OLPC:News: Difference between revisions

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=LAPTOP NEWS=
=LAPTOP NEWS=


1. Hugh Herr and his students at the Media Lab have begun a set of
1. Michail Bletsas worked with Professor George Sergiadis, Aristotle
preliminary efficiency tests on both the Squid pull-cord generator and the
University of Thessaloniki, on novel broadband antenna designs for the $100
Freeplay crank generator. They are indirectly measuring the exertion of
Server. These antennas can be constructed with adhesive copper foil and
users and directly measuring the electrical power output.
glass at a very low cost and can support operation on both the 2.4 and 5.7
Ghz bands.


2. São Paulo: David Cavallo and others, including the secretary for
2. Alan Kay reports that Steve Jobs has agreed to relicense Squeak under
distance education of the national ministry, presented to TechEducation.
the Apache License so we can include it with the base software in the
Education officials from a large number of states in Brasil attended and
laptop.
discussed how to best bring immersive access to laptops for children in
their states.


3. Chris Blizzard and others the GNOME community hosted a two-day hacking
3. Mechanical design: Mark Foster reports a significant milestone: The
session and summit at the MIT Media Lab for GNOME in the embedded space.
first release of the system's mechanical design is now completed; all of
The embedding space is becoming increasingly important to the success of
the enclosure's component designs have been released for the creation of
GNOME; representatives from Nokia, Garmin, Palmsource, and other companies
system tooling. These tools are hardened-steel molds that will be used to
were all in attendance. People shared thoughts, what they were working on,
form the actual enclosure components from different blends of PC/ABS
and what they needed to make the platform more successful. Chris gave a
plastic. Many thanks to the team at Quanta for their incredibly hard work
talk about Sugar: what we're trying to do and what we're not trying to do.
to complete the mechanical design on-time for the upcoming B-Test build.
It was food for thought for all in attendance, and there was excellent
feedback.


Over the long holiday weekend, the larger GNOME Boston Summit will be held
4. Electrical design: Mark also reports good progress on electrical design.
at the Media Lab as well. Anywhere from 50–150 people from all over the
With successful completion of the debugging of the initial version of the
world will be in attendance talking about the latest goings on in the GNOME
CAFE (Camera and Flash Enabler) prototype chip, the team at Marvell has
desktop.
produced a second version of the CAFE design. The electrical team has also
made great progress on the system's motherboard. This new “B-Test”
motherboard is designed to work with the CAFE chip, as well as the DCON
(Display CONtroller) ASIC. The first batch of B-Test motherboards has been
fabricated and assembled.


4. Mark Foster reports that the first sample B-Test motherboards have
C. Touch pad: The first full prototype of the system's touch pad, created
arrived. These boards represent the first major revision of the system's
by Alps, is scheduled to arrive early next week. Using an earlier
electronics, including:
prototype, Andres Salomon has the dual-mode touch pad working on our
machines.


* Designed for incorporation of the DCON (Display CONtroller) ASIC.
5. Chris Blizzard reports that we've made some more progress in shrinking
the size of the OS. We've been able to remove some package dependencies in
the gnome stack and work is underway to finally break the dependency on the
old X font server, bitmap fonts and perl.


* Direct support for the DETTL (double-edged TTL) interface used by OLPC's custom 7.5" LCD panel. The LCD interface is now fully integrated on the motherboard.
6. UI: The Sugar team has also been investigating a library called
“HippoCanvas” that Havoc Pennington has been writing as part of his mugshot
work. It's a canvas that fits very well with our model—as opposed to the
other GNOME canvas libraries. Marco Gritti has been working hard on getting
the canvas building in our environment and has started on python bindings
for it.


* Incorporation of the CAFE (Camera And Flash Enabler) in FPGA form. The B-Test motherboard incorporates a new high-performance NAND Flash controller, an SD card slot, and an interface to the new VGA resolution video/still camera.
7. Camera: Jon Corbet reported that the CAFE camera is working at about
15FPS (VGA resolution) using the PCI FPGA CAFE development board, which is
about half of the ultimate hardware specification. A CAFE board was also
sent to Pierre Ossman for SDhci driver testing. A third board arrived in
Cambridge for additional driver testing.


* Replacement of the previous on-board wireless solution with a small daughtercard. The new wireless solution incorporates full shielding to improve RF sensitivity and range.
8. VSA: Jordan reports that AMD has released the Virtual System

Architecture (VSA) code under an open license; this is a major transition
5. UI: Marco Gritti and Dan Williams have both been hard at work: the
in how Geodes are treated and will be beneficial to AMD customers in
implementation of the chat bubble overlay is underway; and the migration to
general.
the HippoCanvas implementation has progressed—large parts of the UI
are now using it.

6. Wireless: Work is progressing on the wireless driver. Both Marcelo
Tossati and Dan Williams have been working on the driver, fixing it up to
make it work as a full Linux driver. This week they spent time getting the
various kinds of encryption working on the hardware. Dan also spent some
time working on NetworkManager, getting closer to making it possible to use
it on our platform.

7. Image: We have broken the Perl dependency and the dependency on bitmap
fonts, freeing up much more space on the flash for user space. Some time
this weekend we should have images that also include the newest X server,
which is required for the X input-driver work. That X server has also been
built without a lot of modules found in desktop X servers that we don't
need, enabling even more space savings.

8. Keyboard: The team from Pentagram finalized the keyboard design for the
B-Test machines. Six different versions of the keyboard are being made:
Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Nigerian (for Hausa, Ìgbo, Yorùbá, Ẹdo,
Ẹfik, Fulani, Kanuri, etc.), and US International.

[[Image:Thai-keyboard.jpg|thumb|left]]

9. CAFE: The camera driver written by Jon Corbet is substantially complete,
and being merged (the camera is now running at its full 30-frames per
second). All of the CAFE device drivers and the kernel touchpad driver have
now been integrated into the OLPC development kernel source pool for
testing. Remaining are a battery driver and the analog input mode of the
codec.

10. Chris Ball joined the OLPC team in Cambridge and immediately tested 21
A-Test boards with a variety of second source parts; one memory related
problem was uncovered in one of the DRAM's chosen, and problems programming
one of the serial ROM varieties were encountered, but not yet resolved.
Chris is setting up a build “tinderbox” for both basic testing of our
software and hardware; he is also putting the infrastructure in place to
monitor ongoing performance of our systems.


9. Test framework: AMD also released into open source a performance-test
framework and some specific implementations of high-use routines
implemented by John Zulauf. John did most of this work on a Geode LX, but
the GX and LX are similar in most areas.


Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].
Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].

Revision as of 14:02, 7 October 2006

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.


LAPTOP NEWS

1. Hugh Herr and his students at the Media Lab have begun a set of preliminary efficiency tests on both the Squid pull-cord generator and the Freeplay crank generator. They are indirectly measuring the exertion of users and directly measuring the electrical power output.

2. São Paulo: David Cavallo and others, including the secretary for distance education of the national ministry, presented to TechEducation. Education officials from a large number of states in Brasil attended and discussed how to best bring immersive access to laptops for children in their states.

3. Chris Blizzard and others the GNOME community hosted a two-day hacking session and summit at the MIT Media Lab for GNOME in the embedded space. The embedding space is becoming increasingly important to the success of GNOME; representatives from Nokia, Garmin, Palmsource, and other companies were all in attendance. People shared thoughts, what they were working on, and what they needed to make the platform more successful. Chris gave a talk about Sugar: what we're trying to do and what we're not trying to do. It was food for thought for all in attendance, and there was excellent feedback.

Over the long holiday weekend, the larger GNOME Boston Summit will be held at the Media Lab as well. Anywhere from 50–150 people from all over the world will be in attendance talking about the latest goings on in the GNOME desktop.

4. Mark Foster reports that the first sample B-Test motherboards have arrived. These boards represent the first major revision of the system's electronics, including:

  • Designed for incorporation of the DCON (Display CONtroller) ASIC.
  • Direct support for the DETTL (double-edged TTL) interface used by OLPC's custom 7.5" LCD panel. The LCD interface is now fully integrated on the motherboard.
  • Incorporation of the CAFE (Camera And Flash Enabler) in FPGA form. The B-Test motherboard incorporates a new high-performance NAND Flash controller, an SD card slot, and an interface to the new VGA resolution video/still camera.
  • Replacement of the previous on-board wireless solution with a small daughtercard. The new wireless solution incorporates full shielding to improve RF sensitivity and range.

5. UI: Marco Gritti and Dan Williams have both been hard at work: the implementation of the chat bubble overlay is underway; and the migration to the HippoCanvas implementation has progressed—large parts of the UI are now using it.

6. Wireless: Work is progressing on the wireless driver. Both Marcelo Tossati and Dan Williams have been working on the driver, fixing it up to make it work as a full Linux driver. This week they spent time getting the various kinds of encryption working on the hardware. Dan also spent some time working on NetworkManager, getting closer to making it possible to use it on our platform.

7. Image: We have broken the Perl dependency and the dependency on bitmap fonts, freeing up much more space on the flash for user space. Some time this weekend we should have images that also include the newest X server, which is required for the X input-driver work. That X server has also been built without a lot of modules found in desktop X servers that we don't need, enabling even more space savings.

8. Keyboard: The team from Pentagram finalized the keyboard design for the B-Test machines. Six different versions of the keyboard are being made: Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Nigerian (for Hausa, Ìgbo, Yorùbá, Ẹdo, Ẹfik, Fulani, Kanuri, etc.), and US International.

Thai-keyboard.jpg

9. CAFE: The camera driver written by Jon Corbet is substantially complete, and being merged (the camera is now running at its full 30-frames per second). All of the CAFE device drivers and the kernel touchpad driver have now been integrated into the OLPC development kernel source pool for testing. Remaining are a battery driver and the analog input mode of the codec.

10. Chris Ball joined the OLPC team in Cambridge and immediately tested 21 A-Test boards with a variety of second source parts; one memory related problem was uncovered in one of the DRAM's chosen, and problems programming one of the serial ROM varieties were encountered, but not yet resolved. Chris is setting up a build “tinderbox” for both basic testing of our software and hardware; he is also putting the infrastructure in place to monitor ongoing performance of our systems.


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 at laptop dot org.

MILESTONES

Aug. 2006 Working prototype of the dual-mode display
06 Jun. 2006 First video with working prototype [1]
28 Jan. 2006 World Economic Forum, Switzerland
UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement
news release
13 Dec. 2005 Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop
(html)(pdf)
16 Nov. 2005 WSIS, Tunisia
Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan

Photos: (Image 1) (Image 2) (Image 3)
Webcast: (Arabic) (English) (French) (original)
Webcast provided by the ITU and UN Webcast Services with the support of RealNetworks Ltd. RealPlayer is required to view the webcast (available at no cost).

Jan. 2005 Laptop Intiative Officially Announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland

PRESS

6 Oct. 2006 Washington Post | $100 Laptop May Be at Security Forefront
25 Sep. 2006 vnunet.com | OLPC offered free satellite connections
14 Sep. 2006 Vanguard | Keyboard In Three Nigerian Languages Ready-Obasanjo
08 Sep. 2006 Technology Review | Hack: The Hundred Dollar Laptop
06 Sep. 2006 nacion.com | Computadoras de $100 estarán listas en el 2007
 Aug. 2006 Wired | The Laptop Crusade
07 Jul. 2006 San Diego Union-Tribune | U.S. and international educators show great interest in prototype
Jul. 2006 SPIE Professional | $100 laptop nears launch
21 Jun. 2006 BusinessWeek online | For Brazil's Poor, a Digital Deliverance?
24 May 2006 CNET News.com | $100 laptop gets working prototype
07 Apr. 2006 rediff.com | Our $100 laptops will run on human power
02 Apr. 2006 O Estado de S.Paulo | Fazer a diferença
28 Mar. 2006 FT.com | Waking up to a laptop revolution
24 Mar. 2006 Diário do Comércio | Um Laptop por Crianca
22 Mar. 2006 Times Online | Getting the world's poor logged on
09 Mar. 2006 Correio Popular | País disputa fabricação de laptop de US$ 100
  Folha de S. Paulo | Governo quer comprar 1 milhão de laptops
  Info Exame On Line | Governo quer um milhão de laptops de US$ 100
08 Mar. 2006 IDG Now | Faculdade abre programa de inclusão digital para alunos
  Folha de S. Paulo | Governo negocia fabricação do laptop de US$ 100 no Brasil
  Agência Globo | Governo estuda possibilidade de produção de computador de US$ 100 no país
  Teletime News | DVB detalha contrapartidas oferecidas ao Brasil
05 Mar. 2006 ACM/CIE | Interview with Nicholas Negroponte on the $100 laptop
16 Feb. 2006 MITIR | Podcast of Walter Bender's MURJ lecture on One Laptop per Child
15 Feb. 2006 CNET | PCs for the poor: Which design will win?
10 Feb. 2006 CNET | Perspective: Will the $100 PC fly?
09 Feb. 2006 NYTimes | A Plug for the Unplugged $100 Laptop Computer for Developing Nations
  UPI | One Laptop Project reaches critical stages
31 Jan. 2006 Slashdot | Microsoft OS Smart Phone for Developing Nations
  USA Today | Gates sees cellphones as way to help Third World
  Macworld | Red Hat officially commits to MIT's $100 laptop
28 Jan. 2006 UNDP | $100 Laptop Project Moves Closer to Narrowing Digital Divide
20 Dec. 2005 BusinessWeek online | Quanta faces challenges in making "millions and millions" of $100 laptops.
19 Dec. 2005 Forbes.com | China to decide by March whether to join OneLaptopPerChild project.
14 Dec. 2005 UPI | Nortel to take part in OneLaptopPerChild endeavor.
13 Dec. 2005 Red Herring | Quanta to manufacture laptops; expects deliveries in 2006 4th quarter.
  OLPC | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture $100 Laptop
11 Dec. 2005 NYTimes | NY Times: 5th Annual Year in Ideas $100 Laptop
04 Dec. 2005 Guardian Unlimited | The $100 laptop question
01 Dec. 2005 RFDESIGN | $100 Laptops Feature Novel Peer-to-Peer Wireless Connectivity
30 Nov. 2005 FT.com | Five companies in Asia making bids to manufacture $100 laptop.
28 Nov. 2005 Fortune Magazine | THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: I'd Like to Teach the World to Type
25 Nov. 2005 People's Daily Online | Nigerian president says government has budgeted for a million $100 laptops.
18 Nov. 2005 The Electric New Paper | Gramophone? No, Laptop
17 Nov. 2005 BBC News | UN Debut for $100 Laptop for Poor
  Seattle Times | $100 Laptops Aim to Bring Children the World
  TechWhack | MIT Unveils their USD 100 Laptop
  TeitB | 100 US Dollar Laptop Computer Launched
  ZDNet | '$100 Laptops' Here by Next Year
  ABC | $100 Laptop Bridges Digital Divide
  Financial Express | Laptop @$100!
16 Nov. 2005 MIT News Office | Annan to Present Prototype $100 Laptop at World Summit on Information Society
  Reuters | Researchers Unveil $100 Laptop for Schoolkids
  CNET | $100 Laptop Takes World Stage
  CNET | $100 Laptop Expected in Late 2006
  Christian Science Monitor | A Low-Cost Laptop for Every Child
  ADNKronos International | Internet: Wind-Up, Budget Laptop Unveiled
14 Nov. 2005 WSJ | The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality
13 Nov. 2005 The Inquirer | Hubris over $100 Laptop idea
New York Times | Google Earmarks $265million for Charity and Social Causes
13 Oct. 2005 Technology Review | The Hundred Dollar Man: Technology Review's editor in chief, Jason Pontin, talk with Nicholas Negroponte about the Hundred Dollar Computer.
30 Sep. 2005 Times Online | A $100 clockwork computer to help the poor to learn
29 Sep. 2005 I4U News | Sub-$100 Laptop design unveiled
28 Sep. 2005 Boston Globe | Prototypes of $100 laptop with hand crank planned by early next year.
  MIT World | NN at Technology Review
27 Sep. 2005 Datamation | Low cost PCs for the Enterprise
06 Jun. 2005 estadao.com.br | Cada criança na escola com um laptop a tiracolo

Video

(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found here.)

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