Thursday, February 28, 2008, 7:13pm
Turns out that Drupal could be a flexible software application for the OLPC laptop. Three hours later (minus four hours spent hunting down a bug noted below) Drupal was up and running. Right now, I'm viewing the Drupal site being served off the OLPC next to my desk from my MacBook via its private IP address. Wow, it's fast! The hardest part about the installation was the small keyboard ; ).
Just think of all the applications that - once made lighter - students could get on their OLPC laptops. Our next move it to get our intranet package on the OLPC machine - its light weight wiki could help students collaborate together on their own machines. You can imagine how Drupal and OLPC can be used to help organize classrooms where students use OLPCs in a mesh network, with or without greater internet connectivity. We all know Drupal can do practically anything and can usually do it quite well. Now there is the opportunity for classroom intranets, student-editable wikis, and teacher portals to run on OLPCs. Each OLPC can be a web server, with the potential to serve Drupal to other students and teachers. That leaves the possibility for each child of OLPC to become a web content manager, a web server administrator, a content collaborator/creator, and ultimately, a Drupal hacker.
But getting back to what you really want to know - how we did it. (Note: We'll maintain a wiki of these instructions on the groups.drupal.org page.)