We've trained lots of elderly people on Linux machines and even put some machines in senior citizen centers. Configuring Suse Linux for them was the right first step to do. The next step should be a GUI designed for them.
If you're interested in contributing, drop me a note (a_rueckert@gmx.net), and I'll give you more details.
> What this means is that there is an unavoidably steep learning curve
> right up front that bars entry to anyone without the time and/or desire
> to climb it.
Or there's a business model for someone to customize it for some special group,
that has a limited set of tasks to accomplish.
I liked the stirr.net site a lot, but it seems to me, that it definitely lacks a (online-) forum. I'd like to attend those meetings, but since I'm located in Germany, that's not so easy...
Is there a online version of this concept, where you can discuss your ideas in a forum?
Most OSS ideas come from coders with very few business experience, I guess. So the code might be there, but not the business plan. I guess you won't invest at such a early stage. Are you aware of any good concept where to find this marketing know how, so the projects gets far enough to find an investor?
One of the answers might be 'business angels', but at least in my state, the whole BA scene has disappeared (the local BA organisation has not helped any entrepreneur in the first 3 years of it's existence and then decided to close the organisation completely).
Sorry, but I don't see this. Just converted one my servers from Gentoo to Debian, because I think those compiling orgies just don't help productivity. Don't get me wrong. I'm a Gentoo fan using Gentoo for years now. I have a machine here, doing nothing but compiling our Gentoo-based distro. But I also had to fetch ebuild's from the Gentoo bugzilla, and had to read x different howto plus y different Gentoo forum postings to get simple stuff, like a mailserver running. My notebook currently runs an update for a week now, and simple stuff like KMail does not start anymore. I'll get that going again, I know, but having such an incident on a production server is a nightmare. I don't want 50 folks per day calling me, because they cannot send mail anymore and I'm aware, that the server will compile for another few days. I have 5 Gentoo machines here, which usually means 5 version of KDE, 5 versions of the mail program, 5 apache version etc etc. Supporting this is not easy, and if you want to count those 9's, it's usually not about having bugfree software, but about knowing those bugs exactly and having the workarounds at hand. Extremely hard with Gentoo...
That was one of the problems, when we started Seniorix (a Linux distro for senior citizens). We went to home for retired seniors and tried to teach people older than 80. When we looked at local public education programs for seniors, they accepted seniors from 40 to 60. Most obvious, that they were more succesfull...
I guess it's easy, if you have a long ongoing project, but who could you contact, if you have an OSS based idea and need some money to create a prototype?
You're right. And that's the reason, why I cannot understand, that some companies start their WiFi activities in the US. Higher population densitiy => more customers per hotspot...
On the powerlines: smaller lines, that lead to the houses are all underground. Only the 100kV lines etc are not...
I already have Opera running on my PDA (with a Spectec SDW 820 WLAN SD card). Not
so interesting, since the screen is quite small for most apps.
What's very interesting are apps like Skype or VOIPSurfer.
But so far my Win Mobile 2003 PDA is not reliable enough compared to cellphone.
I was checking hotspots yesterday (have some problems with an AP of mine), and it
crashed 10x, or so, in less than 1h. Not acceptable for serious usage in my eyes.
My main concern with past D-Link products was their power supply.
I was running a 624+ for less than 2 years, when it started to
act weird. Lost PPP connection every now and then, didn't want to
route any traffic through the router (although you could ping the
router just fine). After 2 weeks of testing and trying, it turned
out, that the router worked just fine with a AP900+ power supply, that
I had available. I have 2 other 900AP+ here with connection problems,
and I guess it the power supply, too.
If you check the forums, you'll read a lot of complaints about the PSU's,
so I guess I'm not alone.
Another issue is the WEP, that D-Link uses. I does not connect with my
Atmel card, my Spectec card, my X-micro dongle or my Skyracer router.
Seems like D-Link requires D-Link for encryption. WEP off and I can connect. I'll try WPA at some point, but I'm still uncertain about the new firmware versions (the router is required and I don't want to brick it).
I followed the tutorial links to the textdrive
forum, where nrbrookes recommended this strategy:
This is what I did to get feed tools working...
a) unpacked feedtools and the uuid gems
b) edited the feed_tools.rb changing require_gem( 'uuidtools' ) to plain ol' require( 'uuidtools')
c) copied the feed_tools.rb, feed_tools folder and uuidtools.rb into my vendor directory (don't put the whole of the unpacked gem, the stuff you are interested in is in lib)
But I wonder about the quality of this packaging. As an example: I'm trying to get FeedTools going for a week now. There's a gem installation available, but it seems even the developers don't trust it and recommend a manual installation. It seems there are several installation methods available (like copying the source files to your vendor directory), but so far no luck for me...'Feed constant not initialized' is my best result so far...:-(
We would currently go for 'rooms', if we had graphics manpower available. Like an office to write a letter etc. Removing the start menu is just the first step I guess.
The screensize is not that much of a problem, if you reduce the number of applications. We are working on a system for senior citizens, and I guess we reduce the number of apps to 20 or less. Use multiple desktops, and your screen could look like this:
Seniorix desktop.
Sorry, only available in German yet, since we only cooperate with local retirement home yet...
Ok, that's what we did so far:
- We went into several old people's homes and installed a first test machine to learn from
those folks there (age around 80).
- We started training younger seniors (around 60-65) on Suse.
- We learned a lot about the problems those folks have. There a lots of simple issues like the lack of some games (checkers is better than frozenbubble, because most folks know the rules from their childhood. Just a little example).
- We started our own distro, because we couldn't find anything good on the market.
There's a lot more going on, that we'll show at a further stage of the project.
I wonder how you have to get as a OO developer, before investors catch on? Do zou need
the finished and boxed product, before potential investors catch on? I was told so,
when I asked a friend to make some contacts for a project, I'm working on.
I'm fully aware, that you are perfectly right. Problem is, that about 4 folks are working part-time on our project. We have to work on our distro (LiveCD + installer), the portal for our clients + do the training in the retirement homes. We are currently working in local home, were the folks are speaking German, so the localization is no priority to them. Good thing is, that the GUI is more or less a tailored KDE, so localization should not be an issue here. The website will be more work, though. But we are trying to get quite some content by third parties, so if we find some partners in the US, that problem might be solved, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Stripped down enough? http://seniorix.de/images/screenshot/seniorix-20060508-desktop1024x768.jpg
We've trained lots of elderly people on Linux machines and even put some machines in senior citizen centers. Configuring Suse Linux for them was the right first step to do. The next step should be a GUI designed for them. If you're interested in contributing, drop me a note (a_rueckert@gmx.net), and I'll give you more details.
Sounds like the prize was made for the Loremo...
http://evolution.loremo.com/index.php?lang=en
The answer to this is
:-(
http://www.sgtpepper.net/hyspro/deb unstable/
, but those packages are somewhat outdated, and I'm constantly struggle with some gems, that won't work with some of the older libs.
So far, I failed to get a current rails running on my deb box with all the libs, that I need...
Maybe I should compile all the stuff by myself and see if get further then...
Is there finally an easy way to have different icons on each virtual desktop? Under 3.x it's an ugly hack...
> What this means is that there is an unavoidably steep learning curve
> right up front that bars entry to anyone without the time and/or desire
> to climb it.
Or there's a business model for someone to customize it for some special group, that has a limited set of tasks to accomplish.
I liked the stirr.net site a lot, but it seems to me, that it definitely lacks a (online-) forum. I'd like to attend those meetings, but since I'm located in Germany, that's not so easy...
Is there a online version of this concept, where you can discuss your ideas in a forum?
Most OSS ideas come from coders with very few business experience, I guess. So the code might be there, but not the business plan. I guess you won't invest at such a early stage. Are you aware of any good concept where to find this marketing know how, so the projects gets far enough to find an investor?
One of the answers might be 'business angels', but at least in my state, the whole BA scene has disappeared (the local BA organisation has not helped any entrepreneur in the first 3 years of it's existence and then decided to close the organisation completely).
Sorry, but I don't see this. Just converted one my servers from Gentoo to Debian, because I think those compiling orgies just don't help productivity. Don't get me wrong. I'm a Gentoo fan using Gentoo for years now. I have a machine here, doing nothing but compiling our Gentoo-based distro. But I also had to fetch ebuild's from the Gentoo bugzilla, and had to read x different howto plus y different Gentoo forum postings to get simple stuff, like a mailserver running. My notebook currently runs an update for a week now, and simple stuff like KMail does not start anymore. I'll get that going again, I know, but having such an incident on a production server is a nightmare. I don't want 50 folks per day calling me, because they cannot send mail anymore and I'm aware, that the server will compile for another few days. I have 5 Gentoo machines here, which usually means 5 version of KDE, 5 versions of the mail program, 5 apache version etc etc. Supporting this is not easy, and if you want to count those 9's, it's usually not about having bugfree software, but about knowing those bugs exactly and having the workarounds at hand. Extremely hard with Gentoo...
That was one of the problems, when we started Seniorix (a Linux distro for senior citizens). We went to home for retired seniors and tried to teach people older than 80. When we looked at local public education programs for seniors, they accepted seniors from 40 to 60. Most obvious, that they were more succesfull...
I guess it's easy, if you have a long ongoing project, but who could you contact, if you have an OSS based idea and need some money to create a prototype?
You're right. And that's the reason, why I cannot understand, that some companies start their WiFi activities in the US. Higher population densitiy => more customers per hotspot...
On the powerlines: smaller lines, that lead to the houses are all underground. Only the 100kV lines etc are not...
I already have Opera running on my PDA (with a Spectec SDW 820 WLAN SD card). Not so interesting, since the screen is quite small for most apps. What's very interesting are apps like Skype or VOIPSurfer. But so far my Win Mobile 2003 PDA is not reliable enough compared to cellphone. I was checking hotspots yesterday (have some problems with an AP of mine), and it crashed 10x, or so, in less than 1h. Not acceptable for serious usage in my eyes.
My main concern with past D-Link products was their power supply. I was running a 624+ for less than 2 years, when it started to act weird. Lost PPP connection every now and then, didn't want to route any traffic through the router (although you could ping the router just fine). After 2 weeks of testing and trying, it turned out, that the router worked just fine with a AP900+ power supply, that I had available. I have 2 other 900AP+ here with connection problems, and I guess it the power supply, too. If you check the forums, you'll read a lot of complaints about the PSU's, so I guess I'm not alone. Another issue is the WEP, that D-Link uses. I does not connect with my Atmel card, my Spectec card, my X-micro dongle or my Skyracer router. Seems like D-Link requires D-Link for encryption. WEP off and I can connect. I'll try WPA at some point, but I'm still uncertain about the new firmware versions (the router is required and I don't want to brick it).
But I wonder about the quality of this packaging. As an example: I'm trying to get FeedTools going for a week now. There's a gem installation available, but it seems even the developers don't trust it and recommend a manual installation. It seems there are several installation methods available (like copying the source files to your vendor directory), but so far no luck for me...'Feed constant not initialized' is my best result so far... :-(
Ok, our machine might be slower than his, but I wish we could rebuild our distro within 24 hrs...it's much closer to 3-4 days usually... :-(
We would currently go for 'rooms', if we had graphics manpower available. Like an office to write a letter etc. Removing the start menu is just the first step I guess.
The screensize is not that much of a problem, if you reduce the number of applications. We are working on a system for senior citizens, and I guess we reduce the number of apps to 20 or less.
Use multiple desktops, and your screen could look like this:
Seniorix desktop.
Sorry, only available in German yet, since we only cooperate with local retirement home yet...
I have a P166, 48MB Ram, 16GB HD. Gentoo, XFCE4, Firefox, Apache, Postfix etc. running on it. Kinda slow, but definitely usable.
Ok, that's what we did so far: - We went into several old people's homes and installed a first test machine to learn from those folks there (age around 80). - We started training younger seniors (around 60-65) on Suse. - We learned a lot about the problems those folks have. There a lots of simple issues like the lack of some games (checkers is better than frozenbubble, because most folks know the rules from their childhood. Just a little example). - We started our own distro, because we couldn't find anything good on the market. There's a lot more going on, that we'll show at a further stage of the project.
See: http://logos-os.dfki.de/
I wonder how you have to get as a OO developer, before investors catch on? Do zou need the finished and boxed product, before potential investors catch on? I was told so, when I asked a friend to make some contacts for a project, I'm working on.
Is there anything, that the average /. geek could do? Maybe create a website to search for missing persons or something like that?
I'm fully aware, that you are perfectly right.
Problem is, that about 4 folks are working part-time on our project. We have to work on our distro (LiveCD + installer), the portal for our clients + do the training in the retirement homes.
We are currently working in local home, were the folks are speaking German, so the localization is no priority to them.
Good thing is, that the GUI is more or less a tailored KDE, so localization should not be an issue here. The website will be more work, though. But we are trying to get quite some content by third parties, so if we find some partners in the US, that problem might be solved, too.