Design for Isolated and Inexperienced user base

[Jonathan Carter]

Hi Jonathan

On Thu, 2006-03-16 at 11:19 -0500, Jonathan D. Proulx wrote:
> :Just check that the suspend on lid close works fine, some IBM's only
> :work with APM, and others just with ACPI.
> 
> Good point hadn't tested that yet,  but power management is rather
> crucial here.

Which model Thinkpads are those, btw? Have they been sourced yet? I
would also suggest a laptop with a smaller display- since it would use
slightly less power. Slower hard disks will help too, and making sure
that the cpu scaling works is also important (Edubuntu should do it
fine, but just make sure).

> Populating the desktop is a key question, what should go there (I'm
> leaning toward home directory, gcompris, tux-math, openoffice.org)

>From what you've explained, there'll be a high user to laptop ratio in
the areas these laptops will go into. I think it's likely that the
productivity tools will be high in demand, OpenOffice will probably be
quite highly utilised. Something like Scribus might be of importance for
community newsletters, etc. I would also include Inkscape, and of
course, some documentation/turorials for all these packages. I don't
know what the mandate of the sponsor is, but if the communities have
full autonomy over the use, I would assume that they'll address their
primary ICT needs first. Will they have cell phones with GPRS
connectivity? (that would be fantastic)

> I'm a bit concerned that the well meaning folks who've proposed this
> donation haven't thought through how to really make use of the
> resources we're handing out.   I'm hoping they have, but given my
> rather vague marching orders... 

I hope they take your feedback into account ツ

> Oh did I mention that this is all meant to ship out the first week of
> April?  

I don't think you did.

> Worst case maybe I'll need to fly out to Fiji to run additional
> training, there are worse things.

Worst case!? Sounds like good fun to me.

-Jonathan