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.

Computing UK takes a look at internet-controlled wireless robots which are simple enough for “almost anyone” to build with off-the-shelf parts.

“The stated goal is to make highly capable robots accessible and affordable for college and pre-college students, as well as anyone interested in robots. At the heart of each TeRK robot is a unique controller called Qwerk that combines a Linux computer with the software and electronics necessary to control the robot’s motors, cameras and other devices.”

via LWN.net

Codec specialist Hantro has added support for “Silverlight” — a new Adobe Flash-like multimedia technology from Microsoft — to its ultra low-powered hardware VC-1 codec for mobile devices running Linux and other embedded OSes. The “7190 Multiformat decoder” can decode VC-1-encoded 720p video at 30fps,

Link via LinuxDevices.com

A project that aims to deliver low-priced laptops with string pulleys to the world’s poorest children may have a new market: U.S. schools. The nonprofit “One Laptop per Child” project said on Thursday it might sell versions of its kid-friendly laptops in the United States, reversing its previous position of only distributing them to the poorest nations.

Link via LXer Linux News

The founder of the ambitious “$100 laptop” project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface.

Nicholas Negroponte, the former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who now heads the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project, updated analysts and journalists on where the effort stands, saying “we are perhaps at the most critical stage of OLPC’s life.”

That’s partly because at least seven nations have expressed interest in being in the initial wave to buy the little green-and-white “XO” computers — Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya — but it remains unclear which ones will be first to pony up the cash. The project needs orders for 3 million machines so its manufacturing and distribution effort can get rolling.

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People have been asking me to weigh in on Intel’s MID Linux devices. I started writing and ended up with the monstrosity of an editorial you find below.

The Windows UMPCs aren’t exactly flying off shelves, but that is understandable since we are waiting for hardware to catch up with Vista. We see commitment from manufacturers to deliver next-generation products in this market and, as performance improves, we can expect more consumer adoption.

Intel’s announcement of MID Linux at IDF stirred the UMPC pot again. Apparently, they saw the enthusiasm over the Linux based Nokia internet tablets and wanted to get in on it. What does that mean to the Windows UMPC world?

Read more @ Tabletblog.com

Here’s the latest update on the status of the OpenMoko project:

Dear Community,

We owe you all an update as to our status. Here it goes…

Last week we finished 200 devices. Of these about 50 seem to have some
problems but the rest are functionally complete, tested, and ready to
go. We know the source of the problems for the 50 that failed and this
is already corrected. This is great news because it means we can finally
start to move out of engineering sample mode and into real production!

These first 150 (or so) devices will go to phase 0 developers and our
internal / external developers — of which many still don’t even have
phones!

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GPilotInstaller is a small Java application that acts as a frontend to the gpilot-install-file command line program to queue Palm application (.prc) and database (.pdb) files for installation. It presents the user with a list box, buttons to add files to and remove them from the list, and buttons to queue all added files for installation the next time a Palm handheld is synchronized with GNOME.

Intel’s recent moves to embrace Linux for its consumer ultra mobile devices is likely to signal a major shift in the battle over web content and delivery, industry experts predict.

According to Gartner, the chip giant’s switch to Linux for mobile internet devices moves the personal device argument away from Windows and platform discussions towards web technology. The move will also shift the focus of the discussion away from the operating system platform and towards content.

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a la Mobile has announced the availability of streaming media capability support on its Convergent Linux Platform (CLP). With a la Mobile’s CLP 3G Streaming Media Solution, Linux smartphones can now support a host of rich media applications on high-speed 3G networks such as video conferencing, video telephony, 3G interactive gaming and mobile IPTV.

a la Mobile’s CLP 3G solution is a pre-integrated streaming multimedia Linux operating system platform that includes comprehensive support for 3GP multimedia, H.263, H.264, MPEG-4 and AMR codecs, and the RTP and RTSP network protocols. In addition, the platform integrates a mobile browser, Java platform, Adobe Flash with a core suite of applications such as messaging and push-mail.

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