Monthly Archives: November 2011

Guyana launches One Laptop per Family program with 1000 netbooks

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President Jagdeo of Guyana has launched an One Laptop per Family initiative “to develop the country’s ICT sector”.  The program has been in planning since last year, with the laptops provided by Chinese manufacturer Haier.  5000 have already arrived in Guyana, with plans for 22,000 more later this year.  Their goal is to reach 90,000 families within two years.

Deployment of the first 1000 laptops began this week — as this is election season, most public discussion has been around whether it is simply an effort to buy votes by a the incumbent party (the PPP).

There is commentary at the Stabroek News.  A selection:

“This is a good initiative but it will not save the PPP from getting the boot in this election.”

“Its not like they are doing the people a favour, this is what they’re suppose to do for the citizens.  Do they think they’ll get credit for it?”

“An independent audit into the distribution of these laptops will show a favor towards so called “rural” residents.”

“Hope they will also get free Internet access, and blog on this site.”

 

Pakistan’s Open Source Resource Centers celebrate their students

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Pakistan has a government initiative to support and promote the use of open source tools — an “Open Source Resource Center” program, supported by the Pakistan Software Expert Board.   13 of their students recently became Red Hat-certified technicians and engineers, and they have helped work on Sugar and related localizations.

They are running a small PR campaign to celebrate their work — representing Pakistan’s open source community at international events, and training over 8000 people who have come to a center for help or study.    Kudos to the OSRC teams – I expect we will hear more from them soon!

Making the world a more intelligent and humane place to live

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Rodrigo Arboleda is giving a keynote address today at the International Symposium on Convergence Technologies (ConTech 2011) in Seoul, Korea – a gathering focused on making the world a more intelligent and humane place to live.   His talk is “Children as a Mission, not a Market“, focusing on the challenges of making modern education available to children in developing parts of the world, and OLPC’s lessons learned to date.

Digital citizenship and hacking: Sugar Camp Lima, Nov 18-19

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Somos Azucar, Activity Central, and escuelab are organizing Sugar Camp Lima on November 18-19, to build a new Sugar image for Peru: complete with Aymara and Quechua localizations, and activities focused on engagement online and “digital citizenship”.  An invitation to the event can be found here, and Sugar enthusiast Yannick Warnier explains why he finds this so exciting in a call for others to join him.

The event has international support, including the Municipality of Lima, Ciudadano Inteligente, and the World Bank.  The XO image developed will be proposed to the national team as a basis for the next update implemented across the country.

If you have an activity you’re hoping to polish up and get into the next Peru image — or are interested in localization, testing, or general Sugar development, this promises to be a great event.  I hope the camp attendees will review and add to the Feedback Actividades page that Claudia recently set up, a place to gather requests and suggestions from students and teachers in the field.

 

To RSVP, or for more information, contact escuelab: contacto@escuelab.org

 

OLPC retrospective in the latest Linux Journal

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SFSU professor and OLPC-SF organizer Sameer Verma wrote a nice project summary in the latest Linux Journal titled OLPC: Are We There Yet?  In it he discusses the state of the project, and what remains to be done before every child has access to tools for their own education.

Sameer writes from the perspective of his own efforts to promote olpc around the world, and that of the Bay-area education hackers who help with everything from testing hardware, Sugar, and peripherals (leggo my WeDo!) to supporting schools in other countries.  It’s a well laid-out piece, with pointers to how local groups can make a difference.

 

 

Make your XO Racy with lightweight PuppyLinux

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Mavrothal has been promoting PuppyLinux as a lightweight OS for the XO for a long time.  Last year he began releasing polished “XOpup” builds, most recently XOpup 2.2 – providing the most light-weight desktop around for the XO-1 and XO-1.5.

Recently he published a build system that lets anyone build their favorite Puppy-distro for the XO, and has used it to package the latest release: PuppyLinux Racy 5.1.110  (currently only for the XO-1).   This 90MB build includes a softphone app, printing / camera / CD support, and the Mozilla Seamonkey suite (browser, HTML editing, email, newsfeeds, and IRC).

He’s even taking feature requests for the build – give it a spin and let him know what you think.