Four countries -- Brazil, Thailand, Argentina and Nigeria -- have already committed to buying and distributing 1 million of the PCs next year, and three others -- China, India and Egypt -- are close, Negroponte said.

Negroponte hopes to get final commitments by September, delivering prototypes to developers in the third quarter and to educators in the fourth quarter. The target shipment date is sometime in the second quarter of next year.

Red Hat, which joined the OLPC in January, is leading an effort to shrink its Fedora Core version of Linux to run on the laptops.

Red Hat has been able to cut down Fedora, which normally requires 1.3GB to install, to about 250MB, engineering manager Chris Blizzard said earlier this week.

It is aiming to deliver an even skinnier version of Fedora, bundled with essential applications such as e-mail, the Gecko Web browser, document-creation software and a VoIP application, that requires just 130MB of flash memory storage, leaving more than 350MB available for children to store documents, photos and more.