OLPC

aka One Laptop Per Child http://laptop.org/

Super Cheap Laptop initiative from the MediaLab.

Hardware spec - 128MB RAM, 512MB flash

Software/related included http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Software_components

• Python
• JavaScript
• GNOME, X, GTK
• SQLite
• Xul Runner
• Sugar UI http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Sugar
• Logo Wiki? or some other WikiEngine?
  • Ivan Krstic says he has a custom SmartAscii markup similar to WikiCreole - called Cross Mark.

P2P, Mesh Network

• going to be based on 802.11s (ESS Mesh) (which isn't done yet)
  • http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mesh_Network_Details
• how do you do Digital Identity?
  • how do you authenticate messages sent over P2P as coming from a specific human?
• each machine will run a Python-based Desktop Web Server to serve local WebApp-s, so writing for local use vs remote interaction is blurred - excellent.
  • hmm, I wonder whether they should build WebMail rather than a Fat Client (they're working with PyMail Gui which is based on TkInter)? (shades of OSAF?)
• need EMail (or other store-and-forward messaging) for communicating with people not connectible at the moment.
  • do you broadcast copies of outgoing messages to everyone, then have some way of deduping for the recipient, and aging/discarding for the other copies that end up sitting around undelivered on other machines? (this way a message eventually "finds" its recipient)
  • or maybe an explicit forward-via-intermediary approach: have a Village Server (which might not even have its own Always On connection to the outer Internet), and your friend can say "hey I'm going in to the village, do you want to give me some messages to pass along to the server?"
• Instant Messaging and Presence Detection raises its own issues on top of this. I hope they don't try to reinvent SMTP on top of Jabber (though, actually, using the SMTP protocol on top of XMPP might be more defensible).
  • XMPP with ZeroConf can run completely P2P
  • or is a Distributed Hashtable approach an alternative?