Peru Upgrade process.

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Sat, Jun 7, 2008 at 10:44 AM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org> wrote:
> Look, the reality on the ground is that Peru has at least 15K laptops in
> the field running 651/653/656 that need upgrading.    They will not have
> school servers deployed for another three months.

I understand this.

> If upgrade
> (not reflash) requires more than inserting a key,

I don't believe this.

or it wipes the
> activation lease/the kids work

I believe this.

> this won't happen.

OK, even granting this, why is this necessarily a bad thing?  This
work has to be prioritized.  If the laptops in the field don't get
updated until (say) 1Q 2009, is that necessarily a bad thing?  Should
I be working on this rather than, say, making Uruguay's upgrades and
security work?

It seems reasonable to expect that machines in the field will not be
updated until the teachers come in from the field for training.  The
teachers will be taught about the new release (UI changes, new
activities, etc), and given instructions and a USB key for updating
the machines in the school.  They can schedule the update for a
holiday when they've got time to follow the instructions to update the
machines.  "Open up a terminal and type this" isn't nearly as
impossible as you are making it sound.  Peru actually has a process in
place for this training.  Yes, we can imagine better, but I'm not
convinced the current process isn't Good Enough.
  --scott

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