BlogDale

The One Laptop Per Child project always seemed to be too atruistic to be true yet I had high hopes for it.  With a forceful and charismatic leader to front the hard work done behind the scenes by the open source developers it looked as if this projet would work in ways that have never been seen before.  Now it seems that Negroponte is courting the favours of M$ to widen the appeal of the XO.  (erm..by doubling the size of the storage to accommodate XP?   Does not compute, captain)

For about a year, however, Microsoft has been working to get a slimmed-down version of Windows to run on XO laptops. As a result, Negroponte said Tuesday that he expects XOs to soon have a “dual-boot” option, meaning users would be able to run Windows or Sugar.

from http://www.thestate.com/technology-wire/story/383365.html

Why the heck does it need Windows?  The big success story lately is the Asus Eee, running Xandros Linux.  OK, you can make it run XP if you want but it begs questions about whether you want a learning machine  or something that conforms to Windo$e just because everyone else has it (not that they do).

Could it be that the hard work done by the OS guys at OLPC was just to raise product awareness and get some units sold before opening a backdoor for the heavy mob to move in and take over?  Even if Windoze was given away free on the XO, the hardware costs increase to accommodate it, moving further away from the $100 goal price tag.  I hate to say it but it looks like a puppy-dog sale to me - when it needs an upgrade in a couple of years and support for XP has been withdrawn, and those folks with an XO find they just can’t manage without it so they just gotta have the upgrade, what’s to stop a commercial entity like M$ charging for it?  They’ve generated a sleeping market by giving it away free, investing in their own future sales.  Well, slap my cynical wrist.

Seems to me that part of the philosophy behind the XO is compromised by Windoughs.  The bit where it was to be, as far as practical, fixable locally.  With Linux the user can learn to fix the software when it throws a hooley, but a bug in Window$ stays unfixed until the next upgrade.  And if the nearest access point is a 10 mile walk away across a minefield, the revolutionary new learning machine becomes a placemat.

I loved the scandalised  call that”it doesn’t support Flash”.  Um, as I remember neither did my Asus when it came out of the box.  Oo, neither did Firefox on the Mac Pro.  Adobe drives traffic to their website to install the plugin.

Naughty Microsoft to hijack this project like they are doing with the Asus Eee (sigh, but who wants to pay fullsize laptop price for a tiny laptop?  we’ll see).  Naughty Nick Negroponte for selling out.

More on this story here, here, here, here.

Everyone I show my Asus to is really impressed. Teachers can see that it will fit into their daily flow, students all want one (not just to play Tux games). In a Year 9 sessions today we talked about how useful it would be to have one in lessons and how they could grab information from the web to support their learning. Again, this use raises the issue of “information literacy” in that they would need to be able to differentiate between good and bad information, and where they should be looking for information and how to acknowledge it. All of the class members thought that the outlay was justified.

After a night of no-sleep on Weds (working on a project for somebody) I was in no shape to try to get the Asus to talk to the WPA-TKIP network. Apparently it won’t do it with the native ndiswrapper package and it needs madwifi. I think I fell asleep trying to install it all, but anyway my patience wore thin (helped with the nagging conscience that I should be doing reports) and I left it for another day. But I’d scrambled the wireless settings for home… Not to worry, there’s an easy rollback to default settings on the Asus and I was home and dry again.

Getting software - once the Synaptic repository manager is set up, installing packages is a doddle as with any Linux distro these days. I installed Audacity for good measure (just to prove it could be done - Harvey had asked me recently if I could do it, and it was easy once I’d found how to install synaptic). My favourite so far is the advanced desktop tweak, which changes the look and feel to be a standard KDE desktop. I was intending to install Ubuntu on the machine instead of the factory default Xandros Linux, but I don’t think I’ll do it yet awhile considering that Ubuntu isn’t so hot on wifi at the best of times (so I understand - please tell me if I’m wrong, but it took a bit of fiddling to get ndiswrapper installed on the kids’ EdUbuntu machine at home so that I could move it out of the study.) The Xubuntu people are getting things solved daily though, so it’s only a matter of waiting.

As I said in a previous post - this little machine is really going to change things around here.

Mr C is asking about open Source software. I was responding to his post when I thought I might be better off posting here and using trackback.

Open Source junkie that I am, I’ve used all the items on his list for quite some time. Predictably, my fave open source software is Moodle. See eCognition if you want some (commercial plug).

Scribus is a superb OS DTP program.  Unlike the M$ offering, it maintains standards.

We use GIMP alongside paint.net (not OS) on the school network, and despite the cries of “totally unusable, you need a degree in nuclear physics to use it” from people who really should know better, GIMP is excellent. Get this - at our school an Art student teacher used GIMP with a year 7 class to do popart pictures using their own portraits. With no preconceptions of unusable software on the part of teacher nor pupils, the lesson went down a storm. None of these people had a degree in higher Computer Science. Mind you, if your photoshop-savvy friends sniff at it, show them Gimpshop. And remind them what they paid for their (legal) copy of Photoshop.

WINK is another fave of mine. Rather than getting kids to produce lengthy tomes for their Nationals coursework, we’re gettting them to record evidence using WINK. It creates a swf which we’re putting on the VLE so the moderator can see it.
I think Nvu is an excellent replacement for Dreamweaver (particularly if you haven’t bought Dreamweaver yet). Another alternative is html-kit. I’ll be using it with Year 7 later this year.

AVG. Wouldn’t be without it. Honestly. It’s freeware rather than OS though.

Videolan - use it instead of Windo$e media player. Works for me. Freedom means more than “no cost”.

Inkscape - oh boy, I love this vector-graphics editor. Only today Year 9 spent half an hour learning the basics of Inkscape to produce a scalable logo in svg and png formats. One of my favourites is it’s ability to produce vector images from rasters. Cartoonify your friends!

Thunderbird - if I wasn’t using Googlemail these days, I’d still use Thunderbird although there might be a blip on the development horizon as Mozilla are concentrating on other things. (Actually I still do use Thunderbird too).

If you need ftp, take a look at Filezilla . I’m really impressed with it. Does what it says on the tin.  WinSCP is a great SSH tool too, I use it all the time.

If you’re into project management try Open Workbench . Can be a bit complicated but worth a try. Apparently GanttPV is an alternative but I haven’t tried it.

Blender is awesome for 3D modelling but there’s a steep learning curve (I’m at the bottom, looking up). A more creative colleague than I uses Wings3d and swears by it. Another learning curve for me though, I’m afraid.

Synergy allows computers on a network to share keyboard and mouse.  You probably need it, you just don’t know it yet.

I could go on - it’s late though.  Take a look at this list of OS. I concur with most of it.

Soon I shall get to compile a CD of OS for the kids at school so they can use school software on their home computers without needing a licence.