In yesterday's OLPC community news, Walter Bender confirmed that production of the first OLPC units has begun with the first 10 units having been hand assembled this week. A further 900 are due to be built in next week's B1 production run. Over to Walter:
[...] The team hand-assembled the first 10 units to evaluate the system's many custom components, to perform systems-integration testing, and to ensure that the production process is solid, all in preparation for next week's B1-Test build. Quanta will assemble 900 OLPC machines that will be used for destructive testing and distribution to our development partners. Our vision is a step closer to becoming a reality.
The XO key on the test board
As you can see, these new keyboards closely resemble the prototypes that were test driven by Chrisopher Blizzard in September, although, interestingly, the "XO" logo - or "skull and crossbone" key has disappeared. The "go to home page" function that was mapped to it is still present, having migrated to F3, but the XO logo is no where to be seen. This is rather interesting given the continuing confusion over the laptop's name.
HALT! Ain't no "XO key" here
On a day where we found that the XO key has been consigned to the scrap heap, John Palmieri - a Redhat developer seconded to the OLPC team - goes on to say on his blog that "XO" is a codename (a result of rotating the logo through 90 degrees).
Clearly, none of these facts rule out the possibility that the machine may ultimately be called the XO - but won't someone at OLPC please put us out of our misery and officially name the darn thing?
I think everyone should relax and stop worrying about the "name" that the laptop will be christened with...it will be christened, you can count on that. We should all be focusing on the efforts being made to get the laptops operational -and I must admit, a lot of work has been done and is being done to reach all remainig milestones.
In the end, when its ready for launch/deployment/takeoff -whatever we want to call it, we can all have a big, jolly, naming ceremony (Re: name change of Airbus "A3XX" to "A380", Boeing "7E7" to "787"). We will all get there. Cheers.