The net result is a machine in which many modes of use can consume as little as a half watt of power (e.g. reading a book, while forwarding packets in the mesh network), yet be able to run most of today's software. This contrasts with other systems, using 10x the power and costing 4-10x as much.

What has a Linux platform allowed you to offer that closed proprietary systems can't?

Computing is a large part of today's world: interested children should be able to see how computers work, from the first instruction they execute on power-on: they can do so on this system. The BIOS (LinuxBIOS), boot loader (Open Firmware), Linux, and applications and environment can all be studied and understood.

We're even including a "view source" key on the keyboard. And the power management work required to support rapid suspend/resume from RAM, greatly reducing our energy use, requires work in the BIOS, the operating system, and applications. In a proprietary system, many or all of these components are closed to you, and these kinds of power management would not be feasible.

What is the most challenging aspect of this project?