OLPC Ethiopia/2008 09 Daniel visit recap
DanielDrake visited the Ethiopian deployment team at ecbp in September 2008. This page summarises core principles that were taught to the local team.
Content bundling
Content bundles are simply zip files which get extracted in /home/olpc/Library. The customization key does not really do any checking of the content itself, so it is possible (and very easy) to create a bundle of content which is installed successfully but cannot be found through Sugar.
We decided to create one content bundle per grade per region. In other words, we have bundles for Addis-Grade2, Addis-Grade3, ..., Oromia-Grade2, Oromia-Grade3, etc.
You must pay attention to the file structure of the content bundle zip archive. Generally, the PDF content bundles for Ethiopia should have structure:
BundleName/ BundleName/library/ BundleName/library/library.info BundleName/index.html BundleName/FirstFile.pdf BundleName/SecondFile.pdf
library.info contains some basic information about the content bundle, including the title of the content (e.g. "Grade 2 textbooks") and so on. This is how sugar recognises and indexes the content bundle.
index.html is a hand-built HTML file which provides links to all of the PDF files inside the content bundle. We started by writing some instructions for the children in English and Amharic, then we made an index.html file for each bundle including those instructions and a list of links to textbooks.
Finally you zip up the whole thing (including the BundleName directory) and give it a suitable name e.g. Oromia-Grade2.xol. These bundles can then be placed on a customisation stick.
Requesting help from OLPC
There are two channels to request assistance from OLPC:
- The private tech support contact address staffed by the internal OLPC deployment support team
- The OLPC bug-tracker (trac) at http://dev.laptop.org.
The tech support contact should be used for questions and unknown problems. A good example is the issue we encountered when one XO forgot its serial number. We needed to know how to rewrite the serial number from the firmware prompt. As this was a question, the techsupport contact is the right channel. If the problem of XOs forgetting serial numbers becomes a regular occurrence then it would be suitable for a trac ticket, but currently this is just a one-off.
Trac should be used for solid, well-defined problems. For example, if you found a way to crash an activity through a certain sequence of events, and this was reproducible on multiple XOs, then trac is suitable. However, high priority issues that must be fixed in the short term should be reported to techsupport, to make sure they are prioritised accordingly inside OLPC.
Trac tickets are always public; tech support requests are private unless explicitly publicised.
You may find that it's not easy to decide which support channel to use (it is not easy to explain either); if in doubt, use tech support.