'$100 Laptop' Goes On Sale In Europe On Nov. 17

November 15, 2008 1:47 p.m. EST

London, UK (AHN) - Starting Monday, the people in 27 European nations will be able to purchase their own XO laptop, an initiative to increase donation of laptops to school children in developing nations.

The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organization will launch "Give a Laptop, Get a Laptop" scheme on European Amazon online outlets for the people to buy either a distinctive green or white XO laptop at a price of 268 pounds ($398).

OLPC has sold several machines in the U.S. with an initial idea to create a small, powerful laptop for school children that would cost less than $100, but the final price of the machine was $188. So far the group has only sold around 600,000 machines.

Following its launch in the U.S. in November and December of last year, the organization is hoping to sell more than 190,000 machines through the scheme and a deal with Amazon.com.

"This time last year, we did not yet know how our young project would fare under the demands and needs of large deployments," the OLPC said in a statement.

It added, "Today there are hundreds of thousands of children using their XOs every day, including over a quarter of all young students in Uruguay. Roughly twenty thousand students from Uruguay alone visit our wiki each week."

According to the information on the organization's website, most of the laptops sold are being used by children in Peru, Mongolia, Rwanda, Haiti, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia and Iraq.

The laptops to be released in the EU region along with Switzerland, Russia and Turkey will run the latest release of Sugar on a Linux-based Fedora Core operating system, but will not dual-boot Windows and Linux, the OLPC said.