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OLPC XO

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XO-1
The latest prototype of the device, named the XO-1
ManufacturerQuanta Computers
TypeSubnotebook
Media1 GB flash memory
Operating systemFedora-based (Linux)
CPUAMD Geode [email protected] + 5536
Memory256 MB DRAM
Displaydual-mode 19.1 cm/7.5" diagonal TFT LCD 1200×900
InputKeyboard
Touchpad
Microphone
Camera
Camerabuilt-in video camera (640×480; 30 FPS)
Connectivity802.11b/g /s wireless LAN
3 USB 2.0 ports
MMC/SD card slot
PowerNiMH or LiFePO4 battery removable pack

The XO-1, previously known as the $100 Laptop or Children's Machine, is an inexpensive laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world[1], to provide them with access to knowledge. The laptop is developed by the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) social welfare organization.

The $100 laptops can be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child. Pricing is currently set to start at US$188 and the goal is to reach the US$100 mark in 2008. Approximately 500 developer boards (Alpha-1) were distributed in summer 2006; 875 working prototypes (Beta 1) were delivered in late 2006; 2400 Beta-2 machines were distributed at the end of February 2007; full-scale production is expected to start in mid-2007.[2] Quanta Computer, the project's contract manufacturer, said in February 2007 that it had confirmed orders for one million units. They indicated they could ship 5 million to 10 million units this year because seven nations have committed to buy the XO-1 for their schoolchildren, including Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Thailand and Uruguay.[3] Quanta plans to offer machines very similar to the XO machine on the open market.[4]

The rugged, low-power computers contain flash memory instead of a hard drive and use Linux as their operating system.[5] Mobile ad-hoc networking is used to allow many machines Internet access from one connection.

The OLPC project had stated that a consumer version of the XO laptop was not planned.[6] However, the project has established the xogiving.org website for outright donations and for a "Give 1 Get 1" offer valid from November 12, 2007 for two weeks.[7]

History

Mary Lou Jepsen, Alan Kay and Nicholas Negroponte unveil the $100 laptop

The first early prototype was unveiled by Nicholas Negroponte and Kofi Annan on November 16 2005 at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, Tunisia. Negroponte showed two prototypes of the laptop at the second phase of the World Summit: a non working physical model and a tethered version using an external board and separate keyboard. The device shown was a rough prototype using a standard development board. Negroponte estimated that the screen alone required three more months of development. The first working prototype was demonstrated at the project's Country Task Force Meeting on May 23 2006. The production version is expected to have a larger display screen in the same size package. The laptops were scheduled to be available by early 2007.


The OLPC board of directors announced on December 13 2005 that Quanta Computers had been chosen as the original design manufacturer (ODM) for the $100 laptop project. The decision was made after the board reviewed bids from several possible manufacturing companies. The company emphasized that there was a lot of work that remains to be done: “We still need to put a large amount of research and development into this, and will then hopefully be ready to make a finished product in the second half of next year 2006”, according to Quanta. Over the next six months, a team at Quanta Research Institute is going to be focusing on the $100 laptop.[8]


In late September 2007, it was announced that the XO would be available to consumers for a short time for the Christmas season, starting November 12 for two weeks, through a "Give 1 Get 1" program. This will allow consumers to purchase two XO systems for $399, with one sent to a child in a developing nation.[7]

Design

Template:Future product

$100 laptop in Ebook-Mode.

The XO-1 will be low-cost, small, durable, and efficient. It will be shipped with a slimmed-down version of Fedora Linux and a GUI called Sugar that is intended to help young children collaborate. The XO-1 includes a video camera, a microphone, long-range Wi-Fi, and a hybrid stylus/touch pad. Human power is planned, allowing operation far from commercial sources of power.

Mary Lou Jepsen has stated the design goals of this device as:

  • minimal power consumption, with a design target of 2–3 W total power consumption;
  • minimal production cost, with a target of $100 per laptop for production runs of millions of units;
  • a ‘cool’ look, implying innovative styling in its physical appearance;
  • e-book functionality with extremely low power consumption;
  • the software provided with the laptop should be open source and free software.

Various use models had been explored by OLPC with the help of Design Continuum and Fuseproject, including: laptop, e-book, theatre, simulation, tote, and tablet architectures. The current design, by Fuseproject, uses a transformer hinge to morph between laptop, e-book, and router modes.

Yves Behar is the chief designer of the present XO shell.

Hardware

Production prototype (4th generation) - functional survey

The hardware specifications as of March 2007 are:

  • CPU: 433 MHz AMD Geode LX-700 at 0.8 Watts, with integrated graphics controller
  • 1200×900 7.5" diagonal LCD (200 dpi) that uses 0.1 to 1.0 Watts depending on mode. The two modes are:
    • Reflective (backlight off) monochrome mode for low-power use in sunlight. This mode provides very sharp images for high-quality text.
    • Backlit color mode, with an effective resolution that is asymmetrically reduced in complicated ways. See below for details.
  • 256 MB of Dual (DDR266) 133 MHz DRAM (in 2006 the specification called for only 128 MB of RAM[9])
  • 1024 KB (1 MB) flash ROM with open-source Open Firmware
  • 1024 MB of SLC NAND flash memory (in 2006 the specifications called for only 512 MB of flash memory[10])
  • Internal SD card slot[11]
  • Wireless networking using an “Extended Range” 802.11b/g Marvell 8388 wireless chip, chosen due to its ability to autonomously forward packets in the mesh even if the CPU is powered off. The chip is run at a low bitrate (2 Mbit/s) to minimize power consumption. Despite the wireless chip's minimalism, it supports WPA.[12] An ARM processor is included.
  • Dual adjustable antennas for diversity reception.
  • Water-resistant membrane keyboard using a fairly conventional (QWERTY in the US International localization) layout. The multiplication and division symbols are included.
  • Dual five-key cursor-control pads; four directional keys plus Enter
  • Touchpad for mouse control and handwriting input
  • Built-in color camera, to the right of the display, VGA resolution (640×480)
  • Built-in stereo speakers
  • Built-in microphone
  • Audio based on the AC97 codec, with jacks for external stereo speakers and microphones, Line-out, and Mic-in
  • 3 external USB 2.0 ports.
  • Power sources:
    • DC input, ±10–25 V
    • 5-cell rechargeable NiMH battery pack, 3000 mAh minimum 3050 mAh typical 80% usable, charge at 0…45°C
    • ?-cell rechargeable LiFePO4 battery pack, 2800 mAh minimum 2900 mAh typical 100% usable, charge at 0…60°C
    • ?-cell rechargeable LiFePO4 battery pack, 3100 mAh minimum 3150 mAh typical 100% usable, charge at -10…50°C
    • External manual power options include a pull-string generator designed by Potenco

Intentionally omitted features

In keeping with its goals of robustness and low power consumption, the design of the laptop intentionally omits all motor-driven moving parts; it has no hard drive, no optical (CD/DVD) media, no floppy drives and no fans. An ATA interface is unnecessary due to the lack of hard drive. There is also no PC Card slot, although an SD slot will be available.

Printers, hard disks, CD drives, DVD drives, USB drives, and many other peripherals can be connected via the USB ports. Further expansion is available through an internal SD card slot.

A built-in hand-crank generator was part of the original design, but Negroponte stated at a 2006 LinuxWorld talk that it was no longer integrated into the laptop itself, but optionally available as a hand- or foot-operated generator built into a separate power unit.[10]

Power consumption

The laptop will consume about 2 W of power during normal use, far less than the 10 to 45 W of conventional laptops.[2]

In e-book mode, all hardware sub-systems are powered down except the monochrome display. When the user moves to a different page the system wakes up, draws the new page on the display and then goes back to sleep. Power consumption in e-book mode is estimated to be 0.3 to 0.8 W.

One of the first beta test 1 units.

Display

The first-generation OLPC laptops are expected to have a novel low-cost LCD. Later generations of the OLPC laptop are expected to use low-cost, low-power and high-resolution electronic paper displays.

The display is the most expensive component of the OLPC Laptop. In April 2005, Negroponte hired Mary Lou Jepsen—who is expected to join the Media Arts and Sciences faculty at the MIT Media Lab in September 2007—as OLPC Chief Technology Officer. Jepsen is developing a new display for the first-generation OLPC laptop, which is derived from the design of small LCDs used in portable DVD players, which she estimated would cost about $35.

Normal LCDs address groups of 3 locations as pixels. Horizontal resolution can be increased via subpixel rendering, which is normally only done for fonts. (2400 dpi diagram)
The OLPC XO LCD addresses each location as a separate pixel. Resolution is thus doubled in grayscale mode; in color mode the image is blurred to reduce color artifacts. (2400 dpi diagram)

Jepsen has described the removal of the filters that color the RGB subpixels as the critical design innovation in the new LCD. Instead of using subtractive color filters, the display uses a plastic diffraction grating and lenses on the rear of the LCD to illuminate the colored subpixels. This grating pattern is stamped using the same technology used to make DVDs. The grating splits the light from the white backlight into a spectrum. The red, green and blue components are diffracted into the correct positions to illuminate the corresponding R, G or B subpixels. This innovation results in a much brighter display for a given amount of backlight illumination: While the color filters in a regular display typically absorb 85% of the light that hits them, this display absorbs little of that light.[13]

The remainder of the LCD uses existing display technology and can be made using existing manufacturing equipment. Even the masks can be made using combinations of existing materials and processes.

In color mode, the display is lit from the back with a white LED. Most LCD displays use cold cathode fluorescent lamp backlights which are fragile, require a high voltage power supply, are relatively power-hungry, and account for 30% of their cost[citation needed].

In monochrome (grayscale) mode, the display is lit only by ambient light such as the sun.

Mode change may normally occur with a change in use of the device. The color display is expected to be used in laptop mode, whereas the portrait format monochrome display is expected to be used in tablet mode for reading pages of text. This is the so-called “curl-up-in-bed mode” to enable reading of e-books for an extended time in bright light such as sunlight.[14] Negroponte has said at the Technology Review’s Fifth Annual Emerging Technologies Conference that the monochrome display has four times the resolution of the color display.[citation needed]

In color mode, the display does not use the normal pixel geometry for LCD computer displays, which makes each pixel contain tall thin rectangles of each primary color. Instead, the display provides only one color for each pixel. The colors align along diagonals that run from upper-left to lower right. (see diagram) To reduce the color artifacts that this pixel geometry causes, the image is blurred as it is sent to the screen. Despite the blurring, the display will still be decently sharp for its physical size; normal displays as of February 2007 put about 588×441 to 882×662 in this amount of physical area and support subpixel rendering for a tad more. A conventional LCD display with the same number of green pixels (green carries most brightness information for human eyes) as the OLPC XO-1 would be 693×520. Unlike a normal 693×520, resolution varies with angle. Resolution is greatest from upper-right to lower left, and lowest from upper-left to lower-right. Images which approach or exceed this resolution will lose detail and gain color artifacts. There exist arguments that the color display gains resolution when in bright light; this comes at the expense of color (as the backlight is overpowered) and can never reach the 200 dpi sharpness of grayscale mode because of the blur which is applied to images in color mode.

Wireless mesh networking

IEEE 802.11b support will be provided using a Wi-Fi “Extended Range” chip set. Jepsen has said the wireless chip set will be run at a low bit rate, 2 Mb/s maximum rather than the usual higher speed 5.5 Mb/s or 11 Mb/s to minimize power consumption. The conventional IEEE 802.11b system only handles traffic within a local cloud of wireless devices in a manner similar to an Ethernet network. Each node transmits and receives its own data, but does not route packets between two nodes that cannot communicate directly. The OLPC laptop will use IEEE 802.11s to form the wireless mesh network.

Whenever the laptop is powered on it will participate in a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) with each node operating in a peer-to-peer fashion with other laptops it can hear, forwarding packets across the cloud. If a computer in the cloud has access to the Internet—either directly or indirectly—then all computers in the cloud are able to share that access. The data rate across this network will not be high; however, similar networks, such as the store and forward Motoman project have supported email services to 1000 schoolchildren in Cambodia, according to Negroponte. The data rate should be sufficient for asynchronous network applications (such as email) to communicate outside the cloud; interactive uses, such as web browsing, or high-bandwidth applications, such as video streaming should be possible inside the cloud. The IP assignment for the meshed network is intended to be automatically configured, so no server administrator or an administration of IP addresses is needed.

Building a MANET is still untested under the OLPC's current configuration and hardware environment. Although one goal of the laptop is that all of its software be open source, the source code for this routing protocol is currently closed source. While there are open-source alternatives such as OLSR or B.A.T.M.A.N., none of these options are yet available running at the data-link layer (Layer 2) on the Wi-Fi subsystem's co-processor; this is critical to OLPC's power efficiency scheme. Whether Marvell Technology Group, the producer of the wireless chip set and owner of the current meshing protocol software, will make the firmware open source is still an unanswered question.

Keyboard and touchpad

More than ten different keyboards have been laid out, to suit local needs to match the standard keyboard for the country in which a laptop is intended. Around half of these have been manufactured for prototype machines.[15][16] Negroponte has demanded that the keyboard will not contain a caps lock key, which frees up keyboard real estate for new keys such as a “view source” key.[17]

Beneath the keyboard is a large area that resembles a very wide touchpad that Jepsen referred to as the “mousepad”. The central third is a capacitive sensor that can be used with a finger, while the full width is a resistive sensor that can be used with a stylus.

Shell

The shell of the laptop is resistant to dirt and moisture, and is constructed with 2-mm thick plastic (0.7-mm thicker than typical laptops). It contains a pivoting, reversible display, movable rubber WiFi antennas, and a sealed rubber-membrane keyboard.

Software

File:OLPC-800px-Frame.jpg
Mock-up of the “neighborhood view” showing children collaborating on various tasks, within the mesh network. By clicking on the icon, communication by Wi-Fi is activated.

Countries are expected to add and remove software to best adapt the laptop to the local laws and educational needs. As supplied by OLPC, all of the software on the laptop will be free and open source.[17] The projected software as of November 2006[18] are:

The laptop will use the Sugar graphical user interface, written in Python, on top of the X Window System and the Matchbox window manager.[20] This interface is not based on the typical desktop metaphor but presents an iconic view of programs and documents and a map-like view of nearby connected users. The current active program is displayed in full-screen mode.[2]

Steve Jobs had offered Mac OS X free of charge for use in the laptop, but according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative's founders, the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with: “We declined because it’s not open source.”[21] Therefore Linux was chosen.

Jim Gettys, responsible for the laptops' system software, has called for a re-education of programmers, saying that many applications use too much memory or even leak memory. “There seems to be a common fallacy among programmers that using memory is good: on current hardware it is often much faster to recompute values than to have to reference memory to get a precomputed value. A full cache miss can be hundreds of cycles, and hundreds of times the power consumption of an instruction that hits in the first level cache.”[9]

On 4 August 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that static copies of selected Wikipedia articles would be included on the laptops. Jimmy Wales, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, said that “OLPC's mission goes hand in hand with our goal of distributing encyclopedic knowledge, free of charge, to every person in the world. Not everybody in the world has access to a broadband connection.”[22] Negroponte had earlier suggested he would like to see Wikipedia on the laptop. Wales feels that Wikipedia is one of the “killer apps” for this device.[23]

In a Slashdot forum post on March 8 2007, Don Hopkins announced that he is creating a free and open source port of the game SimCity to the OLPC with the blessing of Will Wright and Electronic Arts, and demonstrated SimCity running on the OLPC at the Game Developer's Conference in March 2007.[24]. The free and open source SimCity plans were confirmed at the same conference by SJ Klein, director of content for the OLPC and longtime Wikipedia contributor, who also asked game developers to create “frameworks and scripting environments—tools with which children themselves could create their own content.”[25]

The laptop's security architecture, known as Bitfrost, was publicly introduced in February 2007. No passwords will be required for ordinary use of the machine. Programs are assigned certain bundles of rights at install time which govern their access to resources; users can later add more rights. Optionally, the laptops can be configured to request leases from a central server and to stop functioning when these leases expire; this is designed as a theft-prevention mechanism.

Criticism

On November 10 2005, Lee Felsenstein criticized the centralized, top-down, “imperialistic” design and distribution of the OLPC. Felsenstein, currently of the Fonly Institute, draws upon his previous experience with distributed collaboration and open source hardware in the Homebrew Computer Club.[26]

On December 9 2005 Intel Chairman Craig Barrett criticized the project for being a “$100 gadget”: “... The problem is that gadgets have not been successful... It turns out what people are looking for is something that has the full functionality of a PC. Reprogrammable to run all the applications of a grown-up PC .... not dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them.”[27] In 2006, Intel announced[28] that they intend to produce a similar laptop, the Classmate PC. In July 2007, Intel joined the OLPC board, and announced[29] that they would work together through collaboration on technological and educational content.

Theft and resale

The OLPC originally planned to restrict the sale of the laptop to governments, meaning that private individuals would not be able to purchase it. This led to the fears of arbitrage. If XO-1 is only made available in certain areas and to certain parties, a parallel black market for the laptops may develop. An arbitrageur could find a way to obtain the laptops for the going rate and resell them in the black market for a higher price.

The presence of a black market could also encourage the intended owners to sell their laptops. Negroponte addressed this concern during his presentation in the Emerging technologies Conference in September 2005:

The grey market is a very serious issue. I don't want to be dismissive of it for a moment, and there are three ways of addressing it. Way number one is to have no market at all for it. I mean you can't sell it, who could buy it, and that isn't bullet proof. That's a little bit dreaming, but it's part of the equation. The second is to put the technologies into the device that help stop that. [The laptops distributed to middle schoolers in Maine are Apple iBooks] so they are not only great stuff to steal and we don't necessarily have corruption of that kind, but it's pretty transferable technology. They've put little things so the machine disables itself after a while if it hasn't connected to the school. You can put GPS in it, you can put all sorts of stuff. But then the third one, which I'm doing and I like is to make this machine so distinctive that it is socially a stigma to be carrying one if you are not a child or a teacher. Now you can obviously take it down to your basement, but I hope your spouse will even say: “Oh God! Honey! What did you do?” [...] So those three combined will I hope at least limit this to one percent or two percent.[30]

See Also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to One Laptop per Child.
Wikiquote has quotations related to OLPC XO.
Similar products
  • ASUS Eee PC, a low cost machine developed by ASUS, and the concrete marketing planning is announced.
  • Classmate PC, a low cost machine developed by Intel
  • Linutop is another Geode LX -based computer meant for emerging nations.
  • Longmeng or Dragon Dream is a low-cost computer being designed in China
  • Tianhua GX-1C, part of a line of affordable machines developed by Sinomanic in China

References

  1. ^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7006316.stm
  2. ^ a b c d For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate. The New York Times, 30 November 2006.
  3. ^ One million OLPC laptop orders confirmed
  4. ^ "OLPC manufacturer to sell $200 laptop". Arstechnica. Retrieved 2007-03-29.
  5. ^ "OLPC's Software". One Laptop per Child. Retrieved 2006-01-27.
  6. ^ "One Laptop per Child Has No Plans to Commercialize XO Computer". Business Wire. Retrieved 2007-01-16.
  7. ^ a b "One Laptop Per Child -- XO Giving". OLPC project. 2007-09-23.
  8. ^ "Quanta cool on contract for $100 laptops". Financial Times. December 15 2005. Retrieved 2005-12-17. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  9. ^ a b "Interview: Jim Gettys (Part I)". LWN.net. June 28 2006. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  10. ^ a b Stephen Shankland (2006-04-04). "Negroponte: Slimmer Linux needed for $100 laptop". CNET. Retrieved 2006-08-11. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  11. ^ Microsoft looking to run Windows on OLPC, VNUnet, http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2170209/microsoft-looking-windows-olpc
  12. ^ "Bug report: WPA/WPA2 not working with Marvell Libertas". Retrieved 2007-09-30.
  13. ^ "One Laptop Per Child - a Preview of the Hundred Dollar Laptop". Worldchanging. November 3 2005. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  14. ^ Fahrenthold, David A. (2005-11-16). "MIT Is Crafting Cheap -- But Invaluable -- Laptops". Washington Post. p. A03. Retrieved 2006-08-18.
  15. ^ OLPC Keyboard layouts, OLPC Wiki
  16. ^ Keyboard category, OLPC Wiki
  17. ^ a b Don Marti: Doing it for the kids, man: Children's laptop inspires open source projects, LinuxWorld.com, 27 October 2006
  18. ^ http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_components
  19. ^ a b "Interview with Jim Gettys, part II". LWN.net. July 6 2006. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  20. ^ a b OLPC - Hardware and Software, Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research, 27 April 2007
  21. ^ "The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality". Wall Street Journal. November 14 2005. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  22. ^ "One Laptop Per Child Includes Wikipedia on $100 Laptops; Subset of Online Encyclopedia to be Available in Static Version to Children and Teachers in Developing World" (Press release). Wikimedia Foundation. 4 April 2006. {{cite press release}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  23. ^ "User talk:Jimbo Wales". Wikipedia.
  24. ^ "SimCity for OLPC". Slashdot.org. 2007-03-08. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  25. ^ GDC: SJ Klein Asks For Serious OLPC Content, Gamasutra Industry News, 6 March 2007
  26. ^ Problems with the $100 laptop by Lee Felsenstein
  27. ^ "World's poorest don't want '$100 laptop': Intel". Reuters. December 9 2005. Retrieved 2006-02-02. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  28. ^ "Brazil to test US$400 (€300) Intel laptop in schools". International Herald Tribune. December 5 2006. Retrieved 2006-12-06. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  29. ^ ""Intel Joins OLPC"". "Intel Press Release".
  30. ^ Video of Negroponte speech, September 28, 2005 (RealVideo, 55:23).
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