Karma/Specifications

Introduction

Notes: recommendations,

Two main goals should be kept in mind when creating Karma lessons:

1. they should be easy to adapt
2. they should run on as much hardware as possibe with OLPC's XO-1 laptop representing the baseline

General Notes

Hardware constraints

Since a large percentage (if not the majority) of Karma users are envisioned to be using OLPC XO-1 laptops, netbooks, older hardware or generally relatively slow systems there are several performance constraints that need to be taken into account when designing Karma lessons.

• CPU/Memory: The baseline regarding available performance is the XO-1 laptop which comes with an AMD Geode LX 433MHz CPU and 256MB RAM (full specifications). This limits the use of high-resolution multimedia, animations and videos to some degree.
• Display: Karma lessons should work well on displays with a resolution of 1024*768 (whereby a part of the display may be taken up by browser UI elements!).
• Mass storage: Since especially the XO-1 laptop only has very limited local mass storage (1GB) lessons should be kept reasonably small.
• Connectivity: Karma lessons must not assume constant connectivity with a locally (e.g. XS) or globally available server. Support for storing data locally will be provided by Karma.

Accessibility

...

Animations

• Format(s): TBD
• Recommended tools: TBD
• Notes: TBD
• ...

Images

• Format(s): JPEG, PNG, SVG (?)
• Recommended tools: Adobe Illustrator (non-free), CorelDRAW (non-free), GIMP, Inkscape
• Max. resolution: 1200*900
• Notes: TBD

Sound

• Format(s): OGG Vorbis
• Bit rate: TBD
• Max. size per lesson: 3~4MB
• Recommended tools: Audacity
• Notes: TBD

Video

• Format(s): TBD
• Recommended tools: TBD
• Notes: TBD
• ...