Proyecto Ceibal: Uruguay's project for OLPC deployment

Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog
Last week I was in Montevideo, Uruguay. While there I visited the people who are rolling out the deployment of the XO (nee OLPC) systems, named "Proyecto Ceibal".
Ceibal's office was located in an incubator where small businesses are started. Project Ceibal occupied two locations in the series of "incubator" buildings. Uruguay is very serious about deploying the laptops, and today the project is deploying about 1,600 laptops per day. They believe that the first wave of laptops will be completely deployed by the end of 2009 (the country of Uruguay has a population of 3,460,607 people according to a July 2007 estimation).
Along with the notebooks, of course, is the deployment of servers and Internet connectivity. Some servers support up to 1000 laptops, others as few as five. One teacher reported that before the project brought the laptops to his five students, there was no electricity in the village, not even a light bulb. Now the parents of the children are also coming to the school to "connect to the Internet" for the information they need.
Proyecto Ceibal has rooms of people who are performing tasks such as assembling and testing access points and antennas. Other rooms have people planning placement of those access points and antennas to assure line-of-sight radio over long distances, and good WiFi coverage throughout the rooms of a school. Still more rooms have a group of support people, who can remotely monitor the servers and laptops seeing if they are still working properly. If not, they try to log in and fix the problem, or dispatch a person to a potentially far-flung village to help get the system(s) back on-line.
Proyecto Ceibal is busy trying to figure out how to remotely administer and support all these servers. Part of the problem is that download speeds are fairly high, but upload speeds are relatively small. The budgets of these small schools do not allow for the larger update speeds.
Despite some issues, the Ceibal people keep delivering laptops to children.
comments powered by DisqusIssue 268/2023
Buy this issue as a PDF
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Find SysAdmin Jobs
News
-
LibreOffice 7.5 has Arrived and is Loaded with New Features and Improvements
The favorite office suite of the Linux community has a new release that includes some visual refreshing and new features across all modules.
-
The Next Major Release of Elementary OS Has Arrived
It's been over a year since the developers of elementary OS released version 6.1 (Jólnir) but they've finally made their latest release (Horus) available with a renewed focus on the user.
-
KDE Plasma 5.27 Beta Is Ready for Testing
The latest beta iteration of the KDE Plasma desktop is now available and includes some important additions and fixes.
-
Netrunner OS 23 Is Now Available
The latest version of this Linux distribution is now based on Debian Bullseye and is ready for installation and finally hits the KDE 5.20 branch of the desktop.
-
New Linux Distribution Built for Gamers
With a Gnome desktop that offers different layouts and a custom kernel, PikaOS is a great option for gamers of all types.
-
System76 Beefs Up Popular Pangolin Laptop
The darling of open-source-powered laptops and desktops will soon drop a new AMD Ryzen 7-powered version of their popular Pangolin laptop.
-
Nobara Project Is a Modified Version of Fedora with User-Friendly Fixes
If you're looking for a version of Fedora that includes third-party and proprietary packages, look no further than the Nobara Project.
-
Gnome 44 Now Has a Release Date
Gnome 44 will be officially released on March 22, 2023.
-
Nitrux 2.6 Available with Kernel 6.1 and a Major Change
The developers of Nitrux have officially released version 2.6 of their Linux distribution with plenty of new features to excite users.
-
Vanilla OS Initial Release Is Now Available
A stock GNOME experience with on-demand immutability finally sees its first production release.