[Server-devel] e: Regarding my OLPC XS Wishlist (Abhishek Singh)

[TONY ANDERSON]

Hi,

Good catches. I meant that there is no good technical reason why Moodle and/or
Dan's Guardian could not be installed as part of XC - not that that is
currently the case.

Meanwhile I have posted my version of the wish list as a wiki page:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/School_Server_Wish_List

This is my own quick version. I am hoping we can come up with a common page
which can be annotated as we develop a consensus on what should be in the next
XS and XC builds.

As you can tell, I see the XS build as fairly similar across deployments but
that XC is more like a set of building blocks from which deployments can pick
or choose.

Abhishek, I have re-interpreted some of your wish list (and probably left some
out altogether). Please hack it so it is more representative of what you see
as needed. 

Yours, 

Tony


Hi Tony, and all,
       Greetings from Nepal. I would like to correct a few things in
Tony's descriptions and elaborate upon what he discussed.

NEXS (the Nepalese version built upon OLPC XS) has separated the content
part from the base server. We call the content part NEXC ("C" for
content). This separation has helped us a lot in managing content
bundles and content updates. The NEXC generally contains:

   1. Content of the digital library (see http://www.pustakalaya.org),
      which is spanned across:
          * Database dumps for Fedora Commons and Fez
          * Fedora Commons datastream files
          * Fez's customized interface (that is being used at
            pustakalaya.org)
   2. Wiki for schools
   3. English Wiktionary
   4. Nepali Dictionary
   5. External Content: All the other static content (e.g. video files,
      maps etc) are packaged as external content
   6. Learn English Kids from British Council (recently added)

We have a 3-month NEXC release schedule. At every release, we'll bundle
the most recent content and put it on a USB HDD, test it internally on
our test school server, and then finally release it. After every
release, the deployment team will go to the schools with the USB HDDs
and plug it to the school server at the site schools. Daniel Drake's
usbmount script takes care of installing/updating the content from the
USB HDDs - you just nee to listen to the starting and the ending beep
during which all the content update is done. We have tried updating it
over Internet, but the connection here in Nepal is so flaky and slow
(most schools do not even have Internet connection yet), and the content
being huge (approx 12GB now), makes it almost impossible.

Corrections to Tony's discussion: Moodle and Dansguardian is not
installed as a part of NEXC, rather they are built with NEXS and get
installed as a part of NEXS. The NEXS is also not released as an img
file (Tony might be confused with NEXO being released as an IMG file),
rather as an iso file. The mkusbinstall (using the OLPC forth script) is
then used to copy the install image to a usb flash drive (using syslinux).

We would really try to test the Au-script for Anaconda USB race conditions.

All our customizations and scripts are available at a few mercurial
repositories hosted at hg.olenepal.org. For NEXS and NEXC, please check:

    * NEXS Scripts, http://hg.olenepal.org/NEXS_scripts/
    * NEXS Image Builder, http://hg.olenepal.org/NEXS-image-builder/
    * NEXC Maint, http://hg.olenepal.org/NEXC-maint/
    * NEXC Scripts, http://hg.olenepal.org/NEXC_scripts/


Thank You.

-- Abhishek Singh System Engineer Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal ????
?????? ?-???? http://www.olenepal.org Tel: +977-1-5544441 ext. 301