That's Community Access Centre in English.



The one here is located in Salé, which is city of around 500.000 inhabitants in Morocco.

What makes this place so special, and what has it got to do with this project?

Multiple EFIKA Open Clients, and a server, are now sitting next to the more conventional PC's at this centre. The goal is formation and education of youth, expanding open source software initiatives, reduce operation costs of the centre to make it self sustained and of course to let the kids have fun!

It is a space of communication, exchange and debate on the various aspects of the local development. Computers and other services are placed at the disposal of the public for various activities, in particular training in data processing and the services on line on Internet. This centre was set up by Tanmia, some more information can be found here: http://www.tanmia.ma/article.php3?id_article=9209

The Tanmia development portal (http://www.tanmia.ma) is a national internet portal designed to increase the capabilities of Moroccan associations by utilising information technology and communication tools. The Tanmia portal is a participation site where associations connect and exchange information.

On the picture below is one of the first EFIKA Open Client installed at the centre. We had some round table session around this time, and the presentations were run from this machine:



So, what can you see on the screen?

The set-up consist of the following elements:

• Customised ROX Desktop (http://rox.sourceforge.net/)
  
• 'Local' applications, such as Abiword, Gnumeric, Gaim,...
  
• 'Remote' applications, such as Firefox, OpenOffice, Gimp ...
  
• User management interface for easy addition and deletion of users.
  

The 'remote' and 'local' applications are an indication of where they are running. Remote applications run on the server, and have their display send to the Open Client. Local applications are those applications which run on the MPC5200B in the Open Client itself.
This distinction alone allows for the use of a much less powerful server while still delivering powerful tools to the user of the system.

We can run Quake III as a local application by the way, just to give an indication of performance possible on board of the client. One can easily edit a document while doing some spreadsheet operations without using any of the server's processing cycles!

Just the same, we can stream music and video. Flash drives connected to the Open Client allow people to take their documents along. Printing documents, burning CD's, etc. is all possible.

Since the Open Client does not have a hard drive in this set-up, the system boots over the network from the server. This consumes far less bandwidth as one might think, and several Open Clients can easily boot at the same time from even a normal PC. During normal operation, network activity drops even further, giving an optimal user experience.

Did they like it? :-)