One Laptop Per Child News on Implementation

Martin Langhoff Brings Change to XS-ive OLPC School Server

Posted on March 06, 2008 by Jon Camfield in Implementation: Maintenance, Hardware: School Servers

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.

Martin Langhoff

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:

The XS prototype OLPC school server
"The actual XS school servers won't look anything like this"

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.

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XO Laptop Support for Children and Parents

Posted on January 02, 2008 by Guest Writer in Use Cases: Community, Implementation: Maintenance, Use Cases: User Groups

Parents are a part of XO learning

My name is Corey Ewing, and I'm just a parent (I moonlight as a geek and IT Professional). I've spent a bit of time tooling around with various Linux distros over the course of time, but primarily I've dealt with Windows. My purpose for buying these machines for our kids was threefold.

First of all, I work for a school district that struggles to get technology into the hands of kids, and this frustrates me to no end as a parent. So if the school district won't do it, my wife and I will.
Secondly, there's the philanthropic aspect (coupled with the spirit of giving at this time of year) of donating a machine to a child.
Finally, I'm a geek, and I'll get to play with it as well).

What I'm wondering is how do we talk parents "off the ledge" who are just seeing not only Linux, but a variant that is vastly different than any distro that has ever existed? We've heard a lot of information from the technical side of things regarding the XO and the "clock stopping hot technology".

Helping G1G1 Parents

However, I think that there are a lot of parents out there who are going to start surfacing more and more who are in the same boat as Drew: a little bewildered with the XO laptop.

The easy answer to this question is "Give it to the kids, they'll understand.". But what about the first time they don't understand? They're going to go to their parents and they won't understand either, and the machine is going to end up just like last years Christmas gifts, gathering dust in the bottom of the toy box. I applaud parents like Drew who are at least making the effort in advance to understand the machine prior to putting it in the hands of their child.

I'm thinking about this from the "first world" point-of-view, and I can't imagine what things are going to be like in the third-world (where these machines are going) where it's not only the first time that the kids have seen or used a computer, but the teachers as well. I think we as a tech community (and OLPC as well) need to focus on supporting not just the devices, but the people (adults and children) who own these devices.

What's your ideas? And actions?

And how can we publicize them on OLPC News and promote them in the OLPC News Forum?

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Marvell's 88ALP01 Driver Documentation Doesn't Satisfy

Posted on September 05, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Implementation: Maintenance, Internet: Routers, Hardware: Wireless

A Marvell wireless card

In September 2006, Theo de Raadt, the founder of OpenBSD, was not happy with One Laptop Per Child.

He accused OLPC of not being Open Source, going so far as to call the developers "morally bankrupt" because they signed non-disclosure agreements (NDA's) with Marvell, the suppliers of the OLPC wireless mesh hardware.

Theo was mad that Red Hat's developers acquiesced to NDA's to gain access to documentation required to write and maintain a kernel drivers for the proprietary firmware used in Marvell's wireless networking hardware, making independent driver maintenance and usage extremely difficult.

Now Marvell has seemingly opened up a bit, and released the 88ALP01 data sheet. This documentation covers the camera, Secure Digital, and NAND flash controllers. A LWN.net commenter asks the best question around the change in documentation:

It would be interesting to know whether the creation of this document was in response to a condition of the choice of component, or to a condition on the NDA, or just due to seeing the benefit of openness (i.e., if they release the datasheet, people buy their components and use them without a large support burden or contract negotiation).

Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD

No matter why Marvell opened up the driver documentation, or if One Laptop Per Child was instrumental in that openness, Theo de Raadt is not satisfied.

In an email to me he dismissed the 88ALP01 chipset documentation as not relevant, since its only in the OLPC and not even the wireless chipset, which he and others have now mostly reverse engineered. He confirms that SD driver support is nearly complete but SDIO is taking a bit longer to reverse engineer.

And yet, he is still disappointed that while the entire PC ecosystem is full of open devices, a few vendors still don't want to open up and Red Hat is not pressuring them to do so.

Personally, I'd love for OLPC to have real Open Source software and hardware to further allow and promote locally managed mesh networking support. That would be just one of many other XO computer support ecosystem businesses that enable OLPC to generate local employment opportunities - arguably just as important as educational opportunities - to increase a country's long-term growth and development.

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OLPC Nigeria's Shocking Electrical Power Costs

Posted on August 16, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Implementation: Maintenance, Countries: Nigeria, Hardware: Power Supply

Low OLPC XO transportation costs

Do you remember Jon's computation of One Laptop Per Child "$100 laptop" costs that concluded that XO's are really "$1,000 laptops"? Or the implementation cost follow-up where we debated the estimate in detail? Or José Antonio Meira da Rocha's OLPC Brazil laptop costs comparison study?

Jon's general point was that computer hardware is usually only one small component of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for technology implementations in the developing world. Training, maintenance, and Internet connectivity can drastically increase a project's scope and expense

Expenses in follow-on years are even more difficult to cover when the initial excitement of new shiny flashy things has past. Now that the initial fanfare around the One Laptop Per Child pilot testing in Galadima School, Abuja, Nigeria is waning, OLPC Nigeria is starting to learn this lesson with a cost we didn't include: electricity.

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Children's Reviews of OLPC XO Technology

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Implementation: Maintenance, Laptops: XO-1

Gabe, focused on XO activities

While we can endlessly debate One Laptop Per Child on OLPC News, what really matters will be the opinions and adoption of XO technology by children. And recently children have been expressing their views on the matter.

First up is Chris Schmidt's experience with giving an OLPC XO to a friend's young son:

I snapped a dozen pictures of Gabe (mercy_rain's son) and SJ Klein (OLPC Manager of Content) with the OLPC.

Note that Gabe had never seen one of these things before, and with practically no help from the adults, he had started painting, typing, and playing with the webcam, cackling quite evilly the whole time.

The photo set is damn cute, a visual statement to the XO's appeal.

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Joel Stanley's OLPC Job: Baking and Breaking Invincible XO-1

Posted on August 06, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Hardware: Keyboard, Implementation: Maintenance, Hardware: Screen, Laptops: XO-1

Cooking clock-stopping hot XO's

Image yourself as 21-year-old Australian Joel Stanley, who not only snagged a coveted Google Summer of Code (GSoC) spot, he is spending his internship at One Laptop Per Child's Cambridge headquarters developing "gang charger" power systems for the XO-1 laptop.

While he's lucky to be designing one of the OLPC Products, the gang charger units will recharge multiple XO laptops at one time via grid, solar, or other power source, I don't think that's the coolest part of his day.

I say its baking OLPC's with Arjun Sarual in a food warming oven. Walter Bender reports that:

The oven is large enough to house eight fully opened XOs and allows us to examine the behavior of the laptops under temperatures ranging from a warm 40°C, up to a toasty 60°C and above. Some preliminary tests were conducted, examining the operation of the battery charging systems under the extreme heat that may be encountered by, say, a laptop sitting in full sunlight.

One motivation for this testing is that the NiMH batteries that are used in some of the XOs lose the ability to be charged above 55°C. (The newer LiFePO4 technology allows charging above these temperatures, for when the need arises.) We are pleased to report the XOs ran flawlessly in the extreme heat, even when the oven's unpredictable thermostat inadvertently allowed the temperature to reach 68°C.

Yet you might think that Joel has an even cooler job in XO computer maintenance.

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OLPC XO Testing: Extreme Heat and Curious Cats

Posted on June 27, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Implementation: Maintenance, Hardware: Production

OLPC XO Bake Test

While you might be feeling the heat of summer, the One Laptop Per Child team is putting the XO computer through its paces with two extreme tests of its durability to guarantee its successful usage with children in the developing world.

The first test is subjecting the OLPC XO to extremes of heat. Funny enough, I know a little bit about building computers to withstand high heat environments. In my day job I helped with the creation of a desert computer that would work in the Sahel - the edge of the Sahara desert beyond Timbuktu.

We developed a computer that could run at 50C (122F) reasonably well but it was no Children's Machine XO. It wasn't subjected to the computer torture that Mary Lou Jepsen is inflicting on a hapless BTest-3 machine.

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Humpty Dumpty on a Million Unit Scale

Posted on May 17, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Implementation: Maintenance, Prototypes: OLPC

Is OLPC XO easy to fix?

While there is no official plan to provide OLPC XO post-sale spare parts or maintenance to participating countries announced by One Laptop Per Child, Nicholas Negroponte has often voiced his idea on how the Children's Machine XO can be maintained in the classroom:

Kids that I know, for instance in that picture, sleep with their laptop. I mean, they're not going to let these break, and Mary Lu's done a heck of a job in making them very repairable, so that 95% of the maintenance is done by the kids, actually.

Now reading that you might think that the OLPC XO is a modular computer, with each internal component easily repaired by students with a screwdriver. Even Walter Bender agrees with Ethan Zuckerman that the X0 is screwdriver repairable in their Radio Open Source interview

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OLPC News Analysis: Christopher Blizzard's OLPC Speech

Posted on March 16, 2007 by Guest Writer in People: Leadership, Implementation: Maintenance, Commentary: OLPC News

Christopher Blizzard presenting

My name is Christoph Derndorfer and you might remember me from my earlier comments about OLPC videos at CES and Sugar user interface testing. Now while I'm on a train racing through the night to Hannover, Germany where I'll be attending CeBIT I finally had time to read through some very interesting notes taken during a recent presentation by Christopher Blizzard.

Blizzard was speaking during the NY Linux User's Group monthly meeting which was held at Google's offices in New York City. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find out who wrote that summary but the person certainly had some outstanding note-taking skills! Anyway, I'll be highlighting some key-aspects that I found to be interesting and which at least I previously hadn't heard about.

"With regard to issues involved in designing for kids: [Christopher Blizzard] admits they are doing something new and it may not work."

This is indeed very interesting. While Wayan Vota and many other smart people have been discussing the pro's and con's of OLPC's approach to education and design for a long time this appears to be the first incident of an OLPC key member admitting that their approach is indeed something completely new that "may not work".

If you've been reading or hearing some of the comments made by Nicholas Negroponte one might end up believing that OLPC's approach is just a great as sliced bread. If not better! 100% guaranteed!! Maybe this will trigger a broader discussion about the OLPC initiatives goals, methods and tools. Even though I'm not holding my breath.

"Tech support? Kids should be ale to do it themselves or just replace the machine at $150. Designed so it can be fixed but at that pricepoint you may not need to."

.

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Merrill Lynch OLPC XO Investment Strategy: Caution

Posted on March 06, 2007 by Wayan Vota in Hardware: Keyboard, Implementation: Maintenance, Sales Talk: Price, Hardware: Production

While we proletariat debate the OLPC XO production model, the mighty moneyed bourgeoisie have their own opinions on Children's Machine XO Taiwanese computer manufacturer impact.

Bloomberg Asia reports a vibrant run-up in OLPC component maker's stock prices since One Laptop Per Child was announced:

Shares of ENE and Shin Zu Shing have almost doubled since then and are among the top 100 gainers of the 1,160 stocks traded on Taiwan's two main exchanges. Simplo has climbed 79 percent and Sunrex Technology Corp., a keyboard maker for the computers, has added 33 percent in the period.

"The program will bring lucrative opportunities for Taiwanese laptop computer component makers and its large scale means high growth potential for these suppliers," said Angela Hsiang, an analyst at KGI Securities Co. in Taipei.

Merrill Lynch even went so far as to issue an OLPC investment strategy. And what's their opinion on "$100 laptop" investment?

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Bitfrost: The Children's Machine XO Security Platform

Posted on February 07, 2007 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership, Implementation: Maintenance, Software: Operating System

What computer security will One Laptop Per Child's initial 10 million Children's Machine XO's have? That is a question that Ivan Krstić has wrestled with since his start with OLPC.

Now he has taken a great leap in implementation and released Bitfrost the OLPC security platform. Reading the Bitfrost Approach I can only wish that more computer security design professionals, be they specialists in Windows, Apple, or Linux, would follow Ivan's lead. His five security goals are radical, simple, and loooong overdue:

Goals

No user passwords
No unencrypted authentication
Out-of-the-box security
Limited institutional PKI
No permanent data loss

If you're the technical type, you can read the full Bitfrost specification on the OLPC Git Repository.

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One Environmentally Friendly Laptop Per Child

Posted on February 01, 2007 by Guest Writer in Implementation: Maintenance, Prototypes: OLPC, Implementation: Plan

I am Toon De Bruyn and while I am no expert on the OLPC project, nor am I an expert on e-waste, I try to develop my knowledge and skills on education for sustainability, and have therefore somewhat mixed ideas on the OLPC project.

Global e-waste

Increasingly, we are being swamped in spam and other junk email by the information age, but a more tangible effect is the increasing amount of e-waste. The sheer volume and mass of discarded batteries, print cartridges, screens and other appliances which contain potentially harmful substances are becoming an environmental sticking point for producers, consumers of laptops and other appliances and for policy makers.

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What is the Real Cost of the OLPC?

Posted on November 13, 2006 by Jon Camfield in Implementation: Maintenance, Sales Talk: Price

$30 Billion is just the beginning. The MOU with Libya unearths a cost of 250MM for the laptop hardware and basic implementation ($208/laptop). And this is just infrastructure -- the laptop, school servers, satellite Internet, and set-up costs (including a team of advisers). We're still missing key components for success of the OLPC experiment, what is the rest of the tab?

With not-really-so-hidden costs of training, maintenance and Internet connection, the cost of implementing an OLPC program skyrockets, almost quintupling the $208/laptop cost!

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Hacking to Preempt Hackers

Posted on October 04, 2006 by Wayan Vota in Implementation: Maintenance, Software: Operating System

While TG Daily pulled its post of what was apparently an off-the-record invitation to hack the OLPC by Ivan Krstić of OLPC at Toorcon, the Engadget follow-on story> reveals the high level of security awareness of the One Laptop Per Child 2B1 Children's Machine's designers.

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2B1 Children's Machine DoS Attacks?!

Posted on September 18, 2006 by Wayan Vota in Implementation: Maintenance

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger, an OLPC contributor, recently spent a whole night writing up the technical ways a DoS attack could happen. He defined four broad methods - power management, network, hardware, and other - which I'll not bore you with here. After discussing it with the OLPC Security listserv, he followed up with a very interesting profile of who might launch such attacks. Here are the three main threat groups according to Carl-Daniel Hailfinger :

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Dan Shine of AMD Defends OLPC Computers

Posted on August 21, 2006 by Wayan Vota in People: Leadership, Implementation: Maintenance, Hardware: Power Supply, Commentary: Press

In the recent BusinessWeek article "A Crusade to Connect Children", journalist Bruce Einhorn was able to garner several choice quotes from Dan Shine, Project Director of AMD's 50x15 Initiative. Dan also happens to be the key liaison for the One Laptop Per Child project within AMD since it dovetails so nicely with the 50x15 Initiative's goal of getting half the world online by 2015.

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No Spare Parts Distribution Plan?!

Posted on August 09, 2006 by Wayan Vota in Implementation: Maintenance

Now I don't know how or if Jim Klein is related to OLPC, a Google Search didn't show any direct relationship, but he portends to speak as a member of the OLPC design team on his OLPC Follow Up Post and his answers give me concern. Specifically his maintenance Q&A:

Q - How will these devices be maintained? They will break, everything breaks, and these will be in the worst of environments for electronic devices. I don't think parts distribution is part of the current plan, at least not in anything that I've read.

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One Laptop Per Child News

Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's "$100 laptop" computer, the OLPC Children's Machine XO, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte.