3 XO's for OOo4Kids and the Education Project
This blog entry aims to say thank you the the OLPC / Sugar project.Indeed, some time ago,
Thomas Fontenay and Abdelkader Bellabes applied for the
OLPC Contributor Program, and we recently had to defend our project (I was invited too on the IRC channel), to explain what we aim to do, our plan, and so on.
To complete the project description,
Pierre Pasteau, and Julien Ballet (
Labfree) are our contacts at
Epitech.
The result is, Abdelkader and Thomas will receive
3 machines : 2 XO's and one XO 1.5 (next XO generation) early september. The plan is to sugarize
OOo4Kids, and help to improve performance. Last, in the case the code is good enough, we'll ask for backporting it in OpenOffice.org.
Another good news:
Bastien Guerry, from
OLPC-France, has been designed as contact and mentor, and we'll work together on this project. The idea is to connect both the OLPC project people, and the
OpenOffice.org one, and see what this synergy can bring.
A presentation, where we'll invite other students, will be scheduled at Epitech Paris (organized by the
Labfree) somewhere in
October 2009.
Next step for the students will be to propose a planning, and start tasks based on the most important
performance issues OpenOffice.org has. Things will be very progressive, and we'll start firstly with what is concerned (which part of the code), what it the associated tool to be used, and how to proceed to verify what happens. e.g. at cold startup, and so on.
If you want to follow the progress, and what they exactly do, everything is on the
OpenOffice.org wiki.
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Education Project on the wiki EducOO.org blog (french) OOo4Kids ProjectMany thanks to
Ben Bois , author of the
EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
...
Libellés : Education Project, Epitech Paris, High Tech, OOo4Kids, OpenOffice, Sugar, Teaching OpenSource
More about the public release of OOo4Kids
To make things clear, after we announced we'll use the GPL V2, we finaly changed for the LGPL v3.
Below, the content of the mails sent to the Project Leads mailing list (copy of the mail), just the URL for download has been hidden)
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Hi,
Our new server is close to be ready for a public development version, but before to announce, I'd like to be sure nothing is wrong (of course, we'll will correct it asap if so)
I know Sun trademarked a lot of things, and we'd like whether there is something wrong with the current versions of OOo4Kids.
The license we finally choosen for the code is the LGPL v3, respecting Martin Hollmichel suggestion. The repository is not created, but will probably be soon : still waiting for Martin answer, to create a dedicated branch, but without the need to use the SCA ( OOo4Kids is not Sun trademarked, but EducOOo, a non profit association )
Additionaly to our own information, we will add, at a visible place, on the download page :
- OpenOffice.org website and a link for download OpenOffice.org source code
- a word explaining this is a development version, intended to work with students around OpenOffice.org, for pedagogical reasons, and who has not all the features OpenOffice.org has
- an invitation to use OpenOffice.org for the one who want to use Base or anything using Java
For the one interested to test, I have put versions of OOo4Kids 0.5pre on the following server : http://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww/ ( openoffice -> OOo4Kids ). Please note this server will be deprecated soon.
Available :
- Windows,
- Mac OS X (Intel and Power PC)
- Linux Intel (Mips -gdium version- and PowerPC will come soon)
Thanks in advance to confirm nothing is wrong, or to explain us what we still have to modify, to respect OpenOffice.org Project.
Eric Bachard
Lead,
OpenOffice.org Education Project
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--
Education Project: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Education_Project
Projet OOo4Kids : http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/Main_Page
L'association EducOOo : http://www.educoo.org
Blog : http://eric.bachard.free.fr/news
Libellés : development, OOo4Kids, OpenOffice
Preparing a public version of OOo4Kids
Since two days we entered in the milestone 0.5 and in parallel,
Nicolas Jeudy started the server setup, means a developpement version will be proposed for download.
Ben Bois will help for the http part.
And as I promised, we'll provide a public version of OOo4Kids.
Many thanks to both, and stay tuned ;-)+ I started to describe a new feature today, and I decided to describe everything on our wiki. See
a new Writer wizard (previous entry was
License dialog.
Feel free to contribute, and or contact and help us !!Note on the license : once the new branch (OOo4Kids) will be created in the OpenOffice.org repository, we'll use the LGPL v3 License, but waiting we'll protect everything using the GPL V2.
Why is it so long to have a repository? Because I asked, as the uniq condition, to not force the contributors to sign the SCA. Indeed, OOo4Kids is trademarked by EducOOo, so use the SCA is non sense. Seems to cause some lags in the answer..."""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Education Project on the wiki EducOO.org blog (french) OOo4Kids ProjectMany thanks to
Ben Bois , author of the
EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
...
Libellés : High Tech, OOo4Kids, OpenOffice, Teaching OpenSource
OOo4Kids : 13rd August changes ...
Since two days, I was working hard to implement a simple request: add a menu entry, to be able to check for the license content.
The idea is to provide soon a public version. of OOo4KidsFor the one interested, I started to document everything I did in the code on an
OOo4Kids wiki page. See
License dialog page . This is work in progress, and currently, 25% of the changes is written, but I'll update asap.
Below, some screenshots :
The first screenshot is the new background for the
mounted image disk. We respected
Christian Lohmaier (aka cloph) request, and
Ben Bois did a great work (I really like this new one)
The second screenshot is the frame you see when installing :
The third screenshot is the implementation of the menu entry
"License ...". This way, no need to ask the user to read or do whatever at install, but the license will be abailable from everywhere. Simple and efficient.
The fourth screenshot is what you see when you click on
"Licence ...". This is simply the about box I reused for the new feature. As you can see, there is still a bug, because the title is not correct, but I expect to solve that soon (please contact me if you have an idea).
... last but not least, the last one is what you can read when you hit CTRL SDT (or CMD+SDT on Mac OS X : the list of the people who contributed or helped to the OOo4Kids code (partial list there, in alphabetical order). As you can see, some formating is mandatory (sentence too long). But that's the beginning :-)
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Education Project on the wiki EducOO.org blog (french) OOo4Kids ProjectMany thanks to
Ben Bois , author of the
EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
...
Libellés : Education, Education Project, EducOOo, High Tech, OOo4Kids, Teaching OpenSource
OOo4Kids : last changes
All the recent changes are given on our wiki. Just see
the changelogs)In the list, there is a new background icon, for the mounted image disk, on Mac OS X. As
Christian Lohmaier suggested, the butterflies showing where drop the application, are bigger than the application itself, and
Ben Bois, who designed this background, will have a look asap.
But what is important to me, what that
Abdelkader Bellabes and
Thomas Fontenay (both from
Epitech Paris) are now able to build (both OpenOffice.org and OOo4Kids),
AND debug on both Windows and Linux, and (in the air) on Sugar now. For example, we traced with Thomas, and finally found a solution (not completely solved yet), together a possible crash with copy-paste.
So, now, we'll be able to start with profiling : Thomas on Linux, Abdelkader on Windows, and me an all possible OS's.
Our first plan, will be to play with the famous generic.ppt (does not work well, good stress for Impress), and analyze everything: first, to learn how Impress works, during presentations, and second, to search what happens, and what can cause slow downs, in some situations. Means pedagogical purpose first, but not only.
Work in progress: with
Thorsten Behrens, we are making a point on the project with people from
Ecole Centrale Nantes, to see what can be or not integrated. (to be continued)
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Education Project on the wiki EducOO.org blog (french) OOo4Kids ProjectMany thanks to
Ben Bois , author of the
EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
...
Libellés : Education, Education Project, EducOOo, Epitech Paris, High Tech, OOo4Kids, Teaching OpenSource
OOo4Kids proposed as part of OpenOffice.org Project
Today, I proposed
OOo4Kids to become a part of OpenOffice.org Project.
Below, the content of the proposal, where you'll retrieve the important points :
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Hi all,
Proposal :
The
OpenOffice.org Education Project proposes to drive the following experimentation :
-
create a dedicated branch in the OOo source code repository (means hosted by OOo Project) for a 7-12 years software, derivated from OpenOffice.org, and made and maintained by OpenOffice.org project.
Formally : create a new branch, completely independent of , including milestones, like OOo does
-
work with schools and students to improve the software
-
innovate about performances and
cooperate with the performance project in this area
- (add your idea)
Resources : to be defined, but the non profit association
EducOOo) is already candidate to manage that (e.g.receive sponsoring for the software, machines for students, and so on).
Facts that brought us to work on this plan:
- OpenOffice.org is
not well adapted to Educational world, nor to children (7-12 there)
- OpenOffice.org has
too much of features for children, and is too complicated for them
-
Performance issues : OpenOffice.org is slow on a lot of machines
(mainly the one who have 512MB of ram or less, and procs 1,5GHZ or less we can find in most of schools)
- Lot of schools, all around the world, are poor, and will have to wait several years before to buy new hardware
- to
fit the new emergent market (netbooks, eeepc like, gdium, future tablets (including the probable Apple one) .. and so on), OpenOffice.org needs to provide a light version, adapted to such machines ( poor in ram and powerless)
The ideas :
-
simplify OOo and
propose a light version of OOo, for example removing Base and providing a simplified Writer and Calc versions
-
experiment new features, new UI and so on, including experiment whatever
-
work with students to write the code, with the goal to
integrate only the best features in OOo,
-
prepare children to use OpenOffice.org
-
adapt OOo for children will help to work on performance issues
- use a name
adapted to children : OOo4Kids, trademarked by one or several non profit association, to keep the project out of companies control
- there is
no risk for OOo, and avoids to disturb the OOo process
Thanks in advance for your opinion
Eric Bachard
Lead,
OpenOffice.org Education Project """""""""""""""" End Quote """"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Below, the link of the announcement ( dev@openoffice.org mailing list) :
archived proposal"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Education Project on the wiki EducOO.org blog (french) OOo4Kids ProjectMany thanks to
Ben Bois , author of the
EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
...
Libellés : EducOOo, High Tech, OOo4Kids, OpenOffice, Teaching OpenSource
