OpenOffice.org Education Project and Epitech Paris students
The great story between
Epitech Paris and OpenOffice.org, for instance
OpenOffice.org Education Project, representing OpenOffice.org Proejct, of course, continued this year.
What happened ?
Last year, was
Pierre Pasteau, who contributed to the
moz2seamonkey migration. Thanks to
Frank Schonheit who helped us a lot btw.
This year, we had two other students,
Thomas Fontenay and
Abelkader Belabbes, who did a great work too. The work they did, was to port
OOo4Kids to the XO
Note: port OpenOffice.org directly is not an option, because an XO machine does only have 1GB of Hard disk, and 256 MB or RAM only, while OOo set is already 400MB :-)
Some will say this is not a directly visible result, but in fact, this is an extremely important result :
Realize this XO port connected OpenOffice.org Community directly with XO / OLPC Community !! (like provide gdium suppport connected us to the OLPH community too)Indeed, from one side, the
.odf is essential, and from another, it must be considered that the students learned a lot of OpenOffice.org source code, in a short time. Learn the code first, is essential to my eyes. If they had to dive into QA, specs (what basically does mostly concern Sun employees), six month would have been too short. The other good effect, is that the OpenOffice.org Project yet built a strong link with an engineer school.
In fact, that's exactly what we did with
Ecole Centrale Nantes, and
UTBM .
The difficulty is that create such bridges with schools is extremely long, needs a lot of energy, but, in return, creates a very positive image of the project, and can really help to find developers (remember, the code is the blood of a free software, not "politics ").
Just a bit of patience, and the future will be better ! Last but not least, we received several machines, exactly 3 XO-1.5 for the next coming students.
The plan is to profile and try to improve Impress performances (the request is very high for the netbooks), and propose a backport in OpenOffice.org, if the code desserves it.
Those machines are reserved to the two first students (from France prefered), able to find a prof (mandatory) to make the link with the school.
any candidate(s) ?Libellés : Centrale Nantes, Education Project, EducOOo, Epitech Paris, High Tech, OOo4Kids, OpenOffice
OOo4Kids.activity.xo is available !
On
XO machines, when using
Sugar, an application must respect some criterias, to appear listed as
activity. We had in the scope to provide OOo4Kids as activity on Sugar.
...and the first step is done !! Until yesterday evening (late in the night),
Thomas Fontenay and me, worked hard to fix a silly issue we had with the first .xo archive of
OOo4Kids. In fact, symlink are prohibited in the activity tree, and we had to modify it. + we had to include the changes in the OOo4Kids build process, similar to the OpenOffice.org one.
For the moment, we only provide en-US, but other locales are possible, like italien, spanish, french, german, and portuguese.
The lucky XO owners can download the archive thereNext steps :
* improve the set, and make its build more robust
* improve performance (simplify, simplify, remove dead code .. )
* work on the Journal implementation
* Study the sharing mechanism, like allow several children to work on the same document, though the network
* improve the python support
As you can see, there is place for a lot of students applications !!
Last but not least, I repeat my thank you to
Thomas Fontenay,
Abdelkader Belabbes, students at
Epitch Paris for their good work.
Libellés : Education Project, Epitech Paris, free software, fun, High Tech, OOo4Kids, Sugar, Teaching OpenSource, XO
Education Project meeting: log available
Was IRC meeting today, for the
Education Project, and it was really a great moment.
We need to improve what we did last year, mostly improve the wiki presentation, the organization, and cleanup the website.
This year, we are more to welcome the students, and to be able to help and mentor them. As developers able to to that, I'd like to mention
Thorsten Behrens, Cedric Bosdonnat (both from Novell), and as developer (representing
Epitech Paris)
Pierre Pasteau ( + me )
On the prof side, we were happy to receive
Fardad Soleimanloo (from
Seneca College, Toronto) and at the end)
Morgan Magnin (from
Ecole Centrale Nantes ... me from
UTBM (both as prof and dev in fact).
On the students side, the list is long, an we were extremely happy to welcome
4 students from Sri Lanka ( University of Moratuwa ), one from Seneca College one from UTBM, several from Ecole Centrale Nantes ( a group of 5). Sadly, the students from ECN had a connectivity problem, and some were not able to join.
BTW, next week, I'll attend the
JDLL, for a presentation I'll do about
OOo4Kids, and I'll probably meet students from
INSA Lyon but I'll write another entry about that soon.
As usual the log is available on the wiki : the logNext meeting is scheduled the 15th October, same hour. See you !!"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
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 : Centrale Nantes, Education Project, effort, Epitech Paris, High Tech, OOo4Kids, OpenOffice, Teaching OpenSource
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
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
UTBM as partner of OpenOffice.org Education Project
After the
Epitech Paris working with OpenOffice.org Education Project, I'm proud to announce, my school,
University of Technology of Belfort Montbeliard (aka UTBM) accepted to sponsor a pedagogical project based on 2 (maybe 4) students contributions.
Current status is : Proposal accepted, waiting for candidates (I'll present what I expect to the one who will apply asap).
Basically I'll teach those students how to build OpenOffice,org on several ports, and what I kwow about OpenOffice.org source code. Together, we'll work on OpenOffice.org profiling, on slow machines, like
XO (under Sugar), or
gdium machines.
It is scheduled to reverse the contents to the community (at least we'll propose ;-) ). Most of the work will be done to contribute to the
Performance Project, who IMHO is very high priority at the moment.
From my side, I'll be paid for the time, and the time will be included in my service, or something similar. From the student perspective, they will have 3 tasks to achieve in several month.
The students will work on
OOo4Kids source code, mostly for performance improvements, but not only : one of the task will be to propose at least one UI Improvement for
OOo4Kids. If the code does worth it, we'll ask for OpenOffice.org integration afterwards. If accepted, but that's another story ...
Design of the OOo4Kids logo : Ben Bois"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Education Project on the wiki EducOO.org blog (french) Many thanks to
Ben Bois , author of the
EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
Libellés : Epitech Paris, High Tech, OOo4Kids, OpenOffice, Teaching OpenSource, UTBM
Education Project and Epitech Paris
From July to December 2009, there will be a new scheduled Project between
OpenOffice.org Education Project and
Epitech Paris Thomas Fontenay, Abdelkader Bellabes will work on a forked version of OpenOffice.org, named
OOo4Kids for
performance improvement on powerless machines, like
XO or
gdium.
Of course, this study will include
backport to OpenOffice.org for the most interesting solutions (if possible and accepted), and will include
profiling too, plus at least one
User Interface ImprovementDevelopers :
Pierre Pasteau, Eric Bachard Managed by
Julien Ballet for Epitech Paris,
Eric Bachard for Education Project.
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Education Project on the wiki EducOO.org blog (french) Many thanks to
Ben Bois , author of the
EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
Libellés : Education, effort, Epitech Paris, High Tech, OOo4Kids, Teaching OpenSource
