Linux Basement Presents: Chad’s Blog

OLPC-XP

This picture says it all…

OLPC - The Corruption of Corporate Giants

At some point, something went very wrong. The vision of the One Laptop Per Child project went well beyond giving consumers a “usable XP laptop”. Instead, by fostering the concept of giving third world countries’ children a free and open source platform to learn and work on, we are setting a low barrier to entry for them for the rest of their lives, to use and develop these open technologies.

From an article on CNN Money.

“Microsoft’s Utzschneider says government technology ministers and other leaders have long been attracted to the XO’s innovative design, but were also partisans of Windows. They worried, he says, that support would be a problem, and also wanted students to use software they would also be using later in life. These are clearly reasonable concerns.”

This statement by Microsoft is case and point. The fact that they believe that a proprietary system is more supportable by people in a third world country is absurd. Opening source code to your operating system allows anyone who is willing to know the inner workings of a system. What exactly is the support structure for a nearly obsolete operating system (XP) on the OLPC? It is a laughable notion that a child in Chile who’s family  makes 50 dollars a year is going to get any support from Microsoft when his XP OLPC blue screens. By making the system free and open, a support structure can, and has been built around the communities that receive the OLPC.

Microsoft wants these students to use software they will be using later in life? Putting children that will be reaching the corporate world in 10 years on windows XP benefits no one. It does not benefit the child, and it certainly does not benefit the countries they live in. Putting them on a free and open system that embraces web technologies built into the operating system embraces the future of computing. It is more important that children learn the underlying foundations of technology, and not the superficial layer on top. That is to say, they should be learning how to word process, not how to use Microsoft word. They should be learning how to surf the web, not how to use Internet Explorer. The argument that the OLPC is “hard to use” comes from people who do not have vision, and do not allow change. You have to look at these technological tools from the perspective of a Child who does not have preconceptions of what a computer is, or what a computer should be.

Unfortunately I think that bad business decisions have put the One Laptop Per Child program in jeopardy of failure, and now they are grasping at anything to keep afloat. This latest move clearly undermines the foundations that the project was built on, and it saddens me to see such a brilliant project become part of the proprietary grind.

It is true that many Governments will not purchase computers unless they have a Microsoft label on the box. However, this is a fault of government agencies being tied into monopolistic bad decisions. Many governments are now seeing the folly of relying so heavily on an operating system. As Web services and cloud computing become ever more prevalent, this reliance on proprietary software as a fundamental norm will go away, and I am hopeful, for all of us, that in the future we will not see such a pure project become corrupt by Corporate Giants.

Several Quotes in this article credited to http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/15/technology/microsoft_olpc.fortune/

Tags: education, OLPC

Open Office 3.0 Beta

Thanks to Peter Nikolaidis for pointing out the .deb package for Ubuntu here.

Thanks to Tombuntu.com for the directions on how to get it installed once you untar it.

Install all of the packages in the DEBS subdirectory:

• sudo dpkg -i BEA300_m2_native_packed-2_en-US.9301/DEBS/*.deb
• Clean up the downloaded files:
  rm -r BEA300_m2_native_packed-2_en-US.9301/rm -r ~/Desktop/OOo_3.0.0beta_20080429_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz

You WILL need to make a launcher for your application with:

/opt/openoffice.org3/program/soffice

as the path.

It works!

Tags: OpenOffice 3

Thursday, May 15th, 2008 Open Source, linux, technology 1 Comment

NameVirtualHost *:443
<virtualhost *:443>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem

DocumentRoot /var/www/
<directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</directory>

<directory /var/www/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
# This directive allows us to have apache2's default start page
# in /apache2-default/, but still have / go to the right place
# Commented out for Ubuntu
#RedirectMatch ^/$ /apache2-default/
</directory>

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
AllowOverride None
Options ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</directory>

ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn

CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined
ServerSignature On

Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<directory "/usr/share/doc/">
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</directory>

</virtualhost>

NameVirtualHost *:80
<virtualhost *:80>