OLPC to Run Windows, Come to the US

An anonymous reader writes "'Yesterday Nicholas Negroponte, former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and current head of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project, gave analysts and journalists an update on the OLPC project. Two big changes were announced — the $100 OLPC is now the $175 OLPC, and it will be able to run Windows. Even in a market where there are alternatives to using Windows and Office, there's a huge demand for Microsoft software. The OLPC was seen as a way for open source Linux distributions to achieve massive exposure in developing countries, but now Negroponte says that the OLPC machine will be able to run Windows as well as Linux. Details are sketchy but Negroponte did confirm that the XO's developers have been working with Microsoft to get the OLPC up to spec for Windows.' We also find out that the OLPC gets a price hike and will officially come to the US. Could this be tied into Microsoft's new $3 Windows XP Starter and Office 2007 bundle? Now that the OLPC and Intel's Classmate PC can both run Windows, is Linux in the developing world in trouble?"

Comments

The death of Linux on OLPC is greatly exaggerated

[HerbieStone]

From here and here

True: Microsoft is working on a Windows based system that can be executed on the OLPC laptop.
False: There is no strategy change. The OLPC is continuing to develop a Linux-based software set for the laptop in conjunction with Red Hat. But since the OLPC project is open we cannot (and maybe even don't want to) stop other people from developing and supplying alternate software packages.

Re:Not News

[Anonymous Coward]

The price has gone up because the memory and drive space have mysteriously doubled from 128MB to 256MB and 512MB to 1GB, respectively.

Congratulations

[Vexorian]

I'd like to congratulate this project for becoming a total failure.

I live in a third world country, let me say this: 175 $us is too expensive, that 75% more actually means a reduction in possible buyers by 90% (Although this statistic is totally made up, I am pretty sure this is the case, let's say 85%~95%), as a matter of fact, here it is possible to get a 'real' computer (Pentium I, which is enough for a child's computer, did you know?) for 150$us.

And all of this so it can run windows...

Technically, no

[DrYak]

Actually, my Vista boot goes faster than my Ubuntu boot

Several users of both systems (including my own experience) tends to show that Windows comes up with a desktop earlier than Linux. But once there the disk is still trashing for some time. Whereas on Linux, once you're logger, you're logged and everything is ready to run.
The whole stuff is build on windows to give you the impression that it is faster.

Re:Not News

[niiler]

Wired.com has the update here:

OLPC spokesman Kyle Austin says the wire services got it wrong. In response to a request from Microsoft, the project gave Redmond some early demo models of the XO to play with -- but that was over a year ago. "Their developers are toying with it," Austin told Wired News editor Kevin Poulsen.

OLPC hasn't changed the XO's design to support Windows, and has no formal partnership with Microsoft, he says.

So as often happens, the story is more sensationalist than anything else.

Re:Why 256Mb?

[dhasenan]

The OLPC interface was optimized for the machine. From the screenshots I saw, it didn't take up much space with textures and such; just about everything could be drawn with a minimal amount of SVG, which means you can spend slightly more CPU time and save on RAM.

Also most of the applications are more or less custom, designed or modified to save on RAM and CPU time. Windows XP...could be, but I somehow doubt it would be that easy. If they said it was based on Windows Mobile, I'd be less skeptical.

Re:Wow... No OS X?

[TeknoHog]

I believe that Negroponte refused, with the argument that he wanted a truly open OS. Now they've gone with windows, I think his mind must be slipping..

In the great Slashdot tradition, I didn't read the article, but I got the impression that the OLPC will still be preinstalled with the tailor-made Linux distro. The ability to install Windows or whatever OS doesn't preclude this.

Re:Why 256Mb?

[evilviper]

I still have a 1999 vintage Sony Vaio laptop with 64Mb RAM and 333MHz Pentium II running Linux with Kde version 2.

Yes, but you, no doubt, have a swap partition when RAM gets full. If you were running off of a small amount of Flash storage instead, you'd have real problems.

Not to mention that the power requirements for your laptop is more than an order of magnitude higher than the OLPC, and yet you probably don't have a WiFi router card in your notebook.

Re:Why 256Mb?

[evilviper]

Microsoft was the first company to really get the PDA right - the original Palm OS sucked because the interface was annoying,

PalmOS was a panacea compared to the horrific WinCE, which was the competition at the time.

However, Windows was not the first, by a hell of a long shot. Psion was there in the earliest days, with an operating system that Windows Mobile still can't match, to this day. Hell, I would be willing to use Psion's operating system on my desktop if I could... Palm and Microsoft are both still putting out crap that needs a desktop system to accomplish anything... A decade ago, it was even worse. Yet back then on my handheld Psion, I was doing research via the web, typing entire research papers, inserting graphics, spreadsheets, charts/tables/graphs, and printing it out directly to any available printer via IR, etc.

It worked wonderfully, despite the fact that it had over a month of battery life on 2AA batteries (rechargeables in my case), and with a mere 25MHz CPU it was still far more responsive than any of the 200MHz+ systems with WinCE (or later PalmOS machines).