Give One Get One laptop for software development

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Danilo,

> I'm a student at State University of Campinas, Brazil. I'm researching
> efficient implementation of Elliptic Curve Cryptography in constrained
> environments. I'm working with an ARM XScale PXA270 platform but would
> like also to work with a x86-based constrained platform. I think the
> OLPC laptop is an interesting option for many reasons.
> 
> I'd like to know if one of those laptops of the Give One Get One program
> are suitable for software development? I guess so, but would like to be
> sure.
> 
> Do I need any special hardware or cable to connect to the OLPC laptop
> from my desktop? A telnet or SSH connection is all I need.

  It highly depends on what you want to develop and how.  From what
you described, you are not interested in developing software for for
Sugar.  If so, you can certainly replace the window manager to, say,
twm and start a terminal emulator to use the X Window System in
somewhat more conventional way.

  The size of your program won't be too large, so GCC should be fine
to compile your software with the memory XO have.  You can of course
compile your software on another computer and copy to run.

> I want real timings, so I think an emulated solution would not be
> suitable.

  It sounds like you will want/need to do some assembly language
programming.  Geode LX has some features to generate random number
sequences (and AES accelarator).  I thought it has some statistic
counter stuff, but don't know how to use it (or I don't know what it
is, in fact).

  As others wrote, the XO keyboard is not great...  But I'd say with
some training, it is not unusable.  So it is conceivable to do the
whole development on XO.

  (What are the "many reasons" that makes it an interesting option for
you?)

-- Yoshiki