[Server-devel] XS Community edition

Thu Feb 28 12:55:24 EST 2013

Hi, All

I am disappointed that this team appears to be proceeding to re-invent 
the wheel.

If you are interested in "What will schools worldwide really want from a 
server in the coming 10 years?", it would appear appropriate to start 
from what is available now and what new capabilities may be needed.

The XS Community edition has performed a vital service in enabling an 
Arm-based server. However, in the process I have lost track of the 
download and installation procedure in the discussions of some kind of 
cherry-picking procedure for 'services'.

It would be helpful to have a web page which provides a download and 
install procedure for the Arm-based server equivalent to XS-0.7.

If and when the services selection procedure is in place, it would be 
helpful to have a page which shows the services which can be provided 
and how this is done.

Currently (and for many years) OLE Nepal has deployed a school server 
with an extensive library (pustakalaya). This library is also available 
online (http://www.pustakalaya.org). A comparable library capability is 
deployed in Rwanda and Lesotho on XS-0.7 based on Django. However, 
unlike Pathagar, the library content (pdfs and so forth) is on the 
schoolo server so that the library is fully available at schools which 
have no internet connection. In addition, the school server at these 
schools has a complete set of Sugar Activities from ASLO (as of 5/2012) 
so that XO users can download and install any of these activities (with 
WebKit version of Browse). The Learn activity also enables teachers to 
develop their own lessons and provides for students to download these 
lessons (so they can be completed at home).

I think it would be a great use of the very limited available technical 
resources to look at what is already available, determine limitations in 
these capabilities, and devise plans to add new capabilities or to 
enhance those already available.

For example, in Uruguay, the urgent request was for a capability for a 
teacher to present a lesson on her laptop simultaneously to the laptops 
of all of the students in her class. Currently Ejabberd includes all 
registered (and connected) laptops in a single group. I suspect this 
will result in confusion when the students in a single class (e.g. 40 of 
120 laptops) try to connect to their teacher's lesson. Another option is 
to provide a single url for the lesson; however, someone would need to 
set up a synchronization (web2.0) method so the teacher can move all 
laptops to the next slide in the lesson. The ShowNTell activity attempts 
to provide this capability via Ejabberd but has not been tested in a 
classroom setting.

Even in schools not connected to the internet, it might be useful to 
have an email capability and a mailing list capability. This would 
require a very lightweight email client as a Sugar activity (not 
dependent on gmail) and a mail server (pop3, smtp) on the school server. 
It would be helpful if this capability supported a sneakernet access to 
the rest of the world (someone takes mail to be sent on a usb key to the 
internet cafe and sends it and then collects email for the school on the 
usbkey for upload to the schoolserve).

In many deployments such as Rwanda and Lesotho, the only internet access 
is via the mobile network. This network charges by time or by megabytes 
transferred. Aside from bandwidth issues, it is unlikely that schools 
will be able to afford the cost of 120 students surfing independently. 
If the school server could connect to a 'mothership' via a chron task 
uploading new content created at the school (email, local wiki, forums, 
blogs, ....) and downloading new content for the school server (lessons, 
additions to the library, ...), there might be an affordable way to use 
the internet.

The most important service provided by the school server is storage 
capacity. The school server can reasonably be expected to have 2GB+ main 
memory and 500GB+ secondary storage. In this context, it is unimportant 
to minimize storage to exactly those services needed at a specific 
deployment (unlike the XO-1, for example). If a deployment does not use 
Moodle, nothing is gained by removing it (just don't start the daemon). 
However, the current use of http://schoolserver to access Moodle by 
default is probably not reasonable given the low number of deployments 
which use it. It might be better for this address to display a portal 
page as do most websites.

Currently OLE Nepal and the schoolservers I supply support access to 
Wiki4Schools. However, it might be better to implement Kiwix and access 
the .zim version of Wiki4Schools. This would provide a more effective 
search capability. Since the internet offers many capable search 
engines, Wikipedia does not need a search capability. However, when 
rehosted to a school server, this becomes a problem.

While Wiktionary is supported, the school server really needs 
interactive bilingual dictionaries as well as age-appropriate 
monolingual dictionaries. Availability of picture dictionaries on the 
school server would also be very helpful. The kamusi project 
(http://kamusi.org/) is an example of what might be done. Currently, the 
dictionary is not technically capable of rehosting on a school server. 
One valuable project would be to define a standard framework for these 
dictionaries that could be rehosted as well as support 'pootle-like' 
opportunities for contributors to supply bilingual and multi-lingual 
definitions.

There is a book by Adam Smith, 'WordPress for Education' published by 
Packt. I think it would be relatively easy to install WordPress on a 
school server which would give students and staff a chance to exchange 
information. In particular, this may be a way to satisfy the request 
from Jamaica for a way that students can submit assignments via the 
school server which can be reviewed and marked by their teachers.

To make a long story short, there are many needs for additional 
capabilities on the school server. XS-0.7 meets the essential needs of a 
deployment and with the valuable addition of support for ARM based 
systems, the needs of deployments with only solar power are addressed.
It would be wonderful if some of this team which is interested in making 
the server more usable could address some of these needs.

Tony

On 02/28/2013 12:00 PM, server-devel-request at lists.laptop.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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>     1. Issues Backing Up XO logs to jump drive (HALL,Brian C)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:51:25 -0500
> From: "HALL,Brian C" <brian.hall02 at uwimona.edu.jm>
> To: Adam Holt <holt at laptop.org>, XS Devel
> 	<server-devel at lists.laptop.org>,	Support Gangsters
> 	<support-gang at laptop.org>,	IAEP <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>,	Discussion
> 	list for Toronto/Canada area OLPC Community
> 	<toronto-dev at lists.laptop.org>, "Sameer Verma (sv3rma at gmail.com)"
> 	<sv3rma at gmail.com>
> Cc: "dean_jc3 at hotmail.com" <dean_jc3 at hotmail.com>
> Subject: [Server-devel] Issues Backing Up XO logs to jump drive
> Message-ID:
> 	<39D05A5FD7C1334DA749CCFCE8538F87410F7F60DF at xchg1.uwimona.edu.jm>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Good Day All,
>
>
> We are presently in the process of backup up the logs from the XO's (1.75's) to a jump drive. Most of them have been successful. However I am getting an error for a couple. The error I get is
>
> Backup up Journal to /media/DEAN
>
> Org.freedesktop.dbus.pythom.IOError: Tracebook (most recent call last):
>
>
>
> Could you assist?
>
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Brian Hall
> From: server-devel-bounces at lists.laptop.org [mailto:server-devel-bounces at lists.laptop.org] On Behalf Of Adam Holt
> Sent: Sunday, February 10, 2013 10:37 PM
> To: XS Devel; Support Gangsters; IAEP; Discussion list for Toronto/Canada area OLPC Community
> Subject: [Server-devel] XS Community Edition 0.2 Release & Invitation
>
> Toronto-area School Server Hack Sprint
>
> This weekend, seven dedicated souls pulled together to solidify,
> plan and build -- getting to know each other much better en route.
> What will schools worldwide really want from a server in the coming
> 10 years?  What's the most constructive community & solid product
> we as volunteers can build within 1 year?
>
> Careful advanced planning helped us release version .1 Friday late,
> strengthening our minimal core of AP-like features on an XO-1.75:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition/0.1
>
> Next we tackled version .2 with a small set of extended services,
> also for XO-1.75 but with experimental support for x86 "big iron":
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition/0.2
>
> Further down our main page (http://schoolserver.org) thoughtful
> documentation has begun under "Getting Started":
>
>    * Get Started Hacking (developers, contributors)
>    * Get Started Implementing (administrators)
>    * FAQ
>
> What's new?  In our prelim releases we're aiming towards a drop-in
> equivalent of February 2012's XS 0.7 but running on Fedora 17+
> including ARM.  Working forward, we want to refine core services
> for modularity (Squid, etc) and content/collaboration services
> (eg. Mediawiki, OPDS/Pathagar to curate ebooks, etc) in support
> of library-like "offline clouds" for very rural communities that
> won't have Internet for many, many years.
>
> We invite you to join, installing/testing scenarios most vital to
> your (micro)deployment and planet.  Thanks all who can help think
> this through, joining our Thursday weekly voice calls where you can!
> Finally, sketching out v.3 and v.4 is underway, eg. for modularity,
> GUI console and fuller support for x86, XO-1.5 and XO-4:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition/0.3
>
> Early spring we hope to meet again to make this happen & much more =)
>
> --
>
> Help kids everywhere map their world, at http://olpcMAP.net !
>
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