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."

Re:Why not Vista??

[Anonymous Coward]

Microware's OS-9 comes to mind when you're talking about modular functionality. Linux essentially does that now with so many drivers and functions being made available as a kernel module rather than part of the monolithic unit. Granted, it's not for the same purpose or intent exactly, but it often gets used that way.

Re:Why not Vista??

[DragonWriter]

It was the purpose that was formulated followed by a selection of an OS which just as easily could have been BSD or even Windows if it was best-suited.

Part of the requirement had to do with licensing, so barring Microsoft releasing their OS under an open-source license, it couldn't have been Windows. Microsoft, IIRC, tried to get to be the OS supplier, and didn't start bad-mouthing the OLPC project until they were rejected based on licensing terms.

It could have been BSD, though.

Re:OLPC open?

[samkass]

The "open" comment quoted in the summary kind of implies that Microsoft is working on a port on a level playing field with the "open" folks. If you actually read the article, though, you find that the OLPC folks are actively working with Microsoft, sending them first-run hardware, and otherwise favoring Microsoft in order to get XP onto their system. That's not just "letting it be open", it's actively working towards getting a more closed OS onto the system.

Also, I vaguely recall a rumor that Apple offered MacOS X for free and it was declined, so I'm not entirely clear on OLPC's motives here.

Re:OLPC open?

[iabervon]

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 [laptop.org] that has a very long, particular, and incomprehensible (but carefully documented) startup sequence.