Hi, I volunteered to contact the folks at MIT to offer them NetBSD for use on the $100 World Computer, since I'm an MIT alum.

Here's the response.

-Mike




---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2005 17:37:50 -0500
From: Jim Gettys <jg@freedesktop.org>
To: mac@wireless.com
Subject: OS Software for the $100 World Computer  (NetBSD)

Mike,

To begin with, a hearty welcome to NetBSD!

The machine is an open platform, for people to do as they will with, and
NetBSD is certainly more than welcome to play, as is everyone else. To
the extent possible, we'll make specifications available as soon as they
solidify.  In some cases, some components may not yet be in the market,
and you'll probably have to get NDA's to get the detailed specs (for
example, we may choose to use a new version of the AMD Geode, for which
specifications are not yet public).

To first order, you can get a good idea of the baseline (lower bound) of
the hardware at http://www.gettysfamily.org/wordpress/. More exact
details will be forthcoming as the machine design solidifies over the
next few months (modulo the issue mentioned in the paragraph above).

The #1 challenge for NetBSD is that, as far as I know, none of the BSD's
have an equivalent to the Linux jffs2 (journalling flash file system,
V2) file system found in Linux: the machine is flash based, and wear
leveling essential for general purpose use.  I recommend the BSD systems
pool effort here if they can; this lack leaves *BSD maybe 2 years behind
Linux on one really key technology, somewhat to my surprise (I only
discovered this last week).  Googling for "flash file system" on the BSD
portal was more than a bit disappointing.

#2: On the networking side, we expect to want/need/require mesh
networking; this derives on Linux from the good work FreeBSD has done,
as I understand it. The reason is we expect to drop bunches of systems
into places like jungles in the developing world, and do not expect that
there may be the expertise or any infrastructure: the systems should be
able to talk to each other and be useful "out of the box".

#3 And, of course, for a battery (and crank) powered machine, power
management is way up there too.

It is entirely possible we'll want to deploy on IPv6, given the scale of
the project and the fact it is going into the developing world.

Over the next month or two, I hope we get better web and project
infrastructure set up, but this should get you going in the right
directions without more fussing around, and without having to wait for
us to get that part of our act together.  This instant, we're focused
almost entirely on solidifying the design for the first machine, and
making sure the display will really work.

Feel free to forward this to the appropriate NetBSD mailing lists.

 			Best regards,
 				Jim Gettys
 				One Laptop Per Child