[Server-devel] XSCE sprint update day 0 and day 1
We are safely locked away in cabin in Gimli, Manitoba ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli,_Manitoba ) We have been going through a couple days of reflection. Sometimes painful, but always useful. It feels like many of the big technical pieces are coming together. Now, we are in that awkward adolescence phase, more than an idea... by less than a product. We are 80% done... with 80% left to go :) We are talking about where we should go and what we need to do. Navigating the fog of uncertainty. Through all this I am still pretty confident: 1. George is advocating for what he needs in Haiti. - A full turnkey system from power to wireless. A typical micro-deployment. 2. Jerry is advocating for what he needs in Australia. - Thousands of laptops in 100s of schools which are 1000s of kilometers apart. 3. I am advocating for I think the ecosystem needs in a server appliance. Inexpensive, low power, easily maintainable, sane defaults yet configurable. 4. Adam is advocating for the big picture needs of olpc Please join us on this mailing list or IRC #schoolserver to advocate for your deployment or use case. If it feels like your voice is not being heard, patches and clearly define customers specification will have greater effect than all caps :) -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] XSCE sprint update day 0 and day 1
Thanks David for writing daily reports on our http://schoolserver.org/0.4/Sprint progress and I apologize to all our 1st voice call was choppy yesterday, due to our untested 3G backwoods modem. Working better now! So daily 3PM EDT voice calls (3PM NYC time on Skype) should be smoother today and in coming days we hope, all who can join this week, please reply to me with your Skype username -- or see you on #schoolserver on http://webchat.freenode.net On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 8:43 AM, David Farning dfarn...@activitycentral.comwrote: We are safely locked away in cabin in Gimli, Manitoba ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli,_Manitoba ) We have been going through a couple days of reflection. Sometimes painful, but always useful. It feels like many of the big technical pieces are coming together. Now, we are in that awkward adolescence phase, more than an idea... by less than a product. We are 80% done... with 80% left to go :) We are talking about where we should go and what we need to do. Navigating the fog of uncertainty. Through all this I am still pretty confident: 1. George is advocating for what he needs in Haiti. - A full turnkey system from power to wireless. A typical micro-deployment. 2. Jerry is advocating for what he needs in Australia. - Thousands of laptops in 100s of schools which are 1000s of kilometers apart. 3. I am advocating for I think the ecosystem needs in a server appliance. Inexpensive, low power, easily maintainable, sane defaults yet configurable. 4. Adam is advocating for the big picture needs of olpc Please join us on this mailing list or IRC #schoolserver to advocate for your deployment or use case. If it feels like your voice is not being heard, patches and clearly define customers specification will have greater effect than all caps :) -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] [support-gang] XSCE Sprint
Thank you Tony for you perspective. So can we begin to look at implementation details? Perhaps discussions about how to implement new features belong on server-devel rather than support gang. My apologies if so. But if XSCE begins to offer features that are really used and needed in the classroom, then the meaning of support will start changing. George On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 10:43 AM, Tony Anderson t...@olenepal.org wrote: Hi, All I am sure this is a broken record by now, but I keep hoping that there will be focus on content. I am not immediately concerned about power issues. The move from 386ISA to Arm has good potential, but the stability and functionality of XS-0.7 makes it still the software of choice. By mid-2014, the new generation of Atom may provide even lower power consumption. The IIAB (internet In a Box) now mandates a TB+ hard drive. This is viable for Atom based systems. It is also viable on the Trim-Slice H. My concern with the Trim-Slice is the 1GB memory. A server for a school of 100+ laptops probably needs more. 2GB is good, 4GB is better. There have been recent conversations with the Trimslice manufacturer, to get a version which has 2-4GB memory, quad core processor, and 2 ethernet connections. My urgent concerns are: 1 - An effective way to organize the digital library so that kids are attracted to find items they would like to download. We hope that we can evolve, and incorporate Pathagar for this in the short term. I've asked if there are other open source alternatives, and not gotten any viable suggestions. Seth insists that Pathagar is only going to work for books. I'd like a multimedia warehouse. 2 - Provide for a shared printer attached to the server which serv- es all of the XOs but gives the teachers and administrators control over the use of expean andible resources. Just looking at low hanging fruit -- What do you think of a PHP file on the XSCE web server to initiate a file upload, and using Browse Activity to extract Journal entries? We could have these uploaded files dropped into a directory where the teacher could trigger a print job. There may be a client/server interface in CUPS which lets the teacher administer, and trigger print jobs, from her own laptop. 3 - an implementation of Puppet or similar technology to allow update of the XOs - supporting mix of XO-1 to XO-4, providing for reflash as well as updates (something like Nandblaster). This should work equally well for locked and unlocked XOs. I'm not sure how to achieve these objectives. We have been exploring another package very similar to puppet, ansible, might be able to achieve the same outcomes, and be simpler to administer. Reflashing seems very different from in-place upgrading. Both puppet, and ansible, require root access permissions, and a functioning operating system. If the target machine has broken software, I don't see an easy alternative than to reflash with a signed image, just to verify the hardware. 4 - some way for the school server to support email, proabably a light-weight client Sugar activity and postfix or similar on the server. There needs to be a mechanism to offload pending email for the outside world to a usb drive which can be sent at a cyber cafe as well as a way to receive email at a cyber cafe for insertion into the school server queue. It would be nice if the kids could have a school-based email address but this means setting up an internet domain somewhere. Gmail would work, but I am not sure how that can be done on the LAN when not connected to the internet. This need is not in my area of expertise. Sendmail is often installed by default, but is complex to configure. Does anyone have recommendations on how best to achieve this objective? 5 - upgrade to Moodle 2 along with some strategy on how it could be used in the local school environment. My approach is to use it for a 'teacher's lounge', a place for teachers to find lesson plans, training materials, and a method to communicate with each other. In reality, teachers do not have time to take advantage of this. Sadly, even though Moodle is open source, there is very little open source courseware available for Moodle (one good digital photography course). Naturally, Moodle has the additional disadvantage that courseware can not be downlaoded to the XO so that students can work at home. Moodle assumes the student is online. We spent a little time looking at the resources required, server horsepower, etc. and decided that moving to a more recent moodle was not an easy choice to make 6 - support for GSM modems and wifi dongles on the school server. This is minor, but network configuration for this has to be done at the command line (no gui network manager). More important is a model for 'ET call home' for the school server. I believe in our deployments, the internet model is going to be more 'batch' jobs than online surfing. We all have experienced
Re: [Server-devel] [support-gang] XSCE Sprint
On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 9:53 AM, Gonzalo Odiard gonz...@laptop.org wrote: 1 - An effective way to organize the digital library so that kids are attracted to find items they would like to download. We hope that we can evolve, and incorporate Pathagar for this in the short term. I've asked if there are other open source alternatives, and not gotten any viable suggestions. Seth insists that Pathagar is only going to work for books. I'd like a multimedia warehouse. OPDS, the protocol used by Pathagar, can manage any media. In sugar we use GetBooks activity to download books, but there are no limitations to use it to other media. In fact, Ceibal use a modified version to download music too. True. As long as the http server has a mime type entry for the file, it gets served. Pathagar hands over the download to the http server. We've hosted both audio and video files on Pathagar. From what I remember, the confusion about what Seth said was to do with the possibility of automatically extracting metadata from epub files, which does not exist in Pathagar currently, but can be incorporated with little effort. Extracting such metadata from other media may or may not work. cheers, Sameer Gonzalo ___ support-gang mailing list support-g...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
[Server-devel] XSCE Update day 2
We are in the early afternoon of day two here in Gimli. We are still in a camper trailer with limited 3G access. George is suggesting that we turn of the power and try to survive on the trailer's 12 volt battery power The big new is that Aneesh Dogra will be picking up Pathagar ( http://www.olpcsf.org/node/126 ) and beating it into shape. Pathage is a simple book server which is a critical piece of the puzzle. The book server presents a four way question of which came first the chicken or the egg :( 1. Well curated book collections. Unless librarians and teacher know that real live students will be benefiting from their work, it is hard to engage them in curating digital libraries. 2. Working book collection software. Unless hackers know that real live students will be benefiting from their work, it is hard to engage them in writing the software. 3. Publishers support. Unless publishers know that real live students will be benefiting from their catalog, it is hard to engage them in sharing their catalog. 4. Impact on students. Without book collections, book server software, and publisher support, it is hard to have a significant impact. This presents an implement challenge. We can't just say, Step one done, let's move on to step two. Instead, we iterate back and forth. Adding one brick at a time to build up the four walls. The other technical advance is Jerry's progress on the off line installer. As we saw with David Leeming. Installing MUST just work. If someone wants to try XSCE and the install fails, it is going to be very hard to convince them to try again. Please see the Purchase Funnel at ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_funnel ) Finally, on the community side. We have 10+1 people from around the globe participating in the sprint to make this project a success. A couple of hours ago, during our daily call I thought I was going to lose my mind:) Each sprint the number of people and number of moving parts increases. It can be stressful to trust the culture that we have worked hard to nurture... rather than micromanage and piss everyone off:( -- David Farning Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
