Voting Machine

Following the referendum held in October 2017 in the Region of Lombardy, the 23.000 voting machines SmartMatic VIU-800 used for electronic voting were distributed between April and May 2018 in about 1.000 schools in the Region for educational uses, with Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS installed as the operating system.

Although the use of Voting Machines is not integrable with our project, they are deployed with Linux and free software; their use therefore accords with the purposes behind the project itself, which is to support schools that intend to adopt free software and open source. That is why we decided to create this page, trying to provide useful pointers and references for those who have them available and want to understand how best to use them.

WARNING: in addition to the directions that will be provided on the rest of the page, always remember that the prerogative of free software are communities. These are the big advantage and the extra gear of this kind of solutions, making them something more important than just the functionality provided by the software and allowing all community participants to give and receive assistance, share experiences and expertise, and contribute to and enjoy the contributions of others. Joining a community is the best way to compare, learn, contribute and grow.

Our Experience

One of our team got to test a couple of Voting Machines for about a month, holding a demonstration event in Bergamo organized by the Bergamo Linux Users Group (BgLUG). The following are our evaluations.

Many media outlets (online and printed media) have summarily referred to these machines as tablets; however, we find this definition misleading and incorrect, because a touch screen and small size are not enough to define a tablet. Furthermore, it is true that there is something resembling an app store on the installed operating system, however, the “apps” that can be found in this store are not necessarily optimized for a touch screen device, but are much more similar to the apps that are normally found on PC operating systems (and thus involve mouse and keyboard interaction).

Therefore, we treat these machines as real PCs and recommend attaching a mouse and a keyboard to them. Thus equipped, they will be perfect machines for one of these functions:

  • teaching/laboratory: can safely perform this function and, although not very light especially for children, lend themselves to being moved from one classroom to another without the need for dedicated wiring. In this case, it is necessary to have a wireless network (Wi-Fi) available;
  • attendance register: management of the attendance register is absolutely possible through browsers that can be found on board or installed through the app store. However, you can hardly use them to manage the interactive whiteboards: these machines do not have the connection ports usually required for the purpose (VGA, DVI, HDMI);
  • digital signage: if you have movies illustrating the School’s facilities and courses of study, you can take advantage of the bright screen and the included speaker to illustrate the School’s special features to the users in an alternative way;
  • kiosks: if you have a web application, you can leave the voting machine available for users to fill out online forms or general inquiries.

Voting Machine con xubuntu

The hardware is not particularly high-performance (Intel Atom Quad Core with 2 GB RAM); based on our experience with the Librescuola project, we can say that it is nevertheless hardware equal to or superior to the average PC we find in school labs: commonly used applications such as Internet browsers (Firefox, Chrome, etc.) can run on them without problems. ), office automation suites such as LibreOffice, image editing software (GIMP and Inkscape), and much more.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS GNOME, the Linux distribution with which they are provided by the Region of Lombardy, surprised us positively. At first superficial analysis, we agreed that it was too heavy for the hardware in question; instead, we found it sufficiently usable and responsive. In particular, the desktop environment chosen, GNOME, is very nice and feature-rich, although it is rather heavy and perhaps the choice should have fallen on a lighter one, although not as complete.

Other useful considerations:

  • the batteries provide 5 to 7 hours of use on a full charge, thus covering the entire school morning. In addition to this, the Voting Machines come with an additional battery (power bank) to further increase their autonomy;
  • while using the voting machines, we have noticed that when connected to the power supply during their use, noisy cooling fan sometimes activates. We do not know if this is a common feature of all machines or only the two we tested; however, the advice is to use them on battery power (which is also much more convenient) and put them on charge when they are not being used;
  • the hard disk is not very large, only 16 GB of which about 2 or 3 GB are occupied by the operating system and preinstalled software. So you need to choose well the list of software you want to install and consider saving documents and work done during the teaching activity on an external storage medium, such as a USB stick;
  • do not have a wired network card. This means that if you want to connect to the school network or the Internet, you must have your own managed wireless network.

Voting Machine Apps

While reiterating that they can be used as is, we also tried installing a distribution with a lighter desktop environment: Xubuntu 18.04 LTS, whose desktop environment is XFCE. Apart from some initial hardware recognition problems that we overcame, the result was definitely interesting from the point of view of usability and especially performance. All installed applications benefited greatly in terms of both responsiveness and smoothness. In the future, we plan to give more information about this for those interested in this solution.

Ubuntu-it Wiki dedicated to Voting Machines

Voting Machines are distributed by the Lombardy Region with the Ubuntu Linux operating system installed, so Ubuntu-it (reference site of the Italian Ubuntu community) has published a section of their wiki dedicated to the use of Ubuntu on this tool. Various topics are described: how to deal with the first steps, the basics of using Ubuntu, references to programs already installed and some that can be installed for educational purposes, and much more. In addition to the wiki dedicated to the Voting Machine, on the entire Ubuntu-it wiki you can find a lot of other interesting information regarding the use of Ubuntu and free software in general, which, of course, also applies to use on the Voting Machine. The wiki is open, which means that anyone can contribute based on their own experience and expertise.

Ubuntu-it Forums

In addition to the wiki, Ubuntu-it also has a forum where anyone can ask and provide support and/or information.

Dedicated school.linux.it wiki

The community that runs the scuola.linux.it wiki also wanted to contribute by dedicating a special section to the topic where you can find other useful information.

Technical information of Emiliano Vavassori

Emiliano Vavassori, one of the founders of the Libreschool project, had fun replacing the standard distribution with which the Voting Machines come with Xubuntu 18.04 LTS, which, as mentioned earlier, proved to be decidedly more performant and fluid. In doing so, he ran into some configuration problems that he was able to solve. He shared the information he gathered during this research on his site, making it available to other people who want to experiment with different solutions.

Linux applications list for schools

This wiki, maintained mainly by teachers, contains a long list of Linux applications dedicated to education. The applications listed are not described at all or in full, but essential instructions for their installation are provided.