Ars Technica says MIT’s $100 Laptop will run Red Hat Linux.
The lime-green laptop, which uses a 500Mhz AMD processor and has 1GB Flash RAM instead of a hard drive, will only use open source software, despite an offer from Apple for it to use Apple’s OS-X operating system for free.
The laptop features an eight inch SVGA display, 1 GB of flash memory, 128 MB of DRAM, and a 500 Mhz AMD processor will also ship with a web browser, a word processor, and a programming environment of some kind.
At this point, it is probably safe to assume that the browser and word processor will be the increasingly popular Firefox and OpenOffice.org, but the nature of the programming environment remains a matter of debate. Some preliminary details suggest that the laptop will ship with the Squeak Smalltalk environment, which is not particularly surprising, since Squeak luminary Alan Kay is one of the researchers contributing to the laptop project.
The laptop also features support for a unique, peer-to-peer wireless mesh network that will work right out of the box, and MIT researchers are currently investigating various ways to facilitate low cost internet access for the laptop systems.
The latest details also indicate that the OLPC folks plan to distribute a commercial version for about US$200. Details on commercial distribution are still pretty sketchy, but based on the note at the bottom of the Tectonic article, it looks like OLPC could currently be negotiating with potential distributors.
Related DailyWireless articles include; $100 Laptop Shown, Mesh Standards?, Mesh Roundup, Meshed Roofnets and PersonalTelco Building Free Cloud in Portland.
