TurtleArt problems in Ubuntu

[Edward Cherlin]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/turtleart/+bug/731133

TurtleArt 98.1, as packaged for Ubuntu, is missing essential files and
cannot start. Who is responsible for this package?

-- 
Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
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Re: [Localization] Fwd: Updated 11.2.0 schedule

[Edward Cherlin]

At the end of your e-mail, you wrote

> Testing is much appreciated.

It sounds as if there is no formal testing process for Sugar on XOs. I
know that this is the case for packaging for various distributions. I
recently found out through my own testing of the release that Turtle
Blocks for Ubuntu Natty was packaged without an essential file,
tapalette.py.

I assume that it worked for the packager because the file was on his
computer from a previous installation or some such. We can't go on
like this. We need testing in known and repeatable environments, for
one thing, and we need to know who has done what.

I would like to see whether I can help with this situation, by
recruiting more testers, and setting up something more formal to make
sure that issues don't fall through cracks.

Where is the process from your point of view?

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 23:04, Chris Leonard  wrote:
>
> Forwarding to L10n list
>
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Daniel Drake 
> Date: Fri, May 13, 2011 at 12:38 PM
> Subject: Updated 11.2.0 schedule
> To: OLPC Devel 
>
>
> Hi,
>
> Due to various travel arrangements and movement on the XO-1.75 front,
> we have delayed the 11.2.0 release by a few weeks from its original
> plan (which would have already had us in feature freeze).
>
> We also have some stability concerns: the current development images
> have various regressions (mostly on the Sugar and activities side)
> compared to our previous stable release, and we may not be able to fix
> all of these in time for the release. The release notes will be as
> painfully true as needed in pointing out these issues. If the issues
> remain serious then deployments may wish to simply consider it as a
> preview for the release that follows, where we'll aim to improve on
> 11.2.0.
>
> The new schedule is:
>
> Bug-fixes only (feature freeze): May 23rd
> From this point onwards, only bugfixes are accepted, and the rate of
> change will be low
>
> Regression fixes only: June 20th
> From this point onwards, only regression fixes are accepted and the
> rate of change will hopefully be very low
>
> Release: July 18th
>
>
> Note that this gives about 1 week from today for any final feature
> work to be landed.
>
> Wiki updated:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/11.2.0/Release_plan
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/11.2.0
>
> Here is some further info about how the bug-fixing and
> regression-fixing stages will work:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Process/Stabilization
>
> Testing is much appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel
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Raspberry Pi (was Fwd: [Sur] linux system por $25)

[Edward Cherlin]

FYI. Anybody who would like to port Sugar to a $25 computer (requiring
only monitor, mouse, and keyboard) should contact Eben, and let us
know too.

-- Forwarded message --
From: Edward Cherlin 
Date: Sat, May 21, 2011 at 22:10
Subject: Re: [Sur] linux system por $25
To: Eben Upton 

On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 12:22, Eben Upton  wrote:
> Hi Edward
> Thanks for your mail, and apologies for the delay in replying. The
> devices should be available to the general public later in the year;
> I'll add you to our mailing list, and will keep you posted as we get
> closer to launch.

Thank you.

> We've heard of Sugar, but need to find out more about it. Do you think
> it's suitable for a machine with limited processing power and only
> 256MB of RAM?

That's what it was designed for.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specifications
AMD Geode 433 Mhz processor
256M RAM
Fedora Linux

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Getting_Started
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities

> Cheers
> Eben Upton
> Director, Raspberry Pi Foundation
>
> Follow us @Raspberry_Pi on Twitter
>
>
> On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Edward Cherlin  wrote:
>> Your Web site asks
>>
>>> Do you have open-source educational software we can use?
>>
>> The answer is Yes. Sugar education software runs on a variety of Linux
>> distributions, including Ubuntu. It is currently in the hands of more
>> than 2 million children.
>>
>>> We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer,
>>> for use in teaching computer programming to children.
>>
>> Sugar includes Python and Smalltalk (Etoys). One Laptop Per Child XO
>> computers also run Open Firmware, written in FORTH, and including the
>> complete FORTH development library, the editor, and an assembler. OFW
>> is available for systems  based on ARM processors.
>>
>> The Sugar Labs Replacing Textbooks project, which I started recently,
>> will include a variety of materials for teaching programming and
>> Computer Science, and for applying those languages to every school
>> subject. We have compiled a list of successful projects for teaching
>> programming in the elementary grades, including projects using Python,
>> Smalltalk, Logo, LISP, BASIC, and APL.
>>
>> The real question is one that Seymour Papert asked in 1970: Can we
>> design an environment in which children learn math and programming
>> languages as readily as they learn human languages, largely from each
>> other? Some of us think so, and we are working on it.
>>
>> I will be happy to answer further questions, or to direct you to those
>> who know more about some aspects of Sugar than I.
>>
>> -- Forwarded message --
>> From: Sean DALY 
>> Date: Fri, May 6, 2011 at 11:28
>> Subject: Re: [Sur] linux system por $25
>> To: "OLPC para usuarios, docentes, voluntarios y administradores"
>> 
>> Cc: Gleducar 
>>
>>
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2011-May/003273.html
>>
>>
>> On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Daniel Ajoy  wrote:
>>> linux system por $25
>>>
>>> http://www.raspberrypi.org/
>>> ___
>>> Lista olpc-Sur
>>> olpc-...@lists.laptop.org
>>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-sur


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Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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Re: quick Forth question

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 10:59, Daniel Drake  wrote:
> Can anyone help me with a tiny Forth script? Can never quite get my
> head around the language.

I once wrote pen plotter programs in FORTH for fractals, to test the
plotter mechanism. Hypnotic.

> I'm trying to set up an if-else based on whether a mfg tag exists (or
> whether writing a mfg tag succeeded or not)
>
> I'm trying:
>
>    add-tag ak 0 catch if 2drop ." Laptop already activated" cr then
>
> But, if ak already exists, it simply says:
>    Tagname already exists
> ...rather than executing my conditional code.

That isn't very FORTHish, to have the argument to add-tag come after.
Is that right?

Your description is incomplete, and looks incorrect. My guess is that
add-tag gives you the  Tagname already exists  message, and then FORTH
continues, executing your conditional when it gets to it, and dropping
two items from the stack. Please check.

Here is what we need in order to comment usefully:

Stack picture before starting.
Expected result of add-tag, with stack picture.
Expected result of ak, with stack picture. Is ak the address of a string?
We're OK about putting 0 on the stack.
Expected result of catch, with stack picture.

Once you have all of that, you may not need our help. You can compare
it with what actually happens by inserting stack display words.

> Also experimented with find-tag but couldn't figure it out.
>
> cheers,
> Daniel
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Re: Haiti OLPCs - some news

[Edward Cherlin]

Sounds good.

On the data entry, what medical software is in use?

Is anybody considering OpenMRS, which Zanmi Lasanté (Partners in
Health) promotes, or OpenVistA, free software based on the US
Veterans' Administration software?

Are people thinking about how to network from village to town to city
for such purposes?

Is there any thought about telemedicine using the camera, video chat,
and data acquisition functions of the XO?

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 18:50, Guylhem Aznar  wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Long time no see. So I've got news to all y'all volunteers who helped
> me raise dead XO to the Vodoo of Haiti :-)
>
> The machine are safely stored in vice director locker of the
> University Hospital of Martinique. First tests and OS (non sugar) -
> for now, work as expected.
> 6 terrain units were deployed in the hospital. They performed as
> planned (but wifi mesh - last minute mistake I made on a script)
>
> A group of infectiologists and administrators flew to Haiti 2 weeks
> ago. There, demos were given to various health programs, mostly
> focused around AIDS.
> I was told that many people loved the hardware- more so that my
> software, but never mind :-) They were glad to see a cheap machine
> suited to their terrain. And I'm always glad to give a hand.
>
> My project was about giving drug information to primary practitioners.
> But apparently, there's a strong interests in simply using the devices
> as data entries for outpatient clinics.
>
> It's an evolving process and I'm open to anything that can help
> people, as long as the units are not diverted into some obscure
> research program with very little benefits to the sick people.
>
> Soon, we should receive a visit of their team, (I will do my best to
> make pictures - I'm not in PR :-) during which I'll offer to adapt for
> free their existing software, if they can also put some of the XO
> loaded with drugs prescriptions, interactions, etc. to primary care
> doctors.
>
> Then finally the XO will be at their new home in Haiti !
>
> --
> Dr. Guylhem Aznar, MD PhD
>
> Unité d'Analyse Médico-Économique
> Service de Santé Publique et d'Économie de la Santé
> Pôle SPSSR
> CHU de Fort de France
> BP 632
> 97261 Fort De France Cedex
> Martinique, France
>
> Tel : 05 96 55 23 47
> Fax : 05 96 75 84 57
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-- 
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Re: New Synthetic Phonics Literacy Activity

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:03, Mike Dawson  wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> As many of the target areas for the XOs suffer from massive illiteracy
> problems, and some live away from where schools will be built during
> the time that they grow up and could benefit from a literacy learning
> activity using home schooling.
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/SynPhony

Excellent.

> Norbert Rennert has done work on a prototype Synthetic phonics based
> application that can pick out appropriate words from a list according
> to learner's levels and the phonics being stressed.  Then we have
> espeak that can handle text to speech.
>
> We can migrate this to using HTML 5 for it's database and built it as
> an offline application (which could then use any other source to
> update word lists etc).  We can then define a means to link words to
> other media such as images.
>
> We have no shortage of potential test beds here in Afghanistan that
> could benefit massively, illiteracy is at the heart of many problems
> here.  If we can support the mass production of literacy learning
> experiences then that could have a significant positive impact.
>
> Contributors both in terms of those involved in linguistics and
> literacy (we have people for Dari and Pashto) as well as those
> familiar with the involved technologies would be most appreciated.  I
> will myself be focusing on this and have reasonable experience with
> Javascript, SQL, etc.  We are working on a Dari version of espeak that
> is in prototype at the moment.

I will be happy to help in any way I can. I have worked with the
espeak developers on ideas for karaoke-style marking of the text being
read, and I can help document the Activity for teachers and other
stakeholders.

> Regards,
>
> -Mike
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Re: OLPC XO 1.5 overheating problems

[Edward Cherlin]

I don't know whether I can help, but I'm willing to try. I edited the
Geode manuals for National Semiconductor before they sold the product
line to AMD. The throttling and suspension mechanisms are quite
complicated, but the explanations seemed to make sufficient sense at
the time. Of course, they might have made more sense if I had had a
chip to practice on.

On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 8:19 AM, Ed McNierney  wrote:
> Tiago -
>
> Well, everyone gets to contribute something to thermal problems :-)
> But the CPU's the main source and also provides internal throttling
> mechanisms to manage it (along with the external heatspreader
> mechanisms, of course).  The A-phase boards were designed to get the
> thing up and running, and for A-phase machines (produced only in the
> dozens) it's completely OK to tell folks to do all kinds of funky
> things to keep them running.
>
> No, the FTL is integral to the microSD card itself, so we're not using
> (and don't need) an external FTL for it.
>
>        - Ed
>
>
> On Oct 3, 2009, at 10:56 AM, Tiago Marques wrote:
>
>> Hi Ed,
>>
>> I was wondering if it's related to the CPU or Northbridge. I said the
>> description was unclear to me because it didn't mention where the
>> overheating was from, or if you had already found the problem. Some
>> videos of pre production units were shown running with just a square
>> of thermal interface material acting as an heatspreader and I found
>> that odd, even for alpha level units, that Quanta was shipping them
>> back to you that way.
>>
>> Also, I'd like to ask something off topic(better to post another
>> mail?) but I couldn't find any description on the wiki about the flash
>> controller. Are you still using one - and if so which - or are you
>> just using the microSD card's FTL?
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Tiago Marques
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Ed McNierney  wrote:
>>> Tiago -
>>>
>>> Sure, but what kind of elaboration would you like?  These are pre-
>>> production
>>> machines and have an assortment of problems, this being one of
>>> them.  I
>>> think the description is pretty clear; if you have a question about
>>> it
>>> please let us know - thanks!
>>>
>>>        - Ed
>>>
>>>
>>> On Oct 3, 2009, at 10:13 AM, Tiago Marques wrote:
>>>
 Hi all,

 Hope this is the appropriate list to post this, I apologize if not.
 Please be kind to redirect me to the appropriate one if so.

 Referring to:

 "The B2 prototypes have shown a tendency to overheat. We are working
 on a more respectable solution than simply throttling back the
 processor. In the meantime, be aware that the laptop may begin to
 function erratically if it gets too hot. This usually manifests
 itself
 as problems reading/writing the internal SD card. "

 Can someone please elaborate on this?

 Best regards,
 Tiago Marques
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>>>
>>>
>
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Re: OFW access from linux

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 7:42 AM, Paul Fox  wrote:
> on the XO, openfirmware stays resident when linux runs, and is
> accessible via an API specified in arch/x86/kernel/ofw.c.  i've
> just pushed a commit to our 2.6.30 kernel branch that adds a
> sysrq hook (SysRq-y) for starting (returning to?) the resident
> OFW command line interface.  when invoked, you can do all the
> usual OFW peeking and poking, and even play pong.  (and, since
> linux is still active, you can royally trash your system if
> you're not careful.)
>
> there's no SysRq key on the XO keyboard, so you'll need to use a
> break on the serial console to invoke it, or, usually easier:
> "echo y > /proc/sysrq-trigger".  use "resume" from OFW to let
> linux run again.

Added to

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_undiscoverable
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Open_Firmware

Thanks.


http://wiki.olpc.org/go/Open_Firmware

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The undiscoverable

Thanks again.

> OFW itself prevents invocation on secure machines, so this
> only works when unlocked.

> paul
> =-
>  paul fox, p...@laptop.org
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The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] updates and testing SocialCalc on the Sugar Live CD

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Dan Bricklin wrote:
> Edward,
>
> Thanks for doing the testing. Here are some answers to some of the questions
> you asked or things you found undocumented.

Thanks. I believe that you are right in your comments below, that the
Open Document spec, manuals for other software, and your video will
enable us to create an excellent manual at FLOSSManuals.net. Would you
like to join us when we do the Book Sprint?

I am thinking about what we might add to the Help in SocialCalc,
allowing for the tradeoff between space and completeness. Adding links
to existing documentation will provide a sufficient backstop, but I
think that there are several places where just a few words will make
all the difference for beginning SocialCalc users, particularly for
harried teachers. I don't want to make them learn too much themselves,
or to have to tell children to rely too much on external resources.

I'm sure that we can find a suitable balance on these questions.

> The database functions, like all of the functions, are pretty much the same
> as the functions by the same name in Excel and many other spreadsheets (many
> going back to Lotus 1-2-3 and even sometimes VisiCalc). They are defined in
> the Open Document Format specification. The same is true of all of the
> financial functions. (There used to be an Open Formula specification, which
> I think got moved into Open Document Format. I coded the functions looking
> to the Open Formula specification.) The built-in SocialCalc doc does not
> provide more than the simple explanation for all functions to save space and
> since they are well documented with other spreadsheets.

Of course, our target users (students and teachers) do not have local
access to this other software. But we can put it into a manual.

>Most of the
> SocialCalc documentation is about what is special to SocialCalc. Also, the
> code itself documents what it does, including, with the financial functions,
> a reference to the Wikipedia entry that helped in their specification. I
> assumed that others can read that to produce appropriate written
> documentation.

As a mathematician and programmer, I can, if necessary.

> (I think there is a reported issue that SocialCalc's IF
> function only takes the 3 argument form, not the 2 argument form. It also
> evaluated all arguments unlike many other IF functions.)
>
> The toolbar buttons, including the two types of move and swap colors, as
> well as the sheet settings, names, and more are explained in a video I
> created. The 54 minute Flash video, created with Camtasia, goes over many of
> the features of the main SocialCalc engine that the Sugar version of
> SocialCalc is built upon. (For example, that version does not have the
> Sugar-specific graphing tab.) You can view the video at:
>
> http://www.peapodcast.com/sgi/socialtext/sctraining1/

Perfect. I'll report on that soon.

> Note that the value format specification language, used to define numeric
> formatting, is similar to that used in most spreadsheets, including Excel.

Right. I didn't have any trouble with it.

> You can learn much of it by looking at the samples already built into the
> product (set a format and the choose Custom to see the definition). This can
> be used when customizing the product for other locales to, for example, have
> different currency symbols and placement. Custom formats are demonstrated in
> the video.

I tried it in Cyrillic briefly without problems, but I cannot type
other currency symbols such as € or £ within Sugar. I will have to do
much more language and locale testing.

> Thanks again for taking time to work with SocialCalc so we can help provide
> this functionality around the world through this platform.
>
> -DanB
>
> Edward Cherlin wrote:
>
> I ran through all of the basic functions of SocialCalc, including
> every icon on every tab. I have tested some but not all of the 109
> functions provided, with good results so far. Although there are
> functions I could wish for, the only real deficiency I have found is
> in the documentation.
>
> I have created a page for elements of Sugar that children are not
> likely to discover on their own,
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_undiscoverable. I recommend it to
> developers who want to think about whether more of Sugar can be made
> discoverable, or whether we need to write lesson plans for the
> features that cannot be made obvious to the novice. I will put in a
> section for SocialCalc. These are not bugs in the sense of incorrect
> behavior or missing explanations, so I omit them here.
>
> Here is a summary of the other issues I have encountered.
>
> o The database functions are severely underdocumented. What database?
> What are databaserange, fieldname, criteriarange?

Re: [Sugar-devel] updates and testing SocialCalc on the Sugar Live CD

[Edward Cherlin]

I ran through all of the basic functions of SocialCalc, including
every icon on every tab. I have tested some but not all of the 109
functions provided, with good results so far. Although there are
functions I could wish for, the only real deficiency I have found is
in the documentation.

I have created a page for elements of Sugar that children are not
likely to discover on their own,
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/The_undiscoverable. I recommend it to
developers who want to think about whether more of Sugar can be made
discoverable, or whether we need to write lesson plans for the
features that cannot be made obvious to the novice. I will put in a
section for SocialCalc. These are not bugs in the sense of incorrect
behavior or missing explanations, so I omit them here.

Here is a summary of the other issues I have encountered.

o The database functions are severely underdocumented. What database?
What are databaserange, fieldname, criteriarange?

o Where does Paste Formats get its formats from?

o What does Swap Colors do?

o The financial and statistical function definitions in the Help might
be clear to one who uses other spreadsheets a lot, but certainly are
not to a beginner.

o More explanation is needed on angles in degrees and radians.

o I understand Move From and Move Paste, but not Move Insert.

o I see how to set names, but not what to use them for or how.

o I don't see the Sheet setting control on the Format tab that the
Help refers to.

o I found the OK and Sort... buttons on the Sort tab confusing. It has
since become clear to me. Perhaps OK should be renamed Set Range.

Not bad for a beta.

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Manusheel Gupta wrote:
> Dear community members,
>
> We are preparing for the next release of SocialCalc on Sugar. Localization
> infrastructure, canonicalization of the save format and collaboration will
> be the key features available in the next release. We are also looking
> forward to develop interoperability between SocialCalc format and a number
> of other spreadsheet formats like .wk3/.wk4/csv/excel/open office
> spreadsheet. We have recently received a number of requests on developing
> interoperability between SocialCalc and .wk3/.wk4 format, which has been a
> challenging problem to work on. Hope to get this feature ready before the
> next release.
>
> Lately, I have been testing SocialCalc on the Sugar Live CD, and have run
> into issues. I can't seem to get SocialCalc to start.  I fired up the Sugar
> LiveCD, and opened up the USB icon in my journal.  I can see the file
> SocialCalc.xo on my USB stick.  When I click on it, I get a start button,
> but then nothing happens.  Below is a gears image, which starts something
> that looks like a developer interface. Not sure, where I have been going
> wrong. Any help on this issue is highly appreciated.
>
> Please visit the SocialCalc on Sugar page at
> http://seeta.in/j/products-and-services/socialcalc-on-sugar.html. The
> activity is available for download both from the SEETA website
> (http://seeta.in) and from activities.sugarlabs.org. If you have any
> questions, or would like to add suggestions/comments/feature requests,
> please do so here.
>
> Thank you for your continued support.
>
> Regards,
>
> Manu
>
> ___
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> sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
>



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Re: [Sugar-devel] updates and testing SocialCalc on the Sugar Live CD

[Edward Cherlin]

I downloaded SocialCalc from the Activities subdomain to the journal,
where it installed and ran with no difficulty. I will give it some
serious testing soon.

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Manusheel Gupta wrote:
> Dear community members,
>
> We are preparing for the next release of SocialCalc on Sugar. Localization
> infrastructure, canonicalization of the save format and collaboration will
> be the key features available in the next release. We are also looking
> forward to develop interoperability between SocialCalc format and a number
> of other spreadsheet formats like .wk3/.wk4/csv/excel/open office
> spreadsheet. We have recently received a number of requests on developing
> interoperability between SocialCalc and .wk3/.wk4 format, which has been a
> challenging problem to work on. Hope to get this feature ready before the
> next release.
>
> Lately, I have been testing SocialCalc on the Sugar Live CD, and have run
> into issues. I can't seem to get SocialCalc to start.  I fired up the Sugar
> LiveCD, and opened up the USB icon in my journal.  I can see the file
> SocialCalc.xo on my USB stick.  When I click on it, I get a start button,
> but then nothing happens.  Below is a gears image, which starts something
> that looks like a developer interface. Not sure, where I have been going
> wrong. Any help on this issue is highly appreciated.

Have you tried copying it to the journal and then bringing up the menu?

> Please visit the SocialCalc on Sugar page at
> http://seeta.in/j/products-and-services/socialcalc-on-sugar.html. The
> activity is available for download both from the SEETA website
> (http://seeta.in) and from activities.sugarlabs.org. If you have any
> questions, or would like to add suggestions/comments/feature requests,
> please do so here.
>
> Thank you for your continued support.
>
> Regards,
>
> Manu
>
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> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
>



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Re: [IAEP] SHIRT SLOGAN VOTE! "Class Acts" Poster! OLPC/Sugar Community Book Sprint (Sept 6-11, Washington DC)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 1:12 PM, Holt wrote:
> Please vote for the back of our T-Shirt -- Mike Lee's image will be on the
> front of the shirt:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/3865753915/in/photostream/
> But we need your help for the back!!!
>
> Proposal #1 (yes the "constuctionist assessment" parody's intentional!)
>
> NO NINO LEFT BEHIND

That's NIÑO. But no. It brings up too many bad memories for me.

> Proposal #2 (from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Five_principles )
>
> CHILD OWNERSHIP
> LOW AGES
> SATURATION
> CONNECTION
> FREE AND OPEN SOURCE

Needs too much explanation.

> Proposal #3
>
> (Caryl Bigenho's attached PDF, or close simulacra you provide!)

Yes! XOs in two colors each, please. Or one giant two-color XØ over
the entire text.

> Proposal #4, another fantastic oldtime OLPC joke (see
> http://rt.laptop.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=4519 and RT4424, or better yet
> ask a Supportive friend ;)
>
> MONGO HAPPY NOW

Please leave inside jokes inside. Mongo confused now.

> Please vote BY midnight latest -- publicly or privately is fine -- FYI I am
> paying for these T shirts with my own money, will be asking for a very small
> payment (about $6 covering half the costs if you want a shirt) and more
> important plz thank ALL the silent volunteers silently working their butts
> off on DC logistics around Sept 6-11's http://wiki.laptop.org/go/ClassActs
> :)
>
> ___
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> i...@lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>



-- 
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Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name, and
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Re: [Sugar-devel] erasing the journal and config

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 8:17 AM, Daniel Drake wrote:
> 2009/8/27 Sameer Verma :
>> We have a lending library at SFSU, ready to go, but we need to have a
>> way to erase the config and journal every time the XO comes back from
>> a borrower.

> In my opinion, this is silly. Teach them how to run a script, teach
> them how to reflash or tell them to stop being difficult.
>
> As for the borrowers end - this is sillier. What are you expecting the
> borrowers to actually do with their XOs? It's for generating
> contributions to the community, right?

It is a fundamental principle of Customer Relations that you don't
tell users what they want to do with your product. If people have a
security concern, you deal with it or risk losing them and their
friends etc. permanently.

If you need to be convinced, ask any librarian about National Security
letters demanding a patron's reading list. You will get an earful.

> Daniel
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Re: The Next Wave of Activity Sharing

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 12:01 PM, Joshua Eddy wrote:
> Sugar Labs DC would like to propose an exciting new direction for the
> development of the Sugar interface.  It is our belief that in the
> spirit of sharing and collaboration, Sugar activities should be
> publishable to the Internet, just as they are in Scratch
> (http://scratch.mit.edu/), another children's software suite.

+1

I am working on math lessons in Turtle Art at the moment, and was just
wishing for this. Right now it is very clumsy to export Journal
entries.

-- 
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Re: is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Carlos Nazareno wrote:
> Hey all.
>
> Check out the latest piece:
> Negroponte Sees Sugar As OLPC's Biggest Mistake
> http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/20/1628228
>
> (The title is bad FUD from OLPC News -- it's actually Negroponte
> saying that Sugar should have been run as an application instead of
> the main OS layer/frontend and not Sugar itself as the mistake.)

Most of Slashdot is FUD, even if the headline is correct. I have
replied to several such stories about OLPC/Sugar and about other
important topics, on Slashdot and elsewhere, and you are all free to
quote me on this one. I've given up on Slashdot, since all but one of
my factual posts has been modded down to 1. I conclude that Slashdot
readers, like many in the political world, don't want to be distracted
from setting the world straight by facts.

http://xkcd.com/386/ Duty Calls

site:slashdot.org mokurai
#
Slashdot | One Laptop Per Child and Intel Join Forces
Re:OLPC is a project - Classmate is a device... by jabuzz (Score:2)
Friday July 13, @03:55PM; Re:OLPC is a project - Classmate is a
device... by Mokurai ...
hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/07/07/13/1646218.shtml - Cached - Similar -
#
Slashdot | Attempts to Count Linux Users Remain Pointless
Re:Start counting here by vimh42 (Score:1) Monday July 09, @12:10PM;
Re:Start counting here by Mokurai (Score:1) Friday July 13, @05:22PM
...
linux.slashdot.org/linux/07/07/09/1424259.shtml - Cached - Similar -
#
Slashdot | Open Voting at OSCON
Re:Modest proposal: Run it on Diebold's hardware? by Mokurai (Score:1)
Thursday April 22 2004, @06:05PM. Re:Modest proposal: Run it on
Diebold's hardware? ...
slashdot.org/articles/04/04/22/1913223.shtml - Similar -
#
Slashdot | President Of India Advocates OSS
... @10:18PM; OSS in home of Simputer by Mokurai (Score:1) Thursday
May 29 2003, @11:05PM; I2IT and IIIT by shamir_k (Score:1) Friday May
30 2003, @12:40AM ...
slashdot.org/articles/03/05/29/1226247.shtml?tid... - Cached - Similar -
#
Slashdot | Why Unicode Won't Work on the Internet
... (Score:1) Saturday June 09 2001, @01:04PM; Unicode character
allocation (was Unicode's reply) by Mokurai (Score:1) Thursday June 07
2001, @03:19PM ...
slashdot.org/mainpage/01/05/20/1431230.shtml?tid=95 - Cached - Similar -
#
Slashdot | Celebrating Spam's Ten-Year Anniversary
Re:The only solution to spam by Mokurai (Score:1) Friday March 05
2004, @03:03PM. when it's 20 by va3atc (Score:2) Friday March 05 2004,
@01:11PM ...
slashdot.org/articles/04/03/05/160229.shtml - Cached - Similar -
#
Slashdot | Diebold Voting Systems Grossly Insecure
Diebold Voting Systems Grossly Insecure -- article related to Bug and
United States.
it.slashdot.org/it/03/07/24/153258.shtml - Similar -

> Now everytime there's a piece on OLPC at Slashdot.org, it seems 30% of
> the comment traffic is composed of bashing OLPC for caving in to
> Microsoft and Windows.
>
> Now AFAIK, there's little to no Windows work being done in-house by
> the OLPC team, and it's all or mostly at Microsoft's side that the
> work's being done.
>
> And AFAIK, the deal is that "you buy the machine, you're free to run
> any software you want on it. We're not stopping you from running
> Windows even though we're pushing Sugar."
>
> In this case, OLPC is not really in bed with MS but is more of
> allowing MS to run Windows on the OLPC the same way users can install
> any software they want on their PCs.
>
> Am I correct in this assumption?
>
> I'm sick and tired of the this OLPC-MS FUD (Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt) on
> Slashdot (one of the highest-traffic websites, so high that getting
> linked on the frontpage is like being DDOSed) and it would be great if
> the record on this could be set straight so that the MS FUD inanity on
> Slashdot can be ended as it's destroying the image of OLPC.
>
> All the best,
>
> -Naz
>
> --
> carlos nazareno
> http://twitter.com/object404
> http://www.object404.com
> --
> user group manager
> phlashers: philippine flash actionscripters
> adobe flash/flex/air community
> http://www.phlashers.com
> --
> interactive media specialist
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> http://www.zengraffiti.com
> --
> "if you don't like the way the world is running,
> then change it instead of just complaining."
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>



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And Children are my nation.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Journal and filenames on USB disks - more leases.sig problems

[Edward Cherlin]

Better way: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities#Midnight_Commander

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Martin
Langhoff wrote:
> I am trying to get leases.sig from the XS to the USB stick. On 8.2.x,
> Browse.xo saves the file as
>
>   File leases.sig from http://...
>
> ... two possible ways to move next.
>
> Copy and rename
>
>  1 - Insert (fat-formatted) USB stick, once mounted copy the file to
> the USB stick. Check on Terminal indicates that the file has the LFN
> we expect ("File leases.sig from http://...";).
>
>  2 - Switch to the 'USB disk' view of the Journal.
>
>  3 - Rename the file to leases.sig . A check from the commandline
> shows that the file has not been renamed. Oops?. The Journal only
> renames the metadata. Bug?
>
> Rename and copy
>
>  1 - Rename the file in the Journal to 'leases.sig'
>
>  2 - Insert (fat-formatted) USB stick, once mounted copy the file to
> the USB stick. The Journal reports that the file is called lease.sig.
> From terminal I can see that the file is called lease.sig.txt . Bug?
>
> Is there a better way to do this?
>
> cheers,
>
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langh...@gmail.com
>  mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Chris Ball  wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   > What is the command to start Sugar in 20090519.iso? There is no
>   > 'sugar-emulator', and 'sugar' fails.
>
> On the first login screen, choose "Sugar" instead of "GNOME" on the
> Session dropdown at the bottom of the screen.

Got it. So obvious once you know. [sigh] I guess the menu is just in
alphabetical order.

Thanks. I'll add this to the Wiki.

>   > Is there an installer on the image? It doesn't make itself
>   > obvious.
>
> No, better to just "copy-nand u:\the.img".  We'll work on making
> installed rather than live images for the NAND as one of the first
> build system priorities.

I was just wondering whether someone could install it in regular Fedora.

> - Chris.
> --
> Chris Ball   
>



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Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.

[Edward Cherlin]

What is the command to start Sugar in 20090519.iso? There is no
'sugar-emulator', and 'sugar' fails.

Is their an installer on the image? It doesn't make itself obvious.

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Chris Ball  wrote:
> We have some good news:  OLPC has decided to base its software release
> for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11.  Unlike previous releases, we
> plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving
> users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead.
> (This will mostly be useful for older kids in high school.)
>
> I'm particularly happy about this plan because it will allow us to
> catch up with the awesome work present in the Sugar community's most
> recent release, Sugar 0.84, as well as merging the latest Fedora work
> and including GNOME into the mix for the first time.  The new machines
> will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough room for both
> environments at once.
>
> We think we'll need to use our own kernel and initrd, but the other
> base packages we expect to need are present in Fedora already,
> including Sugar; in fact, we already have an F11+Sugar+GNOME build
> for the XO-1 using pure Fedora packages.  That build will get better
> as a result of this work (although OLPC's focus will be on getting
> the XO-1.5 running) and it will form the basis for the XO-1.5 build.
>
> If you're interested in contributing, we'd certainly love your help,
> and you can find us on the fedora-olpc mailing list¹, and freenode
> IRC's #fedora-olpc channel.  Our existing F11 build images for the
> XO-1 are here², and we'll soon begin publishing images for the XO-1.5
> too.  XO-1.5 beta machines will start to be manufactured over the next
> few months, and will be available to contributors as part of our
> Contributors Program³ once the hardware's up and running.
>
> Finally, thanks are due to the volunteer Fedora packagers and testers
> who helped us get to the point of being able to commit to Fedora 11
> for this new build, in particular: Fabian Affolter, Kushal Das, Greg
> DeKoenigsberg, Martin Dengler, Scott Douglass, Sebastian Dziallas,
> Mikus Grinbergs, Bryan Kearney, Gary C. Martin, Steven M. Parrish,
> and Peter Robinson.  Thanks!
>
> - Chris, for the OLPC techteam.
>
> ¹:  http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-olpc-list
> ²:  http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/
> ³:  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program
>
> --
> Chris Ball   
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Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 11:21 AM, Peter Robinson  wrote:
>>> If you're interested in contributing, we'd certainly love your help,
>>> and you can find us on the fedora-olpc mailing list¹, and freenode
>>> IRC's #fedora-olpc channel.  Our existing F11 build images for the
>>> XO-1 are here², and we'll soon begin publishing images for the XO-1.5
>>> too.  XO-1.5 beta machines will start to be manufactured over the next
>>> few months, and will be available to contributors as part of our
>>> Contributors Program³ once the hardware's up and running.
>>
>> In the meantime, are there instructions anywhere for setting up these
>> builds in VirtualBox?
>
> probably the  best place to start is the sugar on a stick liveCD or
> Chris's rawhide-xo builds. In a week or so (May 25th from memory)
> Fedora 11 will be out and an install of that with the gnome and sugar
> desktops installed will be a good start.
>
> Peter

On checking further at http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/, I saw
the instructions for qemu,

sudo qemu-kvm -cdrom 20090217.iso

so I can start in VirtualBox in the same way.

-- 
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Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Chris Ball  wrote:
> We have some good news:  OLPC has decided to base its software release
> for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11.  Unlike previous releases, we
> plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving
> users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead.
> (This will mostly be useful for older kids in high school.)

We shall see at what age it becomes practical to introduce children to
Gnome. I'm looking forward to the experiment.

> I'm particularly happy about this plan because it will allow us to
> catch up with the awesome work present in the Sugar community's most
> recent release, Sugar 0.84, as well as merging the latest Fedora work
> and including GNOME into the mix for the first time.  The new machines
> will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough room for both
> environments at once.
>
> We think we'll need to use our own kernel and initrd, but the other
> base packages we expect to need are present in Fedora already,
> including Sugar; in fact, we already have an F11+Sugar+GNOME build
> for the XO-1 using pure Fedora packages.  That build will get better
> as a result of this work (although OLPC's focus will be on getting
> the XO-1.5 running) and it will form the basis for the XO-1.5 build.
>
> If you're interested in contributing, we'd certainly love your help,
> and you can find us on the fedora-olpc mailing list¹, and freenode
> IRC's #fedora-olpc channel.  Our existing F11 build images for the
> XO-1 are here², and we'll soon begin publishing images for the XO-1.5
> too.  XO-1.5 beta machines will start to be manufactured over the next
> few months, and will be available to contributors as part of our
> Contributors Program³ once the hardware's up and running.

In the meantime, are there instructions anywhere for setting up these
builds in VirtualBox?

> Finally, thanks are due to the volunteer Fedora packagers and testers
> who helped us get to the point of being able to commit to Fedora 11
> for this new build, in particular: Fabian Affolter, Kushal Das, Greg
> DeKoenigsberg, Martin Dengler, Scott Douglass, Sebastian Dziallas,
> Mikus Grinbergs, Bryan Kearney, Gary C. Martin, Steven M. Parrish,
> and Peter Robinson.  Thanks!

+1

> - Chris, for the OLPC techteam.
>
> ¹:  http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-olpc-list
> ²:  http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/
> ³:  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program
>
> --
> Chris Ball   
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Re: from Peru, sugar in DEBIAN

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 5:17 PM, OLPC Puno  wrote:
> My name is Sdenka from Puno Peru, since one month we are using Debian at
> Glorioso San Carlos High School in PERU. We installed the sugar and 10
> activities including in Debian packages, then added ETOYS, SCRATCH AND
> LOGOTURTLE.
>
> I need the other activities' source code to compile in Debian to use and
> test them with teenagers students this year. Our goal is testing and
> then use Debian in elementary school which didn't receive LAPTOP XO, but
> like to use the wonderful activities FOR EDUCATION.

Jonas Smedegaard is working on packaging Sugar activities for Debian,
and would be one of your best resources. In order to help you most
effectively, I would need to know something more about what you would
like to do. You can compile and run Sugar activities in several
different ways. If Sugar in jhbuild or in a virtual machine image will
work for you, these resources will help.

o http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Jhbuild

o http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Xo-get

o http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick

o http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Image_files

o http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/QEMU

Any information you can give on results of compiling, or on packaging,
or testing, will be very helpful.

> Thanks in advance for your reply,
>
>
> SDENKA
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Re: [Grassroots-l] OLPC Project

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 8:37 PM, Angule Gabriel  wrote:
>
> Hello
>
> iEARN Kenya has interest in this project and would do with as many laptops as 
> you would practically be able to provide in its endeavour to initiate the ICT 
> integration in education programme within Kenyan schools.

Similarly Earth Treasury, OneVillage Foundation Kenya and Asante
Foundation are interested in setting up laptop projects in Maasai
schools and in other areas.

> We would like to start with some schools in Western Kenya then move on after 
> getting the necessary lessons.
>
> We were impreesed with the report from Mali.
>
> Are able to put us on?
>
> Regards
>
>
> Angule Gabriel
> iEARN Kenya Representative
>
>
>
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Another Linux in education

[Edward Cherlin]

Here is another needed port of Sugar.

http://itschool.gov.in/otherprograms.php#6

The Kerala IT Education Department believes that sharing is an
important virtue. However, sharing proprietary software would be a
violation of the End User. Building collaboration and sharing
practices are essential factors for the well being of societies and
proprietary software often denies that. Against the odds that
Proprietary software are user friendly, the effort of the Project saw
educational community in Kerala accepting open source technology. Its
own GNU\Linux supporting mechanism and a GNU\Linux resource center to
clarify all the queries in operational and software requirement issues
and there is constant interaction among these sections is an
advantage.

In the case of Project, the free software platform is i...@school
GNU\Linux, a free version of operating system was indigenously
developed in association with free software foundation. The open
source materials developed/used by the Project includes
√ i...@school GNU\ Linux- Free software operating system which is now
used in entire schools in Kerala

This distribution does not seem to have a site of its own, but there
is a fair amount going on around it. It is based on Debian, and was
started in 2006.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8687173118.html

Indian schools to use homebrew Debian distro
Sep. 26, 2006

Earlier this month we learned via an AP story that the southern Indian
state of Kerela is in the process of migrating all computers in its
12,500 high schools from Windows to Linux. Today, DesktopLinux.com
learned what distribution they plan to use: a homegrown,
Debian-offshoot dubbed "i...@school GNU/Linux."

#
Help Desk - HelpDesk
Jan 27, 2009 ... Information on i...@school GNU/Linux 2.0 - 2006 · Free
Software Business Directory. Join the support mailing list for School
GNU/Linux ...
support.space-kerala.org/ - 16k - Cached - Similar pages -
#
School GNU Linux Tips - HelpDesk
Aug 21, 2007 ... root (hd0, Press double tab , then it shows all
partion in that disk, find out linux partition number which is the
line containing ext2fs ...
support.space-kerala.org/wiki/index.php/School_GNU_Linux_Tips - 21k -
Cached - Similar pages -
More results from support.space-kerala.org »
#
Index of /downloads
it-at-school-gnu-linux-base-2.6.21.iso 241M - [DIR]
it-at-school-gnu-linux-base-2.6.21.iso.md5 1K - README.html 15K - ...
www.edugrid.ac.in/webfolder/download/schoolGnu/slgnu.html - 2k -
Cached - Similar pages -
#
Education Grid
This Education Grid Portal is provided as a platform for the
educational community to support generation and sharing of education
resources across the ...
www.edugrid.ac.in/ - 7k - Cached - Similar pages -
#
[School-GNU-Linux] i...@school GNU/Linux goes online - schoolgnu ...
Aug 17, 2006 ... Free Software, Free Society 
For Tips and Tricks on School GNU/Linux visit
http://support.space-kerala.org ...
www.freelists.org/post/schoolgnu/ITSchool-GNULinux-goes-online - 6k -
Cached - Similar pages -
# [PDF]
IT SCHOOL GNU LINUX INSTALLATION GUIDE
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
IT SCHOOL GNU LINUX INSTALLATION GUIDE. 1. First Boot Device CD rom
B¡n amänb tijw sF.Sn kvIqÄ áq/en\Ivkv kn.Un C«v {]hÀ¯nnv XpS§pI. AtmÄ
Xmsg ...
www.educationkerala.org/Data/pdf/installation_gnu_linux_pdf.pdf -
Similar pages -
#
Request your i...@school GNU Linux CD from Zyxware | Zyxware ...
We have been getting good response from the Linux community regarding
the new RequestCD service that we have started recently. We are happy
to inform all ...
www.zyxware.com/articles/2008/01/08/request-your-itschool-gnu-linux-cd-from-zyxware
- 23k - Cached - Similar pages -
#
LTSP for i...@school GNU/Linux: msg#00043 org.fsf.india.fsf-friends
LTSP for i...@school GNU/Li - Find Help in our org.fsf.india.fsf-friends Forum.
osdir.com/ml/org.fsf.india.fsf-friends/2005-11/msg00043.html - 23k -
Cached - Similar pages -
#
[Fsf-friends] LTSP for i...@school GNU/Linux
Hi all, LTSP for IT at SCHOOL GNU/Linux We have got the HCL winbee
thin client setup made working on customozed Debian installation for
IT at SCHOOL. ...
mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2005-November/003729.html - 5k -
Cached - Similar pages -
#
The Innovation Lover » i...@school GNU/Linux
Jul 18, 2006 ... Today, I got some time to play with i...@school
GNU/Linux which is distributed all schools in kerala as a part of
i...@school. ...
www.sarathlakshman.info/2006/07/18/itschool-gnulinux/ - 19k -


And there's more where that came from.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6309151740.html
Related Stories:

* South Africa may migrate 14,000 Windows desktops to Linux
* Federal IT managers increasingly considering Linux, says panel
* Swiss government switches 3,000 systems to Linux
* Linspire offers to replace Microsoft in South Korea
* Open Source worthy of "serious consideration" by schools, UK
agency advises
* Chilean government moves to Linux in high schools

Re: [Sugar-devel] instructions for flashing SoaS on a XO

[Edward Cherlin]

2009/3/6 Wade Brainerd :
> Glad to hear it works, I'm going to try it this weekend on my XO.
> I wonder if we could get the release team to execute these steps
> automatically for each release, and then make .img files available on
> downloads.sugarlabs.org along with the .iso files?

+1 I have also asked for that.

> That would skip a lot of
> potential mistakes that users might make, and would lower the barrier to
> entry (e.g. no Fedora or Ubuntu machine req).
> The same goes for .vmdk files, I would love to have .vmdk files created
> using http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick_VirtualBox/Preparing_a_disk_image available
> for each snapshot.

+1 also.

> Regards,
> Wade
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 4:42 PM, Walter Bender 
> wrote:
>>
>> I tried it (from Ubuntu instead of F10) and it seems to work
>> "flawlessly"!! I've documented what I did in the wiki:
>>
>> http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Installation/OLPC
>>
>> -walter
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Tomeu Vizoso  wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > below are some instructions for flashing the last Sugar on a Stick
>> > image (containing Sugar 0.84) on a XO (provided you have a developer
>> > key).
>> >
>> > Could someone volunteer to test and wikify them?
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> >
>> > Tomeu
>> >
>> > ---
>> >
>> > on a F10 system:
>> >
>> > $ sudo yum -y install crcimage mtd-utils
>> > $ wget http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/livecd-iso-to-xo.sh
>> > $ wget
>> > http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/1/Soas-200903051021.iso
>> > $ sudo sh livecd-iso-to-xo.sh Soas-200903051021.iso
>> > Soas-200903051021.img
>> >
>> > and then copy Soas-200903051021.img and Soas-200903051021.crc to a usb
>> > stick
>> >
>> > on the XO, boot with the usb stick plugged in and get into OFW, then
>> > type the following commands
>> >
>> > ok disable-security
>> > ok copy-nand u:\Soas-200903051021.img
>> >
>> > then the XO will reboot and you should get into Sugar.
>> > ___
>> > Sugar-devel mailing list
>> > sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
>> > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
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>> Sugar Labs
>> http://www.sugarlabs.org
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>
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eBook controls (was Re: rotate button sucks on the XO)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Eben Eliason  wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 6:43 PM,   wrote:
>> On Sun, 1 Mar 2009, Eben Eliason wrote:
>>
>> second, you may want to use the keys for something else and not dedicate
>> them to moving the mouse around.

For example, next page, previous page, front matter (cover or ToC),
back matter (index, notes, references). This does not give us a
convenient way to get back to a page we just left, which would
normally be done with on-screen controls.
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Re: Price point plus sales to individuals

[Edward Cherlin]

2009/2/18 Robert D. Fadel :
>
> On Feb 18, 2009 at 10:24 PM, John Watlington wrote:
>
>>I don't see how a non-profit can do this, as requires financing at
>>risk, and
>>staffing for uncertain demand.    Let me know when you have the capital.
>
> Absolutely true and I'm not sure the capital would be enough. Its difficult
> to imagine OLPC entering a retail channel, directly or indirectly.

We aren't talking about retail at this point. The idea is to support
schools, museums, and the like to get 30 or more each.

Eventually I would like to see GiveOneGetOne revived, but not with the
abysmal marketing we saw last time. OLPC is one of the great brands,
if managed appropriately.

> Perhaps I
> have misunderstood the intent but thats what it seems like when we talk
> about individuals buying small volumes, perhaps simply to tinker with a cool
> machine.

I am working with The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose CA, which
wants 50 for a lab exhibit where school classes could get a working
demo and a peek at software in development. Other museums such as the
Exploratorium and Zeum in San Francisco and the MIT Museum have
expressed interest in creating a variety of exhibits. It's a cool
machine, but they want to use it, not tinker with it.

We also want to support home-schooling groups and other small trials.

Another reason for this is to educate the public and to create the
political will to get XOs into US schools, and to get the US to fund
XOs in developing countries.

> In the immediate future I don't see overwhelming evidence that OLPC should
> devote resources to satisfy every volume demand in every channel. The outcry
> over discontinuing Change The World was far greater than the willingness of
> people to put up money.

I will see what I can do. There is interest in funding a program such
as I have outlined, which is quite different from OLPC's program.

> Very often those willing to pay were small-volume
> resellers.
>
> OLPC is better off focused on its engineering, advocacy and implementation
> efforts AND supporting accompanying networks of olpc-phile communities.
> Running an effective developer program is fundamental to all the above.

So what is this nonsense about OLPCorps?

> r.

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Re: Price point plus sales to individuals

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 6:37 PM, Mitch Bradley  wrote:
> Okay, so those of you who are keen on there being a way for individuals
> to buy XOs at $2xx dollars should place a volume order, set up a web
> site, and start raking in the dough.

Earth Treasury has wanted to do that for more than a year, although
"raking in the dough" was not part of the vision. It would be hard
work for a thin margin at the best. It has not been possible, for
several reasons.

o Initially, it was cash in advance with no delivery date. Sixty days
later, we would get a date within the next year. So delivery within
three months is a great improvement.

o We never got the same terms twice when we asked.

o We didn't have and couldn't get the financing.

o GiveMany/Save the World for orders of 100 or 1,000 units was cancelled.

I will now assume some fudge factors that can be replaced with real
numbers with some research. So we can say that we can order 10,000
units @ $200 and change, or $2 million+. There is a volunteer support
gang, which we assume we can work with. Amazon is willing to handle
fulfillment, in principle, if OLPC asks nicely, but only if we can
assure delivery of orders within a month. That means we have to place
our order at least two months before we can start selling.

I will also suppose that we can get firm terms so that we can present
a real plan to any potential funding source. Then it turns out that we
are able to begin the discussion with several possible sources, and we
have in fact started a discussion, and will start others.

This is not to say that we have a full business plan, and we certainly
don't have funding lined up, but we are in the range where we can
discuss the possibility. So if anybody wants to help write the details
of a business plan and some funding applications (commercial or
non-profit).

The plan also has to include setting up paid support services for
buyers to deal with necessary infrastructure, training, developing
teaching materials, and the like. We have started the Digital Textbook
project with various partners, and we have a good idea where we can
get the other partners needed.

> Obviously you guys know something about making a few bucks per machine
> that has eluded the OLPC organization, so go for it.  As the old canard
> says, put your money where you mouth is.

I'll have to see if I can get someone who actually has money to do
that. I'll let you know.

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Re: Journal empty in Soas-200902231225 and what is Soas-200902241809.iso in snapshots/2/ ?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Ton van Overbeek  wrote:
> When trying out Soas-200902231225 the journal stays empty.
> Anybody else seen this ?

This is true in several versions of Sugar, including Ubuntu packages.
Jonas Smedegård has made a patch for it, available from

http://debian.jones.dk/ sid sugar

> Ton van Overbeek
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Re: power consumption after shutdown

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Chris Ball  wrote:
> Hi,
>
>   > by default the wireless card remains alive to participate in a
>   > potential mesh network, disabling wireless should give you a lot
>   > more time.
>
> You're thinking of sleep mode, not the full shutdown that Mikus is doing.

That's not how I learned it. The wireless was designed to remain
active when everything else was off, in order to support mesh
networking throughout a community. However, I don't see any
measurements for that, although the wireless chip draws less than a
watt. Perhaps someone would be willing to add it to

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_power_draw

> - Chris.
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Re: AMD to stop working on Geodes (Carlos Nazareno)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 8:48 PM, Jordan Crouse  wrote:
> Edward Cherlin wrote:
>
>> National Semiconductor, which bought the line from Cyrix. I edited
>> several of the pin- and register-level manuals for various chips for
>> them more than ten years ago, and updates of my work are still online
>> on the AMD Web site. OLPC has educated AMD on how to use the
>> power-management registers to do things that nobody previously knew
>> were possible.
>
> AMD may have made some odd decisions over the years, but they don't deserve
> the kicking they are getting.  AMD gave OLPC unprecedented access to the
> combined software and hardware expertise for the Geode - AMD didn't have to
> be so open and OLPC didn't ask for it. The AMD engineers (and there were
> many, many more than I) worked hand in hand with the OLPC designers from the
> beginning, long before virtually everybody on this mailing list or in the
> IRC room had jumped on the bandwagon.  I was fortunate to be working with
> brilliant developers such as Mark and Mitch who were able to read datasheets
> and ask interesting qeustions, and they were fortunate to be able to have a
> nearly direct connection to the silicon designers that designed the part.
>
> AMD and OLPC educated each other

My point. I took it as obvious that AMD had to teach OLPC about the
Geode processors, and commented that OLPC also found some other things
in addition to what they were taught.

> - and the result was arguably the most open
> processor in history on one side, and a little green machine on the other.
>  So I take exception to the idea that AMD was the bumbling fool in this
> partnership -

Which is not what I said. I know something about combinatory
mathematics, and a good deal about the definitions of the Geode
registers, and I think it would have been astounding if OLPC had not
found combinations and sequences with new uses. I am also well aware
that AMD contributed greatly to the design of the XO, as did Red Hat
and Quanta. I am also aware that power management design and
implementation is nowhere near finished.

> that is an unfair characterization, and an insult to the AMD
> engineers that spent a lot of hours reviewing schematics, looking at USB
> debug traces and writing code - much of which is still running on the system
> to this day.
>
> Jordan

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Re: AMD to stop working on Geodes

[Edward Cherlin]

2009/1/27 Benjamin M. Schwartz :
> Carlos Nazareno wrote:
>> Do ARM processors do these things better than anything else on the
>> market right now? but then you lose the X86 compatibility and this
>> probably breaks things for cross-platform upstream contributions for
>> any deved/researched write-once-run-many apps/projects. (correct me if
>> I'm wrong, am just speculating because I'm not a CE and as well-versed
>> with computer architecture)
>
> Sugar has been tested on both x86 and ARM [1].

How about the XScale version of the ARM architecture? Is anybody
working on that? We need it for the Encore Mobilis port, on Montavista
Linux.

It would be hilarious to me if the XO-2 had an XScale processor, and
Microsoft suddenly had to port Windows XP to it in order to stay in th
game. :-Þ

> I expect it would run
> perfectly on MIPS, PPC, SPARC, Itanium, Alpha...  Linux runs on just about
> every major architecture, and I expect the same of just about any
> Linux-based system.

None of the Geode-specific power management code would work, of
course, but that's kernel-level stuff. It doesn't go into the .xo
bundles or the distro-specific packages.

> I'm not too worried about upstream support.  Our Activities are mostly
> written in Python or portable C, and the underlying operating system is
> typically based on Fedora, Debian[2], Gentoo[3]... which already support
> all of the above architectures.
>
> It's true that you lose the ability to run arbitrary binaries from other
> platforms, but this is only important if you care about closed-source
> code.

That means, for us, Flash and drivers. There are Open Source BIOS
equivalents for some of these architectures.

> Most important open source programs are easily recompiled for any
> architecture.
>
> --Ben
>
> [1] http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardSugar
> [2] http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual
> [3] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/index.xml#doc_chap4
>
>
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Re: AMD to stop working on Geodes (Carlos Nazareno)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 10:32 PM, Edward Cherlin  wrote:

>>> AMD bought the Geode business from another company.
>
> National Semiconductor, which bought the line from Cyrix. I edited
> several of the pin- and register-level manuals for various chips for
> them more than ten years ago,

For National Semiconductor, that is.

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Re: AMD to stop working on Geodes (Carlos Nazareno)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Sameer Verma  wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 5:14 PM, Mitch Bradley  wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Carlos Nazareno  
>> wrote:
>>
>>> > AMD sees no Geode chip replacement in sight
>>> > AMD on Monday said it has no replacement for the aging Geode low-power
>>> > chips that are used in netbooks and set-top boxes.
>>> > http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/274414/amd_sees_no_geode_chip_replacement_sight
>>>
>>
>> The cost of developing and supporting a processor family is staggering.
>>
>> AMD bought the Geode business from another company.

National Semiconductor, which bought the line from Cyrix. I edited
several of the pin- and register-level manuals for various chips for
them more than ten years ago, and updates of my work are still online
on the AMD Web site. OLPC has educated AMD on how to use the
power-management registers to do things that nobody previously knew
were possible.

>> Often, when a company buys a business unit, that unit withers on the vine.  
>> The "new kids on the block" have a difficult time establishing a strong 
>> place within the established "pecking order", so in the competition for 
>> resources, the new group often comes up short.  When there is an economic 
>> downturn, the new group is often the first to go.
>>
>> AMD barely has the resources to maintain a competitive stance in the part of 
>> the market that has traditionally been their core, especially now that the 
>> economy is bad.
>>
>> I'm sure that AMD would be very happy if they had enough money to go after 
>> the low power market, but they just don't.

I am delighted that this premature obituary also turns out to be
greatly exaggerated.

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>> Devel mailing list
>> Devel@lists.laptop.org
>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>>
>
> Somebody on Slashdot (yeah!) has a good write-up pointing to the fact
> that AMD isn't halting production. Its just not going to develop Geode
> further. http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1105799&cid=26623857
>
> From the comment:
>
>
> 
>
> AMD is NOT halting production of the Geode. They are not leaving the
> market (RTFM!). They have decided that it serves it's niche AS IS and
> will be kept AS IS. That's a very different statement. They're saying
> that it is a mature product (a rare thing in IT).
>
> Currently, the Geode is good enough for many applications and would be
> a step up for others. The embedded world tends away from the shiny
> object model of upgrades. If it worked last year, it works this year,
> and it'll work next year. Changes in the product are considered
> undesirable.
>
> AMD's statement doesn't even mean there won't be a die shrink or even
> a faster Geode in the future, just that they won't be updating it's
> architecture.
>
> It's not a bad decision either. There is a significant niche for the
> Geode between the Atom (too hot, too power hungry) and things like the
> Dragon Ball and mips (not enough power).
>
> Geode isn't in trouble until Intel comes out with an x86 that doesn't
> need a heatsink (or at least doesn't need a fan).
>
> 

Marvell has bought XScale from Intel. That may be the principal
alternative. The Encore Mobilis being bought by Brazil for its schools
uses an XScale processor and MontaVista Linux, so Sugar Labs should be
working on an XScale port of Sugar soon.

> I've seen the Geode in action in Soekris boards
> (http://www.soekris.com/) when I was doing fun Wi-Fi stuff, and used
> to wonder what it would be like if we had a Geode machine running a
> laptop...well that wish came true with the XO :-)
>
> I'll also point out (peripherally) to a comment made by Jeff Bezos in
> a BusinessWeek article
> (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_17/b4081064880218.htm),
> where he says that frugality leads to innovation (necessity being the
> mother of invention, etc.) and I think the frugality of XO's design
> has definitely lead to many innovations. I for one would *not* have
> thought that I would be using a 433MHz x86 laptop with 256MB RAM as my
> favorite machine :-)

Alan Kay loves to ask how Doug Engelbart and his team managed to
shoehorn all of the Online System (NLS) in The Mother of All Demos
into 192K in 1968.This included realtime videoconferencing and
instantaneous, seamless crash recovery. People come up with all sorts
of technical theories, but Alan's answer is, "Because they wanted to
badly enough."

> Hats off to the Geode!
>
> cheers,
> Sameer
> --
> Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor of Information Systems
> San Francisco State University
> San Francisco CA 94132 USA
> http://verma.sfsu.edu/
> http://opensource.sfsu.edu/
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Re: see ya'

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 12:04 PM,   wrote:
> like many others, today is my last day at OLPC.  my short tenure
> here has been loads of fun, and it's been an honor to be close to
> the center of such a great project.
>
> i'll be around -- please stay in touch.  to the extent i can, i'll
> be following the lists, and dropping in on irc once in a while.
>
> richard and i have agreed that since i've already "tainted" myself
> by working with the sooper seekrit EC firmware, and i'm still effectively
> under NDA, that there's no reason i shouldn't continue to be a resource
> for questions and help in that area, if anything should come up
> where richard's not around, or whatever.  hope i can help out
> somehow.

But it's the stuff you can't tell us that we want to know. ^_^ And
Richard Stallman, too.

> my "home" address is p...@laptop.org,

I believe you meant to say something different here.

> but pgf (or paul) @laptop will
> continue to work for some time, i believe.
>
> paul
> =-
>  paul fox, p...@laptop.org
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Re: Leaving

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 10:50 PM, C. Scott Ananian  wrote:
> Like many others, Friday will be my last day employed by OLPC.  I've
> enjoyed working on the project a lot, and hope to find some way to
> continue the work that has been begun.

I'm very sorry to hear that. Will you be able to attend XOCamp2?

The next release of Sugar appears to be left hanging, with no comment
from management. I find this appalling.


> Although I expect that the @laptop.org addresses will continue to work
> for some time, you should probably use csc...@cscott.net for future
> correspondence.  I've enjoyed working with you all.
>  --scott
>
> --
> ( http://cscott.net/ )
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zen root (was Re: Flash wiki entries)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Samuel Klein  wrote:

>>> Anyway, why does this wiki page tell you to enter
>>>   sudo su -
>
> Some future zen compilation of sudo may support infinite nesting of
> levels of protectedness, so that you have to really REALLY mean it to
> say sudo sudo sudo 'make me a sandwich'

I had Zen Buddhist priest training, and I have publicly taken a vow
never to write anything entitled Zen and the Art of Computer
Programming. Stan Kelly-Bootle thought that vow worth recording in The
Computer Contradictionary.

So don't start any Zen threads here unless you know enough to mean it. ^_^

> SJ



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Re: G1G1 updates, Lennon video and other vids

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Bastien  wrote:
> "Samuel Klein"  writes:
>
>> The Lennon video that's been murmured about for weeks has been
>> released.  I'm curious to see reactions from the list.
>
> I only like the beginning - flying XOs...  the first attempt for a
> forthcoming screensaver "activity"?
>
> For the rest of it, it sounds fake, it's too short, what we see and
> hear is nothing but a distraction from the core message.  Looks like
> people have been playing with a beautiful idea, but ended up with a
> toy-movie.

I would have written a far different script for digi-Lennon, around
some of the themes of "Imagine". Probably this final segment, or part
of it, perhaps with some minimal patching, or a voice-over blending
into the music:

Imagine no possessions (change to "Imagine these possessions", with XO
ownership images? Imagine shared possessions?)

I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man;
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world.


You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one.

Those original wards don't have to be faked at all, although a patch
would. Then he could end, "Hey, even I couldn't imagine this,"
speaking from inside an XO. Perhaps in one of our text-to-speech
voices, rather than his own.

> My favorite so far is Waveplace's one:
>
>  http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=Py3wB-7JeOE

+1

Much more to the point than anything I have seen out of OLPC. I don't
know how many viewers would understand the reference.

Alan Perlis, as Chairman of the CS department at Yale, talked about
powerful software as a pou sto, a place to stand, to give you leverage
over the hardest problems. He was talking about APL, but the principle
applies to Smalltalk, or Lisp, or Sugar, or any well-designed
general-purpose software that does not hide the fundamental
mathematical nature of programming.

> --
>  Bastien
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Re: Deployment image customization

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 11:26 AM, Michael Stone  wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 09:18:51PM +0200, Morgan Collett wrote:
>>On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 18:29, Daniel Drake  wrote:
>>> On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Greg Smith  wrote:
 Your suggestion that we allow
 addition of RPMs and get those built into a signed image via "pilgrim or
 puritan" is certainly valuable and part of the requirement.

 However, it doesn't cover a few added things (language settings was
 specifically requested by Mongolia and others):

 - Updated language packs (I believe we are trying to make this an RPM which
 may solve it)
 - Starting language
 - Date, time and timezone
 - Network settings
>
> Both puritan and pilgrim install many unpackaged hacks; that's actually
> the major reason why they exist.
>
> (Some special indirection needs to be taken if you want to deploy hacks
> to /home via olpc-update, since it doesn't touch /home, but for
> whole-NAND-reflash tasks, either is certainly adequate.)
>
> It's also possible to combine a compose-tool like puritan or pilgrim
> with our existing image-builder technology (which generates mfg-ready
> images from customization-stick data.)

Would it be possible to apply these tools to creating LiveCDs and
qemu-ready image files? I certainly don't want to add to the burdens
of over-burdened staff, but can some of us volunteers do that part? I
ask in large part because recent LiveCDs and image files don't work on
my computer.

> Michael
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Re: What's going on with Text To Speech on the XO?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 1:22 PM, James Simmons
 wrote:
> Ed,
>
> Thanks for your response.  I never questioned that there was still interest
> in TTS on the XO.  What I was wondering is if there was any progress made by
> Hemant Goyal or anyone else in getting the Speech-Dispatcher software
> included with the Sugar distribution, if the newer version of Python that
> resolved the power management issue was included, etc.  I've sent a couple
> of emails to Hemant and haven't heard back from him.  I was wondering if he
> was still working on these things, or if someone else had taken over his
> work, etc.

I'm starting a textbook initiative, and haven't kept up with software
development that much. I would also like to have answers to your
questions, because we will need TTS for some of the early-grade
textbooks and for language learning.

> He was making RPMs for Fedora for installing speech-dispatcher.
>
> James Simmons
>
> Edward Cherlin wrote:
>>
>> Welcome back. There is significant interest from other organizations
>> in our use of TTS with text coloring. I have just started discussions
>> with the Doug Engelbart Foundation, Creative Commons ccLearn, Alan
>> Kay's Viewpoints Research, and OLE about a new project to create a
>> full range of teaching materials around Sugar. TTS-TC is important for
>> literacy, of course, and also for language learning.
>>
>>
>>
>
>



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Re: XO deployment count?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 4:08 PM, Samuel Klein  wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 1:30 PM,   wrote:
>>> In countries all over the world, XOs are *actually arriving in
>>> children's hands*.
>>> --scott
>>>
>>> [*] "roughly" means there are lots of minor details I'm omitting; Peru
>>
>> rough numbers are good enough for answering critics who claim that OLPC
>> is a failure, the only thing is that if different people give vastly
>> different numbers we end up looking like idiots.

The latest I have heard is more than half a million in the hands of
students, and another half million on order or in the pipeline. That
isn't good enough for updating the Wiki, but staff are completely out
of bandwidth at least until after the New Year. There are supposed to
be more blockbuster G1G1 ads coming, for one thing. We have zero
information on sales through Amazon after the initial best-seller
listings.

>> the deployments page mentioned above is not linked to from the main page
>> of the wiki (this is one of my gripes about most wikis, they end up having
>> lots of information in them, but the linking structure is frequently so
>> bad that you would never know it, which leads to multiple pages being
>> maintained by different people, with conflicting information)

OLPC Ghana page says that Ghana has ordered 10,000 units, and
committed to enough for every child. But there is no contact
information, and the Ministry in Ghana (moess.gov.gh) doesn't have a
page for the project.

>> if you could pass this along to the folks on the business side. they need
>> to realize that we are part of their sales/marketing force.
>
> You certainly are.
>
> The main page is editable by anyone with a user account; I encourage
> anyone with ideas about what should go there to add specific
> suggestions to the talk page, or to update directly if the change is
> obvious.  Most other pages, if you see that they aren't linking to the
> most current version of a relevant page, be bold and fix them.
>
> SJ
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Re: Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 4:53 PM, John Gilmore  wrote:
>> Some of us are new to one or another part of this issue, and need a bit more 
>> background.
>
>> o Can you list the offending binaries and explain their faults?
>
> Sure.  For example, "ls" is part of the Coreutils.  In 8.2.0, it's
> licensed under GPLv3+ (try "ls --version"); in earlier releases, it's
> licensed under GPLv2+.  In both cases, OLPC is shipping binary copies
> of "ls" on the flash media of laptops.  This means that it must ensure
> that every recipient has either the actual source code of "ls", or has
> both a written offer of such source code and ready access to redeem that
> offer for the actual code.

Interesting. I have never received a Linux system with either the
source code or a written offer of source code. I certainly know where
to download it.

> One of the original ideas at OLPC was that all the source code would be
> put on the school servers and every school would have a server and so
> the kids would all have access to the sources.  See
> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4286#comment:8 .  That didn't work in
> practice, because many laptops go to places that have no school
> servers.  It didn't work for G1G1 either.  See also
> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4417 .

Presumably we could have included a CD, regardless of whether
recipients had drives.

> There are also some packages for which OLPC doesn't seem to have
> SRPM's that match its RPM's:  http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4835 .

Wouldn't surprise me. Who is supposed to take care of this stuff?

> In addition, there's a bigger problem with the packages that are
> licensed under GPLv3 (24 packages in 8.2.0, and growing).  GPLv3 bans
> "TiVoization" which is the way that the TiVo company figured out how
> to cheat the GPLv2.  They used a ton of GPL software to build a
> product, flashed the binaries into a physical product, and provide all
> the matching source code -- but the firmware in the physical product
> will never let you reflash the binaries.  This means you are "free" to
> modify the source code and recompile it, but you can never actually
> modify it IN THE PRODUCT.
>
> GPLv3 bans this, for products designed for household or consumer use.
> If the vendor themselves has the power to reflash the binaries, then the
> consumer must be provided the keys and instructions required to do so.

OK, now I know what you are talking about. Yes, I would prefer
children to have complete software freedom. I don't see it happening.
I expect that if faced with this question directly, governments would
uniformly assert that they are the consumers, and that no court in
their countries would disagree, since the government paid for the
equipment. I also see no way that a US court would hold any of this to
be a license violation, given that the source code is delivered to the
governments.

> OLPC follows exactly the TiVo model.  It comes with DRM that prevents
> the kids from reflashing their own laptops, even though OLPC can
> reflash them with new versions.  The DRM directly affects modified
> versions of the kernel and initrd, which do not contain software
> licensed under GPLv3.  Coreutils ("ls") is GPLv3 though.  Normally, to
> modify "ls" you wouldn't need to reflash; you could just log in as
> root and install the new version on top of the old version (with "rpm"
> or "yum" or "cp").  But some of the countries who distribute OLPC
> laptops want even more control -- they have disabled root access
> completely for the kids.  This means the kids can't just login as
> root; they'd need to reflash to install a modified version of "ls",
> and they can't.  This violates GPLv3.
>
> In addition, one of the key deliverables for the 9.1 release is
> limited-time "leases" that would make the laptop refuse to boot, if
> some third party who has OLPC connections doesn't issue it a new lease
> periodically.  Part of the implementation strategy was/is to avoid
> cheating by denying every laptop user the ability to reset the
> laptop's clock.  This can only be enforced if root access is removed.
> Thus Uruguay's mistake is scheduled to be spread into every country as
> of the 9.1 release.  This violates GPLv3.
>
> OLPC has a complicated process for getting the keys that would enable
> you to reflash your laptop, get past the lease crap, (or merely to
> boot software, such as the Fedora 10 release, that isn't signed by
> OLPC's secret keys).  This is the "developer key" process, which
> requires Internet access, a 24-hour arbitrary delay imposed by OLPC,
> and a lot of hand-holding and instructions.  Many kids in the
> mountains of Peru and Uruguay do not have Internet access.  There's
> supposedly a way to send a postcard to OLPC, but I think it has never
> been tried (it neglects to tell the kids to include their serial
> number and UUID, which are required; and it would require that the
> kids correctly type in a long string of random letters and digits.
> The Support Gang has had lots of troub

Re: [Grassroots-l] SugarLabs Sur - Libre Social Network Project

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 12:52 AM, Sebastian Silva
 wrote:
> Friends of our community,
>
> I'd like to introduce you to a project that Rafael, me, Alejandro
> (proj.man.) , Antonio (django wiz), Alfredo (theather educ) and Jose
> (mathematics professor at the UNMSM) have been working on.
> It is our proposed strategy for training and supporting a large rural
> and distributed sugar deployment including collaboration servers in
> traditional Computer Labs settings. Already we are preparing for a
> workshop with the first teachers in early february, when the roll out
> will occur.

+1

> We have two main strategies:
>
>  - Reduce the maintenance overhead of schools by providing a tailored
> suite + best practices + documentation ---"easy to replicate"

Earth Treasury wants to work on the teaching materials. We announced
our intention of forming an R&D consortium for this just a few days
ago.

>  - Harnessing social network functionality for sharing, collaboration
> and peer-support ---  "easy to share"
>
> Everybody understands the value and power of social networks. However
> these remain propietary and have a number of privacy and control
> issues. We'll incorporate existing social networking software (could
> be Elgg, NoseRub, Pinax...) that not only will provide "One Social
> Network Per School", but will jumpstart the first (that I know of)
> massive, self-replicating, decentralized educational social network
> ecosystem, a network of social networks. And we want to make it extra
> easy to add a node anywhere on the globe.

That is another item that Earth Treasury has had on its To Do list. We
have to be able to link schools and individual students around the
world, for educational and social purposes, and then to create
multinational partnerships to set up sustainable businesses.

> Our expected deployment involves ~200 school laboratories (and
> servers), and ~2300 workstations, for a total of tens of thousands of
> students and their respective teachers who will be online and
> collaborating with each other and with the community across
> organizational, geographic, and cultural boundaries. We will foster
> this community and bring them in touch with other teachers using Sugar
> in the classroom. Perhaps even more schools will join this global
> network, as we want to make it as simple as possible.

What computers? XOs? Laptops? Desktops with Sugar on a Stick?

> We hope to give details on this deployment soon but need a particular
> confirmation from the Regional Government. We have submitted a
> proposal for USAID challenge and would use the money as SugarLabs to
> develop, prepare, tailor and integrate a platform that allows us to
> deliver excellent teacher workshops that empower educators to
> appropriate the technology and learn about it "in community" like we
> so happily do in Free Software.
>
> Please find our proposal for at
> http://www.netsquared.org/projects/free-social-networks-rural-education
>
> Give it a look. Think about it. A large social network owned by its
> users, that can grow organically without any need for central offices
> or large datacenters... Give us your comments and feedback and...
>
> Vote for it. The voting process is particular, you have to pick us,
> and then 2 others. You can't vote unless you pick 3. Please do this
> for us.
>
> I would do it if you were asking!;-)

I did this before seeing your message. You rock.

> In all seriousness, I think our proposal has a great chance, because
> frankly, i think it rocks and is better than the other options, but
> the first phase of the challenge involves the community for picking
> 15, then a panel picks 3 winners. So we need you, community!
>
> Thank you for your time.
> --
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> Iniciativa FuenteLibre
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Re: Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 12:22 PM, Michael Stone  wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:52:54AM -0800, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:14 AM, John Gilmore  wrote:
>>>
>>> OLPC is at risk of similar action unless it gets its act together.
>>> The project and its customers have skated by on GPL compliance,
>>> figuring that we're the good guys, and make halfhearted attempts every
>>> once in a while, so we won't get sued.  That didn't work for Cisco.
>>> Even a public *allegation* by FSF that OLPC is not compliant would
>>> have an effect similar to the "We're going Microsoft" debacle, further
>>> alienating the free software development community who OLPC depends
>>> deeply upon.  OLPC has, by distributing binaries under DRM, without
>>> source code, and with minimal notice, hung a sword over its head that
>>> just about anybody could unleash.
>>>
>>>   John
>>
>> Some of us are new to one or another part of this issue, and need a
>> bit more background.
>
> For some basic background, please see
>
> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4265

Thanks. That explains about source code and notice. Is there anything
about DRMed binaries?

> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4268

That's a lost cursor bug. I assume you meant some other one.

> Thanks,
>
> Michael
>



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Re: Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:14 AM, John Gilmore  wrote:
> OLPC is at risk of similar action unless it gets its act together.
> The project and its customers have skated by on GPL compliance,
> figuring that we're the good guys, and make halfhearted attempts every
> once in a while, so we won't get sued.  That didn't work for Cisco.
> Even a public *allegation* by FSF that OLPC is not compliant would
> have an effect similar to the "We're going Microsoft" debacle, further
> alienating the free software development community who OLPC depends
> deeply upon.  OLPC has, by distributing binaries under DRM, without
> source code, and with minimal notice, hung a sword over its head that
> just about anybody could unleash.
>
>John

Some of us are new to one or another part of this issue, and need a
bit more background.

o Can you list the offending binaries and explain their faults?
o Can you explain how that puts us afoul of the GPL or any other
specific license?

Or are you just talking about PR effects if we claim to distribute
only Free Software, and somebody can say we ship something else in
addition, as happened with rms and tdr over the Marvell code on the
wireless chip and some other code in ROM?
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Re: What's going on with Text To Speech on the XO?

[Edward Cherlin]

Welcome back. There is significant interest from other organizations
in our use of TTS with text coloring. I have just started discussions
with the Doug Engelbart Foundation, Creative Commons ccLearn, Alan
Kay's Viewpoints Research, and OLE about a new project to create a
full range of teaching materials around Sugar. TTS-TC is important for
literacy, of course, and also for language learning.

On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 1:38 PM, James Simmons
 wrote:
> I've haven't been working on the XO lately (my basement office had to go
> through Mold Remediation after a flood) but I have been monitoring  this
> mailing list every day.  When I last did any development work on the XO
> it was to create a mostly successful text to speech feature for the Read
> Etexts activity.  Using this successfully would require some RPMs
> installed on the XO that Hemant Goyal was working on for Fedora, plus a
> newer version of Python that resolved some problems caused by
> threading.  What I remember is that if you used threading at all in your
> activity it prevented power management from working.
>
> I've been cleaning up my basement after the tile installers finished and
> there is some hope that I can resume working on my activity, at least a
> little.  I have my XO upgraded to the latest release of Sugar and it
> looks like Speech Dispatcher still is not part of that release.
>
> I'm well aware of all the other work going on with the XO and I don't
> kid myself that this should be a priority for anyone, but if someone
> could bring me up to date on what's happening with text to speech on the
> XO I'd be much obliged.
>
> James Simmons
>
>
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Re: Music Keyboard for TamTam?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:55 PM, Caryl Bigenho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Thanks for all your efforts!
>
> The last time I used a midi keyboard with a Mac (it was a G3) it had to have
> a special "midi interface" and then was just "plug and play" from there
> using Finale as a program. In looking over your discussion below, it looks
> like you did manage to get a midi keyboard to work with the XO, but with
> great difficulty. Some questions...
>
> Will it work with all of the TamTam Activities?
>
> Is it likely that all midi keyboards would work?

All MIDI *USB* keyboards. Not those with only the standard MIDI
connector, unless we find MIDI to USB converters cheap.

> Would it be possible to put the instructions into language that the less
> technically inclined could easily follow to get started on this?

As soon as we decide on the technical solution. "Plug in your USB MIDI
instrument, assign it an instrumental voice in the UI, and play,"
should about cover it when we have everything put together.

> Does anything have to be changed in the software/hardware to make this
> easily used by teachers everywhere?

It should be set up so that it Just Works.

> Do you know of any source of very simple, inexpensive midi keyboards? No
> bells and whistles needed, they are already in the XO in the TamTam
> Activities.

Google very kindly put this ad up in Google mail next to your message.

Yamaha UX16 MIDI/USB
$41.99 In Stock Now
Free Shipping
www.kensprosound.com

> Could easier use of a midi keyboard be incorporated into a change in the
> Sugar OS (like 9.1.0)?
>
> Or is there an easy way to make the current set-up easier?

I leave the rest to the developers.

> Thanks again for your interest and efforts!
>
> Caryl


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Re: Sugar installer for Windows

[Edward Cherlin]

Would you add that to the Sugar options in the Wiki?

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 12:02 PM, Wade Brainerd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I wrote a simple Sugar installer for Windows:
> http://dev.laptop.org/~wadeb/OLPC-XO-Software-8.2.0-Setup.exe
>
> It installs/uninstalls a working Sugar environment (based on Ton van
> Overbeek's QEMU) with just a few clicks.
>
> The installer was built using the open source installer creator NSIS
> (nsis.sourceforge.net).  The installer script can be found here:
> http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/wadeb/wininstall/.git
>
> Note to build administrators: NSIS exists for Linux, so this process
> of creating Windows installers for Sugar could be automated.
>
> -Wade
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>



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Re: Music Keyboard for TamTam?

[Edward Cherlin]

See also

http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/189728345/

Walter and Simon demonstrate MIDI keyboard input into the A-TEST board
Taken on July 14, 2006, uploaded July 14, 2006

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 9:16 PM, Gary C Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 1 Dec 2008, at 04:01, Gary C Martin wrote:
>
>> On 30 Nov 2008, at 22:16, Erik Garrison wrote:
>>
>>> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 12:20 AM, Gary C Martin
>>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 On 30 Nov 2008, at 01:29, Erik Garrison wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 8:23 AM,  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> ignacio wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 04:24 +, Gary C Martin wrote:

 On a more disappointing note I found this ticket "G1G1 tamtam
 suite
 should respond to MIDI keyboard input" from 10 months ago.
 Closed.
 Wont fix :-(

 https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6031
>>>
>>> All "wontfix" means is that they're waiting for someone with a
>>> stronger
>>> itch to scratch it ;)
>>
>> i really have no idea how such devices are normally presented to
>> the systems, but is it possible that the keyboard is consists of
>> more than one USB device (i.e., via a built-in hub) and that not
>> all the drivers are present on the XO?
>>
>
> FWIW, The M-audio systems abide by open midi specifications and are
> platform-independent.  I don't know about the driver situation.
>
> There is a program which can be used to dump midi signals to
> stdout.
> It might be a good test as it's very simple to configure and its
> results are very clear, unlike the audio programs you'll want to
> use.

 ... and it's called??? Gah! ;-)
>>
>> Just for reference, after connecting the USB Midi keyboard amidi -l
>> gives me:
>>
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$ amidi -l
>> Dir DeviceName
>> IO  hw:1,0,0  Keystation 49e MIDI 1
>>
>>> I'm not at an XO or my development machine now, but looked around the
>>> web to try to find some information to help.
>>>
>>> See: http://www.4front-tech.com/pguide/midi.html
>>
>> Will go read.
>>
>>> Does the system have a /dev/midi* when you plug the device in?
>>
>> Yep, I get a /dev/midi1
>>
>>> Do you see anything interesting in the kernel logs returned with
>>> dmesg?
>>>
>>> Unfortunately our kernel configs aren't online anywhere i can find...
>>> but I'll check to see if it's enabled.  My guess would be not, but
>>> perhaps I'm mistaken.
>>>
 I'm trying to hack my way through coding csound, but I've not had
 much time
 to play so far. A magic midi data dumping tool would be a nice
 shortcut to
 test – FWIW, I can see my M-audio correctly listed on the USB as an
 available MIDI input device, but not got any further yet.
>>>
>>> Perhaps cat /dev/midi*  if the file(s) exist.
>>
>> Fab, yes, cat/dev/midi1 gives me wild ascii characters each time I
>> press a key, looks like both note and velocity (this particular
>> keyboard doesn't emit pressure but I have another one somewhere that
>> does), also other controls (volume, pitch blend & modulation) trigger
>> comms.
>>
>> I'd say the drivers are good to go, and I need to get back to reading
>> csound documentation and try a demo to pickup the incoming midi feed.
>
> OK, really boring but working example (XO 8.2-767):
>
> 1) Plug in your USB MIDI input device
>
> 2) In terminal run "amidi -l" it should list something like:
>
>Dir DeviceName
>IO  hw:1,0,0  Keystation 49e MIDI 1
>
> 3) Make a file bells.csd, it MUST be called .csd,
> that alone wasted hours of my life :-( here's a what should go in it,
> the one thing to watch is the -M hw:1,0,0 as this is the option that
> tells csound which midi device to listen to, if "amidi -l" shows your
> MIDI device with a different reference, use that instead:
>
> 
> 
> -odac -M hw:1,0,0
> 
> 
> instr 1
> idec = 1
> iamp ampmidi 32767
> kfrq cpsmidib 2
> kenv expsegr 1, idec, 0.1, 0.1, 0.01
> asig oscili  kenv*iamp, kfrq, 1
>out asig
> endin
> 
> 
> f0 36000
> f1 0 16384 10 1
> 
> 
>
> 4) Then again in console run:
>
>csound bells.csd
>
> 5) Start pressing keys and make beautiful music, see I said it wasn't
> too exciting, but nice to get this far :-) The XO speakers don't do
> very well below middle C (with this instrument), but it's a start.
>
> So... hardware/kernel/driver all working in 8.2-767. MIDI input is now
> demoted to just ;-) a client software side feature for the TamTam
> activities. I'll do a little more csound reading on the python side
> and try to hack on TamTamMini, will ping the list if I make useful
> progress.
>
> Regards,
> --Gary
>
>>> Erik
>>
>> Many thanks,
>> --Gary
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Re: Music Keyboard for TamTam?

[Edward Cherlin]

2008/11/15 Caryl Bigenho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Hi,
>
> I was wondering if there would be a way to connect a usb musical keyboard to
> the XO to use with the TamTam suite of Activities?
>
> The software would have to be able to recognize the input from the
> keyboard.  A small 37-key midi keyboard by M-Audio costs about $50.
> .  It supposedly works with
> any computer with a usb connection, but I suspect they mean any Mac or
> Windows based machine.

With an appropriate USB MIDI driver installed.

> The programs in the TamTam suite are really powerful, and could appeal to
> older children and adults if the keyboard input was more suited to their
> larger hands.
>
> Any ideas?

We need to add a driver from the usual sources, and we need to modify
our music software to accept MIDI from USB as well as from
conventional files. This being Linux, the changes required for
handling a port as a file are fairly trivial internally, but we need a
UI to select USB I/O and to map it to the desired instrument.

Once we have this, we get not just MIDI keyboards, but drums, guitars,
breath controllers, string controllers, and all the rest, and we can
play any instrument from any controller.

I am also looking forward to using the second touch screen on an XO-2
as a MIDI controller, with all of the graphical input possibilities
that it will allow: keyboard, drums, string tablature, theremin,...

> I'm not on your mailing list so please just cc your answer to:
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Thanks
>
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>
>



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Re: [Localization] OLPC Afghanistan

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 10:15 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [changing to the olpc devel mailing list]
>
> On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 10:50 AM, Ebtihaj Obaidi
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Hi dears.
>> finally OLPC Afghanistan started its official work from Afghanistan.
>> For details just visit:
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/One_Laptop_Per_Child_Afghanistan
>> OR
>> http://www.olpc.blogsky.com
>
> Hi Ebtihaj,
>
> would like to know more about your software development tasks, what is
> OLPC Afghanistan going to work on?

I see work on Dari, Pashto, and Uzbek for Afghanistan. How about
Hazaragi and Aimaq? Do you need Tajik?

We have an Arabic language Qur'an Activity, and we also have the Sword
Activity, which can handle any texts, dictionaries and commentaries in
any number of languages. What would your country like to make
available to its children?

What other Activities would be specific to Afghanistan? Music?
Literature? Games? Art? History?

> Thanks,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> Sohaib Obaidi "Ebtihaj"
>>
>> BSc. (Hons.) Economics, IIIE-IIUI
>> OLPC Afghanistan
>> Community Development Liaison.
>>
>> +923349072974
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>> http://www.eqtisad.co.cc
>> http://www.olpc.blogsky.com
>> http://www.olpc.af
>>
>> ___
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>>
>>
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Re: [Olpc-open] The 40th Anniversary of the Dynabook event at Computer History Museum

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 1:45 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:24:09 -0400,
> Brian Jordan wrote:
>>
>> Cool! (bump)
>
>  Yes and thanks.  The third panelist has been announced and it is
> none other than Mary Lou Jepsen.
>
> http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1221864610

Are they going to get Doug Engelbart for the panel? It has also been
40 years since his "Mother of All Demos" (Dec. 9, 1968), showing the
first mouse with menus, windows, interactive text, video conferencing,
teleconferencing, email, and hypertext.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

The first known usage of the phrase "Mother of All Demos" was in
journalist Steven Levy's 1994 book, Insanely Great: The Life and Times
of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything ISBN
978-0140291773:

"... a calming voice from Mission Control as the truly final
frontier whizzed before their eyes. It was the mother of all demos.
Engelbart's support staff was as elaborate as one would find at a
modern Grateful Dead concert. ..." - Insanely Great, page 42


I gave Doug his first look at an OLPC XO at the International
Symposium on Digital Earth 5, last year at UC Berkeley. He loves it.

> It looks like the registration is still open (didn't sound like so
> many seats are remaining though).
>
> -- Yoshiki
>
>> 2008/9/24 Yoshiki Ohshima <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>> >  There will be an interesting event.  It is even sponsored by OLPC!
>> >
>> > http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1221864610
>> >
>> > -- Yoshiki
>> >
>> > --
>> >
>> > CHM Presents
>> > The 40th Anniversary of the Dynabook
>> >
>> >
>> > SPONSOR
>> > Sponsored by One Laptop Per Child
>> >
>> > Alan Kay, Charles Thacker, and moderated by Steve Hamm, BusinessWeek
>> >
>> >
>> > DATE & TIME
>> > Wednesday, November 05, 2008
>> >
>> > 6:00 p.m. Member's Reception - CHM Members only
>> > 7:00 p.m. Program
>> > Wine for the Member's Reception provided by the Mountain Winery
>> >
>> > LOCATION
>> > 1401 N. Shoreline Boulevard
>> > Mountain View, CA 94043
>> >
>> > Call 650-810-1005 for information.
>> >
>> > ABSTRACT OF TALK
>> > The roots of "personal computers" -- that is, machines that are not shared 
>> > between users -- date back to at least the late 1950s. Within a decade, 
>> > several more of these "one machine, one user" computers were developed; 
>> > and the idea of a user having direct control over the computer was 
>> > established, at least within academia.
>> >
>> > In 1968, young computer scientist Alan Kay gave a presentation on the FLEX 
>> > Machine at a meeting of computer science graduate students and saw the 
>> > first working versions of a new flat panel plasma display technology. This 
>> > led to discussions about how nice it would be to (someday) place the FLEX 
>> > computer itself on the back of such a display to make a notebook-sized 
>> > computer.
>> >
>> > A visit a few months later to MIT computer scientist and educator Seymour 
>> > Papert and to a school with children doing advanced math with Papert's 
>> > LOGO programming language, produced an epiphany in Kay. He decided to make 
>> > "A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages." This was to be in the form 
>> > of a compact notebook using both tablet and keyboard, a flat-screen 
>> > display, GUI, and the wireless networking that defense funding agency ARPA 
>> > was starting to experiment with.
>> >
>> > This idea eventually acquired the name "Dynabook" as an homage to what the 
>> > printed book has meant to civilization and learning. It is also a gesture 
>> > to a future in which not just the content of "books" will be dynamic, but 
>> > the relationship of people to computers will itself also change.
>> >
>> > The founding of Xerox PARC a few years after the Dynabook concept provided 
>> > support and a context for developing many of these ideas. In fact, the 
>> > PARC "Alto" workstation was originally called "the interim Dynabook". Many 
>> > of the results from this research influenced commercial computing, 
>> > including the bit-mapped screen, high-quality text and graphics, 
>> > overlapping windows and an icon-based GUI, desktop publishing, 
>> > object-oriented programming, and many others.
>> >
>> > Join Steve Hamm of BusinessWeek as he moderates a panel discussion to 
>> > celebrate this idea that provided metaphor, motivation and inventions for 
>> > the personal computers of today.
>> >
>> > This event is generously sponsored by One Laptop Per Child.
>> >
>> > Panelists:
>> > - Alan Kay
>> > - Charles Thacker
>> > - TBD
>> > ___
>> > Olpc-open mailing list
>> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open
>> >
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Re: [Localization] [sugar] 9.1 proposal: Language learning on the XO.

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Yamandu Ploskonka
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Please be _very_ careful on any thought about teaching English with the XO.

It is a requirement in many countries. We don't have a choice.

> Enemies of the project everywhere are just waiting for a chance, any
> chance, to call us yokels of the imperialist empire, and they would have
> a field day if the XO delivered EFL.

The defense against this nonsense is to provide courses for as many
languages a possible, and toolkits for people to develop their own for
languages not currently popular in the textbook industry. Also, to
encourage schoolchildren to learn how to record and preserve their
linguistic heritage everywhere.

> Of course we know that many locally parents want EFL, as they want Math,
> but there is a weird layer of opinion that would just be so happy to
> ruin the whoile project for short term political gain.

Pay no attention to the naysayers, Yama. "By their fruits ye shall know them."

> To develop _tools_ for language learning is _very_ good, as a general
> concept.
>
> Aymaran kids need to learn better skills in Aymara, and such tools would
> be useful, Castillian speaking kids skills in Castillian and would
> benefit to learn Aymara and Quechua also, but proposing Aymara and
> Quechua kids to be assisted to learn Castillian using the XO is already
> a delicate matter, proposing English is a definite no-no in these times.

In many countries English or a former colonial/imperial language
(French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian) are required for all
children. In the Netherlands, for example, students get 12 years of
English. English is the only language that people can agree on in
India, and is the language of almost all higher education there.

_We_ are not going to impose anything on the children. We are going to
make tools available.

> Since all of this is a local decision anyway, I know of a deployment
> that, at the request of local parents and with local workers is
> developing EFL materials.

Tell us more.

> What I suggest is that as a team to focus in the _tools_.  Dictionaries,
> interactive tools (HablarConSara, etc).  Those can then be loaded with
> local language packs, and eventually, and as a local decision, other
> languages, which of course are not limited to English.

I see that we agree on the principles, and we are discussing
presentation more than substance.

> I listened to an
> NPR report the other day on how fashionable it is to have pre.schoolers
> learn Mandarin nowadays.

Yes, we have Chinese immersion in elementary schools and preschools
here in Cupertino.

> Yama
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Fwd: 9.1 proposal: Language learning on the XO.

[Edward Cherlin]

Sorry, this got away before I added the rest of the recipients.


-- Forwarded message --
From: Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:25 PM
Subject: Re: 9.1 proposal: Language learning on the XO.
To: Chris Ball <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 4:46 PM, Chris Ball <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm learning Spanish at the moment, and I wish the XO made it easier
> for me.  I don't have any knowledge of what the right way to do either
> conventional or constructionist language learning on computers is; if
> anyone has much experience with either, I'd love to hear about it.

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/une.education.pour.demain/materiels_pedago/sw/swprese.htm
Caleb Gattegno: The Silent Way

The Silent Way is the pedagogical approach created by Gattegno for
teaching foreign languages; the objective is for students to work as
autonomous language learners.

> I have some obvious candidates for software that could be produced in
> mind:
>
>   * A method -- similar to Scott's recent GtkLabel overlay for allowing
> strings inside Sugar and activities to be translated -- that does a
> dictionary lookup of a word on the screen and overlays the
> translation of that word into a local language.  This should be
> activity-agnostic, if possible.  For bonus points, translate
> phrases instead of just words.

I worked once for Sentius Corp., which had such software for providing
either translations or definitions through pop-up "portlets". This
kind of software is in wide use.

Sites such as translate.google.com and
http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/Portal_e.aspx or http://www.rikai.com
offer various ways of doing this, including copy and paste, or
entering a URL to get a version of a page annotated dynamically.

>   * Perhaps some kind of Pronunciation Activity that gives you words
> in the target language, speaks them to you, explains what they
> mean in your local language, and asks you to speak them back,
> perhaps grading your response?  (All but the last part is already
> possible to do manually in the Words activity, but not in a
> structured way.)

Our text-to-speech engine will be available for all Activities. In
addition to speaking selected text in any supported language, it will
highlight the point of pronunciation as it reads. It can be adapted to
a language lesson Activity.

>   * Is there any free content that matches iconic images to words,
> so that language vocabulary could be taught even without textual
> translation to a local language?

We ought to be able to combine Google Translate and Google Images
using Google APIs.

There are a number of picture dictionaries or visual dictionaries, in
which all of the parts of an object are labeled in the target
language. We could ask for a license, or create our own. We could
throw a draft together out of free clip art in fairly short order, and
get our artists to do something even better for global publication.

> Feel free to come up with questions/ideas around language learning on
> the XO in general in this thread, and they'll make it into the
> conference talk.

There is a substantial body of Free Software for language learning,
and other Computational Linguistics software that could be adapted to
language learning.

o Content: Literature; man pages and other documentation; localization files

o Dictionaries

o Typing tutors for various writing systems

o Kana drill and practice

o Flashcard programs usable for vocabulary, simple grammar drills
(plurals, genders, tenses) and somewhat more.

o Spelling and grammar checkers

What we need most is a Transformational Grammar engine to drill more
advanced constructions.

>From simple transformations, such as "I am going out."-->"We are going
out." to such things as counterfactual conditionals. "He went."-->"Had
he gone..." or "If he had gone...", including different patterns for
the formal, even the old-fashioned (to prepare students for
literature) and the more colloquial. Or dialect. "If'n he went...", if
a student so chooses.

A quite decent summary of some of the development of this field is in
>From algorithms to generative grammar and back again
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/goldsmith/Papers/CLS2004Algorithms.pdf,
by John Goldsmith, The University of Chicago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Goldsmith
http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Webpage/index.html

The author describes one of his research interests as "unsupervised
learning of morphology". Unfortunately for us, that means unsupervised
computers attempting to analyse word structure, with a 70-80% success
rate measured by words in the corpus. It has nothing to do with human
learning or the grammar of sentences.

Re: [Community-news] Software developers needed for OLPC Afghanistan

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Don <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:09:21 -0700, "Edward Cherlin"
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Don <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> > I am interested Svetla.
>> >  I have lots of skills and I do also possess a bit of charm.
>> > I am not religious but that does not mean that I am against religion.
>> >  Sadly my knowledge of
>> >  computers thus far are only windows based.  I am a G1G1 and to be
>> >  frank, not a lover of microsoft.  My trade is in construction... on
>> >  both the very high
>> >  ends and the very low.  If you think there is a place there for one
>> >  such as me so as to perhaps
>> >  strengthen your credibility in that culture, please let me know.
>
>> Actually, it is not a matter of credibility. Decades of war destroyed
>> much of the building stock and infrastructure and almost all industry,
>> and the Taliban drove everybody competent from the country, down to
>> the level of telephone installers. Although people have been
>> returning, and there is a considerable amount of investment,
>> Afghanistan needs people who can teach the skills for building,
>> including math, engineering, design, skilled trades, finance, and
>> sustainability. And the skills for teaching.

> I am a a licenced builder in the state of michigan...USA, with decades
> of experience in construction...and also being friendly to everyone
> along the path of creativity.  I have trained many young ones with my
> knowledge over the years. I would like to help.
> Who are you?
> Don

I am a volunteer with OLPC and Sugar Labs, and I run Earth Treasury.
You can see a video I made about where the XO program can take us on
my Wiki page (URL below). To see my names, you need to turn on Unicode
support or use a Unicode-capable mailer, and install Chinese, Sanskrit
Devanagari, and Arabic/Urdu fonts.

I am working towards a microfinance project in Afghanistan, to supply
looms and other art and craft tools and to supply Internet
connectivity so that people can sell their works on eBay,
Shopping.com, Overstock.com, and so on.

My first work on OLPC Sugar software was in language
support--keyboards, writing systems, fonts, and so on. I helped
recruit translators for the less well supported languages of target
countries. Now I watch for other things that need to be done, and go
recruit people to do them. Village electricity and broadband Internet;
microfinance; various kinds of software; educational content; redesign
of textbooks to take advantage of the powerful collaborative software
in Sugar; and more.

-- 
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Re: [Community-news] Software developers needed for OLPC Afghanistan

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Don <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am interested Svetla.
>  I have lots of skills and I do also possess a bit of charm.
> I am not religious but that does not mean that I am against religion.
>  Sadly my knowledge of
>  computers thus far are only windows based.  I am a G1G1 and to be
>  frank, not a lover of microsoft.  My trade is in construction... on
>  both the very high
>  ends and the very low.  If you think there is a place there for one
>  such as me so as to perhaps
>  strengthen your credibility in that culture, please let me know.

Actually, it is not a matter of credibility. Decades of war destroyed
much of the building stock and infrastructure and almost all industry,
and the Taliban drove everybody competent from the country, down to
the level of telephone installers. Although people have been
returning, and there is a considerable amount of investment,
Afghanistan needs people who can teach the skills for building,
including math, engineering, design, skilled trades, finance, and
sustainability. And the skills for teaching.

> Don Czapski

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9.1 Proposal: Textbooks (was Fwd: Call for Proposals for OLPC miniconference November 17-21, 2008)

[Edward Cherlin]

As requested.

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 11:52 AM, C. Scott Ananian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I would suggest that people cc' devel@ and sugar@ as well, so that we
> can see what has been proposed (and encourage people to make proposals
> who have not already).

-- Forwarded message ------
From: Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Subject: Re: Call for Proposals for OLPC miniconference November 17-21, 2008
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]


On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> An OLPC miniconference will be held November 17-21, 2008 at our
> Cambridge offices (10th floor, 1 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, USA)
>
> This week-long event will help frame our long-term software development
> efforts. In addition, we will work on prioritizing requirements,
> features and goals for the next major feature release called XO Software
> Release 9.1.0.

I think I can attend.

> Please submit proposals for topics to cover. These may include, but
> are not limited to:
> - Top concerns and requirements of users and countries including reviews
> of available feedback
> - Learning priorities and tools needed to support them
> - Technologies, applications and software design proposals
> - Process and infrastructure proposals
> - Current and needed research


> For details about the event and submission process, see the XOcamp
> description online. [1]
>
> Please submit < 200 word descriptions of topics or sessions on the
> event page [2] or by emailing your ideas to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .

What does an electronic textbook look like?

Since the 1960s there have been experiments in high-powered
educational software, but not a lot of textbook development that
integrates this software into the text, and very little classroom
experience. This session will look at the available materials, the
types of software and content available, and the implications for
future curricula.

What do we know? What examples do we have and what do they show us?
What opportunities can we see? How do we make this happen? What
questions should we ask next?

Examples:

o Edison Talking Typewriter to teach reading and writing to pre-school children
o Ken Iverson's textbooks, Arithmetic, Algebra, and Calculus
o Smalltalk and the Dynabook concept
o Matlab, Mathematica, and other powerful software
o Notebook and workspace formats and capabilities
o Teaching programming to children: Smalltalk, Logo, APL, others


> Thanks,
>
> Greg Smith
> OLPC Product Manager on behalf of the OLPC development team
>
> [1]  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp
> [2]  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Sessions
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>

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Re: [Grassroots-l] World scriptures

[Edward Cherlin]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 12:48 PM, Eduardo H. Silva
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I would vote for the The Nag Hammadi Library (early christian lost
> gospels) to be included as well in this all-encompassing
> religions/theologies activity: http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html
> .

Are you putting your hand up? Votes don't count, only volunteers.

> Eduardoa

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Re: [Grassroots-l] World scriptures

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 6:40 AM, Lisa Caroline Lewis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Are there any other sites we could use which would be less biased in how
> they define what religions?

We don't have to use their site at all if we don't like their attitude.

AFAIK the Sword software is under a Free license, and we can just put
our stuff where we like.

> I imagine some might be seriously offended
> by considering Buddhism a cult, and in general OLPC shouldn't find
> itself in the position of endorsing one religion over another.

I wouldn't list my work on that page. I would ask for a respectful
page for non-Christian religions.

> Choosing
> the immediate expediency of a convenient site over the mission of OLPC
> could very well cost OLPC all kinds of support.  Do we really want to
> open ourselves to charges of being underhanded Christian missionaries?

By posting non-Christian scriptures? Do you really think people will
be that confused?

> I imagine there might be some countries which are already challenging
> for OLPC to work in, and this could make it significantly harder in
> certain conditions.

Let us not borrow trouble, but inquire whether this is so.

> From the crosswire.org site:
> ---begin quote---
> About Us
> The CrossWire Bible Society is an organization with the purpose to
> sponsor and provide a place for engineers and others to come and
> collaborate on free, open-source projects aimed at furthering the
> Kingdom of our God. We are also a resource pool to other Bible societies
> and Christian organizations that can't afford --or don't feel it's their
> place-- to maintain a quality programming staff in house. We provide
> them with a number of tools that assist them with reaching their domain
> with Christ.
> ---end quote---
>
> My $0.02,
> Lisa

Good questions. Thank you, Lisa.

> On Thu, 16 Oct 2008, Jeffrey Kesselman wrote:
>
>> 2008/10/16 Sebastian Silva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>>> E
>>> The link http://www.crosswire.org/sword/publisher/index.jsp seems to suggest
>>> they would be open, for at least putting it on the "Cult / Unorthodox"
>>> module add-on section.
>>>
>>
>> The irony being that this is a world-project and, buy the numbers,
>> when comapred with say, Buddhism, Christianity is the cult/unorthodox
>> religion.

Now, now. No need for snark.

>> JK
>> ___
>> Grassroots mailing list
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/grassroots
>>
> ___
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> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/grassroots
>



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Re: World scriptures

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 3:30 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The instructions for preparing new modules are at
>
> http://www.crosswire.org/wiki/index.php/DevTools:Modules
>
> Let's pick some short texts and try them out. I'll start with the
> Heart Sutra in Sanskrit and Chinese.

New page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Heart_Sutra
I added some notes on the Sword Read page in the OLPC Wiki.

> On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> We have a Bible program in Sugar. Sword allows any number of texts,
>> dictionaries, and commentaries in any combination of languages to be
>> integrated together. I know where many other scriptures in many
>> languages are available, and would like to start a project to
>> integrate them into Sword and make them globally available.

[snip]
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Re: World scriptures

[Edward Cherlin]

The instructions for preparing new modules are at

http://www.crosswire.org/wiki/index.php/DevTools:Modules

Let's pick some short texts and try them out. I'll start with the
Heart Sutra in Sanskrit and Chinese.

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> We have a Bible program in Sugar. Sword allows any number of texts,
> dictionaries, and commentaries in any combination of languages to be
> integrated together. I know where many other scriptures in many
> languages are available, and would like to start a project to
> integrate them into Sword and make them globally available. Some of
> the materials are
>
> Qur'an, Muslim
> Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Sikh
> Tipitaka and Tripitaka, Buddhist
> Kanjur, Tanjur, Buddhist
> Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Hindu
> Laozi, Juangzi, Daozang, Daoist
> Confucius, Mencius, Confucian
> Talmud, Jewish
> Popul Vuh, Mayan
>
> I am open to other suggestions, and will need help with appropriate
> dictionaries and commentaries. This is a large project, and will need
> people with a range of skills. I can contact organizations that work
> on each of the sets of texts listed, but we will need more contacts
> beyond them.
>
> o Should I create one ticket for the project, or one per religion, or what?
>
> o Where can we host this?
>
> --
> Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज ) is my name
> And Children are my nation.
> The Cosmos is my dwelling place,
> The Truth my destination.
>



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World scriptures

[Edward Cherlin]

We have a Bible program in Sugar. Sword allows any number of texts,
dictionaries, and commentaries in any combination of languages to be
integrated together. I know where many other scriptures in many
languages are available, and would like to start a project to
integrate them into Sword and make them globally available. Some of
the materials are

Qur'an, Muslim
Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Sikh
Tipitaka and Tripitaka, Buddhist
Kanjur, Tanjur, Buddhist
Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Hindu
Laozi, Juangzi, Daozang, Daoist
Confucius, Mencius, Confucian
Talmud, Jewish
Popul Vuh, Mayan

I am open to other suggestions, and will need help with appropriate
dictionaries and commentaries. This is a large project, and will need
people with a range of skills. I can contact organizations that work
on each of the sets of texts listed, but we will need more contacts
beyond them.

o Should I create one ticket for the project, or one per religion, or what?

o Where can we host this?

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Re: [OLPC-Games] Play Go issues for laptop

[Edward Cherlin]

here is a good one online already, I
>>> link
>>> to it from our learn to play page.  If you didn't click on it, the link
>>> is
>>> here:
>>> http://www.playgo.to/interactive/index.html  It is also already available
>>> in
>>> some 30 languages, so you could save yourself some trouble by using what
>>> has
>>> already been done.  The interactive way to go was written by Hiroki Mori,
>>> I
>>> am sure he would be completely supportive of OLPC.  His contact info is
>>> on
>>> the website.  I would also be happy to work on a learn to play interface
>>> for
>>> your program if that were more feasible for an end product.
>>> What materials describe the application to laptop users, and entice them
>>> to
>>> explore it?  My understanding was that it needs to be downloaded
>>> separately
>>> from the main package.  Is that the case or is it bundled with everything
>>> else?
>>> Another excellent way to get some feedback would be for Andres and I to
>>> play
>>> a game together online.  The KGS Go Server is a terrific program.
>>>  Looking
>>> at how that works together, and talking about important aspects of the
>>> game,
>>> could give you a good deal of insight into how to improve PlayGo.
>>> This forum is fine, I am happy to conduct these discussions through your
>>> list.  I just wasn't sure how many people were on it, or if this was the
>>> appropriate place for this discussion.
>>> Thanks,
>>> Paul Barchilon,
>>> American Go Foundation
>>> http://tigersmouth.org
>>> http://agfgo.org
>>>
>>>
>>> On Oct 10, 2008, at 7:37 PM, Andrés Ambrois wrote:
>>>
>>> On Friday 10 October 2008 06:49:58 Edward Cherlin wrote:
>>>
>>> I am a go player and programmer, and I have been involved in PlayGo
>>>
>>> from the beginning. I am also the one communicating with AGA about
>>>
>>> PlayGo and about our plans for multilingual content for teaching Go.
>>>
>>> Some years ago I worked on a multilingual go glossary in Unicode,
>>>
>>> adding various writing systems to the ASCII original.
>>>
>>> On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 9:53 PM, Paul Barchilon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello to all who are working on this project, and thank you for the great
>>>
>>> service you are providing to kids around the world!  I am the Vice
>>>
>>> President of the American Go Foundation, a charitable organization that
>>>
>>> provides free Go equipment to children and teachers in schools.  I spend
>>>
>>> a great deal of time teaching children, and am an active Go player and
>>>
>>> organizer on the national scene.  It has come to my attention that there
>>>
>>> are a number of problems with the Play Go program, and also that a set of
>>>
>>> rules that are appropriate for children may well be needed.
>>>
>>> I am not a computer programmer, and do not have one of the laptops, so I
>>>
>>> haven't actually seen the Play Go program at work.
>>>
>>> Hello Paul and Edward!
>>>
>>> I've written most of the code in PlayGo, following Gerard J. Cerchio's
>>> initial implementation, so its very encouraging to see so much enthusiasm
>>> behind it!
>>>
>>> While I'm not a great Go player, (I do think it's a fantastic game, just
>>> haven't found a good sparring partner :)). I believe it's a great way to
>>> teach
>>> analytical thinking to young kids in a fun way. Therefore, feedback such
>>> as
>>> this, from knowledgeable people like you, is paramount to its
>>> improvement.
>>> Thank you!
>>>
>>>
>>> You can download the latest version. I'll get you instructions offline.
>>>
>>> I did ask a child who
>>>
>>> has one, and plays Go, to tell me how it seemed.  He may have an older
>>>
>>> version of the software, but if his observations are correct it sounds
>>>
>>> like there are some serious issues.  I would be very glad to help solve
>>>
>>> some of these problems if you would like some input.  As I said, I can't
>>>
>>> program, but I can tell whoever is writing the software what the problems
>>>
>>> are.
>>>
>>> Thank you.
>>&g

Re: [sugar] notes from the field - Mongolia

[Edward Cherlin]

Martin, Deniz, cool it, the pair of you. No more ad hominem attacks.
You each owe the other an apology. And one to Marco, too.

The list is not out of touch. There are many on the list who are
ignorant of conditions on the ground and of other things through no
fault of their own.

Now shake hands and come out arguing about facts, needs, and possibilities.

On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Martin Dengler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 08:10:57PM -0400, Deniz Kural wrote:
>> [this list is out of touch]
>> Hence, student, or teacher, I need a USB stick.
>
> 1. Plug USB stick into XO running build from the last six months
> 2. Drag files from the Journal to the USB stick icon
> 3. Drag files from the USB stick's file list to the Journal
>
>> Deniz
>
>> p.p.s Marco, you're a stuck-up asshole :)
>
> And you managed to call people that actually know what the hell
> they're talking about "out of touch".  Thanks for advancing the
> state of knowledge on the list all the way forward to, oh, 2007.
>
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>
>



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Re: journal is hard + sugar and the digital age

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 7:15 AM, Carlos Nazareno <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi Tomeu. Some personal feedback:
>
>> 3) Basically - The journal is really hard for people/ kids to use over
>> a longer period of time. Kids and teachers can't find things that they
>> did unless it was done within the last 30 minutes.
>>Could you please elaborate on the difficulties that people have when
>>using the journal?
>
> I've experienced the same problem. Items tend to clutter up in the
> journal over time, it's like viewing your entire web browsing history.
> Its current implementation simply leads to information overload with
> the accumulating number of entries.

How about the Gmail method, in which you archive messages when you are
done with them, but you can tag messages, set filters, and search
easily?

> IMHO, the philosophy of "nothing gets forgotten" with the journal is a
> bit flawed because as people we don't even naturally do that. We
> selectively choose which information to remember and mark as important
> and discard the rest because that's just information overload.
>
> Think about it from a browser paradigm. You bookmark important items
> that you want to reuse later on. On the other hand, viewing your
> browser history over a prolonged period of time gets pretty unwieldy.
>
> Another problem I've had is that I tried to offload some programs onto
> an SD card due to the XO's limited internal storage. This can lead to
> hundreds to thousands of files when opening up the SD card in the
> journal. The flat heirarchy makes navigation extremely difficult when
> you have this many files.
>
> Sure, there's search, but that presupposes that you know the names of
> the files you're looking for. What if you stick in something that has
> hundreds of files and you were looking for an image file or something
> that you didn't know the name of?
>
> Hmm. I think one improvement that can be added to the journal is to
> improve the display filters?
>
> Like for example, the ability to filter by delineated date? It would
> be a little better if users could browse the journal from a date
> range, like the range of 2 weeks to 3 weeks ago only because that's
> when the user remembers the activity that was used.
>
> Another one is the ability to view journal entries by name
> alphabetically. This would help in browsing through entries.
>
> That being said, is there a possibility of creating a separate file
> manager activity? The reality of having to deal with files and folders
> is an inevitability that users will eventually go through once they
> grow in sophistication and interact in other digital environments like
> pcs. I think giving the idea of giving XO users the ability to view
> the sourcecode and muck around with them (a much-touted feature of the
> XO) requires a sophistication levels above navigating through and
> dealing with folders and files.

I recommend installing Midnight Commander for file management.

yum install mc

It is text-mode, so it runs entirely in a Terminal session, and
doesn't need to be Sugarized.

If you think that this is too much for students, we can easily rip out
unneeded functions.

>>could you elaborate on what means for teachers/schools/govts to
>>prepare kids for the digital age? It may be that we are not giving
>>enough importance to that requirement (?).

It clearly does not mean supposing that the tools of today will be
around in the same form in twelve years when our newest students will
graduate. So it must mean learning to adapt.

> *Interoperability with current systems.
>
> The sugar environment fosters a new "closed" paradigm/ecosystem that
> is different from pre-established paradigms. The intentional "removal"
> of the file and folder paradigm might make transitioning difficualt
> and I think users are having difficulty because of it.
>
> Also, for high school students, this means *office applications*.
> They're pretty much a requirement in private schools here where I come
> from. One of the things we hope do achieve with OLPC is to bridge the
> divide between "haves" and "have nots", and that includes giving them
> a boost in IT skills (which is one of the biggest attractions of
> OLPC). I guess that's why governments or educational ministries
> insisted that the XO be able to run windows or no go.

You don't think that Free Software for the office makes the grade?

If we could start teaching students Office 2012 today, I would
consider it. If the alternative under discussion is teaching Office
2000, don't bother.

> Oh, some more observations slightly off-topic:
>
> Here in Manila, internet cafe rates are now cheap due to extreme
> popularity and proliferation. You can go surfing or playing LAN games
> for 20 Pesos/hour which is about 42 cents. Going home, I pass through
> a depressed area and there are 5 internet cafes in there.
>
> I've seen 6-8 year old street children in groups of about 3, pooling
> together money to play 3D realtime strategy games like the newest

Python 2.6 Turtle module and Sugar TurtleArt (was Re: [Edu-sig] Edu-sig Digest, Vol 63, Issue 11)

[Edward Cherlin]

How would you compare this turtle module with the TurtleArt activity
in Sugar? It is available in .deb and .rpm packages for Ubuntu,
Debian, and Fedora, and also in .xo bundles, installable with
xo-get.py. Sugar Labs is working with other Linux distributions to
make Sugar packages available as widely as possible.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/TurtleArt
http://wiki.laptop.og/go/Xo-get

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 1:14 PM, John Posner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Miguel,
>
>>
>> Python 2.6, which was released one week ago, comes with a new turtle
>> module. Perhaps this is something, you and your kids would like as it
>> is pure educational Python software based on Tkinter. One of it's design
>> goals was to provide easy access to graphics ...
>
>
> Gregor's new Turtle module is, indeed, terrific. If some students need a
> gentler introduction, take a look at the point-and-click front end that I
> added ("ClixTur" at http://www.geocities.com/jjphoogrp).
>
> Students can begin by creating drawings pretty much as they would in KidPix
> or Paint or Visio. (OK, it's a bit more primitive, because there are no
> dragging operations). As they click, a transcript of the Python code being
> executed appears in a separate window. The students can use this code to:
>
> * "play back" the transcript, to recreate their drawings
>
> This is very simple, but it gets across the idea of a stored program. And
> the high speed of the playback will be fun for younger students.
>
> * make revisions to the Python/Turtle code, and see what differences they
> produce in the drawing
>
> This kind of introduction to programming is much less intimidating than
> starting with a blank page. And it's just about as satisfying, especially if
> you generated the original code yourself with the point-and-click interface.
>
> Best of luck,
> John Posner
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Re: "Walter Bender": Re: devkeys, prettyboot, and G1G1

[Edward Cherlin]

I don't mind if the G1G1 donors have the option to participate in
testing secured laptops, but I utterly reject the notion that we can
jerk customer/donors around like this without their permission in
advance. They _will_ complain publicly.

Engineering and marketing should never have the authority to trump
customer service or product quality.

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 7:15 PM, John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Mitch and I have come up with a way to ship G1G1 laptops so that they
> will pretty-boot, but still come from the factory without any need
> for developer keys (in the Forth "disable-security" setting).
>
> This requires a small edit to /boot/olpc.fth in the OS build,
> to load the XO child image, freeze the screen, and put the
> first "progress dot" down just before jumping to Linux.  It's
> detailed here:
>
>  http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7896
>
> I know the support crew would be much happier if G1G1 laptops were
> shipped able to run test builds and patched software, if users could
> interact with Forth to diagnose their hardware, if they could run
> unsigned Forth code from USB collector keys, etc.
>
> Unfortunately, an IRC discussion with Scott today revealed that the
> engineering team has decided that we *must* ship G1G1 laptops with a
> requirement for development keys.  The reason: because too many kids
> in the third world will be getting lockdown laptops, and we want the
> G1G1 recipients to be guinea pigs to debug the laptops, to be sure the
> laptops work even when locked down (and that they unlock properly when
> the kid requests a jailbreak key).
>
> I see this is utterly backwards.  The countries that want DRM on their
> laptops should be paying the price in support problems and
> infrastructure.  Not the donors who sponsor a G1G1 laptop, and not the
> free software community who donate to help push this project along.
> As believers in freedom, we shouldn't be defaulting EVERY laptop to
> being locked by its manufacturer.  Yet that's the argument: because
> some of them are locked, all of them must be locked.  Or perhaps it's
> slightly more nuanced: A country that orders thousands can order them
> without DRM, but G1G1 users can't.  That sounds reasonable, but I've
> interacted with several country teams (Nepal and South Pacific), who
> had come away from OLPC with the impression that it would be
> incredibly dangerous to turn off the "security" of the laptops.  In
> Nepal's case I was unable to disabuse them of this odd notion.  So no
> country asks for freedom in their laptop shipments, and no G1G1 is
> shipped with freedom, and thus every OLPC laptop is jailed, like every
> iPhone.
>
>John
>
> Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2008 08:34:09 -0400
> From: "Walter Bender" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "John Gilmore" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: devkeys, prettyboot, and G1G1
> Cc: "Mitch Bradley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> If Mitch is comfortable with his fix, I cannot see any reason not to
> ship developer keys with G1G1 machines--it would save everyone
> headaches, especially on support; but of course I cannot speak for
> OLPC these days.
>
> -walter
>
> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 7:26 PM, John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> I recall discussing this last time but  don't recall the reasons not
>>> to do it this way. We did ship them all pre-activated.
>>
>> I questioned people after the fateful meeting, and it seemed to me
>> that the problem was that Nicholas wanted pretty-boot, and Mitch was
>> unwilling to try to disentangle pretty-boot from secure-boot.  Secure-boot
>> was already a tangle of ugly Forth code, and he was sure that adding
>> more complexity there would result in security holes or bugs.
>>
>> Since then, he has figured out the one-line circumvention that's
>> documented in bug #7896.  The circumvention is in the OS (since OFW
>> keeps no state).
>>
>>John
>
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>
>
> [gnu: I also cc'd this to support-gang, but that required sending it
> from a different email address, due to how I am subscribed there.]
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Re: [sugar] G1G1v2 Activities

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> We need to pick the activities we ship with 8.2 when its manufactured
> for G1G1 users. Management needs to sign off on the final list as early
> as next week.
>
> Its not definitive but we want your input on what we should include.
>
> What do you think are the most important activities to include?
>
> Please pick up to 10 and put them in order of priority.
>
> We will tally the votes and use that as input to the decision.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Greg S
>
> PS this is not a scientific voting system like used recently in the
> sugar vote. I accept Arrow's impossibility theorem
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem) and my
> math foo is weak so I'm not going to try and justify the methodology.

1. Measure
2. Etoys
3. Turtle Art with Sensors
4. Scratch
5. xo-get
6. Dr. Geo II
7. E-Paati/E-Paath
8. Record
9. TamTamJam
10. TamTamSynthLab

There are several others that I can't recommend until I try them, or
some other features are added. E-Pals is at the top of that list.
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Re: Peru and Microsoft announcement

[Edward Cherlin]

Thanks for talking to us.

This would be even more useful as the basis for an article or
editorial in one or more of the computer magazines or Web sites, or a
fact-filled press release. All of the media people I have talked with
say they would like to hear from OLPC.

We don't have to frame it as us vs. them. We can just announce the
state of current deployments, and discuss plans for future deployments
and G1G1, including whatever can be said in public about the Microsoft
trials. Everybody wants to know what's up with the Amazon deal, too.

2008/9/16 Ed McNierney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Folks -
>
> There have been a number of questions about press coverage late last week
> from Peru concerning the introduction of XO laptops running XP and Office.
>  Microsoft has previously ordered a number of XO laptops for XP testing and
> pilot deployment.  The usage and distribution of these machines for that
> effort is up to Microsoft, and that's what they're doing in Peru.  This
> activity is not news, but is just a stage in Microsoft's plans as they were
> announced back in May:
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-15MSOLPCPR.mspx
>
> There are a number of milestones yet to be achieved before XP can be made
> widely available on XO machines in any form, from any source.   The work
> involved will require at least more several months to complete.  Microsoft
> and OLPC announced in May that we'd work to make XP available in a future XO
> dual-boot configuration, and nothing has changed about that situation.
>
>  - Ed
>
> Ed McNierney
> Vice President of Software Development
> One Laptop Per Child
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: OFW vs. proprietary BIOS

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 5:07 PM, Mitch Bradley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Edward Cherlin wrote.
>> I also want to see Open Firmware replace proprietary BIOSes everywhere.
>
> I'd like that too, but it won't happen.  The market forces that drive
> the computer business still favor proprietary thinking, notwithstanding
> the many FOSS arguments to the contrary.  Intel calls the shots by
> controlling a big percentage of the silicon designs, and Intel is
> pushing UEFI, partially because it allows them to keep their
> chipset-dependent startup code proprietary.  The board manufacturers do
> what the dominant silicon vendor allows them to do.

If you would be willing, I can put you in touch with companies that
make only Linux computers, who would be delighted to get out from
under Intel as well as Microsoft. RMS would give you an endorsement.
I'm sure we can get you Slashdotted. Want to give it a try?

I spent 17 years in high-tech market analysis. My professional opinion
is that you have a good shot, and that the XO is the sum of all of
Microsoft's and Intel's fears. (Otherwise they wouldn't be pushing for
dual-boot, and the resulting multitude of side-by-side comparisons.)
Certainly, it's an uphill battle overall, but you are starting from an
unassailable niche.
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Re: Power-on to GUI in 20 seconds

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 11:38 AM, Mitch Bradley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> pgf wrote:
>
>> bert wrote:
>>  > Am 29.08.2008 um 15:34 schrieb [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
>>  >
>>  > > bert wrote:
>>  > >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0fAUGRUDVA
>>  > >>
>>  > >> Brought to you by Gerardo Richarte, with bootstrapping help from
>>  > >> Mitch Bradley.

Thanks, Mitch. Where can we get details and code?

>>  > > i can't resist pointing out that we could probably do that with
>>  > > linux too, if we weren't committed to using an off-the-shelf desktop
>>  > > distribution.
>>  >
>>  > Are we committed to that?
>>
>> i suspect so.  it gives us huge leverage in terms of reducing
>> development time and in increased numbers of familiar developers.
>> while i'm sure there's a bunch of savings that could be had
>> in boot time, some of it would come in terms of reduced or
>> delayed services and system flexibility.  the fact is that
>> once the XO is up and running, it's an extremely powerful,
>> full-fledged workstation.  (approximately speaking, of course.  :-)
>> there's something to be said for that.
>
> I think we need to be careful to stay focused on our mission.  To the
> extent that we are too compatible with the big wide world of PCs and all
> the different flavors of Linux, we risk becoming irrelevant.  If you
> want a PC, there are plenty of choices, nearly all of them better (at
> running conventional software) than XO.

I disagree with that analysis. If we had to dump Sugar to be
compatible, that would be a disaster. Multiple boot from flash drives
just strengthens us. I have been talking to other Linux distro groups,
and BSD also, at trade shows, to encourage them to get their software
working on the XO so that our children can study _everybody's_ source
code.

> In my mind, making yet another PC is uninteresting.  We need to focus on
> doing something that is fundamentally better.  We cannot win at the old
> game; we have to invent a new game.

We did that. There is no going back, and the competition knows it. We
inspired dozens of less-capable but higher-priced imitations (see
liliputing.com), which will eventually get mesh networking and
versions of Linux with Sugar, becoming more-capable but higher-priced
imitations, and spreading our work everywhere. I'm all for it.

>> (i do think we should be making our dual-boot capabilities
>> equally available for all OSes.  i'd love to be able to
>> (trivially) try SqueakNOS or debxo, for instance, or be able to
>> experiment with application-specific fast-bootable images.  and i
>> think a lot of G1G1 folks that might prefer an "alternate"
>> distribution of some sort for day-to-day would probably like to
>> keep the OLPC code around as well, just to keep their laptops
>> "stock", and to track our progress.)

I also want to see Open Firmware replace proprietary BIOSes
everywhere. In fact, I would like to see OFW-only embedded systems,
since FORTH is designed for that environment. (I am assuming that
Mitch can add real-time capabilities to OFW, and that a variety of
development environments are available for such systems.) Or perhaps
OFW/Parrot hybrids. I don't know. It's Free Software, folks, what do
you want to implement today?

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Re: ibus, a new input framework

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 11:52 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi,
> I just came across ibus, an input framework which seems to be designed
> to be a better replacement for scim. A presentation is available
> online at http://ibus-user.googlegroups.com/web/ibus.pdf
> Has anyone used this ? Any comments on how well this works and how
> stable this is ?
> Thanks,
> Sayamindu

I'm on Debian Hardy. I compiled and installed Ibus, ibus-pinyin and
Ibus-tables (apparently) but I'm having trouble with the others. I
can't make the ibus-Hangul engine, and I can't make install
ibus-chewing. Ibus doesn't run. Some error communication:


[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/Desktop/ibus-hangul-0.1.1.20080823$ make
make  all-recursive
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/mokurai/Desktop/ibus-hangul-0.1.1.20080823'
Making all in engine
make[2]: Entering directory
`/home/mokurai/Desktop/ibus-hangul-0.1.1.20080823/engine'
/usr/bin/swig -python -I/usr/include -o hangul_wrap.c ./hangul.i
/bin/bash ../libtool --tag=CC   --mode=compile gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I.
-I..-I/usr/include/hangul-1.0 -I/usr/include/python2.5
-I/usr/include/python2.5  -g -O2 -MT _hangul_la-hangul_wrap.lo -MD -MP
-MF .deps/_hangul_la-hangul_wrap.Tpo -c -o _hangul_la-hangul_wrap.lo
`test -f 'hangul_wrap.c' || echo './'`hangul_wrap.c
libtool: compile:  gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I..
-I/usr/include/hangul-1.0 -I/usr/include/python2.5
-I/usr/include/python2.5 -g -O2 -MT _hangul_la-hangul_wrap.lo -MD -MP
-MF .deps/_hangul_la-hangul_wrap.Tpo -c hangul_wrap.c  -fPIC -DPIC -o
.libs/_hangul_la-hangul_wrap.o
hangul_wrap.c:118:20: error: Python.h: No such file or directory
etc.

Where is Python.h supposed to come from?

...
make[1]: *** [_chewing_la-chewing_wrap.lo] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory
`/home/mokurai/Desktop/ibus-chewing-0.1.1.20080823/engine'
make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1


[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~/Desktop/ibus-chewing-0.1.1.20080823$ ibus
Starting ibus-daemon OK
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/share/ibus/daemon/ibusdaemon.py", line 28, in 
import dbus.server
ImportError: No module named server
Start ibus-daemon failed

> --
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> [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
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Fwd: [ElectionReformActivistsforObama] LinuxWorld Obama vs McCain - YouTube

[Edward Cherlin]

The Open Voting software is written in Python. We would like to start
a project to offer it to schoolchildren for conducting school
elections and learning more about the election process in general and
the security and reliability requirements for election software more
particularly.


-- Forwarded message --
From: Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 12:19 PM
Subject: Re: [ElectionReformActivistsforObama] LinuxWorld Obama vs
McCain - YouTube
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: Election Reform Activists for Obama
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


Ah, thank you. I'm in that video in my anti-Spam shirt as a Founding
Member of the Open Voting Consortium. We were delighted to have the
Raging Grannies join us.

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Brent Turner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Election reform news-
>
> Here's a YouTube post regarding the LinuxWorld open voting event
>
> http://www.youtube.com/v/q8CSKdMTARY
>
> Let's keep working so 2008 is the last presidential election conducted on
> secret, corporate owned software systems.

Indeed.

> Brent Turner
>
> San Francisco Election Integrity League

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And Children are my nation.
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Re: olpc school request

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 12:54 AM, Jerry and Amy Higdon
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Thanks so much.
> When I search for OLPC I find many such references are made about buying for
> those really in need like Bangladesh...
> How can I find out if there is a program of sort for Bangladesh going right
> now or not?

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments

There isn't one.

> Jerry
>
> John 3:30 He must become greater and greater, and I must become less and
> less.
>
> - Original Message 
> From: Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Jerry and Amy Higdon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org
> Sent: Friday, August 22, 2008 12:17:58 AM
> Subject: Re: olpc school request
>
> 2008/8/21 Jerry and Amy Higdon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I am a missionary who is inquiring upon olpc for a couple small schools in
>> Bangladesh.
>> I also work as a technology management professional for the past 25 years
>> and have a heart for children.
>>
>> Who might I contact to find out if these schools could qualify for the
>> program.
>
> Your question seems to be whether OLPC would accept an application to
> donate XOs to your schools. That is not how the program works. There
> are three ways to get XOs into a country.
>
> * Have the government buy a large number of units. This is what Peru
> and Paraguay (Uruguay) have done.
> * Have an NGO or private donor buy laptops through GiveMany. This is
> the case in Mexico, where billionaire Carlos Slim has made the first
> major purchase.
> * Get into the GiveOneGetOne program. I have no idea how G1G1
> countries are selected. The current list is Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia,
> Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Mongolia.
>
> Other processes should become available over time, but not yet.
>
> Whom might you approach for donations?
>
> How many children do you have?
>
> What are the local issues? (Economic, health, agriculture,
> environment, or whatever.)
>
> When your children get educated, what economic opportunities will they
> be able to take advantage of?
>
>> Thank you for your help.
>>
>>
>> Pastor Jerry
>>
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>> www.NewHopeQC.com
>>
>> John 3:30 He must become greater and greater, and I must become less and
>> less.
>
>
> --
> Silent Thunder [ 默雷 / शब्दगर्ज ] is my name,
> And Children are my nation.
> The Cosmos is my dwelling place,
> And Truth my destination.
>
>



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Re: olpc school request

[Edward Cherlin]

2008/8/21 Jerry and Amy Higdon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Greetings,
>
> I am a missionary who is inquiring upon olpc for a couple small schools in
> Bangladesh.
> I also work as a technology management professional for the past 25 years
> and have a heart for children.
>
> Who might I contact to find out if these schools could qualify for the
> program.

Your question seems to be whether OLPC would accept an application to
donate XOs to your schools. That is not how the program works. There
are three ways to get XOs into a country.

* Have the government buy a large number of units. This is what Peru
and Paraguay have done.
* Have an NGO or private donor buy laptops through GiveMany. This is
the case in Mexico, where billionaire Carlos Slim has made the first
major purchase.
* Get into the GiveOneGetOne program. I have no idea how G1G1
countries are selected. The current list is Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia,
Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Mongolia.

Other processes should become available over time, but not yet.

Whom might you approach for donations?

How many children do you have?

What are the local issues? (Economic, health, agriculture,
environment, or whatever.)

When your children get educated, what economic opportunities will they
be able to take advantage of?

> Thank you for your help.
>
>
> Pastor Jerry
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> www.NewHopeQC.com
>
> John 3:30 He must become greater and greater, and I must become less and
> less.


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Re: Tux Type on the XO

[Edward Cherlin]

2008/8/12 Cynthia Solomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Hi All,
> Please respond to David Bruce on the following issues.
> Thanks,
> --Cynthia
>
>
>
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: "David Bruce" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: August 11, 2008 11:35:43 AM EDT
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cc: "Cynthia Solomon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: Tux Type on the XO
> Hello Cynthia and Seth,
>
> Over the weekend I installed all the needed tools and libs with yum, and
> successfully built and installed our current, unmodified release ofTtuxtype
> on the XO.  It runs just like on any other platform, except that it can't
> get a 640x480 fullscreen, so it runs in a 640x480 box centered in the
> normal-resolution screen.
>
>
> So - I'm ready to start modifying Tuxtype itself.  I have a few questions
> regarding what you would like to see:
>
> 1.  Are the lib requirements a problem?  Tuxtype uses SDL, SDL_mixer,
> SDL_image, SDL_ttf, and SDL_Pango (which depends on some other libs).  All
> of these were easily installed with yum, but they do take up some space.
> fwiw, they are a subset of the libs needed for Tuxpaint, so if Tuxpaint is
> being considered as a standard app, it will bring in everything Tuxtype
> needs (the same is true for Tuxmath, btw).
>
> 2.  Regarding Tuxtype itself, what needs to be improved to get it to meet
> the needs of OLPC?  My own sense is that there are two obvious issues to be
> addressed.
>
> First, Tuxtype needs to use fullscreen at the machine's normal resolution -
> the 640x480 box is just too small on the XO's small monitor.  This is
> something we have been meaning to address anyway, and we have done so
> already for Tuxmath, so the issues are known.
>
> Second, we need to use standard GNU gettext for i18n.  Currently, Tuxtype
> supports i18n via language-specific "themes" with its own home-brewed
> gettext.  It does not use the standard locales mechanism.  The player
> selects the language to use within the program.  This is also something that
> has been "on the agenda" for some time.
>
> Neither of these issues is exactly trivial, but they aren't prohibative,
> either.


Either way we need lessons for every keyboard we ship, and for Dvorak,
whether two-handed or one-handed (left or right). There are a lot of
amputees in Africa as a result of various civil wars. I'm learning
left-handed Dvorak so that I can type with one hand and mouse with the
other.

> 3.  Am I supposed to be "sugarizing" Tuxtype in some way?  For now, I just
> launch it from the command line (which also requires adding /usr/local/bin
> to $PATH, unless there is some other location where programs are supposed to
> be installed).

Presumably we should implement collaboration and two-person typing games.

> Regards,
>
> David Bruce
>
>
>
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Re: [Localization] Arabic Projects

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 7:44 AM, Nicholas Bodley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On Wed Jul 30  7:17 , "Walter Bender"  sent:
>
>>Welcome to the project.
>>
>>Localization is more that string translation. In particular, there is
>>work to be done to improve the RTL rendering in Sugar. Do you know of
>>any Python programmers who could help with this?

With skills in using Pango from Python. We need that documented somewhere.

Also, Pango has been integrated into Squeak, but nobody in that
community has worked on complex scripts AFAIK, so we need more people
with Smalltalk and Pango skills.

>>regards.
>>
>>-walter
>
> I'm really uncertain whether Sugar developers are aware of the complexity of
> rendering Arabic text acceptably. I'd love to be able to say that rendering 
> (that
> is, displaying and printing) Arabic is easy; however, it is anything but easy.
> Surely, our native Arabic speakers are completely aware of this, but it might
> help if I explain something about what is involved, for the sake of those who
> don't yet know.
>
> First, a bit of personal background: I'm very interested in writing systems, 
> but
> am strictly a dilettante/amateur in the field. Please do correct anything I'll
> say that is wrong!

I have written about Unicode, including RTL and Bidi, professionally,
but have not done development in this area.

> Our Latin (or latin, or Roman/roman)* alphabet is quite straightforward to 
> write
> and typeset; it's simply a matter of placing letters

numbers, and punctuation

>  in LtoR order on the writing
> line.

and getting accents placed correctly on letters.

> This holds true of several other alphabets, such as Greek and Cyrillic, but
> those of India and Southeast Asia are not so simple. *Homework I've neglected 
> to
> do! :)

The rudiments of rendering for Asian scripts are described in the
Unicode Standard, available in PDF on the unicode.org site.

> Hebrew is another RtoL writing system, but it's extremely simple when 
> compared to
> Arabic.

First important point: Hebrew and Arabic are Bidi scripts, not just
RTL. Numbers in particular are written LTR within RTL text, and there
are other exceptions, which differ among languages. The essentials are
described in Unicode Standard Annex #9, Unicode Bidirectional
Algorithm. http://unicode.org/reports/tr9/. Some of the
language-specific details are handled in the Unicode Common Locale
Data Repository, http://unicode.org/cldr/.

> Keeping in mind that probably almost all writing systems have a "typeset" 
> variety
> as well as a cursive, flowing, handwritten variety, Arabic is rare in that 
> when
> properly written, its nature, even when "typeset" (and when rendered by 
> computer)
> is essentially cursive. Although trademarks and product labels can seem to be
> "typeset", nevertheless, afaik, the only way to acceptably render Arabic text 
> is
> essentially according to cursive form, as if handwritten.

The rudiments are available in
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/ch08.pdf
Unicode Standard 5.0 8 Middle Eastern Scripts

> It is easy to position individual Arabic letters in RtoL sequence, leaving 
> small
> spaces between letters, but the result, I'm essentially sure, looks very bad;

Absolutely.

> it
> would definitely not be acceptable in an XO! (Apparently Arabic typewriters
> created rather wretched-looking text; I'd love to know.)

Here is a random example, giving the same sequence of letters
separately and then joined.

ش س ي ب ل ا ت ن م ك
شسيبلاتنمك

> Arabic letters can have as many as four different forms for each letter, 
> although
> (pretty sure!) not every letter has four different forms. More, soon, about 
> this.

Correct.

> Furthermore, keeping in mind the cursive (from the Latin for "running", iirc)
> character of Arabic when properly rendered, consecutive letters are often 
> joined.
>
> As to the four forms, one is "standalone", or isolated -- this is the form a
> letter takes when it's all by itself.

For example:

ي

> The other three forms are for the beginning and for the end of a word, as 
> well as
> a third form used within a word.

The same letter as above, in all three combining forms.

ييي


> The names I recall for these forms are initial, medial, final, and isolated.
>
> Arabic text in computer form could simply specify each letter is sequence, 
> with
> no regard to which of the four forms is to be used; however, to simplify the
> process of rendering somewhat, "combining forms" are offered in Unicode (or
> were!) -- see Arabic Presentation Forms, A and B,
> Unicode ranges U+FB50--U+FDFF (A) and U+FE70--U+FEFF. (This was Unicode 3; 
> sorry
> if I mislead.)

The combining forms are deprecated. They greatly complicate sorting
and searching.

> Apparently, these simplify the process of rendering decent Arabic, although
> (fairly sure) they are not a completely-acceptable solution.

This turns out to be obsolete information. Before Unicode, fonts (as
previously mechanical typewriters) 

Re: Collaboration Requirements

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I wrote up some collaboration requirements to help get us to a
> definition of collaboration support that teachers can use in schools.

Thanks. It is not clear to me whether you mean to include the case of
children at different schools collaborating, even in different
countries. This will be vital for language learning, and important for
many other educational and other functions.

> This is my first somewhat rigorous requirements definition for OLPC so
> comments on style as well as substance are welcome.
>
> I will take one round of comments then I'll find a place for it in the
> wiki (more comments always welcome after that).
>
> Collaboration requirements for OLPC XOs and XS
> Greg Smith
> July 30, 2008
>
> Background:
> The concept of "Collaboration" has been around for a long time. I have
> used cuseeme, MeetingPlace, NetMeeting, WebEx, IRC, AIM, Gobbby,
> Sametime, PC Anywhere, Cisco HD Video conferencing and others. Our
> challenge is different in three respects.
> - wireless
> - educational use
> - greater scale
>
> Motivation:
> The goal of this requirement definition is to provide all the information
> necessary to define tests and fix critical collaboration bugs in 8.2.0
> and to set a goal for 9.1.0.
>
> The best case is that this write up motivates test cases which results
> in a list of detailed examples of collaboration  that will be supported
> in 8.2.0. These examples should be deployable and usable by teachers in
> class. Examples of use cases generated by teachers are at:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Use_Cases#Collaboration_Examples
>
> Collaboration is an area where we are on the cutting edge of available
> technology. It was well promoted and teachers on the "sur" list have
> repeatedly asked for a definition of how to use it successfully.
>
> A list of activities supposedly enabled for collaboration is at:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Collaboration_Central
>
> Documentation on previous wireless tests is at:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Config_Notes#Wireless_.26_Network
>
> Requirements Definition:
>
> I set a high bar but I try to balance between available technology and
> the desires of the teachers. I hope can at least test to this standard
> soon, even if we don't close all bugs found by that testing until later.
>
> Requirements beginning with "must" are critical to success, "should" are
> very important but can be deferred and nice to have are "very useful"
> but likely to be deferred.
>
> If a "must" requirement cannot be met, we should still attempt to
> support as much of it as possible (e.g. if we can't do 50 XOs in N9, 40
> or 30 should be tested and supported).
>
> I - Network Requirements
>
> i - Supported Architectures
> N1 - Must support one of the four network scenarios defined at:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Networking_scenarios
>
> The scenarios in priority order are named as follows.
> S1 - Simple Wifi
> S2 - School Wifi
> S3 - Simple Mesh
> S4 - School mesh (no need to test, just recorded here for completeness)
>
> ii - RF Environments
> N2 - Must support environments where there are no other RF signals
> beyond the APs as needed by the network scenario.
>
> N3 - Must support RF environments where up to 2 other APs are visible in
> the XO neighborhood.
>
> N4 - Should support environments where there are up to 4 other APs
> visible in the XO neighborhood.
>
> II - Scale
> i - Scale of XOs collaborating
> N5 - Must support up to 10 XOs collaborating together. See activity
> examples for exact steps.
>
> N6 - Should support up to 20 XOs collaborating together.
>
> N7 - Nice to support up to 30 XOs collaborating together.
>
> ii - Scale of XOs visible within range of each other
>
> N8 - In N5 above must allow up to 1500 XOs within range in the school.
> Can require that all other XOs aside from those collaborating have their
> antennas turned off.
>
> N9 - Must allow 50 (should allow 100, nice to have 300) other XOs within
> range in the school where all XOs have their radios turned on. Can
> require that only those collaborating are using the network (AKA
> everyone else is verbally asked to stop using the Internet and stop
> collaborating) but they can leave their XO radios on in scenario S1
>
> N10 - Must allow 50 (should allow 100, nice to have 300) XOs within
> range in the school where all XOs have their radios turned on. Can
> require that only those collaborating are using the network (AKA no
> collaboration and no Internet access) in scenario S2.
>
> N11 - Must allow 50 (should allow 100, nice to have 300) XOs within
> range in the school where all XOs have their radios turned on. Can
> require that only those collaborating are on a given Mesh channel (1,6
> or 11) while all the other XOs are on different Mesh channels in scenario S3
>
> III Types of collaboration
>
> In all cases, a single XO starts activity, then shares it, then other
> XOs join the shared activity.
>
> N

Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

[Edward Cherlin]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 6:32 PM, Jerry Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Seems like this problem for linux was solved with RPM.

I wouldn't go quite that far. The holes in RPM drove me to Debian. %-[

> With rpm if something is missing for something you want to install, it
> complains and won't let you install it.

Apt and yum also track dependencies, both better than RPM, and rather
than refuse to install, they offer to get the dependent libraries for
you. Why aren't we using this approach with xo-get?

> It seems like a lot of the python code I have looked at assumes you have
> stuff and just quietly dies and you have to look at the log and see, oh I am
> missing .
> Like the Terminal activity needs python-json.
> Pacman needs pygame.
>
> Jerry Williams
>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:sugar-
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mikus Grinbergs
>> Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 6:19 PM
>> To: devel@lists.laptop.org; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Subject: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use
>>
>> There was an earlier discussion of how to provide the right build
>> level for users out in the field, since now Builds can be installed
>> separately from Activities -- leading to the possibility that for
>> someone an Activity_version on his XO will find itself *mismatched*
>> with the Build_version on his XO.
>>
>>
>> The problem is bigger than that.
>>
>> Since Joyride 2210, I have seen three of the Activities I often show
>> off get broken by the *removal* of services from the Joyride builds.
>> If the current software distribution process has trouble matching
>> existing Activities to the services_provided_by_a_Build -- how will
>> NOT YET EXISTING Activities be accommodated by the software that
>> Sugar is supposed to run on top of ???
>>
>> I'm thinking of someone in a far-off land who has an idea for a
>> "killer" Activity, to be run under Sugar.  HOW does he learn which
>> (library, or kernel, or whatever) services will be available
>> *everywhere* Sugar can be installed, which services will be
>> available only with *specific* builds/platforms, and which services
>> would *never* be available for functions fitted into Sugar ?
>>
>>
>> mikus
>>
>> ___
>> Sugar mailing list
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
>
>
> ___
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> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
>



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Re: CIS solar charging-correct list?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 2:38 AM, Stan. SWAN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Greetings- in spite of numerous [EMAIL PROTECTED] categories I
> can't find any concerned with solar charging! Can someone please
> direct me, as  => devel@lists.laptop.org seems essentially software.

[EMAIL PROTECTED], copied here.

> The need arises after being asked to post my recent findings on
> charging a OLPC with a new release 10W CIS PV. Tests were made in the
> New Zealand winter (which is mostly very sunny with extremely clear
> air) ,& although the CIS PV worked wonderfully- especially off angle
> &under overcast skies (when it outperformed a 20W polyX PV) - initial
> results indicate 10W PVs are marginal for OLPC/XO.
>
> Check pix => www.manuka.orconhosting.net.nz/cisxo1.jpg & =>
> www.manuka.orconhosting.net.nz/cisxo2.jpg
>
> Given the essential need to charge in regions totally devoid of mains
> power (in our case inland New Guinea),the solar quest is naturally
> pretty crucial to the whole rollout. It's otherwise akin to being
> given a 4WD Mercedes, but with no ongoing fuel supply

Yes, I am putting together a group to research electricity, Internet
connections, and microfinance in order to get XOs to the poorest and
most remote villages.

>  TIA  - Manuka ( Wellington NZ)
> ---
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Re: Definition of "Stable Enough To Release" for 8.2.0

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 1:16 PM, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> After a chat with the team this week I tried to come up with a
> definition of what is "good enough to release" for 8.2.0.

Thanks.

> This is just a starting point and I'm sure we'll talk about it again.
>
> Please comment, edit and augment as needed. I may be missing some
> important areas...

> 11 - Must support all languages and keyboards previously supported.
> "support" means all previously translated strings still work in
> activities and sugar.

"Support" needs to include in its meaning

* All programs accepting text input or displaying text in any way in a
supported language/writing system combination correctly render and
print the text. Exceptions: Traditional Mongolian, until it gets into
Pango; and vertical writing (with columns in RTL order in Chinese,
Japanese, Korean, Yi, etc., and columns in LTR order in Traditional
Mongolian, Uighur, etc.), until we enhance the Activities to permit
it.

* Write, Browse, and others must correctly select text in Bidi
contexts, that is logically contiguous but visually discontinuous
selections.

* Cut, copy and paste must work correctly. In Bidi contexts. This
means correctly reordering text before displaying it.

* At some point we need to support CLDR fully. (Common Locale Data Repository).

I will be happy to discuss how much of this has been done in this
release, specific cases, standards, and how to test for these
requirements.

> All language types work the same (e.g. RTL)

The correct term here is "Bidi". Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages
of Africa and Asia with RTL text may require LTR numbers, dates, and
other Bidi features. Foreign computer terminology will typically
appear as LTR sequences within RTL text.

Also, there should be a reasonable way to configure keyboard
selection. At some point, students will have to be able to add
keyboards for the writing systems of languages they are learning.
Students should have ready access to Dvorak keyboard options.

* GUI, fine.
* Command line, might be tolerable
* Edit configuration files, no way

These are key issues. There are other nice-to-haves that I will bring
up after this release goes out.

-- 
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End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay
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Re: PlayGo Patches/Commit access

[Edward Cherlin]

2008/7/19 Andrés Ambrois <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>  Hello all!
>
>  I've recently started learning python and sugar programming and, while
> trying to be useful in the meantime, have been tinkering around with the
> PlayGo activity.

Thanks. I wrote to the American Go Association when we started this
project, and they wrote back, "We can't tell you how excited we are."
They put a note in their e-mail newsletter about us. When we can take
our software to one of their events, we can talk about getting
assorted game records and go literature into a library content bundle.

I was a 6-kyu player in my youth, according to the teachers in my
school in Korea, where I was a Peace Corps Volunteer. I learned at a
chess club when I was eleven. If I had had access to the literature
available now, I am sure I would have made amateur dan. I am delighted
to see children getting opportunities I didn't have back then, and
being able to help get even more opportunities to way more children.

I can read the Korean and Japanese go literature a little, and I can
provide pointers to a lot of on-line resources.

The Hip-Hop Chess Federation is also interested in our work, as is
International Chess Master Josh Waitzkin, author of The Art of
Learning". Walter Bender started discussions with his book and chess
tutorial software publishers about Free licenses on versions of the
book and software.

I have literature and contacts for a great many more games. We aren't
going to run out of programming exercises for a very long time.

>  I have a few patches that add basic scorekeeping,

Do you mean scoring at the very end of a game, or scoring games in
matches, or what? Can your code estimate who is ahead in a game?

> error messages
> (like: "There already is a stone there!"), and small code cleanup.

Is there a ko rule implemented? Can we get all of the different rule
sets as options (Japan, China, Korea, Ing)?

> I'd like
> to start tackling bigger problems (like collaboration) in the future.
> However, cjb told me on #sugar the best way to get this commited is having
> commit access to the git repo. I couldn't find a "Commit access application"
> in the wiki,

Yes, we are very bad at these management issues. Nobody is in charge,
and as far as we can tell, nobody in management notices when nobody is
in charge. %-[

As I understand it, the project manager is supposed to give
participants git access. When a project manager abandons a project, it
often happens that nobody does anything about it.

> so I'm using part of the project hosting application here :) :

Exactly right, under the circumstances.

> 1. Project name   : PlayGo
> 2. Existing website, if any : http://wiki.laptop.org/go/PlayGo
> 3. One-line description : A Go game activity
>
> 6. Committer list:
>Username   Full name SSH2 key URLE-mail
>    -  
>  --
> #1  aa  Andrés Ambrois  http://aambrois.homeip.net/site/files/id_rsa.pub
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> 11. Translation
>   [X] Set up the laptop.org Pootle server to allow translation commits to be
> made
>
> 12. Notes/comments: The project already is on the git repository:
> http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/PlayGo;a=summary . But I couldn't find
> it in the pootle server. It'd be great to have it added.
>
> Also, I'm Uruguayan so I'll take care of the spanish translation :). If anyone
> needs any help with Spanish, I'm usually around at #olpc :D
> --
>  -Andrés
>
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>



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Re: [sugar] Abiword 2.6.4 on Ubuntu (was Re: Write needs your help)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Ryan Pavlik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Edward Cherlin wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 3:24 PM, David Van Assche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>> This from the abiword on ubuntu webpage
>>> (http://abisource.com/wiki/Install_on_Ubuntu)
>>>
>>> At this time, the latest version available directly from Ubuntu is an
>>> Ubuntu-modified 2.4.6. We are working to get AbiWord 2.6 in Ubuntu
>>> 8.04 "Hardy Heron"
>>>
>>> and adding their repo installs 2.6.4... but if you need the source
>>> that should work too

I did get the repo package, and it gives me the same problems.

>>> I can build it without problems on my hardy system... just requires a
>>> lot of development library dependencies like below, you need to
>>> install libglib2.0-dev
>>>
>>> Kind Regards,
>>> David Van Assche
>>>
>>
>> I built 2.6.4 from source yesterday on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on an
>> AMD Opteron 64-bit.
>>
>> It does not display non-alphabetic ASCII correctly. The digits and
>> punctuation, and also the space character, mostly appear as Unicode
>> hex substitution glyphs. Armenian and Arabic display OK. Bengali
>> vowels do not attach to base consonants, but are displayed in their
>> standalone form. I'm giving up for the day.

Well, today Bengali displays correctly, but Armenian is completely
wiggy. It sometimes appears correctly, sometimes blank, and sometimes
as Devanagari.

> Thanks for your testing!  Yeah, I saw your bug, that's a weird one!  It
> works for me on AMD64 with the packages I had the PPA build.  I've put
> some info requests on the bugzilla report - if anyone wants to help
> figure this out the link is
> http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11708
>
> --
> Ryan Pavlik
> www.cleardefinition.com
>
> #282  +  (442) -  [X]
> A programmer started to cuss
> Because getting to sleep was a fuss
> As he lay there in bed
> Looping 'round in his head
> was: while(!asleep()) sheep++;

-- 
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Re: Instructions draft

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 11:42 AM,  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi everyone!

Hi, Mia.

> My name is Mia and I am a "mini-intern" for ILXO. Next year I will be
> in 7th grade.

Would you like to come to PyCon next year to show the grown-ups how to
use an XO?

>Mel Chua asked me to write a set of instructions for
> reviewing http://projectdb.olpc.at/. I have attached a link for a
> draft of these instructions

I think you have the makings of a tech writer (my day job) if you
would be interested. If so, you would be welcome to help on the OLPC
documentation.

I found just a few copy edits (typos, usage), and one question. (Below)

> and I am hoping that you guys could give
> me some feedback.

You say to change the status of the projects to Pending, and write
e-mails to the proposers explaining the status and giving feedback.
Should they go to anybody else?

I don't see any projects to look at so that I could compare your
instructions with the task. The Project Database link takes me back to
the Information page. Did I miss something, or is the site not yet
ready?

> Thanks!

A pleasure.

> Mia
>
> Instructions link:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developers_program_review_process
>
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Re: electricity table (Google Docs)

[Edward Cherlin]

2008/7/18  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I've shared a document with you called "electricity table":
> http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p6DRYWvC0_wbHL1-bzt-3Mw&[EMAIL 
> PROTECTED]&t=808765302247483981&guest
>
> It's not an attachment -- it's stored online at Google Docs. To open this
> document, just click the link above.
>
> Hi guys!
> I was also wondering if you could give me feedback on this table. The
> table shows how much kWh is needed a year to power a xo based on
> different scenarios. If you think I should add or change anything
> please let me know.
> Thanks a lot!
> Mia

I don't understand your calculations. Your table labels the power
column in kWh, which is the wrong unit. It should be W, so that you
get Wh when multiplying by hours. Thus, for example, if we have 6 W (
roughly the power used by a single XO) for 5 hours a day for 365 days
annually, it comes to 10950 Wh or 10.9 kWh.

You also don't give a formula for power generation time. The Potenco
site gives this information:

A minute of pulling the PCG generates enough energy for:

* 20 minutes of talk time on a mobile phone
* 1 hour of ultrabright LED flashlight use
* 3 hours play time on an iPod Shuffle (about one pull per song)

If one minute of pulling gives one hour of use, this comes to 5
minutes a day in the case I considered above, and similarly for the
other possibilities given, from 2 minutes to 15 minutes daily. Your
table, unaccountably, gives well over an hour of pulling daily.

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Re: Abiword 2.6.4 on Ubuntu (was Re: [sugar] Write needs your help)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 3:24 PM, David Van Assche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This from the abiword on ubuntu webpage
> (http://abisource.com/wiki/Install_on_Ubuntu)
>
> At this time, the latest version available directly from Ubuntu is an
> Ubuntu-modified 2.4.6. We are working to get AbiWord 2.6 in Ubuntu
> 8.04 "Hardy Heron"
>
> and adding their repo installs 2.6.4... but if you need the source
> that should work too
>
> I can build it without problems on my hardy system... just requires a
> lot of development library dependencies like below, you need to
> install libglib2.0-dev
>
> Kind Regards,
> David Van Assche

I built 2.6.4 from source yesterday on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on an
AMD Opteron 64-bit.

It does not display non-alphabetic ASCII correctly. The digits and
punctuation, and also the space character, mostly appear as Unicode
hex substitution glyphs. Armenian and Arabic display OK. Bengali
vowels do not attach to base consonants, but are displayed in their
standalone form. I'm giving up for the day.

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Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Martin Sevior <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 20:45 -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
>> I'd vote that we not expend too much effort in supporting multiple
>> development environments in Pippy at the moment--there are so many
>> other high-priority things to be working on. Is there really a lot of
>> demand for this from the field?
>>
>> -walter
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> > -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
>> > Hash: SHA1
>> >
>> > Chris Ball wrote:
>> > | Another useful feature would be for
>> > | Write to have unique background colors for collaborators, as Gobby does.
>> > | I wonder if that would be a small enough task for someone to take on.
>> >
>> > See also #7447.  Currently, Write doesn't support background colors at all.
>> >
>
> Hi Folks,
>Just so you know. The only reason for #7447 is because we
> haven't put the UI in to enable it. libabiword supports background
> colors. If the Powers That Be decide that this is an important feature
> for children it is very easy to implement it. Every feature of AbiWord
> is present in libabiword, say the word and we'll implement it for Write.
>
> I'm not sure different colors for different users is such a good idea
> though. The document will quickly become a mess.  Though if the kids
> want to do this they can.
>
> Cheers
>
> Martin

It will be much more of a mess if you can't tell who wrote what in a
collaborative editing session. Does Abiword provide change tracking,
so that users can turn author coloring on and off at will?

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Re: [sugar] Abiword 2.6.4 on Ubuntu (was Re: Write needs your help)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Sorry, what I meant is that, ideally, we would be testing Write in
>> joyride with the 2.6.4 version. As we don't have that version in
>> joyride yet, I think the closest we can do is testing Abiword 2.6.4.
>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Tomeu
>
> It appears that the 2.6.4 sources aren't configured to build correctly
> on Ubuntu using configure and GNU make.
>
> ./configure reports
>
> configure: error: No package 'glib-2.0' found
>
> (The correct name on Ubuntu is libglib2.0-0)

No, I see that it is the lack of -dev packages. I am now installing
them one or two at a time. %-[

> Then make says:
>
> Building AbiSuite with [ABI_ROOT=/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4]
> make ABI_ROOT=/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4 -C src
> make[1]: Entering directory `/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4/src'
>
>I can't seem to figure out which platform you are using.
>
>You should probably try using the autoconfiscated build system (rather
>than this, the deprecated and unsupported diving make system) by running
>configure (creating it with autogen.sh if need be) and using GNU Make.
>Using configure is a requirement for all known platforms that
> aren't some form
>of Windows, QNX Neutrino, or MacOS X.
>
> exit 1
> make[1]: *** [fake-target] Error 1
> make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4/src'
> make: *** [compile] Error 2
>
>
> Does anybody have a workaround? Would someone like to fix configure to
> work on Ubuntu? Do the makefiles need any change?
>
> So far I have the old version of Write that Ubuntu offers accepting
> and displaying Cyrillic and Greek correctly. I'll wait until I have
> something up-to-date to test before proceeding to the other 30+
> possibilities.
>
> Kim, should we create a process for globalization QA? We need testing
> for Amharic, Arabic, Khmer,
>
> --
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> http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
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Abiword 2.6.4 on Ubuntu (was Re: [sugar] Write needs your help)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Sorry, what I meant is that, ideally, we would be testing Write in
> joyride with the 2.6.4 version. As we don't have that version in
> joyride yet, I think the closest we can do is testing Abiword 2.6.4.

> Thanks,
>
> Tomeu

It appears that the 2.6.4 sources aren't configured to build correctly
on Ubuntu using configure and GNU make.

./configure reports

configure: error: No package 'glib-2.0' found

(The correct name on Ubuntu is libglib2.0-0)

Then make says:

Building AbiSuite with [ABI_ROOT=/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4]
make ABI_ROOT=/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4 -C src
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4/src'

I can't seem to figure out which platform you are using.

You should probably try using the autoconfiscated build system (rather
than this, the deprecated and unsupported diving make system) by running
configure (creating it with autogen.sh if need be) and using GNU Make.
Using configure is a requirement for all known platforms that
aren't some form
of Windows, QNX Neutrino, or MacOS X.

exit 1
make[1]: *** [fake-target] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/mokurai/tmp/abiword/abiword-2.6.4/src'
make: *** [compile] Error 2


Does anybody have a workaround? Would someone like to fix configure to
work on Ubuntu? Do the makefiles need any change?

So far I have the old version of Write that Ubuntu offers accepting
and displaying Cyrillic and Greek correctly. I'll wait until I have
something up-to-date to test before proceeding to the other 30+
possibilities.

Kim, should we create a process for globalization QA? We need testing
for Amharic, Arabic, Khmer,

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Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 8:58 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>> The abi devs have also asked for help in testing Write with non-latin
>>> scripts, this is something of high importance for OLPC.
>>
>> I can do that. OK, Cyrillic works. I just entered every key on the
>> layout, upper and lower case. I'll get you lots more writing systems
>> later today. I am _not_ going to test every Chinese character %-[.
>
> Which version are you testing? I would say that downloading an Abiword
> binary 2.6.4 from abisource.com may be best, as that's the version
> that I hope we'll use in Write for 8.2.0.

I'll see about that. Right now I am using Write 55-0ubuntu1, which
doesn't say what version it is in those terms.
http://abisource.com/wiki/Install_on_Ubuntu is out of date. It says
2.4.6 was in Gutsy, and that 2.6 should have been in Hardy, but what I
see is Abiword 2.4.6-3ubuntu3. What actually happened?

But is the question testing stock Abiword or Write? Or do you want me
to do both?

> I hope we'll be able to
> update joyride with 2.6.4 soon so the Write there will be definitely
> the software we'll be shipping.

I'll install joyride in qemu when 2.6.4 is ready and give it a go.
Remind me when the time comes.

> Thanks,
>
> Tomeu

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Re: [sugar] Write needs your help (was Re: Programming environments on the XO)

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:16 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> The abi devs have also asked for help in testing Write with non-latin
> scripts, this is something of high importance for OLPC.

I can do that. OK, Cyrillic works. I just entered every key on the
layout, upper and lower case. I'll get you lots more writing systems
later today. I am _not_ going to test every Chinese character %-[.

Let me know if the abi devs have any specific tests they want done on
non-Latin characters. How do I contact them?

> Thanks,
>
> Tomeu
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Re: [Localization] How do we manage translation effort in Release, process/roadmap?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 9:47 AM, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi Sayamindu,
>
> Great work, thanks for taking up the gauntlet on this!
>
> One question for you, how much lead time do you need to do the translations?
>
> Assuming something like "final test" starts 15 days before the target
> release date, when do we need to tell the developers to "freeze" all of
> their strings?

We are nowhere near that state. That would be OK if we had enough
localizers working full-time from a previous release that was
completely localized. In the present state of things we have no way to
complete localization in most languages, no matter how much lead time
we specify.

The range on our Pootle server is from 0% translated (Aymara, for
example) to 99% for German. Spanish, the most used, is at 69%, but
almost all of what is missing is in Etoys internals.

We could pick a few languages that are in deployments and are close
enough to finished for this sort of freeze to be meaningful. My
impression as that that would consist of Spanish and French. I invite
you to examine http://dev.laptop.org/translate and draw your own
conclusions.

It would be helpful if we could get a page generated automatically
with some statistics on language projects, but I don't know who could
create it. Sayamindu is rather overwhelmed.

> Possible dates are 90 days before target release day and 60 days before
> target release day.
>
> Let me know which of those you prefer or if you think a different lead
> time is warranted.

A different kind of policy is warranted.

> Thanks,
>
> Greg S

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Re: low power actions?

[Edward Cherlin]

What would it take to put in a journaling filesystem?

On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 10:49 AM, Eben Eliason <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Gary C Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> One concern I have with auto saving state before powering off is the
>> potential corruption of journal data. How robust is the Journal if
>> power off happens half way through an ongoing auto state save – do you
>> loose both the new journal entry and the original entry you had
>> resumed from (partially overwritten)?
>
> Disclaimer:  I'm not a technical expert on the DS, so others more
> familiar should probably correct me if I make claims below that are
> false.
>
> This is yet another problem that can be bypassed with the "new DS".
> In one of our past meetings, we laid out requirements for the process
> by which activities save their state, and it included a means for
> activities to check in temporary saves if they wished to, optionally
> passing a flag to tell the Journal to actually create a new entry.
> This system was in place such that, if the Journal detected that a
> given activity crashed, it could automatically make a new Journal
> entry based on the last temporary save, as a form of auto-recovery.
> This approach could similarly be used after a power failure.
>
> Additionally, in the worst case a corrupt entry might wind up in the
> Journal, but that shouldn't be a problem because, at present, copies
> are stored so there is no loss of data, and in the future we'll have
> versions, and only one version of many would be corrupt.  It should
> never be the case that the entry that was opened gets corrupted.
> Ideally the Journal would be able to recognize when a save transaction
> doesn't finish and either replace it with the most recent temporary
> state or remove the entry compeletely.
>
> - Eben
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Re: [Localization] How do we manage translation effort in Release, process/roadmap?

[Edward Cherlin]

rstand how and when each PO will be pulled to build.
>  > > Without those knowledge it would be difficult for translation
>  > > community to manage their schedule.
>  > > Could you please explain about this?

Localization administrators commit the latest versions of
localizations to git when a milestone is imminent. Commits can be made
more frequently.

>  > > For instance, scheduled build of Terminal activity with pulling newer
>  > > translation was announced recently.
>  > > (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/localization/2008-June/001138.html)
>  > >  So we could easily manage the effort.
>  > > But could we expect similar announcement for every activities, or will
>  > > the window for translation of activity aligned to
>  > > development road map of sugarlab or OLPC?
>  > >
>  > > Maybe I missed important thing, though...
>  > >
>  > > Thanks in advance
>  > > /Korakurider
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Security for launching from URL (was Re: Release 8.2.0 -- pls add critical features (Greg Smith))

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 6:35 AM, Bryan Berry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Greg wrote:
>>Thanks for keeping us apprised of your needs!
>
> My pleasure.
>
>>I'm also not aware of any feasible design proposal which might address
>>your request. You need a precedent or engineering level suggestion to
>>move this forward. Is this possible in Firefox at all?
>
> Probably not.
...
> We need a way to seamlessly integrate supporting materials such as
> readings, lesson plans, together with activities. HTML is the way to do
> this and the browser is what we use to display html. URI's are what we
> use to link to different resources.
>
> We may end up hacking Browse esp. to allow this because of the immense
> demand.
>
> We need to make it dead simple for teachers to use activities like
> EToys, E-Paath, Measure in the classroom. The easiest way to do this is
> to make the transition from lesson plan to activity as easy as possible.
>
>>I think that having a URL launch a local application will
>>be a fatal security hole. I don't know of any examples of that off the
>>top of my head.
>
> I don't know squat about security but this is a very important application.

This is Ivan's domain. My guess is that there is a way to secure the
process, but it might require some extra effort beyond a software fix,
like teachers whitelisting URLs for lessons. Or perhaps just
whitelisting our Moodle instances. Signed lesson plans? At any rate,
_not_ allowing random outside URLs to launch local activities and give
them scripts to run.

>>My guess is that you need to re-think your Moodle
>><-> activity model and work flow. If can solve the problem from there
>>using the currently available functionality that will be the shortest
>>path to a solution.
>
> I have rethought it and I believe more firmly that the moodle <->
> activity workflow is the way to go.
...
> thank you for your attention to these important matters. You should come out 
> to
> Nepal one of these days. As I told one of the developers recently:
> Get Thee to a Pilot site! Any Pilot site!
>
> Bryan
> Kathmandu
>
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Re: fonts-thai-ttf has been abandoned!

[Edward Cherlin]

2008/7/2 C. Scott Ananian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 9:01 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I would expect it to be the same as the Debian package ttf-thai-tlwg,
>> but if not, then you have a new resource.
>>
>> Thai fonts in TrueType format
>> This package provides some free-licensed fonts that are
>> enhanced by developpers from Thai Linux Working Group.
>> In TrueType format.
>>
>> At the moment, it provides two families from the National Font
>> Project (Garuda, Norasi), one from NECTEC (Loma) and three
>> developed by TLWG itself (Tlwg Mono, Tlwg Typewriter, Purisa).
>>
>> http://www.nida.gov.kh/activities/localization/thai.pdf
>
> Seems like it.  The Redhat package also has fonts named Kinnari,
> Sawasdee, Umpush, and Waree, as well as one named 'TlwgTypist' (which
> is different from the TlwgTypewriter font, also included).  These
> extra fonts are probably why the new redhat package is ~1M larger than
> the old package included in 708 and earlier.
>
> Do we need all these fonts?  I'll admit to not being an expert on Thai
> typography, but the Thai fonts now comprise more than 50% of the fonts
> on the pulldown menu in Write.

Do you have Cyrillic, Amharic, Khmer, Dari (extended Arabic), and
Nepali (Devanagari)?

> Latin languages look the poorer for
> only having the three basic DejaVu fonts (Serif, Sans, Sans Mono, and
> another Serif).

There certainly are other Free Latin alphabet fonts.

Bitstream Vera
Dustin
Freefont
Liberation (Red Hat)


> The wikipedia pangram page suggests
> เป็นมนุษย์สุดประเสริฐเลิศคุณค่า กว่าบรรดาฝูงสัตว์เดรัจฉาน
> จงฝ่าฟันพัฒนาวิชาการ อย่าล้างผลาญฤๅเข่นฆ่าบีฑาใคร
> ไม่ถือโทษโกรธแช่งซัดฮึดฮัดด่า หัดอภัยเหมือนกีฬาอัชฌาสัย
> ปฏิบัติประพฤติกฎกำหนดใจ พูดจาให้จ๊ะๆ จ๋าๆ น่าฟังเอยฯ
> ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram#Other_languages )
> might be an appropriate text to use to verify proper font support?
>
> (It does display correctly on joyride-2098, but the Pangram page
> indicates that we are missing fonts for Dzongkha (language of Bhutan),
> Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.  These fonts are in the
> packages 'fonts-hebrew' (1M), 'fonts-japanese' (22M!), 'fonts-chinese'
> (24M!) and 'fonts-korean' (18M!); hopefully these's a subset of the
> japanese/chinese/korean fonts which is lighter weight!)

Yes, but you aren't going to get away with much less than 10M each.

>  --scott
>
> --
>  ( http://cscott.net/ )
>



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Re: fonts-thai-ttf has been abandoned!

[Edward Cherlin]

On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 2:52 PM, C. Scott Ananian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> We added a package named 'fonts-thai-ttf' to our builds a while ago
> for thai font support.  However, no one here now remembers where this
> font came from, or where the upstream came from.  Can someone familiar
> with thai support help out?  Ideally we'd like to confirm the
> licensing and then grow a maintainer for this package in fedora.
> Thanks!

I would expect it to be the same as the Debian package ttf-thai-tlwg,
but if not, then you have a new resource.

Thai fonts in TrueType format
This package provides some free-licensed fonts that are
enhanced by developpers from Thai Linux Working Group.
In TrueType format.

At the moment, it provides two families from the National Font
Project (Garuda, Norasi), one from NECTEC (Loma) and three
developed by TLWG itself (Tlwg Mono, Tlwg Typewriter, Purisa).

http://www.nida.gov.kh/activities/localization/thai.pdf

>  --scott
>
> --
>  ( http://cscott.net/ )
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Re: First Draft Development Process Proposal

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 8:31 AM, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I posted a first pass Release Process Overview.
>
> See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Process_Home

Thank you.

> Its based on work done by Michael and others on this list. It needs a
> lot more work, but I hope we can start using it soon and improve it over
> time.
>
> I could use help fleshing it out and closing the open items listed in
> the final section. Let me know if anyone wants to work with me on that.
>
> The goals of this process are:
> 1 - Ensure high quality releases which meet the needs of users in a
> timely fashion.
> 2 - Maximize the participation, productivity and enthusiasm of the open
> source community.
> 3 - Create a predictable process which helps users and developers plan
> for the future.
>
> I want to minimize the process overhead as much as possible. If its not
> helping make coders life easier then its not likely to make better code.
>
> Please comment, question, augment and criticize as needed. I especially
> want to know if it makes sense, looks useful and meets the goals
> outlined above.
>
> Comments on linked pages also welcome, especially:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Releases
> and
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Unscheduled_software_release_process
>
> Any input welcome.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Greg Smith
> OLPC Product Manager
>
> PS - This is my first e-mail to the list since I changed from volunteer
> to employee. It's truly an honor to have this chance to work for OLPC
> and to learn from you all!
>
> Right now, I'm 90% focused on gathering input so I'm open to a call or
> e-mail exchange with anyone who is contributing to the project. If you
> want to have a brief call, just send me an agenda and a few open times
> 7AM - 6PM US ET, Mon - Fri.

We don't seem to have any process for translating textbooks and
content. There are teacher training materials in Spanish and Nepali
that we need in English, and a variety of other content in many
languages.

I think that we also need to do some work on creating a global
conversation on curriculum and free textbooks incorporating Sugar
software capabilities, and what we know about how children learn and
when they can learn it.

I am working with others to create a separate process for researching
and deploying other parts of the solution, such as electricity and
Internet in villages with microfinance support, parts which are out of
scope for OLPC. But we would still like to coordinate our efforts with
yours.
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Re: etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository

[Edward Cherlin]

I am no slouch at understanding a bootstrap process, but it has taken
me a few days to find the information I'm trying to understand by
myself, given the refusal to even consider that someone might need
this information in order to answer Debian's concerns, and thus the
refusal to provide the pointers to it. So it is no surprise to me that
Debian still has those concerns. It is no good being right if you
can't explain or demonstrate _why_ you are right in terms that make
sense to someone else who is willing to understand, but doesn't know
how.

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 11:17 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:43:45 -0700,
> Edward Cherlin wrote:
>>
>> I think that the result of all this is that we can produce all of the
>> C (or some other language, maybe CLOS) and Smalltalk source files that
>> Debian wants (even if we think of the C as compiler output, we don't
>> have to bother them with that interpretation.) One of the compilers
>> translates a subset of Smalltalk to C, but I gather that other
>> compilers can translate all of Smalltalk/Squeak/Etoys/what you like to
>> their chosen target language.

Now I see that this is unnecessary. We have the directly executable
Smalltalk source for the VM, including memory management and graphics
primitives written in Smalltalk. It is already in the .sources files.
We can therefore provide all of the source code for Etoys in a
conventional file system in the way that users of compiled languages
expect. This may be necessary in order to educate the Debian license
people. It might even be useful to somebody who wanted to base another
language on Smalltalk. Yes, they should probably modify the Smalltalk
interpreter in the image instead, and use Smalltalk to run, test, and
debug it, and export/translate/compile everything necessary once it's
all working. But it's their choice.

>> As I understand it, Debian wants to see
>> a commented set of semi-human-readable code in ASCII files (although
>> we can discuss using Unicode source) together with various multimedia
>> files in known open formats, from all of which an Etoys image can be
>> constructed, and they don't care how we generate them, or what mix of
>> languages we use, as long as there are Free/Open Source compilers and
>> any other needed apparatus for them.
>
>  As Alan precisely put it ("we are dealing with stories, not
> reality."), this seems to be a backward way to work on this problem.
> When (if) Debian guys asked something based on wrong understanding,
> what we should do is not to cater the wrong story, but have them have
> real understanding.

Right. So that means we have to educate them. Which means, just as in
Piaget's research, we have to educate ourselves first about how the
Debian people have constructed their understanding of the programming
process, and how we can assist them to construct an improved model.
Saying, "We're right! What's the matter with you people?" doesn't cut
it.

I find it useful to meet people half way in such a situation. Well, we
don't have to have our code in a conventional file system, but here is
how you can fairly trivially create such a file system and rebuild an
image, even though we never do this in practice. Well, almost never.
Aha! You can do it that way, somebody might need to do it that way,
that's what I'm looking for in the first place. So give. Don't tell me
I don't need to know.

I want to _see_ that fairly trivial script. I want Debian to see it
and to be able to run it and examine its output. Once they understand
how one can generate "source code" in the traditional form whenever
desired from the real source, and where that real source lives, they
may be able to believe in using the code in the image and not
bothering with generating a conventional representation. They seem to
want proof that we can do something unnecessary but comforting. Well,
it shouldn't be any real effort, so why not give them that
demonstration?

We had an issue like this in the IETF on multilingual URIs in
ASCII-encoded UTF-8. It was claimed that this would break everything,
so we showed how to translate between this form and normal UTF-8 in
two or three lines of Perl for each direction. The final question was
whether Japanese users would be able to type a mixed ASCII-Japanese
URL containing Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji. So I didn't just say,
"Motiron dekiru naa! Nihonjin wa baka da to omou desyou ka nee?" I
gave it to them, keystroke by keystroke, with the keyboard layout and
IME switching and the conversions to Kana and Kanji. And then they
said, Oh, of course. Now I can see that there isn't a problem. OK, we
can make a standard for this.

>  The reality is that the all description of c

Re: Dictionaries/spell checkers

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:33 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Thanks for the link Khaled. I went through the wiki page, and it seems
> that once we switch to F9 as our base, 6104 should be fixed. We need
> to double check though if the versions of Xulrunner and libabiword
> (rather, enchant) we ship use hunspell or not.
> Thanks,
> Sayamindu

Should we contribute all of the words in our localizations to these
dictionaries? We are going to be making up computer terminology in
many languages.

> On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 2:42 AM, Khaled Hosny <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I think we need first to spell dictionaries/engines among all
>> applications, I think F9 did most of the job
>> (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureDictionary), see also
>> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6104
>>
>> Regards,
>>  Khaled
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 02:28:03AM +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
>>> I was wondering about the languages - I guess as a minimal, we should
>>> ship the spelling dictionaries for the languages mentioned in
>>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Mfg-data#Keyboards (if they are available).
>>> This should also be also a part of the locale specific customization
>>> keys we have been thinking of (more or this very soon, ie, as soon as
>>> my brain become a bit cleared up :-).
>>> Thanks,
>>> Sayamindu
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 2:23 AM, Samuel Klein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> > well, there are the cracklib dictionaries.  There are also the spelling
>>> > dicts for aspell and the wordlists for Speak (not in the core builds, but
>>> > should be).
>>> >
>>> > SJ
>>> >
>>> > On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 4:26 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>> > wrote:
>>> >>
>>> >> Hi,
>>> >> Can anyone provide me with any information on the
>>> >> dictionaries/spellcheckers that we ship in our builds ?
>>> >> Thanks,
>>> >> Sayamindu
>>> >>
>>> >> --
>>> >> Sayamindu Dasgupta
>>> >> [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
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>>> >> Devel mailing list
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>>> >> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>>> >
>>> >
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Sayamindu Dasgupta
>>> [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
>>> ___
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>>
>> --
>>  Khaled Hosny
>>  Arabic localizer and member of Arabeyes.org team
>>
>> -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
>> Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
>>
>> iD8DBQFIZVekRoqITGOuyPIRAoJLAJ9VrBZ2TJTKhO/ReKhqEhWCET3bYQCfX8dz
>> FVSeegy1WY9TSD0MlG+Bf9k=
>> =fBCK
>> -END PGP SIGNATURE-
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Sayamindu Dasgupta
> [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
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Re: etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 12:04 AM,  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Jun 2008, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>
>> I think that the result of all this is that we can produce all of the
>> C (or some other language, maybe CLOS) and Smalltalk source files that
>> Debian wants (even if we think of the C as compiler output, we don't
>> have to bother them with that interpretation.) One of the compilers
>> translates a subset of Smalltalk to C, but I gather that other
>> compilers can translate all of Smalltalk/Squeak/Etoys/what you like to
>> their chosen target language. As I understand it, Debian wants to see
>> a commented set of semi-human-readable code in ASCII files (although
>> we can discuss using Unicode source) together with various multimedia
>> files in known open formats, from all of which an Etoys image can be
>> constructed,
>
> so far so good
>
>>  and they don't care how we generate them
>
> I think you are wrong here

I don't think your opinion or mine count. Debian's counts. What did they say?

>> , or what mix of
>> languages we use, as long as there are Free/Open Source compilers and
>> any other needed apparatus for them.
>
> this part is again correct.
>
>> I gather that all of this can be done by a fairly trivial Smalltalk
>> program. Would somebody write it and post it, and would somebody run
>> it and make the results available? Then if Albert agrees we've done
>> it, we can invite Debian to examine it, and get back to work.
>
> if you send them C that's generated and call that your source, it's the same
> thing as writing your code in C and sending assembler as your 'source'
> (assuming there was a cpu independant assembler)

The analogy doesn't work. If I have C, I'll send the C. I have friends
who used to write APL and ship Ada as source, and their military
customers never complained. If the generated C is well-structured and
has the comments from the Smalltalk embedded, so that people can
understand it, what's the problem?

> breaking out the .source and .changes files that have been referred to in
> this thread and having the build process create the resulting blob that you
> use would probably be acceptable (and far more useful as people can then
> send out patches to those files)

I personally don't mind which files are generated or how. If .source,
.changes, and VM source are sufficient, hooray. If we generate the
files some other way, hooray. I want to see readable, commented C and
Smalltalk, or some other such combination.

> David Lang
>
>> On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Yoshiki Ohshima <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> At Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:47:11 -0700,
>>> Edward Cherlin wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm glad that Debian didn't break the rules for etoys.
>>>>> You're claiming to be open source, yet you've LOST the
>>>>> source code decades ago.
>>>>
>>>> This turns out not to be the case. All of the source code for the
>>>> parts of Etoys written in Squeak/Smalltalk is in the image.
>>>
>>>  ... is in .sources and .changes and the image holds the compiled
>>> results of them and each of these compiled results hold a file offset
>>> of the source chunk.
>>>
>>>> The .sources file and .changes file contain all of this code nicely
>>>> formatted.
>>>
>>>  Yes.
>>>
>>>> The core of Smalltalk, the part not written in Smalltalk,
>>>> is also available in both source and in binary parts of the usual
>>>> image. The usual tools for handling all of this are in
>>>> Smalltalk/Squeak. Nothing prevents you from rewriting them in C,
>>>> Python, or what you like.
>>>
>>>  Oh, yes.  Speaking of which, Dan did a version in Java:
>>>
>>>
>>> http://news.squeak.org/2008/06/21/jsqueak-smalltalk-interpreter-written-in-java/
>>>
>>>> Now, for the rest of you, let's see what we can produce, to make
>>>> Albert happy, but more importantly Debian. We have .sources and
>>>> .changes. Albert and Debian would like to see source for the VM, in
>>>> the manner of gst, and the binary core of Smalltalk that goes with it.
>>>> What can we show them, and what would it take to show them the rest?
>>>> "The Squeak system includes code for generating a new version of the
>>>>