Comment on 8 November 2012 - OLPC-SF Conference

Sameer Verma has made some goods points about my post on 8 November 2012 - Report on 2012 OLPC-SF Summit.  Because comments on L2L blog posts don't show unless you click on them, I'm reposting his comments below to make sure everyone sees them.

Thanks, Sameer.

- Janissa

 

Sameer Verma Thursday, November 08, 2012

You may have misunderstood the status of the school server and its role. The XS 0.7 is actually fully functional and runs at several sites. XS 0.6 is also fully functional, but had a slightly more complicated networking, which has since been simplified in XS 0.7. If you wanted to run a server for your project, I would recommend the XS 0.7

One of the purposes of the XS is to plug the gap when Internet access is not possible. Applications like Moodle and several others are used to create a mini offline Internet, where the content is limited to the materials you have on the server, but when one has no Internet access, one has little choice. The laptops themselves have little storage, so keeping materials at one location makes more sense. Content, once curated, (yes, this is a task!) can be moved to the XS server via USB sticks.

What you saw with the Community XS presentations by George Hunt and Tony Anderson is work that is very much in progress. It is not ready for prime time, but does add a lot of features that would be useful to smaller projects. In fact, with the newer design, one may be able to switch off something like Moodle and replace it with a digital library like Pathgar. I would encourage you to stay tuned on that effort at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel

cheers,
Sameer