Signed build for Italy

[Bernie Innocenti]

Giulia D'Amico wrote:
> Bernie,
>  
> It's great your support for Sugar, but before taking any decision, 
> please be avare that the Municipality of Florence in primis but also all 
> those financing the program in the city never make this kind of request. 
> The Muncipality of Florence needs to know that OLPC won't be able to 
> support custom builds

This, or the laptops will have to remain in English.  I don't think this
is acceptable for the municipality.  Also, OLPC support for regular builds
at this time is limited to one new release every 6 months.


> and those laptops will be isolated and not connected to OLPC server.

There's actually no necessity to isolate the laptops just get them in
Italian.  However, the only benefits would be:

 - check for OS updates, which are going to be issued every 6 months
   or so;

 - check for the "remote-kill" feature which is part of the anti-theft
   scheme, and has never been enabled in any deployment country to my
   knowledge.

What OLPC means by "not supported" should not be overstated.  Kim may
want to correct me on this, but the way I interpret it is: "please don't
call us if your custom build has problems".  Of course, when one finds a
problem that can be reproduced also in Update.1, you can report it and
ask it to be fixed in the next release, of course, subject to the severity
of the problem and the available engineering resources.

The reality of things is a much more relaxed relationship than what
contractual clauses normally states: the bug database is publicly
accessible and the OLPC support gang and developers are usually
available online to help users solve these problems.


> As second, Florence designetd some laptops to 
> developing countries, in this case will you also build locale expertise??

This is why I thought it was strange that Florence would order the
laptops directly.  We need to plan ahead what types of keyboards, and
what language the laptops should come with.

In case the keyboard needs to be designed, it will take some time.
To support a new language, we should coordinate with volunteers of
the target cities.  Some languages, such as Amharic, present additional
difficulties that need to be analyzed by OLPC.

There's a deployment guide that gives a lot of good advice, but it
is not a public document and I only have an old draft of it.

I could do some of this work myself, but we should again consider how
this work will not appear in an official OLPC build until the next
formal release 6 months from now.


> I don't think it is Florence's desire, but I can be wrong. In both 
> cases, I will ask specifically the Deputy Mayor of Florence (who signed 
> the agreement) to put everything on paper about their specific requirements.

Sure, that would be best.

What I asked above is what the people of OLPC Italia who are presumably
going to deploy and support the laptops asked for.  So it may be best for
them to meet again with the deputy major next week and find a common plan.

-- 
   \___/
  _| o |  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \|_X_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"