One Laptop Per Child Project -- we have an early sample board!

One Laptop Per Child Project -- we have an early sample board!

deur Martín Langhoff -
Getal antwoorde: 6
Half a day after MoodleMoot NZ was finished, and barely an hour after MartinD had left Catalyst I got a big square box delivered to my desk.

What it had inside looks roughly like the board at the bottom of this pic:


It does _not_ look like this


I haven't had time to set it up and install linux on it, but I plan on doing that next week. Perhaps I should blog this process a bit knipoog

This board has landed on my desk because we talked about Moodle at length with Jim Gettys at linux.conf.au, and he's keen on seeing it running on the laptop (which is quite constrained memory-wise). That means two things for him: running in the web browser without taking too much memory, and also working in disconnected mode in some fashion, either being able to run a php/sql server on the laptop itself (and sync afterwards, somehow) or running a firefox plugin that caches some Moodle data and syncs later.

Anyway -- I have the board here, and I'm going to start playing with it in the next few days. Wohoo!

Some references:

Last update here in moodle.org
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=47100

Jim Gettys
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gettys

$100 laptop in wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%24100_laptop

OLPC project homepage (go for the wiki!)
http://laptop.org/

Anyway -- they have the first run of their boards available, and have sent me one to start working on it.
Gemiddeld van beoordelings: -
In antwoord op Martín Langhoff

Re: One Laptop Per Child Project -- we have an early sample board!

deur Benoit Brosseau -
WOW nice to have contact  wink met jim once very nice guy and we as a community are in dept to him so much
Gemiddeld van beoordelings: -
In antwoord op Benoit Brosseau

Re: One Laptop Per Child Project -- we have an early sample board!

deur Martín Langhoff -
Contacts are overrated knipoog and we hadn't really met before (of course I agree with you, we owe him a lot!). It was more about being involved in 2 projects he was really interested in: Moodle (for OLPC) and GIT (for X.org).

What I am after now is for people with ideas for interesting Moodle-related projects for the board... and with the drive to get them done. I have limited time, so I'll focus on a couple of things and let others play with it too.

I hope to be able to put it online via SSH and/or VNC if someone has interesting ideas for it. The system will be running a custom Fedora with Sugar, which Jim tells me has an embedded gecko engine.

Of course, hardware projects (like getting Debian going on it!) will mean that you either have to be in Wellington NZ or ask OLPC for a board yourself. Don't do this unless you have a serious project -- these boards will cost ~$30 when mass produced, but in these early runs probably cost ~$1000. The OLPC project also asks that you send it back when you're done, so they can send it out to someone else.

I'll try to bring it over to MoodleMoot UK, see http://docs.moodle.org/en/UK_MoodleMoot_06_hackfest

(Shameless plug: that linux.conf.au was great as a catalyser for project collaboration. X.org has already migrated from CVS to GIT with some help from yours truly, and if we can get Moodle on OLPC, I'll be over the moon.)
Gemiddeld van beoordelings: -
In antwoord op Martín Langhoff

Re: One Laptop Per Child Project -- we have an early sample board!

deur Martín Langhoff -

Tonight after work hours I did a bit of scavenging around the office. In the dark of the night, I stole:

  • One nice Dell LCD screen, probably 17'
  • One USB keyboard
  • One powerstrip from the meetingroom
  • One USB CDROM
  • One USB type-b cable connector -- someone's scanner won't work tomorrow knipoog

And with that I connected the machine and it started. Got to get some pictures of this. It is meant to use LinuxBIOS but it has an interim one while LinuxBIOS gets sorted. All the ubuntu CDs we had were for Macs and AMD64/I-64 machines so I borrowed a Gentoo live cd which booted like a champ, but without framebuffer and a bit of corruption in the screen.

After that I downloaded Damn Small Linux, burnt the iso and booted off it. GREAT. Got a working desktop immediately, works fast, and the good thing is that the memory usage is ridiculously low (32mb in use, a whole 96MB for apps). And the shell windows are all translucent. Weird!

The only strange thing is that I haven't been able to mount the Flash RAM as a block device. The wiki doesn't say a thing, and noone is talking about it in the mailing lists. So it's either very easy or so hard nobody's done it yet knipoog

Gemiddeld van beoordelings: -
In antwoord op Martín Langhoff

Re: One Laptop Per Child Project -- we have an early sample board!

deur Alexandre Enkerli -
Now that we're getting closer to an actual release and possibly to a parallel commercial release, what's the word on Moodle and OLPC? Moodle seems to fit OLPC in theory and it'd be really nice if Moodle (or another FLOSS CMS) were involved in this attempt at helping students in emerging societies leapfrog in the technological domain...
Gemiddeld van beoordelings: -
In antwoord op Martín Langhoff

Re: One Laptop Per Child Project -- we have an early sample board!

deur Dan Stowell -
Martín, I hope this isn't a stupid question, but why Moodle on one of these low-spec laptops? Moodle is a server app after all, and although I can imagine some kind of setup where students' moodles sync later, whenever they get an internet connection, it doesn't really feel like the right tool for the job.

Surely it would be better to get some of this embryonic "PLE" (Personal Learning Environment) software running on the laptop, for example Plex, and work on integration between PLEs and Moodle?
Gemiddeld van beoordelings: -
In antwoord op Dan Stowell

Re: One Laptop Per Child Project -- we have an early sample board!

deur Benoit Brosseau -
let me propose a senario: the teacher runs moodle on his laptop all all the students connec to it in a ad-hoc wifi network. how needs the internet  wink
Gemiddeld van beoordelings: -