OLPC and web browsing

The OLPC connection to the wireless network was very stable and it came with Firefox 3.0.1
The yahoo mail pages rendered better than the Kubuntu 8.10 with Firefox 3.0.1. And its so neat! However since there are tonnes of online stuff for kids it also means more fun. But most ofthe games were Flash based and the Gnash that came with OLPC did not have any sound for the flash.

Here are my notes on adding Adobe flash plugins.

1. Go to www.adobe.com and download flash 10 as an RPM package. It should then appear on the /home/olpc directory if I recall correctly. Alternativelyin a terminal type


wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/flash-plugin-10.0.12.36-release.i386.rpm

2. Open a terminal and login to root

su -l

3. Install the flash

rpm -ih flash-plugin-10.0.12.36-release.i386.rpm

4. This installs flash to standard mozilla directory, which will not work. Create a link in the Activities directory for Firefox.

cd /home/olpc/Activities/Firefox-6.activity
ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so .

5. Open Firefox and test it on the flash website.

Martha then can play the online alphabet games! yippee!

FOSS.my 2008 at APIIT

Wow a major FOSS event held at APIIT! This I couldnt miss and I brought along Martha for both days.

FOSS.my ran between 8 to 9 Oct 2008 with a capacity of close to 250 participants. This brought about the much needed awareness for students and fellow developers who have been using OSS but have not had the chance to embrace its aura. Abdullah found it mind blowing, OSS speak. Others were just awed that there was even such a movement and the various technologies available.

I had chance to mingle with FOSSchixs Nuha, Eavay, Liyana and Saro. They are keen to recruit Martha, but I suspect its more to make her into a mascot. They will have to wait a couple more of years before Martha can show her ICT skills. If not as a programmers, maybe a coordinator of OSS projects. See photos of martha at http://flickr.com/photos/lotso

Pia had a session where everyone is invited for a 10 sec pitch on why they should own an OLPC laptop. Martha pulled me down and managed to get an OLPC! Yippee she was so happy and managed to get around quite a bit on her own. Martha could move the cursor, turn the screen and select some of the menus.

Initially I could not get the OLPC wireless to work at home. With a hard reboot, then I saw my WPA network and managed to get connected after the password prompt appeared and I entered the correct password.

Some how the web browser wasnt very easy to locate.