The Freebsd notebook project... was Flashplugin

[sergio lenzi]

Em Dom, 2008-06-08 às 14:37 +0100, Chris Whitehouse escreveu:

> Jerry McAllister wrote:

====================================

The idea behind the FreebSD nobebook project is rather simple:

Here in my country a person must (or should) pay a lot of taxes to
the govern...  for every notebook sold, there is about 70% of taxes plus
about 6% month of fincancial costs... so a "small notebook" sells for
about U$1400.  
in this $1400 there are almost $800 of taxes... without count the
financial costs of about 6%/month (at best) .

But not everything is lost...  the govern invest much money in
education,
and health... (I know that a lot of money is lost... but it does not
count, lost is lost)...

For educacional pourposes,  the taxes are very low (about 10%)... so a
good notebook
sells for US800. (final cost)..  the notbook is turion 64 (preferable
not dual core)... 120gb hd
wireless 13"... without operating system.. and bought in chunks of 1000.

Because they will use open source, and the operating system must be
built from  ground zero within the university...
serialized, with a software key code that is able to trace the
machine...
(there is no debian, mandriva, gentoo....,microsoft) no comercial brand
should apply... 
finance with the State bank in 36 months it will cost about US$20/month
with insurance...

The student sign a contract that will take care of the machine and if
tampered (other no open source
OS installed)... all the taxes should be payed  by him... 

The notbooks runs Gnome 2.22 and with wireless in the campus, everybody
can access the multimedia
files stored in the FreBSD servers (about 20T)... Using a modified divx
codec, the media is protected from
being seen or used by non authorized persons (ok I know that the
protection is not hard) but is enough
for dayly used (all media is marked with a water mark (thanks mencoder
team...)).

The Evolution (email client...) is linked with the open exchange server
and ldap... so a person can email and
receive information form the university staff and others using the ldap
servers... 

Telephony is done using Ekiga (low rates apply to PSTN)... and if you
have fast internet connection, the builtin camera can be used
for video on Ekiga... 

Gatekeepers (using gnugk) links directly to the PSTN, ekiga talks h323..
so no problem with it too.

For office is used openoffice 3.0 (now beta).. 

Media is produced or convertd using ffmpeg mplayer...    can be seen on
the standard gnome media
player, using libxine backend... 

it just works....

Hope will start installing the servers till end of this month...

Ok... and the users that already have the vista boxes??? (about 2%)
No problem... for a small $$$$  they can install a program
that identifyes the notebook to the servers. About the media...
well they can always convert the media... (some more cost is
involved...)
no virus protection is installed in the network. so windows users
are advised to not link their computers at any point of the network
(use at own risk signs are all around...)

Included in the project, there is $$$$ for training the users to use
gnome...
(well in fact... make the users forget words and methods. (excell,
outlook, word,
anti-virus, codec, media player...))
Why not KDE????   too powerfull.. excelent, consumes more resources,
must get an written permission for QT (the lawers said...). Too
complicated for the users....
the users just want to ckick and go... 

That is the project... it was 2 years of negotiation... of course "THEY"
tried to do the same...
but after 2 years... the project specification remains the same... 

Another good candidate is Arch Linux...   but have some problems with
the media play...
(totem xine zoom does not work, and the openoffice in native language
have some problems,
kernel version and internals change too soon... the kernel schedule does
not compare to FreeBSD7_ULE...
so sometimes the media play "chokes"  at heavy load...  but is a good
candidade)...

With the $$$$  earn in the project... some of them will be inject in
FreeBSD to make some things work (flash player,
buggy bios...).  Must have $$$ to teach people to program in
gnome/gtk... 
this will generate JOBS.. if one in 100 produce something in some time
we will have a "new softwre company"...
The first buyer???  the govern...

The ideia is to theach the children for no need to punish the men...


Thanks for reading....

Sergio