Multitouch Making Its Way to OLPC Laptops
Chris Ball, the Lead Software Engineer for the OLPC project, made a series of announcements this week about the direction the low-cost laptop is taking, not the least of which is the addition of a multitouch display. That's right folks, the next iteration of the XO laptop -- XO-1.75 -- will sport a touchscreen display, and so will upcoming XO tablets.
"We've begun working on modifications to Sugar to enable touchscreen and multitouch use (the XO-1.75 will have a touchscreen, as will future OLPC tables based on its design), and we'll continue to do so," Ball said. "The first outcome from this work is Sayamindu Dasgupta's port of the Meego Virtual Keyboard to Sugar -- you can see a screencast of it in action here."
In addition, Bell indicated that Fedora will continue to serve as the base distribution for XO-1.75 as the platform transitions from x86 hardware to ARM. Since ARM is not a release architecture in Fedora, Bell said the OLPC project is hard at work helping out with a port.
"We've begun working on modifications to Sugar to enable touchscreen and multitouch use (the XO-1.75 will have a touchscreen, as will future OLPC tables based on its design), and we'll continue to do so," Ball said. "The first outcome from this work is Sayamindu Dasgupta's port of the Meego Virtual Keyboard to Sugar -- you can see a screencast of it in action here."
In addition, Bell indicated that Fedora will continue to serve as the base distribution for XO-1.75 as the platform transitions from x86 hardware to ARM. Since ARM is not a release architecture in Fedora, Bell said the OLPC project is hard at work helping out with a port.
