OLPC XO

The first early prototype was unveiled by the project's founder Nicholas Negroponte and then-United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on November 16, 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, Tunisia. The device shown was a rough prototype using a standard development board. Negroponte estimated that the screen alone required three more months of development. The first working prototype was demonstrated at the project's Country Task Force Meeting on May 23, 2006. Steve Jobs had offered Mac OS X free of charge for use in the laptop, but according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative's founders, the designers wanted an operating system that can be tinkered with: "We declined because it's not open source." Therefore, Linux was chosen. In 2006, Microsoft had suddenly developed an interest in the XO project and wanted the formerly open source effort to run Windows. Negroponte agreed to provide engineer assistance to Microsoft to facilitate their efforts. During this time, the project mission statement changed to remove mentions of "open source". A number of developers, such as Ivan Krstić and Walter Bender, resigned because of these changes in strategy. The version of Windows that ran on the XO was Windows XP. Approximately 400 developer boards (Alpha-1) were distributed in mid-2006; 875 working prototypes (Beta 1) were delivered in late 2006; 2400 Beta-2 machines were distributed at the end of February 2007; full-scale production started November 6, 2007. Quanta Computer, the project's contract manufacturer, said in February 2007 that it had confirmed orders for one million units. Quanta indicated that it could ship five million to ten million units that year because seven nations had committed to buy the XO-1 for their schoolchildren: Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay. Quanta plans to offer machines very similar to the XO-1 on the open market. The One Laptop Per Child project originally stated that a consumer version of the XO laptop was not planned. In 2007, the project established a website, laptopgiving.org, for outright donations and for a "Give 1 Get 1" offer valid (but only to the United States, its territories, and Canadian addresses) from November 12, 2007 until December 31, 2007. For each computer purchased at a cost of $399, an XO is also sent to a child in a developing nation. OLPC again restarted the G1G1 program through Amazon.com in November 2008, but has since stopped as of December 2008 or 2009. On May 20, 2008, OLPC announced the next generation of XO, OLPC XO-2 which was thereafter cancelled in favor of the tablet-like designed XO-3. In late 2008, the New York City Department of Education began a project to purchase large numbers of XO computers for use by schoolchildren. The design received the Community category award of the 2007 Index: Award. In 2008 the XO was awarded London's Design Museum "Design of the Year", plus two gold, one silver, and one bronze award at the Industrial Design Society of America's International Design Excellence Awards (IDEAs). == Goals ==

in e-book mode The XO-1 is designed to be low-cost, small, durable, and efficient. It is shipped with a slimmed-down version of Fedora Linux and a custom GUI named Sugar that is intended to help young children collaborate. The XO-1 includes a video camera, a microphone, long-range Wi-Fi, and a hybrid stylus and touchpad. Along with a standard plug-in power supply, human and solar power sources are available, allowing operation far from a commercial power grid. Mary Lou Jepsen has listed the design goals of the device as follows: • Minimal power use, with a design target of 2–3 Watts (W) total • Minimal production cost, with a target of $100 per laptop for production runs of millions of units • A "cool" look, implying innovative styling in its physical appearance • E-book function • Open source and free software provided with the laptop In keeping with its goals of robustness and low power use, the design of the laptop intentionally omits all motor-driven moving parts; it has no hard disk drive, optical (compact disc (CD) or Digital Versatile Disc DVD) media, floppy disk drive, or fan (the device is passively cooled). No Serial ATA interface is needed due to the lack of hard drive. Storage is via an internal SD card slot. There is also no PC card slot, although Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports are included. A built-in hand-crank generator was part of the notebook in the original design; however, it is now an optional clamp-on peripheral. == Hardware ==

chipset runs an RTOS on an ARM9 and interfaces over a shim with the actual operating system Display (LCD). The images show 1×1 mm of each screen. A typical LCD addresses groups of 3 locations as pixels. The OLPC XO LCD addresses each location as a separate pixel Pixel Qi screen installed in an OLPC XO laptop operating in reflective mode, note that the screen is in grey scale mode and is not retro illuminated The first-generation OLPC laptops have a novel low-cost liquid crystal display (LCD). It has a 1200 × 900 7.5 inch (19 cm) diagonal transflective LCD (200 dpi) that uses 0.1 to 1.0 W depending on mode. There are two modes: Reflective (backlight off) monochrome mode for low-power use in sunlight. This mode provides very sharp images for high-quality text and Backlit color mode, with an alternance of red, green and blue pixels. The XO 1.75 developmental version for XO-3 has an optional touch screen. The electronic visual display is the costliest component in most laptops. In April 2005, Negroponte hired Mary Lou Jepsen, who was interviewing to join the Media Arts and Sciences faculty at the MIT Media Lab in September 2008, Negroponte has demanded that the keyboard not contain a caps lock key, which frees up keyboard space for new keys such as a future "view source" key. • 2 watt ARM CPU • Fewer physical parts, 40% lower power use. • Power option: solar panel. • CPU: 400 to 1000 MHz ARM Marvell Armada 610 at 0.8 watts, with integrated graphics controller • 1024 to 2048 MB of DDR3 (TBD) • 1024 TBD kB (1 MB) flash ROM with open-source Open Firmware • 4-8 GB of SLC NAND flash memory (upgradable, microSD) • Accelerometer • Average battery life 5–10 hours The XO 2, previously scheduled for release in 2010, was canceled in favor of XO 3. With a price target , it had an elegant, lighter, folding dual touch-screen design. The hardware would have been open-source and sold by various manufacturers. A choice of operating system (Windows XP or Linux) was intended outside the United States. Its price target in the United States includes two computers, one donated. The OLPC XO-3 was scheduled for release in late 2012. It was canceled in favor of the XO-4. It featured one solid color multi-touch screen design, and a solar panel in the cover or carrying case. The XO 4 is a refresh of the XO 1 to 1.75 with a later ARM CPU and an optional touch screen. This model will not be available for consumer sales. There is a mini HDMI port to allow connecting to a display. The XO Tablet was designed by third-party Vivitar, rather than OLPC, and based on the Android platform whereas all previous XO models were based on Sugar running on top of Fedora. It is commercially available and has been used in OLPC projects. == Software ==

. By clicking on the icon, communication by Wi-Fi is activated Countries are expected to remove and add software to best adapt the laptop to the local laws and educational needs. As supplied by OLPC, all of the software on the laptop will be free and open source. All core software is intended to be localized to the languages of the target countries. The underlying software includes: • A pared-down version of Fedora Linux as the operating system, with students receiving root access (although not normally operating in that mode). • Open Firmware, written in a variant of Forth • A simple custom web browser based upon the Gecko engine used by Mozilla Firefox. • A word processor based on AbiWord. • Email through the web-based Gmail service. • Online chat and VoIP programs. • Python 2.5 is the primary programming language used to develop Sugar "Activities". Several other interpreted programming languages are included, such as JavaScript, Csound, the eToys version of Squeak, and Turtle Art • A music sequencer with digital instruments: Jean Piché's TamTam • Audio and video player software: Totem or Helix. The laptop uses the Sugar graphical user interface, written in Python, on top of the X Window System and the Matchbox window manager. This interface is not based on the typical desktop metaphor but presents an iconic view of programs and documents and a map-like view of nearby connected users. The current active program is displayed in full-screen mode. Much of the core Sugar interface uses icons, bypassing localization issues. Sugar is also defined as having no folders present in the UI. Jim Gettys, responsible for the laptops' system software, has called for a re-education of programmers, saying that many applications use too much memory or even leak memory. "There seems to be a common fallacy among programmers that using memory is good: on current hardware it is often much faster to recompute values than to have to reference memory to get a precomputed value. A full cache miss can be hundreds of cycles, and hundreds of times the power use of an instruction that hits in the first level cache." On August 4, 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that static copies of selected Wikipedia articles would be included on the laptops. Jimmy Wales, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, said that "OLPC's mission goes hand in hand with our goal of distributing encyclopedic knowledge, free of charge, to every person in the world. Not everybody in the world has access to a broadband connection." Negroponte had earlier suggested he would like to see Wikipedia on the laptop. Wales feels that Wikipedia is one of the "killer apps" for this device. Don Hopkins announced that he is creating a free and open source port of the game SimCity to the OLPC with the blessing of Will Wright and Electronic Arts, and demonstrated SimCity running on the OLPC at the Game Developer's Conference in March 2007. The free and open source SimCity plans were confirmed at the same conference by SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC, who also asked game developers to create "frameworks and scripting environments—tools with which children themselves could create their own content." The laptop's security architecture, known as Bitfrost, was publicly introduced in February 2007. No passwords will be required for ordinary use of the machine. Programs are assigned certain bundles of rights at install time which govern their access to resources; users can later add more rights. Optionally, the laptops can be configured to request leases from a OLPC XS central server and to stop working when the leases expire; this is designed as a theft-prevention mechanism. The pre-8.20 software versions were criticized for bad wireless connectivity and other minor issues. == Deployment ==

The XO-1 is nicknamed ceibalita in Uruguay after the Ceibal project. == Reception and reviews ==

The hand-crank system for powering the laptop was abandoned by designers shortly after it was announced, and the "mesh" internet-sharing approach performed poorly and was then dropped. Bill Gates of Microsoft criticized the screen quality. Some critics of the program would have preferred less money being spent on technology and more money being spent on clean water and "real schools". Some supporters worried about the lack of plans for teaching students. The program was based on constructionism, which is the idea that, if they had the tools, the kids would largely figure out how to do things on their own. Others wanted children to learn the Microsoft Windows operating system, rather than OLPC's lightweight Linux derivative, on the belief that the children would use Microsoft Windows in their careers. Intel's Classmate PC used Microsoft Windows and sold for . The project was known as "the laptop", but it originally cost $130 for a bare-bones laptop, and then the price rose to $180 in the next revision. The solid-state alternative to a hard drive was sturdy, which meant that the laptop could be dropped with a lower risk of breakingalthough more laptops were broken than expectedbut it was costly, so the machines had limited storage capacity. == See also ==