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The “$100 laptop“ the product of the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative (OLPC) and MIT Media Lab founder Nick Negroponte’s near-realized dream to provide laptops to schoolkids in the third world, seems to be hopping along. The final hardware form factor and supply chain questions seem to now be mostly resolved, with the effort shifting to the operating system and final usability.

Since it’s inception, $100 Laptop has been using various versions of Fedora Linux. Apparently the people at Red Hat have taken Fedora and customized it into a child-friendly UI known as “Sugar”. Videos of it have started appearing online, with instructions on how to run the OS within Mac and Windows.

Video link: http://www.ivr-usability.com/olpc/olpc.html

My impressions: It’s a curious little thing and it looks like a straightforward repackaging of common gnome applications such as Abiword.

It will be interesting to see how this thing tests. The interface — for all of it’s reliance upon primitives and oversized icons — seems pretty complex for the kindergarten crowd. Even though I was a precocious tot when it came to the blinky terminals of the Commodores and Tandys of my youth I still find it hard to imagine that the laptop will be intuitive to very young children. Perhaps older kids will truly appreciate it. Perhaps the device will be self-selecting, and the same apple-cheeked youths will be using it to ping-attack your enterprise network during their later pimply adolescent years. By then we can only hope they will have moved on to Dells.

BTW: In memoriam:

I wuv you Timex Sinclair 1000. Still miss you.

Part of this site is going to be my nerd devotional. Fair warning before the non-nerds go crosseyed.

I have been a Linux user for many years, but started exclusively using it for the desktop starting in 2004. Familiarity with the platform allowed me to explore using it in the home, but as a Windows user, getting my PC virused to death every month was certainly enough to push me over the edge. So one day in December of ‘03, I installed a copy of Red Hat over Windows.

It was a crude, clunky experience at first. And since then I have made the progression through various Linux releases, and increased my technical competency to the point where I’ve fashioned my desktop to be many times more useful and powerful than it could ever be under Windows.

I’ve created a video to give a peek of what my new environment is like. By no means do I have a blazingly fast computer. It’s just a testament to what good software, unburdened by institutional practices and refined by thousands of dedicated open-source developers, can do to the humble PC.