Release notes/8.1.0
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 (forthcoming).
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 activity packs including:
- G1G1 Activity Pack or G1G1 activity pack.
- Peru activity pack
- Here is a list of the customizations OLE Nepal has made as of March 27th for build 702.
To use an activity pack:
- Download it.
- Unzip it onto the root of a USB key.
- 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.
- Another future option for installing 'activity pack' bundles, from console use xo-get.
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.
Improvements from official-656
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 and that may avoid the "Christmas tree" effect ([1]).
- A new libabiword that fixes a Write sharing crasher.
Notable Current Bugs
- #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
- The contents of a USB key didn't show in the journal. So couldn't install activity bundles from the USB through the journal.
Customization Issues
- Customization key wont install if the activities or library directories had already been created as root.
Activity Issues
- #6773 TamTamJam: Recorded microphone slots don't playback
- Couldnt add feeds to news reader because clicking "+"/dropdown on the feeds tab didn't do anything.
(Almost) full activity testing results for Update.1 RC-2, all results are from build 702
Network Issues
- WEP and WPA initially worked fine and were tested several times; however, after some time, no XOs could connect to the WPA access point. The icon also disappeared in one of the XOs.
Collaboration Issues
Activity sharing is quite fragile in official-703. See Collaboration Network Testbed for more detailed results.
In particular, Read sharing is not a reliable mechanism for transporting PDFs between laptops. Other less bandwidth-intensive activities such as Write, Distance, Chat, and Memorize were somewhat can be shared with somewhat more reliability.
