Post-August developer-education hardware availability?

[Edward Cherlin]

If you promise that your students will work really hard on some vital
project for OLPC, and you really, really need a test bed, you can
probably get a few units at no cost. If you sign up on the demo page
on the OLPC Wiki, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Demonstrations, I am sure
that somebody will be willing to come by your school with an XO or two
at least once a semester. I will do it in Silicon Valley and elsewhere
in the SF Bay Area, and there are others with laptops waiting for you
to call on them.

But your students don't need to work directoly on the OLPC hardware
unless you are doing hardware design or writing/testing drivers. If
you want to do Smalltalk or Python programming, or create some hot new
educational app (I can make several suggestions, and so can a lot of
other people), you can do it on any Linux system (although Red Hat
derivatives are currently easier to support than Debian derivatives),
and on many other platforms besides. The dev Wiki will tell you what
you need to install.

Can I interest you in connecting to a university in Africa or Latin
America or somewhere, so that your students can work with their
students? I can offer you institutions in Ghana, Nigeria, and Ecuador
now, and no doubt many more in the future. I will be setting up a
system for such linkages when I can get an Earth Treasury Web site
properly organized. If anybody would like to assist?

On 4/12/07, Mike C. Fletcher <mcfletch at vrplumber.com> wrote:
> Question was raised today:
>
>     If I want to integrate development on/for the OLPC into our
>     (University Level) Computer Science course, is it possible to
>     purchase X laptops for use in September semester?
>
> Which seems like it would come down to logistics.  Quanta is going to
> print out thousands of pallets of laptops, but they are AFAIK just
> shipping them all out directly to the client countries.
>
> Is there any plan to divert some laptops into the developer channels?
> This was formulated with the assumption that the University would pay
> for the hardware (not the project), but it still requires distribution,
> storage and the like within the project, which is a non-trivial cost.
> On the plus side, it would produce new trained potential developers at
> approximately X per semester and hopefully some useful
> development/review during the actual class work.
>
> Anyway, long question short, post-August are we going to be able to
> entertain this kind of idea?  If so, we'd have to confirm it far enough
> in advance to allow for classes to be designed around the machine.
>
> Have fun,
> Mike
>
> The particular request today was for X == 20, btw.
>
> --
> ________________________________________________
>   Mike C. Fletcher
>   Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
>   http://www.vrplumber.com
>   http://blog.vrplumber.com
>
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-- 
Edward Cherlin
Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Earth_Treasury
WIRE AFRICA  http//www.wireafrica.org/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/cherlin