Some computers do not support boot from USB, but do have USB ports. On these machines you can boot your Slax operating system off USB using a helper CD.
There is a simple way to accomplish this.
- download the Slax ISO http://www.slax.org/get_slax.php?download=iso
- extract the ISO. on linux you can mount the ISO and copy it to a new directory on your hard drive
- mkdir /tmp/cdrom; mount -o loop /dev/cdrom /tmp/cdrom;mkdir /tmp/slaxcd;cp -R /tmp/cdrom/* /tmp/slaxcd/
- Now you can modify the copy of the ISO in /tmp/slaxcd. To make the CD read the operating system from the USB remove /slax/livecd.sgn. This is the only change you have to make. You can also remove /slax/base and /slax/modules to make the helper CD smaller. I have not investigated if other files can also be omitted.
Write up of the Open Minds Conference [www.infinitethinking.org]
(photo by Dolly)
LAMS was very well recieved at the K-12 Open Minds conference in Indiana. I think its hard to understand what LAMS does until a person has some experience with Moodle without LAMS. There were lots of Moodle users at this conference. My audiance was mostly Tech Directors and they felt that the teachers they were supporting were trying to do LAMS like sequences using Moodle alone and would really appreciate LAMS.
The State of Indiana is officially moving K-12 Education to Open Source so there was a lot of interest in LAMS as a mechanism for sharing lessons plan and helping to administration monitor where in the curriculum teachers were.
One of the most exciting sessions at the K-12 Open Minds conference was on Sugar by Walter Bender himself!
Background: Sugar is the operating system that ships on the XO (One Laptop per Child) laptop. It is actually a varient of Linux and can run on any computer.
I had had various conversations with people about School Key so the room was primed to think about Sugar on a Stick, that is giving students bootable USB Keys loaded with the Sugar operating system.
The idea really captured the imagination of the room. Most of the people I spoke with at the conference saw the potential advantages of School Key with a standard Linux distributions. But Sugar for young (probably K-3) students is far more exciting. Sugar doesn't look like Windows, its is clearly designed for younger students and is clearly designed to promote collaboration, exploration and knowledge construction.
Coming off my success applying the bootsplash image to a customized Slax, I tried again. This time, I could not replace the old bootsplash image with my previous custom bootsplash image.
I spent a while trying many different combinations.
Eventually I noticed that there was a copy of the bootsplash image under /slax/changes that was overriding the custom bootsplash image embedded in the bootsplash.lzm module I created.
So my advice is to start with a clean changes directory whenever possible. Any changes you want to persist should be stored in a module or /slax/rootcopy/.
Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson
In Chapter 1 the authors discuss the advantages of moving technology to a modular environment.
"[The] Microsoft Windows Operating System is interdependent. Changing just ten lines of code could necessitate rewriting millions of others. It would cost millions of dollars to customize Windows exactly to your needs. The economics of interdependence mandate standardizations, and we live with it. Most of us are unaware of how our lives might improve if we had easily configurable operating systems at our disposal; it's just a luxury that had never been feasible. Once Unix technology had matured sufficiently, however, an open source operating system such as Linux became feasible. Linux's architecture is modular and can be customized - witness how the open-source programming community continually updates and enhances it, kernel by kernel." (p. 32)
I use the bootsplash.lzm that is periodically updated and posted on the Slax forums. The latest is for Slax 6.0.7.
http://www.slax.org/forum.php?action=view&parentID=12476
Once you download the bootsplash.lzm you just add it to your
/slax/modules directory, boot up Slax then open a terminal window. Run
bootsplash.slax commmand and follow the prompts.
To customize the splash screen you need to generate a 640x480 jpg file.
The easiest way to make sure the file is the correct format is to take
the existing jpg and edit it. I used gimp. Take the bootsplash.lzm
file. Use /slax/tools/lzm2dir to extract the lzm to a directory. Then
go into the directory and edit
/etc/bootsplash/themes/current/images/silent-640x480.jpg (or
verbose-640x480.jpg). You can also edit the configuraton
/etc/bootsplash/themes/current/config/bootsplash-640x480.cfg.
To add a progress bar to the boot splash screen see this
thread on linuxquestons.org.
You can do this on a running slax install and it will be saved you your changes directory.
Download rc.progress.
This is a modified version from that link. I tried creating a
progressdown function so the progress bar would shrink during shutdown,
but I haven't gotten it to work yet.
Add rc.progress.rc /etc/rc,d.
Then at the top of each rc file you want to increase the bar in add:
# Load the splash function
. /etc/rc.d/rc.progress
After that just add "progressup" to each file where you want the
progress bar to increase (make sure it is at the start of a new line
each time).
My Todo/Wish list of the next Video
- Customized splash screen that says Fenway School not Solution Grove
- Video releases so I can have students in the video
- Longer shots, I didn't shoot enough still footage and thus stuff is choppier then I would have liked
- More shots focusing in the the USB Key
Let me know other suggestions!
Ernie over at LAMS has been working on LAMS "Tool Adaptors". These allow you to use the LMS, e.g. Moodle, .LRN, tools such as Forum, inside of LAMS with far more integration.
Main page on Tool Adaptors: http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lams/Tool+Adapters
The secret to understanding this is to go into the .LRN and Moodle pages and watch the vidoes of the Forums integration.
But the real power and promise isn't in using Forums, its the concept of being able to integrate tools from the LMS in rich ways with LAMS. That opens up a wide world of possiblities for creating customized solutions for learning.
We haven't done it yet but here are instructions for how to make a bootable USB for OLPC.
(photo by Test Computers)
This weekend I tested the two partian key on 5 machines in my house. The test results are here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=px5yPvIlUlLtVM4rBcqdJdA&hl=en
With either the Key alone or with the helper CD everything booted up. They all appeared to work except the128 RAM machine, which could not open the web browser. Interestingly, it did not fail in the same way as the Shaw school machines. At the Shaw school the machines spontanously rebooted. On my older 128MB machine it did not reboot, just failed to ever actually start the web browser.
Our customers, and thier students, are often using a wiki for the first time on one of our sites. I saw a great video on YouTube explaining the whys and hows of Wikis.
I also made a quick demo to show the features they go over in our wiki. Try out the basics and then when you are ready to learn more check out this documentation: http://www.solutiongrove.com/docwiki/howtoxowiki
Connectivism Course [ltc.umanitoba.ca]
I am participating, in a non-credit capacity, in the massively online course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. This is a great experiment to apply the ideas of connective knowledge to a course about the same topic. As a programmer, I enjoy the recursive nature of that. The course started this week. I am a little behind on my homework but I am catching up. My first task was to post an introduction on the Moodle forum for the course.
Here is what I posted to the forums:
I am Dave Bauer from a small town outside Albany, New York. I am chief
architect at Solution Grove, a company that provides online learning
technology, among other things.
I have been interested in learning pretty much ever since I got online.
I have followed a networked, hyperlinked path all around learning and
learning technology, and hopefully this course will give me even more
to think about, and help me organize me thinking.
This course will be a success for me if I can take what I have learned, and actually explain it to someone else!
I have actually followed a networked learning path to my current job. I
was exploring online for ways to improve a retail web site I ran about
10 years ago. I discovered an online book, Philip and Alex's Guide to
Online Publishing, and after reading that, I changed my focus. The main
premise (besides the software behind it) is that a community is a set
of people focused on learning. So from there I learned about online
community software and eventually taught myself enough to find a full
time job building interesting online communties, often focused on some
form of learning.
I hope to be able to learn from this course how to make better software
tools for online learning by understanding how the learning half of
that actually works.
One of the technical issues we are working on is that in last weeks tests I found that if I was reckless about when I pulled out the USB Key I could end up with a USB Key that no longer boots. In an ideal world everyone will shut down thier computer and wait for shut down to complete before removing the key. However, the point of the project is to design for real people in real schools!
We are working with the SLAX community on ideas for making the Key more robust. http://www.slax.org/forum.php?action=view&parentID=21051
Will update as we find out which solutions actually help.
MLC uses two cells to represent each bit, but can pack the cells more densely. MLC requires 2 writes for each bit.
SLC uses one cell per bit so it writes faster and has no "partially programmed" state.
Here is even more detail: http://www.supertalent.com/datasheets/SLC_vs_MLC%20whitepaper.pdf
The problem:
Some computers, for example the older computer lab at Fenway High School, do not have the capablilty to change the BIOS to allow boot from USB. However, they still have a USB port. So the question is how do we allow these computers to be used with School Key.
The answer is create a CD with just the bare necessity of boot files, and set it to look for a USB drive for everything else.
We asked on the Slax forums and its been done!
http://www.slax.org/forum.php?action=view&parentID=21028
We've tested it and it seems to work! We need to put in a splash screen and take out the boot-up choices and then I can take it back to Fenway to test again.
YUI the Next Generation [developer.yahoo.com]
Solutiongrove has been using YUI on the front-end since it was released in 2006. I fell in love with it's sophisticated handling of browser events and how event listeners put unobtrusive in "Unobtrusive Javascript".
We have seen it evolve from a couple of core utilities to a library with complex controls and widgets.
Just a few days ago the YUI team released a developer preview of YUI 3, the next generation YUI library (YNG, YUI Next Generation).
I haven't had a chance to try it yet out but I'm pretty sure I will soon.
While I haven't had a chance to examine the code , I have had the opportunity to read up on the documentation and join the YUI 3 Yahoo Group.
We are trying to boot our custom Linux distribution on as many different configurations as we can find. Today we tried this at the Shaw school computer lab.
Both the current USB boot and the SLAX CD were unstable on the Compaq computers in the Shaw school computer lab. They would boot, let me do a couple of things then the screen goes black and they reboot.
Our current hypothisis is that the system is running out of RAM and dieing. We suspect this is due to the RAM disk allocated on startup to help performance. Dave is going to work on a new test system that creates a smaller RAM disk.
In the long run we need to find a way to check how much RAM a system has and then configure the system to take advantage of it. This seems tricky, but perhaps not impossible. My first thought is to boot really quickly not loading much, check the system, write to the USB what memory configuration to use, then reboot using that. Please post a comment if you have other ideas on how this can be done.
The School Key concept was created by Caroline Meeks and Amy Bisiewicz in the Spring of 2008 the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) "Educational Entrepenuership" class taught by Professor John Richards.
In the Fall of 2008 Caroline Meeks will work on implementing and piloting the concept as an Internship for credit at HGSE. The Internship will be advised by Professor Chris Dede of HGSE and Bryant Patten of the National Center for Open Source in Education.
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