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.
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
index.html is a hand-built HTML file which provides simple links to the pdf files included in the content bundle.
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.
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.