Open Source at SF State University - All things open source at San Francisco State University

Forget Gates and focus on bars

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:47:29 -0700

From a BBC article written by Richard Stallman:

"To pay so much attention to Bill Gates' retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers."

Read it in full at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7487060.stm

OpenMoko coming soon - 4th July, actually

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:15:16 -0700

OpenMoko's FreeRunner will be available on Friday, July 4 2008. The shipped version of the phone will come in both 850Mhz and 900Mhz Tri-band GSM flavors with a 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen, WiFi, AGPS, GPRS 2.5G, Bluetooth 2.0, 128MB WSDRAM, and 256MB NAND flash. It will cost you $399 and can be bought starting Friday at http://www.openmoko.com/

Una Laptop por Niño - Perú

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:36:26 -0700

The one thing I really admire about OLPC's team, both hired and volunteering, is that come what may, they keep plugging away. Here are some great pictures from the work being done in the field in Perú. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

See more pictures at http://flickr.com/photos/olpc/

OLPC-SF June 2008 meeting: a report

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:13:01 -0700

This is a report in reference to the OLPC-SF meeting held on June 21, 2008 at the Google campus in Mountain View. I'd like to thank our host, Weihaw Chuang for making the necessary arrangements. The meeting had approximately 30 people, including the usual suspects of Linux enthusiasts, newbies, and (grand)parent(s) with (grand)child(ren). We also had Christian Einfeldt of the Digital Tipping Point filming his neighbor while she unwrapped her new XO laptop from its shipping box. That video should be available some time soon.

While meeting and talking with others is quite productive in getting ideas going, we need to have a bit more focus on activities. I've attached slides from the meeting. These are more like starting points instead of a plan to move forward. We will probably start a sub-group focusing on children and their use of XOs. We heard from two children at the meeting where they expressed their excitement and frustration with the XO. Let's see if we can kickstart a sub-group with parents and children, and not get bogged down by the discussions about software and operating systems only. If anyone is interested in kicking off activities with children and XOs, please speak up on the list or write to me at sverma@sfsu.edu

There is definitely a strong sub-group that likes to tinker (and there is nothing wrong with that ;-)), so the discussions tend to get technical. We also have a fairly good overlap with Linux User Groups from around the SF bay area (SVLUG, SF-LUG, BALUG, EBLUG, NBLUG, etc). Mark Willey has developed a simple activity that manipulates the backlight as a flashlight. See http://superhappydevhouse.org/XO+Flashlight for details. He talked about it a couple of meetings ago. I haven't seen it yet, but I'd love to see it at the next meeting as an example for developing simple activities.

One highlight of the meeting was that Robert Howard demonstrated a VoIP session with another person in New York, New York, using a TeamSpeak server located in Alabama. TeamSpeak is proprietary, but its resource requirements are pretty low. Robert was "on-the-phone" throughout the meeting. Running Asterisk may be a bit more hefty than TeamSpeak, but looking at AstLinux (embedded Asterisk server), there is some hope. I wonder if anyone has sugarized iaxclient for the XO.

I had a copy of build 708 on a USB key, so a few people updated their G1G1 machines from 656 to 708. This build has "suspend on closing the lid" enabled which makes the battery run longer. A quick press of the power button usually brings the machine out of suspend.

We wrapped up around 1:45pm, but the fun didn't end there. Jay McCauley, a docent at the Computer History Museum and a member of OLPC-SF, had invited us to a 2pm demonstration of the Charles Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 which is currently on display at the museum. So many of us went down to the CHM for a demo of the Difference Engine. What a terrific piece of work! The saddest part of modern machines is perhaps that as they get progressively faster, they lose their mechanical parts. For example, there is a certain charm in watching a hissing steam engine in spite of its inefficiencies while I find no pleasure in watching an idling electric locomotive :-)

Here's a video of the Difference Engine in action.

Ubuntu 8.04 - Miracles on shiny discs

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:20:31 -0700

First, forgive me for the cheesy title of this post. Its 6 am and I am jetlagged. After a successful trip to Italy and Finland, I am finally back home and what a pleasure it was to find that my new notebook had finally arrived! I got a new X300 Thinkpad with a solid-state drive and a bunch of goodies, that I won't go into. At least, not yet. The first thing I did after booting into the machine was to check the drive space. The laptop comes with Microsoft Vista pre-installed. There was no way around it.

The next thing I did? Slide in the Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 CD into the drive (yes, unlike the MacBook Air, this one actually has an optical drive) and reboot. The CD booted without a hitch. After a quick inspection, I ran the install and a few minutes later, I had Hardy Heron running on the Thinkpad.

June 2008 OLPC-SF meeting at Google

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 13:56:59 -0700

June 2008 meeting of SF Bay Area OLPC Enthusiasts.

What: If you have an XO laptop, or are just interested in seeing how they work, come on down to Google campus in Mountain View for a get together on June 21, 2008. If you have an XO or two (or ten), bring them! Don't have an XO? Simply bring your enthusiasm.

Bonus: Gather at the Computer History Museum (CHM) for a tour/photo ops with the Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 (Babbage engine with XO!), courtesy of Jay McCauley. Babbage Engine at 1pm and 2pm. Also scheduled are DEC PDP-1 tours at 1:30pm and 2:00pm. Short and long tours of Visible Storage (main exhibit area) are scheduled throughout the afternoon. CHM opens at 12. CHM is located right at the Shoreline exit off 101, about a mile from Google. Entry is free.

Why: Build a mesh network, share activities, generate intersting ideas. See the school server in action. Discuss translation activities. Get an update on pilot studies. And more...

When: June 21, 2008 from 10am to 2pm

Where: University Theaters @
Building 40 2nd Floor
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

FOSS in Espoo, Finland

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:30:51 -0700

I am now in Espoo, a suburb of Helsinki, Finland. I will be here for approximately two weeks, teaching a short course on Global Software Management at Evtek. After I got an account at the school, I logged into the system. The desktops are Windows XP, with a Novell authentication layer running printers and shared drives. No surprises there, although I would have imagined that an Active Directory backend would make more sense to have an integrated experience.

FOSS in Varese, Italy

Thu, 29 May 2008 06:53:04 -0700

I am currently visiting Insubria State University in lovely Varese, Italy. I had a presentation yesterday titled "Open Source Software and Software Industry Change". The talk was attended by students and faculty. Information about the talk can be found here. To get the slides in PDF format, go to http://www.cresit.it/GetFile.aspx?ID=58&LCID=1040

BBC covers FOSS as the alternative

Mon, 19 May 2008 10:05:04 -0700

The BBC has an article and an interview extolling the virtues of the Free and Open Source Alternative Christian Einfeldt of the Digital Tipping Point calls it a mini tipping point in itself.

From the article:

OLPC soap opera and its critics

Wed, 14 May 2008 13:47:02 -0700

There has been a ton of noise and some signal about the recent disagreements about OLPC management, direction, policy, strategy, etc. and while I usually try not to contribute to the noise, here's a post that was in response to a blog entry by Ivan Krstić on his notebook (Its a long post. Read it in full. Some language NSFW)...but, I found the response by Pamela Jones (of Groklaw fame) more interesting. So, here's a part of that response. You can read the full post here:

Where we don't want you to go today

Sun, 11 May 2008 19:11:06 -0700

Its one thing to explore the limits of what technology can do for you, but it takes an entirely different mindset to figure out and limit what technology may do for you. How cheap can laptops get and still be useful? We are seeing this with many new products such as the XO-1 laptop from OLPC, The Eee PC from Asus, and many other ultra low-cost PCs as they are being called. One common theme across these cheap laptops has been the use of Linux. This article from PC World point out to an interesting effort from those people in Redmond. From PC World:

OLPC-SF May 2008 meeting

Thu, 08 May 2008 12:24:00 -0700

Calling the San Francisco Bay Area OLPC community!

If you have an XO laptop, or are just interested in seeing how they work, come on down to SF State campus for a get together on May 11, 2008. If you have an XO or two (or ten), bring them! Don't have an XO? Download a LiveCD from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/livebackupcd/ or simply bring your enthusiasm.

Wireless mesh at the beach

Sun, 04 May 2008 11:07:22 -0700

It was a great day to be at the beach in San Francisco (Apr 27, 2008). Thanks to Jason Stone and Jim Stockford for sparing their Sunday afternoon, we met up at Ocean Beach with three XO laptops. The little green machines attract a good bit of attention. Even before we got started with out little experiment, we had people stopping by to ask questions or just check out the green machine.

So, the experiment was: How far will the point-to-point mesh network on the XOs go in relatively clear RF (radio frequency) environment? At least cleaner as far as 2.4 GHz spectrum goes. We did such a run on campus and got about 600 feet max. or so across two XO units. I suspected that this was because our campus has a lot of Wi-Fi traffic, so the interference alone would decrease the hop length. We also have a lot of foliage, so that would add to the interference.

Ocean beach is right along the Pacific at the edge of San Francisco. I hoped that RF would be cleaner there. So, we got started by setting up the mesh of three laptops (me, Jim and Jason) and then got Jim firmly planted (say, position A) in the thick of beach population to answer questions. Jason and I walked south while pinging Jim's laptop all along. Well, we kept on walking...and walking...and walking. This was definitely way beyond 600 feet. Eventually, we started seeing "host unreachable" a few times, so we stopped. We saw ping times of about 25 to 30 ms. Jason became point B there. I kept walking further south and after a few steps, the pinging resumed with low latencies (3 to 5 ms). I kept walking...and walking...and walking. A quick note about walking on the beach. Walk closer to the water. Its a lot firmer and works well when measuring paces (1 pace approximately equals three feet). Eventually, I started seeing "host unreachable". I called Jim to verify. He was seeing the same. I tried holding the laptop higher up and the pings would resume. Eventually, I stopped at what I thought was the outer limit of pings, marked the spot and took the following picture.

Ubuntu 8.04: Oh, the miracles!

Thu, 01 May 2008 21:24:17 -0700

I just finished installing 8.04 LTS on my old(er) Fujitsu Lifebook P2120. Yeah, I'm slow at adoption...by a few days. So, forgive me! Anyway, I had tested the Beta under VMWare so no real surprises there, except the big surprise was with suspend and hibernate. After installing and without further updating, I decided to try out suspend and hibernate features. Well, guess what? They work like a charm. A bit slow compared to Windows XP or MacOSX, but it actually works!!! Way to go Ubuntu!!!

Open Screen Project from Adobe

Thu, 01 May 2008 09:36:34 -0700

It seems that Adobe is working towards removing some barriers to the adoption of its Flash technology. This may very well be due to pressure from potential competition such as Silverlight. From Adobe's site:

"...as part of Adobe’s ongoing commitment to enable Web innovation, Adobe will continue to open access to Adobe Flash technology, accelerating the deployment of content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). This work will include: