Apparently, after the initial scepticism, the OLPC project is gaining momentum. The USD 100 laptop is said to be rolling out of the factories and will soon start being distributed in the participating countries. The laptop will run a customized Red Hat/Fedora linux distro and I’ve found some pointers regarding how to run the OLPC as an appliance inside virtualization software (like VMWare or QEMU). Further instructions at the OLPC wiki. OLPC images are here. Go give it a try.

(Then there’s also a Slashdot article about Microsoft Looking to Run Windows on OLPC. Don’t the poor children of the world suffer enough?)