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.
I’m curious if the user experience will degrade (and by how much) with the display intended for the device.
Cool!
Will it be possible (without too much work) to get this running on old x86 hardware later on?
Man, this is really sweet to see something already moving forward! :) Keep us informed :)
What is the current specification of this board?
We’re actually building the user experience around the display’s size. That’s one of the reasons why we’re building our own small framework instead of using a standard panel/desktop setup.
There’s no reason why the software itself couldn’t run on other hardware. The problem with the software will be that it’s designed for the laptop’s display and the way that it will be deployed. That is, it makes certain assumptions about clusters of laptops and the way that the mesh networking works and that might not work in another metaphor. But it’s all free software, so there’s no reason why you might not be able to use it on other hardware.
The machine itself is a pretty simple x86 machine. 500mhz processor, 128 meg of ram and a half a gig of flash for storage. There’s a decent amount of technical information in the laptop.org wiki.
Since it’s flash based… how long does it take to boot? I’d think it would be pretty quick.
wow, that brings me back! Don’t forget: don’t put the board on an anti-static bag, those things _do_ conduct electricity just fine ;)
We haven’t optimized the boot yet so we’re not sure. Mounting a filesystem takes a few seconds, starting up some of the services takes a few seconds as does booting the kernel. But it’s less than your average desktop, that’s for sure.
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I love the idea of one laptop per child, hope this come to my country soon.
I wonder if this could use the Maemo platform?
I know that maemo is going from a big PDA screen and taking pieces of Gnome and the Fedora OLPC project (Sugar) is going from Gnome to fit on a big PDA screen. I think you’all are going to meet in the middle.
The main platform for Maemo is the Nokia 770, with dual 200 Mhz ARM CPUs and 64 MB of ram. The platform for OLPC is a single 400 Mhz x86 CPU with 128 MB of ram. More people on the same desktop env. means more apps in more languages.
Why call ahead and make it a nice meeting?