You've heard about the “One Laptop Per Child” program, didn't you? It was meant to provide underdeveloped countries with cheap, reliable and portable computing solutions in order for unprivileged kids to catch a glimpse of what computers and the modern world can achieve together.

As it is more than obvious that the netbook concept was directly derived from the OLPC design, why not copy even more of the project? As for example, the slogan. Gdium, developers of a proprietary netbook solution, have come up with the “One Laptop Per Hacker” concept. The goal of the program is to help users become an integral part of the netbook OS development and allow the company to build a secure mobile and portable platform.

The program promises to provide every developer wiling to contribute to the development of the netbook platform a free pre-release version of the Gdium netbook and a G-Key. So fine, you get a free netbook, but what's with the G-Key?

Well, you have to know a little bit about what the Gdium team is actually developing and why they haven't yet finalized their platform, especially considering that there are lots of netbooks available today. The company is working on creating a truly portable platform (note, I mentioned “portable”, not “mobile”) which users will be able to run from a special portable USB drive. So, it's like Linux on a stick.

The special distribution is a derivate of Mandriva Linux and the G-Key is the host of the OS. The idea is to allow users to run the OS directly from they G-Key on their Gdium netbook, but at the same time, provide them with the ability to insert the stick in any other computer as it was their own personal environment. Interesting how this concept is being promoted on a portable netbook platform. Seems a little strange if you analyze it. I mean netbooks are natively portable, so why create a portable OS for a netbook? This kind of solution is a lot more appealing for desktop operating systems. But hey, I love my Windows and I'm not willing to trade it for any Linux distribution.


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