OLPC XO-3 and Fedora

For a lot of you its not been much of a secret that I’ve been working on various OLPC things for quite a number of years now in my own time. Its also not a shock to a lot of people that I’ve been spending a lot of my Fedora time on ARM related things in recent months! After all in both cases it’s been not unusal for me to bother you about dependency or build issues whether it be by email, bugzilla, or even in person 🙂

Most Fedora people would have seen the announcement of the XO-3 Tablet by One Laptop Per Child and Marvell Semiconductor. You’ve likely seen it in the media, its been reported all over the place. You might have even seen some of the cool press shots like this one..

XO-3 Tablet

or this one…

XO-3 Tablet

One of the things that you may not have realised is that the devices being demoed at CES were running Fedora 14 on ARM. Pretty cool huh? Sure it’s by no means currently as fast as it could be. Firstly it’s running “softfp” which doesn’t properly make use of the hardware floating point. It also doesn’t even begin to make use of Marvell’s equivilent of SSE/MMX let alone some of the other features. We’re aiming to make it scream, comparetively for a device that draws 2 watts! It will never be a super computer but it will be able to run an OS that is pretty close to the linked beast, and even be a little more rugged and portable to boot!

If you don’t believe me check some of the following photos (courtesy of Gizmodo) . Do any of them look familiar?

Yes, that’s Sugar

And GNOME 2.32, I’m working on GNOME 3… help wanted!

a close up.

Say CHEESE! Well say Record on Sugar actually.

More details can be found in Gizmodo’s OLPC XO 3.0 Hands On: The $100 Wonder Tablet article.

I think it’s very cool to have Fedora running on a device that is again so ground breaking in both cost and design right from the very beginning! No Android here, it’ll come later. I’ll have its big brother at FUDCon Blacksburg and I look forward to getting it running Fedora 17 very soon 🙂

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