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.
Unfortunately there is NO BIOS in OLPC, therefore public users cannot use FreeDOS, BSD, AROS, Haiku, ReactOS etc.
Is it possible to port LinuxBIOS to OLPC laptops? Who can do this job? Thank you.
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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.
This is great idea! I know there's been some demand for the XO in the US market, this is a great way to please us greedy Americans and help out developing countries at the same time! Thanks for drawing my attention to it.
Unfortunately there is NO BIOS in OLPC, therefore public users cannot use FreeDOS, BSD, AROS, Haiku, ReactOS etc.
Yes there is. There's just no standard PC BIOS like those OS's require, IIRC, OpenFirmware is used. The XO was designed to run linux, and to run linux well, and also to use only free, open-source software. Most PC BIOS's are not open source, nor are they free, so they weren't an option.
Is it possible to port LinuxBIOS to OLPC laptops?
Should be, early versions ran LinuxBIOS.
-Corey
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...
On 25/09/07 08:30 -0400, Robinson Tryon wrote:
Unless they have changed the hardware, I assume that LinuxBIOS could be slipped right back in...
Only a new processor... :) Its going to take a goodly amount of work to catch back up with what OFW has done, and even then, we'll be behind since we we'll still need to write support for booting from the NAND, and control the DCON, and other such matters, and lets not even start to discuss power management.
Its not impossible, but its not something we can get done before lunch.
Jordan
We ought to stop worrying about OLPC. Great kid machine, and admirable purpose, and it will probably (we hope!) make good things happen around the world. But a machine for you? I doubt it.
Impossible to use, for me, anyway. Kid-sized keyboard. And I find Linux unusable in 128MB.
It would be an ok Plan 9 or Inferno machine, but, there seems to be little interest except among us Plan 9 and inferno guys. And you still can't type on it.
ron
On 9/24/07, big one bigone@qon.lao.net wrote:
Is it possible to port LinuxBIOS to OLPC laptops?
Oh, the irony :-)
ron
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big one -
Corey Osgood -
Jordan Crouse -
Robinson Tryon -
ron minnich