Google is a company that is so interested in creating solutions especially for its users that it tries to be an important part of everyone's life. This fact is sustained by multiple services provided by the search giant that can help users take important decisions in their lives: university search, book search and many other products. The company made a generous offer for multiple Fiji schools, donating laptops with Linux distributions. The laptops were offered to elementary schools from a Fiji district and were running Edubuntu, a Linux distribution designed
especially for educational reasons.
"Thanks to a generous grant from Google's Open Source Program Office, the Imara Project at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) was able to provide computers based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for each elementary school in Fiji's rural Taveuni school district. (note that this project is separate from OLPC).
We chose laptops for the project, both for shipping concerns (shipping PCs to developing nations tends to be prohibitively expensive) and because electrical power isn't available at all the school locations. We used Lenovo Thinkpad R52s due to their large screens, low cost, and Linux-friendly components. Three members of the CSAIL community took the 10 laptops as carry-on luggage, and held training sessions for the teachers once they arrived in Fiji," Jonathan Proulx, MIT CSAIL, said on the Google blog.
The search giant decided to configure the laptops before they sent them to the Fiji schools, adding a teacher account for administrative processes and a student user without password. The company also created shortcuts for the most important applications such as office and educational applications. Google also mentioned all the applications that were installed on the laptops: GCompris, TuxMath, TuxTyping, TuxPaint, The GIMP, KTouch, OpenOffice, GeoGebra, KBruch (math with fractions), KPercentage, KTurtle (turtle logo programing), KStars, Calculator.
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