The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization, chaired by Nicholas Negroponte, is a non-profit organization set up to develop an inexpensive entry-level laptop mainly based on open source software, intended to be distributed to children from developing countries around the world, to provide them with access to knowledge and modern forms of education and shorten the technological gap.
Jürgen Rink from Heise Mobil has posted an interesting article on the OLPC project, complete with pictures inside the notebook and covering hardware specs on the XO. The project is still in development and some of the goals are yet to be achieved, like optimizing power management to boost battery life and the much talked about pull-string power generator which is still just a prototype. Still, the project has gone a long way in a short time, catching the attention of companies like Microsoft and Intel, the latter having started an educational project of their own called World Ahead.