This is the latest episode in the CFS SoaS Deployment Saga.

Netbooks arrived today! We filmed the unboxing.

I annotated the video so it's easier follow along with my excited-and-way-too-fast narration. Annotations converted into bulleted transcript form below:

  • We are unboxing netbooks for the 1st grade SoaS pilot at the Cambridge Friends School.
  • We got Acer Aspire One 532h netbooks because they're (1) cheap and (2) known to work well with Fedora (the underlying OS for SoaS).
  • I am talking really fast because I'm happy (and nervous about being on camera).
  • We're doing this at the kitchen table in the middle of a normal day - it's a snow day for school, a lunch break for me.
  • Melanie is way better at opening boxes than I am.
  • We're keeping the boxes the netbooks arrived in to be used as cases for transport.
  • We may someday need to buy accessories like extra batteries or cases. We're not worrying about that now, though.
  • The netbooks cost $298.95 each; we got 3, for a total of about $900 out of our $1000 hardware budget.
  • There are 3 netbooks and 9 students, so 1 netbook for every 3 students.
  • The netbooks come in 3 different colors so they're easy to tell apart; students will be assigned to a netbook to keep them from fighting over their favorite colors.
  • I apparently cannot identify colors. We eventually figured out that the netbooks were silver, blue, and red.
  • We would like to plaster these netbooks with Sugar Labs stickers. (And Fedora ones, for that matter.) If you have 3 extra Fedora or Sugar stickers floating around that can easily reach the Boston area, let me know.
  • Concerns: is the hardware usable? (Can they use trackpads? Should we buy mice?)
  • Concerns: will the hardware survive a classroom of 6-7 year olds? (The students need to write a usage agreement and sign it with their parents, promising that they will take good care of the netbooks.)
  • The 6th graders last year (7th graders now) used XOs, and the 4th graders are using them this year, so the 1st graders will ask the older students for advice on how they did their usage agreement.
  • The 4th grade and 1st grade are buddy classes, so the connection between the two grades using Sugar this year will be especially strong.
  • The 1st graders will be working on their usage agreements during the first week of the deployment, and blogging about them on Planet Sugar Labs.


People in the video:

Lynne May (black vest) - voice, camera: my aunt and the 1st grade classroom teacher involved.

Melanie (red vest) my cousin, a high school freshman off school for a snow day today, and another deployment support team member (brand-new, as of an hour ago).

Mel (blue shirt) - me: deployment support.

This concludes my deployment duties for the day. Melanie will be installing Fedora 12 (one each of GNOME, KDE, and XFCE) on the netbooks later this afternoon. Strictly speaking, this isn't necessary for the deployment, since the sticks (liveusbs) will bypass whatever is on the hard drive, but if, for instance, a stick isn't working and they need to boot a computer to go online and figure out what's happening, they won't have to boot into Windows 7 (which came on the netbooks) to do so.