Part of our current bi-weekly teachers training sessions in our pilot in China, we introduce new applications that we believe could be of interest to teachers. As you could read on RPM Experimental group BLOG we found and (quickly) packaged a new (very old) GTK application for G-Linux enabling simple English vocabulary rehearsal. The strength is that teachers can customize the vocabulary list without recompiling the application and one just need to have a native English speaker around to record the associate soundtrack and copy the file in the proper directory. We ran a demo of the application at today's session, where coincidently a visiting English teacher was attending. She just loved the application and pertaining that we can build her vocabulary list into the application (of course we can) she'll be visiting the school daily as soon as it's ready, and use the gdium plus this great little software to teach Wende school students English. Definitely a big plus for the students since they'll be getting new classes thanks to the computers, and great feedback on our side.

Now the reason why I am posting this in OLPH is that this application has been unmaintained for about 10 years (with two exceptions in 2001, and 2004 for a GTK2 port) and needs a bit of additional features. What we would like to see is an easy way to add vocabulary lessons (that can be handled by data packages), but most importantly a way to select them from the application itself. This way children could for example only work on "city, people and greetings" lessons, or all or whatever other options we could have. So this is a real need today and what better place to ask than the great OLPH community? Source code and package information can be found here and we already contacted the Debian maintainer to see whether he had time for this. Any other question please ask in the comment section, on the mailing list or on the IRC channel

Coly Li who did mentor the GSoC project of porting OpenSUSE on the Gdium is in Paris this week to present his student work at the Open Source Developer Conference. It's happening at la Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie on October 2^nd and 3^rd for the 1^st Open Source Developers Conference in France. Fabrice, Emtec Technical Director (fga under IRC), will be there as well, participating in Coly's session on Friday morning. Definitely a good opportunity to meet people very familiar with the device (Gdium) and porting issues, as well as Linux and Open Source in general. The conference agenda can be found right here and hopefully you'll find other topics worth of interest.

In order to support two Google Summer of Code projects related to Loongson this year, Dexxon/Emtec took the initiative to donate hardware to the students and got Lemote/ICT to do the same. For people not aware of what Google Summer of Code is, it is a program for student to get paid to work on Open Source software as a summer job and totally financed by Google. The two projects in question are openSuSE MIPS port and a new N32 ABI port for Debian. We're now reaching mid-term of the program and each project has provided us with their current status. We will initially post the openSuSE report and the Debian one will come in a few days.

The OpenSuse MIPS port final objective is to run basic openSuSE system on the MIPS platform, with the Gdium sub-notebook as the first supported hardware using a Loongson2f MIPS 64el compatible processor, so let's review what has been done so far.

We are delighted to announce that our public bug tracker is now available to all gdium.com registered members. We're launching it with currently 2 projects, one being G-Linux, the Mandriva based operating system, and the other one is the community supported Debian MIPS version that runs on the Gdium. Same as all other available applications for OLPH you just need to use your gdium.com account to log in and see or file a bug. Should you have a separate Gdium/OLPH project that you would like to be added to the bug tracker, please just contact Philv or anyone from the team on our IRC channel. Thank you for your patience on this one, hopefully it was worth the wait!

Thanks to the work of Phil, Julien and a few others we have managed to upload a new Debian image to our server. For stability reasons we are using the latest stable version of Debian. This is not a raw image (where you can use 'dd' to copy it) but instead we have chosen to compress the two partitions and let you decide how to allocate each one on your Gkey. There is of course a tutorial going with it and we welcome any comment that could help improve the process of installing this other OS on your Gdium. Find all the details on our wiki right here!

This upcoming Saturday in partnership with SUPINFO and the Beijing Linux User Group we will all meet in SUPINFO's Beijing Campus to see SUPINFO's facilities, to demonstrate the latest Mandriva and have an introduction to the Gdium (which comes preloaded with Mandriva), its on-line platform, gdium.com, and what they're doing in China. Event will start at 13:30 and last until the evening. So if you're in town, definitely something not to be missed!

Parinux (the Paris LUG) is organizing together with Dexxon and the Paris 3rd district Public Digital Space (Espace public Numérique du 3ème arrondissement) a RPM compilation hackathon!

The two days event will start with an introduction about the Gdium, MIPS and Mandriva RPM packaging in order to prepare all the participant to the task. At the end of the weekend lucky winners will be selected and go back home with a free machine! So if you're in town and are in interest in either topic, please do attend! You can find the announcement and registration page in French right here.

Four full months after the launch of our developer program and now that Gdiums can be found in selected outlets in Belgium, France, US, Italy, China and Spain soon, we are excited to announce the nomination of Philippe Vachon as our Community Manager. Phil, an OLPH member and a customer, has shown tremendous interest into the project since his enrollment into the program, continuously providing code, support and insights to the project. As such we believe choosing someone from our own community to represent our customers can only bring benefits to the equation! By providing the tools and (some) access to our company resources and partners we hope to give you the freedom to achieve more with your Gdium and open up communication.

Phil is a software developer based out of Ottawa, Canada. He attended (and continues to attend) classes at Carleton University, towards attaining degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. He lives with his lovely and tolerant fiancée and his cat Odin and his excessive collection of PDP-11s.

Phil's passion for Open Source started at a fairly young age, when he first installed a young Finnish student's "toy operating system" on a spare computer. From that point on he was hooked; one of the first jobs he held was a Linux kernel developer working on wireless drivers. Subsequently, he held several positions at Nortel before leaving to pursue an interest in high performance computing applied to digital signal processing, and to return to school. As well, he has contracted for a variety of organizations, working on developing custom support for embedded devices.

In his spare time, Phil thoroughly enjoys developing support for new hardware devices in Linux -- one of his current projects, for example, is Linux/Cisco, porting Linux to various legacy Cisco routers. As well, he continues to attempt to further the capabilities of Linux on the MIPS platform, having fallen in love with MIPS at a young age because of exposure to SGI hardware. One of his key interests is hardware exploration, learning details about hardware through reverse engineering.

On top of computing, Phil is also an avid photographer and is very passionate about the social aspect of open source.

OLPC France and Sugar Labs are organizing the 1st SugarCamp in Paris. Gdium together with AFUL are sponsoring the event. This one day event will not only allow participants to meet the European Sugar community but also Walter Bender, OLPC foundation co-founder and Sugar Labs executive Director, Samy Boutayeb and Bastien Guerry who have been working on porting Sugar on the Gdium and, of course, the Gdium team!

The day will be split between light presentations, technical, educational and translation workshops and meeting great people! A beta of Sugar on a stick will as well be demoed. You can find the full announcement in English and in French right here. The event is happening at La Cantine not too far from Mandriva's office and is starting at 10am on Saturday May 16th, 2009 until 7pm. Definitely something worth attending if you're in town!

For those of you not subscribed to our mailing list we'd like to inform you of a new release of Mandriva G-Linux specially tailored for developers. It comes with a few bug fixes and new software versions such as Firefox 3, OpenOffice.org 3 and several improvements in the interface, more specifically in its configuration tools. The developer version also allocates more space to the root partition (vs. the user space where you store documents and which is directly compatible with other operating systems). Of course doing system updates should get you all the updates, but you might as well try starting from a new system to get the "first usage" experience! The image is available for download on our wiki right here. In the meantime we're working on making a new Debian image and a few other stuff. Stay tuned!