webbookblog

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 10:12 am and is filed under Software Freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.