One Laptop Per Child resumed the Give 1 Get 1 program on Monday, via Amazon, available in the USA and 30 countries in Europe. USA orders can be shipped overnight, so buyers get the XOs much faster than last year. You pay $399, get an XO, and help fund OLPC deployments in developing countries – see where the laptops from last year’s G1G1 went.
The XO rose quickly to #1 on Amazon’s “Bestsellers in Computers and PC Hardware” and is still there.
There are videos on OLPC’s Youtube channel, introducing the XO laptop, OLPC’s mission and how the laptops are used for education.
The XO laptop runs Sugar, a platform and user interface designed for learning. You can run Sugar on various GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora.
You can also run a conventional GNU/Linux distribution on the XO, either by installing onto the built-in NAND flash storage, or from a USB drive or SD card – including Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. Amazon also lists Fedora 10 preinstalled on an SD card as a companion product to the XO (for preorder before F-10 is released). You do need a developer key, but then you can simply insert the SD card and boot Fedora without needing to install anything.
Microsoft also have a version of Windows XP for the XO, but this is not available for sale anywhere, as far as I can tell – so you’d need to be in one of two towns in Colombia to run it. “OLPC builds XOs with Linux. OLPC will continue to build XOs with Linux. OLPC has no plans to change this. None.”
In addition to the comprehensive description on the Amazon listing, see OLPC News’s buyers guide for more information on buying the OLPC XO.
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