OLPC News covers the One Laptop per Child project, including the XO laptop's hardware, software, deployments, and politics.
HN links it for XO laptop history, such as the dual-mode display, the early focus on the Global South, and Negroponte's deal with Microsoft over Windows XP.
There's been various articles over the years discussing their strategy. They were targeting the third world market with customized distributions for inexpensive educational computers, and focusing on making the installer easy to use.
http://www.olpcnews.com/software/operating_system/mandriva_classmate_linux.html
> Mandriva, a France-based Linux distributor, spent eight months customizing its operating system for the Classmate, and adapting education applications specially developed for Intel's World Ahead program. In addition, these Linux-based Classmates will be produced in Brazil, part of Intel's local laptop assembly manufacturing plan, for delivery to Brazil, Mexico, India, and other assorted developing countries.
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Nigeria-Puts-Mandriva-Back-on-Classmate-PCs
> At least 11,000 Classmate PCs ordered by Nigeria will run Mandriva Linux, and not Windows, according to a government spokesperson. ... Mandriva will be deployed on at least 11,000 PCs destined for the Nigeria Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF), a government organization.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122332198757908625 (paywall)
http://my.ewb.ca/posts/13/46149
https://handyfloss.wordpress.com/2007/11/06/my-opinion-on-mandriva-vs-microsoft/
(for non-SWJ subscribers, these two summarizes some of the WSJ article's points.)
The statistics I've seen (on California[1]) suggest that homeless folks are generally locals, not migrants? But I agree that just providing some usb ports on public transit (likely also in stations or at stops) would be a low-cost/high-benefit approach. For human-powered approaches, I will say that old OLPC hand crank was a good design, since it clamped to a table or railing, which allowed for clever 'hacks' like hoisting a bucket or water bottle and letting the weight coming down turn the shaft [2]. Still less practical than just plugging in, to be fair.
1: https://californiahealthline.org/news/article/california-homelessness-is-homegrown-university-of-california-research/
2: http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/power_supply/two_awesome_examples_of_repurposed_olpc_hand_cranks.html
Thats one of the really interesting things about the OLPC - most of the programs are written in Python, and it has a 'source' button on the keyboard, so users can view and modify stuff [http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/keyboard/children_view_source.html]
I had that same experience with HTML, I'm sure if I could've viewed source on a load of decent Python programs I would've gone nuts for it as a kid. A hell of an improvement to feeding a book full of BASIC into a C64. If the rest goes to plan, there'll be a lot of handy hackers around in a few years.
OLPC's Give 1 Get 1 program actually cost each donor US$400, of which $200 paid for a donated laptop and $200 paid for a laptop for the donor. I don't know whether they ever eventually got the price close to $100.
I know this because I own an OLPC XO-1 that I acquired through the G1G1 program. See also http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/usa/olpc_xo_laptop_sale.html
They initially targeted governments in the Global South and excluded North America, Europe, and other high-income countries (see http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/education/childrens_machine_xo_usa_school.html for a summary of their thinking early on). This did shift over time, though.
The OLPC had a dual-mode display that worked great for reading both indoors and out. For some reason nobody has since picked up on this idea.
http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/screen/olpc_xo_resolution_display.html