Chris Ball just dropped a bombshell on the IAEP listserv - he explained OLPC's software strategy for the XO-1.75 which should have you itching with excitement:

Fedora on XO-1.75 ARM

XO-1.75 software development is underway. Today we're announcing that we're planning on using Fedora as the base distribution for the XO-1.75. This wasn't an obvious decision -- ARM is not a release architecture in Fedora, and so we're committing to help out with that port.

Our reasons for choosing Fedora even though ARM work is needed were that we don't want to force our deployments to learn a new distribution and re-write any customizations they've written, we want to reuse the packaging work that's already been done in Fedora for OLPC and Sugar packages, and we want to continue our collaboration with the Fedora community who we're getting to know and work with well.

[If] anyone's interested in helping out with this or other Fedora ARM work, please check out the Fedora ARM page on the Fedora Wiki. We're also interested in hiring ARM and Fedora developers to help with this; if you're interested in learning more, please send an e-mail to jobs-engineering at laptop.org.

Multi-touch Sugar on XO-1.75

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 tablets based on its design), and we'll continue to do so. The first outcome from this work is Sayamindu Dasgupta's port of the Meego Virtual Keyboard³ to Sugar -- you can see a screencast of it in action here:

But before you think that OLPC has forgotten about the XO-1 or XO-1.5 in their rush towards the XO-1.75, here's a heartening update for all the existing XO deployments and G1G1 users:

XO-1 & XO-1.5 Software

OLPC release 10.1.2 will be available for both XO-1 and XO-1.5 at the same time, and will contain Sugar 0.84, GNOME 2.26 and Fedora 11. We think that offering this fully interoperable software stack between XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops will greatly aid deployments, and we're very thankful to everyone who has enabled us to be able to turn this XO-1 work into a supported release!