Article

Guri is a project born inside a High School in Italy, as an answer to the growing practice of treating abstract concepts of knowledge as tangible objects. In fact the mainstream cultural framework in Italy is locked by dangers and threats to our freedom such as patents, copyright laws and attempts to make the knowledge become a property of someone. These threats are locking down education in Italy and everyday prevent the exercise of some of the most important human rights.Education in most of the schools is meant in a pyramidal way, creating a strong dependence between the educators and the educated people. Also in the filed of IT-enabled education we are facing a similar conception of knowledge. This is caused by the adoption of proprietary, subjugating software inside schools.

In the proprietary software model people are completely divided from the developers who provide the software, and are only treated as "end users". This creates a big lack in knowledge not allowing people to understand and control the software they are using and thus preventing access to knowledge, by putting locks such as NDA, patents, absurd copyright laws and EULAs.

This makes people weak and dependent, by being not able to adapt the software they are using for their needs, imposing restrictions to the users and by not distributing the source code, essential to understand how a software works.

The software libre is the natural and fundamental tool to give back freedom to the people, by giving them the power to control, study, adapt and share the software they are using.

Our practical goals are to convert the whole educational system and base it exclusively on free software, extending the freedoms it grants back to every field of knowledge. In fact we believe in the power of education and we think that by changing the way the future citizens will learn and cooperate we can achieve together a better society, made by informed and aware people.

For these reasons we are advocating and working for a completely horizontal way of sharing knowledge as a fundamental good for humanity, in which everyone can participate in the shaping of knowledge and improve it, for a better society. This is possible thanks to the free software commitment to the community, which grants to everyone the freedom to share.

Our aims are:

• to focus our efforts on the creation of a network of people sharing together ideas and projects
• participate in the development of an educational environment which can be actively shaped by students
• endorsing the creation of communities cooperating with free software that keep the money and efforts on the territory, in opposition to a centralized knowledge system.

To achieve them we are taking actions to promote and endorse the raise of many NGO and groups of people all over the world, helping them communicate and be free from censorship. The main actions are:

• providing web hosting to NGO and people who shares our goals;
• releasing all our articles and material in a free editable wiki;

• the realization of conferences and event about software libre, in cooperation with many other partners in the world;
• provide material for education, focusing on videos;
• organizing lessons inside schools made exclusively by students, in order to help students to cooperate and share knowledge;
• working with social co-operatives to help them become free software enabled.

Thanks to the scarse presence of GNU/Linux manuals in Italian, the team of GURI is working on the drafting of a book, the so called GURIBook.

The level of difficulty of the book is medium to few knowledge which means that it can be read by everybody who has used a computer before without significant problems.

We want to create a reference book not only for teaching GNU/Linux technologies in schools but our efforts are also related to achieve the main problems a normal user can face during the exporation of a Free Software environment.

Inside the pages there will be many links or invites pointing to external documentation: nearly every GNU/Linux command has beautiful pages of documentation already written and checked so it's a pity not to read it to understand well it's behaviour or the possible other functions.

Since the technologies used to compile the text are not so common it can't be defined a real "book".

Written using LaTeX we decided to adopt Subversion to write it in a collaborative way, checking the versions automatically. Then, from the .tex file, it will be possible to automatically generate .pdf files and so read every page in a smartly-formatted way.

The book is mainly a translation of FocaLinux which is a complete guide in Portoguese language released under GNU FDL 1.2.

The license we chose for this document is the 

All the parts translated from the original FocaLinux will mantain the same original license and there will be credits for the owner of that guide.

If you want to follow the development of the work this is the link to our wiki.

If you are interested in translations to other languages than Italian and Portuguese your help will be well accepted.

This is the final document that was written down at the National Conference on Free Software and Education, in Kozhikode. It is posted here for dissemination. You can find an editable version in our Resources page.

The Role of ICT and Education in Social Inclusion

Information & Communication Technology (ICT) is one of the most powerful technologies ever developed by humankind. It has drastically changed the way we do things, the way we communicate and even the way we think. Education is one of the spheres of human activity that is being strongly influenced by ICT.

Time has come to make things go the other way around and make good education influence the world of ICT. This because, while the teaching of ICT has been incorporated at the school-level and ICT itself is being used in the classroom and outside for teaching and learning more effectively, access to ICT is not universal due to various reasons, generally falling under "digital exclusion".

Digital exclusion (the exclusion of large masses of human beings from the benefits of ICT) is an effect of the current economical system, but has many concurrent causes:

• the lack or poor quality of education in the field of IT in both "developed" as well as "developing" countries. There is lot of ICT technical training, in particular there is strong pression and funding from big US charities, for proprietary software solutions. What is lacking is general-purpose and senseful education on IT
• the lack of bandwith or even Internet connectivity in many areas of the world, in particular in developing and emerging economies, but also in many rural areas of developed countries, with an "horizontal" effect typical of most outcomes of globalization (dividing human beings in classes that are transversal to countries, and coupled by income)
• the cost of hardware which, even if declining, is still a barrier for many people
• the obscurity and the high cost of proprietary software stopping people and especially students to learn how things work, software in particular. The right to use, know, change and share technical knowledge about modern artefacts is an essential human right in knowledge societies.
• the lack of translation of software and education resources in languages other than English, excluding all people in the world that do not receive the needed education in languages other then their local ones.

Why is Software Freedom a necessity and not a choice?

Proprietary software does not allow community participation in shaping the ICT to be used for education, and is not suitable for education since such solutions treat students as consumers. The Free software community (sometimes called free and open source software community) on the other hand produced the GNU/Linux operating system and a comprehensive stack of collaborative workspaces that enabled students to really learn ICT during the last 25 years. Most of the free software workspaces are made accessible for speakers of all languages of the world, including physically challenged students. The software freedom granted to the people (1. to use the software for any purpose; 2. to study how it works; 3. to modify it and 4. to distribute the modified software) is unquestionably the core source of the free software revolution that is being witnessed. Any software that grants these four freedoms is called Free Software. These freedoms are essential for students to learn how things work, and to share their experience, knowledge and collaborate without "legal fences".

The software freedom makes it eminently suitable for any purpose, especially for education. The software used in education has to be freely available and accessible to all because education has to be universal. Moreover, the software has to be available in the language used by the community in that part of the world, for small the community may be. This is normally not possible with proprietary software because some communities are too small to satisfy the commercial interests of the company, plus because the main interest of globalized corporation is to "standardize" software solutions as well as human beings.

But the situation is different with Free Software. Since the source code is available for study and modification by anyone, students of computer science and software engineering are able to see code written by master programmers and learn from them, just as students of literature learn from works of great writers, or students of art or cinema learn from the works of great artists and movie makers. This is obviously not possible with proprietary software.

Any community that has people with reasonable software skills can customise the interface to show the menu and other items in their own language. They can also create fonts for the language if they are not available. And they can localise applications to suit their culture and environment.

Finally, the students who have computers in their homes can use the same software they use in their educational institutions without either breaking the law and using illegal software, or spending a lot of money to buy the same software.

Thus, Free Software is undeniably ideal for use in all educational institutions at all levels; for primary, secondary or higher education. Proprietary software keeps people divided and helpless, while Free Software empowers them. Furthermore, teachers using participatory pedagogies can use free software to nurture the much needed creativity and encourage students to critically think and reason with their minds, instead of becoming consumers of software "products" packaged by corporations, together with their "consumer ideology".

It is important for the graduating students to become entrepreneurs or join the various agencies for employment. Considering this requirement it is essential that the syllabus in educational institutions focuses on skills and does not include any specific branded applications. Therefore, the syllabus should be neutral and not mention any particular brand.

Just as the software requires to be free, it is essential that learning and teaching resources including documentation, books, journals, and other media be released with a license (such as Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike) which grants similar freedoms for other resources. All these resources must also be encoded in an open standard so that the exchanged documents are decodable in all platforms ensuring interoperability.

Therefore

considering all the reasons mentioned above, we, the undersigned, call on all educational institutions, policy makers, students and teachers from all corners of the world to start fostering digital inclusion by:

• discarding all proprietary software in favor of the exclusive use of Free Software
• sharing knowledge at all levels with their friends and colleagues
• teaching everybody that education and freedom to participate at all levels are basic needs and rights of all human beings
• asking the State for quality education in ICT and beyond

Signatures

1. Nagarjuna G., FSF India.
2. Satish Babu. SPACE.
3. V Sasi Kumar SPACE.
4. K P Mohandas, N I T Calicut
5. Rajagopalan A, N I T Calicut
6. Prabhu Ramachandran, IIT Bombay, India.
7. PP SHAMEER PALATH,JDT ISLAM VHSE,CALICUT
8. SANJAY SHITOLE SNDT MUMBAI
9. SARATH BABU NIT CALICUT
10. GEORGE JOSEPH NIT CALICUT
11. M V M SHIYAS GHSS, KOZHIKODE
12. AHAMED RASHEED C K, KWA
13. Harish N. , NIT CALICUT
14. JAYAPRAKASH.C VHSS OMANOOR
15. RAJASEKHARAN K. MCC, CALICUT
16. RIZVI IQUBAL GREENLEMON CALICUT
17. JAMAL KUTTY K,GPTC TIRURANGADI
18. P JANARDHANAN, BECON
19. KRISHNA PINGAL B,NIT CALICUT
20. ANDREW TITUS MANUEL MCC. CALICUT
21. GEORGE MAHEW K , BLP CALICUT
22. HASHID K,MARKAZ HSS,KOZHIKKODE
23. SHAJI. A , IISR CALICUT
24. ANUNAY BHARGAVA , N I T CALICUT
25. ASHISH THOMAS, STUDENT, NIT CALICUT
26. Ac3, http://slumdweller.wikispaces.com/ ( thanks for bringing in digital divide into the debate )
27. JAYWIN JACOB VARGHESE, NIT, CALICUT
28. PRAVEEN ACHARYA ,NIT CALICUT
29. Sujan K. Heuju, N I T Calicut
30. S ABHINAY VISWAKARMA, NIT CALICUT
31. PALLAMALA VENKATESWARLU NIT CALICUT
32. GAUTAM KUMAR NIT CALICUT
33. KRISHNAKANT MANE, GNUKHATA MUMBAI
34. RAHUL BHALERAO, IIM KOZHIKODE
35. MUHAMMED YAZAR Y, NIT CALICUT
36. SUDEV A C, NIT CALICUT
37. MAHESH MOHAN MU, UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, THIRUVANANTHAPURAM
38. RARU RV,UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, THIRUVANANTHAPURAM
39. SOORAJ KENNOTH, ZYXWARE TECHNOLOGIES
40. ANISH A, MOHANDAS COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY, THIRUVANANTHAPURAM
41. MANOJ.K VAST ,THRISSUR
42. Juan Carlos Gentile - hipatia
43. Marco Ciurcina - hipatia
44. Renzo Davoli - Universita di Bologna - Italia
45. Anil Vishnu G K, N I T Calicut
46. Raghavendran G, N I T Calicut
47. Asish Oommen Abraham, N I T Calicut
48. Greegar George, N I T Calicut
49. Anoop K, N I T Calicut
50. Akhil P Satheesh ,NIT Calicut
51. Pranav A Rai, NIT Calicut
52. Matteo Gamba - Hipatia
53. Diego Saravia - UNSa - Argentina
54. Stefano Barale - Hipatia - Italia
55. Alpesh Gajbe - HBCSE (Mumbai) - India
56. M.C.Arunan -HBCSE/Sophia College-Mumbai-India
57. Daniel Donato - Università degli studi di Salerno - Italia
58. Pablo Manuel Rizzo - UTUTO - SoLAr - Argentina
59. Leonardo Bauchwitz - Hipatia - Argentina
60. A. MANI - ASL - KOLKATA
61. Marcos Guglielmetti - Musix - SoLAr - Argentina
62. Arun Eapen - Red Hat India
63. Nidia Morrell - Hipatia - Chile
64. Ramiro Castillo - SasLibre - Ecuador
65. Gurumurthy Kasinathan, IT for Change, Bangalore
66. Akshay Sasikumar, Nouveau Solutions, Gurgaon, India
67. Dr. C.M. Harish, Centre for Earth Science Stdies, Thiruvananthapuram, India
68. Jaseem Abid , NIT Calicut.
69. V.S Sajithchandrakumar, Kerala Forest department,Thiruvananthapuram
70. CK Raju, Thrissur, India
71. Vimal Joseph, Zyxware Technologies
72. Kadambari Devarajan, Mumbai, India
73. Anupam Jamatia,NIT,agartala.Tripura,INDIA
74. VK Bardwaj, Mumbai, India
75. Abhradip Mukherjee - Passion4Freedom, Kolkata
76. Parriath Robin Sebastian, Saintgits College of Engineering, Kottayam, Kerala
77. Vineeth Kartha, Govt. Engineering College Barton Hill, Thiruvananthapuram
78. Nishandh M, Freelance documentation artist, Kannur, Kerala
79. Sameer Mohamed Thahir, Indian Libre User Group, Cochin
80. Haynes Davis, Bangalore, India
81. Dr. Venkatesh Choppella, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad
82. Arun M., fsf.org.in, India
83. Jibu Jacob, SW Railway, Mysore
84. Joseph John (Saji), Kollam,Kerala
85. Ganesh.H SPACE,Kerala
86. Charles Escobar, Universidad Israel - Ecuador
87. Marcelo Almeida, Universidad Israel - Ecuador - America del Sur
88. Dhananjay, Student, College Of Engineering, Trivandrum.

To provide the streaming service and to make and edit the videos, we used various free software tools. You can find them in this page, as well as some useful scripts we used. If you want to know what software we are using to run our server, please refer to this page.

Videos: recording, editing and encoding.

To record the videos we shot with our DV camera, we used a combination of dvgrab and mplayer.

dvgrab -format raw - | mplayer -cache 1024 -dumpstream -

To edit the audio files we used Audacity, encoding the audio in Theora Ogg format.

For the watermarks we layered on the videos we used GIMP, and Kdenlive.

To encode the videos in ogv format, we used libtheora from Xiph.org

Streaming:

Our streaming server: http://streaming.hipatia.net:8000/ is running Icecast2.

To send the videos from our DV camera to our server for the live streaming, we used dvgrab with ffmpeg and oggfwd. To embed the video in our website pages we use the player provided by iTheora, using the specifications of HTML5.

Here is the script we are using to send the videos to our Icecast server:

dvgrab -format raw - | ffmpeg2theora -a 0 -v 5 -f dv -x 640 -y 480 -o /dev/stdout - | oggfwd <icecast_server> <port> <password> guri.ogv

We support the FSF campaign PlayOgg! to spread information about this free format. For this reason all our videos are encoded in ogg or ogv format. To see how to configure our Apache based server to manage ogg files, please see this page.

Our site, together with its contents, is composed entirely by software libre. To reproduce its features you should install on your server the following software:

• Apache Web Server  
• MySQL
• PHP

Our server is Debian based and it's running a Linux kernel.  

To manage the contents of our website we are using Drupal, a CMS released under the therms of GNU GPL.  

• Drupal uses third-party modules (plugins). The one we chose are released under the General Public Licence.
• The theme we are using is  Free Software too.
• Our contents (texts and multimedial data), excpet where specified, are released under the GNU Free Documentation License v1.3 (or later). To use the contents of our site please use our RSS interface.
• Our share icon is quad licensed under GPL,LGPL, BSD,Creative Commons Attribution 2.5

• The images (logos, header, ...) have been designed by the free (as in freedom) editor GIMP. For the vectorial graphics (svg), we use Inkscape.

• Our videos are econded in the free container Theora Ogv, as well as the audio files (Vorbis). The stream of the videos is embedded in our pages through HTML5 and Cortado. To provide a user friendly interface for managing videos, we use iTheora, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3. 

The team of Guri received from Stack-Studios a cluster which was previously used for 3D rendering. Now the aim is to set the cluster in order to give part of its computational power to many interesting projects in the software world but also in the educational sphere.

Technical Specifications

A cluster is a combination of high-end server components which work together using a fast Local Area Network connection. Each calculation is divided by the total number of processor so that it can be accomplished in a very low amount of time. A cluster platform is not used for usual tasks but it is really useful when we need to render frames in high quality or compile a huge amount of code: with a normal Personal Computing platform these operation can take several days. Companies, that treat great amount of data, own a cluster calculation platform or, if the housing costs are too high, they use calculation power provided by a third party. Our cluster is based on 58 Intel Xeon processors, which is a family of processors meant for server usage. These kind of micro-processor, using Socket PGA-604, can work at 2.66 GHz which means that it can accomplish a high quantity of tasks. The Hyper Threading technology, implemented in the Xeon we are using, gives the opportunity of creating a secondary not physical core that makes the platform a Dual Core processing unit. The heat generated by the Central Processing Units is treated using 2 copper heat-pipes with 2 80x80x2mm fans over it.

Our motherboard, a Tyan Tiger i7501 - S2723, is a high performance server oriented board. It has a dual socket technology that gives the chance of installing a secondary identical micro-processor to increase the amount of computational power decreasing the time for each operation. The chipset is an Intel E7501 Server chipset and has a Front Side Bus support for 533 MHz. There are 4 slots available for 184-pin 2.5 Volt DDR DIMM operating at a maximum frequency of 266MHz in single or dual channel set up. High quality connection is guaranteed by an Intel 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet controller and a Intel 82551 Fast Ethernet controller. The integrated ATI Rage XL PCI graphic card gives the opportunity to connect a VGA monitor. Hyper Threading support is guaranteed to work perfectly from Linux Kernel 2.4.18 on. We have 29 dual socket motherboards ready to use. Power Supplies Units have an output of 350 Watt Max. Our cluster needs one PSU per motherboard, so the total number of units is 29.

Talking about the Hard Disk section, we used several types of solutions. Some IDE disks are Western Digital, rotating at 7200rpm and with a total capacity of 40/80 GB. We also have some Maxtor disks and Seagate ones with the same characteristics. 19 is the total number of disks available.

Testing

We had to test the cluster to see if all the machines were perfectly working so we decided to configure one machine at a time to see the results. This was also forced by the fact that we could not test all the configurations together because of the high quantity of power required and the “cooling” problem.

We set up this type of configuration as a test machine:

• Tyan Tiger i7501 - S2723 Motherboard
• 2 sticks of Corsair DDR2100 RAM working at 266MHz with 2.5V in Dual Channel Mode
• 2 Intel Xeon Processor working at 2.66GHz per core
• 1 Western Digital HDD connected with an IDE interface
• 1 Asus Optical Reader 52X MAX
• 1 PSU 350 Watt MAX
• 1 LCD Monitor 15”

Once the platform was ready we noticed that it required to connect another 4-pin molex to guarantee the right amount of power for both the cpus. In the BIOS section, which is an American Megatrend one, we checked that the temperatures were right and that all the devices plugged in were correctly recognized. Then we set the RAM voltage to 2.5V and the boot priority to the optical drive. After reboot the distro started loading. We tried different distros ( gmrl for example ) but we liked Inquisitor a full GPLv3 distro⁽¹⁾ intended for hardware testing. This GNU/Linux distribution offers some great tools in a simple interface so that it's possible to perform every test with speed and accuracy.

We ran a full non-destructive test which was 40 minutes long and gave us feed-backs about the machine. We were a little bit skeptical about running this kind of test because of one detail: the temperature. In fact when both cpus are running in full load mode there is the risk of reaching the temperature limit which can cause the automatic reboot of the platform (in the BIOS there is a section to set up many variables to prevent any hardware damage caused by high temperature/wrong heat dissipation). Fortunately we were testing in a very ventilated place and all the heat generated by the processors, taken away using cooling fans, was immediately replaced with fresh wind air. The temperatures were always good, never reaching 60° C (the cpu limit is 72 Celsius Degrees). Also the RAM testing can produce a great quantity of heat but this was controlled with a normal fan placed on top of the slots on the motherboard.

As soon as the test finishes, Inquisitor gives the possibility of seeing a detailed log with all the operations clearly illustrated. Unfortunately some of the results were in XML format so reading those with a normal text-editor is difficult. When the first platform was successfully tested we set up the second one and so on until night time. The whole operations for each test has a cost from 40 to 50 minutes in terms of time. The test can run faster if the Hyper Threading technology is disabled from the BIOS section because if not Inquisitor will recognize and then test 4 cores instead of only 2.

Problems

During all the test session we encountered some problems. Many of them were RAM related: when nothing happens when you turn the PSU on, if everything is well connected, there's an high possibility that the Random Access Memory sticks are corrupted. Many times just removing, cleaning the slots and reinstalling solved the problem whilst in other occasions the memories were damaged. In one case we experienced a motherboard problem. The system was not booting correctly even if the fans were rotating and the drives started as usual. We changed all the devices connected but we didn't find a solution for that.

Conclusions

In conclusion we can tell that the whole testing operation is not difficult. We did not use any cabinet but just a box with many holes, paying attention to avoid overheating or other problems related to cable connections. The stress test, as the name suggests, are meant to use all the resources at their maximum potentials. At full load our configuration needs 310/320W so also the PSU unit has been well stressed. My suggestion to everyone trying to test a platform is to work with gloves or rubber protections and set up the working area in a safe electrical way. Dust can cause many problems so it's better to use an air compressor to clean everything before actually starting the machine. If you have to store the components it's better to use a dry place where the temperature is always controlled. Hard drives can suffer if they're exposed to magnetic fields.

Notes

1. ^{The core components of Inquisitor are covered by GPLv3. Inside the distro there are several patches and other components, which we did not use, covered by other types of free software licences (like GPLv2).}

Cluster Testing by surF is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione-Non commerciale-Non opere derivate 2.5 Italia License.
Based on a work at guri.hipatia.net.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at lio [AT] hipatia [DOT] net (please remember to change [AT] and [DOT] with @ & .)