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The South Carolina Department of Education and the non-profit Palmetto Project have teamed up to get a laptop in the hands of every elementary school student in South Carolina. Inspired by the vision behind the OLPC Initiative, educators, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and government officials started working together in 2005 to see if they could make this happen.

The OLPC/SC hopes to distribute as many as 50,000 laptops this spring to eligible students. The effort is underwritten and managed by the Palmetto Project, whose mission is to put new and creative ideas to work in South Carolina. While low-performing school districts with limited resources are a special focus for the OLPC/SC, the group is adamant on one point: There are no free laptops. In fact, there are two requirements for children wishing to receive a laptop -- one is merely a token, the other puts the greater meaning of the laptop in perspective.

Even as a child, I knew that Pixie Sticks were just trouble. The paper tubes loaded with colorful yet mysteriously flavorless sugar weren't particularly tasty, and too many of them led to mom and dad either threatening to pull the car over or hinting ominously about what would happen if they had to tell me again. Parents today know that in addition to the traditional side effects, Pixie Sticks aren't terribly good for USB ports, either.

That's not the case with the other sort of Sugar. Sugar, the kid-friendly open source desktop that was featured first on the OLPC XO laptop is now available (in a beta release) as a liveUSB image. The Sugar on a Stick environment is powered by Fedora 11 and features familiar Sugar desktop applications and functions, as well as new educational and collaborative tools, such as the InfoSlicer online content editor, remixer, and delivery application.

On Wednesday, Amazon and the OLPC Project announced that the XO-1 laptop would be available for sale in the US as a Give One, Get One arrangement on November 17th. At that point, the OLPC said XO availability on Amazon storefronts in other countries was a possibility.

Today, it was announced that Amazon and the OLPC are opening the sales of XO laptops to 30 countries on Monday. This is the first time that these laptops have been offered for general sale outside of the United States and Canada.

PCWorld reports that the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Group has confirmed that Amazon will have XO laptops for sale on Monday, November 17th. The XO laptops at Amazon are sold in the same manner as they were initially at the OLPC site, with a $400 donation securing a laptop for the customer, and a laptop for a child in a developing country. This donation (or at least the portion used to purchase the laptop for the child) is tax deductible.

OLPC's vice president of software engineering, Jim Gettys, said that the XO laptops sold through Amazon will be Linux based (though some countries are opting for Windows versions), and that there is some talk of selling the XO through Amazon in other countries.

Last Thursday, the OLPC Special Interest Group (SIG) announced the availability of the Fedora Sugar Spin LiveCD. This release incorporates the Sugar Desktop Environment in to a Fedora liveCD.

It's an easy way to try out the Sugar environment and associated applications without touching your existing system.