For those who don’t know, OLPC is the “One Laptop Per Child” program going on where partners are trying to construct a laptop, simple enough for a child to use and cheap enough for countries to purchase for their children. The initiative is taking some heat lately form the press, orders falling out, and even competitors…
It’s an interesting project and I have not had time to formulate my own thoughts on the situation. I did, however, get a little envious of their “give one get one” initiative. You pay $400 (price of 2) and they send you one and one to a child in a developing nation. It ran a custom OS built on linux that has an interesting user interface and core set of applications, with a chance for people to provide applications for the project.
By missing their “give one, get one” campaign, the laptop is going to be a little out of reach for a while… for me and potentially the child my laptop would have gone to.
But have no fear, they have put up VMWare images of the shipping versions out on their wiki site. Sweet! Now I can fire up Parallels, run their Transporter tool, and have my own “OLPC” on my MacBook Pro.
Here’s a quick screenshot:
The UI is very unique, almost hard to use (since I have been using standard interfaces for what seems like an eternity).
Wireless and RSS functionalities built in. Creative applications galore: painting, audio, audio processing, writing, calculating, reference materials.
Neat “Neighborhood” feature… nothing like prepping these kids for the next social network!
At any rate, play around with it, and donate $200 to get one out to a kid (I will eventually).