NYLUG: Christopher Blizzard and OLPC February 27, 2007

Chris Blizzard
- on -
One Laptop Per Child

One Laptop Per Child, alias The Children's Machine, the XO-1 and previously The $100 Laptop, is an inexpensive laptop computer intended to be distributed to children around the world. Especially to children in developing countries. Providing them with access to information, knowledge, a modern form of education. The laptop is based on the AMD Geode Processor platform and runs a derivative of Fedora Linux.

A cutting edge simple user interface called Sugar sweetens the laptop experience. All work on the laptop is being doing in concordance with Open Source principles and processes. The project itself (a U.S. based, non-profit organization created by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab) was created in the spirit of Open Source.

This is a *deceptively* simple project. If one pokes around articles on the project it simply leaves the impression of an altruistic technical endeavor. But catch the right insight and you are left impressed on technical merits. These devices are going to do wondrous things with wireless networking, meshes, flash drives, UI's, power consumption and generation, BIOSes, etc. Leanly. Aesthetic design is superb as well.

Throughout the OLPC development process many significant technical hurdles and challenges have been overcome. Developers focused on implementing extraordinary functionality in spite of scarce resources, such as processing power and system memory. A problem when developing for a platform where the abundance of these resources is absent.

On Tuesday, 27 February Chris Blizzard, Director of Red Hat's OLPC development team, will present at NYLUG about the vision, goals and technical considerations of this groundbreaking and world changing project.

For more information:
http://www.laptop.org
http://wiki.laptop.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child

Official Website: http://nylug.org/home/index.shtml