IIAB

The Product

The school Server Community Edition provides communication, networking, content, and maintenance to schools and classrooms. In everyday usage the school server provides services which extend capabilities of the connected laptops while being transparent to the user. These services include:

• Classroom connectivity – Similar to what you would find in an advanced home router.
• Internet gateway – If available, an internet connection is made available to laptops.
• Content - Tools are available for deployments and teachers to make instructional media available to their schools and classrooms.
• Maintenance - Tools are available to keep laptop updated and running smoothly.

Get started by downloading and installing the latest: XSCE 0.3 was released June 6, 2013.

The FAQ

Please check out the Frequently Asked Questions (and answers!) from our global community, those beating hearts delivering nearly free learning content to the world's poorest children, in almost every corner of the world.

Volunteer contributors keep our FAQ fresh thanks to your organic input, always welcome! Please also ask questions on this mailing list: http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel

The Project

Testing would be Wonderful -- are we tough enough for your school? Take a look testing release 0.3. Or, if high adventure gets you moving, test pre-release 0.4!

Do report bugs and feature requests on the list above, for the benefit of all -- and if you can, directly in our tracker: https://sugardextrose.org/projects/xsce

Community chat is on channel #schoolserver so jump in anytime, by connecting any IRC chat program to irc.freenode.net. Weekly Skype calls are 2PM NYC Time, Thursdays: Agenda. Please email if you want to join, so we can add you to the call.

Contact: holt @ laptop.org

The Ecosystem

• BRCK.com by Ushahidi
• http://SMEserver.org since 1999, based on CentOS
• http://eXeLearning.org being enhanced by Mike Dawson, for Nokia phones
• http://LibraryBox.us by Jason Griffey & All (map shows 25 locations)
• http://internet-in-a-box.org by Braddock Gaskill
• http://LocalFi.org by Caryl Bigenho, Sebastian Silva & All
• Sugar Network by Aleksey Lim
• BeLL Ground Server on RPi, by http://OLE.org
• Pathagar Bookserver by Sayamindu Dasgupta, now maintained by Seth Woodworth & All

The Community

• Jerry Vonau (SW architecture)
• George Hunt (configuration, GUI, low-power HW)
• Tim Moody (documentation, testing, Puppet auto-distribution & config mgmt)
• Anna Schoolfield (testing, content/ebooks curation platforms)
• Anish Mangal (integration, offline cloud)
• Rodrigo Hartmann (security, GUI, maintainability, intl languages)
• David Farning (software engineering tips)
• Alex Kleider (bookserver eg. Pathagar)
• David Rodríguez Álvarez (web design)
• Rubén Rodríguez (Linux/Trisquel advisor)
• Adam Holt (documentation, community coordination & outreach)
• Professor Sameer Verma (free/open advisor & user)
• Sridhar Dhanapalan (video) & many more!
• Nitika Mangal (QA Manager in India)
• Santiago Collazo (Sysadmin)
• Kartik Kumar Perisetla (Sugar developer, Delhi, India)
• Mike Dawson (advisor on SME Server technologies, Mideast, Afghanistan)
• Seth Wolfwood (Pathagar ebooks library)

The Future

Now's the time to bring together the upcoming XSCE 0.4 version, with our July 8-12 Hack Sprint near Winnipeg in Canada, and final release expected in August 2013.

Do try some of the latest RPM builds, at your own risk of course: http://xsce.activitycentral.com/repos/xsce/devel.

Or you can use the repo definition http://xsce.activitycentral.com/repos/xsce-devel.repo.

Vision for XSCE

Learn more about the long term goals at XSCE Vision.

Design

Add a Service to School Server by Creating a Plugin (original written April 2013).

Older Design documents: Design Document, Use cases, and Release Priorities.

Original OLPC XS design and implementation available at OLPC School Server.

The History

Oct 2013 Agenda

v0.5 hack sprint expected, near Toronto.

Sep 2013 Agenda

Haiti implementation of 0.4 at two schools, for the new school year.

Aug 2013 Agenda

Hard work continues strengthening 0.4 for final release. Prep for Haiti implementation late Aug and early Sept?

Jul 2013 Agenda

v0.4 Sprint July 8-12, 1hr north of Winnipeg. v0.4 spec gaining precision, bringing stability & configurability to most XOs, x86, 64-bit Fedora, RPi? Pathagar bookserver & Internet-in-a-Box integration also expected.

Jun 2013 Agenda

Version 0.3 released! Prep July sprint! Volunteers can buy XO-4 Touch Laptops if they will help test XSCE & http://internet-in-a-box.org etc.

May 2013 Agenda

Very successful Toronto-area Sprint May 8-13,with Braddock Gaskill all the way from LA! 0.3 RC1 unleashed May 14; RC2 May 28? India prototype installed.

Apr 2013 Agenda

Prep v0.3 May sprint. Los Angeles interfacing with Caryl Bigenho's http://localfi.org and Braddock Gaskill's http://internet-in-a-box.org.

Mch 2013 Agenda

Boston meetup Mch 1-4 with Sameer Verma, Anish Mangal. Early pre-field test connects an orphanage from Haiti.

Feb 2013 Agenda

Toronto/Waterloo area Sprint Feb 6/7 to 10/11.

Release of XSCE 0.1 Stable and 0.2 Coming.

Jan 2013 Agenda

Proposed Core Spec and Priority Tuning.

Dec 2012 Agenda

Jamaica implementation sprint (delayed).

Nov 2012 Agenda

Centred around Toronto area hack sprint Nov 10-18:

Expand testing+UX with Anna Schoolfield, Tim Moody & Seneca College students' packaging with York Univ/Seneca College Professor Chris Tyler.

Meet with Anish Mangal and Nathan Riddle near Detroit etc to discuss wider community integration.

Oct 2012 Agenda

Working w/ Alex Kleider's model classroom @ http://olpcSF.org/summit & http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugarcamp_SF_2012.

Sep 2012 Agenda

Toronto area hack sprint Sept 16-23, incl public demo Saturday Sept 22.