[IIAB] OLPC Server and Internet-in-a-Box Project

[Tony Anderson]

Hi,

I remember our conversation at the booth.

In some ways, what we are trying to do with the school server is provide 
the 'internet-in-a-box'. Caryl Bigenho, who was in the booth has a group 
'localfi':http://www.localfi.org. The website is sort of 'coming soon' 
but has a good explanation of the mission. George Hunt, who was also in 
the booth, has been leading a group in developing a version of the 
school server software which supports the ARM processor.
Beyond this there is the larger OLPC community (worldwide volunteers 
working on supporting deployments of the XO laptop), which works through 
a number of mailing lists including server-devel.

My personal project is a derivative of the work of OLE Nepal 
(www.olenepal.org).

You have presented a number of possibilities to be explored.

The school server is designed on the basis that a school deploying XOs 
would have one for the school. While the software is based on Fedora, 
the architecture is more important.

The school server is intended to support 100+ XOs at a school (the size 
of + is based on the school server performance and, more critically, how 
it is used. The number of concurrent connections is a typical limit. 
When a teacher directs her class to download Tom Sawyer, there can be 
problems.

The server supports two network interfaces: LAN and WAN. The LAN is a 
local network which connects the XOs to the school server (which acts as 
the gateway/DNS/host) and to each other (in a simulated mesh using 
ejabberd). The WAN is optional and normally connects to the internet 
(which the server shares via the LAN).

The original XO-1 (1.89 million shipped) has an internal store of 1Gb 
(with a 256MB memory). More recent models (XO-1.5, XO-1.75, and XO-4) 
typically offer 4GB internal store and 1GB main memory. The last two 
have ARM processors (V7).

The primary problem for the school server is to supplement the limited 
space on the XOs with content on a large hard drive. Since the central 
idea of OLPC is that each child has a laptop, the server needs to 
deliver files to the XOs for local storage and use when the student 
takes the XO home (out of range of the school server).

At a personal level, I am leaving April 8 for Africa. I would like to 
arrange to take a copy of your current content. Perhaps we could find a 
way for me to reimburse you for the purchase of a Seagate device which 
you could install your current build and content to take with me.

One short-term option could be to connect a server to the Seagate 
device. The server could access files and deliver them to a requesting XO.

Longer-term, we could explore installing the school server software on 
the Seagate device leveraging your experience with Debian. Daniel Drake 
who is responsible for the current release of the school server software 
(XS-0.7) has documented the build process based on CentOS. The team 
supporting XSCE (XS Community Edition) which is based on Fedora is 
developing similar documentation.

I hadn't thought of using Zim for content other than the Wikipedia. We 
are currently using Wiki4Schools (a DVD sized slice of the English 
Wikipedia from 2010). The problem with Kiwix (which has been implemented 
in the form of an XO activity) is that it expects the Zim file to be 
local. We need a way for Kiwix to browse a Zim file on the school server 
while running on a client (XO). Nick Doiron has implemented a map 
activity which has a similar limitation (It operates on map-paks which 
are derived from Google Maps or OSM; however, it assumes the Paks are 
built while online. This could be done on the server using your OSM 
database with the resulting pak downloaded to the XO. In this case, the 
teacher (or other technical support) could create a pak (e.g. Rwanda) 
which could then be accessed by the students via the school server library.

In my implementation, the library is based on Django. It shouldn't be 
hard to implement a Django mechanism to download Gutenberg items from a 
Zim file. One important capability of Zim (and Kiwix) is the ability to 
search the content.

By the way I was excited to find that there are collections of classical 
music available by Creative Commons (e.g. musopen). I downloaded a 7.5gb 
collection.

This is a bit disjointed (thinking out loud?). We should be able to 
refine our dialog going forward.

Thanks for your email. I look forward to a mutually beneficial relationship.

Yours,

Tony



On 03/22/2013 11:59 PM, Braddock wrote:
> Hello Tony,
>
> It was good to talk to you at the Scale conference a couple weeks ago
> about your OLPC Server work, and our "Internet-in-a-Box" project.
>
> We are aiming to provide a variety of knowledge sources including
> world-wide maps (osm), wikipedia (kiwix), gutenberg, open source
> software, khan academy, etc on a low powered appliance.
>
> I know there is a lot of overlap with your OLPC Server work and I'm
> hoping we can be of use to each other.
>
> I'm attaching a quick overview of the goals of our project.
>
> A few things we might be able to offer you a la carte:
>
> -We have world-wide zoomable street maps down to a resolution of 15 feet
> running on a very low powered device with a very simple setup. We
> pre-render the entire globe, with some extra emphasis on populated
> places, from Open Street Map, and are then able to very easily serve up
> the image tiles.  The dataset is about 100 GB and I'd be happy to ship
> it to you.  It wasn't clear to me how far along your own mapping work was.
>
> -We are working to get Debian Linux running on the new Seagate Wireless
> Plus portable harddrive, which is very low power and can in fact run on
> its internal battery for ten hours.  We are also working on running our
> services on a Seagate GoFlex Home network hard drive, and a Seagate
> Satellite (the predecessor of the Wireless Plus) in a fully
> self-contained chroot image which really could be run from any ARM
> device.  I know you had mentioned a desire to run on low power for solar
> installations.
>
> -Would a kiwix-compatible ZIM of Gutenberg content be of interest to you?
>
> I am CC'ing our group - there are only about a half dozen people on the
> list, all located in the LA area.
>
> Hope we can collaborate - I know we could learn a lot from your
> real-world experiences.
>
> Braddock Gaskill
>
>