IIAB
Welcome to the School Server Community Edition (XSCE, or http://schoolserver.org), a global project where volunteer professionals are taking the One Laptop Per Child movement into a new decade, enabling quality learning among the world's poorest children. Commercial support for our free software is available for those who need it, at Activity Central.
Our Product
The school Server Community Edition provides communication, networking, content, and maintenance to schools and classrooms. In everyday usage the school server provides services which extend capabilities of the connected laptops while being transparent to the user. These services include:
- Classroom connectivity – Similar to what you would find in an advanced home router.
- Internet gateway – If available, an internet connection is made available to laptops.
- Content - Tools to make instructional media available to their schools and classrooms.
- Maintenance - Tools to keep laptop updated and running smoothly.
Get started by downloading and installing the latest: XSCE 0.3 was released June 6, 2013.
Our FAQ
If you are anything like me, you are already losing interest in lofty, often jumbled, and ambustion prose of the wiki. If so, please jump to the Frequently Asked Questions (and answers!) from our global community.
Volunteer contributors keep our FAQ fresh thanks to organic input from folks just like yourself, always welcome!
Our Project
The School Server Community Edition is a community-based project developed and supported by volunteers from around the world.
Our heartbeat is our weekly call at 2PM NYC Time, Thursdays. At the call we review decisions made the previous week and make plans for the next week. Please see the Agenda for a history of past topics or to add a topic for a future week. Please email Adam Holt (holt @ laptop.org) so we can coordinate the logistics necessary to add you to the call.
Our cadence is our quarterly sprint. Every three months we meet for a week long face-to-face work session. At these sprints we work like crazy to get our features complete so they are ready to make the feature freeze which happen just after a sprint. All are welcome in our community, however, if you are the sort that likes to stand on a soapbox and preach... you might be asked to step outside :)
If you can not make a call or sprint, please send us your questions or concerns via fax :) Seriously, in addition to the old-fashioned channels, we made use of typical open community tools.
Our IRC chat is on channel #schoolserver so jump in anytime, by connecting any IRC chat program to irc.freenode.net. Or join our channel (#schoolserver) directly on the web.
Our mailing list is at server-devel. Teachers and new contributors especially, are strongly encouraged to ask questions!
Our bug tracker is at https://sugardextrose.org/projects/xsce.
Our technical and user documentation, while crucially evolving at an early stage, can and should be critiqued and refined by all.
Our Ecosystem
The School Server ecosystem is fascinating. There hundreds of similar projects around the world. Each work from slightly different perspectives. If you are interested in the project... but don't quite 'feel it,' please consider one of the follow projects.
- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_server
- BRCK.com by Ushahidi
- http://SMEserver.org since 1999, based on CentOS
- http://eXeLearning.org being enhanced by Mike Dawson, for Nokia phones
- http://LibraryBox.us by Jason Griffey & All (map shows 25 locations)
- http://internet-in-a-box.org by Braddock Gaskill
- http://LocalFi.org by Caryl Bigenho, Sebastian Silva & All
- Sugar Network by Aleksey Lim
- BeLL Ground Server on RPi, by http://OLE.org
- Pathagar Bookserver by Sayamindu Dasgupta, now maintained by Seth Woodworth & All
Our Community
Our community is made up of people just like you. If you are interested in the project please reach out to any of our members to learn more about us.
- Jerry Vonau (SW architecture)
- George Hunt (configuration, GUI, low-power HW)
- Tim Moody (documentation, testing, Puppet auto-distribution & config mgmt)
- Anna Schoolfield (testing, content/ebooks curation platforms)
- Anish Mangal (integration, offline cloud)
- Rodrigo Hartmann (security, GUI, maintainability, intl languages)
- David Farning (software engineering tips)
- Alex Kleider (bookserver eg. Pathagar)
- David Rodríguez Álvarez (web design)
- Rubén Rodríguez (Linux/Trisquel advisor)
- Adam Holt (documentation, community coordination & outreach)
- Professor Sameer Verma (free/open advisor & user)
- Sridhar Dhanapalan (video) & many more!
- Nitika Mangal (QA Manager in India)
- Santiago Collazo (Sysadmin)
- Kartik Kumar Perisetla (Sugar developer, Delhi, India)
- Mike Dawson (advisor on SME Server technologies, Mideast, Afghanistan)
- Seth Wolfwood (Pathagar ebooks library)
Our Future
Now's the time to bring together the upcoming XSCE 0.4 version, with our July 8-12 Hack Sprint near Winnipeg in Canada, and final release expected in August 2013.
Do try some of the latest RPM builds, at your own risk of course: http://xsce.activitycentral.com/repos/xsce/devel.
Or you can use the repo definition http://xsce.activitycentral.com/repos/xsce-devel.repo.
Learn more about the long term goals at XSCE Vision.
Our History & Inspiration
How did XSCE's design evolve? Progress only makes sense when we learn from the past...
Oct 2013 Agenda
v0.5 hack sprint expected, near Toronto.
Sep 2013 Agenda
Haiti implementation of 0.4 at two schools, for the new school year.
Aug 2013 Agenda
Hard work continues strengthening 0.4 for final release. Prep for Haiti implementation late Aug and early Sept?
Jul 2013 Agenda
v0.4 Sprint July 8-12, 1hr north of Winnipeg. v0.4 spec gaining precision, bringing stability & configurability to most XOs, x86, 64-bit Fedora, RPi? Pathagar bookserver & Internet-in-a-Box integration also expected.
Jun 2013 Agenda
Version 0.3 released! Prep July sprint! Volunteers can buy XO-4 Touch Laptops if they will help test XSCE & http://internet-in-a-box.org etc.
May 2013 Agenda
Very successful Toronto-area Sprint May 8-13,with Braddock Gaskill all the way from LA! 0.3 RC1 unleashed May 14; RC2 May 28? India prototype installed.
Apr 2013 Agenda
Prep v0.3 May sprint. Los Angeles interfacing with Caryl Bigenho's http://localfi.org and Braddock Gaskill's http://internet-in-a-box.org.
Mch 2013 Agenda
Boston meetup Mch 1-4 with Sameer Verma, Anish Mangal. Early pre-field test connects an orphanage from Haiti.
Feb 2013 Agenda
Toronto/Waterloo area Sprint Feb 6/7 to 10/11.
Release of XSCE 0.1 Stable and 0.2 Coming.
Jan 2013 Agenda
Proposed Core Spec and Priority Tuning.
Dec 2012 Agenda
Jamaica implementation sprint (delayed).
Nov 2012 Agenda
Centred around Toronto area hack sprint Nov 10-18:
Expand testing+UX with Anna Schoolfield, Tim Moody & Seneca College students' packaging with York Univ/Seneca College Professor Chris Tyler.
Meet with Anish Mangal and Nathan Riddle near Detroit etc to discuss wider community integration.
Oct 2012 Agenda
Working w/ Alex Kleider's model classroom @ http://olpcSF.org/summit & http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp_SF_2012.
Sep 2012 Agenda
Toronto area hack sprint Sept 16-23, incl public demo Saturday Sept 22.