The MIT project Kay Nishi mentioned in his Tilburg presentation seems to become reality.
It is called for some time now the 100 dollar notebook.

See here

The project is called One Laptop Per Child, see here. No mentioning of Kay Nishi on that site. Fun to see Brazil has expressed interest in the notebook (see the Map) and not yet many african countries (too busy fighting their tribal wars?).

It has nothing to do with MSX (as to be expected ) but is based on opensource like Fedora Core. OpenMSX may run on it or maybe not since they seem to strip the OS as much as possible to make it fit in the limited resources.

behold! Linux Lite!

They complained about current operating systems (Windows and Linux) being too bloated when it comes to power consumption.

Oh, commmon.... 128Mb and 500mhz processor is more than enough to run Win98! I'm right now on a p2-400 with 256 RAM and it runs smooth as hell...

Quote:

Oh, commmon.... 128Mb and 500mhz processor is more than enough to run Win98! I'm right now on a p2-400 with 256 RAM and it runs smooth as hell...

They are not only talking about the "normal" memmory, but als the flash-mem that stores the complete OS and apps

And probably a veeeery lite version of GNOME. Plain desktop without eyecandies.

Quote:

...too bloated when it comes to power consumption.

Well the X-Server is already pretty CPU-consuming, due to it's architecture.
But has some advantages in that RAM-/Memoryconstrainted system. Perhaps running some bigger apps via a central server using it's WLAN? Naaah

I miss the sticker... 'not for white kids'

Well the president Kirchner had pre-order like 100.000 units for Argentinian IIRC.

An X server isn't CPU consuming at all if it enables you to use hardware acceleration. X servers on local machines are not optimal, but not very bloated either. If you want it simpler: use DirectFB, which comes with a stripped down X server and works with hardware acceleration as well. MIght be nice for this project.

I don't know how much of that 128MB RAM is left for applications, but openMSX does not use a lot of RAM. Especially when using modest MSX configurations (don't insert a couple of 4MB mappers) and 16-bit colour output (16-bit colour video buffers are only half the size of 24-bit colour video buffers, since the latter are stored as 32-bit for performance reasons).

Also, a 500MHz processor should be fast enough, depending on what kind of instructions it offers. If there is something like MMX or SSE, the video processing should run quickly and video processing is the bottleneck in openMSX.

The openMSX installation could also be stripped down. If the laptop is running GNOME, then libpng and libxml2 are already present in the system. We could then compile SDL with only the X11 (for video) and ALSA (for audio) drivers, this will make it a lot smaller than usual, similarly compile SDL_image only with support for PNG. I already have a script to perform those stripped-down builds for the OS X binary. We might have to add TCL if it's not on the system by default and then we have everything that's needed.

We don't have to ship all configurations either: including only C-BIOS would suffice since we can't legally distribute the ROMs for other configurations anyway. Of the documentation we only have to include the user guide and FAQ.

Once openMSX is running, the fact that MSX software is so small compared to PC software is a big plus for a laptop without harddisk. So you might have to invest 4MB (rough estimate) for openMSX itself, but in the next 4MB you can store an enormous amount of games and applications.

So if anyone gets their hands on one of these laptops, please contact us and we can try to get openMSX running on it.

Can openMSX use libsvga as well, instead of SDL?

Because I've managed to run an libsvga game without X.
Or could I run openMSX with SDL without X?

Also, what happens when those kids do:

su
<default password>
rm -R * /

to each other?

openMSX runs with any driver supported by your SDL library. If your SDL supports libsvga, so will openMSX, as it simply uses libSDL for video-output (and some other things).
So, you can definately run openMSX without X by using alternative SDL drivers like libsvga.

These $100 laptops will be great for kids not only in African or South American countries but also in western coutries. A great laptop to do their homework, chat and browse the internet.

Indeed, thing is... these laptops cost far over $100, and can only cost as low thanks to sponsorship from charities and governments... perhaps we'll see these laptops on the western market some day, but certainly at a higher price.

an idea is to sell these laptops for $200 in western countries (which is still a bargain) and with the extra $100 give a child in a 3rd world country one for free.