Doing it for the kids, man: Children's laptop inspires open source projects

By Don Marti, LinuxWorld.com, 10/27/06

Page 4 of 4

Blizzard, with GNOME developer Jeff Waugh hosted a two-day summit on the GNOME desktop environment at the MIT Media Lab, and got some new projects interested in OLPC, he says. Freedesktop.org's telepathy project for instant messaging, voice and other conversations, and the PenguinTV RSS reader are both considering OLPC-adapted versions, he says.

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OLPC is getting indirect benefits from Nokia's 770 Internet Tablet, including the long-awaited ability to add input devices without restarting the GUI subsystem, which Nokia developer Daniel Stone added for the 770. "The input stuff on x has needed an overhaul for a decade and Daniel is finally doing that," Gettys says.

Nokia is also funding X Window System developer Matthew Allum to work on a display simulator, Xephyr. Xephyr is the basis for a Manu Cornet's Google Summer of Code work on simulating the CM1 display on a conventional monitor.

Blizzard anticipates that developer interest will grow even more with the next round of prototype machines, which will be complete laptops instead of just bare circuit boards. "There are really great spinoffs. We're going to build a lot of laptops and put them in the hands of a lot of people, " he says.

Just as the CM1's software is getting an overhaul, so is the keyboard. "Nicholas Negroponte's one absolute demand is to get rid of Caps Lock," Gettys says.

And, Bender says, "There's one new key they get that's the important one and that's the View Source key."