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