The image above is a result of the work that the awesome team at Red Hat has done. The board at the bottom of the screenshot is one of the first pre-test A boards that the amazing people at Quanta have delivered. The hardware is pretty close to what the final main board will be in the actual One Laptop per Child Laptops. Same memory, same CPU, same flash, etc.

The display is showing the framework that we’ve been building to run on the laptops. We’ve been working closely with the One Laptop folks over the last few months to come up with a reasonable environment for kids all over the world to use. Our goals are to turn the Laptop into a fun, easy to use, social experience that promotes sharing and learning. The image above doesn’t show much of that. It was largely a demo of showing the framework running in a minimal OS environment booting without most of the desktop stack or OS stack. But it is on a network and you can chat with friends in the area and browse the web – two of the main tasks that kids should be able to do with the laptops.

We’ll be building out more and more of the framework over the next couple of months, adding a more appealing visual design and nailing down our common UI elements.

Now that we’ve got a lot of the groundwork laid out and have good sense of our context of use, we’ll be building out more of the code. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting on a regular basis to describe more about our goals and the framework. If you want to help us out, feel free to join the mailing list or join us on #olpc on irc.freenode.net.