One Laptop Per Child News

Do you dream in Bash? Can you Moodle all night with Dev "Where’s the Party Yaar?" Mohanty. And do any of these technology terms excite you: BIND, DHCPD, or Squid? Then you'll be interested in this opportunity of a lifetime: OLE Nepal Super SysAdmin.

OLE Nepal is looking for a Super Systems Administrator to work with their Kathmandu-based team and with OLPC to implement a school server solution in the OLE Nepal school pilot program.

Much work remains with the School Server as it is currently under active development and will likely be so throughout 2008. And while OLPC recently made a great decision in hiring Martin Langhoff as School Server Architect, OLE Nepal needs help with the technical aspects of deployment like updating the XO’s, back up of student data, maintaining mesh network, and web caching.

There's only one small catch to this dream job - it's a volunteer position. That means you'll not be paid in cash for your efforts. You'll get a greater reward, one that money cannot buy.

No, not a Superman bodysuit, but the life-affirming warm and fuzzies of happy children as they learn and explore with the XO laptop.

So if you are ready for the adventure of bringing educator driven development to Nepalese children, then apply today!

Tags: BIND | DHCPD | Dev Mohanty | Educator Driven Development | OLE Nepal | OLPC Volunteer | School Server |

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The XS School Server list has been a hotbed of activity the past few weeks with management changes as well as some disgruntled people seem to realize that the XS Server is not quite what they were hoping for in terms of functionality, ease-of-use, or ruggedness; despite some goals in these areas.

Change is afoot, though. John Watlington announced on February 28th that he would "increasingly focus on the hardware, as we renew our efforts to provide low power, environmentally robust servers for rural schools"; with Martin Langhoff coming in as the School Server Architect in mid-March:

Martin is currently one of the lead developers of Moodle --- a FOSS Course Management System for online learning, although he has contributed to a number of other FOSS projects. Most of his last 10 years of work is well indexed by Google.

Interesting keywords to try include mod_perl, GIT, Midgard, Arch (or GNU Arch), Moodle, OSCOM, metadata, dublin core, performance, Eduforge, Elgg, e-Prints, Mahara, PostgreSQL, Debian, TWIG, Ubuntu.

He will continue to reside in New Zealand. He's fluent in English and Spanish, and can speak some Portuguese, Catalan, Italian and German.

So, congratulations to both OLPC and Martin -- it looks like good change for the server project, which has been lagging behind the XO Laptop, but yet is a key ingredient in successful deployments.

For small schools; an XO laptop plus an external storage drive can serve as small server for an estimated 30 students, but beyond that the discussion has shifted to more standard, off-the-shelf PCs with all the care and feeding that they require (things like reliable electricity being problematic).

The School Server is of course two different projects; there is the software and services side now under Martin, and the XS as specific hardware implementation which John Watlington will now be focusing on to make it more adapted to the situations the OLPC laptops already face.

The software side however will be no easy road; as the developers will have to balance server functionality, administrative tools for the XO laptops in the server's province, and ease-of-use to reduce the training/expertise required to manage it all.

Various list members already involved in active deployments so need administration tools and manageability they are begging in other forums:

I am utterly disappointed with [OLPC's] way of administrating the school server. I wouldn't have been, had I not a CentOS SME server running at home proving that "all" their tasks (dansguardian, moodle, squid, apache) can be handled/administrated in a non-geek way. Very smoothly, securely, and efficiently.

The OLPC project will IMHO suffer performance and acceptance problems for lack of administrability. And that would be a REAL DESASTER. Btw: I never wrote all capitalized words in a posting before either...

Another contributor suggested existing software solutions like webmin. So far these hacks have been received coolly by the OLPC server-development team. OLPC Security guru "Ivan Krstić responded to the webmin suggestion with:

Webmin is a hopelessly broken, horrifyingly bad piece of software. So much so that we had it removed from the Ubuntu archives entirely since installing it meant almost certain system breakage. Let's not go there.

So here's hoping that the shuffle in management and new dual focus can move the school server to a reasonably easy to manage, useful part of XO deployments -- there's certainly a lot of work to be done.

Tags: FOSS | Ivan Krstić | John Watlington | Martin Langhoff | Moodle | OLPC School Server | Webmin | XS | XSX |

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As One Laptop Per Child rolls out hundreds of laptops at each school, there is a need as well for some infrastructure that connects these students to digital materials, and teachers to manage their lesson plans and other activities.

I have been working with OLPC Nepal on their deployment of two servers. One is a library server that provides digital content in the local language, ebooks, pictures, and reference materials. The other is a school server that provides filtering, caching and connectivity to the outside internet.

However well we design this, there will be a need for local "system administrators" to put together and maintain these systems and perform the care-and-feeding needed to keep the systems operating properly.

While the exact details of what stack of software will run on these is still in development, we have agreed they would be based on the free and open source software bundle known as the LAMP platform, which stands for the combination of:

• Linux operating system, Fedora 7 in this case
• Apache web server
• MySQL database
• PHP, Perl and Python programming languages

See my post Understanding the LAMP platform for more details.

The local teams I am working with have expressed concern that there is a lack of written documentation. Actually, there is probably plenty in both written and online form, we just need to identify it, select the best of the best, and either make that available somewhere or send them physical books and CDs of the content.

Want to help? Here's what we could really use:

1. If you know of great books or websites that have easy-to-understand instructions on deploying and maintaining the LAMP platform, how to administer Linux in general, how to write PHP programs, and other tutorials, please post a comment below.
   
   For example, I have been using the 900-page "Fedora 7 Unleashed" from SAMS Publishing, but I suspect there are other books and websites out there that others might consider useful or easier to carry.


2. If you have books that you no longer need, because they are too introductory or basic for you, consider donating them to an OLPC project. Intro to Linux, Intro to PHP, intro to SQL database query language, would all be useful.


3. If you have a PC that you aren't using, and are interested in helping out, consider installing the OLPC server software yourself, and document your experiences, this would greatly help out testing out the bugs, figuring out what needs tuning or adjustment, and to see how well the procedures work on different types of equipment. See the wiki for more details.

Tony Pearson is a Senior Storage Consultant at IBM System Storage and previously gave us the needed OLPC printing guide.

Tags: Apache Server | Fedora | LAMP Stack | Linux | OLPC Nepal | PHP | SQL Database | School Servers | Tony Pearson |

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I'm Nils Hettich, a student of digital media at Furtwangen University in Germany's black forest currently working on a concept for asynchronous communication for future OLPC equipped schools.

Providing Internet connectivity to all OLPC schools is probably one of the challenging issues yet to solve. Looking at the dissent statements on OLPC News, one can assume that especially in rural areas there won't be access for everyone very soon.

2-Way Satellite access, often the only option if infrastructure lacks, is very expensive, even if some satellite companies might give some bandwidth for free. Still, if some regions can't be reached with permanent connection (yet), why should they not have at least the possibility to browse web pages, do research or send emails asynchronously?

I am suggesting a solution where the users can be connected to the World Wide Web using a store-and forward concept with mechanical back-haul. This has been inspired by the pioneering work of United Villages, connecting telecentres in India.

Tags: Asynchronous Communication | Internet Connectivity | Nils Hettich | OLPC | School Servers | United Villages |

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No matter how you feel about Teemu Leinonen's suggestion that One Laptop Per Child should use Participatory Design in developing a XO-2, it looks like Intel Corporation is already pre-participating in the next generation of OLPC products. Just read their OLPC + Intel announcement closely:

Q: How will OLPC work with Intel technology?

A: Initially, OLPC is planning to add Intel Xeon processor based servers to their product offerings, taking advantage of world class performance, reliability and energy efficiency. In addition, Intel is developing a system board design for OLPC consideration in their next generation XO device.

We are also beginning to explore more wide ranging technology and product collaboration that will bring exciting new technology innovations to children around the world.

Reading that, I say bye-bye to the current XSX school server motherboard, a fanless Mini-ITX from VIA Technologies. I also see the next generation XO-2 dropping the XO-1's AMD Geode LX-700 processor for Intel’s 2008 Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform.

Tags: AMD Geode | Intel Xeon | Mini-ITX | Mobile Internet Device | OLPC | OLPC XO-2 | School Server | XO-1 |

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Ever since Nicholas Negroponte realized that Presidents loving OLPC laptops doesn't equal Ministers buying XO's I've been waiting to see what the participating countries' request for proposals (RFP's) would look like.

These competitive RFP's are the method by which every honest government purchases goods or services, especially millions of dollars worth of goods, and I fully expect One Laptop Per Child will need to first get countries to issue RFP's. Then, once governments have an outstanding RFP, OLPC can respond with the best one-to-one computing solution.

In a surprise move that somehow slipped past me, Uruguay has issued the first Request for Proposal that I know of as part of Ceibal (Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea).

Tags: Ceibal | OLPC Uruguay | OLPC XO | Pablo Flores | Request for Proposal | School Servers | Teacher Training |

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In this weekend's , OLPC VP Walter Bender casually drops an OLPC product lineup bombshell:

We are shipping five products this fall: (1) the XO laptop; (2) a school server; (3) a multi-battery charger; (4) an active antenna; and (5) a solar-powered WiFi repeater. Much of the emphasis has been on the laptop, but a push from Quanta this week has resulted in firmer plans for the other products.

While we are all intimately familiar with the OLPC XO, what are the other four "products" that Water speaks of? The last time we checked, school servers were still very much an idea or barely Beta, and now they're going to be production ready?

The multi-battery charger, or "gang charger" is even more mysterious. There is a basic Wiki entry, and now a photograph, but not much else.

Walter tells us about the active antenna for the first time in the very same update:

Thanks to John Watlington and the team from Cozybit, we have out first working "active antenna" prototypes. Attaching them to an XO lets you optimize the placement of the antenna: use with a mesh portal will double the network throughput. They can be used on the school servers or attached a 5V power supply to build a stand-alone WiFI repeater.

Luckily, thanks to Aaron Kaplan, we now know more about the solar mesh repeaters, but that was only last week.

Tags: Active Antenna | Gang Charger | OLPC Products | OLPC XO | School Server | Solar Mesh Repeaters |

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Browsing through the archives here at OLPC News and over on the official "Community-news" mailing-list I noticed that there's one topic that hasn't really been discussed all that much: the OLPC school servers.

Reading through Walter Bender's weekly updates to the mailing list there are only few recent mentions of the school server. In early March he wrote that "software architecture of the school servers is starting to come together". Then 4 weeks later he mentions that "the school server development continues" and "applications and content for the Library are starting to be installed". Development went on throughout April and apparently there's one trial setup being used at the OLPC offices in Cambridge but as of May 5 "work on the School Server hardware design continued".

With regards to the OLPC Wiki there are several entries dealing with school servers but there's relatively little in terms of (f)actual information. I assume this is also the reason why Walter Bender called the Wiki entries "really more of an introduction".

Tags: Mesh Networking | OLPC School Servers | OLPC Wiki | OSPS | One Server Per School | XSX Server |

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The OLPC XO needs back-up to serve its student users. At a minimum, an Internet router for the mesh network and local storage for OLPC content: One Server Per School. But just what does one server per school look like, what does it cost, and who is making it?

So far the OLPC Wiki is in agreement that One Server Per School will facilitate Internet connectivity and have data storage for 100 Children's Machine XO's. Everything else is still up for debate: server hardware & OS, other services, and the actual Internet connectivity method.

No matter what the outcome, the servers will not be free or few. The OLPC Wiki shows the OSPS impact for Argentina:

Doing some quick math based on Argentina Statistics, at the national level you have 5,151,856 kids in K-12 grades in 27,888 public schools, giving ~180 laptops / school (or ~3 servers / school).

Or 8,3664 servers total. Now while the final cost for the servers is still unknown, an OLPC feel-good pricing guesstimate would be $200 each or an additional $16.7 million dollars of Argentinean debt financing for one server per Argentinian school.

Interestingly enough, we do know who will be making the first 50,000 OSPS's: Brazil.

Tags: David Cavallo | Guilherme Felitti | One Server Per School | Positivo | President Lula | Semp Toshiba |

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