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.

Valerie Henson, Linux Kernel hacker working for Intel, came to Corvallis to talk with the CS 461 class about “how to write open source code and get paid for it, too.” As Val noted, in the dreary post-dot com crash era, the conventional wisdom is that there are more qualified computer professionals than job openings. In reality, the reverse is true in many areas of software development. Open source development is a fast-growing field; many Linux-related programming jobs go unfilled for 6 months or more for lack of qualified applicants.

The weekly LUG hacking social, in Dearborn 401, heard from Mike Burns, undergraduate student in computer science. He talked about the One Laptop Per Child project initiated by Nicholas Negroponte and Kofi Annan of the United Nations. Mike demonstrated the motherboard for the proposed system, and some of the software that the system will run. Despite competition from the Senior Dinner, which was taking place at the same time, there was a good crowd. Audience included a writer and photographer from the Oregon Stater, the Alumni publication, so perhaps we will see an article in the near future. As every week, the free Pizza and drinks provided by Google were an added attraction.

Dearborn 401, humbly known as the “Penguins Nest”, just got an upgrade. EECS generously bought us two excellent couches. The room is quickly being adopted as a great place to study, collaborate, and, well, take a quick nap.

The Oregon State Linux Users Group and Open Source Education Lab took down the house at the recent EECS Open House. The open house was oriented towards Freshman, who are often unsure about their career. We inundated them with the joys of free/open source software, hopefully showing them something new and interesting.