The projectors are a fine choice when you need to create a large viewing space.
With the kids seated on the floor was the screen height okay?
Did you have any problems with anyone getting motion sickness or vertigo!?
On Mac's with GE there's no proper full-screen mode, however if you
place GE on the second display port (but I'm guessing Mini's only have
one display) you won't have the Finder Menu. Another work-around is to
shorten the screens and place the top menu bar just out of view on the
black screen edge... I've done that before!
Also depending on your Internet connectivity and local caching
policies, you could benefit from setting up a local HTTP cache (like
Squid) on the controlling Macbook and proxy'ing the requests from the
Mini's. This will create a larger, hopefully more permanent, tile/data
cache then the 2Gb on each of the GE clients. If you have questions I
can give you (& the list) advice on how to do this.
If you get interest from the School, before talking about screens, I
would arrange to purchase a 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator mouse (it works
with GE on Linux/Mac/Windows). It makes moving around in GE more fluid
and 'natural', you may even be able to hand over control to some of
the kids.
Cheers, Andrew
eResearch Advisor / Uni of Western Sydney
On 28 December 2010 09:46:56 UTC+11, James Crawford
--
"Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know." (Lao Tzu)
My household GHG emissions from energy & transport ~4kg CO2e/day or
~1.4tonnes/year
Household daily use of Water 110L, Electricity 3.9kWh, Petrol 1.2L, Gas 0MJ
I mostly solved the 'going to' motion problem by maintaining a
horizontal horizon as the rig flys to the next search/location, so it
really does feel like a gigantic hop! I'll have to post a video. Also
the Space Navigator let's you move slowly and naturally around the
scene.
The config for LiquidGalaxy in GE6 is the same as GE5. Make a copy of
/Applications/Google\ Earth.app/Contents/MacOS/drivers.ini,
install/upgrade to GE6, then copy'n'paste the changes you made for
your LG setup from the old drivers.ini into the new drivers.ini
You will need administrator (root) access on the machine you install
Squid (I'd suggest the Macbook) and some hard drive capacity, say
10-20Gb for the cache. Installing a basic Squid server is straight
forward, I used http://squid3.darwinports.com/
On the Mini's there's nothing special to do, besides setting network
proxies to point at the Macbook. That can be configured each time you
use them for your setup. System Preferences -> Network -> Ethernet ->
Advanced -> Proxies -> Web Proxy (HTTP)...
I'm back at uni next week and I can send a squid config I use. You can
use http://code.google.com/p/liquid-galaxy/source/browse/trunk/gnu_linux/etc/squid/squid.conf
although it does a bit more than you'll need.
BTW OS X 10.7 will have a better fullscreen mode for apps, so that may
help with GE.
Cheers, Andrew.
On 29 December 2010 06:34:43 UTC+11, James Crawford