Whats on Your Mind ?

I was invited for a site visit of OLPC in Chen­nai India , Arani is town around 150 Kms from Chen­nai here is a route map Route Map , and pic­tures below

OLPC in Chennai

, over­all the visit has been fruit­ful saw sugar @ work kids dis­cov­er­ing and learn­ing new things on there own , there were some 10 Xo’s which attracted around 200 kids from in and around the village.

The weather was too hot and dry i did not feel the humid­ity like Chen­nai so sug­gested them to install water cooler . The most pop­u­lar activ­i­ties were Paint , Wikipedia , lack to Inter­net is some­thing which needs to be looked into to get these kids talk out to the world.

on 20th the next day i vis­ited one more school which is a govt school which is under Sarva Shik­sha Abhiyan pro­gramme of govt of India , here i learned about the ABL ( activ­ity based learn­ing ) which is sim­i­lar to activ­ity based in Sugar but it was more struc­tured in the sense of the kid goes from one class to other after he has com­pleted a set of activ­i­ties in on sub­ject or class. In this school the four XO’s are pro­vided the pro­gramme is sched­ule to begin after sum­mer holidays.

things to be done in com­ing days , XO’s need Sugar upgrade. Teach­ers need train­ing , iden­tify kids who can teach other kids , get Inter­net con­nec­tion so that they can con­nect to the larger OLPC community .

In spite of folks talk­ing about not to buy Benq i bought myself a gift for New Year Joy­book Lite U 121 Eco from Nehru Place, New Delhi.

Actu­ally the itch has been going on for long after read­ing reviews on var­i­ous mail­ing lists in India, it was evi­dent that find­ing a Net­book with GNU/Linux installed would be a tough bargain.

I had an eye on Acer One D250 for long. But it was a no no after read­ing this pre­sen­ta­tion by Matt Porter

i strongly rec­om­mend for all the mobile devel­op­ers to con­sider read­ing this before div­ing into the Android way of undo­ing things.

ok com­ing back to the story of why Benq all in the world , since Acer was already ruled out and Asus had some good rec­om­men­da­tions , Benq was def­i­nitely was not on the list.

had a look at the two Joy Book mod­els one was with smaller screen and lesser hard disk space , the other was rec­om­mended by the mar­ket­ing guy as it came with Linpus .

Lin­pus still does not con­nect me to the Net , i called up there office had to go round in cir­cles aka musi­cal chairs, but still i wanted to taste first hand rea­sons why folks don’t make GNU/Linux based Net­books or Laptops.

The answer i sup­pose is a well know one in FOSS world “Sup­port” , i am still explor­ing and find­ing how the OEM is tied to Lin­pus and what sup­port aggre­ment i am enti­tled to.

in the mean­time i did not want to install any other OS and get online ASAP since i am still explor­ing and expect­ing some form of decent sup­port from the Ven­dor ;-( , more on that later…

In the mean­time i had a liveusb with Ubuntu 9.10 to test the wifi, it too does not work out of the box , i got it work­ing work­ing by insert­ing rt ker­nel module.

$sudo su -
#mod­probe rt3070sta

enabled the net­work by press­ing func­tion key and F10