[LinuxBIOS] LinuxBios For Buy 2 Get 1 OLPC Laptop

[Robinson Tryon]

On 9/25/07, Corey Osgood <corey.osgood at gmail.com> wrote:
> big one wrote:
> > OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) "Buy 2 Get 1" Laptops are sold for the public. One laptop is sent to the buyer and the other laptop is sent to a child in poor developing country.
> >

The 1-for-the-price-of-2 deal sounds socially commendable, but I
wonder if the OLPC folks wouldn't have been better served by using
their no-profit-needed position to undercut everyone else and get a
lot of hardware out on the market, thus
- raising awareness of the project in the US (and other western countries), and
- getting a bunch more people hacking on the hardware.

If anyone does purchase one, I'd be interested to hear what it's like
to type on the child-sized keyboard.  It sounds like it'd be
frustrating for those of us with adult-sized hands:

"OLPC keys on the keyboard are small. NO, they are not just smaller
than a normal keyboard…they are so small that only a five year old kid
can press them with ease."
(http://www.void.gr/kargig/blog/2007/05/31/hands-on-olpc/)

> > Is it possible to port LinuxBIOS to OLPC laptops?
> >
>
> Should be, early versions ran LinuxBIOS.

This page has edits through March 2007:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Upgrading_to_LinuxBIOS

This page details how the project went from proprietary BIOS to
LinuxBIOS, then to LinuxBIOS + OpenFirmware, then finally to A bit of
Assembly + OpenFirmware: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware

Unless they have changed the hardware, I assume that LinuxBIOS could
be slipped right back in...