nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

One is constantly looking for the best working/creative/or playing environment when it comes to one's desktop. It sounds like there must be a fairly obvious answer to a seemingly ridiculous question, yet everywhere you look or listen, everyone's opinions, when they have one (that excludes the majority of people who use a computer for less time than 2 hours a day (my opinion obviously)) is a changing, mostly circular desktop environment. This sounds somewhat convoluted, so let me try and break this down a little.

Most of us, other than those lucky enough to have had parents who were either highly alternative, worked in the academic industry or perhaps even the government, grew up using one of about 5 systems:

# Commodore 64 ands its cousins like spectrum atari or msx
# Commodore Amiga or Atari ST (The step up from the previous line)
# Apple (mostly macintosh)
# Microsoft DOS and Windows
# IBM OS/2 (god knows whatever happened to that? Did MS buy them out?)

Of course, we have to remember that personal computing was considered something for those people unable to do real number crunching requirements, and usually didn't want or need to. That was left for the nerdy geeky scientists and to a pretty large part the telecommunications companies, who I guarantee saw the mobile revolution far ahead of its time, and to some extent are still seeing things ahead of their time, releasing technology today that they probably developed 5-10 years ago. And why not... in an age where human beings have been programmed to work in order to buy an object and ultimately equate that to happiness, gradually releasing new products makes sense. More sense than releasing the technology and what they call their intellectual property  just after being invented and created, which is surely what the scientist or creative person in charge would want, but can't due to stupid outdated and frankly cannibalistic intellectual property laws which would get them fired for even talking to their cat about it.

Think I'm talking hogwash, well, lets look at a scenario that is actually forcing certain companies to release products ahead of the times they usually would. As we are talking about computing we can pick either any BSD derivative or Linux kernel with a decent visual platform (be it Gnome, E17, KDE, XFCE or even LXDE) Now... we have 2 different completely free, in every sense of the word, operating systems running a stunning variety of highly evolved desktops, all also free in every sense of the word.

What's happening? Well, the so called fortune 10, high flyers, the guys with talking houses who still dominate by massive numbers due to the slow adoption of new computer systems, the fact that not everyone spends the majority of their day in front of a computer, and finally the massive and aggressive marketing campaigns these 2 companies throw at us like candy and coca cola.

But even with all that strength, the money, and probably seriously committed people, its clear to those of us living in the digital age and who understand the concept of open source, GPL, and free software, there isn't even a battle here to be won. Those 1000s of people working daily on the Linux kernel, or hundreds working on each of those open source projects mentioned above don't do it for financial gain, or for any kind of monetary aspiration. They simply do it because at that precise moment in time, they notice something needs to be created, fixed, tweaked, documented, or the hundreds of other micromanaging events that happen in open source projects. No one has told them they have to do it, nor how they have to do it, they simply get to a point where they can't resist scratching a so called digital itch, and go ahead and go forth, perhaps checked by a peer here and another interested peer there, but due to such an efficient self checking system it always just works out, eventually.

And from the outside this whole open source thing, Linux thing, or whatever other name is given to the information revolution, seems like a chaotic mess, uncoordinated, unmanaged, spread far and wide without any one person really knowing what the whole picture is.

But the truth and beauty of it is, because of this unstructured completely anarchistic (because its not even democratic, I can think of at least 5 benevolent dictators for life) system there will never be anything but the voice of the people that pushes the direction the information revolution takes. And if that doesn't fill you with joy then I suppose few things will.

Anyway, having digressed quite a bit, but I think in a necessary direction. these days more than ever we take the time to sit and think... hmmmm... what operating system should I install for the next X number of months or even weeks, and you might start thinking as many people of my generation think, what would best for our parents and grandparents or our kids. And the truth is, the choices are just amazing... Should I get an One laptop Per child XO for my nephew, while feeling good about myself for giving another individual on this planet the chance to learn. Should I buy a dual tablet/laptop  made by Asus running ubuntu Linux for my Mom, and should I install pcBSD on the ageing computer (mainly used for the Internet) in my Dad's study room. Unfortunately the only person I haven't been able to convince is my 91 year old grandfather, but understandably, perhaps this is just too way out there for him, though I would give anything for him to feel the joy of using this tool most of us take o so for granted.

And my brother is in the Mac OSX phase, one I went through, I cannot lie, but freedom is far more important than an admittedly luxurious looking desktop, since the company in question bought itself a significant number of years by moving to a UNIX based system, possibly being the next dominant player, but I think the speed with which open source is breaking down digital walls will surely hit them to, perhaps not so hard since they've sneakily (in my mind) marketed themselves as pro-open source, which they are absolutely not... In that respect, and just looking at the amount of limitations they've stuck in the iphone and ipad on purpose makes me not only distrust them but consider them evil. At least the other big giant shows its true colours and doesn't hide behind plain sneakers, a black polo and 501 Levis (hello everybody, I'm the honest common man) Still, I run pinguyos in a virtualised second window and really don't notice much of a difference between that and OSX, other than the cost.

But getting back to the reason for this article in the first place, it was Linux, BSD, GNOME, and KDE which pushed the information revolution far faster than it would have gone did they not exist. It was due to the OLPC XO that the information revolution was pushed again faster making smaller and cheaper and even sturdier laptops. And it was due to yet another open source player, perhaps the biggest of them all, at least for now that mobile telephony is being taken in directions we can only dream about. I'm obviously talking of Android and the now millions of android apps and Android programmers. (I'm one of them BTW, hint hint)

So whats the prediction for the future? well its hard to say, because trends change, wallets get thinner or thicker, people are certainly manipulated in ways we still don't quite understand, watching TV, films, or playing Video Games. But that won't stop any time soon since those are the biggest money makers on the planet and unfortunately our own pride, greed and envy is our worst enemy, embedded in the very objects we desire and acquire ever more abundantly.

Can the information revolution still save us from this? Will open source, and its yet to be contested armour, GPL open the hearts and minds of people everywhere and unite us, rather than divide us....

aye... there lies the rub. So next time you are looking for your brand spanking new OS and desktop... give a couple of names you haven't heard of a try. Distrowatch.com is always a great starting point. My own recommendations in order of preference are currently ( and this always changes, I guess for everyone ):

# PinguyOS
# Strawberry Linux
# Mint
# Ubuntu / Fedora or even Fuduntu (not kidding, it exists and strives to be a combination of the best of both worlds.)
# PCBSD
# Sugar ---- extremely fun desktop environment that kids will love, and parents will enjoy. Built at Massachusetts Institute of Technology after decades of research into how humans and especially children use the computer. Its truly an OS that is years ahead of its competition, focusing on things like collaborative learning, journal based memory and intuitive management of the desktop. In fact, every program on the system can be changed right there on the fly, encouraging kids to tinker and look under the hood, rather than stay away and look from a distance with expected admiration at the expensive laptop Daddy bought at PC World with extra worthless guarantees, antimalware, antivirus, antiphishig, antihacking, antichildren, etc etc etc.

If you're serious and want industry standard telephone support, you have 3 options, Debian, Redhat Enterprise, and Novell SuSe Enterprise. Debian doesn't really have official telephone based support, though many companies support them anyway because of the large user base in the server Arena [basically, its super super stable], whereas Redhat and SuSe have proper industry standard contracts with up to 24/7 support, but it ain't cheap. Ubuntu is desperaately trying to get a foothold in that market, but either they've had bad marketing executives or haven't really tried hard enough. because their product exceeds both SuSe and Redhat in many ways. The likely explanation is that Ubuntu is still a young player, compared to Redhat and Suse, who have been around for at least 10 years longer. But one can argue that Ubuntu is simply Debian with some extras. Anyhow, its a political war which makes little sense, since they are all on the same open source GPL protected side. But everyone needs to eat I guess so perhaps we can write it off as a little bit of healthy, though somewhat silly competition.

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I'ts certainly been a while since I posted anything, but I figured, if u have nothing worthwhile posting, don't. Well here is something worthwhile I think:

Edu Jam

The idea here is to represent the latest advancements in techology using not the XO laptops, Sugar on a Stick, LTS Sugar, or Sugar , the operating system running on multiple environments and embedded devices. Right now it stands head to head with both Android and iOS, but the big difference is that sugar was never meant to be or designed as a toy to be played with, so that later on kids might migrate to the extremely popular MS Office or even Oracle openoffice.org, becoming another one of the zombies running their lives uncreativealy through the rat race.

In any case, it seems that nature is taking things into its own hands. Both players seem to have come to the market just a little late. Apple slightly got it with its online ability to edit documents of any kind, thoughb with severe restrictions and regulations, and Google went straght for the juggular vein, allowing any user to use its office suite for free, completely compatible with previous incantations of their competitors. They got what the others just didn't appreciate or understand... I'm talking about the cloud baby, Yes... it may seem a stupid misnomer... but its very real in business terms, and Google knows it. It is really just an extension of what already was, web 2.0, web 3.0, and so on.

But lets break it down a bit. We now have smartphones, tablets, iphones, ipods, apples's flopped TV, gmail, youtube, itunes, facebook, twitter, and google's 2 crown jewels, search and Android.

Had you asked me 2 years ago, I would have said we live in boring times, but the blatant backstabing that seems to have become common place on wallstreeet and even Silicon Valley can really only mean one thing. With the lack of a trusting society, having been taught, be it on the streets of major cities, or prep schools where manners and all that crap was spoonfed to the youngsters that now walk down the halls of our ivy leauge colleges, only to be leading hthe country in a couple of years, becoming celebrities that even us skeptics thought impossible.

Yes, those individuals who ran goldman sachs into the ground, Lehmman brothers, bankrupt 2 days before anyone took notice. And hey.... lets not forget whole countries going bankrupt because of our notion that people are inhrently NOT greedy (newsflash, apart from a very very small minority... they absolutelyt are)... I speak of Iceland, who lost 10 times its GDP, Portugal, whose figures I forget but aren't really important. Today, even the EU cannot find ways to REGULATE its economy again. For more information on that, watch the documentary narrated by Matt Damon, "Inside Job", it will certainly make you think carefully about where you next invest your money :-)

So Where do we go from here?

Ok, so I started a little rough right? But if I stood up like all the ex presidents adn even our new golden boy, an simply said.... its business as ususal, that we had a couple of problems in the middle east, but that all in all the economy was geting better., but that due to certain past events he was not able to make any of his promises true. Using the same excuse ever predecessor used before him... that he'd been left with a situation caused by previous presidents.... So... we stand at a breaking point.

Our World leader cannot help to increase educational spending. My answer to that is something that stuck with me for months and haunted me:

Deep in a Spanish village , a kid came to, he knew I was a teacher, implementing a large scale educational project based on Linux. He said.... how come my 2 borthers of 17 are forced to go to military service, when they could be advancing their knoweldge, things they could use for the future, by using these academic systems you are putting in. I felt silent, becuase I had no reasonable explantaion to give the young boy.

So, I ask you, with utmost humility, could u find it in your heart to help a child obtain a laptop for under 200 dollars. Or at least donate so that vounteers like me and others at Edu Jam can try and give everyone an equal possibility at an equal education? We.... we merry few, we take care of the rest, which includes but is certainly not limited to:

• Working 12-18 hour days to update the XO computers and csutomise the laptops so that what children learn is both culturally and academcally correct.
• Create social Networking portals whereby children can publicise their unique takes on the current state of the planet, either using tools like wordpress, wikipedia, or habari
• Work with more advanced tools (sometimes called content managment systems) like Joomla and Drupal, though to be honest, they really are all the same and do the same things, perhaps slightly diffferently, but the important thing is not to get confused by the mirirad of terms. They basically all can make u a journalist or even a you tube VJ.

I'm sure I've forgotten many things, but I have been priveledged enough to be a teacher for almost 10 years, and quite an efficient science engineer for almost 15.

My main point here is is that there is no one stopping you from learning how to code in Python, Django, Photohsop, Gimp, Inkscape, Scibus, Blender 3D. Its just about picking your poison, or perhaps a couple of them.

The open source community has made it easy for us, now its time to give something BACK!

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Starting the session was a little chaotic, as this was the first time we've tried a group collaborative session, and there were no specific goals we had in mind. The idea was generally to see how collaboration worked in a mixed environment (0.82, 0.84, different distros, different network connections, etc)

The good news is, that for the most part, getting connected worked, and once in a collaborative session response times were quite good. This means that the underlying sharing mechanism works, it just doesn't respond very quickly. The bad news is that the server load is much worse than originally thought and expected.

From our initial experiences, it was clear that the sugar-presence framework had some huge problems in terms of visually representing who was connected, which activities were being shared, and who was sharing these activities. It was not clear where the major bottleneck was in terms of reaction and response, but suspicions lie at the ejabberd end of things. In future sessions we will have to restrict connections and individual details to the point that we can make proper measurements, and thereby find out what is going wrong, and at what point it is going wrong. Suspicions are that the jabber server in question (jabber.sugarlabs.org) didn't have gadget enabled, and was therefore broadcasting the list of all registered users continously, which would burden the server severely. The lag and server load also affected the visual clustering of users around specific activities

Though reaction times were very slow, the underlying sharing framework clearly works very well. Once users were connected, their connections were stable, and within specific activites, reaction times were fast and reliable. We were able to test a fair set of activities, some of which had better implementation of collaboration than others, and some of which didn't seem to have collaboration enabled at all.

We started off with the chat activity, which took a good 10 minutes before people started being able to connect to the initial shared session. Once connected, reaction times were pretty decent, and the frame showed all the connected users. There was a large variance between the shared buddies shown. Some users reported seeing 5 buddies, some 3, some 7, and some even saw buddies with a ??? as their handle. The screenshot below shows how it looked:

Speak was another interesting activity to share, as it allowed multiple people to join a session where the computer speaks out what's typed in the accent of the user's choosing. The choice of accent is used for the proper pronounciation in different languages normally, though there was much fun to be had speaking English words in the various accents. Below is a screen shot:

Reaction times were again very good once users had joined the activity. Buddies connected was highly variable from user to user again, and though clustering around activites did take for ever, it did eventually start to happen, as can be seen from the screenshot below:

Etoys was a surprisingly good collaborator. Once users were connected they were able to create various items, even animated and custom coded, and then send them through to the connected buddies. We just scratched the surface of this activity, and it was clear that some really interesting things are possible with collaborative etoys:

Other activities that worked quite well were Cartoon builder, connect, Maze, Colors, and Tam Tam. We were unable to get write or paint to collaborate, and are unsure as to why. Talking with the authors of these programs seems appropriate, though it has been verified that write, at least, does collaborate. Below is a screenshot of what it looked like when multiple activites were being shared:

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Massive strides were made in community integration and community driven projects which will be considered or worked on in the coming months for the next release of Sugar, referred at this time as 0.86, and to be officially released in August of this year, following a 6 month release cycle of Gnome and many other open source projects.

Some of the more interesting changes that are being considered are a move away from matchbox to metacity, the well known and supported backend window manager used by Gnome. This should in theory allow for much greater integration into Gnome itself of individual sugar activities, as well as the launching of sugar in Gnome, and even speed improvements. This move is possible because the XO 1.5 will have more memory and better cpu speeds, as well as a move away from sugar being agnostic to that hardware. Sugar on a Stick was the big focus, which is now working quite well, but still not perfect.

A desire for a revival of the help application was shown and that will become one of the core fructose activities, though likely it will be totally updated and perhaps even interactive. Browse will be upgraded to have tabbed browsing, and have better support for integrated flash/gnash, pdf support and youtube casts. A demo was shown of a screencast of the usage of an activity coded at the camp, using turtle art. These quick advances show that it is not only possible to strengthen the Sugar Core and its activities, but also that one day soon we will have a ubiquitous sugar solution that will run on all distributions and platforms and most hardware.

The mention of fundraising was raised and there is a target in place of aquiring 100,000 euros within the next release cycle which will be used primarily in marketing and gathering core sugar people to the places they need face to face talks like the one provided in Paris.

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