Hi, My apologies to the net for flooding them with requests and top posting and breaching netiquette (I apologized to both Easwar and Sanjay). Well, my Ubuntu 8.10 does NOT install on my Kubuntu 8.04 computer. And Canonical promises only 18 months of SECURITY updates ---- not ALL updates. Yet, I have ordered Kubuntu 8.10 from CANONICAL. My machine has something like 768 Kbytes of RAM.
Now, what can a KIOSK do ---- why should cultural book depot or a college put a kiosk. How can you enhance the marketing appeal of a LINUX kiosk in any book-store (educational).
Well, how about training courses English (from Hindi/Marathi/local Indian language) followed by online testing (a cybercafe would love this) followed by in-person testing or (in-camera testing in the cybercafe).
The training course could be scheduled for 1 hour of adult training or 30 minutes of adult training daily and distributed via DVD / CD ---- computer should not be needed if you want to reach the very poor --- but if you wish initially computer could be needed.
What are the consequences of boosting English, boosting Education, boosting even skill-based training and knowledge-based training ? Well, Google language tools translates web-pages into Hindi (written) and shows original Wikipedia pages in English.
The IIT's have courses they distribute online. Why are you focusing on KIOSK and LINUX (Linux is merely a tool, Windows works just fine/see Wikipedia) ---- why not an entire University. (Sorry, I am a toothless PhD so I seek to inspire you to lift your vision for Education --- but I have no resources or labor to give). Flame me if you want.
You have seen students smoking outside colleges ---- do you think you could inspire them to build open-source content (or content for a cheap fee). There is a website which sends you the revenues for free of all the videos loaded on it.
I asked an old woman (67) whether she would put an Italian-Hindi cd (author it, she teaches Italian when she has students), she promptly said, what is in it for me ?
Erach