JLP’s Blog

Skipped the breakfast today, since I forgot to set up the alarm clock and was already running late. Went directly to the university, because I wanted to be there about half an hour earlier to connect to the internet. The connection was not working and it was strange that there were no people. Luckily Mario Fux came by (he forgot his power adapter) and told me that the talks are in the Livingston Tower across the street.

We had three talks in which we were told about three actual deployments of Linux in schools over Europe (Norway, Switzerland, Spain). It was shown how much money a school can save by using free and open source software, in what way the money is saved and how the deployments are made. It is sad that at first school administration is often very afraid of Linux in their school, because they don’t know anything about it. After they actually see how well it works and how many benefits it brings they eventually want more Linux. It was also very interesting to see what and how many customizations are made during deployments. Either to make a better fit for school’s special needs or to work around deficiencies in existing Windows servers, which often don’t work nicely with the rest of the world.

There was a chance to see One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Intel Classmate PC side by side and we also got them into our hands. I was quite surprised that Classmate PC actually feels lighter. What I also like about Classmate PC is that it appears to be a more capable machine for which it is easier to develop applications. The model at the presentation actually had a slimmed down version of Mandriva Linux installed, with KDE desktop and OpenOffice.org. And everyone knows how heavy OpenOffice.org is when it comes to system resources.

The guy with OLPC also showed us around GCompris, a suit of educational applications. I’ve heard about it before, but never checked it out. It has over 100 educational activities and is definitely something to check out in more detail and see how well it is translated into Slovenian language. Later Marble was presented. It is a widget for showing geographical data that is ready to be used in Qt or KDE applications (for example in KStars to set location you are observing from). In addition, it is a full application, which is similar to Google Earth. During the presentation Summer of Code student managed to get GPS support working. Another application presented was KAlgebra, which can be used as a bit more advanced calculator and is also capable of drawing 2D and simple 3D graphs. It is also very nice to see that KAlgebra is based on MathML standard.

At the end we had a discussion where we collected a few topics, on which it would be nice to work in the future. For example more task oriented and simplified desktop and applications. Another idea was to set up a web portal and mailing list where people interested in free and open source software in education could work together. Maybe SchoolForge could be revived and used for this.

Another very interesting day indeed. And if you would like to know all details about what was happening be sure to check out KDE Edutainment pages some time later. You will be able to find all the presentations and some notes there.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland, education, olpc, one laptop per child, classmate pc