OLPC XO-1.75 News

OLPC Lead Software Engineer Chris Ball writes:

Hi all,

OLPC Engineering had a trip to Taipei for the XO-1.75 motherboard
bringup last week.  The 1.75 machine lives in the same industrial
design (display, case, batteries) as the XO-1/XO-1.5, but uses an
ARM system-on-chip from Marvell -- the Armada 610/MMP2.

There's still a great deal of driver and basic bringup work ongoing,
but we're at a point where we can share details and photos:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_1.75_A1
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO1.75_Bringup
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/File:XO1.75_A1_bringup.jpg

http://dev.laptop.org/~lennert/20101109148.jpg
http://dev.laptop.org/~lennert/20101108144.jpg
http://dev.laptop.org/~lennert/20101108146.jpg
http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/1.75/1.75-a1-dmesg
http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/1.75/xo-1.75-broughtup.jpg

The grand plan is to first move to the new ARM motherboard in the
old industrial design (XO-1.75), then move to that same motherboard
in a new tablet industrial design (XO-3).  Of course, there tend to
be a lot of changes to OLPC's grand plans before devices ship!

Software-wise, we're running XO-EC and Open Firmware at the low level,
and Fedora 12 with Sugar and GNOME for the OS.  We plan on moving up
to Fedora 13 or 14 as they become available for ARM.  (An easy way
to help us out would be to help the Fedora ARM team with their mass
rebuilds for newer Fedora releases.)

As usual, we'll be running a Developers Program with these machines
once we've got past the necessary initial hardware fixes and made a
larger volume of boards.  That's going to take several months, but
we wanted you to know that it will be coming.

Thanks!

The Armada 610 is a 1GHz ARM core and the amount of memory is still unknown but should be around 1 GiB, which is what the XO-1.5 will eventually ship. Disk duties will still be carried out by microSDHC cards, as far as I'm aware from discussions, and it will feature a whole new touchscreen.
If you've been reading for a few months you know I had one XO-1.5 around and it is a pretty nice netbook, especially for using outdoors, and one that features a remarkable construction for something so cheap.

This work will fork into the XO-3 and a tablet from Marvell that will be available for the general public, somewhere around next year. For now, I leave you with a pretty GNOME screen: