On Monday the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative gave the “thumbs-up” to go ahead and start mass producing the XO laptop. The laptop being made is based on the Beta-4 (B4) design and is priced at $176 each, which the OLPC hopes to have down to the originally planned $100 by sometime next year.

The production starts on a path to create 3 million of the B4 XO laptops by October of this year which will be distributed to the governments of 15 countries to then be given out to the children who would otherwise not have the chance to purchase or use a computer. The participating countries so far include Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Greece, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Rwanda, Tunisia, the U.S. and Uruguay.

These B4 model laptops being produced by the OLPC are designed to withstand the rugged environmental conditions that they will encounter in many of the areas they are going to. They can be used in places with no electricity through alternate sources like solar panels or manually cranks to power them up and the display is specially designed so that it is viewable in direct sunlight conditions.

Companies such as AMD, Red Hat, Google and lately Intel are all contributors in some way to the success of the non-profit project kicked off by Nicholas Negroponte to bring the children of even the most remote of villages into the information age.