[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-07-01)

[Walter Bender]

1.  Barry Vercoe's  keynote at the WorldComp '06 conference in Las Vegas
was pulled off with some theatrics: a bare-stage and six
faintly-spotlighted OLPC systems. The audience burst into spontaneous
applause at the distributed piece. The systems, controlled through the
mesh, provided surround-sound music that filled the theater. Miller Puckett
demonstrated a 50-cent conductor's baton made with just a photocell and a
wooden spoon, taking advantage the machine's analog input capability. Our
show filled an exciting hour, and the other speakers visibly found this a
hard act to follow; altogether a remarkable first rollout. We are extremely
grateful to the team who had worked so hard these past weeks.

2. We have been iterating with Fuse Project on the keyboard design.
Features we are exploring include an over-sized enter key; elimination of
the Caps Lock key; and possibly adding three new keys: XML, Wiki Word; and
Undo.

3. Jim Gettys, Chris Blizzard, and David Zeuthen attended the Gnome User
and Developer's conference (GUADEC) this week in Vilanova i la Geltrú, just
south of Barcelona. Much of the user-interface software stack we use is
based on Gnome technologies; Chris demonstrated Sugar, the laptop UI
framework, at the OLPC birds-of-a-feather session. There were many useful
hallway conversations, in particular with the Nokia attendees, as the
laptop shares some the same challenges as the Nokia 770 handheld. There is
great enthusiasm in the Gnome community about OLPC that we hope to harness.

4. Extremadura is the poorest region of Spain; it is also the site of the
first large-scale deployment of Linux desktop systems in the world,
primarily into schools. Over 80,000 desktops have been deployed to date,
with near saturation (>50%) in high schools, but fewer numbers in
elementary schools (typically in computer labs). The deployment is seen as
a success, and is now spreading beyond schools and libraries to the
regional government as a whole. Jim visited the project in order to gain
insight into the issues that arise in the schools. Although Extremadura's
experiences are only partially applicable to ours, they are generally
positive.

-walter
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Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org