nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

Hi folks,
A lot of my time has been taken up lately by 2 external projects that are quite neat, and could use volunteers. One is the creation of a python based generic lesson plan creator. Its actually more simple than that, its basically an image a teacher loads up, places some points on, and then labels. He can then pass that on to the kids so they can fill in the labels collaboratively (like in those TV quiz shows when questions get passed from one user to another and they can ask for some letters which takes away some points.) Or the teacher can simply print these out and let the kids fill out the answers by hand (still working on the print/pdf module) You can see pyclic advances here:

http://www.launchpad.net/pyclic or here
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/pyclic

The other thing I've been working on is a very complete Moodle that should contain courses about everything related to education and Linux. One of the latest things I did was add courses on how to create the perfect Ubuntu and Opensuse desktops, and a database of linux commands and their usage (lots of loving is needed for this project, so please email me if you want to get involved....) It doesnt take long to make a course and there is even how to copy courses from other sources into Li-f-e there:

http://www.linux-for-education.org/course/view.php?id=69

and a course on why to use moodle here:

http://www.linux-for-education.org/course/view.php?id=9

enjoy

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It turns out, even though its not advertised anywhere, the Chrome browser, based on Chromium, Google's great open source browser project, is available for download. It has been available for windows for a while now and work on Linux just fine via crossover or Wine.

Although I had to link a couple of libraries to get it working on my openSUSE machine, it was not a lot of work, and I have to say my first impressions of it are very good. It is a lot faster than Mozilla in both starting up and then the rendering of pages. It seemed to be about 2 to 3 times faster and tracking its CPU and memory usage showed it was less resource hungry than Firefox too. It is of course lacking a lot of features including plugin support (think flash), printing, gears support, etc.

The most noticeable feature was the visual cache u have of sites you visit most often. This creates a kind of dynamic favorite bookmarks page, which seems vey useful (to me at least.) It seems they are building various snapshots a day, making it a project that is clearly very active. If you'd like to get it running on openSUSE, follow these instructions once you've downloaded the file chromium.zip from the latest snapshot directory: ( http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/ )

cd /home/_user_

wget http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-linux/_latest-snapshot_/chrome-linux.zip

Make sure you replace _latest-snapshot_ with the latest snapshot number from the page, and _user_ with your home directory

unzip chrome-linux.zip
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libnss3.so /usr/lib/libnss3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so /usr/lib/libnssutil3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libsmime3.so /usr/lib/libsmime3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libssl3.so /usr/lib/libssl3.so.1d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplds4.so /usr/lib/libplds4.so.0d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplc4.so /usr/lib/libplc4.so.0d
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libnspr4.so /usr/lib/libnspr4.so.0d

You should now be able to run chrome via command line or by clicking on the binary. If you are on Ubuntu, there is a PPA where u can download the latest version: https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

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This is a recent netbook release, which is a clone of the HP mini note 1000, but seems to be available overseas only. Compared to the Eeepc and Acer, it wins great points in terms of style. If an iphone and a macbook had a baby, this is what it would look like. With a full sized, comfortable keyboard, and nicely responsive mouse, the look and feel make it the nicest netbook I've had the pleasure of using. I've heard some people complain that the casing may not be as sturdy as the Acer and Asus, but I have not seen any issues yet. Perhaps a few years on, there might indeed be issues with the thinness at some places on the case, but I'll give up a little sturdiness for the pleasure of looking at this beauty and day of the week.

Though like other netbooks, the mouse buttons are on the sides, this seems to work allright with this model, and I'm not sure why, though maybe its because they are plenty big. The speakers are in a grill that fits along the bottom, where the keyboard and screen meet. The speakers won't win any awards, but not only do they look good, they sound is great too.

In terms of performance, it is quite similar to other Atom powered netbooks, with 1 gigabyte of ram, being more than sufficient to run Ubuntu or Windows XP. Ubuntu Intrepid ran out of the box, and hummed along nicely, with about 4 hours of battery life. The webcam worked out of the box too, which was a nice surprise as this wasn't the case with the Acer or Eee PC. This model seems to be about 100 € cheaper than the HP which will release next month here in Europe and the UK, but it seems it will just be a matter of branding, as the specs seem to be identical. Perhaps the main difference will be the size of the hard drive, which at 60 gigabytes is a little on the small side, but keeping discipline by putting video and music files on external drives seems to be a good idea anyway, so I don't see that as much of a problem. The HP mini note will probably have a 180 gigabyte drive, and 3 usb connections as opposed to 2 (one is disabled on the compaq mini.)

Going quickly back to running on ubuntu there were no problems with sound drivers, wifi drivers, or keypad and touchpad. It just all seemed to work out of the box. The screen at 10.2 inches is nicely widescreen and the perfect size for both work and play (watching movies, listening to music)

I'd definitely recommend this for anyone looking to use a netbook with Linux.

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Wacom tablets have become the staple food product of any half decent designer or design house. For illustration they are second to non, and work well with both vector based and bitmap based software. For years, the wacom tablet was considered the tool of the Mac designer, and then started becoming more widely available on the PC market. Finally, in recent years it has become both installable and quite usable in the Linux world, with programs like Gimp and Inkscape.

Something happened though, in between Hardy and Intrepid, which made the whole process much easier, but also more prone to not working properly This guide should attempt to make it easy to install the tablet without trying anything fancy. It still requires manual steps and playing with the command line, but most people will have realized that that's just the way of the world with Linux sometimes. Finally I am also going to attempt to connect it to a olpc XO laptop, which should not be much more complicated than connecting to a regular laptop, though I'll leave that excercise for another day. I am talking about the Wacom Cintiq tablets here by the way, you know, the kind that has a LCD screen that you draw on, perfect for illustrating cartoons of faces and the like. And to be specific the instructions here are for the 12 " model with usb connectors to the computer.

If you are using Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10, there is a bug that will cause freezes in the tablet, so download these community packages, instead of the ones from the repos, by putting their addresses in your browser:

http://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wacom?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=xserver-xorg-input-wacom_0.8.1.6-1ubuntu2_i386.deb

http://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wacom?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=wacom-tools_0.8.1.6-1ubuntu2_i386.deb

To make sure Hal doesn't automatically pick up your wacom cintiq tablet, remove the non working (at least for cintiqs) policy file:

sudo rm /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-wacom.fdi

Next we put in the relevant details in our xorg.conf including disabling hal hot-plugging (which does more harm than good for the cintiq while its being used.):

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option "AutoAddDevices" "False"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver        "wacom"
  Identifier    "stylus"
  Option        "Device"       "/dev/input/wacom" # USB ONLY?
  Option        "Type"          "stylus"
  Option        "USB"           "on"               # USB ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver        "wacom"
  Identifier    "eraser"
  Option        "Device"       "/dev/input/wacom" # USB ONLY?
  Option        "Type"          "eraser"
  Option        "USB"           "on"               # USB ONLY
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver        "wacom"
  Identifier    "pad"
  Option        "Device"       "/dev/input/wacom"    # USB ONLY
  Option        "Type"          "pad"
  Option        "USB"           "on"                  # USB ONLY
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
  Identifier       "Default Layout"
  Screen          "Default Screen"
  InputDevice   "stylus"   "SendCoreEvents"
  InputDevice   "eraser"  "SendCoreEvents"
  InputDevice   "pad"                      # For Intuos3/CintiqV5/Graphire4/Bamboo tablets
EndSection

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