PNG TIME

ipblocker

5/15/2009

What did I do today?



Gonna get geeky here.
Before I do. A truck from about 5 hours away came in, full of heavy steel and such for us to install our new satellite dish!!! It took 6 men to unload all of the items together.

Okay geekiness.
What you see above is (from left to right) an ibook g3 installing Ubuntu 9.04 linux, an XO running OLPC (ubuntu linux) and an ACER aspire one netbook running Ubunto 9.4

One of the things we are doing here is trying to get our applications to run on linux on a low power type of laptop.

The ibook is an old one and I'm jsut messing around with that.
The XO is for a translator, and while slow, these are low power and as indestructible as a laptop that size can get. And the Netbook was jsut because Windows XP ran WAY to slow on the ATOM processor.

Today I've been formatting, unlocking, file copying, and pretty much hacking away at linux distributions to get them on all these three machines.

The end result?
2 little SDHC cards that fit in your pocket, handed to a translator who can use them to boot his little XO in the village running off of a car battery.

THAT is amazing to me. A tiny little SD card (the memory inside your digital camera) has the power to turn that little green and white thing, into a tool used to translate the Bible.

sometimes, technology can be really really cool, and at the same time, really practical.

I can assure you, if you've ever asked yourself "but why? Why do these things?" Out here, there are practical applications, because power is hard to come by out in the bush.