Debian Edu One Laptop per Child project
After a tip from Walter Bender at MIT, I was subscribing to the devel-boards list for the One Laptop per Child project. Walter is president, software and content, of the One Laptop per Child foundation.
My subscription was forwarded to the list moderator for approval. Then i got a nice e-mail from Jim Gettys. He wrote that if my interest in the list is to get a developer's board, then please follow the following instructions (look at the bottom):
This will result in a developer's board if the request is at all reasonable, and you will be added to the mailing list (which is meant to be low volume announcements for people with boards).
I wrote some suggestions for a plan to get the OLPC-machine up running April 5th 2006:
So people, I could apply for boards to realize this plan. (The plan is not at all finale, but a suggestion):
To make the Debian installer work with OLPC-machines. Comment from h01ger: I dont think this is needed. The laptops dont have a harddrive, so IMO the better approach is to create a usbstick live-image with http://live.debian.net
- To make bare bone Debian run with network connectivity in a mesh network (IPv6)
- Make the power management work
- To make X and a window manager with simplified debloated desktop
- 4.1 Make a KDE school desktop with debloated applications
- Make it posible to update translations after it's frozen upstream
- Make the software distribution simple in large community installation
- (e.g a staget apt-get repositories on every school server)
- Make the OLPC integrate with the schools server when it's on the network
It's a considerable job tailoring the different subsystem in Debian to OLPC hardware. The installer has to be tailored, the network mesh net support has to work, simplified debloated desktop has to be configured, and the power management has to work.
We have done interesting things with Custom Debian Distributions and Debian Installer in the Skolelinux / Debian Edu environment before. It seems to me that more people have joined the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project. I believe the One Laptop per Child is important for Debian, and we should do this development.
About
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/08/26/002217.shtml
pickyouupatnine writes "According to a story on Ars Technica, the $100 MIT Laptop is now going to cost $140. It has a new name — it'll now be called the Children's Machine 1 (CM1). The added price comes with new features! The laptop will now come with a 400 MHz AMD processor, 512 Megs of Flash storage, an SD card slot, mic and headphone jacks, a built in camera, built-in wireless, and an 8-inch LCD at a 1280x900 resolution." From the article: "Tremendous progress has been made this summer on the Sugar user interface system that will be shipped with the CM1. Funded by Google through the Summer of Code (SoC) initiative, intrepid college student Erik Pukinskis has collaborated with the GNOME development community to adapt AbiWord for use with the portable Linux system. Although still experimental, AbiWord has successfully been integrated into the Sugar environment. Artists and developers continue to work on the evolving Sugar interface, and the fruits of their labor can be seen in demos, mock-ups, and design reviews."