OLPC:News

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LAPTOP NEWS 2007-04-28

1. Cambridge: Delegations from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Libya, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay attended a week-long meeting at the OLPC headquarters to discuss the current status of the program, share ideas, and plan next steps.

Just seeing and hearing the diversity of faces and voices around the table was remarkable. Although the discussion was occasionally heated, every attendee was convinced that OLPC is something they should and must do for the children of their countries. Passion was infectious; and most important: there was a vibrant exchange among the attendees of their experiences and ideas about how to move forward together.

2. A pivotal moment was when Marta Voelcker showed videos from the work being done with XOs by Léa Fagundes and her colleagues at the University of Rio Grande do Sul in a school in Porto Alegre; this was followed by Irene Ficheman, who showed videos from the work she and her colleagues from University of São Paulo are doing with XOs in a school in that city. We were able to see how the teachers there worked with the XO and each other (a priceless moment was helping each other open the XO for the first time) and heard how students do not want to go home—even when dismissed early. (The children without laptops at the school in the Porto Alegre—only one in four have an XO—are emulating the landless movement in Brazil—Movimento Sem Terra—they have created a laptop-less student movement.)

3. OLPC added a new country this week: the USA. This move will engage a wider developer community, impacting and improving software and content. Please note that such a move into schools and learning in the USA is not necessarily a commercial machine.

4. One of the pleasant surprises of the week was the extent to which software development for the XO is beginning to take a life of its own. A developer in Pakistan is building a Qur'anic Studies for the laptop; a team from Uruguay surprised us with a demonstration of an activity for using USB “dongles” on the laptop; a team from Brazil has built some original “learning” games for the laptop; and a team from Argentina has been continuing to work on a wide variety of activities, including a calculator activity that “shows its work.”

5. Environmental impact: Mary Lou Jepsen has compiling data to determine the environmental impact of the XO. Of course XO is literally the greenest laptop on the planet, but it is also figuratively the greenest: having less environmental impact than any laptop ever made. Mary Lou is working with EPEAT, “a procurement tool to help institutional purchasers in the public and private sectors evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes.” EPEAT provides “a clear and consistent set of performance criteria for the design of products, and provides an opportunity for manufacturers to secure market recognition for efforts to reduce the environmental impact of their products.” Details will be available next soon.

6. Weather-proofing: XO is made for use outdoors. On a rainy day in Boston, Mary Lou decided to let the BBC film her testing the XO in a downpour. She worked with the laptop for an hour in the pouring rain while they filmed; both she and the laptop got drenched. XO worked fine; the crew were to be able to see the screen clearly outside—it was bright despite the rain.

7. B3 Hardware and Firmware: Mitch Bradley, John Watlington, and Richard Smith returned from Taipei after a successful bring-up of preB3. Together with the team from Quanta, they:

  • solved a camera-noise problem that has been plaguing us for months;
  • with help from Tom Sylla fixed the RAM stability problem by improved settings of RAM timing registers—10 boards with 3 different RAM vendors ran memtest overnight with no errors; and
  • stabilized suspend/resume with the OFW test.

Gary made a test rig whereby one XO can force another to do repetitive suspend/resume cycles. We used it to perform 14,000 consecutive suspends of 1-second duration and 234 consecutive 2-minute suspends. Tom has been extremely helpful in debugging video and suspend problems this week.

Mitch trained some of the Quanta software people in the use of OFW. They succeeded in doing their own OFW build, and used it to test a fix for a GPIO-related leakage issue.

Lilian Walter's OFW-based hardware test suite proved invaluable in the preB3 bring-up. It let us prove that various hardware features were working very quickly, without the “is the problem caused by hardware or software” issue that often arises when trying to use OS drivers for testing.

Quanta has implemented most of the new EC commands that Richard specified, so we can migrate away from direct access to EC GPIO ports (which was a latent security hole). Mitch have written and tested OFW interfaces to those new functions.

Jordan Crouse, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon worked on the LX graphics driver to shake it down (the LX has a significantly better graphics processor requiring significant changes and additions to the drives). Chris and Jordan debugged an X cursor problem on the pre-B3 with Jordan Crouse. Andres worked with Jordan on lxfb and DCON drivers, and committed them. The DCON support is now broken out, and both the LX and GX frame-buffer drivers can control it.

Chris Ball took Quanta's testing spreadsheet and added missing bugs to Trac. He also wrote a kernel patch to fix an audio bug (by inverting EAPD) on B3, and submitted it to Jaya Kumar who maintains the audio driver we use.

8. System software: Andres committed initial code for calling into OFW, and changed the platform detection code to use OFW rather than dealing with GPIOs.

Chris also brought up Sugar under Python 2.5 on an XO using the Fedora 7 packages, which we'd previously thought to be impractical. He is in the middle of taking performance measurements which we can use to help decide whether and when we want to migrate the build to it.

9. Localization: Jim Gettys gave a presentation on localization at the Country Meeting. The “meat” of the presentation can be found in the wiki (See Localization). He also gave a presentation on the design of the X0-1 at MIT; a video of this presentation can be found at: http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3417. It was attended by about 100 people, and may result in a number of people contributing to the project.

10. Journal: This week Ben Saller joined the software team to work on the Sugar data store. Welcome, Ben. He's based in San Fransisco and is working remotely. Ben already has a few things working in the data store including a working query engine, a simple file-based back-end data store and full-text indexing. Marco Gritti has integrated it into jhbuild (our sugar build script) and Tomeu Vizoso has started on integrating into the Journal activity. It's great to see this work finally underway.

11. Presence: The new presence service based on the work that Dan Williams and the Collabora team have been working on has landed in jhbuild. This means we can use the XMPP/server-based bits for collaboration and move to the new “tubes” model for activities. This code is still under heavy development so expect some bumps, but this is a big step that a lot of people have been working on for a long time.

12. Sugar: This week Tomeu, Marco and Eben Eliason met in Italy to work through a number of design issues surrounding controls and look and feel. Those notes have been posted to the mailing list and a full overview is in the wiki for anyone interested.

13. Collaboration: Guillaume Desmottes from Collabora has been working on the “collaboration bits” and has a sample activity (based on Connect-4) working on top of the new tubes/collaboration API working in the sugar environment. He also spent a lot of time debugging video and VOIP problems. There turned out to be an incompatibility between gstreamer and one of the streaming libraries. Most of the UI for the video-call activity is done; the streaming issue is being fixed; once that's completed, we should have a very nice video call activity on the XO.

14. Erik Blankinship and Bakhtiar Mikhak from Media Mods demonstrated a shared camera activity this week. While it doesn't yet leverage the tubes/collaboration API, it is a harbinger of some of the new modes of interactive learning enabled by the XO/Sugar architecture.

15. Connectivity: Mesh testing continues and this time we have some nice results to report from our friends at UFF in Rio de Janeiro. In one test they placed five laptops in five different floors in their building and they measured application throughput—copying a file using the Linux SCP command. After four hops, there was 500 kilobits of real application throughput!! They also measured (in the lab) throughput via a chain of ten laptops. (A long chain of laptops can be created by means of special debugging features in the laptop's firmware.) Using the iperf benchmarking program, they got over 2 megabits over 9 hops.

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@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.

OLPC PRESS RELEASES

Jan. 2007 OLPC has No Plans (broken link) 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 Transform Learning.

Articles

  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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