Installing the RACHEL Education Package

RACHEL is a free collection of powerful educational content available in several languages. It includes packages like Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Edison for Robotics, CK-12 Textbooks, UNESCO's IICBA Electronic Library, MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia, Great Books of the World, OLPC Educational Packages, or MIT Scratch, among many others. To get an overview of what a package includes, please refer to the project's page at http://rachelfriends.org/ or check OER2GO's list of educational software from http://oer2go.org/.

RACHEL takes about 20-25GB of disk space and it is recommended to install only on disk drives of 50GB or higher.

To install RACHEL, first, you need to download the package into your local disk. If you are sanitizing a Labdoo laptop or tablet, we recommend you installing RACHEL by downloading it from http://ftp.labdoo.org/download/install-disk/wiki-archive/wikis/. In this FTP server, you will find zipped (compressed) files with extension *.tar.gz organized by languages (for instance, "EN" for English, "FR" for French, etc.). Download as many compressed files as you think are necessary for the school of destination your laptops/tablets will be deployed at.

Installing RACHEL on a Laptop
Once you have downloaded the RACHEL package(s), create a new folder called "wikis" inside /home/labdoo/Public/ and unzip RACHEL there (the downloading and unzipping operations could take some time depending on the speed of your network and computer). Once unzipped, double click on the file /home/labdoo/Public/wikis/RACHEL-EN/bin/www/starthere.html to open a web browser that will take you to the RACHEL's start page.

To create easier access for users, we recommend you to make the default web browser page point to RACHEL's initial page. For that, open the web browser (these instructions are for Firefox but similar steps apply to other browsers) and go to:

File => Open File
[ navigate to /home/labdoo/Public/wikis/bin/www/starthere.html ] => Open

Then go to:

Edit => Preferences
[ opens a window for the settings, click on "Use current Pages" and close the tab "Preferences" ]

Please repeat any of the configuration steps for both the 'Labdoo' and the 'student' users (if they are both available on your laptop).

Note. The first folder "Wikipedia for Schools" is equivalent to the Xowa package; hence, if your Labdoo laptop already has Xowa installed, you can remove this folder from RACHEL, which will give you back 6,5 GB of disk space.

Installing RACHEL on a Tablet

The RACHEL package includes also an installation file for Android (apk file): http://rachelfriends.org/downloads/public_ftp/. However, notice that as long as you read the RACHEL content in a web browser from a tablet, it is not necessary to install this apk-file. That means that you can just copy and unzip the RACHEL file to the tablet and open the file "starthere.html" from the tablet's web browser. With this method, you can use RACHEL in any tablet (not just Android) just by using the tablet's web browser. Some tablets may not have enough built-in disk space to store RACHEL. If that is the case, you need to include an external storage card and install RACHEL in it.

Note. RACHEL is much more than just content for a web browser as it also includes executable files. Some of these executable files may not be compatible with Labdoo's operating system. However, these additional programs do not take much disk space, and hence we recommend to leave them where they are so that schools abroad can still have the option to copy these tools to other compatible platforms and use them.