Demonstration build
The XO is often presented in demonstration, at events, to new users, or as a showcase for what would be possible under different school or low-infrastructure scenarios.
Demonstration build
There are many capabilities of the XO that aren't easy to demonstrate on a standard build. We are preparing a set of builds that can show off the features described here.
- Dual-boot
- with a Fedora/Gnome or Edubuntu setup (via SD card)
- with any simple hacks to speed up launch -- perhaps a dual-boot OpenWRT?
- Video (full screen)
- Audio
- Stereo sound to show off speakers range
- multichannel audio from creative activity (tamtam)
- Duet example
- streaming audio from an online source
- Book Readers
- pdf (evince)
- js (flipbook, ICDL, jresig)
- Flash
- smooth Flash animation with gnash
- the best that can be done with Adobe Flash
- text-to-speech
- Speak
- videochat or at least audiochat
- drawing w/ stylus
- phun / elements / crayon physics
- Browsers
- Full-fledged firefox
- Opera
- New Sugar UI and configuration screen
- Faster load time (now in joyride)
- Abiword
- Develop/ Pippy
- Xaos Python fractal viewer
- Modified xoIRC -- auto join #olpc
- a plot of battery strength/usage over time, however crude, like what the Prius offers for gas conservation
- a compressed view for the Journal (or a way to link directly to a compressed view)
There are also a number of activities whose demos should be focused down to a couple of minutes, whose components could all be set up in advance; I'm thinking about how to effectively walk through them, without waiting to long for each one to load and set up, but without having more than one in memory at a given time. Is there some way to launch an activity while simultaneously demanding/reserving a block of memory, potentially killing other processes when starting up to improve the repeatability of demo length?
Progress
Here is what is done (from the list above)
- full-screen full-motion video
- Ogg / mpeg / many other proprietary codecs all fully supported via mplayer
- In full screen mode game keys are used for control
- Usage: mplayer filename
- Media: Elephants Dream
- Ogg / mpeg / many other proprietary codecs all fully supported via mplayer
- Book Readers
- Audio
- Stereo mp3 playback working via mplayer
- Streaming audio working via mplayer
- Flash
- gnash installed + working
- Adobe Flash player installed + working (latest Flash runs youtube videos at 5-10fps)
- Text-to-Speech
- Speak installed + working
- Tablet Example
- Unexciting proof of concept tablet activity installed + working
- Tablet drivers may work on joyride but there aren't any interesting activities that show it off
- Browsers
- Full-fledged firefox installed + working
- See firefox2 for guide
- Works well for the most part, it is not the ideal browser for the XO.
- Designed for a windowed GUI, full of features that are not helpful in the XO enviornment
- Opera
- Works very well, definitely the happy medium between Browse and Firefox
- See Opera for installation guide
- New Sugar UI and Config screen
- integrated into the joyride-1914 build used
- Faster startup
- integrated into the joyride-1914 build used
Difficulties / Requests
- Playing youtube video
- Gnash not compatible via youtubes website
- Adobe Flash runs youtube at only 5-10fps
- Mplayer can't seem to play the rtsp stream from m.youtube.com
- Need a good TamTam demo
Types of demos
Situational demos
XOs used in
- an emergency school (school-in-a-box)
- a tiny village w/unconnectivity (digital courier)
- a disaster / zero-infrastructure intervention
- an agriculture/water intervention
- a health intervention / clinics
Learning demos
Children learning...
- geometry (Dr. Geo)
- collaborative music (lifelong K w/ distributed orchestra)
- language
- art (interactive creation)
- writing (abicollab)
- world maps
Parents learning
- spreadsheets
- geography