[OLPC-Philippines] Stallman and OLPC

[James Shields]

Regarding content in general, the schools which I've visited sorely lacked
books.  Their "libraries" were tiny with single copies of each book, MAYBE
two.

Seems like the first thing to do is to get textbooks into the hands of the
kids via the XO.

Now, what I say next I want people to read in the best possible light.  I've
been to these barangays, I've seen the deep levels of poverty and the
desperation in some of their eyes (this is why I keep going back donating my
time and what resources I can).  What I say next is not meant to shed a bad
light on ANYONE ... just a question about KEEPING the XO in the hands of the
child.

What can be done to prevent the sale or pawning of the XO?  Even a few
hundred pesos could be very tempting to a family faced with no food.  I know
that I would do just about anything to ensure the health and welfare of my
wife and son.  I would not find fault in others for doing so themselves.

Everything we might create is worthless if the children don't have the XO.

Also, has anyone locally looked into alternative power generation for the
laptop?  I know that even small rises in the power bills can really hit
these families hard.  The recent rice growing seasons have been hit with bad
weather (my father-in-law lost 80% of his tapol (red sticky rice)).  <---
you can tell I'm a programmer, nested parenthesis :)

James Shields


-----Original Message-----
From: olpc-philippines-bounces at lists.laptop.org
[mailto:olpc-philippines-bounces at lists.laptop.org]On Behalf Of Jerome
Gotangco
Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008 2:29 PM
To: OLPC Philippines/Pilipinas grassroots
Subject: Re: [OLPC-Philippines] Stallman and OLPC


Hi James,

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 2:03 PM, James Shields <james at marasbaras.com> wrote:
> 1. Based on what I've been reading here, elsewhere, and what I've seen in
> the schools (I belong to the local Rotary club and we've been taking milk,
> books, and supplies to the poorer barangays here) ... what they need is
> content, not software.  Is there anyone among us who is a content
generator?
> I'm a developer, I can mush things around and make them somewhat pretty,
> although I'm not designer.

I did got myself involved with content with I was still with an
education foundation but the fundamental problem with content in the
local education front is that anything that is provided to the local
school system should adhere to the DepEd curriculum. If it doesn't
fall under that, it only becomes a supplement. I know some key people
in local foundations involved with education and what is common to
them is that the educational team will always involve two
specializations: technology and content. So you are right that what we
lack currently here are content developers/generators.

> 2. I have two the B1G1v1 machines.  It's my understanding that I cannot
run
> Windows XP on them.  Am I wrong?  I hope so.

Currently no documented way of doing so. The ones discussed before
were internal demos made by MS to the OLPC team and it involves
running the OS from an SD Card. Another is a special batch of XO-1
machines that have bigger storage just to make it work but these are
prototypes. Not sure about XO-1.5 perhaps Greg is the best guy to
answer this.

> 3. I skipped a few e-mails when you folks were discussing Gnash vs. Flash.
> Was it decided that Adobe's Flash license was too restrictive to use?

We have a bunch of flash developers here involved with
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/Flash_Gamedev and the consensus is
that doing things in Flash Lite will make it compatible with Gnash.
There are issues though with Flash content using MP3 as sound codec in
which the current builds do not support (most likely need backporting
of gstreamer plugins).

> 4. Last I looked, Sugar did not run natively on WinXP.  Is that still the
> case?  Is there any desire for Sugar to have a native XP version?

There is currently no one-click way to install Sugar on Windows as the
dependencies are too complex to make it work. The best route is
emulation. It's much, much easier to have it work on a different Linux
distribution and install Sugar components and activities.

--
Jerome G.

Website: http://www.gotangco.com
Blog: http://engage.wordpress.com
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