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Posts Tagged ‘JRE’

Java on the OLPC Take II

Posted in olpc, tech support, tagged , , , , on March 25, 2008| Leave a Comment »

It seems sites that use lots of java also like to detect the kind of browser you are using and then limit their site only to the browsers they know work.  So, while getting java working on the Opera activity was a step in the right direction, it still wasn’t solving the problem of not being able to get onto the Scantron site or the ARIS website. 

So I thought I would see if someone has done any more work on Firefox for the OLPC – and of course someone has: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Firefox2.  The instructions work well for setting it up.  Before you do though, make sure to look at the “Known Problems” – the biggest one on there in terms of a classroom implementation is “It can’t be sugarized” meaning students will always have to open up the terminal activity and type in “./firefox/firefox” to launch the browser.  They won’t have a nice icon to click and launch it.  Not good.

BUT – it does take java and it does work on all sites that I’ve tested (including ARIS and Scantron).  To link up java after you have installed firefox, follow the installation instructions here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/RestrictedFormats#Sun_Java and instead of:

su –
cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_13/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
exit

use the firefox plugin directory – like this:

su –
cd /home/olpc/firefox/plugins
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_13/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
exit

That should do it.  I also asked some heads over at OLPC what the plan for Java was.  They said they are definitely working on it and will integrate it into the standard browse activity as soon as they can.  Opensource is a key for them, so they are working on solutions.

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Java on the OLPC

Posted in olpc, tech support, tagged , , , on March 24, 2008| Leave a Comment »

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:

  1. 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
  2. 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:

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.

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