OLPC

First, I attended Mike Fletcher's talk on the OLPC project. He covered the basics of the project to bring people up to speed, then went into the more current details. He showed a map of the countries to which the XO and XS (the server) will be deployed first, and what countries are still in talks. He gave some more technical specs and clearly explained the manual power system. There's a flywheel-based dynamo similar in operation to a lawnmower starter that provides great amount of power for just a few quick yanks. He also said that, with some adaptations, just about anything that can generate power can be connected to the XO. There's also a footpedal that can be connected and supply constant power. The interface of the XO is designed for the cognitive abilities of a six-year-old, so hopefully most of the children who are given laptops will be able to use them regardless of reading or writing ability.

Something else that Mike pointed out really makes sense. One of the concerns of the framers of this project is theft. What happens if the laptop is stolen? A lot of thought was put into this. First, these laptops are only being given to children. So, if someone sees an adult with it, it's probably been stolen. Second, the laptop keyboards are made for childrens' small hands, so adults will find it quite uncomfortable to use (I verified this myself while using it briefly). Third, the laptop must check-in with the server to which it is tied every 20 days. If it doesn't, it gets locked down at the firmware level.

PGP signing/Vendor booths

Second, I attempted to attend the PGP/GPG key signing, but I was apparently the only one there looking for people. Jon and I sat and talked, then walked around the vendor area. SuSE, IBM, and Red Hat were very well represented, as well as some smaller, Toronto-area companies. Some folks from FreeBSD were there handing out light-up devil horns—many attendees wore these throughout the day.

Novell, Xen, and virtualization

Third, all three of use attended a talk from Novell's Canadian operation's CTO, Ross Chevalier. His topic was Xen, the hypervisor and virtualization environment that is making a lot of headlines. Novell is the primary financier of and contributor to Xen development, and virtualization is a big deal to them. Since Novell bought SuSE a few years ago, the company has developed a vested interest in the future of Linux. The talk attempted to sell OpenSuSE 10.3, which includes Xen by default, as well as a graphical utility for configuring and monitoring virtual machines. If I had a powerful need for virtualization, I'd definitely look to OpenSuSE after hearing his talk.