Hugo Chavez Shopping: A Million Classmate Laptops for Venezuela
As the International Herald Tribune reports in an Associated Press news article, Venezuela has ordered a million Magellan laptops that are based on Intel's Classmate PC design.
Whether the blue and white laptops are intended only for Venezuelan children in the mission to "connect children to a promising future" is not yet certain. Venezuela maintains aid agreements with many other countries. The technical specifications for the laptop are on Intel's Classmate website.
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez ordered the laptops in a bilateral deal with Portugal valued at more than $3 billion that also included delivering a million barrels of oil to Portugal. The exact cost to consumers of the laptop is not known, but is said to be a few hundred dollars each. Earlier the Portuguese government had provided 500,000 Classmate PCs to the country's school children through an education initiative. Thanks to government subsidies a PC cost a mere 50 Euro; the normal street price would be about 285 Euro, which is $412.
The laptops are manufactured in Portugal; whether they will be installed with Windows XP or Linux is yet to be determined. Chavez may lean toward Linux due to his U.S. relations, but in Portugal it will be the parents of school children who decide which platform to install. In the case of Linux, a commercial Portuguese distribution called Caixa Mágica (Magic Box) would be the choice.
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Dash to Panel Maintainer Quits
Charles Gagnon has stepped away as maintainer of the popular Dash to Panel Gnome extension.
-
CIQ Releases Security-Hardened Version of Rocky Linux
If you're looking for an enterprise-grade Linux distribution that is hardened for business use, there's a new version of Rocky Linux that's sure to make you and your company happy.
-
Gnome’s Dash to Panel Extension Gets a Massive Update
If you're a fan of the Gnome Dash to Panel extension, you'll be thrilled to hear that a new version has been released with a dock mode.
-
Blender App Makes it to the Big Screen
The animated film "Flow" won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards held on March 2, 2025 and Blender was a part of it.
-
Linux Mint Retools the Cinnamon App Launcher
The developers of Linux Mint are working on an improved Cinnamon App Launcher with a better, more accessible UI.
-
New Linux Tool for Security Issues
Seal Security is launching a new solution to automate fixing Linux vulnerabilities.
-
Ubuntu 25.04 Coming Soon
Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) has been given an April release date with many notable updates.
-
Gnome Developers Consider Dropping RPM Support
In a move that might shock a lot of users, the Gnome development team has proposed the idea of going straight up Flatpak.
-
openSUSE Tumbleweed Ditches AppArmor for SELinux
If you're an openSUSE Tumbleweed user, you can expect a major change to the distribution.
-
Plasma 6.3 Now Available
Plasma desktop v6.3 has a couple of pretty nifty tricks up its sleeve.