At 11:31 PM 1/5/2008, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
For starters, What is O.o.o?? does this refer to object oriented development tools??On Sat, Jan 05, 2008 at 10:29:55PM -0500, phillinux wrote: > Did anyone here work on the OLPC XO project??? > > I'm a teacher who would be interested in adapting the XO for secondary > school students. I would need to get a lightweight version of open office > running on that machine. > > Is the XO GUI Python based?? > Could Open Office run on it?? > DSL uses a lightweight GUI. Could that run on an OX and could it support > OpenOffice?? > > I guess the question I'm asking is, which is more possible: > 1. Getting Open Office to run on the existing XO OS & GUI or > 2. Could another GUI and apps be built on the XO kernel?? Which is more possible? Too many factors involved to answer. So back up. what allows Oo.o to run on your linux box now? An X-windows system. You don't even need a window manager. So, does the XO have X? If so, and provided other minimum dependencies are met, then yes you could run Oo.o on it. You might have better success with some other, more lightweight apps though: abiword, gnumeric, etc. And, what allows guis and apps to be built for a particular kernel? Well, they're not built for the kernel, more like built for a particular libc, but we'll ignore that part. What is needed to build anything for a particular system is a compiler and development headers for the various libraries used. Seeing as some apps have been ported to the XO, that makes it a pretty good bet that there is a compiler and the requisite libraries available. A
I'm not a developer, I did main frame programming in CoBOL a million years ago and barely have the skills to write shell scripts much less a GUI or sophisticated apps like a spreadsheet. I'm looking to find a way to get Open office or any office suite that will translate/convert common file formats - like microsoft's - so kids can co-operate on projects.
The kernel on th XO is a redhat derivative (I think) because I saw some selinux stuff in there. I don't think it has any loaded modules. Everything seems to be compiled into a tight kernel. I haven't figured out how to get it into single user mode, there's a GUI terminal app. it has great wireless but I don't know what hardware it has because lspci lsusb and lsmod don't work. ,aybe I'll pull those programs from another machne.
Thin clients are nice for a lab, but a lot of educators are looking for a light cheep machine kids can carry around and take home. A graphic browser is essential for research and frankly if kids can listen to music and play with it as well, their work center becomes a real source of enjoyment. and at 100 bucks, no tragedy if it gets ripped off or lost. Most school districts pay $50 and $60 for crappy text books.
While the OLPC folks are focused on the third world (a really great thing) I have my sights set on my inner city kids; some of whom come to school with their Macbook pros, and others who don't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out!! A functional $100 laptop (like the Asus EEE, only cheaper) would be hard for school administrators to refuse.
Thanks for your fee back. I'll look into the IBM 'developerworks site and see what their doing
Phil _______________