[Opensim-users] Hosting your own sim -- no admin access

Tue Oct 5 00:41:40 UTC 2010

On Oct 4, 2010, at 5:36 PM, Serendipity Seraph wrote:

> If you had a good enough script to get the mono bits and build them locally then the local mono executable *may* be enough.  Just a thought.    So a script that got mono and built that (assuming the kids have the mac developer tools on their boxes) and got the diva distro and ran its setup could perhaps work.
> 

Duh.  Build it on any machine with privileges then give the students a tar or zip and script to locally run everything.   Also, doesn't the school have some way to change what is on the kids's machines (remote admin)?

> - s
> 
> On Oct 4, 2010, at 5:22 PM, Justin Clark-Casey wrote:
> 
>> On 04/10/10 14:29, Jeff Mao wrote:
>>> 
>>> Please excuse the x-post
>>> 
>>> Greetings all,
>>> This is sightly off-topic, but I figured this was a community that could
>>> help point me toward the people who could help me solve a
>>> challenge...here it is (this is a little long)...
>>> 
>>> In my real life, I work for the State of Maine, Department of Education,
>>> and I oversee the Maine Learning Technology Initiative. It is the United
>>> State's largest 1:1 student computing program. Currently, we have 70,000
>>> users (students, teachers, and administrators) in grades 7-12. Annually,
>>> we host a student conference at the University of Maine. About 1000 kids
>>> attend annually, and it is a time for kids to share what they are doing
>>> and to learn from others -- all things that are powered by the fact that
>>> we have a unique scenario...every student has a State issued MacBook
>>> laptop computer.
>>> 
>>> Part of the day each year, we host an "ubër session" where all 1000 kids
>>> are in an auditorium together and do something that really demonstrates
>>> the power of the scale of the program. Last year, we played at
>>> www.freerice.com <http://www.freerice.com/> and in 45 minutes, the kids
>>> donated 2.4 million grains of rice to the World Food Program by
>>> answering vocabulary questions.
>>> 
>>> This year, we were thinking of doing a virtual world project. Here's
>>> what we were thinking...rather then attempt to set up enough servers for
>>> all the kids to login to a grid together (its already a challenge to
>>> create a wireless network that can host 1000 concurrent users in one
>>> auditorium), we were thinking that each student would host their own sim
>>> (the other benefit to this is that when they leave, they take their sim
>>> with them and can use it anytime anywhere). To connect the session to
>>> the larger theme of the student conference (STEM education) we are
>>> focusing on energy this year. The activity we wanted them to play with
>>> for the hour we have is to play with energy use. To do so, we wanted to
>>> preload the default avatar inventory with some scripted items like a
>>> plasma TV, toaster, microwave oven, etc. In addition, things like small
>>> windmills, solar panels, etc. The idea is to let the kids drag these
>>> items out into their world, and with a HUD of some sort, be able to
>>> monitor electrical use even with these items "off". And then be able to
>>> turn them on, and see what happens to their energy draw...add a solar
>>> panel, and see what it takes to offset their electrical use, etc.
>>> 
>>> None of that is hard except...hosting your own sim. We've looked at the
>>> opensim project, and it appears that their is potential here, and we're
>>> only at the start of investigating this...but here's our initial barriers:
>>> 
>>> 1) The students are not administrators on their laptops, so the sim and
>>> any supporting frameworks (ie mono) need to be able to be installed into
>>> the user home directory without an administrator password.http://github.com/diva/d2
>> 
>> Unfortunately, I believe mono can only be installed with administrator privileges on Mac.
>> 
>>> 
>>> 2) How to set up a dynamic "map" so that once the 1000 kids each have a
>>> sim running, how to visit each other's sim?
>> 
>> In principle, you could do this by enabling hypergrid on OpenSim.  Hypergrid allows avatars from different installations of OpenSim to visit other installations without having to be in the same grid (which would require a large amount of network traffic).  There are some details at
>> 
>> http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Installing_and_Running_Hypergrid
>> 
>> which I believe relate to Hypergrid 1.0 in OpenSim 0.6.9.  Later OpenSim versions run a revision called Hypergrid 1.5 which I believe uses different commands which are not yet well documented (?).
>> 
>> Although HG can be set up on OpenSim, you may want to take a look at the Diva Distribution
>> 
>> http://github.com/diva/d2
>> 
>> which comes with Hypergrid pre-configured.
>> 
>> I suspect this will all be very technically challenging - I'm guessing 1000 simultaneous users is significantly higher than any scaling scenario seen so far with this architecture....
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> So, the question for the wisdom of this group...anyone ever try anything
>>> of this sort? Anyone know who we should be talking to? Maybe someone at
>>> Linden Labs would be interested in playing with this with us? This event
>>> is scheduled for the end of May 2011, so that's our timeline for any
>>> development that we might need to get done to make this happen.
>>> 
>>> Thanks in advance for any wisdom you might have...
>>> 
>>> Jeff Mao
>>> Learning Technology Policy Director
>>> Maine Department of Education
>>> jeff.mao at maine.gov <mailto:jeff.mao at maine.gov>
>>> SL: Geoffrey Mayo
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Opensim-users mailing list
>>> Opensim-users at lists.berlios.de
>>> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Justin Clark-Casey (justincc)
>> http://justincc.org
>> http://twitter.com/justincc
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