[vox] OLPC Conference review. was Proclamation, wine, laptops and learning!

[Brian Lavender]

I went to the OLPC conference and I really enjoyed it. The great thing
about this conference is that were dedicated OLPC attendees from around
the world, technical and those doing deployments.  Without a doubt, there
is great opportunity with OLPC and with that a lot of work to do. But,
at the same time, a lot of work has been done (shoulders of giants to
build upon). The conference had a great "grass roots" feel. Numerous
people contributed to make it happen, and there was no overlooming
corporate twist you sometimes feel at conferences.

I still have yet to write an application for OLPC. I would say that was a
shortfall of the programming session I went to. There were links to howtos
and online videos, but I would have really liked to have seen "hello
world". I did do a little digging afterwards, and most coding is done in
Python and it appears that GTK works under the hood using PyGTK. I hope to
soon write a simple app and run it on OLPC. There is also the integration
aspect of OLPC. OLPC has what is called Sugar on a Stick. If you download
the iso image for OLPC, you can burn create a bootable USB stick using
the Fedora Live USB creator.  

https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/

I am running Ubuntu which has a "Startup Disk Creator" similar to
Fedora's. Somehow, I thought I might be able to create sugar on a
stick using Ubuntu's program, but this was not the case. So, someone
created me a stick. But, once again, how was I to code a program with
OLPC booted on my system. Yet, another neighor of mine mentioned that I
could install Sugar in my Ubuntu. A few moments later, I installed it,
but there seemed to be problems. I am not sure what they were, so I
am still have yet to write "Hello World". Even another Sugar developer
lamented that some of the integration was a ways off and work could be
done in this area. I hope to write a "Hello World" soon as there seems
to be a number of resources on the Wiki.  Not to mention, I would like
to see TuxPaint on OLPC. The thing with OLPC seems that packages
contain the all the dependencies, so this may be a challenge.

I also learned about libusb while listening to a USB temperature probe
that is being used with OLPC in Uganda. I had not realized that USB
support in Linux had been moved to user space. OLPC uses the Linux kernel.
Some day down the road, I hope to check it out in detail. I'll add it
to the wishlist. At the same time, OLPC implements a security model in
case your laptop is stolen that I would like to dig into and see how it
is implemented.

It was also interesting to hear those who were doing implementations of
OLPC at schools and their experiences. One of the people who has worked in
Haiti told me teachers feared the laptops would replace them. I responded
that that would be quite a feat deserving the Loebner prize. And, we
also heard some details about an implementation in Birmingham, AL and
her experiences and struggle to make OLPC a success.

There was much more that I could recount upon. Those who didn't go, you
missed out! 

brian

On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 09:41:32PM -0700, Sameer Verma wrote:
> We have had an incredible two days thus far at the OLPC San Francisco
> Community Summit 2010. Mayor Gavin Newsom declared October 23, 2010 as
> One Laptop per Child Day in San Francisco!
> http://blog.laptop.org/2010/10/22/october-23-is-olpc-day-in-sf/
> 
> Here are some photos from the events and sessions.
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/sets/72157625222079022/ and
> http://picasaweb.google.com/tuxwingsgroup/Olpc#
> 
> You can join us online tomorrow at 11:30AM and 13:45pm Pacific.
> http://www.ustream.tv/channel/olpcsf-community-summit-2010
> 
> cheers,
> Sameer
> -- 
> Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor, Information Systems
> Director, Campus Business Solutions
> San Francisco State University
> http://verma.sfsu.edu/
> http://opensource.sfsu.edu/
> http://cbs.sfsu.edu/
> http://is.sfsu.edu/
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
Brian Lavender
http://www.brie.com/brian/

"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to
show their absence!"

Professor Edsger Dijkstra
1972 Turing award recipient