[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-04-23)

[Walter Bender]

23 April 2006

1. Taiwan: Mark Foster reported that our first pre-A-Test PCB successfully
booted up into the commercial Insyde BIOS. Starting with the first freshly
assembled prototypes of the OLPC laptop's printed circuit boards, we
successfully booted the 2.4.27 version of the Linux operating system,
including the full graphical user interface. The board works booting from a
local HDD, a local CD-ROM, and even from a USB Flash drive.

2. Egypt: Nicholas and Khaled Hassounah began their visit by meeting with
the open-source community and the press. They later met with the Egyptian
ICT minister. Later, Khaled had a live-television interview and also met
with representatives of UNESCO and IDRC, who expressed strong interest in
providing logistical and financial support to local initiatives in the area
of open-source development, educational-tool development, and training in
both Nigeria and Egypt. An open-source candidate was identified to
participate in the May meetings, and we made many new committed and able
friends in the NGO and business communities to help us advance the
initiative in Egypt.

3. Porto Alegre: Jim Gettys, Lindsay Petrillose, and Chris Blizzard from
Red Hat manned an OLPC booth at fisl7.0 International Forum on Free
Software, he largest annual international gathering of open-source
developers.

4. We have hardened the decision to support Python as the basic development
platform for the laptop. (Java is not an option because we will not ship a
proprietary VM and the “free” VM is not ready yet; e.g., it is missing a
debugger.)

-walter

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Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://www.laptop.org