OMG, can you imagine a billion children getting their first taste of computing with Windows XP running on an OLPC XO? Microsoft has apparently paid for 7,000 dual-boot XOs (Linux + Sugar in main flash, XP on an extra flash card) to be used in trials in Uruguay.

http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/uruguay/uruguay_windows_xo_ms_office.html

The only good thing I can say about this is, "Woot!" Microsoft is actually paying to have trials of Linux + Sugar vs. XP plus educational shovelware, on the same hardware, conducted by a multitude of teachers and schoolchildren, none of them on the M$ payroll. Oh, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

The best bit is that Uruguay has just started an educational blog, where teachers and students have started posting. Story at http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/uruguay/update_on_xo_laptops.html, more (in Spanish) at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Blog_educativo

In 1983 I wrote a market research study on the competition between Microsoft DOS and Digital Research CP/M-86. DOS was, well, DOS, but Gary Kildall had just put a real-time kernel into CP/M-86, and it could read and write on the floppy drive, the hard drive, keyboard and screen, and the modem all at the same time without missing a beat. DOS then, and Windows afterwards, couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time for many years. Apparently nobody at MS knew anything about concurrent programming, particularly how to make concurrent file operations safe. Anybody remember untangling cross-linked files with Norton Utilities?

Gates was a hotshot programmer in high school, but apparently never learned any significant amount of Computer Science before he dropped out of Harvard. Kildall was a CS Prof. If IBM had been willing to deal with Kildall, we would have been spared more than 25 years of software incompetence coupled with insensate greed.

CS is misnamed, of course. It isn't science. We don't have big experimental CS labs. Some of it is math, and some of it is how to do engineering design so that your product actually works, in large part by using math that actually works. Like how to use semaphores correctly in concurrent programming, how to use that do atomic database writes, and other things of that kind.

Also LiveCDs, among other options. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Emulator_image_files#Live_CDs

You can develop software for XOs using an emulator on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Also, I guess you never heard about the developer program that gives out XOs for free if you can explain why you need the actual hardware, and can't develop on an emulator.

Can I have yours? I have projects that can use any number of XOs that would otherwise molder in closets.

Put it on eBay if you don't want it, or give it to a LUG, or to a budding programmer in a school near you. Or a child. Children like XOs better than grownups do. It was designed for them.

This turns out not to be the case. There are several documented ways to run Linux apps in Sugar. Text-mode stuff like Midnight Commander works like a champ in Terminal. You can boot several flavors of regular Linux on an XO. And the developers are working on a way to wrap ordinary Gnome applications for Sugar on the fly.

The Venezuala deal uses Caixa Magica Linux, which is based on Mandriva, which is based on Red Hat. Sugar Labs is working on a port of Sugar to Mandriva and Caixa Magica. So we haven't lost the Venezuela deal.

No netbook costs half what the OLPC XO does, and if you can design one for $50, I can get you a job, or venture capital funding if you prefer. The XO would have cost about $100 if

a) W hadn't sold off the dollar to the Chinese, and

b) OLPC and some of the governments interested in it hadn't decided to double memory and storage, and use a slightly faster processor.

By the time Asus et al. get anywhere near $100, the XO-2 (most likely from Pixel Qi, not OLPC) is projected to be $75. Mid-2010 is the latest estimate.

There are also projects to create $12 8-bit computers for education, such as PlayPower. Unfortunately, that's without a display. If somebody can figure out how the students can use them, there is excellent free 8-bit education software that we can port over.

I have some pre-Linux math software for the Apple II and C64 that I have offered to GPL if somebody else will do the necessary work to get it into Sugar or onto the PlayPower system. (Sorry, I'm writing textbooks to go out under GPL full-time now.)

As they and their partners have done. And as we intend to go on doing as fast as we can teach the children to program.

"Please check your facts before posting nonsense to Usenet."--Beable van Polasm, alt.religion.kibology

It's true that the AMD Geode processor in the XO is underpowered. It's almost as slow as a Cray-1. But that's partly the point. It runs on only half a watt. The XO _maxes_ at about 8 W, an essential design point for villages where they take car batteries in a donkey cart to get them recharged somewhere else in order to keep their mobile phones running.

I agree about selling to the First World, which we are in fact doing. There are 15,000 units in Birmingham, Alabama, and trials in New York. Likely-soon-to-be-Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois is a strong supporter of giving every child in Illinois a laptop and a real education. (Blago is due to be impeached next week, with a trial in the IL Senate to follow.)

It's still about education. We're getting moving now on post-Gutenberg digital textbooks. Not PDFs of dead tree books, that is, but interactive learning systems based on Smalltalk, or incorporating the digital oscilloscope function of the XO, and much more.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks

It's also about social transformation. Google

OLPC ethiopia-implementation-report

or

OLPC Astounded-in-Arahuay

to get both the reports and the discussion about them.

As for XP on the XO: I am greatly looking forward to the spectacle of Microsoft shooting itself in all of its shareholders' feet by sponsoring trials of dual-boot XOs. We are going to see tests of Fedora Rawhide Linux and Sugar vs. XP and a lame set of so-called educational software on the same hardware by the same people, hardly any of them on the Microsoft payroll. I have not been able to think of a suitable Onion headline that could make this seem worse for M$ than it already is.

Sugar is not an operating system. The OS on the XO is Fedora Rawhide Linux. Sugar also runs on Debian and Ubuntu.

OLPC gave over development of Sugar to Sugar Labs some time ago.