thoughts for the library

2 views

Skip to first unread message

Bryan Berry

unread,

Jan 19, 2008, 7:09:05 PM1/19/08

to ole-nepal-tech, sulochan acharya, Rabi Karmacharya, Saurav Dev Bhatta

[Note: Sulochan and I are working on an e-library for the Dept. of
Education. I am posting our discussion to this list because we would
love outside help]

Sulochan,

Here is an update on what my ideas for the library

Charlie and Andrew are doing a great job on their prototype for the
Billion Kids Library. It is essentially a user interface + metadata
storage and search that sits on top of something like fedora. They
haven't decided if they will use fedora as their default repository but
what they are building will be compatible w/ fedora.

I think we should stick w/ fedora and use the Billion Kids Library (BKL)
front-end when it becomes available. 1) because fedora is rapidly
becoming an industry standard and 2) it beats the pants off the other
repositories. The only problem is that its out-of-the-box UI sucks

There are two issues w/ using the BKL

1) It isn't stable and Charlie doesn't know exactly when it will be
ready
2) They are using Flexbuilder for the graphical display. I am not
certain how well the XO supports Flash. The default flash support is
Gnash and it runs very poorly. I installed the proprietary flash plugin
on an XO a long loong time ago and it worked. I don't know if it still
works.

I am pretty impressed w/ Flex. Flex 2 isn't open-source but Flex 3 will
be. can you try loading the flash plugin on one of our XO's and try to
view http://oledev.org ?

I would try to do it myself but I won't have an XO w/ me for the next
several days.

Since the BKL won't be ready in the interim we should either continue to
use the current fez + fedora solution we have, try Muradora which is
supposed to be easier, take a snapshot of the BKL in development and try
to use that.

You put a ton of work into fez and it looks great. Can we stick w/ it
for now or is too much of a hassle to maintain?

I want to try out Muradora this week and see if it is significantly
easier than fez. I don't know how difficult it would be to rework the
Muradora UI into something similar to what we did for fez. Will send you
the web link later.

The only headache about fedora is that the Fez User interface sucks. I
am looking at Muradora UI for fedora to see if that is a lot easier.

Let's try to talk on Monday

[If anyone out there has some ideas on how we could do this better,
would love to hear it :)]