User:Tabitha

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Revision as of 21:49, 15 July 2010 by 203.110.5.16 (talk)
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Tabitha.jpg Kia ora

I am Tabitha Roder. I coordinate the volunteer efforts in New Zealand. We have a volunteer group based in Wellington that started meeting weekly middle of 2008 and are still going strong. We have another volunteer group in Auckland who also meet weekly. We are spreading out across the country, with volunteers in Christchurch, Tauranga, and Hamilton.

We use laptop.org.nz to keep people informed about what we are doing.

An interview about me completed by Brenda

Join our mail distribution list: [olpc-nz]

In January 2010 I was education miniconf organiser at LCA2010 where we showed the XO laptop and had a hacking sugar session. I also ensure XOs make it to other events related to education and or to computing.

Kotahi tamaiti, Kotahi rorohiko iti: nō Aotearoa


Some ways to find me:

Emailing tabitha@tabitha.net.nz IRC tabs freenode.net - #olpc-au
Twitter tabitharoder Identi.ca tabitha
Facebook tabitharoder Skype tabitharoder
LinkedIn tabitharoder My blog using Mahara
Facebook Join group My website using Moodle


I spent four days in another country using an XO-1.5 as my travel laptop. I went to visit a tertiary institute in Australia to help them with their Moodle, then went to a Moodle conference to give two presentations. The XO was running build 205 and I used Gnome (with a few additions) and Sugar probably pretty equally.

Touch typing took a while to get my head around. I had to slow down and typing mistakes were regular (I normally type about 80wpm with 99% accuracy, and probably dropped to about half that speed and accuracy initially but I did get better).

On the Sugar side - mostly used browse, write, record, memorize, maze, physics.

Additional installs to build 205 I required - Skype, irc (xchat), jabber thing (empathy), open office presentation (Impress). Needed lots of other packages to run those. Rearranged the panels so there was only one panel at the top, removed the wide menu thing and replaced with "foot" menu. Removed gnash because it left processes hanging around using 100% cpu gnome-utils (for the system monitor applet) rpmfusion's mplayer packages adobe flash via their yum repo


Skype worked, but was unable to record sound, so other party couldn't hear me. I could hear them and video worked both ways.

Set up a displaylink external USB DVI adapter for doing my presentation, but didn't need it. Unfortunately at the conference I had to use their conference equipment so did not present from the XO but lots of people played with Sugar in the breaks.

Will do proper write up with full list of modifications and post or link it to here.