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 DisqusSubscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 is Available
Linus Torvalds has announced that the latest kernel has been released with plenty of core improvements and even more hardware support.
-
Kali Linux 2025.3 Released with New Hacking Tools
If you're a Kali Linux fan, you'll be glad to know that the third release of this famous pen-testing distribution is now available with updates for key components.
-
Zorin OS 18 Beta Available for Testing
The latest release from the team behind Zorin OS is ready for public testing, and it includes plenty of improvements to make it more powerful, user-friendly, and productive.
-
Fedora Linux 43 Beta Now Available for Testing
Fedora Linux 43 Beta ships with Gnome 49 and KDE Plasma 6.4 (and other goodies).
-
USB4 Maintainer Leaves Intel
Michael Jamet, one of the primary maintainers of USB4 and Thunderbolt drivers, has left Intel, leaving a gaping hole for the Linux community to deal with.
-
Budgie 10.9.3 Now Available
The latest version of this elegant and configurable Linux desktop aligns with changes in Gnome 49.
-
KDE Linux Alpha Available for Daring Users
It's official, KDE Linux has arrived, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
-
AMD Initiates Graphics Driver Updates for Linux Kernel 6.18
This new AMD update focuses on power management, display handling, and hardware support for Radeon GPUs.
-
AerynOS Alpha Release Available
With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.