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Titel: Linux-help for Cambodian schools
 Verfasst am: 02.08.2006, 16:35 Uhr
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Anmeldung: 10. Feb 2005
Beiträge: 10
Wohnort: Poppel, Belgium
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Hello all,
I spent my last holiday (July 2006) in Cambodia and was very much struck by the poverty and lack of good education in this country. There are initiatives by the government and several NGO's to better this situation but still the situation is rather bad. One of the things we did is visit a school for poor children, set up by a Cambodian volunteer, Noeum -Luckyman- Samuth in 1997. Luckyman is the founder of the "Helper Students for the Poor Children of Cambodia Organisation" (HSPCCO), an NGO providing free education for poor and underpriviliged children in the Angkor Thom and Puok District.. He has two schools which give some education in agriculture, English language, ethics etc. partly to orphans. But of course lack of resources is a big problem here.
Cambodia is building hard on an internet infrastructure and cybercafes are opening up in all major towns and cities. Mostly older PC's like Pentium II are used with mainly win XP running on them, which makes the systems very slow. Moreover most Windows copies are illegal since people don't have the money to pay the licenses. The thought of implementing Linux on their systems is therefore a logical one. The Cambodian government has taken up a plan to convert to Open Source programs and eventually Linux (see http://www.nida.gov.kh/activities/foss/ ... anFOSS.pdf ). Also there is an initiative to build a localized OS, based probably on Debian, which offers Cambodian language and Khmer font support (see http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en ) Still those efforts will not positively affect the lives of poor children and orphans for the next decade I guess.
What I am thinking of now is to gather a group of people willing to raise funds and put some effort in helping out specifically the poor-children schools we visited. The idea I have (maybe a bit over-enthusiastic) is to introduce Linux from the bottom up. Kind of a grass-roots revolution so to speak. What is happening now is that anyone that has access to a PC is using Win XP and so gets used to that system, where Linux of course would be a much better choice. So why not start with it at the very root: in schools.
To be concrete: me and my family would like to try to raise some funds in order to be able to donate several PC's, with Linux pre-installed, to the schools I mentioned. Also some way of supporting them and helping them out to use the PC's will be needed. I already read about the $100 PC project but it seems not ready yet and moreover seems mainly to be directed towards the governments, ordering big quantities of the PC's. Another approach would be to start from used PC's that companies in the West throw away by the thousands every year and that would be still very useable in third world countries when Linux would be installed on them.
Considerations:
- Internet access is not readily available everywhere in Cambodia, so a distro that is stable and ready to use is needed, possibly a live-CD?
- DVD-players are scarce so it would be best if the OS would fit on only one CD
- Working with older PC's means the OS should be very resource-friendly
- Many locations are rather moist and dusty, so the hardware should be solid
- English is a language the Cambodians are very eager to learn but their English level is still rather poor, even that of the teachers. Still it is the question whether a fully localized OS would be proper here, since it makes communicating to the international world harder (thinking of support)
- Khmer language uses Sanskrit fonts; in Cambodia dual language keyboards are used that have a standard QWERTY layout and extra options for typing Khmer language
- The children have no PC experience whatsoever (but of course, like all children are fast learners)
There are the things I have been thinking of. I would like to ask any readers of this mailing list if they are interested in a project like this or even expand it or offer any help, suggestions or other input.
Thanks in advance,
Sincerely,
Dion van Oirschot
Belgium
dion@rietland.com |
Zuletzt bearbeitet von Dion am 19.08.2006, 21:31 Uhr, insgesamt ein Mal bearbeitet
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Titel: Update
Verfasst am: 19.08.2006, 21:28 Uhr
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Anmeldung: 10. Feb 2005
Beiträge: 10
Wohnort: Poppel, Belgium
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Hello all,
Though I haven't gotten much response to my original posting above, my enthusiasm for the project hasn't diminished. I have spent some time reading on the khmerOS site mentioned above and even posted on their forum in a topic that advocated Ubuntu as a good distro to base khmerOS on and suggested they'd try Kanotix. I got some positive response there and this really got my mind rolling ....
.... what about a khmer-Kanotix version? I see several interesting oppurtunities:
1. This would be a nice way to get Kanotix under the attention of the khmerOS team.
2. If adopted, it would be a nice way to get a real Debian-based distro spreading in a country that is on it's way to adopt OpenSource anyway, according to the govenments principles,
3. It would be a base for making Kanotix/Debian/Linux knowledge grow with a basic group of people who can then support others in Cambodia,
4. Kanotix being a live-CD would be easy to distribute and cheap as well.
What would be needed is a khmer remastering of Kanotix, including several of the khmer localized versions of KDE, firefox, thunderbird, OpenOffice, that are already being develloped (and are in a useable state already) and the khmer UNICODE fonts.
But more is possible. What about a khmer-Kanotix remaster which focuses on children? This would really help the project for small schools. I already found an educational version of Knoppix for primary-school education ( http://www.ofset.org/freeduc-cd ), featuring several interesting programs for children, all free software, several of them being french though.
I would really like to make a remastered Kanotix version with the above adaptations. Any help in doing this would be very much appreciated!
Greetings,
Dion |
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Titel: RE: Update
Verfasst am: 20.08.2006, 00:03 Uhr
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Anmeldung: 12. Mar 2005
Beiträge: 1005
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If I was going to look at creating a cambodian flavor of linux/debian, I'd give a serious look at gnuLinex, at http://linex.org
this is built to be stable, easy to use, user friendly, a true 100% windows replacement system wide, that's how they are using it currently.
that's all in spanish, but since you'd have to translate everything anyway, that's a great place to start, based on debian stable, very good looking, features automatic package installation of all the packages many users want, etc. Sort of cross between ubuntu, minus the vile parts, debian stable, and redhat, from what i can tell, but it's debian stable based, with only extra linex.org repositories added to the stable ones. |
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Titel: RE: Update
Verfasst am: 20.08.2006, 10:11 Uhr
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Anmeldung: 10. Feb 2005
Beiträge: 10
Wohnort: Poppel, Belgium
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Hi h2,
Thanks for the tip. I will look into gnuLinex for sure. The only problem I see in using/translating it, is the fact that it is in Spanish and I don't speak Spanish (nor Khmer for that matter). So the translation itself will have to be done entirely by the KhmerOS-team, who are Cambodians who do speak English but not Spanish. The fact that gnuLinex is Debian-based is certainly an advantage, since at the moment KhmerOS is looking at Suse and get some support by Novell doing the translation job. I think Suse is maybe interesting for people who have new and fast PC's with a DVD-player, but for schools like the one mentioned, a one-CD system would surely be an advantage. And the resource-usage should be low, so I am thinking of using xfce4 and Rox possibly. Only that would require extra translation, since KDE and gnome have been localized to Khmer for a great part, but xfce4 probably is not.
Greetings,
Dion |
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Titel: RE: Update
Verfasst am: 21.08.2006, 19:17 Uhr
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Anmeldung: 12. Mar 2005
Beiträge: 1005
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I would talk to the gnulinex people and see if they know of anyone who may be working on an english version of that, it's really very good, with an extremely well documented installer section by the way, both on their website and on the actual install process. A lot of hardcore work has gone into that, and it was built primarily for the application you are thinking of, schools, although since that phase of the project was successful, it's now being extended to all government machines there.
It's currently installed on I believe 70 k machines in extremedura schools. It's worth a few emails to the gnulinex people, this would be my choice for this type of application by far, especially because it's based on debian stable. They do use some local gnulinex repositories, the same way kanotix does I assume, for added components and fixes etc.
Try contacting them, maybe english is something that is already being worked on, though since it's a project by and for spanish speakers, I doubt they themselves would have any motivation to do that themselves, but I strongly suspect that quite soon an english version may appear. It's really very solid from what I can see, perfect for older hardware since it runs gnome. And not an ugly gnome I might add, which is a rare sight. |
_________________
Read more on dist-upgrades using du-fixes-h2.sh script.
New: rdiff-backup script
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Titel:
Verfasst am: 30.08.2006, 11:36 Uhr
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Anmeldung: 05. Mai 2005
Beiträge: 23
Wohnort: Brasil
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Titel:
Verfasst am: 31.08.2006, 12:36 Uhr
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Anmeldung: 05. Mai 2005
Beiträge: 23
Wohnort: Brasil
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Titel:
Verfasst am: 03.09.2006, 22:50 Uhr
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Anmeldung: 10. Feb 2005
Beiträge: 10
Wohnort: Poppel, Belgium
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Hi Prometeus,
Thank you very much for the input. I have downloaded the ISO and will try it out.
Will let you know what I think.
Greetings,
DIon |
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Titel:
Verfasst am: 10.09.2006, 11:56 Uhr
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Anmeldung: 05. Mai 2005
Beiträge: 23
Wohnort: Brasil
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