Release notes/8.1.0

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.

+	Software
XO
	13.2.11	2020-01-29
XS
	xs-0.7	2012-02-20

  For the general public

DRAFT

Pending successful completion of the Release Checklist, we will release build candidate-703 as official-703.

Breaking Changes from official-656

Activities must be installed separately.

Motivation: OLPC cannot presently afford to maintain more than one stable build. Therefore, we have decided to provide a "blank slate" which must be customized with activities and content bundles at installation time. (Some people have asked OLPC to provide a single step upgrade/customization path but no resources have been allocated to this task).

Finding Activities

OLPC hosts many Activities and several:

To use an activity pack:

1. Download it.
2. Unzip it onto the root of a USB key.
3. Insert the USB key into your XO and reboot. (Hold the X game key while booting if your machine's firmware is unlocked.)

Linux will boot and unpack each of the bundles into place.

What's the recommended way to upgrade?

The recommended method is to run Olpc-update to the new build, and then to reboot with a G1G1 Activity Pack key inserted.

Which builds are signed, and why does it matter?

There are three streams for update.1 builds -- "update.1", "candidate", and "release". The first is unsigned, the latter two are signed. The workflow is:

• Update.1 builds are created (for example, "update.1-699"), and if they pass testing such that they're an improvement over previous candidates, they become a signed "candidate" build.
• Candidate builds are represented in the form "candidate-699", and are our latest proposed final build for a release.
• Release builds are builds that have been passed to Quanta for installation on new laptops. Notwithstanding an Unscheduled software release, we expect only one of these builds per release cycle.

Creating your own activity pack

The create-customization-key Python script will create a customization key bundles/ directory for G1G1 (or Mexico, or Peru, or "all"). You should first unpack a customization key image on to a USB disk, and then in the root of the USB disk:

python create-customization-key G1G1

The advantage of creating the key yourself is that you get the very latest activities from the Update.1 repository, as opposed to the ones that were latest at the time the most recent Activity Pack was created.

See also

• The final location of the list of default activities, will appear in :

/usr/share/sugar/data/activities.default

• Other developing activity packs.
  • G1G1 Activity Pack or G1G1 activity pack.
  • Peru activity pack

• Another future option for installing 'activity pack' bundles, from console use xo-get.

Notable Current Bugs

• #6773 TamTamJam: Recorded microphone slots don't playback
• #6777 Library bundles cannot use non-ascii characters in their file names
• #6729 Read doesn't save the PDFs it opens (when sharing)
• #6532 SD Card Corruption: partition table gets corrupted on ext3-formatted SD cards on suspend/resume

Changes in Release Candidate 3

See OLPC_SW-ECO_4 for a more precise list of the changes, indexed by ticket, that lead from candidate-699 to candidate-703. To summarize, we added:

• OFW version Q2D14 which will delay firmware updates until power is available.
• Newer library indexing software which fixes a recently introduced typo.
• Better Spanish localization of the library and of the X and console keymaps.
• A new telepathy-salut which should lead to more reliable long-running Chat sessions.
• A new libabiword that fixes a Write sharing crasher.

Changes in Release Candidate 2

Customization

Starting with the Update.1-699 release, the OS image is separate from the customization, which includes activities and content bundles. Each country or deployment can customize the activities and content (and other things going forward), following the Customization_key process.

• We saw a bug today where the customization process would freeze when installing large .xo bundles like tamtamedit.

There is a workaround in customization-2, which was recently sent by mstone.

• Read wasnt included in the Mexico customization. It has been added in customization-2
• Michael managed to update activities/content bundles through the browser
• Customization key wont install if the activities or library directories had already been created as root. This wont apply to freshly reflashed builds.
• Here is a list of the customizations OLE Nepal has made as of March 27th for build 702

Issues with this release

Activities:

• Couldnt add feed to news reader. Clicking "+"/dropdown on the feeds tab didnt do anything
• The contents of a USB key didnt show in the journal. So couldnt install activity bundles from the USB through the journal.
• Could copy images to the clipboard through record+browse+paint. They were successfully opened in paint and pasted in write!

(Almost) full activity testing results for Update.1 RC-2, all results are from build 702

Collaboration

• Activities were reliably sharing between 2 XOs in the same School server mesh, and also in simple mesh. This was tested with write/distance/chat/memorize
• Some XOs were connected to APs, while still running salut in channel 6.

These could very reliably exchange presence info(XOs showed in meshview/received activity invitations/joined public activities) with each other and also with the ones connected to the SS in channel 6. However, no application traffic was able to be shared. This was tested in many activites including write/chat/pippy/connect and others. These XOs had different msh0 ip subnets(one was SS,msh0=172.18.x.x, other was AP,msh0=169.254.x.x). Perhaps this explains why the traffic data wasnt sent? But again, presence traffic was shared fine.

• Some times when joining a Chat the activity wasnt responding. Keystrokes were shown int he edit box.

The log displayed : "groupadd: group 10019 exists Creating mailbox file: File exists". The bug wasnt consistent though Seemed identical to 6499

• We couldn't manage to make read share. Perhaps this is still related to 6483. More testing was done subsequently and bugs have been filed.

Network

• WEP/WPA initially worked fine and were tested several times. However after some time no XOs could connect to the WPA/olpc. The icon also disappeared in one of the XOs. Perhaps smth was wrong with the AP.
• Disabling salut(6299) was working fine. Salut + Avahi traffic were successfully disabled for some minutes when receiving a public ip.
• Only one telepathy-salut crash was seen. It seemed that 6310 was fixed. More testing needs to be done here.
• Also I didnt manage to reproduce the xmas-tree effect(5501). I wasnt aware that the new telepathy-salut was attempting to fix it. This is good news!
• Last but not least: The inhibit-idle-suspend flag stops the XO from suspending automatically.

I was under the impression that a suspended XO will wake with MDNS packets. However, I removed the inhibit-idle-suspend flag and suspended for 15min. When resumed, all the XOs were failed in avahi. It seems that MDNS packets didnt wake it. Are there different rules for resuming from automatic suspend vs resuming from manual suspend? This needs to be further looked into.