New build for the XO-1 and 1.5 -10.1.3 can be installed and questions for our group
Nancie Severs
Hi everyone,
I have copied below an email announcement sent to the OLPC Support Gang yesterday. I have installed the new build on my XO-1 and also on the XO 1.5 that I am testing. It seems really good.
Perhaps this is a good time for a conversation. I am concerned that we have 12 XOs out in the floating village and no one is asking questions or for advice.
Has there been any progress towards getting Internet in the Vung Vieng Village? Is there a desire for it? Do the parents and teachers understand that the XOs are not just a closed "game system" but that they can be customized by connecting them to the Internet and downloading updates and specific desired Activities and used for learning all kinds of things?
There are so many useful Activities! http://activities.sugarlabs.org//en-US/sugar/
In addition to the 3 XO-1s that I sent to Hanoi via Nguyet (Nguyễn Thị Ánh Nguyệt), I have 7 more that have been re-donated. 5 need the clock battery repairs and I plan to do that this winter. There are two additional XOs in Hong Gai that don't boot and probably have this same problem. I brought them "damaged" thinking that the pilot may need them someday for spare parts. But I believe they can be fixed. The description of the problem is found here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Fix_Clock
As a group, do you think the OLPC Vietnam volunteers should start a small pilot in or near Hanoi in a location where teaching and IT support can be provided? Should I continue my efforts to procure more XOs?
I pose these thoughts as the TET Holiday approaches. I wish everyone a very Happy, Healthy and Lucky New Year and I hope that after Tet, we can continue our work together!
My very best,
Nancie
Yesterday's email announcement follows:
Dear olpc community,
we are very pleased to announce build os860 as the final 10.1.3 release
build for XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops!
This is an update to software release 10.1.2 that fixes important bugs
and includes some new improvements (listed at the bottom of this mail).
The release is based on Fedora 11 and contains the latest Sugar 0.84 and
the GNOME desktop.
The full release notes can be found at [1]. Instructions for installing
the release on an XO can be found at [2].
Many thanks to everyone -- testers, translators, documenters,
developers and others -- who contributed to this release!
On behalf of the OLPCA-team,
Simon
[1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.3
[2] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.3#Installation
==New features==
===Collaboration "under a tree" on XO-1.5===
We have significantly improved collaboration when XO-1.5 is used with no
Access Points available ("under a tree"). The Neighborhood View now
shows three default Ad-hoc networks (for channels 1, 6, and 11) in
user-friendly icons, and XOs will auto-connect without user
intervention. This behavior is similar to the "mesh" behavior on XO-1.
===Sharing/Backup Journal entries using a mass storage device===
You may now share Journal entries with another learner using a [[USB
drive]] or SD card. The user experience is: Martin wants to give a
picture he has been drawing to Simon. He plugs in his USB drive and
copies the Journal entry on the drive. Simon plugs in Martin's drive in
his laptop. The entry will be shown with Martin's XO color on the drive.
Simon copies Martin's entry into his Journal.
You can use this feature to backup Journal entries to a USB drive or SD
card.
===Connect your XO to external projectors and monitors===
We have added support for USB2VGA adapters. You can now connect an XO to
a projector over a USB2VGA adapter and project what is on your XO screen
onto a screen or for many people to see.
===Screen Rotation on XO-1.5===
On XO-1.5 it is now possible to rotate the screen using the 'rotate'
button. This allows learners to use the XO in ebook mode.
===Protected Activities Support===
In this build certain activities are protected from being deleted by
accident. In the activity list in the home view the erase option is
disabled for those. Protected activities are: Browse, Terminal, Log,
Write, ImageViewer and Record.
===Better interaction between GNOME and Sugar===
Switching between Sugar and GNOME user interfaces is smoother. Changes
of settings in GNOME now do not affect Sugar, and vice-versa.
The ~/Activities directory is now hidden from the user in GNOME, to
prevent accidental deletions that could harm Sugar. The networking
settings are now synchronized so enabling/disabling networking is unified.
Users can now change GNOME panels and fonts without risk of breaking
GNOME -- invalid settings are reset on restart.
The dialog to set a GNOME keyring password when connecting to a secure
wireless network has been disabled.
===Browse===
A home button has been added into the Browse toolbar. The button returns
to the home page, where important links are.
A busy cursor has been added for when a page is loading. This was
present in 8.2.1 but missing from 10.1.2.
Finally, previews for downloaded images have been added, so that the
Journal will show appropriate thumbnails of downloaded images.
===Paint===
The Paint activity has been improved a lot:
* The cursor has been enhanced and realigned,
* Text tool has been improved
* New filters: invert colors and mirror effects
* Tool size and shape are shown
* Improvements to copy and paste
===Read===
Scrolling has been improved. The up and down directional keypad to the
left of the XO display will now scroll, which is especially useful if
the laptop is in ebook mode. Using the fn key with the up and down arrow
keys will now scroll by page.
===Write===
You can now paste images into Write. Images can be copied from Browse,
Paint or Write. You can now put images into tables and export to PDF.
The style list has been reordered to place paragraph text styles before
heading styles.
===Wikipedia===
Page loading has been sped up and several smaller fixes made.
===Scratch===
A new camera plugin adds importing from camera on XO-1.
===Activity Updates===
We included the latest versions of Calculate, Colors, Distance, Etoys,
Help, InfoSlicer, Jukebox, Labyrinth, Memorize, Physics, Pippy, Turtle
Art and Typing Turtle.
===System Lid Behavior===
When the lid is closed on the XO, the laptop will suspend its operations
and turn off the screen. Historically re-opening the lid has turned on
the screen and woken up the laptop for normal use. In order to avoid a
problem where stacked XO units may accidentally turn each other back on,
this wake-up behavior has been disabled. To wake up the laptop from
suspend press the power button once.
--
This email came from my XO from OLPC!
Please check out One Laptop Per Child at http://laptop.org/ and help make the world a better place!
Quynh Vu Do
2011/1/18 Nancie Severs <nancie...@gmail.com>:
> Perhaps this is a good time for a conversation. I am concerned that we have
> 12 XOs out in the floating village and no one is asking questions or for
> advice.
Unfortunately, sometimes a long silence can tell more than a few words.
> As a group, do you think the OLPC Vietnam volunteers should start a small
> pilot in or near Hanoi in a location where teaching and IT support can be
> provided? Should I continue my efforts to procure more XOs?
>
I don't know what others are thinking.
For any project to be successful, it should fulfill some essential
needs, needs that have to be expressed by the beneficiaries of the
project.
In Vietnam, if you give something, people will take it, even if they
don't need it, because it could be played with, sold or given to
somebody else. If they have to give something as a counterpart, like
some money, or some efforts (that means time, energy), they won't take
it unless they have a strong interest.
There are also other cultural aspects that can be involved :
pupils-teachers relationships ; children-parents relationships that
are not in favour of promoting child initiative and discovery like it
is in western culture, excepted maybe in richer families of big cities
(that usually are more opened or embracing western culture).
It is not my prospect to discourage here. But when the situation is
not ripe enough for something to bear fruits, we need to analyze and
weigh out our actions because the time of everyone is limited and
evrybody has its own personal agenda. This is clear from this silence
on the list : I waited until today to see whether somebody would react
or not before answering to this post.
So, I think that the main thing we could do is sensibilization and
increasing awareness about XO, Sugar and OLPC. Doing translations to
Vietnamese is also something which will help towards a better
awareness.
Because I'm living in Hanoi, having a pilot project nearby would be
more convenient to follow than in Halong Bay. But the key thing still
is to find local stakeholders, people that are interested and want to
co-operate. Ideally that would be a primary school where director and
staff are sensibilized and would like to invest their efforts in
applying OLPC concepts..
Unfortunately, I do not have any strong acquaintances with teachers in
primary education.
I have tried one approach through the Ministry of Education and
Formation of Vietnam without concrete results : some interest but...
I think OLPC is not interesting them unless, maybe, there is a
donation of hundreds of XOs for a pilot project. Intel tried its way
with his Classmate PC (a concurrent to OLPC) not to be given to
children (like in the OLPC concept) but as class materials (ie to be
purchased in bulk by the education sector) : I don't hear much about
it now although they have certainly donated some consequent amount of
thses classmate computers.
If other local members of OLPC-VN, in Hanoi, are willing to do
anything and have ideas, I'm in.
>
> I pose these thoughts as the TET Holiday approaches. I wish everyone a very
> Happy, Healthy and Lucky New Year and I hope that after Tet, we can continue
> our work together!
Thanks for your ideas and dont get discouraged, things need to get in
place and will eventually get in place, but it is often very slow.
Happy New year of the Cat to everyone.
--
Vu Do Quynh (M.)
Hanoi, Vietnam
Blog: http://vdquynh.blogspot.com/
Mario Behling
well, as your question was about a pilot close to Hanoi, I could not
really say anything about it as we are in the South. I agree with Vu
Do Quynh that there are many things to consider. Apart from cultural
aspects and resources we put in, we also need to consider the current
state of technology (hardware and software).
I am interested to push for education and IT and I believe it is great
to engage people to join up, to use and develop for the Sugar
interface for example. But, we also need to realistically see what
resources in regards to Hardware are available from OLPC. Currently
the XOs (also version 1.5) are not always up to the tasks running
quite slowly for todays standards. There are much faster chips out
there now that are comparably energy saving for example. Looking at
interface development, there are new concepts that we can see with
Android pads and Ipads. The study of OLPC3 went into this direction
and I am looking forward to see what the future will bring. I am happy
to engage in it. In the meantime, I would like to continue to push for
OLPC in Vietnam - maybe we could term it Open Learning Project with
Computers in Vietnam? To my mind we do not depend on the OLPC
hardware, we can also push for other energy saving and faster
solutions using the Sugar desktop.
Having said, that the hardware is now a bit old, it is nevertheless a
nice thing to play around with and we have a few people around, who
would definitely be interested in hacking on the devices. So, if you
have XOs available to educating students and getting them started and
interested in Sugar, we would be happy to keep some in our new
hackspace in Can Tho to be opened in April during the Open Design
Weeks.
All the best and happy Tet!
Mario