There's been a lot of talk about the OLPC's cute little mesh networking laptop at Linux.conf.au this week. The foundation is taking its low-cost, robust laptop the XO to underprivileged kids around the world, but it's also funding its work by selling XO laptops to the public. The cool news from the LCA conference was that a local OLPC group is setting up in Australia to help get computers to kids across Australia.

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.

This weekend, the One Laptop per Child movement in New York City is holding an OLPC "Grassroots Jam" at the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. The Jam is a gathering of volunteer educators, content creators, artists, writers, programmers, engineers, and others who want to help create a central server for NYC schools that already make use of OLPC laptops.

Developer Chris Ball has announced that the upcoming OLPC XO-1.5 laptop software release will be based on Fedora 11. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is a non-profit organisation who's mission is to provide children across the world with low cost laptops for self-education.

In 1991, DUX Software licensed the rights to port Maxis Software's SimCity to Unix. Don Hopkins, working then as a contractor for DUX, rewrote the Mac version of the game to run on numerous Unix platforms. More recently, John Gilmore, an advisor to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, suggested the idea to Hopkins of bringing the game to the OLPC's XO laptop. Hopkins told SimCity creator Will Wright, who was enthusiastic about the idea and got the ball rolling at Electronic Arts, the current owner of Maxis.

Today marks the official mass production of the OLPC (or XO laptop computer). However, the project has lost some buzz and It is hard not to think that there's a global neo-conspiracy to harm the OLPC project.

The One Laptop Per Child Project and Intel have put their differences aside, at least for now, as Intel agrees to take a seat on the OLPC Board of Directors. The new "peace" between Intel and OLPC will also involve the project receiving some funding from Intel, and according to a statement, "Intel and OLPC will explore collaborations involving technology and educational content."

As Nicholas Negroponte said a year and a half ago in a presentation on the OLPC: “people really don’t want to criticize this because it is a humanitarian effort, it is a non-profit effort and to criticize it is a little bit stupid actually”.

You may know about One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Sugar, and the many projects inspired by this initiative. You may not know Edward Mokurai Cherlin or of his plans for OLPC: Education, economic development, global commerce, all in an environmentally friendly, fair-trade context -- plus ending poverty at a profit. All in less than 40 minutes of conversation.