The OLPC team yesterday announced plans to load Windows XP on XO Laptops in a handful of countries in June as part of a limited trial. By September, Windows could be available to any developing nation placing orders for XO Laptops. And today, Walter Bender, the former president of software for the OLPC Foundation says the unique software interface that was designed for the XO Laptop will live on. Maybe.

Here's a little background. The XO Laptop was designed to be a cheap laptop that could be distributed in developing nations to help bridge the digital divide. The original plan for the XO was to use Linux as an operating system because it's cheap, works well on low-powered devices, and because it's open source anyone could write software for it easily. A unique desktop environment called Sugar was built to make Linux more user-friendly. But many governments have been reluctant to place orders for the laptops because they don't run Windows, which is the desktop operating system used by most of the rest of the world. So the OLPC Foundation has been working with Microsoft to bring a low cost version of Windows XP to the XO.

But what does that mean for Sugar? Walter Bender says Sugar Labs, a new non-profit will develop new versions of the software. The goal is to continue developing open source software for the XO so that children in developing nations will be exposed to open source applications and ideals as they learn about computing. The question is, if Windows XP is available for just $3 more than Linux, will anybody buy the Linux/Sugar version? Yes, we know that many Download Squad readers would be more interested in the Linux models, but if the goal is to give school-age children in your country computer literacy, wouldn't you want them to use the same software that most students in countries like the US are using?

Pretty soon you'll be able to run Windows on pretty much any PC you buy, no matter how small. Thanks to Boot Camp and Parallels you can run Windows on a Mac. And thanks to an aggressive push by Microsoft, you can run Windows on Asus's low-cost laptop the Eee PC (while the first units are shipping with Linux, they include instructions for loading Windows XP and Asus plans to sell units with XP preinstalled soon).

Microsoft also plans to bring Windows XP to the diminutive XO laptop, of One Laptop Per Child fame. Microsoft released a statement yesterday announcing plans to begin testing XP on the XO in January in the hopes of making a final version available by the second half of 2008.

One problem Microsoft is dealing with is that the XO laptop includes just 1GB of storage, while Windows requires at least 2GB. So Microsoft insisted that an SD card slot be included in the XO, and is developing a version of XP that will run off of a removable storage card. There are no plans to make the custom, low-cost version of Windows available in the US or other developed countries.

Now, the folks over at the Eee User forum have demonstrated that you can indeed run Windows XP with less than 2GB of storage by removing the page file and using nLite to slim down your installation. But 1GB would still be pushing it.

How do you get national governments to commit to ordering hundreds of thousands of your new low-cost computer for "educational" purposes? Put more games on it, of course.

The One Laptop Per Child Project is hosting a "game jam" in Needham, Massachusetts from June 8th through the 10th. The goal is to get small teams of game designers together to create open source games that:

• Take advantage of the XO laptop's mesh networking capability
• Use the built in camera
• Use the XO's tablet mode (it's not a touch-screen, but there are joystick-like buttons on the side
  
• Oh yeah, and educational games, and applications that let kids create their own games

Right now, the OLPC project has about 2.5 million orders for the XO laptop, which is a bit shy of the 3 million goal the developers had set for themselves in order to begin shipping by September. The laptops might look a bit more attractive if there's more software designed to run on them, such as games that teach young children to read or do math.

[via PC World]

One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte revelaed this week that the $100 laptop will actually run about $175 -- and that it might be able to run Windows, not just Sugar OS, its customized version Linux.

While Sugar OS is designed to make the machines as user-friendly as possible, Negroponte says developers have been working with Microsoft to ensure that the machines could also run Windows, possibly the $3 version of Windows XP that Microsoft recently announced it would sell to governments of developing nations.

As for the price, it'll take about 3 million orders to make producing and distributing the little computers cost effective. 7 countries have expressed interest in placing orders, but no money has changed hands yet. Negroponte says the $100 figure was always a long term goal, and he hopes to reduce the price by 25 percent per year once production begins.