If you had a good enough script to get the mono bits and build them locally 
then the local mono executable *may* be enough.  Just a thought.    So a script 
that got mono and built that (assuming the kids have the mac developer tools on 
their boxes) and got the diva distro and ran its setup could perhaps work.

- s

On Oct 4, 2010, at 5:22 PM, Justin Clark-Casey wrote:

> On 04/10/10 14:29, Jeff Mao wrote:
>> 
>> Please excuse the x-post
>> 
>> Greetings all,
>> This is sightly off-topic, but I figured this was a community that could
>> help point me toward the people who could help me solve a
>> challenge...here it is (this is a little long)...
>> 
>> In my real life, I work for the State of Maine, Department of Education,
>> and I oversee the Maine Learning Technology Initiative. It is the United
>> State's largest 1:1 student computing program. Currently, we have 70,000
>> users (students, teachers, and administrators) in grades 7-12. Annually,
>> we host a student conference at the University of Maine. About 1000 kids
>> attend annually, and it is a time for kids to share what they are doing
>> and to learn from others -- all things that are powered by the fact that
>> we have a unique scenario...every student has a State issued MacBook
>> laptop computer.
>> 
>> Part of the day each year, we host an "ubër session" where all 1000 kids
>> are in an auditorium together and do something that really demonstrates
>> the power of the scale of the program. Last year, we played at
>> www.freerice.com <http://www.freerice.com/> and in 45 minutes, the kids
>> donated 2.4 million grains of rice to the World Food Program by
>> answering vocabulary questions.
>> 
>> This year, we were thinking of doing a virtual world project. Here's
>> what we were thinking...rather then attempt to set up enough servers for
>> all the kids to login to a grid together (its already a challenge to
>> create a wireless network that can host 1000 concurrent users in one
>> auditorium), we were thinking that each student would host their own sim
>> (the other benefit to this is that when they leave, they take their sim
>> with them and can use it anytime anywhere). To connect the session to
>> the larger theme of the student conference (STEM education) we are
>> focusing on energy this year. The activity we wanted them to play with
>> for the hour we have is to play with energy use. To do so, we wanted to
>> preload the default avatar inventory with some scripted items like a
>> plasma TV, toaster, microwave oven, etc. In addition, things like small
>> windmills, solar panels, etc. The idea is to let the kids drag these
>> items out into their world, and with a HUD of some sort, be able to
>> monitor electrical use even with these items "off". And then be able to
>> turn them on, and see what happens to their energy draw...add a solar
>> panel, and see what it takes to offset their electrical use, etc.
>> 
>> None of that is hard except...hosting your own sim. We've looked at the
>> opensim project, and it appears that their is potential here, and we're
>> only at the start of investigating this...but here's our initial barriers:
>> 
>> 1) The students are not administrators on their laptops, so the sim and
>> any supporting frameworks (ie mono) need to be able to be installed into
>> the user home directory without an administrator 
>> password.http://github.com/diva/d2
> 
> Unfortunately, I believe mono can only be installed with administrator 
> privileges on Mac.
> 
>> 
>> 2) How to set up a dynamic "map" so that once the 1000 kids each have a
>> sim running, how to visit each other's sim?
> 
> In principle, you could do this by enabling hypergrid on OpenSim.  Hypergrid 
> allows avatars from different installations of OpenSim to visit other 
> installations without having to be in the same grid (which would require a 
> large amount of network traffic).  There are some details at
> 
> http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Installing_and_Running_Hypergrid
> 
> which I believe relate to Hypergrid 1.0 in OpenSim 0.6.9.  Later OpenSim 
> versions run a revision called Hypergrid 1.5 which I believe uses different 
> commands which are not yet well documented (?).
> 
> Although HG can be set up on OpenSim, you may want to take a look at the Diva 
> Distribution
> 
> http://github.com/diva/d2
> 
> which comes with Hypergrid pre-configured.
> 
> I suspect this will all be very technically challenging - I'm guessing 1000 
> simultaneous users is significantly higher than any scaling scenario seen so 
> far with this architecture....
> 
>> 
>> 
>> So, the question for the wisdom of this group...anyone ever try anything
>> of this sort? Anyone know who we should be talking to? Maybe someone at
>> Linden Labs would be interested in playing with this with us? This event
>> is scheduled for the end of May 2011, so that's our timeline for any
>> development that we might need to get done to make this happen.
>> 
>> Thanks in advance for any wisdom you might have...
>> 
>> Jeff Mao
>> Learning Technology Policy Director
>> Maine Department of Education
>> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>> SL: Geoffrey Mayo
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Justin Clark-Casey (justincc)
> http://justincc.org
> http://twitter.com/justincc
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