While it’s probably not very practical for typical day-to-day laptop use, the Sugar Linux desktop environment, designed for the OLPC project, is a novel take on user interfaces. Now, Sugar Labs has released Sugar on a Stick, a version of the OS that is designed to boot, run and save data from and on a USB drive. [Techradar]
Sure, for gadget nuts like you and me, the XO OLPC may not quite have the grunt to be usable, but for the poor, indigenous communities out in the middle of the Northern Territory, it’s fantastic. And a couple of days ago, the first OLPCs were officially handed out to Aboriginal primary school children at Shepherdson College on Elcho Island, Northern Territory.
In a bit of an about-face, India has placed a huge order for 250,000 OLPC XO laptops for their schools. This is a huge victory for the OLPC project.
The display technology Pixel Qi has been promising is revolutionary: A high-res colour LCD and low-power, reflective reader mode better than E-ink. For dirt cheap. And it’s coming next month.
Despite being an original sponsor of the OLPC project, AMD processors will not be used in the upcoming XO-2 touchscreen netbook. Instead, in an interesting move, ARM chips will take on the computing load.
Intel’s Classmate 2 was never intended for manufacture by Intel; the PC was simply a reference design provided for OEMs. Well, the first one is here: meet the Computer Technology Link 2Go PC.
The OLPC movement rode a rollercoaster of fun disaster danger when it decided to try and give away a unit to kids in need for every unit sold to US customers last year. Now that rollercoaster ride is coming to Australia.
If you purchase an OLPC laptop, you’ll also be donating another unit to a child in need in outback Australia or the Pacific Islands. According to the website, this deal kicks off on November 30 and will only run until December 31, so get your orders in sooner rather than later.
For some reason, the OLPC is still priced in US dollars, with GST chucked on top of that, which is a kind of dodgy way of doing it, if you ask me. Still considering they’re actually making an effort to try and chance the world one laptop at a time, I suppose we can forgive them.
You can order your OLPC at Laptop.org for $US399 plus GST from November 30.
China’s HiVision has debuted a Linux-based laptop that makes the OLPC seem ridiculously expensive. For US$98, you get a MIPS-based processor, 1GB flash storage, 3 USB ports, Ethernet, an SDHC card reader, WiFi, audio in and out, voice-chat and Firefox browser support on a Linux user interface. No word who this is being marketed towards, but with a price tag that low, maybe this will end up being the device that fulfils Nicholas Negroponte’s much criticised mission. The video above is Tech Video Blog’s review of Hivision’s miniNote (hmm, naming conflict with HP in the near future?) at IFC 2008. [ Tech Video Blog via The Earth Times]
