nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

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!

Rate It! (Average 0, 0 votes)

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

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.

Rate It! (Average 0, 0 votes)

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

We recently held a olpc / LTSP presentation in Vienna, which had the enormous turnout of 11 people. Though the turnout was pretty bad, it did give us the opportunity to be experimental and check the wonderful world of using sugar on various platforms via LTSP.

We hooked up 2 acers, a thin can (artec), a laptop acting as LTSP and ejabberd server, along with 2 traditional xos. Before going into the details of the experiment some explanation is due. LTSP stands for Linux Terminal Server Project, and refers to the use of a mainframe like infrastructure, where minimal systems without hardrives and little cpu and ram can be used as diskless terminals. The idea is that everything runs from the server, with the client netbooting the environment and using the little ram and cpu it has to load the kernel and connect its display session to the server.

Usually older computers (pentium 200hz+ with 64 MB ram) are re-used in this way, though there are various dedicated thin terminals that are mobile phone sized and are highly energy efficient. LTSP terminals usually have no moving parts, making them hard to break. Whereas the XO, and rightly so, has been marketed as the guerrilla
educational device for the 3rd world, it is a little tied in with a specific company and a specific set of hardware. Sugar on the other hand is not, and in my view the more hardware can run sugar natively and flawlessly, the closer we get to a solution that can really feed the masses. As the politics of OLPC grow and change, such as dropping
sugar support, or moving to windows (these are just speculations), Sugar's growth and deployment should not be affected. If anything gives sugar and Sugar Labs a firm grounding its its ability to run on multiple systems and scenarios. I am aware that Sugar Labs is in communication with various vendors and distributors, and it is only a matter of time before some interesting deals are struck.

In our presentation case, for a mobile server, we used a dual core 1.8ghz with 2 gigs of RAM. Setting up the server on the laptop was pretty straight forward, and involved installing LTSP on top of a base Ubuntu system, and then
adding ejabberd as well as Sugar sessions for all newly created users. One can choose other sessions of course, but our interest was to test collaboration on all the machines, in which case Sugar was our environment of choice, and the login session for all our users. Installing ejabberd on the ltsp server was the only requirement for sharing across all machines. I followed the instructions as layed out on the laptop.org wikipedia and nubae.com site. There are still some issues installing ejabberd, such as permissions of the /etc directory, but it has generally become much simpler to install for anyone. Without ejabberd the machines did see each other via xmpp-local, including seeing shared activities, but they tended to fall of the network neighborhood. With ejabberd the machines were visible continuously and were very responsive to connections.

For testing purposes we tried sharing chat across all the machines, which worked flawlessly. The applications in general seemed to load much faster than with the xo hardware, both on the thin can and the acer ones. It was nice to see that a dual core laptop with 2 gigs of ram was more than happy to serve 6 thin terminals at once. This makes
the perfect mobile school, with all the machinery fitting into one backpack!

The laptop server was set up to get wireless internet, and then hand out LTSP through the wired interface, using a gigabit switch as a connector. One of the things that still requires a lot of work, and perhaps this
is due to using Ubuntu, is getting all the activities to work. I tested various activities like puzzle slider and jigsaw puzzle, which just left the activity icon cursor flashing on the screen and eventually fell back to the main screen. Another problem was that turning off or restarting the session was nonreactive. Also many, of the items in the control panel either crashed sugar out completely (date/time) or didn't work. These problems have recently been turned into bug reports, so we hope by the next release of Ubuntu, the environment works as it should.

LTSP and sugar are a great combination and much wished for in schools in the developing and developed world. We will talk a little more about the advantages of LTSP, Sugar and scaling, as well as wireless LTSP and Fat clients in another article.

Rate It! (Average 0, 0 votes)

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5