OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2008-02-02

1. Active antennae: Another 90 prototype active antennae should be available in a couple of weeks, followed shortly by a large shipment of pre-build antennae scheduled to arrive in three or four weeks. The initial run will be used mostly for field testing, with the majority of the units going to Uruguay. They will be labeled as “engineering samples—not for sale.” We now have an update procedure for the prototype antennae that allows them to stay connected to a server. (These had been built with firmware that placed them in stand-alone mesh-repeater mode too quickly, thus requiring them to be connected only after a server is up and running.) See Active Antenna Reprogramming.

2. Firmware: Mitch Bradley fixed a problem with OFW reading JFFS2 images (Ticket #6291) encountered when using the multicast update method. (This was one of the bugs uncovered by David Woodhouse in Mongolia last week.)

3. School server: Power continues to concern us. John Watlington realized that the off-the-shelf server prototype he was looking at for rural environments actually came with a 19VDC power supply, not a 12VDC one. While 12V supplies are available, they don't work well with unregulated 12V input. With such a 12V supply, the server prototype required around 16W while idling, and up to 26W when running three meshes and doing heavy disk accesses. The current power consumption requires four hours of pumping on a Weza to keep the server operating for an eight hour day! We will also have to greatly improve the power consumption when the machine is idle to have any hope of the servers being left running when the schools aren't in session.

4. Embedded controller: Q2D10 had some battery charging regressions, so Richard Smith backed out the change that speed up the battery-processing state machine; that fixed the regressions. The EC command saga continues: a machine was brought in that had total EC command failure, yet after Richard started examining it, it magically cleared up. After a long spell of trying to reproduce the problem, Richard made a significant discovery: it appears that if the input-buffer-full (IBF) flag is set and the power to the processor is cut, then the EC can go into a state where it thinks that a constant stream of data is being received. This results in the IBF flag getting reset just a soon as you clear it. Richard is still researching/understanding the issue, but this may explain why the previous interrupt-driven protocol was having so much trouble.

5. Automated charging testbed: Richard has set up an automated charging testbed: four XO laptops are now in a suspend/resume testbed; these laptops are connected to a switch such that every three hours, a supervisor machine turns off the external power to each of them. Each laptop is running a small script that watches for when the battery capacity gets low. When low battery is detected the XO laptop turns its power back on.

6. Power profiling: Now that we have automatic power management in the Update.1 builds we no longer have a simple power profile for measuring battery life. To get an accurate indication of what the “real world” battery life will be when power management is doing automatic suspend/resume we need to know what the power profile looks like while using the machine. We are gathering data from different use cases by running the olpc-logbat script while using the XO laptop: olpc-logbat samples the battery discharge information every 10 seconds. We can use much more data—please run the script yourself and send us the CSV files that it generates.

  1. charge up the battery;
  2. run the sugar terminal activity;
  3. run olpc-logbat in the activity;
  4. unplug from ext power;
  5. use the laptop normally.

7. Testing: Much thanks to Chih-Yu Chao, whose last full time day helping with QA and testing was Friday. This week she was focused on providing test cases, structure and encouragement to the community in our push for Update.1 testing. To help out, please review and execute test cases listed in the wiki (Update.1), or choose some test plans () and then post the results (Update.1#Test_Results). We can really use lots of help!

Yani Galanis has been testing avahi, telepathy, and general mesh capabilities with the latest Update1. He has helped open up some discussions of what we have today, what we would like in the future, and how we might get there. There is still some design work, coding, testing, and discussion needed in this area as some of our real deployments are pushing at our limitations.

8. Support: This week Nicholas Negroponte sent out a letter to all donors who have not yet received their laptops apologizing for the problems and explaining some of the on-going issues. The remaining laptops should be shipped by the end of March. Many people can now track their order directly at the laptopgiving.org webpage, which has started to reduce the number of emails to the support team.

There was a good discussion on Friday with Mel Chua, Nicki Lee, SJ Klein, Adam Holt, Walter Bender, Kim Quirk on the topic of grass-roots repair centers—more on that theme next weekend.

Adam organized another Sunday meeting among ~20 support volunteers, with guest speaker Manusheel Gupta talking about entrepreneurship among children with XO laptops. The ~60 support volunteers continued to fend off shipping/billing questions this week by the 100s. The number of questions almost doubled in January; the percentage of questions pertaining to donor services increased four fold: almost a 700% increase from December!!

But there is lots of good news: even with the continuing onslaught regarding donor services, we've lowered our unresolved tickets queue from 500+ to about 350—and we have received many profuse thank-you letters from donors who had been fed up to the gills at being abandoned until now. Even with the increase in volume of laptops deployed, there was no corresponding increase in questions about connectivity, Flash support, or help getting started. It is safe to say that once people get their XO laptops, they are managing quite well.

Our thanks to dwa (David Aquilina) and alc (Alan Claver) and countless other volunteers working so hard to be supportive towards all.

9. Roadshow: Dave Woodhouse, Bernie Innocenti, and Jim Gettys attended Linux Conf Au (LCA), which is considered by many to be the best Linux conference in the world at this time. The LCA organizers and OLPC combined to distribute a 100 machines to developers at the conference. (The lack of G1G1 in Australia is, of course, frustrating to people here.)

10. Presence Service: Guillaume Desmottes ran more tests on Salut using “hyperactiviy.” He fix various memory leaks and other issues and helped Marco Gritti to use hyperactivity to debug a Sugar UI bug. He also reviewed Sjoerd Simons's Gibber DNS resolver branch; released telepathy-salut 0.2.2, which fixes some OLPC related issues (Ticket #6271); and discovered and tracked more Salut crashers (Tickets #6303, #6309, #6310). Morgan Collett used his new Fedora superpowers to build RPMs for Presence Service and Salut via koji. He has been working on Presence documentation and tested builds and presence service/telepathy related fixes. Sjoerd fixed several bugs in telepathy-salut that were discovered thanks to the hyperactivity stress testing tool.

11. Sugar: Simon Schampijer worked with Marco Gritti and Sayamindu Dasgupta debugged and found the cause of the “Browser being slow after an update from ship.2 (653) to update.1(690)” issue (Ticket #6046). It turned out that timestamps of fonts were set in the future. xulrunner does check if fontconfig is up to date and if it is unsuccessful the fontconfig is reinitialized and the whole thing repeats itself again. The resulting loop is causing the slowdown. Sayamindu has provided a new fontconfig rpm which checks if mtimes are in the future and print a warning but does return true so Browse will not be slowed down. In addition Michael Stone has released a new rainbow-0.7.9 which symlinks '~/.fontconfig to ~/instance'. Simon also provided a patch that releases exported dbus objects (Ticket #6127), which is important for activities that run in a single process, such as Browse.

12. Etoys: The Etoys team is working toward delivering a package for Update.1. Scott Wallace, Bert Freudenberg, and Yoshiki Ohshima fixed various lingering bugs in the system. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness are revising the Quick Guide system and contents. From the effort, the candidate version for Update.1, Etoys-77.xo, was created. Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider keep working on the translation issue. Takashi discovered that Pootle cannot merge large sets of translations fast enough. He is looking into the issue. The interactive geometry system by Hilaire Fernandez is improved. Now, it is packaged as a .xo bundle (DrGeo). It contains the translation framework by Korakurider and others for activities written in Etoys.

13. Spreadsheets: Dan Bricklin and Luke Cross are working on a port of the Sweet SocialCalc Project to the XO laptop. SocialCalc is a highly functional spreadsheet implemented in JavaScript. (To date, 39 functions have been developed: ABS, ACOS, ASIN, ATAN, ATAN2, AVERAGE, COS, COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTBLANK, DEGREES, EVEN, EXP, FACT, FALSE, IF, INT, LN, LOG10, MAX, MIN, MOD, NA, NOW, ODD, PI, POWER, PRODUCT, RADIANS, SIN, SUM, STDEV, STDEVP, TAN, TODAY, TRUE, TRUNC, VAR, and VARP.) Manusheel Gupta is helping them with the Sugar port. The first pass will be to leverage a general application that supports activities written in JavaScript, with Python-based Sugar binding.

Another approach to developing a spreadsheet activity is to begin from the GNumeric code base. Manu is working with Jody Goldberg and Eben Eliason to port a simple version of GNumeric to the Sugar environment.

14. Sensors and learning: Arjun Sarwal incorporated Spanish-language support into Turtle Art with Sensors and made a slightly modified icon of the original Turtle Art icon. The activity is now in Joyride Builds and is identifiable by a slightly modified icon of the Turtle. Arjun spent time discussing with Edward Baafi of the FabLab and Aaron Miller of MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten regarding how sensors, apart from acting like an interface to the physical world, could impact the XO laptop deployment communities. Aaron is working on integrating sensors into “Scratch” (which is now available for download from Activities); Edward Baafi is interested in exploring how general-purpose boards, which include sensors as well as I/O, can be used in conjunction with the XO laptop. Arjun continues to explore the wonderful possibilities of $2 sensor experiments through the XO laptop’s analog-input port. Documentation of the session with youth at FabLab Boston is in the wiki (See Measure/Turtle).

15. OLPC Health: The OLPC Health initiative has gained good momentum. There are active discussions on the Library mailing lists and the wiki pages have also started to take shape (See Health). A vision document (Health/vision) is also in the works. The list of group of advisers to the OLPC-Health initiative includes Josh Hehner, Jim Hopper, Sv Subramanian and Ichiro Kawachi. More detailed introductions of the advisers will follow soon on the Library mailing list. There is a conference call on the 10th of Feb at 1pm EST. People are invited to propose agenda items by posting on the Health wiki pages.

16. Ethernet: Michail Bletsas hosted Jonathan Hsu, founder and CEO of Zoltantech at OLPC this week. He makes a very small, elegant and low cost (< $10) USB-Ethernet adapter that works well with the XO; it could be very useful to developers and advanced users.

17. Localization: Arjun, Manu, Bernie, and Walter worked through integration of patches for Afghan (including Dari, Pashto and Uzbek variants), Mongolian, Ethiopian, Nepali, and Italian keyboard layouts. All of them (except Italian and Nepali) are expected to be integrated into Update. Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Italian, Marathi and Sinhala. Continuing on his recent efforts with QA and testing with respect to local-language support, Sayamindu has added notes in the wiki on how to utilize the translation testing features in our web-based translation management system, Pootle (Localization/Testing#Testing_the_PO_files). He also discovered a few cases where Pootle can become very slow, and discussed these with the upstream developers. They have suggested a few solutions; he is trying to implement them in our deployment. The shifting of Pootle to the new server had caused some issues to crop up with the Git integration; Sayamindu managed to track them down and fix them.

Localization of OLPC for Afghanistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports that they have started localization of Etoys (a major project, as it contains 23,000+ strings). They have done some work in Urdu localization of Etoys and almost 1000 strings are translated into the Dari language. The next step is localization of Etoys ino Pashto.

OLPC User Manual: Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj” continue their efforts; translation of the user manual into the Dari language is complete and is now under review; the review of the translated version in Pashto is 90% complete.

Localization Tests: Habib also reports that they have successfully tested the Urdu localization .po files that Pootle generated on one of their test machines. There are some small issues with some of the character bindings; in addition, they are testing it with Dari and Pashto languages. The target is to have three XOs completely localized inUrdu, Dari, and Pashto by next week.

18. In the community: On invitation by the Computer Society of Pakistan (CSP), Habib made a short presentation on OLPC to the participants and distributed a CD containing presentations on OLPC. The members of CSP are the leaders of Pakistani IT industry.

Mike Lee reports that the monthly grassroots OLPC Learning Club in Washington, D.C. had a record 48 attendees (including several children and teens) this past Thursday night at Greater DC Cares (See http://www.olpclearningclub.org). Their host, Curtis Cannon, talked about how DC Cares will use the seven laptops they acquired through a holiday fundraising effort called Technoliday organized by Peter Corbett to support their program of pro bono technology consulting for social change. Justin Thorp demoed the Library of Congress' World Digital Library, to which he contributed development effort. Mike demonstrated accessories for the XO including auto adapters, solar panels, the Weza foot treadle charger, clip on sports viewfinders for the camera and the new ZoWii miniature USB Ethernet adapter in OLPC green. Two iLite USB keyboard lights and an auto power adapter were raffled off. Attendees stayed for another hour to mesh. The first Mass XO Meet-up was also held this week (in Cambridge).

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

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

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
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.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

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

  1. redirect OLPC:News#Press

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

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