One Laptop Per Child project, popularly known as OLPC delivered more than 1m XO-1 laptops to the children of developing nations. This project was started with a vision to help the poor young ones. The main aim of the OLPC is to ensure that no child is deprived of quality education just because he cannot afford it.

OLPC was founded by Nicholas Negroponte, who is the founder and chairman emeritus of MIT’s Media Lab. Unfortunately it has been through lots of setbacks in past recent years. In 2007 OLPC’s chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen refused to start a new company called Pixel Qi to support development of XO ideas separately. Later on Walter Bender, the software boss also resigned and recently the OLPC had shed off half of its staff and the remaining 32 members have agreed to a huge pay cut. Perhaps even more threateningly, many commercially made netbooks are now approaching and eclipsing the OLPC’s low cost. Whilst commercial netbooks, such as the Asus Eee PC 701 8G, were already almost as expensive as the OLPC XO laptop, recent developments have netbooks approaching the £100 mark; which is obviously a major threat to the OLPC’s viability

The amazing thing is that despite all this the OLPC stands tall and confident with regards to its vision and operations. Nicholas Negroponte doesn’t sound downhearted. He says, “OLPC should have trimmed sooner. We have since grown stronger. Almost all the cutbacks were in engineering staff related to the in-house support of Sugar, which is far better done in the community. In fact, paying people to do it from within created a degree of control that was unsuitable for real open-source development. There are 600,000 laptops in the field, 250,000 in transit and another 380,000 about to be made, so the total adds up to about 1.2m. Thirty-one countries in 19 languages are the exact statistics. It’s less than I anticipated, but still gratifying.”

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One Laptop Per Child, popularly known as the OLPC project, is gaining success day by day at a very fast pace. Aimed at stimulating the growth and development of children in developing nations, the project has put a smile on 600,000 children so far and still continues to make more and more children happy everyday.

According to the OLPC project founder Nicholas Negroponte, 600,000 children in developing nations are using the OLPC’s ultra-cheap XO Laptop as of now. He also clarifies that this figure does not include the number of promised laptops, rather it shows the total laptops that have actually been delivered into the hands of children and are being used by them at schools and homes. The laptops donated under the OLPC project consist of small Asus Eee PC sized laptops running on Sugar OS (a Linux based operating system). These laptops come equipped with all the necessary applications, including a word processor, games, music maker and much more, to help children learn and comprehensively develop their computing skills.

So far the shipment of XO laptops has been made in 31 countries including Peru, Rwanda, and Cambodia and according to Negroponte Palestine will be the next nation to receive the shipment. He also said that by mid 2009 every single child in Uruguay will have a laptop.

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The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project is really becoming a hot favourite in developing countries. Although the XO laptops are minimally powered, they are a perfect tool for making kids computer literate at a minimal cost. The goal of the programme is astoundingly to develop laptops that are even less expensive than the Asus Eee PC 701 4G. The only issue that the OLPC programme has faced is that the laptops used in this project are running on Linux based Sugar Operating System instead of Windows. While in some countries Sugar is considered as a great operating system, others argue that as the global workspace is dominated by the Windows based systems, the students should practice on the same platform; otherwise they will turn into computer literates but still incompetent in the Windows environment.

Thus the OLPC has decided to introduce new XO laptops running Windows XP Pro. As of now, Peru will be the first country to experience these newbies. In addition to this, a dual boot edition is also expected in future. To find out which OS the kids prefer, they were given both the laptops to work and play. The results were amazing. The kids find it easier to work on windows based XO machines but they still want to stick to the Sugar OS because of the array of pre-installed learning games that come with it. Obviously, both the operating systems offer excellent opportunities to learn and enjoy.