OSEL Blog

The Open Source Lab is engaging the One Laptop Per Child community by donating the time of a student developer. Starting next week Justin Gallardo’s full-time job will be making OLPC even better. For those unfamiliar with the OLPC project it aims to create a low cost laptop for students in developing countries. A few weeks before this announcement Justin had spent a weekend to finish a port of Abiword, a word processor, to the laptop. In the future Justin will be working to finish up the OLPC development board cluster hosted at the OSL and working with Red Hat’s team to create new activities for the platform.

Alex Polvi, OSLUG member, gave a brief tutorial, or lightning talk, on how to use Inkscape and exposed LUGgers to the world of vector graphics.

Inkscape Tutorial [Google Video]

Beaver Open House is the opportunity for the university to highlight for prospective students all the exciting things taking place at OSU. And some of the most exciting activities involve OSEL/LUG. Pictured behind the table is Justin Gallardo, who recently ported the AbiWord word processor to the (United Nations Sponsored) One Laptop Per Child project. To the right is Mike Burns, who was showing off the OLPC motherboard. Working the crowd is Alex Polvi. The OSEL/LUG tables was one of the most popular tables at the open house, attracting the interests of a great many potential students. Tux even got to ride on a segway.

On November 2nd Alex Polvi, Mike Burns, Justin Gallardo, Donnie Berkholz, and Brandon Philips visited the Portland Linux Users Group. Alex gave a presentation on the state of free open source software at Oregon State University and the role the OSEL is playing. Then Mike and Justin demoed and discussed the One Laptop Per Child project. After the talks a number of interesting conversation started about helping with OLPC, pursuing a degree at OSU and working with the school of EECS. It will be interesting to see what comes out of the visit!

On Friday October 27th in West International Hall students gathered to celebrate the release of Firefox 2 with a Firefox Party. There were conversations about new features, a demo running on a LCD TV and the plans for a Firefox logo made of blinking safety lights. Judging by the big glowing logo in the Weatherford lawn this party was a big success!

The Oregon Executive MBA program recently held a day long workshop discussing open source business models. Take a look at their website for more innovating business techniques.