OLPC:News

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LAPTOP NEWS

1. Abuja, Nigeria: A significant milestone was reached when approximately one- hundred laptops were handed out to children in Nigerian test school, Galadima. The laptops were received with smiles, curiosity, and giggles. The most popular feature in the first hour the children spent with their laptops was the mesh view. As of this moment, one-hundred families in the Nigerian Galadima community will have spent part of their family time around the laptops, with the children proudly explaining how they work.

2. Buenos Aires: David Cavallo, Rodrigo Mesquita, and Walter Bender participated a series of five half-day workshops for a variety of audiences. The attending groups included key people in government, education, and software development, as well as events for the press and general public. Alejandro Piscitelli and Laura Serra of educ.ar contributed greatly to the discussions and development of ideas. Valter Cegal and Rebecca Gonzales of AMD also participated.

3. New York: Sj Klein met with representatives from UNICEF, which is developing projects for UNIWiki, an effort to coordinate shared free knowledge produced internally and by others (e.g., Voices of Youth). They are especially interested in focusing on projects in developing nations, with attention to multilingualism, mentoring, and cross-cultural communication.

4. Washington: The Library of Congress World Digital Library is asking their network of librarians and curators to join the OLPC curation efforts, in the subjects and languages that most interest them.

5. Mesh activities: Dan Williams and the Collabora team continue to work on the Presence Service, a key to developing mesh-enabled activities. They are making good progress, building out the APIs and testing the libraries under our framework.

6. Startup screen: Dan also found time to put together a new startup screen for the laptop that takes a child's picture.

7. Bug hunting: Marcelo Tosatti investigated and located the source of the iperf-corruption problem we were seeing on some of the laptops under heavy load. It turned out to be the result of a fix in the networking driver. Marcelo has also been investigating and working on implementations to tell activities on the machine when they are running out of memory and give them a chance to release caches or shut down.

8. UI: Marco Gritti and Tomeu Vizoso have been making progress on Sugar. The current builds have a large number of fixes and changes over what shipped with the Build-239 machines; people will be pleasantly surprised. Tomeu has been working largely on underlying widgets and infrastructure and Marco has been busy working on higher-level constructs, including working with Eben Eliason to firm up design decisions. The new Sugar has a better default font, moves a lot of the networking into the home page, includes a Journal demo, and rollover information for the activities that should greatly help with usability and first impressions.

9. Music Activities: The TamTam team has been hard at work improving the music program as well. The new version exposes the track editor and is much more interesting than previous versions.

10. Trial-1: We have been working toward a new stable build that will form the basis of our first tests in the field. Andres Salomon branched a stable tree (http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/stable/).

11. School server: The software architecture of the school servers is starting to come together, through discussions this week around the networking services provided and possible scaling mechanisms. For Trial-1, the networking will remain IPv4, with the school server providing DHCP, DNS, HTTP cache, and NAT functionality. Hardware for school server development has arrived in Cambridge, with plans to have a limited prototype up and running over the next week.

12. Marc Fiuczynky of PlanetLab (Princeton University) visited to discuss lessons learned by PlanetLab. Herbert Poeztl, who developed the virtual-server mechanism (Vserver) used by PlanetLab, has been working at OLPC to help integrate it with our software. (Vserver is a Linux technology for "containerization" of environments that will be very useful in the future for both management and increased security.)

13. Suspend/Resume and Power Management: Mitch Bradley has been working on bringing up resume in OpenFirmware. He has dismantled and instrumented a B2 with the following results:

  • the long delay from power/wakeup to CPU on is down to 12mS (instead

of 500mS—probably a CAFE FPGA turn-on delay);

  • we no longer sees random hard-hangs;
  • a problem with the DCON wiring with respect to wake-up was found; and
  • resume-from-RAM was having problems by is now seemingly reliable.

The current time from power-reapplied to completion of the wakeup procedure is 27.6mS. Mitch knows an easy way to knock off another 4.5mS , to bring the core wakeup time down about 23mS. It is conceivable that he might manage to shave off a few more milliseconds, but probably not much. It is very tightly coded as is, and the "long poles" are hardware delays like PLL startup and ROM access time for early instructions. This time does not include video subsystem restart time, so additional time will be needed for that.

14. Performance: Chris Ball and Dave Woodhouse worked on a booting-performance problem. The JFFS2 kernel-thread-speed problem is resolved. Booting a current build on a B2 machine takes 2 minutes 2 seconds, but drops to 1 minute 24 seconds with the work around for the USB branch-prediction problem (reported last week), and now drops to 1 minute 6 seconds with a fix to the scheduling for the JFFS2 kernel thread. This scheduling fix should go into the build soon. Chris Ball also added graphing of Python performance over time to the tinderbox.

15. Network: Michail Bletsas setup a 14-node mesh testbed at OLPC and spent last week with Cozybit and Marvell debugging the mesh firmware and the wireless driver. As of Friday night all of the major problems have been addressed to the point that the mesh functionality is now usable:

  • in-mesh multi-hop multicast support;
  • link-loss detection and route tear-down with RERR messages (This

improves route-restoration time);

  • mesh transmission rate is done a the highest-available rate for each

hop (The rate for each hop is determined when the route is discovered);

  • deferred route discovery (Route discovery is now done by a lower

priority task, which reduces the variance of transmission time);

  • WDS problem workaround (Wireless interface will accept WDS replies

from WDS-enabled access points. This will only work with APs that have a different MAC OUI than the XO's [Ticket #901]).

  • fixing flow control for the mesh interface on the libertas driver

alleviated the problems with high-data-rate TCP flow corruption (Ticket #915).

16. IPv6: In preparation for integration of laptops and servers, OLPC has started working on our IPv6 implementation. Chris helped Dave Woodhouse with setting up "tubes," the machine running our IPv6 testbed. All XOs and other systems able to support IPv6 in the Cambridge office now get public IPv6 addresses by default, thanks to Dave Woodhouse and our new intern systems administartor Daniel Jared Dominguez.

17. Power management: The power-rail measurement system arrived this week. We now have in house equipment that can measure the current on all power rails of a B2 board to an accuracy of about 1mA. Richard Smith will start taking measurements on each rail and testing the suspend-resume code. In addition to current measurement this equipment has can control several relay contacts. These can be connected to power switches on the laptop. All of the measurements and outputs can be controlled remotely by Ethernet, serial, or USB. We therefore have the ability to build a new tinderbox that can automatically test nand image builds and firmware upgrades, while taking power measurements on every power rail during the entire process. Previously we could not test firmware upgrades automatically because we did not have a good power-cycle method/restart-after- flash method.

18. Kernel: Andres synced up our kernel with the 2.6.21-rc2 release. Andres also fixed a bug in the interaction between the rpm spec file and dynticks that was breaking system tap. With that fixed, tinderbox should work with 2.6.21-rc2 properly and can properly benchmark jffs2 and the SD driver. There is a pending bug in the SD driver for which he has prepared a patch but cannot test until he can actually benchmark. Andres "thinks" the dynticks bug is fixed (Ticket #954), and the jffs2 bug (which adds 30 seconds to the boot time, as discovered by Chris Blizzard) is still pending. Zephaniah Hull and Jim Gettys "fixed" the touch-pad bug. Jordan Crouse of AMD has been developing driver patches for suspend and resume and is further investigating the USB performance problem. Andres also did some investigation of the USB performance problem; he and Jordan discussed how the hardware would implement uncached memory and poked around the kernel code for ways to easily do it.

19. From the community: Andrew Clunis reports that a reasonably functional version of the Develop activity is now available in sugar-jhbuild (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Develop). It provides a very basic "IDE"—a file TreeView and text editor, currently provided by GtkSourceView.

20. Policy discussion: A new mailing list, aop@laptop.org, has been set up to host community discussions about policy decisions: everything from the OLPC security model to our position regarding FOSS. You participation is welcome.


Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Press requests: please send email to press@laptop.org

MILESTONES

Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.
Dec. 2006 Uruguay announced its participation in the project.
Nov. 2006 First B1 machines are built; IDB and OLPC formalize an agreement regarding Latin American and Caribbean education.
Oct. 2006 B-test boards become available; Libya announces plans for one laptop for every child
Sep. 2006 UI designs presented; integrated software build released; SES-Astra joins OLPC
Aug. 2006 Working prototype of the dual-mode display
Jun. 2006 500 developer boards are shipped worldwide; WiFi operational; Csound demonstrated over the mesh network
First video with working prototype [1]
May 2006 eBay joins OLPC; display specs set; A-test boards become available; $100 Server is announced
Apr. 2006 Pre-A test board boots; Squid and FreePlay present first human-power systems
Mar. 2006 Yves Behar and FuseProject are selected as industry designers
Feb. 2006 Marvell joins OLPC and continues to partner on network hardware
Jan. 2006 World Economic Forum, Switzerland
UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement
news release
Dec. 2005 Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop
(html)(pdf)
Nov. 2005 WSIS, Tunisia
Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; Nortel joins OLPC

Photos: (Image 1) (Image 2) (Image 3)
Webcast: (Arabic) (English) (French) (original)
Webcast provided by the ITU and UN Webcast Services with the support of RealNetworks Ltd. RealPlayer is required to view the webcast (available at no cost).

Aug. 2005 Design Continuum starts design of first laptop
Jul. 2005 Formal signing of original members of OLPC
Mar. 2005 Brightstar and Red Hat come on board
Jan. 2005 Laptop initiative officially announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland; AMD, News Corp. and Google agree to join OLPC

PRESS

3 Jan. 2007 networkworld.com| OLPC Aims for Mass Production in Third Quarter
3 Jan. 2007 IDG.net| One Laptop per Child Sweetens Hardware with 'Sugar' UI
3 Jan. 2007 YAHOO! Finance| OLPC Announces First-of-Its Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer
2 Jan. 2007 Bicyclemark's Communique (podcast)| One Laptop Per Child (@23C3)
22 Dec. 2006 Financial Times| Clever Kit to Benefit Developing Countries (registration required)
27 Nov. 2006 Pagina/12| La manera más económica para mejorar la educación
21 Nov. 2006 Official Release|First 1,000 XO-Laptops Roll off the Assembly Line in Shanghai
19 Nov. 2006 Jamaica Gleaner| Technology - a tool for transformation
19 Nov. 2006 International Herald Tribune| One Laptop per Child: Computer designed for those who can least afford them
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review| Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part III
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review| Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part II
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review| Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part I
8 Nov. 2006 Popular Science| Best of What's New 2006: One Laptop per Child XO- Better Screen, Better World
6 Nov. 2006 ZDNet.co.uk | Why Every Child Deserves a Laptop- Matthew Szulik, CEO, Red Hat
27 Oct. 2006 LinuxWorld | Children's Laptop Inspires Open Source Projects
24 Oct. 2006 LA Times | Upward Mobility in a Laptop
24 Oct. 2006 Fortune | This PC wants to save the world
12 Oct. 2006 Bostonist | One Laptop per Child for Libya
11 Oct. 2006 New York Times | U.S. Group Reaches Deal to Provide Laptops to All Libyan Schoolchildren
3 Oct. 2006 GulfNews.com | College gets look at $100 Children's Laptop Computer
25 Sep. 2006 vnunet.com | OLPC offered free satellite connections
14 Sep. 2006 Vanguard | Keyboard In Three Nigerian Languages Ready-Obasanjo
08 Sep. 2006 Technology Review | Hack: The Hundred Dollar Laptop
06 Sep. 2006 nacion.com | Computadoras de $100 estarán listas en el 2007
 Aug. 2006 Wired | The Laptop Crusade
28 Aug. 2006 PCINpact.com | L'OLPC a 100 $ est finalise: un engin hors du commun
21 Aug. 2006 EWeek.com | Knocking Down Barriers to the $100 Laptop
31 Jul. 2006 NPR | Affordable Laptop Computer Project Moves Forward
07 Jul. 2006 San Diego Union-Tribune | U.S. and international educators show great interest in prototype
Jul. 2006 SPIE Professional | $100 laptop nears launch
21 Jun. 2006 BusinessWeek online | For Brazil's Poor, a Digital Deliverance?
24 May 2006 CNET News.com | $100 laptop gets working prototype
07 Apr. 2006 rediff.com | Our $100 laptops will run on human power
02 Apr. 2006 O Estado de S.Paulo | Fazer a diferença
28 Mar. 2006 FT.com | Waking up to a laptop revolution
24 Mar. 2006 Diário do Comércio | Um Laptop por Crianca
22 Mar. 2006 Times Online | Getting the world's poor logged on
09 Mar. 2006 Correio Popular | País disputa fabricação de laptop de US$ 100
  Folha de S. Paulo | Governo quer comprar 1 milhão de laptops
  Info Exame On Line | Governo quer um milhão de laptops de US$ 100
08 Mar. 2006 IDG Now | Faculdade abre programa de inclusão digital para alunos
  Folha de S. Paulo | Governo negocia fabricação do laptop de US$ 100 no Brasil
  Agência Globo | Governo estuda possibilidade de produção de computador de US$ 100 no país
  Teletime News | DVB detalha contrapartidas oferecidas ao Brasil
05 Mar. 2006 ACM/CIE | Interview with Nicholas Negroponte on the $100 laptop
16 Feb. 2006 MITIR | Podcast of Walter Bender's MURJ lecture on One Laptop per Child
15 Feb. 2006 CNET | PCs for the poor: Which design will win?
10 Feb. 2006 CNET | Perspective: Will the $100 PC fly?
09 Feb. 2006 NYTimes | A Plug for the Unplugged $100 Laptop Computer for Developing Nations
  UPI | One Laptop Project reaches critical stages
31 Jan. 2006 Slashdot | Microsoft OS Smart Phone for Developing Nations
  USA Today | Gates sees cellphones as way to help Third World
  Macworld | Red Hat officially commits to MIT's $100 laptop
20 Dec. 2005 BusinessWeek online | Quanta faces challenges in making "millions and millions" of $100 laptops.
19 Dec. 2005 Forbes.com | China to decide by March whether to join OneLaptopPerChild project.
14 Dec. 2005 UPI | Nortel to take part in OneLaptopPerChild endeavor.
13 Dec. 2005 Red Herring | Quanta to manufacture laptops; expects deliveries in 2006 4th quarter.
11 Dec. 2005 NYTimes | NY Times: 5th Annual Year in Ideas $100 Laptop
01 Dec. 2005 RFDESIGN | $100 Laptops Feature Novel Peer-to-Peer Wireless Connectivity
30 Nov. 2005 FT.com | Five companies in Asia making bids to manufacture $100 laptop.
28 Nov. 2005 Fortune Magazine | THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: I'd Like to Teach the World to Type
25 Nov. 2005 People's Daily Online | Nigerian president says government has budgeted for a million $100 laptops.
17 Nov. 2005 BBC News | UN Debut for $100 Laptop for Poor
  Seattle Times | $100 Laptops Aim to Bring Children the World
  TechWhack | MIT Unveils their USD 100 Laptop
  ZDNet | '$100 Laptops' Here by Next Year
  ABC | $100 Laptop Bridges Digital Divide
  Financial Express | Laptop @$100!
16 Nov. 2005 MIT News Office | Annan to Present Prototype $100 Laptop at World Summit on Information Society
  CNET | $100 Laptop Takes World Stage
  CNET | $100 Laptop Expected in Late 2006
  Christian Science Monitor | A Low-Cost Laptop for Every Child
14 Nov. 2005 WSJ | The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality
13 Nov. 2005 The Inquirer | Hubris over $100 Laptop idea
New York Times | Google Earmarks $265million for Charity and Social Causes
13 Oct. 2005 Technology Review | The Hundred Dollar Man: Technology Review's editor in chief, Jason Pontin, talk with Nicholas Negroponte about the Hundred Dollar Computer.
29 Sep. 2005 I4U News | Sub-$100 Laptop design unveiled
28 Sep. 2005 Boston Globe | Prototypes of $100 laptop with hand crank planned by early next year.
  MIT World | NN at Technology Review
27 Sep. 2005 Datamation | Low cost PCs for the Enterprise
06 Jun. 2005 estadao.com.br | Cada criança na escola com um laptop a tiracolo

PRESS RELEASES

Jan. 2007 OLPC has No Plans to Commercialize XO Computer.
Jan. 2007 OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda Commits to One Laptop per Child Initiative.
Dec. 2006 Low Cost Laptop Could Tranform Learning.

Video

(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found.)

http://video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM607884-7823-CRIANCAS+TESTAM+COMPUTADOR+PORTATIL,00.html | Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop, GLOBO- BRASIL

http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx | Mark Foster delivers presentation to Standford University

http://www.technologyreview.com/ | Technology Review Mini-Documentary

http://www.radiofarda.com/Article/2007/01/04/f2_Interview-laptop.html | A Brief Demo