According to the BBC - following up on a report by AP - the first PCs for the $100 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project could be in the hands of third-world users by July. However, you can easily try out the laptop's operating system now! All that's required is a couple of free downloads. One is the VMware Player - a virtual operating system program that lets you run pre-prepared operating systems. The other is the current beta version of the OLPC's Unix-based XO operating system, with its Sugar front-end. At 29MByte, the Windows version of the VMware Player isn't a massive download though the Linux versions are slightly bigger - 37.5MB for the .rpm and 37MByte for the .tar. OLPC's XO operating system is a rather heftier (and slower) download - 135MByte - and comes ready-wrapped courtesy of Tom Hoffman and his Tuttle SVC blog. This version is aimed at Windows users. We presume it's not suitable for Linux - but we haven't tested that side of things. However, we're told that it is okay for use with the free beta of VMware Fusion running OS X on Intel Macs - thanks to Jonny M for the heads-up. Those who want Linux versions should check out the OS images for emulations page of the OLPC Wiki, where there are also links to QEMU - an alternative virtual OS app for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Tom's wrapped-up version automatically fires up into a working version of Sugar - and using VMware to load it lets you either revert to the original downloaded state or save the current working state. Unix-savvy user can interrupt the loading to choose a different target than the auto-booting version of Sugar but that ruled us out. ... http://lifestyle.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7538 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6224183.stm -- ________________________________________ http://olpc.ellak.gr