The OLPC tech team recently flew out to Quanta in Taiwan to bring up the first handful of test boards for the next generation XO laptop, known as the XO-1.5. The new laptop is basically a refresh to solve the difficulties that occur when you continue to try and source 2-year-old technologies in bulk, but will result in core improvements at the same time.

The Geode processor from the XO-1 has been end-of-lifed; the new laptop uses a VIA C7 CPU with the brand-new VX855 chipset. The flash storage and RAM have been quadrupled, providing 4GB and 1GB respectively.

I’m now joining the efforts for a few weeks, helping out on the software. We’re aiming to make a new “deployment quality” software release, including the newer version of Sugar and a generally more-up-to-date system based on Fedora 11. I received my A-test board today, it is already booting into Sugar and is quite functional.