OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-12-30

1. Give One Get One: The G1G1 program ends on December 31. G1G1 has not only made it possible to seed the launch of programs in Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Afghanistan, but we have also greatly broadened the community of participation in the project. The community has already jumped in to help: the level of activity in our forums, IRC, email lists, wiki, etc. has risen dramatically over the past few weeks. G1G1 participants have asked lots of questions—and have uncovered some new bugs—but they also have lots of answers—and have submitted some new patches. The community model seems to be scaling.

Many thanks to Hilary Meserole and the tireless efforts from the teams at Pentagram, Nurun, Eleven, Patriot, and Brightstar.

2. Mary Lou Jepsen: Mary Lou's last day at OLPC is December 31. She will be continuing to consult with us on a number of different fronts as she chases after her next miracle in display technology. Mary Lou was OLPC employee Number One, both in terms of when she joined the organization and in terms of the breadth and depth of her contributions. Thank you and best of luck with your adventures in a new role and new year.

3. Embedded controller (EC): Richard Smith has tested a battery EEPROM dumping feature recently added by Andres Salomon: it seems to work great. Richard has written crontab scripts and "phone home" scripts for inclusion in joyride builds, with the intent to include them in an upcoming release to build an anonymous database of battery performance. These scripts will sample the power used every five minutes and log it. They only sample when the battery is charging or discharging. The hope is to gather a composite view of battery performance under realistic conditions of use.

Richard noticed that on the community-development list there are at least two reports of the EC going "terminal", meaning that on boot they get the error message: "EC problem. Remove all power and restart." We need to get those machines to Cambridge to investigate further.

Another issue found on the community-list are reports from a few people about their batteries not charging. Richard says this would not surprise him if they were NiMH batteries, but G1G1 machines have the LiFePo batteries. He did had one person run "logbat" and send him the results: the EC reads the battery fine and is attempting to charge the battery but no current ever goes into the battery. Again, we need to get these machines to Cambridge as we haven't seen this behavior before.

4. Open Firmware: Mitch Bradley continued to provide G1G1 customer support, for example, chasing down some problems with SD cards. He also added the ability to delete JFFS2 files from Open Firmware and fixed Tickets #5717, #5585, and #5727, all improvements to the overall OFW performance and reliability. Preparations continue on OFW for the Intel prototype XO board.

5. Wireless firmware: Marvell released firmware version 5.110.20.p49 which addresses Ticket #5194. With this firmware release, all known major low-level bugs have been addressed. With the wireless driver that's in the current ship builds, we see locking errors under heavy load from which the driver recovers automatically. David Woodhouse is doing a major rewrite of the driver which should eventually address that issue.

6. Software ECOs: From time to time there may be critical bug fixes that must be released between our regularly scheduled releases. These may occur due to security issues, from unexpected hardware problems, or the discovery of latent bugs that affect large numbers of users. We've started a page in wiki discuss the software engineering change order (ECO) process (See Operating_system_release_procedures).

7. Support: The past week has been a busy one for Adam Holt and the OLPC support team. Adam has organized a team of 30 support volunteers to comprehensively answer help@laptop.org tickets. (Each ticket is an ongoing email conversation with a donor/client.) The volunteer team is working hard, but keeping up with the support load. Part of the process includes the compilation of a Support FAQ (See Support_FAQ). Adam is also organizing a "virtual call center" based on asterisk.org VoIP. Matthew O'Gorman is helping finalize the server. Callers will access a local US number in the 617 area code. It will be informal, but we hope it will provide a critical outreach to those users who need it most. We hope to complete testing and possibly an initial rollout within the coming week.

Please everyone recruit your XO-aware friends as: (1) "charming" volunteers to answer phones; and (2) "perfectionist" volunteers to help organize our wiki pages.

You can email Adam regarding your talents, motivations, and a phone number at "holt AT laptop DOT org". Thanks!

There will be an "Organizing Sunday" meeting among our volunteers on 30 December, 4PM EST. All interested parties can join if they email Adam first.

Noah Kantrowitz has helped to organize the RT system so that volunteers' workflow is more efficient. Instant-response RTFM entries (canned answers auto-pasted into emails) are growing too.

Chih-yu Chao is helping Adam to answer questions from G1G1 recipients; she has noticed that many parents are asking whether our browser support Flash/Java websites, an area we need to improve upon.

Michael Burns of the Oregon State Open Source Lab has been working each night improving and growing the Community Support forum (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/), which is now exceeding 1,000 posts; 200 registered users have answered hundreds of first-time computer questions from G1G1 donors. There is already a growing community of users helping other users on the site. The site includes a live (IRC) chat (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/chat), a feature that works from any computer, including directly from the XO, and a volunteers map (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/phoogle_map.php) that lets developers, enthusiasts and users put a push-pin next to their home town.

8. Etoys: 2007 was a busy year for the Etoys team: they made over 700 patches this calendar year. In addition to these code changes, there is new content: examples, help contents, and documentation. Etoys was more or less stable and mature before 2007, but the effort in the year made it even more stable, useful and be fit to the XO platform. Notable improvements and contributions include: sane mathematical operator precedence by Yoshiki Ohshima; better natural language translation by Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider; display scaling by Andreas Raab; an event recording system (called Event Theatre) by Scott Wallace; a camera interface by Diego Gomez Deck; the World Stethoscope by Kazuhiro Abe; the Quick Guide help system by Kathleen Harness, Ted Kaehler and Yoshiki; drag and drop by Takashi; IPv6 support by Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger; documentation by Alan Kay, Kim Rose and Rebecca Cannara; and numerous fixes and usability improvements from the Etoys team and community, including contributions by Karl Ramberg and Marcus Denker.

In 2007, there were many deadlines in short successions, putting pressure on the team to deliver stable versions—pushing the team towards a conservative approach to development. Many big changes were punted. In hindsight, perhaps delivering some unstable versions with bigger changes would have been better strategy. On the other hand, it is worth to mention that Etoys is one of the most reliable packages over the course of XO development and has seen extensive use in most of the school trials. Kudos to Bert Freudenberg, who maintains the Etoys integration with Sugar (Bert not only led the effort to integrate Etoys with Sugar; he also contributed Sugar's overall development).

There were various Etoys-based activities proposed: a programming tutorial called Bots Inc by Stéphane Ducasse; an interactive geometry program called Dr Geo II by Hilaire Hernandez; and education contents suite by Luke Gorrie, Bryan Berry, and the OLPC Nepal developers. "Conservativeness" was a major issue when discussing the possible inclusion of Dr Geo II into the base Etoys image; accommodating such code in a graceful way is a challenge for 2008.

9. Translation: One of the last pieces in our Pootle deployment is now in place: a mechanism to update PO template files for each module automatically. Sayamindu Dasgupta has fine tuned the script that does this updating to change POT files only if the strings have changed. (This work is based on Damned Lies, the GNOME translation management system). This helps avoid the redundant updating of PO files. The string-change detection feature will also be useful in the future to detect string-freeze breakages and also to notify translators when new strings are added to a module.

This week also saw the first package release of the Update 1 branch to pick up new translators. Thanks to the excellent effort put in by the translators, the Update.1 project (which consisted of the Update 1 branches of the Sugar, Journal activity, Record activity and Browse activity) is, on an average, 50% translated for each language. Languages that have more than 90% of their strings translated are:

• Urdu (100%) • Nepali (100%) • Dutch (100%) • Chinese (Taiwan) (100%) • Bengali (100%) • Arabic (100%) • Portuguese (Brazil) (99%) • Portuguese (99%) • Macedonian (99%) • Russian (98%) • Greek (98%) • French (98%) • Chinese (China) (98%) • German (96%) • Mongolian (94%)

The focus has shifted to the master branches once again, although language teams are encouraged to update their translations in Update.1 project (there will be another package release for Update.1 that would pick up any new translations).

In the middle of the week, Sayamindu also managed to track down a problem in Pootle that was holding up the work being done by the Urdu team. The issue was being caused by a corrupt stats file in the Pootle-Urdu directory.

10. Touchpad: Bernardo Innocenti spent much of the week testing a solution to the "jumpy mouse" touchpad bug. We'll soon be pushing out a patch that should cover the majority of touchpad problems.

11. Journal: Reinier Heeres wrote a script to copy files from the Journal to the Linux file system (Ticket #5571). This got extended by Phil Bordelon, just like the copy-to-journal script. Reinier also fixed some equation parser issues in the Calculator (Ticket #5734) and an issue with Browse not exiting when a keep error occurred (Ticket

  1. 5493).

12. Debian: Ivan Krstić is overhauling the OLPC server infrastructure, but also found the time to put together an "unofficial" etch/xfce4 build. It includes Firefox, Thunderbird, a suite of development tools (python, git, gcc, gdb, flex, bison, automake, autoconf, libtool), a music player (XMMS), IRC client (irssi) and a graphical wireless AP selector. The entire build takes up 250MB of flash. Ivan optimized the Firefox window layout to maximum screen estate and configured a number of keyboard shortcuts.

13. Cow power: Arjun Sarwal along with the Mumbai team made some good progress on the cow-power system for charging the XO. They made some changes in the electrical design (e.g., using an alternator now instead of a dynamo) and they have a plan regarding the mechanical design based upon a better understanding of what are readily available parts. The current setup easily charges two laptops, however with the planned mechanical design changes, they hope to charge at least ten laptops simultaneously.

14. Games: Don Hopkins has been working on the new Micropolis codebase (See http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/micropolis). He has made a web server out of the Micropolis python module for testing and has modularized python code for tile and cellular automation rendering.

15. OurStories: Pablo Flores reports that Uruguay will start collecting stories in late January in different localities, like their recent work in Sarand Grande (See http://olpc-ceibal.blogspot.com/2007/12/day-of-activities-in-sarand-grande.html). Announcements of the site in Spanish and Nigerian languages are being prepared for late January.

16. Library: Lauren Klein has been working on interfaces to make generating content bundles easier, starting with forms to generate bundle metadata. Next up are automatic bundlers that check and generate manifests and metadata from uploaded tars and zips (See http://crank.laptop.org/~lauren/libraryInfo/).

17. Installing activities: OLPC Austria is improving their "xo-get" command-line script for downloading and installing activities. (The script is a complement to the current process of clicking on .xo files from the Browse activity.) They are making it work with the activities found on the Activities page, having added a field there to include tags (See http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get and http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get/Repository).

18. OLPC Communities: Holger Levsen, Aaron Kaplan, and others from Austrian and German OLPC groups spent the last days of the week at the 24C3 conference in Berlin, Germany. John Crispin and the OpenWRT contingent showed off OpenWRT booting on an XO and let a growing number of XOs share their space. At one point there were over 20 XOs in use in the area, most in the hands of developers and early G1G1 arrivals.

OLPC Switzerland is having its first meeting January 15 in Bern, organized by Michele Notari (See OLPC_Switzerland).

Greg DeKoenigsberg and Jack Aboutbol are starting to organize a social and musical OLPC event in New York City for next August. They are presenting a proposal to the NYC parks and recreation committee next Friday.

19. Developer community: Almost 1000 developers are active in our Trac system (http://dev.laptop.org). There are thousands more contributors to wiki.laptop.org and to various fori, mailing lists, IRCs, etc. This participation is invaluable to the success of OLPC mission. We'd like to thank, among others:

a-12, aalam, abelay, abrar.momin, aconbere, adeighton, adetola, admford, adricnet, aegis, aenertia, aferti, afranke, agdelma, ahmad, ajax, akauppi, akeemolabiyi, alagu, albertcahalan, aleph, alexandre, alexl, alfonsodg, als, altemusm, alxx, ambros, amitgogna, andic, andreasraab, andre.mossinato, andrey, angel, angieklein123, angus, anna chang, annegentle, ant, antoninoiacono, antonio correia, antoniojf, approvalforupdate, aprodan, arangelangov, arauto, argento78, ariana, arjs, arnd, arnold, aroscha, artpro, arvinliu, ashish, ashsong, assim, astein, atodorov, aturist, aumana, avocade, avoine, awjrichards, awong9702, axboe, bamdad, bananascanner, barbolo, barry, bart massey, basil, bbaston, bbbush, bcavagnolo, bcsaller, bdoin, beaubrewer, beauty, beckerde, behdad, behnam, bemasc, benzea, bernie, bert, bertl, bfcatfriends, biarm, bigbaaadbob, bigwally, bilboed, billaspell, billjank, bill_mcgonigle, billy, bjfreeman, bkublik, blahedo, blanchet, blankverse, blix, blizzard, bluefoxicy, blueyed, bmcarnes, bnardone, bob, bobbysmith007, bobkeyes, boujelbenhichem, brainrecall, briandorsey, briandorsey, bronson, bryan.ma, bss, bsugarse, btate, budbird, buendia, byodo, c9damico, cafl, cak, calyth, campbell, candy, candy lu, candy_man, cannonjt, carl2, carla, carlfk, carlofalciola, carrano, cavallo, cbramsey, cdoty, cdurrett, cgalpin, chaos, chatworthy, cheetahman, chenz, chiaying.lin, chihyu, chitraspai, chrisb143, christianmarc, christophd, christoph_hagemeyer, chuck, cialis, cihan, ciscos151, cjb, c.kutzleb, clifft135, cmeadors, cmusodza, coderanger, codyl, colonwq, company, corbet, crazy-chris, crazymonk, crichardson, crouchjay, crschmidt, cscott, cshields, csounder, csutton, curlydude007, cwhii, cworth, cycho, czhower, dabender, daf, damonkohler, danarnold, dandelion, danerogers, danielfuhry, daniher, daniher, danjared, dan_margo, danw, dao, dark314, davidgr, david_leeh, david.lin, davidpfarrell, davidz, dbpatterson, dcbw, dcolivares, ddhoppe, ddo, dds, deanbrettle, deborah hanley, dedekind, dennisdanso, dennisfrancis, desertgojo, devinliu, devlware, devwillie, dgd, dgilmore, dhabersa, dhopkins, dhuff, dialectric, diegozacarao, dilinger, diyoung, djbclark, djihed, djneu, dking, dlang, dmd, docdtv, dolphinling, doom, douglas_goodall, drewish, dulouz, duncanb, dushyantgautam, dvsullivan, dwmw2, dyd, dydimustk, dysumner, ea, ealtin, eamaya, ebelechukwu2005, eben, ebf, ebodfish, ebotee, echeonwugbenu, edbatalha, ediaz, edsiper, edstoner, edwardbaafi, eenii, ejkrohne, eli amesefe, elife, elijah, elite231, elizabeth251964, elranchero, elvis, elyip, emilmont, enalax, enjahova, eric, eric, erick, ericsilva2, erikb, erikhatcher, erikos, eteo, ethrop, etoys, evenremy, fab, fabiand, fabiomarcio, factor, fade, faga, fahmi, fayoeu, fc, fciron, fdraeger, felix01, feranick, fernandodotnet, ffm, fgrose, fhill, finalzone, fiorella, fireball, firewing1, florentin_raud, foddex, follower, fongoses, foot, franka001, frazermarge, frief, fuseproject, gabaug, garlick, garrison, gary, garysu, gauravchem, gauthierancelin, gblaufuss, gbulfon, gcarrier, gcase, gcerchio, gdesmott, george rey, george yeager, gesmit, gfw123, ghopper, gi693362, giangy, giles, glezos, glochan, gnrfan, gnu, godiard, gonzalo, grantbow, greg, gregdek, gregm, gregt, gregthompson, grendelt, grenoble, griffithbuilt, grig, gustavo, gustavoo, gwlc, gwright, h7bse1c, hai, hal, hal, hallie, hal.murray, hamed, happyolpc, hartwellfong, hartwellfong, hazardouswaster, hchennings, hello1024, hemantg, henninger, hiper, hitoro, hmes, hoboprimate, holger, holt, holtzman, homunq, hopsman, hsin wu, hsin.wu, huangcza, hughsient, hummingbird, humptybump, hyppy, ianb, ianissitt, iceberg, iknowjoseph, indradg, indutiomarus, info_anarchy, intrader, irish_moss, isforinsects, ismaell, ivazquez, ivo, j5, jaberg, jack, jackeyzhao, jafo, jaimebalb, jaing, jake h, jamesm, jamespaige, jamil, jani, jaq, jason liu, jayakumar, jbarahona, jcallas, jcardona, jcfrench, jdub, jecel, jeckson, jennjacobsen, jenny2, jensjorgensen, jeremyvisser, jeroentb, jerub, jerub, jfallgatter, jfc, jfuhrer, jg, jherzog, jhuangtw, jhulten, jiffy, jimfare, jim.morey, jirwin, jlstomp66, jm3, joaoboscoapf, jochang, joebergin, joeclark, joeywang, john, johnkemeny, johnlin, johnson, jondo, jonknee, jonsd, jordancrouse, jorgecortes, josepht, joshseal, jpff, jpritikin, jrus, juanayup, juliano, julibio, junia, junwiseman, jwildebo, k2nt23, karl, karmaflux, kayseon, kazuhiro abe, kenh, ken lin, kentquirk, kenwatford, kevinprt, kfieldho, khaled, khassounah, kiddo, kimquirk, kim rose, kiran, kityoko, kkv, konrad1134, konrad_kleine, korakurider, kraetzichriz, kreneskyp, krstic, kruemel, ksankar, kylesteinfatt, kylin, larryapple, lathiat, laural, lauren, lbenavente, lcatania, lcbiazon, leejc, leemingd, leetcharmer, legolas558, legutierr, lenkawell, lferre, liam henry, lileeanna, linagee, lincolnquirk, lionstone, lmaltin, lmanul, lorenzen, lrhowa5, lucia, lucks, luisca, lukego, luna, lwalter42, ma895907, mac, madcat, madd, magnum34, mako, maku, mallum, mantaraya36, mantas, manu, manusheel, marcelo, marco, marcos ficarelli, marcus, markharrison, martine, martin.langhoff, martoro, martyvis, marv, massimo, mathew, maurotorres, maxim_o, mbletsas, mbrubeck, mburns, mcalef, mcfletch, mchehab, mchenetz, mchua, mduvigneaud, melekim, methril, meyers, mfoster, mi370560, michael, michael.tiemann, midiwall, miguelon, mihai, mihi, mikelee_aarp, mikes, mikus, mime, mitchellncharity, mitu, mjr, mk8, mkgobaco, mleech, mlj, mohsen, mokurai, monkeyfork, monyu, morgs, morningstar, moshez, motherhoose, mpal, mpdevine, mrdomino, m.scott, msevior, mstone, mtklein, mucca, muccini, murielgodoi, murray, murrays, musallam, mvirkkil, myles, mylesb, nacholudo, nalrawahi, nandoa, nasa, nat, nathalia.sautchuk, naustin, ncorrare, nelhage, nelson, neptune, newsham, ni762428, nibhatish, nicomy, ninjakitten, nirmal, nitin, nnorwitz, nolambar, nornagon, nrp, nuke, nuwdle, obc_spike, oeka, ohm, ohshima, okada, olafura, ollybetts, ondal, openspark, orospakr, osbornisle, osmosys, otakuj462, ozwald, pacease, pamela.dallas, pascal, path, paul, paulproteus, pavel, pavel, pd, peiwei, pekayatt, pengo, pepboy, pepboy, perlhacker, peter, peter.lorenzen, petria, pezhman, phil, philipmac, phollings, php5, pierre, pierreossman, ping, pmj, pnasrat, polvi, ponafarioli, power guo, pr3d4t0r, prasanna, prashant.thakkar, probono, pvanhoof, pwiltsey, pwr, py_geek, pzelenka, qq, quantumcat, quantumg, quozl, rabeeh, rafaelortiz, ramaseshanr, raven, ravikondamuru, ravualhemio, ray.tseng, rbh00, rbhagwat, rblengio, rbwjrw, rcauk, rchokshi, rdebath, rdike, rdobson, rebecca, rebecca, rebecca allen, rebeccag, rebeccagettys, redpawn, reg, regan20, reillysl, rejon, reservedoc, retired_techie, retroplumido, reynaldo, rgs, rharrison, rhindak, rhindak, richard, richie.wang, riv, rj_dean, rkevans, rminnich, robertfadel, robot101, robsta, rock, rodarvus, roel, roozbeh, rorrim, roscherfr, roubert, roy, rsavoye, rsmith, rsriniva, rtlm, ruby, russnelson, rwh, ry313323, ryankelln, ryant5000, ryebo1, sabu, sam, samuel bizien, sandeepdutta, sankarshan, santanu, sarahmoodoo, saramah, satch89450, satyajeet, sayamindu, sbelter, scomst, scott_kirkwood, scottwallace, sdalvi, seberg, segher, seph, seralewise, sero189, shailen, shang, shankar, sharon, shekay, shenki, shiu, sholton, sierrahombre, simon, simon, simosx, sirjuanlu, sj, sjg, sjoerd, skeezix, skiboo, skierpage, slasc, sleet01, smcv, smetz52, smohan, spacey, spditner, splinux, sprezzatura, ssb22, ssc, sssss, steck, steeg, stepheneb, steveb, steve fullerton, stevew, stevo, stoecker, stoutbigred, stressyndrome, sturnfie, subbu, sulmanminhas, sunny, sverma, svu, swagle, sxpert, syd, sylvinus, s.zytkiewicz, t3, tags07, takashi, talmage, tamichan, tannewt, tbpringle, te294177, tedch, ted.juan, tedkaehler, teefal, term, terry su, tess, testing, teus, tf, theperturbator, thiago_s, timbutler, tim.millerdyck, titus, tomeu, tomhannen, tonsofpcs, toygmail, trapdoor, trevor, tribleyl, trobertson, tsylla, tudd, turadg, tushards, twinkle, uden, ufg, uflchamp, ujwal2, usman ansari, usman.ansari, uwog, vadim, vance.ke, vandien, vasukrishnan, vbhunt, vegpuff, vgiasolli, victorchao, victor-y, vjohn, vmb, voden, vorburger, vradok, wad, wadeb, walter, wangwebbxydd, waqastoor, warp, watchhillfarm, wcohen, weixiang, wenmi01, we.three.tees, wildem, williamb68, wiswaud, wkraimer, wmb, wmfwlr, wolf, wolfgang, wvbailey, wwworkshop shannon, wwworkshop terrence, wybiral, xardox, xatzipe, xavi, xiang.wei, xorAxAx, yani, ychao, yhosoai, yosch, youssef, ypod, ywwg, zack, zakarpatska, zapador, zarcher, znmeb, zogger50, zoltanthegypsy, zwl821022, and zztopd.

Best wishes for the new year.

20. Special thanks: As mentioned, the contributions to the project have been numerous and diverse. However, I'd like to acknowledge one contributor who has quietly been playing a central role in perhaps the most critical user-facing aspect of the OLPC effort, Sugar. Red Hat's Marco Pesenti Gritti seems to never rest; he never tires of answering questions, writing patches, and engaging in design discussions. His productivity is monumental; his insights are invaluable.

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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.


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