Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production.

Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the components needed to build millions of the low-cost machines.

"The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, aimed at providing an educational computer for developing countries at a cost of $100, has begun production of hardware. The first mass produced laptops are due to come out in October this year"

Late last year Uruguay landed its first shipment of 100,000 units of the much lauded, sometimes criticised XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation. Buoyed by that success, Walter Bender, president software and content at OLPC effused over the next countries in line for the little green machine. The question is, however, can the likes of Peru, Mexico, Ethiopia, Haiti, Rwanda, Mongolia and a myriad of other impoverished countries stump up with the cash needed to join the OLPC bandwagon? The sums are not that difficult to do.

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 (OLPC) is an amazing project that aims to give every child in the world a laptop with a cost of just $100 a laptop and they also are windup so in countries where there is no or little electricity you can wind the OLPC up to get it working.

One month after the One Laptop Per Child charity went into mass production with its $188 laptop, the Peruvian government has signed a contract to purchase 260,000 units.

The OLPC project has begun production and everyone wants to have a say. The articles I found all had slightly different slants or information, but not different enough to warrant posting each story as a separate entry. Of course, some opinions are far more positive than others!

Here are the links to the stories I found. If you want to add other links in the comments, feel free.

$100 laptop' production begins (the BBC News)
Linux powered OLPC unable to hit $100 target price (DaniWeb)
Getting to know the OLPC's 'XO' (desktoplinux.com)

"China should be an obvious beneficiary of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Scheme, which seeks to provide robust $100 portable Internet computers to children in developing countries."

I didn't intend for OLPC to become one of my favourite topics, I just happen to notice a lot going on about it in the press, and sadly a lot of it is just plain wrong. Take, for example, a recent article by Sam Varghese, entitled "OLPC: one virus per child" [which] surmises that because Microsoft is working hard to provide Windows XP for the XO Laptop and Nicholas Negroponte made a comment about reorganizing the One Laptop Per Child organization to be run "more like Microsoft", the XO Laptop is doomed to be a vessel for spreading computer viruses worldwide.