Negroponte: Dual-boot OLPC laptop on the way

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte has hinted a dual boot XO laptop could soon be on the way.

Negroponte told IDG News Service yesterday that the OLPC project is working with Microsoft on a version of the XO laptop that would be capable of booting either Linux -- its current OS -- or Windows. It appears the two organisations are aiming for something like Apple's Boot Camp: not true virtualisation, but the ability to boot either operating system depending on the applications you'd need to run.

Nigerian students check out their XO laptops, which might soon run Windows and Linux. Credit: Khaled Hassounah

This could help the OLPC address some of the reasons why a few governments have spurned its XO laptop in favor of Intel's Classmate, which runs either Linux or Windows, but not in dual-boot fashion. While the XO's design is certainly innovative compared to many of the other options out there, the support model is not. XO customers are essentially responsible for supporting the product themselves, and some governments haven't wanted to snap up an unproven technology product with the additional support burden.

Microsoft and the OLPC have been talking for months about getting Windows to run on the XO laptop, but until now the discussion had appeared to indicate that project would result in two different XOs, a Linux one and a Windows one. A dual-boot XO is an entirely different prospect altogether, one that might require additional processing power, storage, memory, or all three.

The news comes less than a week after the bitter divorce between the OLPC and Intel over Intel's Classmate PC. The OLPC wants Intel to stop selling in the same markets in which the OLPC -- equipped with an AMD processor -- is being promoted.

Microsoft has also derided the OLPC in the past, preferring to focus on its Windows Starter Edition product or an entirely different notion of bringing computing to the developing world on mobile phones. Just this week at CES, Bill Gates said: "OLPC hasn't done that well. We're in literally over 100 countries with special versions of Windows, including Starter Edition. OLPC is nowhere compared to where we are on this thing."