Microsoft tries to fit XP onto OLPC

It's the microshaft "one-licence-per-child" global domination plan to get every person in the world buy a windows licence as soon as they are old enough to type!!

They will begin testing in January... by that time the machines might boot up... XP is a piece of slow turd on anything less than 512 RAM. Oh and lemme guess they won't be using an antivirus/antispyware so that saves some CPU cycles for worms and malware. Migh aswell try running Vista on a mobile phone. Has anyone at MS wondered that there might be a god reason why the OLPC chose linux?

strange you'd think this was just what windows ce was designed for yet they don't want to use it?

bah thats a crying shame... what with all that stability and security.

Place your bets it'll be a modified version of XPE (XP embedded). It's small (64MB install+) with IE and Media Player. And runs very quickly on flash based machines (use it myself through work). Depending on configurations, it needs very little hardware to run and run fast.

MS wants people to switch to Vista, but they're making yet another version of XP? I guess they believe it themselves - Vista is not for everyone. I'd have guessed they would make a special Vista - Beginnner's Edition or Barebones Edition for the OLPC.

Yes, not Vista. Not XP as we know it either. Asides from the resource issues, they'll have to properly and totally segregate the writeable data from the read-only code, which is how NT (and 2000 and XP) should have been in the first place, and how Unix and Linux were from birth. And, of course, make what's on the CD tolerably bug-free. I quite like the idea of a lightweight "XP live" that'll run from read-only media. It might sell rather well. Of course, it'll be hamstrung, because MS can't afford to allow such a beast to exist if it can't check that it's paid for every time it boots. Now, how will that work in the third world where even the electricity can't be relied on?

Now, once we have a version that will run on the OLPC, I'd like to run that same version on my 3.2GHz Pentium 4 with 2GB of RAM. It's time the eternal upgrade treadmill came to an end. We're already running supercomputer-class machines on almost every desktop - and for what? Pretty 3D windows and icons? Oliver.

I can see Microsofts motivation. They are worried about the effect on the future OS market. If OLPC get their wish, and every child in developing nations gets a laptop, and every one of those laptops is running a simple, free OS, there will grow a gap between current expectations of OS price/performance/features and future expectations. The OS war for the hearts and minds of the worlds young has started, and if MS can't pull off a passable light-weight version of XP, the future OS of choice, for everything from business to home uses, will be Linux.

So what if they DO get some flavor of windows XP or XP-Embedded installed on it? What *else* does it do? The neat thing about the XO machines is not their operating system. The XO is a whole package of applications and mesh networking. What's a third-world kid supposed to do with Media Player and IE?

There's a trend going on to sell underpowered machines running Linux for cheap. The highest profile unit is the Asus EEE and the Zonbu Notebook, but there are others. MS squirmed so much on the EEE that it offered EEE buyers the option to buy Windows for $40! They're seeing Linux coming in through this low-tech "back door" and they want to shut it, FAST.

i can see the African child sitting in the bush, just having been cranking for 30min to charge the laptop. he boots up and starts to play a game. BSOD. he starts out on a quest to throw the damned thing off the end of the earth, saying it has brought evil to his life.

XP comes in an Embedded flavor so this may be what's at the bottom of this story. The problem I've got with this is its a bit like running Linux on your microwave oven -- its nice to prove you can do it but it really doesn't prove anything or give you anything useful. Maybe this is an indicator of what's not quite right in Voledom, they're so used to building their sort of code that they don't understand the big picture -- after all, you could port OLPC's user environment to Windows but why would you bother? What would it give you? Surely they're not expecting to ship a version of Office for the OLPC?

Perhaps they will use something similar to the low-footprint kernel which you guys reported on back here: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/10/19/smaller-footprint-windows

Perhaps the plan and the first step by Microsoft is to be able to tell different goverments that the OLPC runs Windows. The next step will then be to prove that the OLPC hardware (so sorry) is just not good enough for Windows. And the third step, I think you can guess.

this might be interesting, if it has support for most hardware. A small footprint might make xp quite a performer, without going the nlite way.

Voles running around Redmond every which way crashing into to each other in a mad rush to start yet another crash OS project. This time to meet a perceived 3rd world OLPC gap threat to the mighty MS monopoly. This will result in yet another half baked MS OS, only this time to be foisted on the 3rd world. MS's worst nightmare is coming true. Billions of new computer users all over the world being raised on a non-MS OS, growing up to prefer Linux over Windows. Yes Chicken Little the sky is truly falling over Redmond. This means that the predecessor project for Vista will have to be shelved until this new threat to the collective can be contained. Corporate paranoia at its finest. MS needs to stop trying to dominate every new market sector and instead focus on getting their existing software offerings to be bug-free and secure. Will probably never happen in our lifetimes. I don't think that there has ever been a bigger window for opportunity for Linux developers to make major inroads into the MS desktop monopoly. Vista is flagging, MS is being dragged under with their security issues. Problem is will the Linux crowd be able to stop forking out more new useless Linux distributions, that still can't get basic hardware settings right, or will they finally get their act together and concentrate on making one super Linux distribution that actually works. Time will tell.

>What's a third-world kid supposed to do with Media Player and IE? Listen to the pirated Britney Spears music and watch pr0n?

"What's a third-world kid supposed to do with Media Player and IE?" Since the state of alabama in the US bought a whole batch of these for students I'm guessing that answers all confusion.

download a few britney exposed and obey the morse videos, if they´re lucky they´ll attract RIAA´s attention....

well if his OLPC thing works out, Microsoft may have to contend with 2% of the computer market using Linux (Marketing employee at Microsoft shudders).