On 9/25/07, Corey Osgood corey.osgood@gmail.com wrote:
big one wrote:
OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) "Buy 2 Get 1" Laptops are sold for the public. One laptop is sent to the buyer and the other laptop is sent to a child in poor developing country.
The 1-for-the-price-of-2 deal sounds socially commendable, but I wonder if the OLPC folks wouldn't have been better served by using their no-profit-needed position to undercut everyone else and get a lot of hardware out on the market, thus - raising awareness of the project in the US (and other western countries), and - getting a bunch more people hacking on the hardware.
If anyone does purchase one, I'd be interested to hear what it's like to type on the child-sized keyboard. It sounds like it'd be frustrating for those of us with adult-sized hands:
"OLPC keys on the keyboard are small. NO, they are not just smaller than a normal keyboard…they are so small that only a five year old kid can press them with ease." (http://www.void.gr/kargig/blog/2007/05/31/hands-on-olpc/)
Is it possible to port LinuxBIOS to OLPC laptops?
Should be, early versions ran LinuxBIOS.
This page has edits through March 2007: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Upgrading_to_LinuxBIOS
This page details how the project went from proprietary BIOS to LinuxBIOS, then to LinuxBIOS + OpenFirmware, then finally to A bit of Assembly + OpenFirmware: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware
Unless they have changed the hardware, I assume that LinuxBIOS could be slipped right back in...