all) through those who want to engage in serious hacking, and provides a smooth continuum of computer use experiences in between. Along the way, it also provides a vehicle for electronic texts, computer art, communications, simulated labs, etc. A "real" computer could do most of the latter, but not all, and does a fairly poor job of the former.
There are also hardware-related issues. "Real" laptops aren't nearly as durable as the OLPC, don't provide the same wireless networking infrastructure and pose significant problems in areas where power isn't easily available.
Not only does a real computer not accomplish the goals of the OLPC as well as the OLPC, it also does cost "that much more". To you and I, the difference between a $130 OLPC and a $300 low-end laptop is insignificant, but only because $170 isn't really significant to us anyway. To people to whom $130 is a lot of money, more than doubling the cost is a big deal. Of course, the OLPC project doesn't plan on selling to the people directly, but to the governments, and any large organization buying millions of anything cares about a 130% price difference.
More than likely when these things are given away, they will for the most part end up on eBay after having been converted to something that these people find more useful, money.
Undoubtedly, that's a problem. I don't think it's a large problem, however.
I spent two years living and working with very poor people in Mexico (and they're actually well off by the standards of some of the areas targeted by the OLPC -- they almost all have electricity, for example) and also spent a bit of time with people in similar situations in Jamaica. One thing I noticed was that most of the parents placed a huge importance on their children's educations. They knew very well that the only avenue available for their kids to obtain a better life was to acquire a good education, and these parents sacrificed a great deal to make sure their kids could learn as much as possible. Of course, even with all the parents could do, the opportunities were limited. Only rich kids' schools could afford computers, of course, and many of the kids had to work part time so that the family could eat. They tried to arrange things so that this word didn't interfere with schooling, but sometimes it just wasn't possible.
I really, really doubt that such families would even dream of selling their children's OLPCs, unless they got into a situation where they truly were starving to death. The idea that their kids could jump into the computer age, learning high tech skills that would allow them to compete internationally for high-paying jobs (yes, taking our jobs away) would make it clear that the value of keeping the OLPC and using it for its intended purpose vastly outweighed any short-term monetary windfall they might percieve.
Keep in mind, too, that these parents want their children to get ahead not just because they love their children, but because their own futures depend on the kids' success as well. For better or worse, the industrialized world has moved away from the idea that adult children are responsible for the welfare of their aging parents, but in much of the world the idea is not only prevalent, it's the only way for elderly
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To add another data point, I spent time in rural southeastern Mexico and the campesinos have plenty to eat -- farmers rarely go hungry except during severe drought and the like, and fresh water isn't a problem in the rain-soaked tropics -- but computers are almost unheard-of luxuries. In many cases, electricity is something of a luxury, too, so a standard PC would be basically unusable, even if it could be purchased. These people would get a great deal of benefit from the OLPC, both because it would help educate their children (who often live too far from a school and have to work too much to make attendance feasible) and because it would provide them with a way to get useful information about farming and markets. I could see a young, computer-savvy campesino taking the bus into town to do research on farming techniques and grabbing a download onto his OLPC so that others could read it back home.
Information is power, and the OLPC is about empowering those who are surviving okay, but don't have the opportunity to rise above their present condition.
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