Thursday, February 19, 2009

More Linux in World Education

Article

I got myself interested in world education with my son going to Uganda, and meeting people who were near the top in education there. My initial idea was the XO with the One laptop per child program. But that's been blown out of the water with the big recession, and a clash of monstrous egos. Rwanda is still doing very well with this, but I don't know where they are getting the money.

My next move was to go with Sugar on a Stick, on an EEEPC. Sugar is the Linux interface for the XO, but now those XO guys are going with the nasty buggers (Don't use IE6!). I tried for a whole day to get some stupid USB sticks to boot computers! That's hopeless! Even if you get one to work for one computer, it might not work for the next!

This article shows another approach quite opposite to a laptop. It's totally tethered to main computers. But the question is: what are they going to run? Is Brazil going to be as bad as we are with computers in the class?

Anyway, I'm giving up trying to push the son. Right now I don't think computers are going to work in the classroom. Maybe those kids in Uganda will have to wait for a higher-grade cell phone.

2 comments:

Solution Grove said...

Hi, I'm Caroline working on the Sugar on a Stick project. I'd be interested in knowing what happened and why you couldn't get it to boot.

Its definitely still in Alpha but its been doing pretty good booting most computers, especially the Fedora version so I'd be interested in what went wrong as we are actively fixing bugs.

Harold Asmis said...

I just couldn't get the sticks to be bootable even though I tried about 10 different recipes, including XP utilities. I took the coward's way out, and ordered an external cd drive. So, I still put Sugar on the eeepc.