[OLPC-Philippines] Awesome OLPC PH SIG booth at Software Freedom Day in Quezon City

[Carlos Nazareno]

Team OLPC Ph, Congrats on the successful XO-1 showcase and the
interest it generated! :)

Bravo!

next up, dev:

IMHO, Flash as proprietary is just about as evil as Java is proprietary ;)

Adobe has opened up Flash specs with the Adobe Open Screen project and
has committed to keeping docs on the specs, etc open to everyone at no
charge.

Furthermore, I don't think this should be much of an issue in term's
of "proprietary evilness" because OLPC project itself has agreed to
ship versions of XO with MS Windows, and that's about as evil in
proprietariness as you can get :P

Anyway, I'll be creating a new Linux VM and will install Gnash on it
instead of the official Adobe Flash plug-ins like I usually do, and to
some Gnash compatibility testing.

I hope Gnash is able to emulate most of everything Flash 8 or 7 can do
Actionscript-wise. If so, we're pretty golden with Gnash :)

AFAIK, the next iteration of the XO-1 Sugar OSes are shipping with
latest versions of Gnash, right?

I have the latest XO OS dev images, just haven't installed 'em yet
because of hard drive space issues. I think I'll delete my Fedora
Sulphur VM 1st as I'm not using it right now and it's eating *a lot*
of space compared to Ubuntu.

I hope the newer XO-1 OS build behaves this time in VirtualBox,
because it keeps using a resolution larger than my monitor, which
makes it a bit difficult for me to use it for extended testing.

Regards,

-Naz

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Jerome Gotangco <jgotangco at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> The OLPC PH XO-1 showcase booth during Software Freedom Day is a hit!
>
> Me, Harry, Rowen and Tim had a blast sharing about the potential of
> the XO-1, discussing the OLPC project, and showing the various
> collaborative and informational activities that can be done. We met
> and talked with educators, students, hobbyists, and even press people.
> A lot were surprised to see the XO-1, B2 and B4 units and some didn't
> even know such existed for education as they are most familiar with
> the current 4P offerings by Asus, Acer, etc. but voiced out their lack
> of education focus and saw the potential of the XO-1 as a catalyst for
> improving curriculum and enriching the experience of education.
>
> There were a lot of questions raised, like the usual:
>
> "How much does it cost?"
> "Where can I buy one?"
> "Can I run Operating System _____?"
> "What are the specifications?"
>
> To some rather interesting ones like:
>
> "How do you see the XO-1 competing against the current crop of
> netbooks and UMPCs"
> "Can it really achieve its goal of One Laptop per Child?"
> "How are you guys involved with this project?"
> "Are you selling this in the near future?"
> "I'm part of non-profit organization ______, how can we get these
> units to be able to evaluate for schools?"
> "We evaluated the Classmate PC - it doesn't fit much to what we
> requre, we'd be interested to check out the XO-1"
>
> So these questions and more (which I can't recall much), do show that
> there is still significant interest in the XO-1 for enriching
> education here.
>
> Before we left, me and Rowen discussed on what can be done further to
> formalize a group and brainstorm on our mission and vision - we don't
> want be a laptop organization for sure as we don't have the manpower,
> funding and marketing to do so. A focus on applications via etoys is
> the most likely route with the XO-1 as the preferred platform for
> development but also opens opportunities for other platforms/operating
> systems. Another one is flash but this would require proprietary
> plugin-software or, make sure flash applications are compatible with
> gnash. These are just some of the things we discussed, but we'll make
> sure to start discussing further online. Please feel free to pour in
> your thoughts.
>
> You can also check out the pictures here:
> http://flickr.com/photos/jsgotangco/sets/72157607386579832/
>
> --
> Jerome
> _______________________________________________
> OLPC-Philippines mailing list
> OLPC-Philippines at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-philippines
>



-- 
Carlos Nazareno
http://www.object404.com

interactive media specialist
zen graffiti studios
naz at zengraffiti.com