The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project’s new XO laptop could mean a computer in every pot:
Overall, the XO tips the scale at around half the weight of a comparable laptop, gets over twice the usual running time when operating on battery power and costs less than half the normal price of an entry-level computer. One of the tricks has been to make many of the XO’s components serve at least two purposes.To save power, for instance, the XO’s liquid-crystal display (the biggest consumer of juice in a laptop) can be flipped from backlit colour to self-reflecting monochrome. That not only saves electricity, but helps the screen to be seen better in bright sunlight, where many XOs are likely to be used.
The number crunching is done by an AMD Geode processor running at a modest 433 megahertz, compared with the 2-3 gigahertz of conventional laptops. This processor allows the XO to use less energy and therefore generate much less heat. Result: no power-consuming cooling fan.
Indeed, all rotating parts have been dispensed with—to make the XO rugged enough for the wild. Instead of a hard drive, for instance, the XO uses a one-gigabyte “flash” chip to store data even when the power is off. The keyboard has a waterproof rubber coating and the case is sealed to prevent dust from encroaching. A pair of wireless antennas swivel up from the screen’s sides like rabbit ears, endowing the laptop with two to three times the normal Wi-Fi range. When folded down, the antennas not only lock the case and but also seal off its various ports.
Better still, the Wi-Fi circuitry makes every laptop not just a communications device, but also a router. In other words, each laptop is part of a wireless mesh that relays the broadband signal from laptop to laptop—so those out of direct range can still get a connection to the internet.
If the ingenuity of the XO’s hardware is impressive, the machine’s software is truly ground-breaking. Red Hat, the world’s largest Linux distributor, has provided an extremely compact version of its Fedora operating system, called Sugar, that uses a mere 130 megabytes of the XO’s flash memory. By comparison, Windows XP requires 1.65 gigabytes.
The XO comes with a word processor, PDF viewer, Firefox web browser, media player, drawing tools plus the usual set of utilities. But it is the way the Sugar operating system lets the user work that’s so clever. Instead of the usual hierarchical view of a computer’s applications and data, Sugar organises everything around what has been used recently. Alternatively, it can group applications and files in terms of who is connected on the wireless mesh. As such, the mesh approach gives XO an array of collaborative tools that puts expensive business laptops to shame.