Release notes/11.2.0

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EXTREMELY EARLY DRAFT!

Purpose

This is a new, major OLPC OS release, including a general software refresh to bring OLPC in-line with more recent open source platform technologies. Various new features have been added, many previous problems have been fixed, and this release paves the way for increasingly effective development cycles from an expanded OLPC development team.

During the development process, some concerns were raised internally due to the presence of some stability issues and not having completed all of the feature work that had been planned, however, we managed to solve many of the larger issues during the later stages of development and capitalise on testing, meaning that we are happy with the outcome. Nevertheless, as always, deployments are advised to carefully read the release notes (below) where we detail the known significant issues in this software release.

New features

Sugar 0.92

The 10.1 release series included Sugar 0.84. This release includes Sugar 0.92 including a variety of improvements and fixes. For more information, see the following release note pages, denoting all of the individual releases that have been made since 0.84:

• Sugar-0.86 release notes
• Sugar-0.88 release notes
• Sugar-0.90 release notes
• Sugar-0.92 release notes badlink 0.82 0.92?

In addition to the user-visible changes described there, many fixes and improvements have been made to Sugar internals.

In terms of activities, the Abacus, FotoToon, Clock and Hello World activities have been added to the base software release, and Ruler has been re-added. Most of the other activities included have been updated, including enhancements and bug fixes.

GNOME 2.32

This release includes GNOME version 2.32, compared to the previous 10.1 release series which included GNOME 2.26. Many improvements and fixes are included. For more information, refer to the following release notes pages, covering the releases that have been made since 2.26:

• GNOME 2.28 release notes
• GNOME 2.30 release notes
• GNOME 2.32 release notes
• Note that OLPC continues to ship a slimmed down version of GNOME, so not all features discussed may be relevant

Previous OLPC OS releases included batterymon as the battery monitor applet within GNOME. Due to lack of maintainership and deprecation of batterymon, this release replaces batterymon with batti. There are some visual differences but the functionality is the same.

Base system updates

Various behind-the-scenes improvements in underlying open source technologies are included through newer versions of the base system. This release is built on top of Fedora 14 and Linux 2.6.35.13.

Even though we now exert greater control over the selection of software packages included in the release, the move from Fedora 11 to Fedora 14 has resulted in a small increase in the on-disk size of the base system. We will work to improve on this for future releases.

New XO-1.5 video driver

A new "chrome" video driver for the XO-1.5 provides performance improvements, a hardware-accelerated mouse cursor, multiple Xv surfaces (should be useful for some applications e.g. Skype), and means that graphics in rotated screen modes are just as fast as non-rotated modes.

New filesystems

XO-1

The underlying filesystem for XO-1 has switched from JFFS2 to UBIFS. This solves various long-term problems such as huge system slowdown when the flash was nearly full.

The flash is now partitioned, with a small JFFS2 boot partition used by the firmware and the rest of the flash occupied by a UBIFS partition.

XO-1.5

The XO-1.5 software images have switched from ext3 to ext4, an incremental improvement offering various minor performance enhancements.

Faster installation for XO-1.5

Previously, installation of software images on the XO-1.5 laptop wrote to every sector of the disk, even ones where no data was actually stored. As of this release, installation images are now sparse, meaning that data is only written to disk during the flashing process at the point which data actually resides. The result is that installation time is now more than twice as quick.

The effect of this optimization is visible during the flashing process. Previously, all disk blocks were displayed on-screen, and the squares went green one by one from left-to-right and top-to-bottom. Now, only select blocks will go green, and it is normal for these blocks to be spaced out over different parts of the disk with big gaps present. This may appear strange to those familiar with the flashing of previous software releases, but it is now perfectly normal.

Faster boot

The early-boot code (initramfs) has been tweaked and slimmed to boot faster, and bootup time of the XO-1 is greatly decreased thanks to the switch to the UBIFS filesystem and the partitioned disk layout.

olpc-update improvements

olpc-update, OLPC's specialised software update system, previously had usability issues in that after performing an upgrade, it did not delete the previous operating system version or offer a user interface so that it could be cleaned up. The result was that a lot of disk space was wasted. This is solved as of this release: old software versions are automatically deleted soon after the new version has been installed and booted.

In the 10.1 release series, olpc-update faced an inefficiency of always updating many binaries and libraries that were technically unchanged; this resulted in increased disk space requirements for the update process. This has been fixed for 11.2 by no longer prelinking binaries and libraries, which was shown to only have a very minor performance impact.

Build system improvements

• default timezone can be specified in build system

XO-1.5: improved solar charging

The XO-1.5 was recently found to be less effective at charging from solar panels than the XO-1. This has now been fixed through the implementation of Maximum Power Point Tracking in the charging code. XO-1.5 solar panel charging is now on-par with XO-1.

Known problems

XO-1

Disk image is large

The move to the UBIFS filesystem plus the general growth of the Fedora base software has the unfortunate result that the XO-1 images are significantly larger than before, not leaving much disk space to the user.

This issue can be worked around by first installing an older release (e.g. 10.1.3), and then using olpc-update to upgrade to this release. This has the effect of not using the new filesystem, you will instead stay with the old one (jffs2) which stores things in a more compact way. However, even then, the size of this release is large, and olpc-update needs to store both old and new software releases on-disk for a short amount of time, so you may have to erase some of your files/activities to allow the upgrade process to complete. Once completed, you should have enough space to reload your data.

We will greatly improve this situation in the following development cycle.

Deployments also have further options of customising and rebuilding this software release to reduce disk space usage which is quite critical for XO-1:

• Excluding GNOME from the image, and shipping Sugar-only
• Shipping only one or two languages, instead of the large collection shipped by OLPC in the official release
• Building jffs2 images (as in previous releases) instead of ubifs images

Automatic power management instability

On XO-1, automatic power management is disabled by default. It can be enabled through the Sugar Settings dialog, but this will trigger some issues such as:

• Wireless network connectivity may fail, <trac>10232</trac>, or take some time to resume, <trac>9854</trac>, <trac>10272</trac>,
• Touchpad may seem slow to respond as the system wakes, <trac>10233</trac>,
• In GNOME a new file browser window may appear as the system wakes if a USB or SD card is inserted, <trac>10306</trac>.