by Ethan Johnson
January 4, 2007

(Updated below)

Set the Wayback Machine(tm) for April 10, 2006:

A more modest idea would be a more localized community network. In urban and suburban areas, it might be possible to use Wi-Fi and cabled networking to create an overlay network that is independent of the commercial internet. The purpose of this network would have to be mulled over as the commercial internet pretty much works as is, but I like the idea of this community intranet where local news and alerts can be shared without being beholden to the phone companies and so forth. I'll have to think this over some more.

I finally looked into the particulars of the One Laptop Per Child project. In short, the goal is to develop laptops for children in developing countries for roughly $100 USD. As if this comes as any surprise, the laptops will run a variant of Linux. What, you didn't think they'd run Windows [anything] or Mac OS X, did you? Ha! (Snort, guffaw.)

This project is pretty darn revolutionary. A lot of thought is being put into the design of these laptops, and I think computer hardware for the developed world will start adopting some of these advances. Reading through the spec list for the prototype laptops, one item jumped out at me:

Wireless mesh: Child-child sharing! OLPC Laptops are full-time wireless routers. Mesh networking reduces the need for dedicated infrastructure (e.g. access points and/or cabling), and extends greatly the areas in which machines may be connected to each other and/or to the internet.

How about that! This doesn't cut the conventional internet out of the loop entirely, but I like the idea that if the internet is not available, a mesh network can be used anyway to enable sharing and so forth. That's the sort of thing I was talking about last year but not quite envisioning to the extent that the OLPC crowd did.

As exciting as the laptop project is, I wonder if the Law of Unintended Consequences will rear its ugly head once these machines go into mass production. These laptops could become the Fendi bag of geekdom, and people who can afford to buy much more powerful and feature-rich laptops will clamor for these $100 cheapies for the novelty value. I confess that I had a few errant thoughts about the utility value of such a device, but frankly, I have a PDA with Wi-Fi, so short of setting up some sort of weird server for my home, I don't need to clamor for something that would be better served in the hands of a needy child somewhere in the third world.

[UPDATE 1/11/2007:] I just received word that the OLPC laptops may be sold to the first-world public, but with a twist: Buy two, get one. That way a needy child does get one, and techno geeks get to play around with a kiddie laptop. Don't think for a minute that I'm going to pass this up.

Now for some thoughts about the operating system. I continue to be amazed at the inherent flexibility of Linux. Beyond the core kernel, everything is negotiable. I tried out Gentoo last night, and it seemed OK. The point of Gentoo is that everything is customizable, right down to what CPU the OS will be running on, which means if you want performance, you'll get performance. Gentoo is thought to be uber-geeky, and certainly not a sit-and-go OS like say, Ubuntu. It's comforting to know that if I really want to get my geek on, Gentoo is a download away.

Conversely, I was thinking about Microsoft's Windows line of operating systems, and noting that Windows' reputation for being "all business" isn't exactly undeserved. Windows 98 was fairly generic in its intent. Windows 2000 was specifically aimed at businesses, however the improvements that came with the package made the OS more attractive to what I'll call power users. Along came Windows XP, which comes in two flavors: "Home" and "Pro". The Home version is pretty stripped down compared to Pro, which makes Pro the de facto XP offering. More so in that "Home" isn't going to be supported officially much longer, if support hasn't been dropped already.

So why isn't there "Windows Jam" for musicians or "Windows Nitro" for gamers? How about "Windows Gekko*" for the hardcore business types? Like Linux, packages can be added beyond the intended core use of the machine, but otherwise each OS is geared toward a specific interest group. Too complicated? Perhaps the OS packages can be limited to say, 5 or 6 based on broad categories, such as multimedia, gaming, business, and general use. Not to do all of MSFTs thinking or anything.

With the advent of Sugar, the Linux variant used by the OLPC project, the early reviews are stating that OLPC has developed an operating system that doesn't look or feel like anything that has come before. It's not a Windows clone, it's not Mac-ish, and it's not running KDE or GNOME, as Linux is wont to do. The OLPC site has emulators that give a sense of what the new OS will be like, but I'm steering clear as I don't want to hog up bandwidth from people with a greater need to know.

Upon reading a site that contains screenshots of a development version of the Sugar OS, I saw this summation:

You can't underestimate how much the design of this system flies directly in the face of the conventional wisdom in the US of how IT in a school is supposed to work. With mesh networking, there won't be a hard firewall between the school and the community, or the rest of the web. Chat isn't diabled; it is explicitly enabled. The underlying software is not locked down; it is unlocked by design. If you've been writing this project off as a simple attempt to distribute cheap hardware, prepare to have your eyes opened.

(By the way, those screen shots look awfully GNOME-ish. My understanding is that the OS has changed quite a bit since then.)

I'll keep an eye on the OLPC project, and wish them the best as they head into the mass production/deployment phase. I wonder how many people are looking at Linux and wondering, "hey, what else can we do with this thing?" <EM>

* Get it?