What will a child in the UK make of a laptop designed to help children in the developing world? Rory Cellan-Jones brought an XO home to find out.

Microsoft stirred up controversy last week when it suggested a Linux-based laptop for children in developing nations be redesigned to accommodate Windows. Would that be a good move?

In a recent interview, representatives from the One Laptop Per Child project disclosed current plans for distributing the XO Laptop in the United States, and discussed the ways in which even local and city school districts can get the XO Laptop for their students.

Adé Oyegbola, CEO of LANCOR, the company that says it is suing OLPC, was gracious enough to answer some of the questions I sent to the company and to the attorney representing it in the threatened litigation. I'll present the questions and answers, along with some photographs he sent as attachments, as he presents at least an outline of his case.

Despite slower-than-expected sales and tough competition from commercial rivals, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation of Cambridge is enjoying a surge of new orders.

A Massachusetts company has sued the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation for patent infringement, saying that the project has stolen it’s own designs for a multilingual keyboard on the OLPC XO Laptop; which was recently released to the public in a buy 2 get on scheme, where the user purchases a laptop for themselves and pays for a laptop for a user in a third world country.
Lagos Analysis Corp, also known as Lancor, filed the lawsuit on Thursday, in the Federal High Court in Nigeria, where the company owns the patent for the four shift-key keyboard, said said Adé Oyegbola, Lancor’s CEO.

For a donation of $399, one XO laptop will be sent to empower a child in a developing nation and one will be sent to the child in your life in recognition of your contribution. $200 of your donation is tax-deductible (your $399 donation minus the fair market value of the XO laptop you will be receiving). Between November 12 and November 26.

One Laptop per Child has begun mass production. The nonprofit organization, launched in 2005 by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, began mass production of the XO laptop computer yesterday morning at Quanta Computer Inc.'s new manufacturing facility in Changshu, China, two hours northwest of Shanghai.

Current Analysis analyst Samir Bhavnani said that Windows XP for the OLPC's XO laptops makes sense as Microsoft has a commercial motive to keep Windows prominent in developing nations. "Windows is the de facto world standard," he noted, adding that it would be useful for children in developing countries to learn how to use it.

OLPC is experimenting with a cow-powered device to generate electricity for its low-cost XO laptop.

The vaunted "$100 laptop" that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers dreamed up for international schoolchildren is becoming a slightly more distant concept.

Image yourself as 21-year-old Australian Joel Stanley, who not only snagged a coveted Google Summer of Code (GSoC) spot, he is spending his internship at One Laptop Per Child's Cambridge headquarters developing "gang charger" power systems for the XO-1 laptop.

The One Laptop Per Child organisation's XO computer, aka the $100 laptop, has just started mass production. And while Crave is happy that thousands of underprivileged African children will reap the benefits of a PC and the Internet, we can't help but feel a little jealous -- and even embarrassed.

The first machines should be ready to put into the hands of children in developing countries in October 2007.

Nigerian schoolchildren who received laptops from a U.S. aid organization have used them to explore pornographic sites on the Internet, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported Thursday.