Photos: Can I get that $100 laptop in orange?

Orange. Vivid, ripe-for-the-picking orange. That's the latest color to enlist in Nicholas Negroponte's campaign to bring low-cost computing to schoolchildren and their families in developing nations. The secondary color joins lime green, powder blue and rain-slicker yellow (unveiled last month; click here for more images) in the palette of options for prototypes being touted by Negroponte's One Laptop per Child organization.

A working prototype of the $100 PC design gets a tryout on Tuesday at a One Laptop Per Child meeting that brought together task forces from the seven countries where the laptops will be launched.

The Linux-based design forgoes a hard drive, but will have four USB ports. Wireless broadband is expected to let several neighboring laptops form an ad hoc local network. The preliminary schedule calls for shipment-ready units by the end of 2006 or early 2007.