Friday, January 05, 2007

Pepper and OLPC


Engadget reports that Pepper has ported (does this sounds like a tongue-twister?) their OS to the One Laptop Per Child XO machines:

The OLPC kids seem pretty set on their "Sugar" GUI, with its complete disregard for traditional UI forms in search of a new, kid-friendly OS experience. However, there's a new game in town, in the form of Pepper Computer, which has ported its Pepper Pad OS over to those brightly colored XO machines. The port makes plenty of sense, since Pepper's own computers run on similar AMD Geode procs, and both OSes are similarly based on Linux. Pepper Pad was also initially built with younger users in mind, and given the fact that Pepper's OS is quite a bit more mature than OLPC's current offering, it's hard not get attached to the idea. Of course, the absence of a touch screen on the XO might put a bit of a damper on things, but it seems the trackpad can take over just fine in its absence. It doesn't seem like this new development will have much effect on the OLPC project as it relates to those millions of laptops NickNeg is hoping to ship to kiddies in developing countries, but it's nice to know we'll have such an OS option when we snag our own XO off eBay.

Pepper is one of the Connector Group's friends and we're really glad to see this bold, new OS make it's way onto these machines - they do good, and Pepper makes it better. Wow...I should be in marketing...