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News On Laptops For Education
AdamWill notes a Mandriva press release with the news that the government of Nigeria has selected Intel-powered classmate PCs running Mandriva Linux for educational use in a nationwide pilot. About 17,000 machines will be involved at first. We can only wonder at the maneuvering and negotiations that went on with the OLPC project. The latter had its first announced order for 100,000 XO machines, from Uruguay, with a potential for 400,000 over time. The bigger news out of OLPC is that Microsoft is porting XP to the platform, and chairman Nicholas Negroponte says that's fine with him: "It would be hard for OLPC to say it was 'open' and then be closed to Microsoft. Open means open."
The wifi driver is GPL (and included in the mainline linux kernel already). The wireless chip firmware is the proprietary part. But, of course, that's more open than most of the chips in the system, which can't be changed in the field at all, and when can't be modified without a chip fab. People are actually working on reverse-engineering the chip specs (it looks like an ARM920T with a radio peripheral), but it's perfectly reasonable to consider the chip as a device with a detailed specification that has a very long, particular, and incomprehensible (but carefully documented) startup sequence.