The laptop is also likely to sport a low-power 500-MHz processor, 128MB of DRAM, a wireless broadband chip, a two-mode display that will alternate between a color mode suitable for watching DVDs and a black-and-white reflective one that will boost resolution three times and be viewable under sunlight. Finally, the laptop will be powered by a battery and a wind-up electrical generator -- an effort to overcome the primitive infrastructure of the developing nations in which the laptops are expected to be used.

Red Hat is building an emulator of the laptop to distribute to developers in lieu of actual prototypes. The project itself will be managed as a typical open-source software development project by Red Hat and the official maintainers of the Linux OS kernel, Kernel.org, Evans said. 'There are challenges in nailing down the technology, but this is not-atom-splitting stuff,' he said.

Red Hat joins five other corporate members of the nonprofit OLPC, including Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which will supply processors, and Nortel Networks Inc., which will supply wireless technology, as well as three companies whose roles are less well defined: Google Inc., media conglomerate News Corp. and BrightStar Corp., a Miami-based cell phone distributor with international experience.

The OLPC has raised $20 million and is close to a final commitment of $700 million from seven nations -- Thailand, Egypt, Nigeria, India, China, Brazil and Argentina -- to buy 7 million laptops, Nicholas Negroponte, the OLPC's co-founder, said Monday in The New York Times.

In that Times article, Microsoft Corp. questioned the viability of the $100 laptop, which will be made by Taiwan's Quanta Computer Inc., one of the largest OEM notebook makers in the world. Microsoft, which talked with the OLPC about supplying Windows for the project, has demonstrated a specially configured cell phone connected to a TV and a keyboard that it says is a better alternative.