The laptops in question are basic but rugged little beasts, designed specifically for the program, and something like 500,000 have been distributed around the world already. Currently just a few thousand will be avaialble for distribution in Australia but the program will be reviewed after this initial launch phase.

OLPC laptops have a basic 433MHz AMD Geode processor, 256MB of memory and 1GB of flash storage (plus an SD port for adding more). They come wireless ready, and run a version of Fedora with a GUI called Sugar, plus a range of open source Apps.

The machine has no moving parts and it is designed to be robust enough for hot and dusty climates and easily repaired in the field. There are three USB ports, audio jacks, stereo speakers and microphone, a VGA camera, a waterproof membrane keyboard and a clever LCD screen that is perfectly readable in bright sunlight.

This excellent scheme is making the laptops available via a donation scheme. Basically, a donation of $399USD will set aside one laptop for use in a remote community PLUS another laptop will be given to you. You can of course, then also opt to donate ‘your’ laptop so that the program benefits from 2 machines.

All in all, this seems like an excellent way to give kids out in the bush or in other remote communities a helping hand and a bit of access to IT equipment and ideas that they may otherwise not get.

OLPC Australia can be found at: http://olpc-australia.org.au/

Squid is a popular open source web proxy server and web caching software. It has a wide variety of uses, from speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests, to caching web, DNS and other network lookups for groups of people sharing network resources and (which is of most interest to us for the purposes of this post) by aiding security via traffic filtering. It was originally inteneded for Unix/Linux but has been ported to a number of platforms.

Squid has powerful ACL (access control list). The primary use of the ACL system is to implement simple access control. This can be used to deny a user from accessing particular site.

In order to do this we have to edit the Squid configuration file.

e.g. # vi /etc/squid/squid.conf

Search for `Access Controls’ and append the following lines (in this example we are blocking access to ‘nastysite.com’):
acl badsite dstdomain .nastysite.com
http_access deny badsite

Save and close the file, and then restart Squid:
# /etc/init.d/squid restart

 If required, you can specify more than one site to be blocked:
acl badsite dstdomain .nastysite.com  .anothernastysite.com
http_access deny badsite

You can also use regex expressions to block access to more than one website. for example,  if you would like to deny access for any sites where the URL contains the word “twitter”, use the following ACL lines:
acl badsitegroup url_regex -i twitter
http_access deny badsitegroup

More information on Squid commands can be found at: http://wiki.squid-cache.org/FrontPage

According to Sun’s Craig Gering: “We are enabling mobile developers to quickly and easily create rich, portable interfaces for their applications,” declared Craig Gering, Sun’s senior director of embedded Java software.

“This software will also help address the mobile industry’s fragmentation issue by enabling developers to create a single interface that will work anywhere Java is found.”

More information: http://lwuit.blogspot.com/

It can be found here – Gizmo’s Tech Support Site

SourceForge.net provides free hosting to Open Source software development projects with a centralised resource for managing projects, issues, communications and code.

By opening a mirror to the development website, Internode has extended the available unmetered downloadable content for its customers to more than 32 terabytes (TB).

Technical leader content services for Internode’s content services group, Kingsley Foreman, said unmetered access to the 4.7 terabytes of SourceForge data was a boon for the Open Source community.

“We see this as an important enhancement for Australia’s Open Source community by providing high performance access to SourceForge that eclipses its previous local footprint,” he said.

“Increasingly, future software will come from the international collaboration that emerges from the Open Source community, so Internode is pleased to make it even easier for this to happen.”

osTicket is an attractive alternative to higher-cost and complex customer support systems; simple, lightweight, reliable, open source, and easy to setup and use. The best part is, it’s completely free.

osTicket comes with it’s own web-based installer to help guide you through the installation process without frustration.

To install osTicket, your web server must have PHP 4.3 (or better) and MySQL 4.1 (or better) installed.

For more information and to download osTicket, please visit http://www.osticket.com.