IBM has published a online whitepaper with a detailed overview of the OLPC XO laptop computer. The paper also gets into developing for the Sugar interface and the OLPC in general. They go over virtualizing the XO machine and getting started with the developer’s console.

What’s most interesting about the XO laptop is the operating system and graphical environment. The OLPC initiative partnered with Red Hat Software to develop these components. The Linux 2.6 kernel and GNU software make up the operating system, but the graphical interface is called Sugar. It is a simplified graphical interface designed for children and the small screen provided by the XO laptop.

Application development is innovative as well. Applications, or activities as they’re called in the XO laptop, are Python programs using GTK+. I’ll discuss Sugar and Python programming for the XO laptop later in this article.