Today I’ve been hammering away trying to get java to work on the OLPC. Why you ask? Well there are two systems in NYC that students and teachers use:
-
The Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS). This is a major information system that will allow teachers / schools / parents / students access to assessment data. And it uses java
-
The scantron system, that tried and true testing system….also uses java
This is turning out to be quite the pit-fall. At this point none of the java (JRE) releases work with the browse activity. There are issues with pop-ups and a few other things. It is well documented, and seems to be an issue with the OLPC at this point. I’ll outline what I have tried, and has / hasn’t worked:
Using build 656:
-
Tried the installation outlined here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/RestrictedFormats#Sun_Java - this seemed to install, but would not pull-up a test applet. Then tried the latest java release (1.6). Same issue
-
I was able to get the JRE 1.5 to work in Opera. Don’t use the wiki instructions though – these were much better: http://www.opera.com/support/search/view/459/. I also tried the 1.6 JRE in Opera. This did not work.
So the answer is use Opera w/ Java 1.5 right? No. ARIS still doesn’t load – now I am suspicious it is an issue with browser detection on the site. So – back to trying to get Java to run in the Browse activity (which runs on Mozilla…and should be detected as firefox)….more to come if we get something that works.
