Letters to the Editor
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It didn't sound like Intel is helping to make the OLPC
It sounds like Intel is chucking in some servers to build out the backend infrastructure needed to make the OLPC a thin or thinner client which is how the mesh topology infrastructure of the entire OLPC effort views each endpoint. There's not an awful lot that Intel can bring to the table to forward a cheaper design for the desktop/laptop units. It's possible over time for Intel to manufacture them widely and thereby bring the per unit production costs down. But the basic design of them is about as low end as it can be. Swapping out one kind of low powered CPU for an Intel XScale CPU or smaller embedded processor is a small nit in the cost. OLPC is predicated on a network of lightweight clients that are meshed through a redundant fault tolerant backend to accomplish its goals. This is probably where Intel sees its value. In providing largely commodity servers in robust wrappers to service that.
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Will it run Vista?
I can't wait to see how a $100 laptop will run Windows Vista Basic.
Maybe the Gates foundation can prevail on Microsoft to provide an OS that will run reasonably well on a Celeron-grade machine. Like XP does.
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OLPC runs its own OS
It's a microkernel Unix-ish design like some of the non-hard-real-time OS's out there. Probably something deeply thready.