I've made a simple start at porting Debian's NetHack packages to Maemo 5 for the Nokia N900. For now there is just the console interface. It and the nethack-common package are now available in the extras-devel repository.

http://maemo.org/packages/view/nethack-common/

http://maemo.org/packages/view/nethack-console/

The packages are "optified" so they don't occupy space on the root partition.

Note that right now the default shell does not include /usr/games in $PATH, so you'll need to either add that or just start it with /usr/games/nethack.

Bugs can be filed and files downloaded at the Garage project page.

Merci à Marc Hépiègne, et à Oisux de nous avoir invités aux aux JD2L 2010


En plus, ça tombe bien, car j'aurai plein de choses à montrer avec la nouvelle version 8.0 d' OOo4Kids sortie hier :-)

Le programme devrait être le suivant (sauf changement ) :

PLANNING

CONFERENCES (Salle Agnès Varda)
VENDREDI 26/02
18h00 cérémonie d'ouverture (avec trublion)
18h15 Scratch (présentation puis atelier à la salle de réunion)
18h30 Joomla (présentation puis atelier à la salle du Bar)
18h45 Scribus (présentation puis atelier à la salle du Labo)
19h00 Synapse-Picardie (présentation puis échange avec la salle)
19h30 Intervention des organisations APRIL, LDH, FDN, AFUL
(présentations puis échange avec la salle)

20h00 Restauration légère

Soirée projection/débat sur les Libertés Numériques
20h30 Court-métrages
21h15 Intervention de Jean-Claude Vitran (LDH)
21h45 Débats dans la salle
22h30 Poursuite des échanges autour d'une boisson chaude ou froide et
d'un en-cas


SAMEDI 27/02
10h00 ouverture de la journée
10h01 April
10h15 Scratch (puis atelier à la salle de réunion - 11h00-12h00)
10h30 OOo4kids
10h45 U-Ludix (Oisux)
11h00 Abulédu
11h15 Accessibilité (ASH)
11h30 Wikipedia
11h45 Accessibilité (APRIL)
12h00 Créations Numériques du Labo
12h15 Système d'exploitation Haïku (Oisux)

12h30 Restauration légère

14h00 April
14h20 Scratch (puis atelier à la salle de réunion - 15H00-16h00)
14h40 OOo4kids
15h00 U-Ludix (Oisux)
15h20 Abulédu
15h40 Accessibilité (ASH)
16h00 Wikipedia
16h20 Accessibilité (APRIL)
16h40 Système d'exploitation Haïku (Oisux)
17h00 Créations Numériques du Labo


ATELIERS (sur inscription)
Joomla : vendredi 19h00, samedi 10h00 et 14h00
Scratch : vendredi 19h00, samedi 11h00 et 15h00
Scribus : vendredi 19h00, samedi 12h00 et 16h00

LINUX-PARTY
toute la journée du samedi

STANDS
April
Abulédu
OOo4kids
Groupe Accessibilité de l'APRIL
Wikipedia
Oisux/U-Ludix/Haïku

=> le programme complet

À bientôt !!

--
ericb

I have been spending some time reviewing a few FOSS educational software translations over the last months. Localization is a commitment if you want to do a good job; badly localized software leads to poor experience (people simply won’t use the software) and gives the wrong message that FOSS applications are just bad software. So if you thought localization was just pure translation, then you need to think again! Hopefully my experience will help more people to start a localization effort well prepared and be proud of the work they did.

Cultural adaptation and knowing who that software was written for are paramount in the process. I’ve put up a few rules together hoping it will help newcomers, if I missed anything please feel free to add yours in the comment section!

1. Know your audience (the people using the software) and pick words that they can easily understand
2. Have some knowledge in software terminology (if not, web search is your buddy)
3. Be familiar with the software (try it out before translating it and don’t hesitate to use that software when you are doing the translation)
4. Be more than fluent in the target language and good enough in the original language (not the other way round)
5. Don’t be afraid to change the meaning in order to fit cultural differences (e.g. for Rur-ple, we picked a meaningful Chinese robot name rather than doing a phonetic conversion: names must have meaning in Chinese for people and more specifically children to remember)
6. Use the same terms across the whole software (either by proof reading or with the help of localization tools like Poedit and OmegaT)
7. Have someone good enough in both languages to review your work and hopefully familiar with the software (he needs to use the software not just read the text)
8. Fixes, typo corrections and improvements from the source language need to be fed back to the original project in order to help improve the overall quality of the software and all its translation
9. Keep track of changes and reasons behind so that can be useful for other languages
10. Have the passion and the time to commit to do a good work

I'm sorry I won't be in Boston/Somerville for the opening of this new vegan cafe. I went to its predecessor (Vej Naturals in Malden), and it was tasty. I'll be checking it out when I'm in town in March.

The Pulse Cafe

En préparant la future 0.8 (qui sortira très bientôt), j'ai eu l'idée de regarder les vieilles copies d'écran de ce qu'on voit en premier quand on lance OOo4Kids, à savoir le Start Center ... 

One more time, thanks to Ben Bois who created a new great background for the future version (0.8) of OOo4Kids :




The shapes of the buttons are no longer apparent, and when you roll over one of them, a help balloon explains you which application will open. Of course, things are not perfect, and we still have some bugs to fix, but this is very promising !! (and my children love it ;-)

More information about the recent changes

IMPORTANT : the version proposed for download (0.6) below does NOT have the feature yet. The new splashscreen should be integrated in the version : 0.8, not before.

=> Download.ooo4Kids.org website


If you want to help us, to find resource and contribute back to improve OpenOffice.org, via the OpenOffice.org Education Project, donations are welcome

OOo4Kids is made for Educational purpose, has been thought to work with students, making them discover OpenOffice.org source code, without constraints, but just code, and having Fun.
The promise is, when the code is good enough, it will be proposed for integration into OpenOffice.org.

OOo4Kids is a 7-12 years children Office suite, based on OpenOffice.org ( http://www.openoffice.org ) source code. This means OpenOffice.org has some features OOo4Kids has not (like Base and Java). And if you need those features, please use OpenOffice.org, that you can download at : Download OpenOffice.org. Please do not forget that the software is provided as it, and that you will use it at your own risks. Do not forget to do a backup either.

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
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
...

As part of the GNOME.Asia Summit Committee, I would like to post the Call for Host of the GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 here and let all the communities in Asia know that we are looking for potential host this year. Please find below the announcement and don’t hesitate to pass the message along!

Dear GNOME friends,

We are call for the host of GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 now !

GNOME.Asia Summit is the yearly GNOME Users and Developers Asian Conference. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, and also covers applications and the development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss both the present technology and future developments.

GNOME.Asia Summit was held in Beijing, China during 2008 and in Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam during 2009. We would like to continue finding new national locations as we spread GNOME throughout Asia, and we are looking for local organizers to rise to the challenge of organizing an excellent GNOME event. The GNOME.Asia committee will assist in the process, but there is a definitive need for individuals to be actively involved and committed to the planning and delivery of the event.

You can learn more about GNOME.Asia Summit at our official website: http://gnome.asia

The following two links are “must read items” for organizing the GNOME.Asia Summit:

• How to
• Check list

If you are interested in hosting the summit please submit a formal proposal to the GNOME.Asia Committee at asia-summit-list [at] gnome.org. The deadline for proposals is 31st March 2010. You are encouraged to ask questions before writing the formal proposal.

GNOME.Asia is much like a few trees just planted and we want to grow a forest in Asia. We are looking for local organizers in any Asian country with the desire to take on and succeed in the challenges of organizing an excellent GNOME event. We know that you will need all the time you can get to prepare a proposal but we hope we have inspired you to get started.

We are looking forward to hear from you on or before 31st March 2010.

Sincerely,

GNOME.Asia Summit committee

I won’t post my new number here, but for those of you who know me, do not hesitate to either send me an sms or drop me an email to get the new number.

I'll be in San Francisco this Wednesday morning for the Defective By Design anti-DRM protest at Apple's launch event. We'll be out having fun handing out flyers, doing a little theater of our own, and talking to the media and people walking by about the danger DRM poses to the public's freedom and the history of Apple's support for it. We'll be focusing especially on the App Store model used on the iPhone (and possibly used on the tablet to be announced on Wednesday), which prevents users from installing any software from anywhere else.

We're starting at 8:30am (that's not our fault -- Apple is starting at 10am so people will be arriving by 9am I'm sure) outside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater. A perfect time for stopping by on the way to work :).

Here's the full background info.

If you can come out and support the effort, please let me know at info@defectivebydesign.org.

We'll be meeting up outside the Theater entrance. Stay tuned to http://identi.ca/dbd for updates. Hope to see you there, and bring some friends!

For someone who is interested in OS and micro-kernel especially L4.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:

Part 7:

Part 8:

I finally got around to installing GNU Emacs on my Nokia N900.

The instructions and package there worked for me. I did not find it necessary to do the maximization fix -- after turning off the tool bar, the minibuffer was visible for me.

Remapping the keyboard using the file provided does seem to cause some problems. The function key is no longer sticky, so I have to hold it down along with the letter key to get a number. That's not so possible when trying to type the number 1. Will have to look into that.

Now, to get Planner mode working well on it.

And yes, I will be trying out reading my mail using Gnus on it.

Ci-dessous, l'annonce de la sortie d'OptimOffice, par l'équipe de Scénari.

".. Bonjour,

L'équipe Scenari est heureuse de vous annoncer la sortie de la version 1 d'OptimOffice, la chaîne éditoriale généraliste qui permet de rédiger et publier les documents sous forme de site web, de diaporama ou de papier (rapport, dossier, note, etc.) : les avantages d'une chaîne éditoriale pour les usages bureautiques !

Vous pouvez télécharger Optim à cette adresse : http://scenari-platform.org/projects/optim/fr/pres/co/ (la documentation se trouve sur la même page).

OptimOffice tire parti des derniers développements de SCENARIchain 3.7, et de nombreuses améliorations de l'éditeur. 

Scenari 3.7, version préqualifiée, se trouve ici : http://scenari-platform.org/projects/scenari/fr/download/co/test.html

Enfin, OptimOffice est le premier modèle à pouvoir être utilisé avec SCENARIstyler, le nouvel outil de stylage graphique qui s'installe comme un atelier de SCENARIchain, pour personnaliser les publications Optim (à télécharger sur la page d'Optim). SCENARIstyler, c'est une nouvelle manière de créer et déployer vos identités visuelles, sans entrer dans la complexité de SCENARIbuilder.

Au fur et à mesure de la migration des modèles sur Scenari 3.7, SCENARIstyler pourra être utilisé sur tous les modèles SCENARI.

C'est à vous !

L'équipe Scenari ... "

Bravo à l'équipe Scénari pour son travail !

Grâce aux dons de Eric Bachard et de la société www.TuxServices.com, l'association www.educoo.org a pu offrir à Ben Bois notre designer d'Ooo4Kids, un MacBook Pro, afin qu'il puisse poursuivre ses travaux de création graphique et d'amélioration d'OOo4Kids... en laissant un peu se reposer son PC personnel :-)

Morgan Magnin just advertised me today : two students from Ecole Centrale Nantes(aka ECN) will continue the effort this semester (january to june 2010) :-)

Welcome to Cyril le Mat and Arthur Bonnet!

It is planned to continue to improve the HP Tablet PC use with Impress.

The great news, is that this new project will start the third year of cooperation between OpenOffice.org Education Project and ECN.

Links: see the blog entry about the previous project just finished and screenshots about "Tablet PC and OpenOffice.org (french, sorry).





Are you student in computing, and want to learn code (mostly C++), fight with well defined and mentored projects ? or simply contribute to OpenOffice.org, instead of doing dumb internal projects ? Just find a teacher, as correspondant, and join the OpenOffice.org Education Project :-)


Contact : IRC
Channel : #education.openoffice.org
Server : irc.freenode.net




"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Education Project on the wiki

EducOO.org blog (french)

OOo4Kids Project

Many thanks to Ben Bois , author of the EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
...

The EducOOo non profit association is not really rich ( see : the Donations Thermometer for example ), but after I proposed the idea to the EducOOo Administration Council,it has been accepted.

The exact level is being discussed, and can be revised, but it should be between 10% and 15% of the money we receive (donations or partners).

As example : imagine we receive 3000 euros from some partner, or as donation : 450 euros will be directly reserved for direct help, like fund a developer (student prefered, but other cases will be studied) who cannot attend an event, or participate to buy hardware or whatever other action.

Work in progress. Stay tuned.

La pétition contre les brevets logiciels, n'est plus valide, et la collecte des signatures a recommencé. J'ai évidemment resigné (à titre personnel), avec autant de détermination que la fois précédente : NON aux brevets sur les logiciels.

Avec un peu de retard (mais il n'est jamais trop tard pour bien faire), je fais suivre le message que nous a fait parvenir Bastien Guerry. C'est vraiment une super idée ce journal des TICE (je trouve que ça manquait en fait).

Evidemment, nous souhaitons tous nos meilleurs voeux à ce Journal des TICE, ainsi qu'à l'association APTICE Voici le message :

l'association APTICE est heureuse de vous annoncer le lancement du journal des TICE

Ce journal en ligne couvre l'actualité des technologies de l'information et de la communication pour l'enseignement, en France et dans le monde.

Notre objectif est de rendre compte des usages en allant à la rencontre des enseignants, de suivre de près l'évolution des politiques éducatives concernant les TICE, de mettre en avant certaines ressources numériques et certaines technologies particulières, de comprendre les enjeux autour des « jeux sérieux » et de mettre l'actualité francophone en regard de l'actualité des TICE à l'international. Voici nos rubriques :

 * Témoignages
 * Politique Éducative
 * Ressources numériques
 * Technologies
 * Jeux-sérieux
 * International

Pour rester informé, vous pouvez vous inscrire à notre lettre d'information mensuelle

Vous pouvez aussi vous abonner à notre fil RSS.

Pour tout savoir sur le journal des TICE: voir à propos

Si vous avez la moindre question, n'hésitez pas à nous écrire :

 Bastien Guerry <contact@journaldestice.org>

Nous espérons que ce journal suscitera votre intérêt et qu'il permettra à l'association APTICE de nouer un dialogue avec l'ensemble des acteurs aujourd'hui impliqués dans la pratique et l'expérimentation des TICE.

À bientôt !

For the new year, EducOOo and the OpenOffice.org Education Project are proud to announce OOo4Kids 0.6 is out, and can be downloaded at :

=> Download.ooo4Kids.org website


If you want to help us, to find resource and contribute back to improve OpenOffice.org, via the OpenOffice.org Education Project, donations are welcome

OOo4Kids is made for Educational purpose, has been thought to work with students, making them discover OpenOfice.org source code, without constraints, but just code, and having Fun.
The promise is, when the code is good enough, it will be proposed for integration into OpenOffice.org.

OOo4Kids is a 7-12 years children Office suite, based on OpenOffice.org ( http://www.openoffice.org ) source code. This means OpenOffice.org has some features OOo4Kids has not (like Base and Java). And if you need those features, please use OpenOffice.org, that you can download at : Download OpenOffice.org. Please do not forget that the software is provided as it, and that you will use it at your own risks. Do not forget to do a backup either.



The latest changes since 0.5.1 are:

* (experimental) Portable OOo4Kids for Windows the following locales are provided :
- en-US, fr, de, es, nl, it, pt
- zh-CN is provided too - thanks to Julien Forgeat for the translation - but not tested (can be unusable)
Please use them with caution, and report us any bug you found.

* New layout ( thanks to Ben Bois for the icons, and Vincent Ruffiot for the screenshot) :
- fixed the white effect on right
- fixed the look




* New toolbars behavior : now, the toolbars content depend on the
User's Level ( can be changed in the prefs).
See : Toolbars and User Level for
further information.

* New locales are provided :
- Italian,
- Chinese (simplified),
- Dutch
(previous existing locales : English-US, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish)

* New XO port : OOo4Kids has been "Sugarized", means it does respect Sugar tree, and the .xo archive installs like any other activity.

* More OOo4Kids icons

* Linux : .deb and .rpm buildable (yet some bugs)
* Linux : language packs buildable (will be used for XO port)

* Experimental : modified the UI in the prefs, adding the "password" feature, to protect the prefs (avoiding children doing wrong actions).
* Will be implemented in 0.7. It is scheduled that the password will be enabled by default.


* Next step :
- choose the definitive toolbars content, per level, and following the teachers recommandations
- fix more issues with .deb and .rpm
- more bugfixes
- implement the password feature

=> Further information : see the roadmap



Season Greatings, and (almost) Happy New Year to all of you !!

Whoa, been quite a long time since I’ve blogged last time now and the longer it’s been, I’ve felt that I’ve needed to come up with something of more interest to blog about once I finally do some blogging again… ;) Well, I read this poor review of Mandriva Linux 2010 (the only poor review I’ve

Below, the mail I sent to several mailing lists.

After two years of an intense activity of the french part of the education.openoffice.org project, we are ready to reactivate this international list : this is one of our objectives for 2010 !!


To subscribe, just send a mail at : users-subscribe@education.openoffice.org confirm, and that's all : you can start contributing to the Education Project !!

To become a member, please follow the instructions provided there : http://education.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectMemberList

Education Project aims to create a bridge between Educational World and OpenOffice.org Project, following 3 axes :

- create a network of teachers, using OpenOffice.org
- provide a sharing area
- provide new developers, and spread OpenOffice.org source code (teach OOo source code and coding guidelines, UNO, an so on)

Currently, this project counts around 110 members, but everybody is welcome, and there is so much to do, that any contribution is wamrly welcome too !!

Everybody is welcome : teachers, students, just curious :)


For the one willing to help us, we need people able to help us for the website, translate, manage the wiki, but not only (the list is not limited).

Other need is to compare, work together (collaborative work), and concatenate informations providing from several educational systems, and of course, share our knowledge.


Be welcome, and Seasonal Greatings to all of you !!



Eric Bachard
Lead,
OpenOffice.org Education Project

We have been looking for an Open Source typing application for kids for quite some time. We found TuxTyping appealing and decided to localize the interface and the 43 typing exercises that come with it into Chinese. TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin. This educational game comes with two different games for practicing typing, and allows you to create exercises according to students needs. Of course we already brought this good news to Wende School. After two hours of training, Miss Liu  was already mastering TuxTyping. She will incorporate it into the school program starting from 2010.

Fred is now submitting the Chinese version upstream to make it available for everybody.  The TuxTyping developers have been very responsive and helpful with our translation problems and fixing minor bugs we found. We are now even working with them to make it workable for Chinese input method, as only pinyin typing is available currently. Hopefully we will have something ready to test soon.

In no time thanks to volunteers and passionate people like us, we went from nothing available in Chinese to a great looking software that will even deal with the Chinese language specificities. That’s the reason why I love Open Source; its community and its spirit definitely ROCK!

http://hackaday.com/2009/12/27/freerunner-with-android-new-case-battery/ looks like a pretty neat hack.

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) ?

The OpenOffice.org Education Project continues the Effort. Ecole Centrale Nantes is a regular contributor, and below, the story.

How was it this year ? Well, change from svn to hg was a bit tricky (headhache caused by the rebase), but at the end, we did it. Jonathan Winandy, mercurial expert created its own repository, and we used it until the end. At the end, I pushed, with Thorsten Behrens and Rene Engelhard precious advices, all the changes into eraser01 cws.

Another part of the work is at issue 97972, but not only. The wiki too does contain a lot of information.

The students who contributed this year, are :

* Nelle Varoquaux
* Jonathan Winandy
* Leo Collet
* Remy Dumas
* Christian Jacques

And the professor who followed that is Morgan Magnin.

Many thanks to all of them !!

For the one interested, the final report is available online : ECN Tablet, final report (2009)

The feature is really great (specifications have been proposed last year) and we are preparing the cws, for the QA. It will be proposed for integration. There will not be a big change, because the option will not be active by defaut. The plan is to add other features in the next semesters.

I'll retain, like the previous time, it was a pleasure to work online with students, and to help them, to discover the OpenOffice.org source code, and more. Other important thing, is that you can work on the core, when you are enough close to the students, to mentor them, and hear carefully their problems. IRC ( channel : #education.openoffice.org , server : irc.freenode.net ) is really great for that.

Last but not least, I got a movie presenting the feature, made by Nelle Varoquaux, but I can't propose a link from there at the moment. Please click again later ;)

(display "hello, world!") (newline) i had a look at the 2009.1 image and installed it over the 2008 image i had (where everything worked). unfortunately this is not the case with the 2009 image. webcam and battery monitor, for example, seem to be borked. as it is, i've been configuring the debian image a bit more and find it to be very well suited to my needs, so i may stop playing around with the mandriva images anyway. i've been thinking of downloading the latest kernel from the lemote site and seeing if i can compile it and boot it. maybe i'll have some time over the festive season. on the irc channel i've just been told that updating the image will help a lot too :) i've been stuck with modem speed at home for a while, so that hasn't been a possibility. i'll just smuggle my gdium into work today and hog some bandwidth :)

Yi Fan is 4 years old and she is dying She has pulmonary hypertension
She loves poetry, her bunny and her Mom and Dad
Her dreams include walking in the park, roller skating and
someday going to school.

Donation website:

http://yifanfund.com/donations

怡帆的故事

如果不是因为失去了呼吸与行走的自由，即将迎来5岁生日的潘怡帆就可以像其他小朋友一样，在阳光下奔跑，呼吸自由的空气。

在她模糊的记忆里，最大的愿望是得到一双漂亮的旱冰鞋，有一天能够穿上它，自由地起舞。可是，生活留给她更多的，是无数个针头与面罩的记忆，每一个夜晚，她幼小的双手紧紧地护着氧气面罩，害怕失去这唯一维系她生命的纽带。

从来到这个新世界的第二天起，她立刻被送进急救病房，接受胸腔穿刺手术，她的呼吸出了问题，经过15天的治疗，终于回到家中和父母在一起。

她第二次入院是一岁零二个月，那时还不会走路，甚至连爬行也不会，那次是因为间质性肺炎，由于怀疑肺泡蛋白沉积，她的肺被灌洗过两次，18天后，医院放弃了对她的治疗，除了她的父母。

接她回家的时候，她的嗓子完全嘶哑，除了看到她张嘴哭泣，听不到一丁点声音。小怡帆到底出了什么问题，她的父母不知道，他们只能卖掉唯一的房子，通过多方途径尽他们的全力来帮助孩子获得健康。

他们给她配置氧气机，让她枯竭的肺得到充足的氧气，勇敢的小怡帆终于挺过那段艰难的日子，慢慢地恢复到自主呼吸状态，在她三岁的时候，可以扶着凳子挪动了。

如果一切能够延续，生命之花定将如期绽放，但是，命运之神只给了她一年的时间，她还来不及学会独立地行走，她的肺已经不能供给身体足够的氧气，正在向纤维化方向发展，需要全天带着氧气面罩帮助呼吸，行走的努力不得已终止，任何有氧活动都会给她的肺带来巨大的压力。

从那时候起，她离开氧气机的距离不超过一根三米空心送气管的长度，她的全部生活内容来源于电视，她喜欢看动画片，和动画片里面的角色一起笑，一起 哭，她也逐渐懂得，什么是善良，什么是美丽，什么是勇敢，当她从电视里看到在四川地震中的很多小朋友失去了他们的家园，她知道他们更需要帮助。现在，她保 存着红十字会写给她的感谢信，那是她的骄傲。

她有一个梦想，有一天能够自由地呼吸与行走，穿上漂亮的旱冰鞋，自由地起舞。

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

怡帆的爸爸是我在网上认识的朋友. 他在网上被人亲切地成为政委. 虽然我没有和他见过面,但是他在论坛中一贯的理性/乐观/从容让人想像不到他原来一直在承受着常人不能承受的家庭压力.

让我们一起来帮助怡帆,因为我们不愿失去怡帆美丽的微笑. 让我们来帮助怡帆,因为我们相信爱的存在.

捐助网站: http://yifanfund.com/donations  (English)

中文版网站和资料在整理中.

怡帆需要不时带着氧气机,她的肺已经不能供给身体足够的氧气

熟睡的怡帆

怡帆的红十字会四川地震捐赠证书

As a volunteer of the Greenboard Free and Open Teaching project, I was invited to join the charity event hosted by Friends of New Citizens and 10 other NGOs on December 13 Sunday. The event objectives were mainly to:

1. give awards and recognitions to volunteers and migrant schools teachers (and RMB 50,000 red pocket will go to 99 teachers during the coming Chinese New Year, it was announced by Mr. Xu from Narada Foundation during the event)
2. give subsidies to Migrant workers’ families (a total of RMB 600,000 to 300 families)
3. enjoy the day with nice songs and dance (it was definitely a very nice show for all of us)
4. panel discussions trying to solve problems

It was a very successful event with over 400 participants. The whole venue was seated with migrant workers families and migrant schools teachers as well as volunteers coming from different NGOs all focusing on helping migrant workers families. It was also full of touching stories and hot discussions about how to improve the quality of living for migrant workers families. It was very nice to see that so many organizations were concerned about this society problem. But we all know that subsidy can only help in the short term, policy and education are the only long term solution. In order to solve the root problem the society should provide migrant workers with trainings in order to be able to access better job opportunities and their children with free and decent quality education. We should definitely invite the government and Ministry of Education to participate in these kinds of events and panel discussions Yes, it’s time to nurture and be responsible for migrant workers!

As you may know Beijing Linux User Group has a lot of interest groups and one of the most popular groups is “Coding for fun“. The purpose is to bring together developers in an informal way to encourage them to share their projects and coding experience. It’s basically like a Hackathon, everyone hacks on their own code. Even you don’t have anything to hack on? Just look around and join anytime if you feel interested!

I personally found this group very interesting and joined numerous times already! Especially for computer science students, it’s a great place for them to learn how to get involve in FOSS projects as they can always get guidance from other experienced hackers. For other members, it’s their regular meeting place to meet and discuss about their projects. If you work alone on your own project? You can see from the pictures that the environment is very nice, it’s definitely a cool place to spend a day  working there. For myself, I always work on random stuff related to BLUG, GNOME.Asia Summit, Software Freedom Day , College OSS Society and Open Source deployment in schools. My projects of the day are mainly the BLUG website news / events announcement and TuxTyping localization. Here it is, the most popular group in BLUG!

ropevim introduce a one stop python code auto complete, auto import and other features to vim.
refs: http://rope.sourceforge.net/ropevim.html

I did this:

$ mkdir /home/liwen/install/rope
$ cd /home/liwen/install/rope
$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/agr/rope/
$ cd rope
$ python setup.py install
$ cd ..
$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/agr/ropevim/
$ cd ropevim
$ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/agr/ropemode/
$ mv ropemode/ropemode/* ropemode/
$ python setup.py install

And added some code in my .vimrc:

let $PYTHONPATH .= ":/home/liwen/install/rope/rope:/home/liwen/install/rope/ropevim"
source /home/liwen/install/rope/ropevim/ropevim.vim

let ropevim_codeassist_maxfixes=10
let ropevim_guess_project=1
let ropevim_vim_completion=1
let ropevim_enable_autoimport=1
let ropevim_extended_complete=1

function! CustomCodeAssistInsertMode()
    call RopeCodeAssistInsertMode()
    if pumvisible()
        return "\<C-L>\<Down>"
    else
        return ''
    endif
endfunction

function! TabWrapperComplete()
    let cursyn = synID(line('.'), col('.') - 1, 1)
    if pumvisible()
        return "\<C-Y>"
    endif
    if strpart(getline('.'), 0, col('.')-1) =~ '^\s*$' || cursyn != 0
        return "\<Tab>"
    else
        return "\<C-R>=CustomCodeAssistInsertMode()\<CR>"
    endif
endfunction

inoremap <buffer><silent><expr> <Tab> TabWrapperComplete()

Then auto complete should work automatically. But RopeRename not work, which will fill up my cpu, I think it’s ok for a beginning.

PS: hg is mercurial

Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG) and Beijing GNOME User Group (BGUG), two of the most active open source communities in Beijing just celebrated their anniversary in November (one day after the other)! With 7 and 1 year of services for BLUG and BGUG respectively it was about time we organized a joint event. In fact being a core member of both groups and a close friend of Emily Chen, BGUG’s President, I can recall how it all started: in 2008 we worked very closely to organize the first instance of GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 in Beijing, bringing passionate GNOME people from all horizons together, discussing and willing to contribute to the GNOME project here in China. The rest happened “all by itself” and it is really nice to see BGUG growing up strong with now a few core members taking over some of the group management responsibilities!

For this joint event we presented to both groups a report of the second instance of GNOME.Asia Summit which happened in Vietnam this year. Emily, Fred, Ray and myself were giving presentation there and we gave a summary of what happened, who we met, how vibrant the local Open Source scene is and showed of course many pictures of the 3 days event. In the second part of the meeting Peter Junge, core member of OpenOffice.org community, presented his experience while representing the BLUG and attending the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) in Italy. It was really a wonderful evening flooded with event highlights, innovative technology, travel and funny stories. After witnessing the success of GNOME.Asia Summit in Beijing and Vietnam, I can’t wait to know where it will be hosted in 2010 and of course participate again!

Just back from Cambodia and Vietnam, I returned to Wende School to see how things were going.  With the help of Julien and Jason, they already incorporated computer classes into their existing curriculum, once a week for grade 3 to grade 6 (grade 1 and 2 should have it soon) teaching children how to use the keyboard and mouse with Gcompris and giving Art classes with Kolourpaint. Miss Liu already scheduled each grade classes until the end of the school year. When we arrived grade 5 was actually using the computer lab, it was so cool! At the end of the class, we discussed again with Miss Liu and gathered more comments.

The main reason of our visit was to give formal training to the English teacher (whom I mentioned in my previous blog post). For this session, we tried to deliver a class that would enable her to teach at the end of the course. We managed to build a new 2 hours class focusing on:

1. Concepts of Computer, FOSS and Open Education in education (10 mins)
2. Hardware and Operating System introduction (30 mins)
3. Apps to teach English (30 mins)
4. Italc classroom management system (30 mins)
5. Q&A (20 mins)

The purpose of the shortening of the initial teacher training class is mainly due to the high turn over rate of teachers in Migrant Schools. After 2 hours of training, the teacher take the Gdium home and practices with it during her spare time. Any question is then directed to either Miss Liu who is already trained (and of course ourselves).

This time again, at the end of the training section, the Maths teacher this time popped in and expressed her interest to join the training next time. It seems that word of mouth is doing wonder at Wende School hopefully we can spread the word all over China soon!

Last changes for the coming 0.6 :

OOo4Kids is now localized in :

- Italian
- French
- German
- Spanish
- Chinese (simplified)
- Dutch
- english-US (default)

Note: Japanese is postponed (no demand)

A big thank you to :

* Leo Moons (nl version),
* Volker Merschmann and Florian Effenberger (German version),
* Marina Latini and the Italian Team (Italian version),
* Julien Forgeat (simplified chinese version)

On the way :

- Portuguese (missing strings in the MS Intaller)

New versions:

* XO Intel version (both XO-1 and XO-1.5) in spanish, and english (other on demand)
* Portable versions (Windows) in fr, de, es, pt, en-US

Debian port in progress. Thanks to Rene Engelhard ( Debian OpenOffice.org maintainer )

Still waiting my write access at Freedesktop ...

After months of work from corporations, institutions, universities, Open Source communities and NGOs the first fully Open Source based lab is launched in Beijing. The purpose of organizing this Opening ceremony on November 12th is to raise concerns of Migrant Schools education from different organizations!

Everyday hundreds of thousands of children from migrant workers families who are building modern China fail to receive proper education and can’t get basic computer teaching, leaving them even more behind and increasing the digital divide. The complexity of addressing education needs for the part of the Chinese population requires a lot of problems to be solved and computer access is only one of the problems. However computers coupled with the possibilities of accessing the Internet will give them the chance to discover and access invaluable content which can secure their future and give them access to job they didn’t even know existed!

Delivering proper computer based education to poor schools issues range from electricity consumption from a full classroom (one normal PC can easily consume 60 to 200W, multiplied by 20 or 50…), teacher knowledge about IT and integration of the digital tool into their curriculum, content cost and licensing, and of course computers cost.

Today in Wende we have managed to address all the problems above thanks to technology, vision, and collaboration from various parties. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has built a general purpose low powered CPU that runs free software and which enables to consume as low as 15-17W per machine at a very competitive price, enabling manufacturers such as Lemote and Dexxon to build some of the cheapest netbooks on the market.

Thanks to Dexxon for its contributions and sponsorship of the classroom, WenDe today has a fully equipped 20 Gdiums Loongson based set up. Dexxon has sponsored Mandriva, a French Linux software company to bring the latest technology on the Loongson architecture and customized a Linux distribution for education.

Furthermore non-profit organizations such as Greenboard and LEAD have been building the education material together with teachers and released them under an Open Source license so any school can use them for free, modify and improve as they wish.

The last part has been completed by Greenboard and CSIP who are also graciously training the group of selected teachers by WenDe’s headmaster in order to get them ready to deliver the initial curriculum. LEAD is currently training some of their members to get ready to deliver the same kind of training to other migrants schools.

A special thank you goes to COPU for their support throughout the project and helping Greenboard and Dexxon to connect the dots.

So from now on the children of Wende school will be able to access the latest software and technology to become computer literate but also to improve their knowledge in general topics such as maths, English, geography, arts, problem solving, programming and much more.

The organizations involved will continue to build new curriculum, more exercise and will also get more teachers involved in the near future. One of the advantages of using a free software licensing model is that all the cost of such a solution only goes to the hardware and any school can just download, use and adapt the content to their needs. Hopefully we will soon see a strong teacher community improving this initial work and working together to create better free educational content for our children.

It took around 30 hours to compile on a Gdium, several tries due to some silly mistakes but, finally, I got OOo4Kids (Open Office For Kids) running on the Gdium, in simplified Chinese. OOo4Kids is an office suite based on OpenOffice.org and designed for young children (7 to 12 years old). The contributors of the project have made considerable efforts to simplify the user interface and the code and the result is pretty amazing, see by yourself with two screenshots of Calc, the top one from OpenOffice.org, the bottom one from OOo4Kids (images are clickable):

First obvious thing is the great work that has been done on the user interface, OOo4Kids provides a GUI with larger icons in a lower number that makes the software much easier to use for kids. On the top of that, notice how placing the icons on the left side of the window helps making a much better usage of vertical space, this is particularly efficient for netbooks that offer a screen resolution of 1024×600, or sometimes even lower than that.

This said, I also want to mention that OOo4Kids is not only a great project in term of how useful it is for teaching office software to young kids, the development of OOo4Kids itself is also very education oriented. The main maintainer Eric Bachard is working hard on getting students from French and other countries universities involved into the project, providing them support and guidance on the IRC channels and mailing lists. Without these efforts, digging into OOo’s code would be extremely time-consuming and OOo4Kids would have far less contributers.

I now certainly hope to have risen some interest, you can learn more about OOo4Kids in:

• The project page
• The French IRC channel, #educooo on Freenode
• The English IRC channel, #education.openoffice.org on Freenode
• Educooo.org, the French association that is managing the project

Now there is still a lot to be done, the next steps are going to be checking the localization, providing any missing strings, integrate OOo4Kids in the operating systems used by Greenboard (the next version of the customized GLinux we are using will feature a switch to allow teachers choosing between classical OOo and OOo4Kids) and of course prepare and write some content. So you’ll read about OOo4Kids soon on this blog and on Greenboard.

The trip to Cambodia was amazingly excellent! Not only I went to the Open Institute Organization to know more about how they spread Open Source in Universities, joined the newly re-established Phnom Penh LUG first initial meeting, but also had a lot of great Cambodian food in Phnom Penh, as I never had any Cambodian food ever! As an animal lover, Phnom Penh is a paradise,  full of wide life too!

Followed by Beijing, the second GNOME.Asia Summit was successfully hosted in Ho-Chi-Minh, Vietnam from 20 – 22 November 2009. I am always happy to join International Open Source events, especially outside of China, I got to talk to the local communities from all over Asia like core members from Saigon LUG, Hanoi LUG, Phnom Penh LUG, Taiwan LUG, Open Institute Organization in Vietnam! I even got to talk to the Chief Director of the Government Information Center in Vietnam and learned that all the government officers will start to use Open Source Software like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird in 2010. Implementation will begin with massive training. The main reason for the migration is that the government wants to reduce illegal use of Windows. Isn’t it cool?

There were a lot of presentations and workshops covering many topics other than GNOME during the whole summit! The full schedule can be viewed here. As a woman leading the Beijing Linux User Group, I gave three talks and led one panel discussion:

1. Women_In_IT / FOSS
2. Building Communities
3. FOSS Deployment in Schools
4. Panel discussion about Women Participation in GNOME

I was very impressed by the whole GNOME.Asia Summit!  First, Vietnamese participants asked really a lot of questions which is not so common in China. Second, there were a lot of volunteers from different Universities, students of different domains like Computer Science, Trading, Economy and so on. They were very energetic and helpful.  Third, there were a lot of girl volunteers as well which is very rare in Open Source conferences! I can see that the GNOME.Asia Summit 2009 is just a start in Vietnam, with all of these young students’ energy, community building and government support, I am sure 2010 will be a great FOSS year in Vietnam!

Click to reveal Amazon's latest innovation in shipping. The screenshot was taken Wednesday, November 18th, around 12:30am.

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 there

Next 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.

Yesterday, was IRC ClassRoom , and we were extremely pleased to receive Heiner Rechtien

As usual, the log is available on the OpenOffice.org wiki

Hello there,

i had my gdium device (gDium) now for quite some time, it gets delivered with a customized version of Mandriva for MIPS using LXDE as an desktop, i am not the best friend of RPM based distributions, so i did a bootstrap of Debian on another gKey and it was working fine so far. But i run into a lot of problems while trying to compile a recent kernel wit the patches, so the gDium was on hold in my closet for some months …

Some time ago, there was a testing release of Debian (Lenny) for MIPS with the customized kernel and system config, i thought thats a good base to have another try, and here is what i have done.

First i deinstalled all bigger packages that i don’t plan to use (openoffice.org, GNOME, GDM) i don’t like the touch pad so much and was searching for some lightweight desktop or window manager without any heavy decencies, i tried a lot and decided the best for my needs would be awesome.

Awesome 2.x
is in the official Debian repositories and very easy to install
aptitude install awesome

I decided that i even don’t want any desktop manager, so i also deinstalled GDM, to start the system i just loggin in ans fire up startx just in old days ^^
To do so you need to modify your .xsession file a little bit, i add some tool that i need for my comfort, like an input system (SCIM), a wallpaper (nitrogen), an automounting tool (ivman) and a nice clock in the awesome panel Some of the stuff is explained here how to install: forums.debian.net

For rest i just installed some packages like locales, Chinese fonts, htop, iftop, locate and so on…

The first problem
i run into was how to set up my wifi connection, i remember hardly that it was a pain in the A*S to set up the wpa_supplicant by hand, so i searched a bit and found out that there is an super nice networkmanager as well lightweight and not depending on heavy libs: WICD and this nice little tool has even a curses mode (wicd-curses)!!! its super easy to use.

File manager
I did not know witch file manager i like to use, i thought first about PCMan the LXDE file manager but then i noticed that i can work so fast and eficent on my awesom system without mouse, why install a mouse driven GUI, i just try midnight commander and its works very well.

How to use awesome
its took me half day to get used to work on an keyboard only (mostly) system, but after that time its very comfortable. awesome uses a special key to contol the system, this is the typical ‘windows’ or ‘mac’ or in my case the ‘g’ key with is usually not used on Linux. (following called gKey, do not get confused with the gdium usb stick^^)

If you start awesome first you have an empty screen, on top you see some workspaces and if you installed one the clock on the right.

To read a help file you do:
(gKey) + (F1)

You will get an autocomplete and filterd chise in the top panel

For launch an app:
(gKey) + (F2)

So SSH somewhere:
(gKey) + (F3)

To spam a new console you use
(gKey) + (enter)

The new consoles will be add in a certain pattern leaving you a main window and a some smaller ones, that layout can be changed of course.

To moce the consoles around and swap them you can use:
(gKey) + (SHIFT) + (K)

to the right, or

(gKey) + (SHIFT) + (J)

to the left.

To resize the main console you can use
(gKey) + (L) (bigger)
(gKey) + (H) (smaller)

I you like to change the workspace you just use the arrow keys on your keyboard

(gKey) + (Arrow left/right)

More details
You can rename the work spaces and decide by rules in witch workspace new programs will get moved to, all that work plus a lot of customization you can change in your
.awsomerc file, there is a lot of help at google.

my config: paste.ubuntuusers.de

Some Links
– Good install howto plus explanation of the config file
– Great wiki from the awesome makers
– The Debian image i used
– Nice screenshot with some links
– Very details install tutorial for ubuntu

This is a reminder of the Education Project ClassRoom agenda : today, starting 17:00 CET (Paris Hamburg hour)and we are proud to receive Heiner Rechtien, Release Engineer à Sun Microsystems who will present us the OpenOffice.org migration to Mercurial

This is an IRC ClassRoom

Channel is #education.openoffice.org
Server is irc.freenode.net

Everybody interested is welcome. For the newcomers, we use to let the speaker explain everything and keep the second part for questions.

See you !!

Pour la 4ème année consécutive, le club Linux-Tarn organise les "vendanges du libre" à Albi les 6, 7 et 13 novembre 2009.

L'événement se tiendra à la médiathèque Pierre-Amalric et à l'université J-F Champollion.

1. le vendredi 6 Novembre à 17h30 à la médiathèque Pierre Amalric :

Conférence débat avec Arnaud Degroote (présentation de NetBSD) et Gérard Genieys (notion d'intégration continue) sur le thème du développement collaboratif. Le débat sera suivi du verre des vendanges.

1. le samedi 7 Novembre de 10h00 à 17h00 à la médiathèque Pierre Amalric, :

Ateliers autour de différents thèmes (installation, éducation, bureautique, images, MAO...) en continu. Cette année, des professionnels interviendront en direction du monde de l'entreprise autour du thème de la virtualisation et celui de la gestion et de la comptabilité libres en entreprise

1. le vendredi 13 novembre à l'Université Champollion :

Install party à partir de 14h suivi d'un débat sur la loi HADOPI à 18h. Concert de clôture à 21h avec le groupe de musique libre Nej'ma.

L'association EducOOo, le projet OpenOffice.org Éducation et OOo4kids seront représentés lors de la journée de samedi 7 novembre. Venez nombreux !

If you want to discuss and know more what we do, the #ooo4Kids (notice the upper case) IRC channel has been created

Channel : #ooo4Kids
Server : irc.freenode.net

See you !

... and welcome to Marina Latini who started the OOo4Kids wiki translation in Italien !

In Wende School Trial Part 1 and Part 2, I mainly introduced how we identified the school for trial, our preparation work and part of the training. In this post, I will cover the demonstration class that teachers give us and how efficient our training has been so far.

With the target of having the children use the Gdiums by November, we have been raising our teacher on-site training session to twice a week. Another part of the training should be done by the teachers themselves and we insisted that they take the Gdiums at home in order to get familiar with the machine and the system when they have free time.

Migrant Schools always run on very low budgets, making them nearly impossible to attract qualified teachers, buying updated textbooks and avoiding high turn-over in both teachers and learning population.  Talking to the English is was a great example of this, and bringing her the few educational applications we had (dictionary, text-to-speech, vocabulary learning exercises, with native speaker voices, etc) definitely made a great upgrade to her existing teaching arsenal. She is now hoping to use the Gdium classroom daily or as much as possible based on other teacher schedule. She gave us a copy of the textbooks she uses so we can incorporate the vocabulary and the prerecorded words into the software we’re using (LLN (Linux Letters and Numbers). And we’re glad to see her joining the teacher training classes once the (children) mid term examination is over (in 2 weeks).

So 4 sessions into the teacher training it was now time to give them a little exam and see how they would be doing using the system with their students. We started off with 4 children, then 10 and then a full 20 children classroom. It was really exciting to see the classroom being used for its intended purpose: getting the children to learn maths, English and art without even noticing it! For most of them it was there first encounter with a computer, but this didn’t seem to slow them down at all. The teachers did really well as well and we should be starting teaching them content development to build upon and enhance the existing Open Educational Resources we have provided to start using the Gdiums in the classroom. In order to make the project more scalable, we are cooperating with organizations like LEAD and CSIP to have more trainers. If you are interested in this project, feel free to jump in!

OOoCon 2009
Alexandro Colorado will replace me during OOoCon 2009, both for the Education Project presentation and OOo4Kids presentation. Thanks to him!

(what follows is extracted from the changelogs)

30th October - me
* Replaced 82 Sun copyrighted icons in default_images ( 16, 24, 32 and 48 pixels), with the one Ben Bois provided in Applications and Documents icons page. This is achieved using a shell script, and this script will probably help to replace other icons, progressively.

Thanks to Stephan Bergmann who provided Thomas, Abdelkader and me important information for the OOo4Kids sugarization, mostly what do to cleanly modify the OOo4Kids tree, to match with Sugar specs.

(less recent, but so glad to see when other devs contribute :) )
26th October - Thomas Fontenay
First step done for the Sugarization of OOo4Kids: setting additional X window properties for Sugar
* New sources file SugarProperties.cxx in vcl/unx/source/window/
* New header file sugarxproperties.hxx in vcl/unx/inc
* Modified configure.in and set_soenv.in. configure now supports --with-xo-intel=yes (specified for a XO build).
* Many files modified, calling the new function SetSugarXProperties(Display*, window)

Some friends ask me about the performance of loongson2f. They want to know whether the performance of loongson 2f can surpass Marvell Sheeva CPU. Well I can not just say it's better or worse without giving the benchmark data.
Since there is a benchmark result of Marvell Sheeva CPU, we can run the same benchmark program on loongson 2f. The benchmark program is nbench.
Machine: gdium
OS: Debian squeeze
Kernel: Linux

1. gcc-4.3.4
CFLAGS = -s -static -Wall -O3

TEST	Iterations/sec.	Old Index	New Index
		Pentium 90*	AMD K6/233*
NUMERIC SORT	358.24.	9.19	3.02
STRING SORT	33.041	14.76	2.29
BITFIELD	5.5164e+07	9.46	1.98
FP EMULATION	47.402	22.75	5.25
FOURIER	4721.1	5.37	3.02
ASSIGNMENT	7.0534	26.84	6.96
IDEA	1597.4	24.43	7.25
HUFFMAN	575.17	15.95	5.09
NEURAL NET	4.2065	6.76	2.84
LU DECOMPOSITION	107.28	5.56	4.01

==========ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS========
INTEGER INDEX : 16.297
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 5.864
Baseline (MSDOS*) : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==========LINUX DATA BELOW============
CPU                 :
L2 Cache            :
OS                  : Linux 2.6.24-gdium-1
C compiler          : gcc version 4.3.4 (Debian 4.3.4-5)
libc                : libc-2.9.so
MEMORY INDEX        : 3.156
INTEGER INDEX       : 4.918
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 3.252
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

2. gcc-4.4
CFLAGS = -s -static -Wall -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops
CFLAGS += -march=loongson2f  -mtune=loongson2f  -mabi=n32

TEST	Iterations/sec.	Old Index	New Index
		Pentium 90*	AMD K6/233*
NUMERIC SORT	366.08	9.39	3.08
STRING SORT	46.686	20.86	3.23
BITFIELD	4.764e+07	8.17	1.71
FP EMULATION	90.2	43.28	9.99
FOURIER	5171.9	5.88	3.30
ASSIGNMENT	11.094	42.21	10.95
IDEA	1726.9	26.41	7.84
HUFFMAN	605	16.78	5.36
NEURAL NET	9.761	15.68	6.60
LU DECOMPOSITION	215.64	11.17	8.07

==========ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS========
INTEGER INDEX       : 20.035
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 10.100
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==========LINUX DATA BELOW============
CPU                 :
L2 Cache            :
OS                  : Linux 2.6.24-gdium-1
C compiler          : gcc-4.4
libc                : libc-2.9.so
MEMORY INDEX        : 3.922
INTEGER INDEX       : 5.997
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 5.602
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

Since I finally figured out what was wrong, we have Portable OOo4Kids on Windows XP (SP3 mini). To understand more, I started from the version Pierre-Yves Gosset a friend of mine from Framasoft did, but I had to do a lot of modifications, I did some cleanup, and created new files, to obtain something clean.

As a beginning, I started with a french version, but that's very easy to create other locales.

Stay tuned ;-)

Reading the OOo4Kids recent changelogs, I see Thomas and Abdel did serious progress with the OOo4Kids Sugarization !

Glad to see serious and brillant students contributing !! For the one who did not understand, OOo4Kids is a product of the Education Project: everything we implement in OOo4Kids is something we can teach, and explain to the students. As you can see, more time goes and more we can change things, and this brings a real motivation to them.


From my side, I continued to work at the new Writer assistant for OOo4Kids. Last thing I did was to define a value for the SID_NEW_SW slot ID. Better read the cookbook.

To be continued.


"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
Education Project on the wiki

EducOO.org blog (french)

OOo4Kids Project

Many thanks to Ben Bois , author of the EducOOo logo, dedicated to the OpenOffice.org Education Project
...

This week-end we have been for the second time to a new school with the volunteers from LEAD. The school is located in the north of Beijing, between 天通苑 (Tiantongyuan) and the north 6th road. We were already there last week but we could not start the computer class yet because we had to check the computer room first and see what we could do with it. The school has about 15 computers with low-end hardware, typically Pentium II or Pentium III (300 to 500 MHz) with 64MB of memory running Windows 98, Me or 2000. We have spent two Saturday morning checking the computers, merging working parts into new units and sometimes reinstalling operating systems and in the end, managed to get 6 computers running on Saturday and 3 others for which we just need to install a new system.

One of the big challenges I am facing in these kind of cases is to find a way to install Linux on these computers. The schools usually do not have a lot of requirements but they would still ask for compatibility with the Microsoft Office suite and of course Chinese support. I have not been very lucky with the Chinese version of Puppy Linux: 小芭比Linux, the CD would not boot on every computer and burning the image on a USB disk using the provided tool has not worked for me and there is still quite some work to be done on the localization side. On the top of that, I am not sure that Puppy running on a 64MB PII@400MHz would be able to run Open Office but we should certainly not give up and I would greatly appreciate any advice on that field. So, for the time being, I swallowed my pride and got RUR-PLE running on those machines with Windows 2000.

RUR-PLE is quite an amazing educational application, the principle is to teach young kids (we usually work with grades 4, 5 or 6 kids) how to write programing code in Python by piloting a little robot:

The screenshot above shows the main window of the application, the robot on the right side is executing the instructions from the left side when the user clicks on the play button. It proves to be extremely efficient with young students, most of them enjoy experimenting with the robot and solving the problems that are given to them. (for example, guiding the robot through a maze). This is actually the reason why I like this application so much, I wrote that RUR-PLE was teaching how to use python but in practice, what it does teach is problem solving, it does not really matter if the children can write Python code at the end of the term, what is important is the time they spent finding solutions for the problems that were submitted to them. RUR-PLE is available in Chinese too, it was localized by the Greenboard team a few years ago and it comes with a set of 40 lessons that have also been localized by some LEAD and Greenboard volunteers.

So LEAD is now providing RUR-PLE classes in two schools, children have been using volunteers laptops while we were working on the refurbishing but starting from next week, they will be able to use at least 6 of their own computers, and hopefully 10 in the week after.

A big THANK YOU to Ben Bois for his help and everything (building, website and more ...)

=> the link for the download



Changelog :

All versions:
* Fixed the silly Start Center bug with the white rectangle on right.
* Did more code cleanup in backingwindow.cxx (removed useless entries, and so on)
* The new Writer Assistant skeleton is in place. Missing: final implementation.
* Fixed a crash with Calc. Was due to the missing addins functions.
* Fixed a silly bug with addins : now, the Calc functions wizard no longer displays all the addins in "beginner" or "average" mode

Windows only:
* Fixed the sound issues in Impress: build are now made using the DirectX 9 SDK. Need feedback for the videos : usable ?
* Fixed the crash when the computer comes back from sleep. Added Thorsten Behrens patch from the [http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=103464 issue 103464].

Linux only:
* new customizable look for the User Interface (generic plugin is now used, for performance reasons)

La version 0.5.1 d'OOo4Kids est disponible au téléchargement. Cette micro-version corrige un certain nombre de bugs, dont la liste figure plus bas.

=> Site de téléchargement

Changements entre la 0.5 et la 0.5.1 (basée sur le code du milestone DEV300_m57 d'OpenOffice.org) :

Toutes versions :

• Corrigé le bug du Start Center : bug du rectangle blanc à droite, sur la ligne "Créer un nouveau document" .
• Nettoyage de code dans backingwindow.cxx ( supprimé des entrées inutiles, etc )
• Le squelette du nouvel assistant Writer est en place. Manque: implémentation finale (en cours)
• Corrigé un crash avec Calc, dû à des fonctions "Addin" manquantes dans les ressources
• Corrigé un bug avec les fonctions Addin : dorénavant l'assistant des fonctions dans Calc, n'affiche plus toutes les fonctions Addin non souhaitées en mode "débutant" ou même "moyen" (elles n'apparaissent plus qu'en mode expert).
• nettoyage de code

Windows seulement :

• Corrigé le problème du son, avec utilisation de DirectX 9
• Corrigé le crash quand l'ordinateur revient de veille. Le correctif utilise le patch fourni par Thorsten Behrens à l'issue 103464 (et qu'on peut télécharger http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=103464).

Linux seulement :

• Nouvelle interface utilisateur personnalisable pour le thème générique (gnome n'est plus utilisé), via un fichier de configuration.

Le site de téléchargement est gracieusement mis à disposition par TuxServices (http://www.tuxservices.com ), et est maintenu par Nicolas Jeudy et Ben Bois. Si vous appréciez notre travail, merci de penser à nous aider (donations, participation) via l'association qui soutient le projet : DONATIONS

IMPORTANT : merci de nous rapporter tout problème important sur la liste dev@listes.educoo.org (inscription : http://listes.educoo.org/mailman/listinfo/dev ), et aussi de lire attentivement l'avertissement sur la page de téléchargement.

Bien cordialement,

L'équipe OOo4Kids

Informations complémentaires :

OOo4Kids (prononcez "OpenOffice for Kids") est un logiciel à destination des enfants de 7 à 12 ans, basé sur le code source d'OpenOffice.org, mais très simplifié. Cela signifie qu'OpenOffice.org a certaines fonctionnalités qu'OOo4Kids n'aura pas (Base, Java). Si ces fonctionnalités vous sont indispensables, utilisez OpenOffice.org que vous pourrez télécharger à l'adresse : http://download.openoffice.org/index.html

RECOMMANDATIONS :

Attention : il s'agit d'une version de développement (0.5.1, incomplète, mais néanmoins très stable et fonctionnelle). Pensez à faire une sauvegarde de vos données, et ne l'utilisez pas en production.

Les version actuellement disponibles sont les versions :

- Windows (XP mini) : l'installateur est inclus. Suivre les indications et lancer OOo4Kids à la fin.

Problèmes connus: OOo4Kids fonctionne parfaitement en parallèle avec OpenOffice.org. Mais le dernier installé bénéficiera de l'association de fichiers. Ainsi, si vous installez OOo4Kids en parallèle avec OpenOffice.org, pensez à réinstaller OpenOffice.org après, sinon, un double clic sur un fichier .odf ou .doc ou autre compatible OpenOffice.org, ouvrira OOo4Kids et pas OpenOffice.org.

- Mac OS X (Intel et PowerPC) : S'installe et fonctionne parfaitement en parallèle avec OpenOffice.org.

Un double clic sur l'archive téléchargée, montera l'image disque automatiquement, et le logiciel s'installe en glissant-déposant l'icône d'OOo4Kids dans le répertoire Applications (fortement suggéré).Dockez l'icône puis cliquez dessus pour lancer OOo4Kids. Les préférences sont placées dans le répertoire ~/Library/Application Support/OOo4Kids qu'il vous suffit de supprimer si vous avez un problème, ou simplement souhaitez désinstaller OOo4Kids proprement (après avoir aussi supprimé le Bundle, bien entendu)

- Linux Intel : .tar.gz pré-installé : il faut décompresser l'archive, et déposer le contenu dans un répertoire personnel. Ensuite, chercher le script soffice, et double cliquer dessus, ou le lancer en ligne decommande. Si le fonctionnement est correct, créer un lanceur. Des .deb et des .rpm seront fournis ultérieurement.

Pour les autres versions (Linux PowerPC et Mips 32bits), elles seront mises en ligne très bientôt, mais vous pouvez me contacter pour tester une ancienne version.