webbookblog

no, not one of mine, but from a school in Gloucester

You wouldn’t get that kind of performance from a proprietary chicken!

One of the people we met at the BETT show brought an interesting project to our attention, it is a collaboration between the girl guiding association and Book Aid International. They are raising money to send books to developing nations in Africa and educating young people about Ubuntu. No, not the operating system, but the meaning of the word, which is translated in many different ways, their translation is “I am because you are”, others include “humanity to others” and “I am who I am because of who we all are”. Do go and have a look at their website and try to find out if there is a local event you can support.

Yes, the webbookblog was out of action for all of last week. I know. Thanks for all the emails, it is good to know the site is in demand!

So what happened and why? Well, the story starts right back at the beginning of my involvement in the webbook project, we needed a sensible place to track all the issues in the build pre-manufacturing, emails flying about all over the place was getting confusing and I could see that things were going to be missed. I wanted a server set up and I was in the Elonex offices at the time, there was no server available and ordering a nice rack mounted server would require budget, approval and lead times etc. Fortunately there was no shortage of computers lying about so I asked for the use of one. As I recall they asked me to provide a spec for it, “any old heap of junk” was my detailed response. They came up with an AMD Athlon dual core 2Ghz desktop PC, so I stuck Ubuntu on it and installed Mantis. Shortly thereafter the webbook was launched and I needed a place to start community building on the web, so my scrappy old salvaged desktop on the bench next to the rack was pressed into service for the webbookblog.com site. I would have preferred to run the site actually on a webbook, but they just were not available at the time.

Now one of the key features of a server as opposed to a desktop is that if the power is cut to a server, it comes back on. Desktops have a tendency to switch off and stay off until someone presses the button on the front (you can see where this is going can’t you). So last weekend there must have been a power cut or something and the server went down and stayed down. This has happened a few times, it isn’t such a big deal, someone just turns it on again and I think to myself “gosh, must do something about that server some stage” however this week was different because it was BETT 2009, the office was deserted as all of the Elonex team were down in London Olympia along with us at The Open Learning Centre.

BETT is a huge conference and we spent a lot of time educating teachers about the importance of Free and Open Source software. On Saturday there was a cancellation in one of the seminar theatres and I was asked to help in an impromptu session on Free software in education. I got up and talked about the four freedoms and a bit about the One Laptop Per Child project, explaining how Software Freedom enabled change. I was followed by John Spencer of Syrius and Michelle Walters, Deputy head of Chesham High School (by strange co-incidence this is where my brother and sister went to school). She talked a bit about the moral and ethical problems with using proprietary software in schools, when homework is requested in proprietary formats she knows that either the students are using unlicensed copies of proprietary applications (which is unacceptable) or the parents are purchasing them if they can afford them (which is discrimination based on the ability to pay which is unacceptable). This was great to hear coming from someone who is first and foremost an educator rather than a software freedom advocate like me. Chesham has a page on their website about Free software in school.

Over on the Elonex stand in the grand hall they have a new all-in-one computer (monitor with built in computer) which is £199 (probably without VAT but I am not sure) and some new webbook models. They were all running Windows, so I borrowed a new model via webbook and an Intel Atom based webbook to fix them. Both had webcams rather than that blanking plate which is a big improvement! The Intel Atom model had an Intel graphics card so I was able to get Compiz running with no issues and as the drivers are Open Source this would be deployable and won’t break on a kernel update. I didn’t take any photos of them but I will see if I can get some.

Next week from the 14th to the 17th is the BETT 2009 show in Olympia. Each year 30,000 educational professionals (yep, a full 30 kiloteachers) meet up in London Olympia for an educational technology conference. We were there last year generating lots of excitement about the OLPC project, I wrote up a couple of articles about the experience here and here (you can also see where later in the year I met Elonex for the first time). This year will be the same, but bigger as The Open Learning Centre has joined forces with our partners at Open Forum Europe to get a stand twice as big as last year (SW104 upstairs in the National Hall). We will be demonstrating loads of Free and Open Source Software (Moodle, Elgg, OpenOffice.org, Edubuntu, GCompris and loads of others) and telling people how they can save money and deliver a better education to our young people by taking advantage of Free and Open Source Software. One of the four core freedoms of Free software is the Freedom to study the software, personally I think that this should be considered an essential Freedom that schools should insist on for all the software they use (whether or not they have the other Freedoms). In fact, whilst I am on the subject, here are the four Freedoms for those who are not already familiar with them:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Back to the show, Elonex themselves will be on stand D80 but I can’t find them in the BETT show website. Our friends at Canonical will be squatting on a corner of the Intel stand E150 (although a corner of the Intel stand is probably bigger than our whole stand). There is an interesting looking seminar running on Saturday 17th about the Open Source Schools project.

Registration for BETT is free and open to everyone, but it might be best to pre-register if you fancy popping in. If you happen to be involved in a school (governor/parent/teacher/student etc) then do make sure that if someone is going to BETT representing your school that they spend some time learning about all the great Free software that is on display and available to use.

Michael Joyce asked about e-book readers for the webbook, specifically for reading Project Gutenburg texts, it turns out there is indeed a great reader for them, GutenBrowser. This can be installed from the Synaptic package manager, just look down the list for gutenbrowser and install it. It does not appear to have added an icon to the menu but you can start it from alt-F2 then type gutenbrowser and hit the run button. The first thing you have to do is go to Settings-Server Settings and point it at a Gutenburg mirror. I had some problems with the UK mirrors so I am now pointing at the project Gutenburg reading room at the bottom of the list. Once you have selected a server you can go to Library-update to collect the list of titles available, then just browse the list and it will download books on demand. Currently I am reading “A Manual or an Easy Method of Managing Bees” and contemplating the possibility of having Free Honey to go with my Free Eggs.