BY BRYAN ANDERSEN
$100 Laptop
Two OSU undergrads plug into global computer project
T
he hottest computer around just ar-
rived in Corvallis.
The laptop looks like something
made by Playskool found at Toys R Us but
has cutting edge technologies designed by the
open source community.
What 20-year-old college student would-
n’t want one? Problem is, although millions
will be made, you won’t find them at Best
Buy or Circuit City.
OSU sophomores Michael Burns and
Justin Gallardo have one. That’s because
they, along with the team at the OSU Open
Source Lab, helped design software on the
so-called “$100 laptop.”
MIT and OSU are the only universities in
the nation formally working on the One
Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project developed
by Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the
MIT Media Lab.
The goal is to get OLPC “XO laptops”
into the hands of the world’s poorest children.
The little laptops talk to each other via wire-
less networks, have cameras and micro-
phones so kids can make movies, and con-
nect to the Internet. They do word processing
and e-mail, self-generate power, and are envi-
ronmentally friendly.
How did students at OSU get involved
with such an important project?
Burns saw a story on the One Laptop Per
Child project on CNN. He joined mailing
lists and began asking technical questions. A
networking engineer from Cisco Systems
Inc. sent him an email saying his questions
were good, and a dialog began.
“It’s interesting because it’s laptop-to-lap-
top communications in this mesh that kind of
builds itself up automatically,” Burns ex-
plained. “You don’t need routers and net-
working cables and telecommunications in-
frastructure. The laptops just need to be
within half a mile of each other, and they can
do the rest through wireless antennas and
some cool geek bits they’ve coded up. That
really excited me, because I have a back-
ground in networking.”
Everything related to the XO laptop is
“open source.” That means its technologies
are freely shared. Although companies like
Apple and Microsoft offered to let the XO
laptop run their operating systems and soft-
ware, the nonprofit OLPC declined because
things like Microsoft Word contain copy-
righted and protected components. Burns and
Gallardo tackled the problem of adapting an
open source word processing program called
Abiword to the laptop.
“We got an email from one of the devel-
opers. He said, ‘I know you want to get in-
volved, here’s my phone number.’ I’m a
sophomore in computer science, and here’s
this engineer on this big project over in
Boston who wanted me to call,” Burns said.
“My heart stopped for a minute or two.”
Burns immediately called, and told the
engineer he wanted to work on the project.
The engineer explained there was no word
processor or text editor on the laptop, but
demonstrations to important dignitaries were
scheduled.
“We went to lunch,” Burns said. “Justin
and I thought about it. In four or five months,
we could get this software written. We head
back into the office and I check my email, and
the engineer said he wanted it by Wednesday
of the following week. This was Friday!
“So, with a lot of Red Bull, and very little
sleep, Justin caught himself up on how to
write the software. And we did it. It was
Sunday, about 10 o’clock at night, and we
were just exhausted. But it worked for them,
which is a pretty amazing feeling.”
After working with an engineer from
Cisco on networking and one from Boston on
the word-processing software, members of
the OSU Open Source Lab started a new proj-
ect. A team of five undergraduate students,
Burns, Gallardo, Brad Morgan, Josh
Schonstal, and Sarah Cooley, are work-
ing with Real Networks, Inc. on a
media player for the laptop. Burns
said Real (of Real Player fame) re-
cently gave the OSU Open Source
Lab a $500,000 grant to work on
the project.
The laptops
Burns
and
Gallardo re-
ceived March
2 are the third
prototype.
The comput-
ers will go
into full
production in August. Millions will be made
by Quanta in Taiwan. That company makes
laptops for Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-
Packard.
Burns said the XO laptop is nicknamed
the “Green Machine” because of its color and
because it’s environmentally friendly: The
computer’s battery runs 12 hours on a full
charge and is made of nickel metal hydride
(NiMH), considered nonhazardous waste.
The laptop will have a string kids pull to
charge the battery. It works like the string
some stuffed animals have that, when pulled,
slowly reels in and makes the toy “talk.”
Instead of making the computer “talk,” the
motion of the string reeling in powers a gen-
erator, charging the battery. The laptop also
runs on conventional electricity.
The “$100 laptop” actually costs about
$140. In part, that’s because the price of
nickel used to make the battery rose on com-
modity markets last
fall. “It’s now
the 100 Euro
laptop,” Burns
joked. The
price is ex-
pected to fall
after full pro-
duction be-
gins, perhaps
dropping
to under $100 within two years.
It has no hard disk drive. Instead, it uses
512 MB of flash drive memory, like an iPod
Nano. This makes it lightweight and cool
running.
The laptops will offer technologies to
poor children in developing nations. They
contain “collaborative software,” so students
can work on projects together, real time,
through wireless networks. From kinder-
garten through high school, all work students
do will be stored on a server at their school.
Along with the OSU students, others at
the OSL on the project include Peter
Krenesky, OLPC Media Player lead devel-
oper, North Krimsly, OSL development head
manager, and Corey Shields, infrastructure
manager.
Burns also mentioned OSU’s Dr. Timothy
Budd, who taught a popular course, CS419
Open Source Development, during the winter
term. A similar course is offered at MIT.
Budd arranged for Burns and Gallardo to
meet with engineers at Intel in Hillsboro and
to present last weekend on the XO laptop at
the Oregon Computer Science Teachers
Association 2007 Spring Conference at
Willamette University.
The pair, childhood friends from Keizer,
spent a year at Salem’s Chemeketa Community
College before transferring to OSU.
OSU students are the only undergraduates
in the nation getting paid to work on the One
Laptop Per Child computer. They are also
working on improving the XO laptop’s
email software.
Kids in Thailand have been testing
the computers for about half a year.
Students in Brazil, Argentina, Chile,
Libya and other coun-
tries will be getting
laptops soon.
The OSU Open
Source Lab works
with
the
One
Laptop Per Child
Foundation
in
another important
capacity. It will
soon host and
maintain a clus-
ter of develop-
ment boards for
OLPC. ew
Michael Burns shows prototypes of the XO
BRYAN ANDERSEN
The laptop looks like something made by Playskool
found at Toys R Us but has cutting edge technologies
designed by the open source community.
trekking?
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MARCH 29, 2007 13