Mona, Kutloisiso and Asherson, Stephen and Valodia, Trishan (2005) Distributed Office Applications for Linux PDA, CS05-11-00, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town.
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Abstract
Many countries within Africa suffer from lack of access to necessary technology resources; the resulting effect is a lack of computer literacy amongst these societies and in particular, learners within educational institutions. There have been many investigations regarding the use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) within education; many of these investigations involve the use of productivity software suites such as Microsoft Pocket Office. Although these investigations have been undertaken, many of them involve proprietary software. There is a significant need for an Open Source Office suite designed for a PDA, which is able to serve as an alternative to proprietary software. This need is particularly high within the African context whereby financial resources are scarce. This project aims at exploring the possibility of providing an Open Source office applications suite for a PDA. This project resulted in a word processor, spreadsheet application and presentation application ported to a Linux-based PDA. These cheaper devices are limited in their resources yet the resulting applications are not hindered by these limitations. The applications rely on remotely accessing components that are present on a desktop machine, rather than accessing components locally on the PDA. This approach shifts the greater portion of processing, memory and storage requirements onto the desktop machine rather than to the limited PDA. The resulting application sizes are significantly smaller than the original complete applications. As a result, educators and learners may make use of this software within a learning environment to share and gain computer literacy skills
| Item Type: | Technical report |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Spreadsheet, CORBA, Components, Open Source Software, Education, Word Processor, Presentation |
| Subjects: | Software and its engineering Computer systems organization > Architectures > Distributed architectures Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Computing education |
| Date Deposited: | 21 Oct 2005 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Oct 2019 15:35 |
| URI: | http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/256 |
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