OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2008-01-19

1. Cambridge: A third Learning Workshop was held at OLPC this past week. There was excellent attendance and participation; a real network of laptop learning activists is forming. Workshop attendees are not merely listening but are contributing to the conceptual basis of practice in schools and communities. There was a blend between the conceptual and practical concepts, and the localities beginning will help innovate the learning environments and communities of the 21st century. The presentation by Dr. Felton Earls and Maya Carlson of the Harvard School of Public Health on participatory surveys and indicators for community development as well as their work in Tanzania and Chicago was inspirational. The Learning team of Edith Ackermann, Ed Baafi, Fatimata Seye Sylla, Juliano Bittencourt, Elana Langer, Julain Daily, Cynthia Solomon, Alice Cavallo, and David Cavallo contributed mightily. Special thanks for support especially to Felice Gardner, as well as Tracy Price and Jennifer Amaya. As always, a highlight is the Activity Open House where developers demonstrate their activities on the XO.

2. G1G1: During the reconciliation process of the “get” laptops shipped during Give One Get One, a number of unfulfilled order records were uncovered. The OLPC team has been working hard with our partners to resolve all open issues. We expect another ~5000 XO laptops will be shipped on Monday. The remaining orders pose an extra challenge as they either have incomplete or no shipping and contact information. If you have not yet received your XO laptop, you should be getting an individualized email that addresses your specific situation. If you are scheduled to receive your laptop next week, you will also be getting a follow-up email with tracking information. We'll be adding additional phone lines and shifting agents to reduce wait times. A further reconciliation of the data will be conducted this week, although hopeful, we can anticipate additional incomplete orders. Our apologies for these delays.

3. Ulaan Baatar: Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, Carla Gomez Monroy, Jan Jungclaus, and RedHat’s David Woodhouse are working hard to set up a structure that can provide sustainability to the project in Mongolia such that it can spread it throughout the country. On Wednesday, the Minister of Education visited the school for the “laptop hand out” event. On Friday, an optical-fiber cable was set up, in spite of the extreme low temperatures; on Saturday, the schools were connected to the Internet. David has been working with a group of local technical people on the servers and Internet set up infrastructure as well as on configuration. John Watlington has been providing support remotely from OLPC.

We have been meeting almost every evening with the strategic team of the Ministry of Education to provide feedback and sort out challenges. We met yesterday with the Ministry of Education team, teachers, principals, ICTA, content team and pilot research team to provide detailed feedback of how the project is going so far and to bring up things to be considered for the short and long terms.

Teachers are putting their hearts into the program. They had their first sessions with the children. Parents, too, have shown support. And the children, of course, love it. The Constructionist model of learning has found wide-spread support within the MoE.

There are more photos (See Ulaanbaatar) in our wiki.

4. School Server: John Watington reports that we have a new build which supports schools with multiple servers in a school and including a Jabber server! Build 150 was released, along with lengthy configuration notes (See XS Installing Software#OLPC XS 150).

The configuration interface is still stone knife and bear skin, but functionality appears to be there. We hope to have a build improving the configuration process and adding web caching by the end of next week.

David Woodhouse is in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia helping Carla Gomez Monroy deploy school servers along with the laptops. The servers we shipped from Cambridge have arrived and are being installed. David has been handling the difficult task of positioning two servers (with six antennae) to cover a three-floor school. He is also facing the need to upgrade the laptops right away to avoid a networking meltdown. The good news is that the school is finally connected to the Internet; we can assist from Cambridge.

5: Firmware: Richard Smith fixed the “repeated game keys on resume bug” (Ticket #2401). During a resume, the main processor is not ready to receive key codes for about 100ms after the delivery of the SCI wakeup event. The EC dealt with this long delay badly. Fixing this should unblock ebook mode. Richard released a new EC code version that is available in Firmware Q2D09. This should show up in a signed Joyride build soon.

6. Battery issues: Richard did a large amount work on batman.fth; he added the ability to run a manual charge while watching voltage, current, and accumulated current registers. He received three laptops from the field with battery problems. One has a battery that just won't take a charge. The other two laptops won't recognize that the battery is present. Richard plans on tearing into these two machines next week to determine root cause. We need to discuss with Quanta what to do with problem batteries.

7. Schedules: Final testing for Ship2.2, Build 656, was held up this week as we tried to iron out some final details of the new process for “Unscheduled Software Release” (USR) (For those interested in process, please see Unscheduled software release process).

Update 1 is about to start the release process. Highlights include:

  • suspend and resume is mostly, but not entirely implemented;
  • Rainbow security is enabled;
  • the Browse activity has been updated to use the technology in Firefox 3 Beta 2, which is significantly faster and better at memory usage. Innumerable bugs have been fixed. Performance is significantly improved. Memory and file leakage greatly improved.

Update.1RC1 (release candidate 1) is almost ready (Monday with luck). Joyride 1551 is very, very close to Update.1's contents, although it has some additional activities bundled in the base system that we do no plan to ship in Update.1. Please do test it, along with the new firmware version (Q2D09).

We will then start a testing cycle:

  • suspend-and-resume cycling for reliability—during the run up to mass production the laptop was found to be able to reliably suspend and resume at least 50,000 cycles (the length of the tests we were willing to tolerate). We need to ensure there are not software or firmware regressions in this area.
  • scaling tests—we need to ensure sane behavior of the systems in circumstances such as 300 children resuming their laptops all at once in the morning.
  • verification of power use in different use states, on our power measurement systems;
  • wireless driver testing and upgrade testing;
  • testing with the school-server software;

RC2 (release candidate 2) will pick up additional translations and key bug fixes that missed RC1. The community is working to complete the Spanish translation, which was not complete by the string freeze date due to the holidays. There will therefore be a refresh of packages to complete the translations. Activity developers should only be picking up translations (and fixes for approved bugs).

RC3 (release candidate 3) is intended to pick up critical bug fixes discovered during testing, and is the first candidate that is a real candidate for widespread release.

Joyride will be reopened for the start of Update.2 development later this week.

8. Testing: Chih-yu Chao has created the Update.1 Test page, which outlines the major features and bug fixes of this release and links to the test cases to be run and their results (See Update.1). The goal is to have enough planning and information around this release to be able to ask for help from the development and test community over the next two weeks to really hammer on the release. If we can do it, this will be the first release that gets organized, methodical community testing. Keep tuned to your email for more information (testing, devel, sugar mailing lists).

Yani Galanis is back from a short hiatus and has jumped right back into various wireless testing and debug activities. So far he is happy with David Woodhouse's rewrite of the wireless driver. He has fixed some problems with olpc-netstatus so it will accurate report the laptop's network and mesh configurations. He was able to get olpc-netlog working again (with Noah Kantrowitz's help) to zip up the logs, and olpc-netcapture to capture network traffic.

9. Support: This week, when all the laptops to Give One Get One donors were anticipated to have been delivered, Kim Quirk suggested we ask people to send email if they are still waiting for their laptop. When we hit 100 emails in less than a day, it became obvious that were dealing with a much larger problem than anyone at OLPC had imagined. This prompted some quick meetings between the companies involved in the order processing and distribution to try to get a handle on the scope of the problem and how to fix it fast. We learned about orders that could not be matched up between daily and monthly reports, orders that do not have enough information to ship, addresses that couldn't be verified, PO boxes, and miscellaneous other issues—about 10% of the total order volume. Adam Holt's support gang (up to 55 people now!) were inundated by mid-week with donor information requests, as was the Donor Services 800 number. Adam recruited two of the volunteers, Sandy Culver and Steve Holton, to join Greg Babbin and Adam to access the shipping database to help answer these requests.

Thanks to the entire support team who have been working day and night to respond to these extra requests!

10. Datastore: Ivan Krstić ran a Journal/datastore summit at OLPC this week. In attendance through out the week were Marco Pesenti Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, Eben Eliason, Erik Blankinship, and Bert Freudenberg. A number of other members of the core team and the community joined periodically. It was a very productive week: the team nailed down almost all the details required before a first pass at implementation can begin. But before we do so, and while we continue conversations about the new API, Ivan will publish specification in the next few weeks for a round of public discussion. Look forward to a new object model, a refined set of interactions, and new features such as versioning and action-based journal entries.

11. Sugar activities: Arjun Sarwal incorporated sensor input into Turtle Art this week. One can control any aspect of the Turtle's motion based on sensor input. The next step is to integrate the concept into a Turtle Art “block” (See Measure#Sensor Input into Turtle Art).

Arjan has been talking to educators and teachers how they can organize some activities around the Measure Activity. He has also spoke with representatives of the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) chapter who have made a video documentary of experiments with sound using the Measure Activity (See Illinois Math and Science Academy Chapter).

Manusheel Gupta is investigating options for building a spreadsheet actvitiy for the XO. Python-powered spreadsheet (PPSS) seems to be a good choice for integrating into the Sugar environment, while perhaps pulling in some features from GNumeric. Eben Eliason will be discussing the ideas on the UI of the spreadsheet during the coming week. (See http://olivier.friard.free.fr/software/ppss/index.php).

Simon Schampijer fixed an error in the download handling within the Browse activity (Ticket #6018). Dan Williams and Simon finally think we have a good solution for “airplane mode”, e.g., operation with the radio off. A new network manager went into Joyride-1548 and the sugar rpm is building.

Simon does not really understand what happens in regard to reports that Browse is running slow after an update to Update.1 (Ticket #6046) (as opposed to a clean install).

Eva Schroth successfully conducted an interview using the XO laptop’s Record activity: after modifying some constants, she was able to record a one-hour conversation.

On the Etoys front, most of the core team members visited Poitiers, France this week; an IEEE conference called C5 was held. Many researchers, educators and Squeakers who are interested in collaboration and education met together and had interesting conversation. Bert, in response to Arjun’s Turtle Art demonstration, exposed some code in Etoys to enable the microphone level to be used as a data stream within scripts.

12. System software medley: Giannis Galanis contributed network fixes to olpc-utils that solve two Update.1 blockers. Phil Bordelon sent a tool to cleanup orphan Journal previews, which was also an Update.1 blocker.

FFM packaged up the python-gasp, an API wrapper for pygame for new programmers, which has just gone through the Fedora review process.

Chris Ball worked on OHM timing code, and with Reinier Heeres on fixing “ebook mode” to work inside Rainbow.

Reinier Heeres mostly worked on improving and build-testing of some bugfixes of last week. He also activated the new build announcer script, which needed a few minor fixes. For Sugar he fixed an issue with the stop button disappearing when rotating the screen (#5824), and for Read the eBook suspend problem (#1396).

Andres Salomon mostly worked on the touchpad driver this week and has made great progress on fixing problems, and improving its behavior. More importantly, Andres work made clear we should use the tablet sensor in relative mode by default, a conceptual breakthrough that had eluded us. A test kernel with the new driver is available here: http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/master/kernel-latest.i586.rpm.

13. Presence: Dafydd Harries spent most of this week again working on the Jabber server component. A large part of this was working out how to effectively expose the person/activity information that the component will store over XMPP. Dafydd thinks he has a reasonable protocol; he plans to set up a test server that we can measure performance against.

Robert McQueen attended an introductory conference call with Ivan and Jon Herzog about collaboration and security; they are planning a specification-writing fest in late February.

Morgan Collett has been going through the wiki getting the references to Presence, Telepathy, and Tubes up to date, and working on a more comprehensive reference for Presence Service. Morgan also modified Chat to make sure web links copied to the clipboard can be pasted in Write, Web location bar, and Terminal (Ticket #6066). That patch will land when the Spanish translation of Chat is complete.

Guillaume Desmottes continued work on Hyperactivity, a collaboration stress-testing tool (Ticket #5817). It is now able to create/join/leave activities, set up and use D-Bus tubes. Guillaume started to test Salut using it and discovered some interesting bugs; most of them are already fixed.

14. Localization: Bernie Innocenti has been doing some integration work with Manusheel Gupta on Devanagari input support, but it seems there's more work to do, especially in the Write activity. Bernie met with Lidet Tilahun for a roundup on our Ethiopian support, and filed a bunch of bugs out of it. Lidet will contribute translations in Pootle.

Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Dari, Fula and Telugu. He also tracked down a problem in Pootle that was preventing him from updating the PO files in the XO Bundled project. This has been quite difficult to trace down. The rest of the week was spent on more mundane things:

  • he polished and debugged the various helper scripts that is used to run Pootle more smoothly;
  • he helped Simon cross check the list of languages that are given as options by the sugar-control-panel (In the process, they identified a few languages that would require new locales to be added to glibc in order to be supported);
  • he helped a number of users get started with the translations; and
  • he added Slider Puzzle to Pootle.

Dr. Habib Khan reports that localization into Pashto is in final phase and that after some confusion on the Pootle server in regard to Dari and Farsi, progress in being made there as well.

15. Build system: Dennis Gilmore submitted patches to rpm enabling support for the AMD Geode. He has done some work on koji in preparation for supporting us. Patches will be submitted next week for upstream inclusion. These add Geode support and allowing us to pull upstream builds into our instance. Once initial support is in koji, Dennis want to add support to allow .xo building. This would result in a side effect that we get a .src.rpm and .noarch.rpm out of the process

We will need to have a git tree setup that will mimic Fedora’s cvs for things that we keep out of Fedora.

Dennis and Michael Stone looked at possibly using livecd-tools for Update.2: what would be involved in it and if its worth the effort.

This week, Michael talked with Bernie, Scott, and Dennis on ways to improve build infrastructure, offered occasional questions in the Journal summit, and diagnosed the 'upgrade-server can't download builds' bug.

Update.1 is mostly synced up with Joyride. There are a few small pieces that need to be finished. As noted, we are very close to having an Update.1

16. Content: The inclusion of the Doom activity in the wiki has sparked a healthy email discussion about content and filtering. Although heated at times, it has generally been productive. The gist of the debate revolves around the twin issues of (1) should OLPC be adjudicating what is appropriate content and (2) how should content be tagged such that children, parents, teachers, and others can make informed decisions about what content they access.

Suggestions have ranged from adopting “Terms of Use” such as those found on the Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu/terms) to fleshing out our guidelines (Activity guidelines) to making it easier for community members to search and sort favorites (requiring possible extentions to MediaWiki).

This discussion is by no means over, but please continue the thread on the olpc-open <olpc-open@lists.laptop.org> list rather than devel, which is intended for discussion of technical rather than policy topics.

17. OLPC Health: Arjun Sarwal continues his efforts to organize the community in medical and health applications around the XO laptop. He reports that we have a growing list of volunteers in three areas:

(1) Creating a Library/repository of information that would be shipped on the XO laptop as part of the default software on it. This would be a ready reference for preliminary diagnosis of diseases and a reference for symptoms. This would also include general information on an array of topics such as hygiene, nutrition, balanced diets, etc.
(2) Developing software that asks the user a series of questions and helps in a preliminary diagnosis. Links to useful websites and online portals.
(3) Developing and using hardware peripherals that connect to the XO laptop. These include, but are not limited to the build-in camera (with the possibility of add-on optical elements; an EKG; and a pulse oxymeter.

18. Activity Handbook: Christoph Derndorfer reports that the first few chapters of an Activity Handbook are finished. The purpose of this handbook is to provide all the information needed in order to get started with software development for the OLPC XO. The current draft includes the first four chapters:

1. Welcome to the Activity Handbook!
2. Introduction to Sugar
3. Preparation
4. Sugar Basics

Christoph et alia will be expanding the handbook over the coming weeks to include chapters about using the Journal, collaboration, using the various XO input devices, and “Sugarizing” software. (Please see http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook and http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/upload/a/af/Handbook_20080113.pdf).

19. Hello World: In a related effort, Chris Hager and Jaume Nualart report that they have created two new tutorials (during a “pizza-and-beer” coding session) for creating Activities with PyGTK, one of them using Glade (See PyGTK/Hello World Tutorial). Chris and Jaume are using activity.py as a wrapper, which loads the code and GTK interface from gtktest.py. This way, very little code is required to get a PyGTK Activity running in Sugar—just six lines in gtktest.py—and PyGTK Activities can run as standalone versions on any Linux system by default.

Example Bundles:

http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/ba/Gtktest.xo
http://wiki.laptop.org/images/0/02/Gtktest-glade.xo

20. Mongolia: Dave Woodhouse is in Mongolia setting up servers in two schools, which as been an educational experience. Firstly, the wireless penetration through the walls they have here to cope with temperatures of –40°C is fairly dismal—Dave reports that we are having to use a lot of active antennae to get the coverage we need. We're laying them out as if they were “normal” access points, to try to get coverage of all the rooms they'll be teaching the 2nd–5th grades in. Hopefully, the nature of the mesh will improve coverage.

To start with, each school will have five antennae, with two servers. That setup will be re-evaluated when it's fully deployed and tested in the classrooms. It is physically installed in one school so far, and fully cabled (including CAT5 to the other rooms where they have computers). The other school should be similarly set up by the end of Monday.

21. Pakistan: Habib reports progress on the e-book project in Islamabad. Eight elementary text books based on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad have been made into e-text books.

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.

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