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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].


=Laptop News 2008-03-08=
=Laptop News 2008-03-16=


Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan announced the launching of an OLPC pilot project at the Atlas Public School, located in the slums between Rawalpind and Islamabad. (Many thanks to our Afghan volunteers, Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj”, who discovered the school and will be mentoring students and their teacher. The area is economically poor and lacks security measures and basic facilities. There are about 100 children (Grades 1–6), mostly Afghan refugees—many of them work during the first part of the day to support their families and attend school in the afternoon. We distributed 39 XO localized in Dari and Pashto, official languages of Afghanistan.
1. John Watlington, Walter Bender, and Edgar Ceballos (Brightstar) spent this past week in Huampani (Lima) participating in Peru's first train-the-trainers workshop. (143 of the participants will be staffing regional support centrals scatter throughout every corner of the country.)


1. UA Birmingham: Walter Bender met with the dean of the school of education at the University of Alabama. He and his colleagues are enthusiastic about the laptop program in the Birmingham schools and plan to engage at every level: teacher preparation, accessibility, curriculum development, support, and evaluation.
Using a custom image prepared by Chris Ball and Michael Stone, the teachers made great progress throughout the course of the week. They are all completely comfortable with the UI, the Journal, and the pedagogy. They readily navigated the various issues associated with an overloaded network and as was made clear in a Q&A session towards the end of the week, they really appreciate that everything on the laptop is open (and free as in speech); and they appreciate the mandate to take both ownership and the responsibility that comes with it.


They got deep into programming—for most, their first such experience—developing projects with Turtle Art, Scratch, and Etoys. (No Pippy hackers yet, but there was certainly interest expressed.) The workshop culminated with a Media-Lab-style open house, where each teacher demonstrated something they did with the laptop during a week of Constructionist learning.


Meanwhile, the Peru support volunteers met again Wednesday night and decided among other things that they will contact local universities to organize an event of their own around developing networks of educators and creators working with OLPC schools.


2. Learning Workshop: David Cavallo and the Learning Team ran a Learning workshop this week. Attendees included delegations from Thailand, Haiti, and Illinois.
2. Antonio Battro was a keynote speaker at the Las Vegas International Conference of SITE, the Society of Information Technology and Teacher Education. Some 1,300 teachers and educators from many countries attended the Conference. Antonio's talk "OLPC: the cognitive challenges" had one of the largest audiences and was followed by an engaging discussion. The interest and the will to participate at OLPC was significant among the participants.


3. EC: The saga of the Embedded Controller continues. The code that handles shuttling bytes from the touchpad and keyboard up to the host has problems if the host does not read the data fast enough. This might be at the root of some of our touchpad problems. Fixing this will require a significant rewrite. Richard Smith feels he now understand
things enough to do the rework, but it will not be available for Update.1.


4. Multi-battery charger: Bitwork's has assembled a new PCB in and it is functioning as expected. Richard and Lilian Walter added some hardware debugging routines to the firmware to assist Bitworks in their testing. We are still awaiting the larger parts back from the reworked tooling.


3. Laptop activation: Scott Ananian finished documenting the process for activation key generation. This is a critical issue for deployment as it enables the in-country teams to distribute the activation process to a more manageable level of granularity. “Trusted” individuals now have the ability to generate activation keys through a simple web interface by simply uploading a list of XO laptop serial numbers.
5. Q2D14 firmware release: Richard pulled a few new fixes from Mitch Bradley into the current release tree of the system firmware and is preparing to release a Q2D14. The primary reason is to fix an issue with forced upgrades. Once an upgrade has been downloaded, it will be installed on the next reboot. But if the firmware is being upgraded, that reboot will hang unless an external source of power is available (Ticket #6245). The suggestion is to either defer the firmware upgrade until power is available. This will hopefully help in places such as Peru, where many laptops will be off the power grid, when they mass upgrade machines.


6. Battery failures: Richard finished his analysis on the six batteries that were provided to him from laptops returned with charging problems. He's satisfied that its not a charging problem with the laptop circuitry and will be returning the batteries back the the manufacturer for deeper failure analysis.


7. School server: John Watlington reports that after last weeks testing, the current advice to trials and early deployments about wireless interconnection in the schools is the following:


4. Deployment Guide: With input from the Tech Team, the Learning Team, Brightstar, and the Deployment Team, we now have a Deployment Guide. The guide covers planning, execution, and support, along with some tips based upon our experience in trial deployments around the world; a sample deployment schedule; a sample workshop schedule; a check list to guide you through the deployment process; and a glossary of OLPC terms.
* Up to 10 (hopefully 20) laptops will work fine without any infrastructure; Groups of children away from school can share and collaborate;
* Up to 40 laptops are supported either by using a single access point, or a school server with one Active Antenna;
* Between 40 and 80 laptops are best served by a school server with two active antennas;
* Between 80 and 120 laptops can be served by a school server with three active antennas;
* Over 120 students, the schools need to move to more traditional access points to support the network loading.


We will be setting up a longer term (and larger) mesh testbed in a location near Boston where the RF environment is less variable than 1CC, to continue testing improvements to the software. We hope to improve the above numbers! (Chris Ball and Dafydd Harries tested laptops in mesh mode against a school server running a Jabber server—with 32 laptops connected to the school server, the laptops were all able to share a Chat session and a PDF file between themselves without any failures.)


8. Peru connectivity: As mentioned above, John accompanied Walter to Peru in order to set up servers and network access for participants in their regionals leader training sessions. The sessions were held at Huampani, a small resort area about 25 km from Lima up the Rimac river valley. Four VSAT connections were set up to provide internet connectivity to the sessions. While John arrived expecting problems with the presence service and wireless network congestion, the real problems had were due to strange DNS interactions with the VSAT modem's transparent DNS proxy and the Peruvian Ministry of Education DNS service. A fix is being tested.


5. On display: The Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art is acquiring two XO laptops for their permanent collection. MOMA's Paul Galloway said, “We realize that social betterment is the goal of One Laptop Per Child, not the pursuit of design accolades. Nonetheless, we believe the design of the XO Laptop and the ideas it embodies belong in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.”
9. EJabberd: We continue to have problems with obtaining a working ejabberd build with the latest fixes. Collabora is working on this, and as soon as it is available a new build will be announced on the server-devel mailing list.


Meanwhile, Morgan Collett has added improved documentation for setting up ejabberd from source for community jabber servers to the wiki ([[Installing ejabberd]]); so far one community server (for Chicago) has been successfully set up using these instructions, with more in progress ([[Community Jabber Servers]]).


10. Active Antennas are now available for developers, and will be shipped out soon to people who have already requested them. (See the OLPC wiki for further details.)


6. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we are running a new version of Pootle that is significantly faster and should make tasks such as merging of PO files against new POT files easier and less time consuming. He also introduced a patch into the Pootle server to enable translators to view translations in an intermediate language, e.g., an Aymara translator can view pre-existing Spanish translations rather than just the English-language original. We currently manage ~1600 PO files on the server and have more than 450 volunteer translators signed up. More translators are always welcome!
11. Activities: Chris Ball made Pippy collaborative, such that joining a shared Pippy activity now gets you a copy of the source-code buffer of the host at the time you joined.


One of the newest activities developed for the XO laptop is called StarChart. It was created by hobbyist, David Wallace. Dave received his XO via the Give One Get One program at the end of 2007 (See [[StarChart]]).


Prabhas Pokharel, Anjali Lohani and Tsering Lama Sherpa from Harvard University have joined the Nepali Language localization team. Now the team of 10 contributors is doing lots of progress in Nepali localization.
Qirat Activity Version 1.0 is complete and runs as sugar Activity. Waqas Toor is working on making the Surahs (chapters) more presentable when drawn on the Sugar UI canvas.


12. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes implemented and tested flow control in Salut stream tubes (Ticket #6647). As discussed with Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos last week, Salut should be able to use different backends to announce and discover services. Then we could switch from Avahi to Cerebro. That's a lot easier than writing a new Cerebro connection manager as we can reuse the muc and tubes codes (and all the Telepathy interfaces). So Guillame started to design an abstraction layer that will be implemented by Salut and Cerebro (Ticket #6658).


Guillaime also did a few tests and reconsidered Ticket #6585 (PS must reconnect server_plugin when NM changes IP addresses). We agreed with Morgan and Sjoerd this was not a problem and closed the ticket.


7. Support: Adam Holt reports that Yianni Galanis explained the latest wireless mesh testing results at last Sunday's support meeting. The Support Team has responded to an increasing number of support emails as final Give1Get1 shipments are now underway. Adam has been discussing plans for repair centers with various volunteer groups and the OLPC partners. He is also recruiting to fill a Support Specialist Position.
Morgan worked on Ticket #6572 (Replace key with hash to reduce Avahi TXT size) as it currently breaks "friending". The #6572 issue is not as straightforward as it seemed. We derive participants' JIDs from their keys, and friend them using the key as the identifier. So the current patch is for testing the impact on network congestion of a shorter value there but the solution would be more intrusive. (If the current approach doesn't actually improve network performance, it is not worth rearchitecting how PS identifies buddies—which is done using their keys—so testing would be helpful.)


Dennis Gilmore and Dafydd Harries spent time this week trying to get ejabberd running with updated patches from Process One. They had trouble with compilation problems, patches not applying, etc.; also with reproducing the builds that we are currently running. It turns out that the problems were due to newer builds being done with a newer version of Erlang. Dafydd may finally have a version that works, but it needs testing to be sure.


13. Sugar UI: Eben Eliason made some new designs for Journal, Home, and Frame, which he posted to the wiki. New designs for toolbars and bulletin boards are in progress.


8. Firmware: Richard Smith and Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D14 for inclusion into Update.1. The key change is in regard to the boot process when there is a firmware update available: Currently, the laptop will not boot unless there is external power connected; with Q2D14, the laptop will boot regardless of the availability of external power, deferring the firmware upgrade to the next time that external power is present.
The most recent designs have been posted as "slide shows" on the wiki for review and feedback. The first three available discuss plans for future activity management, including a repurposing of the Home circle, a completely reorganized Frame with clearer intent and support for notifications, and a brand new Journal which introduces action- and object- centric views, improves support for visual browsing, and offers a friendlier interface into ones interactions with the laptops.


We are in the process of generating new designs for toolbars as well as beginning to consider future designs for the bulletin boards (and, more near term, designs for standard file transfer). All of these designs are or will be posted to wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs. We encourage those interested to review the images and descriptions posted, and to provide feedback within the discussion pages or on the mailing lists, as appropriate. Thanks!


Tomeu Visozo has been working implementing on the home view redesign. The main changes have been completed and the code is being reviewed. Next step is to discuss
the work done so far with the design team and agree on the several details left to work through.


9. School Server: John Watlington reports that a new School Server build (160) is now available. It provides:
14. Kernel: Andres Salomon did further work in the lxfb/gxfb drivers. He got suspend/resume working properly, prepared more patches, etc.
* an improved ejabberd server, which might improve reliability under load;


* web caching (not enabled by default);
15. Update.1: Scott Ananian reports on the current "state of update.1" including a discussion of the "core activity" changes at:
[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/011537.html] and
[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/011538.html]
(devel archive seems to be broken? split his message in two.)


* the configuration of server domain name has been automated, making setup much easier;
16. Localization: Scott prepared translations for the activation server (including translations for the developer key request form) (See https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/act_server/).


* automatic installation is now supported by the default ISO image; and
Sayamindu Dasgupta has started the migration process to a newer version of Pootle and fixed a few bugs in some of the helper scripts that he uses to manage Pootle.


* miscellaneous bug fixes.
Tomeu has been doing more work on keyboard bindings for the shell and activities in light of localization.


Release notes and installation instruction are available (See [[XS_Installing_Software#OLPC_XS_160]]). Martin Langhoff will be starting to work on the School Server beginning next week.
Waqas Toor reports that the Tahoma font seems most suitable for Urdu on the XO laptop, as Nafees font has some problems when it comes to binding Urdu characters in smaller font size. For Pashto and Dari, we have found Pashto Pasarlai font suitable yet, but it has some problems. Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj” are looking for other font options that contain the complete Pashto and Dari character set on Linux platform.


Mako Hill finished a localization patch for the library, implementing a check for localized start-pages when viewing library collections. The next update of library-core should have at least English and Spanish locales. (While he was in Lima, Walter finished building the Getting Started Guide bundle for Peru. Many thanks to Edgar for the help with the Spanish translation.)


Oz Wilder and Alon Carmeli of Babylon Dictionaries started work two weeks ago on 16 language translations of a basic 2500-word dictionary, to expand our current collection. They are now 99% complete, pending final proofreading, and can be seen on the wiki ([[Dictionary]]). Zdenek Broz is working to include these in our multilingual dictionary bundle.


10. Multi-battery charger: Richard is happy with the way that the new PCB is performing; Bitworks is building several fully loaded PCBs so that we can test all 15 channels at once. Lilian Walter has stated the adaption of the laptop NiMH charging code so that it can be used in the multi-battery charger. Richard will fold Lillian's modifications in to a test version of EC code and verify that the charging still works correctly.
17. Sugar-control-panel: Simon Schampijer is working on the GUI for the sugar control panel.


18. Support: Adam Holt reports progress on a new "Projects DB" Developers Program with Aaron Kaplan et al. in Vienna. (Jim Gettys has been a huge help laying this out.) Usability and features are improving towards release, hopefully later this month.


Alan Claver helped with countless HW / pre-RMA support tickets. Volunteers are doing so much great work behind the scenes we cannot even keep track of it all. Adam shared Scott's deployment maps (with disclaimer) (See http://dev.laptop.org/~cscott/stats-20080201.html).


11. Wireless: Ricardo Carrano's testing uncovered some problems in the wireless driver. Mesh forwarding doesn't always start and ethtool reports back bogus statistics. Ricardo wrote a python tool that reads a list of XOs from the presence service, initiates pings to them (in random order) and keeps track of the communication statistics—very useful for stressing path discovery. He also started to test the tuning of the contention window parameters in the WLAN radio. Marvell released wireless firmware 5.110.22.p6. It adds control of probe responses (including disabling them completely) and fixes warm reboot and host wakeup bugs.
Adam organized another Sunday Support meeting (Sunday's at 4PM EST) with Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin from Mongolia, who spoke about their ongoing deployment; several new volunteers participated. Yani Galanis will be our guest speaker this coming Sunday; topic: our wireless/mesh testing's results/outlook!


19. Help wanted:


* A request has come in from Cambodia for help in setting up mysql in Khmer;
* We are looking for someone to "Sugarize" the GCompris icons;
* Girlstart is looking for graphic artists and designers to make their games attractive through professional graphics (Please see the project website http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Project_IT_Girl).


12. Active Antennae: 2000 Active Antennae are en route from GoldPeak to OLPC. Marvell has released stand-alone firmware that allows operation on any channel that the user selects. We don't have the necessary patches for programming/controlling the antennae in our wireless driver yet.
20. CeBIT/OLPC Deutschland: Holger Levsen and Christoph Derndorfer both reported on the OLPC presense at CeBIT, the largest IT show in Europe.


Holger reports that "OLPC Deutschland" had its first "real life" meeting at the meeting (See http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/104668), just after having decided by voting via mailinglist (http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-de) on the final name of the project three days earlier. The group is planning to have a workshop weekend in Berlin this spring, to develope its visions and structures. A longer workshop which children and teachers called summer camp is also in its early planning stages.


Christoph reports that the feedback at CeBIT has simply "blown us away". They had hundreds of people at their booth: the main reaction always along the lines of "I've read about the OLPC project for two years, it's great to finally have the chance to actually look at and use one". The most common questions "where can I get one?", "are they already being produced and used somewhere?" and, of course, "where is the crank?" (See http://olpcaustria.soup.io/).


13. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso continues to work on the Sugar redesign. The only task left to reach the “no regressions” point is implementation of activity-launch feedback. Tomeu helped Eben Eliason to set up sugar-jhbuild and his personal sugar trees. Eben has already sent several useful patches (See https://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/eben/sugar;a=summary). Tomeu is doing more work on speeding up activity startup—the only remaining functional issue was solved. We now need to find a way to integrate it inside the Rainbow security model (thanks Michael Stone, Chris Ball, Robert McQueen, and John Palmieri).
21: Debian: Holger also reports that sugar 0.79 has been uploaded by Jonas Smedegaard to Debian today, fixing Debian bug #444021. The packaging consists of three source packages: sugar-base, sugar and sugar-artwork.


22. Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports that they had two very educative events this week as part of our awareness campaign: The first one was introducing OLPC to street children in Islamabad’s vicinity. The aim was to observe the reaction of children who have never been to a school. Habib and his team spend half a day with these children and this generated enough curiosity in the community–mostly Afghan refugees. Though out of school, these children were quite smart and quickly learned to operate the camera and play around with music.


The second event was an announced Open Air workshop for graduate students of IIU. Twenty students had registered to participate in this event and more than 50 students showed up and remained throughout. Salman Minhas, Waqas and Sohaib gave demonstrations and assisted students with in understanding the 20 XO laptops that we had readied for the workshop. We expect volunteers from this lot to come forward and help us in the localization and software projects.


Simon Schampijer continues to work on the graphical user interface for the Sugar control panel. The basic design is done (See
23. IDCL: Ben Bederson, Tim Browne, and SJ Klein reviewed what they need to integrate the International Digital Children's Library (IDCL) server infrastructure (Tomcat, mysql, and some custom scripts) into our builds.
[[Sugar_Control_Panel#GUI_for_the_command_line_tool]]). Code of the work in progress can be checked out from git (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/erikos/sugar;a=summary).



24. GSoC: Our Google Summer of Code organization application has been sent in. Now we need more mentors and mre project ideas. Please add ideas to the [[Summer of Code/Ideas]] page in the wiki and contact either Michael Stone or SJ if you are interested in being a mentor. Also, please start spreading the word that we are looking for SoC students this summer—students are welcome to add their own ideas to our list.
Dennis Gilmore is working to make Sugar work as a desktop option; he has also started on a set of Fedora packaging guidelines for Sugar activities. For Fedora 9, we should have available the option to do a “yum groupinstall sugar-desktop” you will then be able to select Sugar from gdm/kdm with a set of activities that work. Sugar is currently available in Fedora 8 and Rawhide, although the packaging still needs some work and does not yet setup gdm/kdm.



14. Activities: Chris Ball wrote and released a new activity, “Words”, a translating dictionary with speech synthesis in English/French/German/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish. Morgan Collett has started on a post-Update.1 Chat.

Erik Blankinship reports that the MediaMods team has built a map activity—it allows children to add images and videos to maps. Erik envisions children will use it for storytelling, history, and science projects. Some features include: saving and annotating map locations; grabbing screen shots of map locations so they can be embedded into other activities; visualizing how many media are clustered in a certain area; and filtering which media are displayed on the map by searching their tags (as set in the journal or in record). Download http://mediamods.com/public-svn/map-activity/tags/xo/map-1.xo to give it a try.



15. Builds: Chris wrote a script to automatically create customization keys. It can pull down the latest version of activities for a Peru, Mexico or G1G1 build, or can include every activity it knows about. We used the script to pull together the Mexico customization key. Scott and Dennis continue to shepherd Update.1.


16. Kernel: Andres Salomon worked with Jordan Krause to find and fix some xorg amd driver bugs. He wrote patches for #6015, #6670 and reworked some framebuffer patches; and, of course, he argued with upstream.



17. Presence: Morgan implemented an alternative patch for Ticket #6572 to reduce the key size in Avahi TXT records, by replacing the public key file (which isn't used at this stage) with a shorter record. This doesn't break “friending” as did the previous patch, as the whole stack uses a consistent value for the key, for calculating the JID, etc. Morgan is awaiting testing with salut to see the impact on scalability. Morgan discovered that sync_friends wasn't working; he provided a patch (Ticket #6690). This adds friends to the Jabber-server roster, which will be used by the server-side component, Gadget. Guillaume Desmottes worked on the Avahi abstraction in Salut (Ticket #6658) and tested Read sharing with wake-on-multicast activated (Ticket #6537).



18. Rainbow: Michael Stone prototyped a network isolation primitive described by Daniel Bernstein (http://cr.yp.to/unix/disablenetwork.html), demoed an activity in which a web browser and an HTTP server work together to examine the filesystem.



19. Squeak: Robert Krahn reports that there is a new Squeak project, BlockAttack, available for download (http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/projects/olpc/).

20. OLPC Health: Dr Walter H. Curioso joins us as an adviser in our efforts. Dr Curioso is a research professor in Epidemiology, STD/HIV, and Health Informatics at the School of Public Health and Administration at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru. His research focus is on how to use technology to promote global health in developing countries and his latest projects involve using cell phones to collect and transmit adverse events, and using personal digital assistants to assess sexual risk and antiretroviral medication adherence among HIV patients in Lima.

The next conference call is scheduled for Sunday, 16 March. See the Health Meetings page ([[Health/Calls]]) for details.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 13:59, 16 March 2008

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Laptop News 2008-03-16

Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan announced the launching of an OLPC pilot project at the Atlas Public School, located in the slums between Rawalpind and Islamabad. (Many thanks to our Afghan volunteers, Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj”, who discovered the school and will be mentoring students and their teacher. The area is economically poor and lacks security measures and basic facilities. There are about 100 children (Grades 1–6), mostly Afghan refugees—many of them work during the first part of the day to support their families and attend school in the afternoon. We distributed 39 XO localized in Dari and Pashto, official languages of Afghanistan.

1. UA Birmingham: Walter Bender met with the dean of the school of education at the University of Alabama. He and his colleagues are enthusiastic about the laptop program in the Birmingham schools and plan to engage at every level: teacher preparation, accessibility, curriculum development, support, and evaluation.


2. Learning Workshop: David Cavallo and the Learning Team ran a Learning workshop this week. Attendees included delegations from Thailand, Haiti, and Illinois.


3. Laptop activation: Scott Ananian finished documenting the process for activation key generation. This is a critical issue for deployment as it enables the in-country teams to distribute the activation process to a more manageable level of granularity. “Trusted” individuals now have the ability to generate activation keys through a simple web interface by simply uploading a list of XO laptop serial numbers.


4. Deployment Guide: With input from the Tech Team, the Learning Team, Brightstar, and the Deployment Team, we now have a Deployment Guide. The guide covers planning, execution, and support, along with some tips based upon our experience in trial deployments around the world; a sample deployment schedule; a sample workshop schedule; a check list to guide you through the deployment process; and a glossary of OLPC terms.


5. On display: The Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art is acquiring two XO laptops for their permanent collection. MOMA's Paul Galloway said, “We realize that social betterment is the goal of One Laptop Per Child, not the pursuit of design accolades. Nonetheless, we believe the design of the XO Laptop and the ideas it embodies belong in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.”


6. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we are running a new version of Pootle that is significantly faster and should make tasks such as merging of PO files against new POT files easier and less time consuming. He also introduced a patch into the Pootle server to enable translators to view translations in an intermediate language, e.g., an Aymara translator can view pre-existing Spanish translations rather than just the English-language original. We currently manage ~1600 PO files on the server and have more than 450 volunteer translators signed up. More translators are always welcome!


Prabhas Pokharel, Anjali Lohani and Tsering Lama Sherpa from Harvard University have joined the Nepali Language localization team. Now the team of 10 contributors is doing lots of progress in Nepali localization.


7. Support: Adam Holt reports that Yianni Galanis explained the latest wireless mesh testing results at last Sunday's support meeting. The Support Team has responded to an increasing number of support emails as final Give1Get1 shipments are now underway. Adam has been discussing plans for repair centers with various volunteer groups and the OLPC partners. He is also recruiting to fill a Support Specialist Position.


8. Firmware: Richard Smith and Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D14 for inclusion into Update.1. The key change is in regard to the boot process when there is a firmware update available: Currently, the laptop will not boot unless there is external power connected; with Q2D14, the laptop will boot regardless of the availability of external power, deferring the firmware upgrade to the next time that external power is present.


9. School Server: John Watlington reports that a new School Server build (160) is now available. It provides:

  • an improved ejabberd server, which might improve reliability under load;
  • web caching (not enabled by default);
  • the configuration of server domain name has been automated, making setup much easier;
  • automatic installation is now supported by the default ISO image; and
  • miscellaneous bug fixes.

Release notes and installation instruction are available (See XS_Installing_Software#OLPC_XS_160). Martin Langhoff will be starting to work on the School Server beginning next week.


10. Multi-battery charger: Richard is happy with the way that the new PCB is performing; Bitworks is building several fully loaded PCBs so that we can test all 15 channels at once. Lilian Walter has stated the adaption of the laptop NiMH charging code so that it can be used in the multi-battery charger. Richard will fold Lillian's modifications in to a test version of EC code and verify that the charging still works correctly.


11. Wireless: Ricardo Carrano's testing uncovered some problems in the wireless driver. Mesh forwarding doesn't always start and ethtool reports back bogus statistics. Ricardo wrote a python tool that reads a list of XOs from the presence service, initiates pings to them (in random order) and keeps track of the communication statistics—very useful for stressing path discovery. He also started to test the tuning of the contention window parameters in the WLAN radio. Marvell released wireless firmware 5.110.22.p6. It adds control of probe responses (including disabling them completely) and fixes warm reboot and host wakeup bugs.


12. Active Antennae: 2000 Active Antennae are en route from GoldPeak to OLPC. Marvell has released stand-alone firmware that allows operation on any channel that the user selects. We don't have the necessary patches for programming/controlling the antennae in our wireless driver yet.


13. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso continues to work on the Sugar redesign. The only task left to reach the “no regressions” point is implementation of activity-launch feedback. Tomeu helped Eben Eliason to set up sugar-jhbuild and his personal sugar trees. Eben has already sent several useful patches (See https://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/eben/sugar;a=summary). Tomeu is doing more work on speeding up activity startup—the only remaining functional issue was solved. We now need to find a way to integrate it inside the Rainbow security model (thanks Michael Stone, Chris Ball, Robert McQueen, and John Palmieri).


Simon Schampijer continues to work on the graphical user interface for the Sugar control panel. The basic design is done (See Sugar_Control_Panel#GUI_for_the_command_line_tool). Code of the work in progress can be checked out from git (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/erikos/sugar;a=summary).


Dennis Gilmore is working to make Sugar work as a desktop option; he has also started on a set of Fedora packaging guidelines for Sugar activities. For Fedora 9, we should have available the option to do a “yum groupinstall sugar-desktop” you will then be able to select Sugar from gdm/kdm with a set of activities that work. Sugar is currently available in Fedora 8 and Rawhide, although the packaging still needs some work and does not yet setup gdm/kdm.


14. Activities: Chris Ball wrote and released a new activity, “Words”, a translating dictionary with speech synthesis in English/French/German/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish. Morgan Collett has started on a post-Update.1 Chat.

Erik Blankinship reports that the MediaMods team has built a map activity—it allows children to add images and videos to maps. Erik envisions children will use it for storytelling, history, and science projects. Some features include: saving and annotating map locations; grabbing screen shots of map locations so they can be embedded into other activities; visualizing how many media are clustered in a certain area; and filtering which media are displayed on the map by searching their tags (as set in the journal or in record). Download http://mediamods.com/public-svn/map-activity/tags/xo/map-1.xo to give it a try.


15. Builds: Chris wrote a script to automatically create customization keys. It can pull down the latest version of activities for a Peru, Mexico or G1G1 build, or can include every activity it knows about. We used the script to pull together the Mexico customization key. Scott and Dennis continue to shepherd Update.1.


16. Kernel: Andres Salomon worked with Jordan Krause to find and fix some xorg amd driver bugs. He wrote patches for #6015, #6670 and reworked some framebuffer patches; and, of course, he argued with upstream.


17. Presence: Morgan implemented an alternative patch for Ticket #6572 to reduce the key size in Avahi TXT records, by replacing the public key file (which isn't used at this stage) with a shorter record. This doesn't break “friending” as did the previous patch, as the whole stack uses a consistent value for the key, for calculating the JID, etc. Morgan is awaiting testing with salut to see the impact on scalability. Morgan discovered that sync_friends wasn't working; he provided a patch (Ticket #6690). This adds friends to the Jabber-server roster, which will be used by the server-side component, Gadget. Guillaume Desmottes worked on the Avahi abstraction in Salut (Ticket #6658) and tested Read sharing with wake-on-multicast activated (Ticket #6537).


18. Rainbow: Michael Stone prototyped a network isolation primitive described by Daniel Bernstein (http://cr.yp.to/unix/disablenetwork.html), demoed an activity in which a web browser and an HTTP server work together to examine the filesystem.


19. Squeak: Robert Krahn reports that there is a new Squeak project, BlockAttack, available for download (http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/projects/olpc/).

20. OLPC Health: Dr Walter H. Curioso joins us as an adviser in our efforts. Dr Curioso is a research professor in Epidemiology, STD/HIV, and Health Informatics at the School of Public Health and Administration at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru. His research focus is on how to use technology to promote global health in developing countries and his latest projects involve using cell phones to collect and transmit adverse events, and using personal digital assistants to assess sexual risk and antiretroviral medication adherence among HIV patients in Lima.

The next conference call is scheduled for Sunday, 16 March. See the Health Meetings page (Health/Calls) for details.

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.

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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2008-03-16

Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan announced the launching of an OLPC pilot project at the Atlas Public School, located in the slums between Rawalpind and Islamabad. (Many thanks to our Afghan volunteers, Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj”, who discovered the school and will be mentoring students and their teacher. The area is economically poor and lacks security measures and basic facilities. There are about 100 children (Grades 1–6), mostly Afghan refugees—many of them work during the first part of the day to support their families and attend school in the afternoon. We distributed 39 XO localized in Dari and Pashto, official languages of Afghanistan.

1. UA Birmingham: Walter Bender met with the dean of the school of education at the University of Alabama. He and his colleagues are enthusiastic about the laptop program in the Birmingham schools and plan to engage at every level: teacher preparation, accessibility, curriculum development, support, and evaluation.


2. Learning Workshop: David Cavallo and the Learning Team ran a Learning workshop this week. Attendees included delegations from Thailand, Haiti, and Illinois.


3. Laptop activation: Scott Ananian finished documenting the process for activation key generation. This is a critical issue for deployment as it enables the in-country teams to distribute the activation process to a more manageable level of granularity. “Trusted” individuals now have the ability to generate activation keys through a simple web interface by simply uploading a list of XO laptop serial numbers.


4. Deployment Guide: With input from the Tech Team, the Learning Team, Brightstar, and the Deployment Team, we now have a Deployment Guide. The guide covers planning, execution, and support, along with some tips based upon our experience in trial deployments around the world; a sample deployment schedule; a sample workshop schedule; a check list to guide you through the deployment process; and a glossary of OLPC terms.


5. On display: The Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art is acquiring two XO laptops for their permanent collection. MOMA's Paul Galloway said, “We realize that social betterment is the goal of One Laptop Per Child, not the pursuit of design accolades. Nonetheless, we believe the design of the XO Laptop and the ideas it embodies belong in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.”


6. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we are running a new version of Pootle that is significantly faster and should make tasks such as merging of PO files against new POT files easier and less time consuming. He also introduced a patch into the Pootle server to enable translators to view translations in an intermediate language, e.g., an Aymara translator can view pre-existing Spanish translations rather than just the English-language original. We currently manage ~1600 PO files on the server and have more than 450 volunteer translators signed up. More translators are always welcome!


Prabhas Pokharel, Anjali Lohani and Tsering Lama Sherpa from Harvard University have joined the Nepali Language localization team. Now the team of 10 contributors is doing lots of progress in Nepali localization.


7. Support: Adam Holt reports that Yianni Galanis explained the latest wireless mesh testing results at last Sunday's support meeting. The Support Team has responded to an increasing number of support emails as final Give1Get1 shipments are now underway. Adam has been discussing plans for repair centers with various volunteer groups and the OLPC partners. He is also recruiting to fill a Support Specialist Position.


8. Firmware: Richard Smith and Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D14 for inclusion into Update.1. The key change is in regard to the boot process when there is a firmware update available: Currently, the laptop will not boot unless there is external power connected; with Q2D14, the laptop will boot regardless of the availability of external power, deferring the firmware upgrade to the next time that external power is present.


9. School Server: John Watlington reports that a new School Server build (160) is now available. It provides:

  • an improved ejabberd server, which might improve reliability under load;
  • web caching (not enabled by default);
  • the configuration of server domain name has been automated, making setup much easier;
  • automatic installation is now supported by the default ISO image; and
  • miscellaneous bug fixes.

Release notes and installation instruction are available (See XS_Installing_Software#OLPC_XS_160). Martin Langhoff will be starting to work on the School Server beginning next week.


10. Multi-battery charger: Richard is happy with the way that the new PCB is performing; Bitworks is building several fully loaded PCBs so that we can test all 15 channels at once. Lilian Walter has stated the adaption of the laptop NiMH charging code so that it can be used in the multi-battery charger. Richard will fold Lillian's modifications in to a test version of EC code and verify that the charging still works correctly.


11. Wireless: Ricardo Carrano's testing uncovered some problems in the wireless driver. Mesh forwarding doesn't always start and ethtool reports back bogus statistics. Ricardo wrote a python tool that reads a list of XOs from the presence service, initiates pings to them (in random order) and keeps track of the communication statistics—very useful for stressing path discovery. He also started to test the tuning of the contention window parameters in the WLAN radio. Marvell released wireless firmware 5.110.22.p6. It adds control of probe responses (including disabling them completely) and fixes warm reboot and host wakeup bugs.


12. Active Antennae: 2000 Active Antennae are en route from GoldPeak to OLPC. Marvell has released stand-alone firmware that allows operation on any channel that the user selects. We don't have the necessary patches for programming/controlling the antennae in our wireless driver yet.


13. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso continues to work on the Sugar redesign. The only task left to reach the “no regressions” point is implementation of activity-launch feedback. Tomeu helped Eben Eliason to set up sugar-jhbuild and his personal sugar trees. Eben has already sent several useful patches (See https://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/eben/sugar;a=summary). Tomeu is doing more work on speeding up activity startup—the only remaining functional issue was solved. We now need to find a way to integrate it inside the Rainbow security model (thanks Michael Stone, Chris Ball, Robert McQueen, and John Palmieri).


Simon Schampijer continues to work on the graphical user interface for the Sugar control panel. The basic design is done (See Sugar_Control_Panel#GUI_for_the_command_line_tool). Code of the work in progress can be checked out from git (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/erikos/sugar;a=summary).


Dennis Gilmore is working to make Sugar work as a desktop option; he has also started on a set of Fedora packaging guidelines for Sugar activities. For Fedora 9, we should have available the option to do a “yum groupinstall sugar-desktop” you will then be able to select Sugar from gdm/kdm with a set of activities that work. Sugar is currently available in Fedora 8 and Rawhide, although the packaging still needs some work and does not yet setup gdm/kdm.


14. Activities: Chris Ball wrote and released a new activity, “Words”, a translating dictionary with speech synthesis in English/French/German/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish. Morgan Collett has started on a post-Update.1 Chat.

Erik Blankinship reports that the MediaMods team has built a map activity—it allows children to add images and videos to maps. Erik envisions children will use it for storytelling, history, and science projects. Some features include: saving and annotating map locations; grabbing screen shots of map locations so they can be embedded into other activities; visualizing how many media are clustered in a certain area; and filtering which media are displayed on the map by searching their tags (as set in the journal or in record). Download http://mediamods.com/public-svn/map-activity/tags/xo/map-1.xo to give it a try.


15. Builds: Chris wrote a script to automatically create customization keys. It can pull down the latest version of activities for a Peru, Mexico or G1G1 build, or can include every activity it knows about. We used the script to pull together the Mexico customization key. Scott and Dennis continue to shepherd Update.1.


16. Kernel: Andres Salomon worked with Jordan Krause to find and fix some xorg amd driver bugs. He wrote patches for #6015, #6670 and reworked some framebuffer patches; and, of course, he argued with upstream.


17. Presence: Morgan implemented an alternative patch for Ticket #6572 to reduce the key size in Avahi TXT records, by replacing the public key file (which isn't used at this stage) with a shorter record. This doesn't break “friending” as did the previous patch, as the whole stack uses a consistent value for the key, for calculating the JID, etc. Morgan is awaiting testing with salut to see the impact on scalability. Morgan discovered that sync_friends wasn't working; he provided a patch (Ticket #6690). This adds friends to the Jabber-server roster, which will be used by the server-side component, Gadget. Guillaume Desmottes worked on the Avahi abstraction in Salut (Ticket #6658) and tested Read sharing with wake-on-multicast activated (Ticket #6537).


18. Rainbow: Michael Stone prototyped a network isolation primitive described by Daniel Bernstein (http://cr.yp.to/unix/disablenetwork.html), demoed an activity in which a web browser and an HTTP server work together to examine the filesystem.


19. Squeak: Robert Krahn reports that there is a new Squeak project, BlockAttack, available for download (http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/projects/olpc/).

20. OLPC Health: Dr Walter H. Curioso joins us as an adviser in our efforts. Dr Curioso is a research professor in Epidemiology, STD/HIV, and Health Informatics at the School of Public Health and Administration at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru. His research focus is on how to use technology to promote global health in developing countries and his latest projects involve using cell phones to collect and transmit adverse events, and using personal digital assistants to assess sexual risk and antiretroviral medication adherence among HIV patients in Lima.

The next conference call is scheduled for Sunday, 16 March. See the Health Meetings page (Health/Calls) for details.

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. Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

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