Demonstration build

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Situational laptop demos

XOs used in

  1. an emergency school (school-in-a-box)
  2. a tiny village w/unconnectivity (digital courier)
  3. a disaster / zero-infrastructure intervention
  4. an agriculture/water intervention
  5. a health intervention / clinics


Learning demos

Children learning...

  1. geometry (Dr. Geo)
  2. collaborative music (lifelong K w/ distributed orchestra)
  3. language
  4. art (interactive creation)
  5. writing (abicollab)
  6. world maps

Parents learning

  1. spreadsheets
  2. geography

Technical laptop demos

There are many capabilities of the XO that aren't easy to demonstrate on a standard build. The idea for this project is to set up an XO that can show off some of the features described below.

  1. 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?
  2. Video (full screen)
    • ogg
    • m.youtube / kaltura
    • the best that can be done with mpeg & rm
      • has been done using a completely separate build which was stripped of absolutely everything but the ability to play video (No "OS"/GUI at all), and uses proprietary codecs
  3. Audio
    • Stereo sound to show off speakers range
    • multichannel audio from creative activity (tamtam)
    • Duet example
    • streaming audio from an online source
  4. Book Readers
    • pdf (evince)
    • js (flipbook, ICDL, jresig)
  5. Flash
    • smooth Flash animation with gnash
    • the best that can be done with Adobe Flash
  6. text-to-speech
    • Speak
  7. videochat or at least audiochat
  8. drawing w/ stylus
  9. Browsers
    • Full-fledged firefox
    • Opera
  10. New Sugar UI and configuration screen
  11. Faster load time (now in joyride)
  12. Abiword
  13. Develop/ Pippy
  14. Xaos Python fractal viewer
  15. Modified xoIRC -- auto join #olpc
  16. a plot of battery strength/usage over time, however crude, like what the Prius offers for gas conservation
  17. 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
  • Book Readers
  • Audio
    • Stereo mp3 playback working via mplayer
    • Streaming audio working via mplayer
  • Flash
    • gnash installed + working
    • Adobe Flash player installed + working (does not support youtube yet)
  • 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 loads the first 2 or 3 frames but cannon play video via website
    • Mplayer can't seem to play the rtsp stream from m.youtube.com
  • Need a good TamTam demo