Monday I am flying from Vancouver to Los Angeles, the city of angels, so they say. LA is just the landing point for a trip to Pasadena. Pasadena is hosting SCaLE 15X, which is a Linux Expo. It is also where Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB) will have a booth. Two of my friends and contributors to the project will also be giving a talk on Sunday. Check out the SCaLE website if interested in attending.
Pasadena will be an excellent chance for individuals working on IIAB to get together and have face to face meetings. There are lots of Skype meetings currently, but it is just not the same. IIAB Release 6.2 will officially be released in the near future. It is very exciting and we could use more people getting involved to really move the project along. If anyone is interested in participating in any fashion me know. I do mean anything.
Now a bit about IIAB. It stemmed from the idea of One Laptop Per Child and started as XSCE School Server. Currently it is still under the title of XSCE, however that name will soon change to Internet-in-a-Box. That is essentially what it is: the internet in a box. IIAB combines many open-source educational programs into one operating system with a simple user interface. It also has useful components such as Moodle, RACHEL and WordPress. Right now IIAB is supported in varying degrees on several platforms: Debian, Fedora, CentoOS, Ubuntu Server and Raspbian for Raspberry Pi 2/3. The beauty of IIAB is that it doesn’t need an internet connection to function. The goal of IIAB is to get information and learning tools to areas of the world that probably wouldn’t have access to this type of knowledge otherwise.
Edwin Hodge and I are just about finished with our proposal to CIDA for building more Raspberry Pi labs in Myanmar. The server driving content in these labs will be IIAB running on a Raspberry Pi 3. Currently there are only a few developers working on IIAB infrastructure, so again if anyone is interested let me know. I am planning to set up a RPi 3 in my house with outside access if anyone wants to check it out in real-time.
If any of this interests you please check out these reference websites:
http://xsce.org\
http://schoolserver.org\
https://github.com/XSCE/xsce/wiki