Feelin' the Launchpad Luv!

The screenshot above shows Scratch running natively on Ubuntu Karmic.  There is a Scratch in Launchpad web page that greatly simplifies the installation process, at least for someone generally familiar with basic Debian system administration.

I've been running the Windows version of Scratch using wine for the past year, and using the new version has several important advantages:

• Most of the midi features now work, so students can be exposed to music ideas through Scratch.
• The operating system is now aware of the application, so clicking on any of the half a million Scratch programs on the http://scratch.mit.edu website now offers the option of loading the programs directly into Scratch.  This is a big step forward for the Scratch user experience on Ubuntu, especially for the young learners who are the target of Scratch.
• Saved programs now have a scratch cat logo on them in the graphical file browser.  Clicking on the file icon with the mouse loads them into Scratch.
• Fonts look nicer, making reading the programming blocks easier.

This is fantastic news for educators using Ubuntu!  While I understand that there are still software freedom issues to be worked out with the Scratch developers, Scratch is compellingly excellent software (the best educational software I have ever seen), and having it available on Ubuntu means that I can stay with the operating system I love best and use the software I need to use for the benefit of my students.  It also opens up the possibility of Ubuntu Live USB sticks with Scratch pre-installed.

Sugar Now Available Too

In related news, Sugar now works on Ubuntu Karmic as well.  The Sugar Team on Launchpad provides a Personal Package Archive (ppa) with the latest (version 0.86) sugar.  This is great news for us at the Governor's Career and Technical Academy in Arlington (GCTAA), where we plan to make contributing to Sugar a central part of our Information and Communications Technology program, and needed to be able to do that on Ubuntu.


Feeling Warm Fuzzies from Launchpad

I've been using Launchpad since soon after it was first available on-line.  Ever since hearing Mark Shuttleworth talk about his vision for it back at the Ubuntu Down Under developer conference, I understood that Launchpad is a core part of bringing developers and users together to make Ubuntu better.

Getting Scratch and Sugar delivered to our computer lab through the fine work of the Scratch and Sugar Teams on Launchpad is definitely giving me the warm fuzzies toward the Ubuntu community and the Launchpad platform.

Thank you Ubuntu community!

Update from Los Chilamates

The picture above shows the students from Los Chilamates who have been attending Saturday XO classes at la Universidad Evangelica de El Salvador.

Classes have been proceeding well, and I'll report back with more details as soon as I have them.  My son, Louis, will be heading to El Salvador on December 17 to help with the project.  I'll be sending detailed reports back from Chalatenango during his visit.

Louis's goals for the project during his visit include:

1. Bring two mini computers running Ubuntu Karmic for the lab.
2. Get a router working so that multiple computers can connect to the Internet at the same time.
3. Organize at least 2 classes with the 5 teenage activists in the project using the networked computers.
4. Jump start work on the website.

 
Scratch on Ubuntu

In related news, there is now a PPA (personal package archive) with the latest Scratch available on Launchpad.  The project is located here.  It works like a charm!  I've been using wine to run the windows version, but midi functions like playing notes and instruments never worked this way.  Now it does, and having a native version makes saving and finding projects a lot easier as well.

Since I will also need Scratch running on the Fedora 12 machines we have in the lab for Sugar development, I needed an rpm.  Sabastian Dzaillas, maintainer of the Fedora EDU spin, suggested I try using alien.  I did, and it worked!

Email me if you want a copy of the rpm.  I want to find a place to post it, but I'm still not sure about the licensing issues.  It works, but it still needs a bit of love to get rid of the errors that are reported during installation.

The Magic of Bees

Dr. Frank Linton is passionate about bees.  Peter Hufford, Robin Brooke and I got to share in a bit of that passion when we visited Frank's observation bee hive yesterday morning.  Teaching duties keep me from having the time to share more fully all that I learned, but let me just hit a few of the highlights:

• Honey bees communicate information about the location of food by "dancing".
• They point relative to the direction and "waggle" relative to the distance of the food.
• They are the only know species of animal to communicate this way.
• There is a 10 million dollar project underway at Harvard to build a robotic bee.
• Bees maintain a temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit around the developing young by converting honey into heat (by flapping their wings).
• If the temperature gets below 55 degrees Fahrenheit, the hive will die.
• Hives generally have only one queen, though about 5 percent have two (sister or mother/daughter) queens.
• Honey can keep a looong time.   Edible honey  was found in Egyptian tombs.
• Below a certain moisture content, sugar becomes a preservative, because it binds chemically with water molecules, literally sucking the living water out of any microscopic plant, animal, or fungus that might come in contact with it.
• A bee hive can be moved less than 3 feet or more than 3 miles, and the bees will be able to find it.  Move it more than 3 feet and less than 3 miles, and the hive will die because the bees will be lost.
  

I left the visit with a much better understanding of Dr. Linton's fascination with bees, and was reminded once again why I am so attracted to project based, interdisciplinary learning.  The "fields of discipline" that come into play when looking at bees -- chemistry, insect and plant biology, information science, linguistics, mathematics, economics, history -- can not be neatly separated into academic silos of knowledge.  Understanding honey bees involves the interplay of all of them, and more.

I am greatly looking forward to our work this semester on the Measure activity for Sugar.

Making a Custom Ubuntu USB Live Stick with Remastersys and Virtualbox

It is a beautiful thing when something just works!

I'm teaching a beginning programming class at a local community college and I wanted to give my students a bootable USB stick with the software (Python, of course!) that we would need for the class.

My minimum requirements above a stock Ubuntu desktop were:

1. gasp
2. geany
3. How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python, 2nd Ed.
   

I tried and failed to make an iso image using the instructions here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCDCustomizationFromScratch

Not only didn't this meet the "for human beings" test, but all I got was an (initramfs) prompt when I tried to boot from the USB stick after I made it.

Before trying to figure out what went wrong, I decided to try using Remastersys. It worked like a charm!

Here is what I did:

1. Installed a fresh copy of Jaunty for i386 on a VirtualBox.
2. Updated the software, and installed all the new software I wanted (geany and a bunch of other python stuff).
3. Downloaded the lastest version of gasp (I used the tgz file with version 0.3.2 from launchpad), untarred it, and copied the gasp directory to /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages.
4. Using System -> Administration -> Software Sources, selecting the Third-Party Software tab, and clicking on the +Add... button, I added the following repository: deb http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/repository ubuntu/
5. Updated the software list in Synaptic, and installed the remastersys package.
6. Selected System -> Administration -> Remastersys Backup and used remastersys to make an iso image of my custom Ubuntu.

Using Remastersys

Using remastersys could not have been easier (it definitely meets the "for human beings" requirement). On launch, the user is presented with the following, warning that all other windows must be closed before proceeding:


Click OK to proceed to the main Remastersys-gui window:


Just select the Dist option, click OK, and wait. After about 15 minutes you will have a working custom.iso image in the /home/remastersys/remastersys directory.

I used scp to copy the image from the VirtualBox instance to the host machine (which was also running Ubuntu, of course) Then I used USB Startup Disk Creator to put the image on a USB stick, complete with read-write storage for saving files.

I can now make live USB sticks for my evening programming class. Remastersys rocks! I hope it makes it's way into the Universe repository, so that it will be even easier to install and use.

It feels good to be part of history...

On Sunday morning (Aug. 23) I met with a friend who works in the Ministry of Culture. We talked about the ministy's interest in using Free Software in the cultural centers they have throughout the country.

At 12:30 pm on the same day, I attended the Ubuntu-SV "Pizza Bash" where I got to hear about the exciting things the 24 folks who attended the event are doing to promote free software in El Salvador.

The most exciting news is the decision recently made by the Ministry of Education to switch from proprietary to free software in all the public schools in El Salvador.

This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak on Radio Cadena Mi Gente, where I had the opportunity to describe what free software is and why I was in El Salvador promoting it to listeners across the country.

It feels good to be part of history, and to play a part, no matter how small, in making changes for the better!

What we accomplished this week...

We held three classes each day for 2 hours each class. The morning class was all younger children, and focused on Sugar and Scratch. The mid-day class was a mix of younger kids and adolecents. We divided this class between the Sugar/Scratch group and the XHTML group. The night class was all older teenage and older folks and focused on XHTML.

The classes were full with as many as 37 people attending the evening session. This stretched our limited resources to the breaking point, and led to some slow going for a day or two, since we didn't have enough XOs to go around. Later in the week classes were a bit smaller, and everyone who attended could get a laptop to work on.

The longer term goal for this project is to make it self sustaining. The most interested participants will form study groups and continue to work toward learning enough web development skills to create a web site for the cooperative. Hopefully others with interest in working with the children will bring them together to work more with Sugar. At some point soon some of the families will be taking XOs home with them. The problem is deciding how to deploy them, since there aren't enough for everyone. The goal is to get them distributed where they will be most heavily used.

One BIG Worry...

Today the router stopped working again! I don't understand why. A single machine can get an address, but the router does not seem to be able to get one. This project will not work if we can't distribute Internet access, so this is a serious concern. Douglas Cerna is on his way here from San Salvador today. He is bringing another router and a NIC. Hopefully between the two of us we will be able to figure this thing out.

Sugar is Sweet!

We just finished our first class in Chalate. Ten of the eleven students had never used a computer before, the first class was spent getting them instroduced the new machine. They are young, they learn fast, and Sugar (or Azucar as we call it in Spanish) makes computers easy to love.

Last Friday I was talking with one of the community elders who told me he didn't like computers. A few minutes later one of the kids showed him an XO running Azucar. "Oh, I like this", he said with a smile.

Since none of the kids can type, I plan to take a look at the typing activities available to see what they can do. I'll report back later. The "Hablar" (Talk) activity was a big hit, and several eyes lit up when we looked up "vaca" (cow) on Wikipedia using the Browse activity.

Oh, a summary of the working condition of the 30 laptops sent for this project is as follows:

• 22 in perfect working order
• 1 with a defective touchpad
• 1 with defective video
• 1 with defective networking

5 of the batteries were bad. I combined 3 of these with the defective computers, leaving 2 working computers that will need to be plugged in to function.