New laptop : Dell Latitude D505

I’ve just got a new laptop, on which I couldn’t resist installing Debian. Here is the report of my setup in case others would need it.

Nice to have 1400×1050 resolution and wifi working. I suspect I haven’t finished with all problems (mainly for suspending, etc.), but looks like it works 😉

Update : I have experienced some strange crash on this system, so I’m not so sure if I would recommend to install the same setup finally… maybe there is a problem with Linux and the hardware support… you’ve been warned in any case 😉

Free maps of … the world ? … uh, Genova

I’m a contributor to the UPCT project whose goal is to produce free geographical data, aka free maps of the world.

I try to collect GPS data whenever I travel, and so did I for my recent trip to Genova to attend OSS2005. I’ve been able to record a track of the flight between Paris and Genova (above Mt Blanc : nice view… too bas I didn’t take a GPS point… nor did I make a picture) and of my wanderings in Genova city.

UPCT is a very interesting project, which may be in the future something as interesting as wikipedia… who knows…

If you are interested in finding out about UPCT, you may have difficulties in finding elements in English, but at least you will find a description in this article.

Gild : very intersting tool for introduction to software development with Eclipse

I’ve discovered a very interesting project, Gild, which was developped by collegues in the Victoria University, for the means of introducing students to both software development and the eclipse tool.

From the abstract of the paper presented at OSS2005 by Daniel German (actually I must confess I’ve had no time yet to read the full paper, and only attended the presentation and talked to Daniel…) :

This paper discusses Gild: An open source, Eclipse-based IDE for teaching and learning programming. Gild was designed to simplify and add pedagogical support to the Eclipse IDE to make it more appropriate for novice programmers and their instructors. Its development has greatly benefited from the ability to study, reuse, and modify existing Eclipse code. The core members of the Gild team are primarily researchers, making the maintenance of a growing code base difficult. It is challenging to create a community of developers because unlike most open source projects the developers (researchers) of Gild are not the main users (novice programmers) of Gild. To overcome this problem, we discuss techniques for making Gild more attractive to skilled developers (professors and graduate students). These techniques include improving instructor support in Gild and developing a grading perspective. We hope that these additions will attract able contributors and make Gild a self-sustaining community.

I find it very interesting as far we are concerned at GET, as we are also trying to teach computer science to our students using the same kind of approach : using libre software tools, and introducing them to the best practices of libre software projects.

We have actually adopted a similar strategy in developping a “scaled-down” sourceforge-like platform in the PicoLibre project, in order for students to discover these kinds of tools without spending the whole projects learning the intricacies of the platform. In this respect I think both tools, PicoLibre and Gild, are really very complementary : one concerning the environment of the project more on the server side, and the other focusing on the IDE on the client side. Our experienced is described in the paper PicoLibre: a free collaborative platform to improve students’ skills in software engineering by Éric Cousin, Gérald Ouvradou, Pascal Pucci, Samuel Tardieu that we had presented at the Second international IEEE conference “Systems, Man and Cybernetics of the twenty-first century”.

Not so surprisingly, both projects seem to suffer the same difficulties in maintaining a live community of contributors around the tools.

Maybe we’ll try Gild and adopt it… and who knows, maybe students of Victoria University will also work on PicoLibre in the future ?

Edukalibre and ProGET… two complementary systems

I went to the OSS2005 conference to present a paper in which we describe the work that we have done on the internal ProGET application (as part of the PFTCR project), a collaborative work environment for researchers at GET, based on libre software. In this paper we also outlined a strategy for contribution when using libre software, but that’s not the point here (no extensive description of ProGET is already really available, but the slides for our paper describe the main items : features and architecture).

At the same conference, a paper about the Edukalibre project attracted my interest, since the tools developped in this project are quite close to what we have or would need in the ProGET platform.

In ProGET we address users being researchers in a higher education school who want to work in a collaborative way with help of a web platform. In Edukalibre, the goal is to allow the development of educational resources in a similar environment. Both project address more or less the same users, then. And both projects are done by teams having a strong competence in libre software (and a commitment to this paradigm).

The features are very similar too : in Edukalibre, the documents repositories are using subversion for revision management and WebDAV (and other protocols/tools) for access to the documents. Whereas ProGET doesn’t yet use version management, we also provide a DAV interface, and subversion indeed was one option we were considering for doing version management in future evolutions. In ProGET we support some levels of confidentiality with respect to who gains access to which parts of the repositories, whereas in Edukalibre, everything is public. And we implement this through LDAP-based auth, when Edukalibre considers using this too for the next evolutions of their tools. Both projects are integrated with other groupware tools : Moodle components for Edukalibre, and PhpGroupware components of ProGET. When in ProGET we don’t recommend any document format, and include a wiki engine, Edukalibre supports mainly OpenOffice and DocBook documents, and enforces their use, and includes automatic conversion tools : both approaches to documents are really complementary.

Whereas what was done in ProGET is mainly internal, and thus not really a libre software project, we would very much like to be able to publish what we have done as libre software as a new version of the old PicoLibre platform.

As a conclusion, both systems are very similar and would probably benefit from collaboration, or at least offer to tools which can inspire each-other. Next step for me will be to test edukalibre 😉

Slides of Open Educational Symposium at OSS2005

I’ve collected slides from the speakers of the Open Educational Symposium at OSS2005… Update : They have been added to the page on the conference’s site, but are still available at : http://www-inf.int-evry.fr/~olberger/OpenEducationalSymposium/OpenEducationalSymposium.html. A report from this symposium will come later.