[olpc-nz] [Testing] first play with new XO 1.5 machines [#9343]

James Cameron quozl at laptop.org
Wed Oct 21 23:31:28 EDT 2009


G'day Tabitha,

I think I can relax you a bit ... there seems to have been a minor
misunderstanding caused by ambiguous terms.

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 04:06:15PM +1300, Tabitha Roder wrote:
> No mesh:
> 
> Just checking this scenario.... I am a teacher and have just been
> handed 5 XOs for my students. I am told you can have a child start
> writing a story and then have the other children join in to write
> together.  How does the teacher do this - in less than 100 words and
> not one word technical....

Click on the icons, probably in a similar fashion as to how XO-1 build
802 does it.

> Will the new solution with 0.842 or 0.846 make this possible without
> any requirement for server or some external network or some special
> setup that the teacher cant do themselves with no effort and technical
> help?

Yes, I expect so.

> I was shocked to find that I could not do this as this is what I
> considered central to Sugar - creating together, learning together.

I don't think you should be shocked ... this is development, and it is
not yet ready for children with such limited technical help.

> I really hope that we see this getting easier for teachers.

I don't see why it won't.

See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/9343 and
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Network_manager_0.7 and
http://dev.laptop.org/~dsd/20090716/olpcmesh.patch

The patch adds Ad-Hoc support back into Sugar 0.84 ... which would give
you want you want.

I think we have a terminology issue ... "mesh" can mean 802.11s, which
as Ed said we aren't going to use ... you weren't using it on XO-1.

In your case, "mesh" means Ad-Hoc networking between several XOs.

You can manually establish an Ad-Hoc network between several XO-1.5's in
build os32 using the following temporary procedure:

1.  start Terminal and become root,

2.  stop Network Manager,

	/etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop

3.  configure the wireless device for Ad-Hoc,

	iwconfig eth0 mode ad-hoc essid xo

4.  manually configure an IP address for each XO,

	ifconfig eth0 10.0.0.15 netmask 255.255.255.0

(change 15 to 16 for the second XO, and so on),

5.  switch to the Neighbourhood view and the other XOs will be displayed
in the usual fashion,

6.  reboot to restore to normal operation.

This procedure is not given here as a final solution to your problem,
but only as a workaround so that you can test collaboration further.
I've tested the procedure with two XO-1.5's.  I didn't have any more
than two to test with.  ;-)

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/


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