Re: [school-discuss] FOSS in Malawi

["Vikram Vincent" <vincentvikram@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

On 12/07/07, Daniel Howard <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Joel Kahn wrote:

> 2. I think I saw a brief mention in someone's
> posting about grabbing web sites and storing them
> for use offline. If live Net access is really going
> to be an expensive pain in these poor rural areas
> for a while, it might be a good option to copy
> a suitable hunk of the web and simply let the
> students do their learning from some slightly old
> data fed to them off the local server. Updates
> could be provided at whatever intervals fit with
> the overall economic realities. After all, do
> students in this situation absolutely require
> up-to-the-second info feeds? The students can
> send email to each other over the LAN, even if
> they can't email people overseas. If a delayed web
> version can be done in a much shorter time, at
> a tiny fraction of the cost, and with a lot fewer
> hassles than having it all live, it certainly
> would seem to be worth considering.

But you're absolutely
right, if it just turns out to be too costly to do a live Internet feed,
shipments of CDs/DVDs with updated web content would be a way to go. 

I work with an Indian Govt. project called National Resource Centre for Free/Open Source Software(NRCFOSS). We have a 'Foss lab server' wherein we have around 200GB of data necessary to help out Institutions which have no or slow internet connections. The server comes with a friendly user interface and reasonably easy to install. 
Do let me know if that may be able to help or if any more details are needed.
Thanks.
-- 
Regards
Vikram Vincent
+919448810822
http://groups.google.com/group/bangalore_alive/
http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Campaign_to_promote_free_software_in_karnataka