Linspire is doomed. No, they haven’t signed an unholy alliance with ID Software involving pre-installing DOOM on all Linspire computers. In my opinion, they are doomed to die a painful death in the operating system world. Why? Read on to find out.

The third day of the Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) featured Jon 'maddog' Hall talking about his dreams for the spread of the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) throughout the third world as an inexpensive, environmentally friendly way of helping get another billion people on the Internet, along with an update on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, and several other talks.

The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) plans to launch OLPC America in 2008 to distribute the low-cost laptop computers originally aimed at developing nations to needy students in the United States.

Dana Blankenhorn yesterday called the OLPC project a failure for its inability to mass market a low-cost Linux laptop. Dana’s definition of failure, in this case, seems to be based on the quantity of XO laptops distributed.

The success or failure of the One Laptop Per Child Project hinges critically on the cost of the XO laptop, which governments are expected to purchase on behalf of their citizens in developing countries. While we know that the XO will be debuting at $175, there has been renewed speculation of where the laptop project might land if sales are successful.

Hello dear reader. I've just been reading an article on News.com, which explains in some detail the exit of Intel from an OLPC alliance. It happened after some few years of disagreements and heat between the teams; and after they seemingly made up and OLPC started developing an Intel-based model (which I would love to see).

"The One Laptop Per Child project, launched by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in 2003, was supposed to lead millions of children around the world to information technology and freedom [...] I now expect that the main effect of the OLPC project—if it succeeds—will be to turn millions of children into Microsoft users.

I will list the ways in which OLPC has influenced the target market which probably defines the interest of most readers of OLPC News, the angle from which most bloggers and industry commentators have been talking about the OLPC project for the past 4 years, which is how OLPC technology may affect the rich Western country's PC/Laptop industry.

The XO laptop (of the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative) is an inexpensive laptop project intended to help educate children around the world. The laptop includes many innovations, such as a novel, inexpensive, and durable hardware design and the use of GNU/Linux® as the underlying operating system. The XO also includes an application environment written in Python with a human interface called Sugar, accessible to everyone (including kids). Explore the Sugar APIs and learn how to develop and debug a graphical activity in Sugar using Python.