Balsa for Eee PC and Other Netbooks
Update!
19 August 2010
The new Balsa v0.6 works on most older netbooks, laptops and desktop computers as well as on the XO-1.0. See Latest version for details.
The next version of Balsa will work on most newer (2010) netbooks as well; but it will no longer support the OLPC XO-1.0. If interest develops in running Balsa on the next generation XO-1.5, we will look into this as well.
You can not use Balsa v0.5 SD card created for the OLPC XO in any other computer! Stay tuned for the new Balsa system which will run on many netbooks and laptop computers.
Balsa development focus has been on the XO thus far, for several reasons.
- The XO is the lowest-power computer (other than pdas and smartphones) currently in use, uses 2-8 watts of power. This was the original goal of Balsa.
- Program packages have not been developed yet for the XO’s native OS — Fedora Linux with the non-standard desktop manager, Sugar. Thus the XO can not currently be used with the language software programs needed for translation and literacy; Balsa-for-XO enables this.
- Other netbooks can run the language programs with either Windows or Linux systems installed, so the need for a customized installation is not so urgent.
However, a version of Balsa is in process that will run on most computers with an SDHC slot, even if the computer is not equipped to boot natively from SD card.
Stay tuned for more…