Sorry, I keep forgetting to put the list manager in my addresses. Here's my latest message:<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Stanley Sokolow</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:overbyte@earthlink.net">overbyte@earthlink.net</a>></span><br>
Date: Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 4:05 PM<br>Subject: Re: Flash + AIR on OLPC<br>To: <a href="mailto:mikus@bga.com">mikus@bga.com</a><br><br><br>I forgot to answer your statement below about Linux on the XO:<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
<div class="im">On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 1:13 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mikus@bga.com" target="_blank">mikus@bga.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">...<div class="im"><br>
p.s. People keep showing various Linux platforms (e.g., Ubuntu, Debian,<br>
etc) running on the XO. As far as I am concerned, if these people<br>
*want* to run Ubuntu, Debian, etc., then buying a modern netbook for<br>
that purpose will give them better performance than using the XO.<br>
<div><div></div><div><br></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br>When I started helping my wife develop an interactive math tutoring capability for the XO we bought from the 2008 G1G1 campaign, I looked at and tried the Sugar activities. None of them were capable of her necessary features: 2-way interactive whiteboard and 2-way interactive video and audio communications. Sure, some activities were in development trying to achieve these capabilities, but they weren't real yet. We tried a web services approach -- looked at various things like "Go to Meeting". When we found <a href="http://www.Vyew.com" target="_blank">www.Vyew.com</a>, we saw what we needed. It worked on our PCs. Turning to the XO, the Browse activity with Gnash just couldn't run Vyew. When I installed the version of FlashPlayer that the <a href="http://laptop.org" target="_blank">laptop.org</a> wiki recommended, it didn't work the XOs camera and microphone and didn't even operate the Flash settings dialog properly. Doing more searching, I found a version of Ubuntu that had been adapted to the XO by a user who called himself "Teapot" on the forum. It's a stripped down, lightweight version that uses Xfce as the window manager (hence it's called a Xubuntu distribution) and incorporates the same kernel that olpc used in the version of Fedora that came on our XO beneath Sugar, so it knows about the XO's unique hardware. After some work, I got it running from an SD card so I didn't have to trash the native operating system. I didn't do this because I wanted to run Linux -- I have other Linux machines -- but rather because it would let me get the job done, the system built with the features necessary for the tutoring project. If the XO comes up to that capability with Browse and Gnash, I'd run the native system. But it's not there, yet. We also tried to use Skype on the native Sugar/Fedora OS, but at that time, you had to do so many hokey work-arounds to fool the software into running Skype, it just wasn't feasible for a deployment with low entry threshold.<br>
<br>The 6 to 12 year-old kids that are the prime target of the olpc mission don't care what platform is behind the screen. Just as in the Wizard of Oz, "Don't pay any attention to that man behind the curtain." As the <a href="http://laptop.org" target="_blank">laptop.org</a> mission statement says, "It’s not a laptop project. It’s an education project." To me that says that the mission is not to empower kids to write programs or tinker inside the system, but rather to use the XO as an educational tool to learn about the world and life and such, to collaborate with each other across the room and around the globe, to explore the depth of knowledge on the Internet, etc. <br>
<br>Stan<br></div></div>
</div><br>