Andrew Grieg did the presentation this evening. His company (Koolu) is building relatively inexpensive, low-power boxes using the same processor as the OLPC XO (they run the official images well). They are already using the processor we'll be using in the final laptops (instead of the ones in the current BTest2 devices).

They were running stock Ubuntu Feisty + Gnome on the boxes. It was running MythTV, OpenOffice, etceteras with reasonable aplomb. Apparently it can't handle MPEG2 streams, but it does handle the MPEG4 streams he showed well.

The "unbelievable" networking technology they are contemplating (not yet implemented) is just Ultra-Wide-Band... David had understood this to be an entirely new "unknown spectrum" with equivalent bandwidth to all of the "known spectrum"... oh well. They are looking at using limited range versions along with a mesh network, which is an interesting approach, but it's just an idea.

Incidentally, I'm told that Koolu is derived in some way from Direct Leap (possibly not cleanly)... i.e. these are the same basic boxes Simon was showing us last summer (I'd wondered why they looked almost identical at the talk). Anyway, the thing that I took away is that the next generation laptop is going to be a heck of a lot more powerful than the BTest2.