Minutes February 14, 2008

Minutes of the February 14, 2008 Vita-Learn Central Meeting 

Present: Ray Ballou, Eric Hall, Bryant Patten, Cynthia
Powers, Michael Morgan, Bob Sargent, Brendan Powers, Warren Luebkeman 

We all logged in to Bradford Elementary School’s thinclient
while Michael Morgan described the system. His lab consists of networked Mac G4
laptops that dual boot between OS X and Resara’s Linux thin client. The Linux
side is administrated from a single server that Resara is able to support
remotely. All of the Macs in the school are able to dual boot in this fashion.
Warren Luebkeman demonstrated the applications Resara has developed for
administrating users, groups, and hardware on the thinclient.

Warren described how Intel-based wireless laptops can be
configured with  Resara’s software to
allow them to dual boot in a similar way, this time as chubby clients that have
their own OS and applications. The linux side can be wirelessly administrated
from a central server. The demo laptop was an ASUS Eee. 

Bryant Patten demonstrated the OX, the One Laptop Per Child
device. He explained the new user interface, Sugar, and passed the OX around to
allow people to use it. It is a robust machine with impressive capability,
though it is not aimed at the market in the U.S. We placed the OX next to the
ASUS Eee to compare screens. The widths were the same, but the OX displayed
about 1/3 more along the vertical dimension. 

Bob Sargent demonstrated a 1 Gig. bootable flash drive with
Knoppix 5.1.1. 

We were reminded that the next meeting is on March 13,
probably at Montpelier High School. Its focus will be VTcite Phase II. 

We were reminded that there will be a Vita-Learn sponsored
Open Source conference on April 4

th. This conference is for teachers
and IT personnel. 

We were reminded to encourage teachers to go to Dynamic
Landscapes. 

We toured the school, which has a brand new addition and an
optical fiber backbone tying its network together. Nice.