Here is my new blog: http://lizards.opensuse.org/author/cyberorg/ update your feed bookmarks to point to the new location

The first batch of school teachers from the Baroda High School completed a two day “Introduction to Linux and OpenOffice” training. The teachers were from all 4 schools of the group with about 10000 students(almost the size of a small university). openSUSE-Education will be reaching that many new users from this year onwards.

Presentation slides are. I’ve tried to put together slides that covers all aspects of Gujarat State Education Board’s(GSEB) Linux and Open Source curriculum for 11th and 12th standards. Share it with all the teachers you know

The OpenOffice slides are from here.

The course ware to use when teaching/give to students is available here: Book 1 and Book 2.

All the participants of the course took home hot new openSUSE-Edu live DVDs.

Sugar developers released 0.84.0 last week, the packages for openSUSE are available via Build Service repository X11:Sugar.

“Sugar is the learning engine for every child: Sugar provides a simple yet powerful means of engaging young children in the world of learning that is opened up by computers and the Internet. With Sugar, even the youngest learner will quickly become proficient in using the computer as a tool to engage in authentic problem-solving. Sugar promotes sharing, collaborative learning, and reflection, developing skills that help them in all aspects of life”. It is the engine that is driving the One Laptop Per Child(OLPC) project.

Check out the installation instructions here: http://en.opensuse.org/Sugar

As a follow up of last week’s project, here is the live CD iso of Sugared openSUSE 11.0, it will give you a rough idea about what Sugar project look like.

Consider it of alpha quality, a lot of things need fixing in this live version.

Enjoy!

Last couple of days Cristian Rodriguez and I have been working on getting OLPC XO’s Sugar interface on openSUSE. Here are the results:

Home

Browser using Hulahop, gecko/pyxpcom engine.

List of “Activities” - Sugar applications.

Write Activity - Sugared up Abiword

Color Activity

Patched for logout

Available via 1-click for openSUSE 11.0.

There is still some work to do done, WolfiR is building python-xpcom, only once that is done Browse activity will work. Use lower screen resolution as fonts are somehow very tiny on large screens.

I started working on it thinking it shouldn’t be difficult to build few rpm packages, but now I realize how much work is involved in the project. Hats off to all the developers working on the project, didn’t know they had a very helpful, active and lively community. Sugar is already available on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora of course(olpc is built onFedora).