Interesting OLPC story

So today I was doing my normal reading around the different Linux planets. For those who don’t know a planet is a aggregator for blogs that many Linux distros use to aggregate all their developers blogs into one stream. I tend to go around randomly and read the planets for gentoo, debian, ubuntu and fedora just to keep up on what is going on with the distros. Now onto the real reason I am writing this. On Planet Gentoo I found a really interesting 3 part series by Daniel Drake about distributing OLPC OX’s in Caacupé, Paraguay. I found it to be a very interesting story and a view of something many of us never see. It also shows a bit as to how much these laptops mean to these children. I hope you find these links worthwhile.

Links:

• OLPC deployments in Caacupé, Paraguay: Part 1
• OLPC deployments in Caacupé, Paraguay: Part 2
• OLPC deployments in Caacupé, Paraguay: Part 3

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India buying OLPCs

India which earlier this year made a fancy AC adapter for $30 that they called a computer has now ordered 250,000 OLPC laptops. This could be the break that OLPC has been looking for since they saw a bit less enthusiasm then they originally expected. The real question though is what version of the XO did India purchase? I personally would not be surprised if India went with the Linux models of the XO as it has in the past been moving more and more towards using Linux in its schools. Also with a country as large as India the amount of savings is huge. I mean it costs $3 more for XP on it which increases the purchase by $750,000. That is not a number to sneeze at.

Links:

• Gizmodo

OLPC upgrades to VIA

A headline I never thought I would write claiming a company upgrading with VIA chips. OLPC though is indeed doing this. The current OLPC uses a AMD Geode processor which by every standard is slow. Friday OLPC announced they were dropping the Geode for VIA’s C7-M processor which is faster. Of course the OLPC upgrades do not end here. VIA is also adding 3d graphics to the chipset and ram is going to get an upgrade. This means that the OLPC is becoming even more usable. Ironically this will most likely also make it easy for the now default Window XP to be installed.

Links:

• Good Gear Guide

Will the next OLPC be able to run Windows?

Well its looking like the OLPC project is going to drop the x86 platform in favor of he ARM architecture. This is mostly for power performance reasons. The AMD Geode has most likely proven to be a rather bad choice which is not surprising as now things like the atom processor run circles around it. On the other hand ARM processors have only been getting faster and are looking to break into the netbook market here soon. What does this mean though for the OLPC which was going to transition over to Windows? Well they want Microsoft to port Windows over. Microsoft most likely wont do this and try and make them run Winodws CE or something on the XO-2 instead. Of course this may also lead them back to Linux which for a long time has been running on the ARM architecture and runs well on it. Of course maybe Microsoft in a move to hold onto the netbook market will start supporting the ARM architecture. I doubt it though.

Links:

• OSnews