One laptop per child interface

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Showing sugar interface can be chosen as an option at login

While in Ghana early this year 2010 the usage of the Internet cafe progressed steadily , and interest was shown from two schools for either the editor to visit them or they visit the Internet cafe for ICT teaching of the children.

While in Accra I met an American interested in the OLPC program. We had a few discussions about the sugar interface and the XO laptop. One element he identified was that with the XO costing around $100 and the number of children at any school who would each be allocated a laptop, the total costs involved would be astronomical. I far as I can see this a a major obstacle to the dispersion of hardware and the software installed on it through a developing country like Ghana

One area I looked at was to consider forgetting about the XO laptop and procuring old unwanted PC's and installing the sugar interface onto them. From the sugar-labs site I can see that sugar can be installed onto Ubuntu. However the laptops I shipped over and computers I could get hold of free or at low cost would not be able to install the Ubuntu system due to the computers low specification. For instance I shipped out 20 Panasonic Toughbooks (CF-27's) these have a Intel Pentium II processor of 300mhz and only 256 ram. I tried Xubuntu, Mint light and other Ubuntu derivatives without success.

Showing sugar interface

However I was successful in installing Simply Mepis choosing light install. This system is based on Debian and has a windows look about it with a KDE desktop having icons on the desk top, a task bar and " start button " type icon which displays applications etc when clicking on it.

Installing the sugar interface was pretty much straight forward using mainly the synaptic package manager from the menu; so its not just Ubuntu that can have sugar interface installed , and the advantage of Simply Mepis is that it can install on lower specification machines. To run sugar its simply a matter of choosing a sugar session from the menu at logging in. (see screen shots) This gives older children the choice of choosing the Mepis Interface when they are ready for it.

One point that I thought important long term is about the inertia problem moving from Windows to Linux; similarly it would be important that children using one Linux system should not be draw into using a Linux system that will give them a problem in the future because the system they have been using wasn't anything like the mainstream Linux systems.

One advantage of Mepis is that not only is the desktop user friendly but at the command line, codes such as "Apt-get install useful programe " are the same in Mepis as they are in other main stream Liniux OS such as Ubuntu.

Showing sugar interface

One thing I don't like with the XO is that the equivalent command for apt-get is "Yum " this is because the XO has a sugar interface running on a Fedora Linux core.

Anyway I have included a couple of screen shot images showing the sugar interface on the toughbooks. I am still playing around with the interface but have tried the calculation program and it works just fine.