[RULE] RULE in Congo

[Ingo Lantschner]

Hi Friends,
I just came back from Kinshasa and try to organize my life here. I was 
there for almost 2 and a half month and it was a *really* hard job. I 
already wrote down my more personal impressions and you can read them on 
http://ingo.netomania.at/bnb/de/index.html Unfortunatly its all in 
German, the French part is still missing. BUT, there is a lot of images 
there, some links to the RULE-Project which may be of interest, even if 
you do not understand German.

A short summary focussed on the more technical aspects and OSS:

As already mentioned in "State of the RULE, October 2003" (By the way, 
thanks for that!) we used the so called vum:BOX, based on Slinky 0.3.97 
to install RedHat 9 on the PCs, which we broght to the schools. For the 
moment we have equiped 4 rooms for 5 schools with approx 15 PCs per 
room. Each school has approx 800 pupils, so we have now - thanks to RULE 
- a potential Userbase of 3200 in Congo. Thanks to RULE, because we 
could not afford new machines, so we had to use old ones, which could 
not run a normal RedHat.

The pupils, the teachers and also the technicians from BnB (the local 
Organisation) were very open and happy using Linux. Explaining the 
advantages of OSS to the parents (who finance with there school-fees 
this project) was not difficult. African people have enough experience 
with dependencies on foreign technology - they like the possibility of 
doing something on there own.

Technically we had only few problems - Slinky works on most machines 
starting with P90/16M RAM up to PII-350/256M. Not only in the classrooms 
but also in the office of BnB we use the vum:BOX. Also the Office of 
CECC (Koordination of all schools in Kinshasa) has been equiped with a 
rulified PC (for textprocessing and other office tasks).

The battle bewtwwen Windows and Linux has also started there: The 
Educationminstery is looking for a schoolplan, and we offered them a 
whole 6-year-plan for secondary schools based on Linux and OSS-Apps. If 
this one gets official - which is not sure yet - we will have a lot to do.

So thanks to all, who helped with providing the so needed Software, 
especially to Michael for writing Slinky; Markus is still in Kinshasa, 
and he will write requests from time to time to this list. Also any 
results we figure out there will be documented here - seems as if he had 
some really interesting experiences with installing Slinky on SCSI-only 
systems. I hope we can help him as much as possible.

Bye for today, Ingo.