OLPC:News: Difference between revisions
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=LAPTOP NEWS= |
=LAPTOP NEWS= |
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1. Shanghai: The first 100 B2 laptops were assembled at the end of the week at Quanta Shanghai. David Woodhouse, Jim Gettys, and Mary Lou Jepsen are in Shanghai with Quanta squashing the bugs. Mitch Bradley, Richard Smith, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon have spun several firmware releases in the past several days and provided invaluable testing data that enable the builds on this tight schedule. |
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1. The software team has released to manufacturing our firmware |
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(version Q2B21) and with the exception of some final test, has the |
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completed the candidate build for the software image for B2 machines |
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(Build 239). This is the software that will be used in testing with |
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children in the coming month in the launch countries. |
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2. The new laptop.org website designed by Pentagram and powered by Nurun was turned live this week. The new website is a welcome upgrade from the one that was originally hobbled together last spring. Many thanks to the teams at Pentagram and Nurun, as well as to Stephen Michaud and Richard Rowe, who wrote much of the copy under a tight deadline. Special thanks to Serge Rosilio of Nurun, who led the effort from soup to nuts. |
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2. Sydney: Chris Blizzard, Dave Woodhouse, and Jim Gettys attended |
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linux.conf.au. It is a volunteer-run conference located in a |
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different city in Australia or New Zeland and organized by different |
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people every year; it is considered one of the best conferences in the |
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world in support of free and open source software. There were about |
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800 international attendees and another 400 locals who came for the |
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"open day." Chris gave one of the keynotes at the conference: he |
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talked about Firefox, OLPC, and the relevance of free software outside |
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of the context of the server room. He gave a separate talk on the OLPC |
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user interface. Jim gave a talk on the process of building the OLPC |
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hardware. |
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3. São Paulo and Porto Alegre: David Cavallo and Roseli de Deus Lopes ran a workshop for teachers in São Paulo at the University of São Paulo (USP) on Tuesday and Wednesday. David and Lea Fagundes ran second workshop in Porto Alegre at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) on Thursday and Friday. José Luiz Aquino, special advisor to President Lula, and OLPC advisor Rodrigo Mesquita attended throughout. Antonio Battro spoke about the OLPC educational concept; Sylvia Gonzales and Miguel Brechner, OLPC coordinators from Uruguay, and Laura Serra and Alejandro Piscitelli, OLPC coordinators from Argentina also presented. |
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3. Thomas Vander Stichele from Fluendo gave a demo of streaming video |
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from a laptop to a laptop that did video encoding to yet another |
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laptop where it was streamed to the Internet at large. |
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4. Porto Alegre: Walter Bender met with the organizers of fisl8.0, the 8th annual international forum on free and open-source software. OLPC has had a presence at the forum the last two years. We discussed the possibility running sessions for both developers and educators. Since one of the test schools for OLPC in Brazil will be in Porto Alegre, the organizers are considering to showcase the kids using the OLPC machines. |
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4. Kernel: The wireless driver has gone through two rounds of reviews |
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with the upstream kernel networking folks and work continues to get it |
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into the Linux mainline kernel. Marcelo Tosatti also reports that we |
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are down to 5–6 interrupts per second (minus a really bad i8042 |
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driver). This is compared with a ~200 per second in a standard Linux |
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desktop. This will have a huge positive effect on our battery life. |
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5. Last-minute B2 mods: This week was dominated by final issues running up to the Beta-2 build of machines. There were a few last-minute surprises, but the team worked through them. These included: |
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5. UI: Marco Presenti Gritti made numerous small changes to the UI to |
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try to improve some of the experience. Dan Williams, Erik Blankinship, |
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Bakhtiar Mikhak, and Eben Eliason worked on the camera activity. Dan |
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also spent time pulling together some multimedia extension (MMX) |
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optimizations for our platform that should help with Cairo and X |
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performance. |
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Microphone problems. A new firmware update fixed problems with the microphone that were discovered with the Beta-2 build. The firmware was not properly detecting the B-2 board and hence was not setting a mode correctly on the cs5536. |
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6. Firmware: Mitch Bradley reports that the firmware for the B2 build |
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is released and seems to be stable. Several new firmware features are |
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working, to be deployed after the B2 build: SD driver for booting from |
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SD; audio driver for startup sound; fixed a longstanding bug that was |
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causing some USB keys (that violate the USB2 spec in a minor way) not |
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to work; a graphical touchpad diagnostic that illustrates the detailed |
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behavior of the "jumping cursor" issue; and Open Firmware can now do |
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the wireless-chip firmware uploading/rewriting process (thanks to |
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Lilian Walter). |
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Power and charging problems. There are still a number of battery-charging problems related to code in the embedded controller (EC). A new release of the EC code fixed a number of the issues. |
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7. Community: As we go into B2, we would like to take this opportunity |
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to acknowledge the much larger community of people and projects, that |
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have made it possible. It is easy to lose sight of them in the |
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day-to-day engineering we do. |
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6. Wireless: Dan Williams attended a wireless summit in London. Lots of people from the wireless world and Linux were in attendance. Intel, Broadcom and CSR were represented, as well as Cozybit, who was represented by Javier Cardona. (Javier and his colleagues have done a lot of work for Marvell and OLPC.) Red Hat sent Dan and John Linville, who is the upstream wireless maintained for the kernel. They discussed specific issues about the code in the kernel, including how to share more code and interfaces in the drivers. In the past, the drivers have all had their own interfaces and work has been underway for quite a while to unify them so that user space utilities will work better. |
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Firmware: Ron Minnich (LANL) and the LinuxBIOS team, Sun Microsystems |
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for freeing up Open FirmWare, Richard Smith (OLPC), Mitch Bradley |
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(OLPC). Tom Sylla has been invaluable with his in-depth knowledge of |
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the AMD Geode. |
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7. Sugar UI: Marco Gritti has been working hard to update Sugar to support newer versions of some of our libraries. He has moved most of the Sugar interface to support Python 2.5 (including support for building Python 2.5 as part of our build process) and Gecko 1.9. Python 2.5 is important for performance and startup issues and gives more longevity to our platform. Gecko 1.9 is the underlying engine that will be used in Firefox 3 and will be important because it will give us more control over font sizes and image zooming. Our 200DPI display needs a more flexible rendering system from the browser, something they are building into Gecko 1.9. |
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Audio drivers: Jaya Kumar has, behind the scenes done a superb job |
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with the AD1888 driver and 5536 ALSA support, and has added support |
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for analog input to the driver and the controls to support them, which |
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is dear to the heart of Seymour Papert. He did so in such a quiet, |
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timely way that it has been easy to overlook his contributions. The |
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Alsa project in Linux provides the driver framework we use. |
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8. Ricardo Medina and Walter Bender got Sugar opening its windows on a remote display—mostly. While still buggy, this feature will be especially useful for debugging—e.g., opening the Memphis window on another laptop—and projecting from a laptop by mapping to the display to a conventional machine. More work is needed to smoothly integrate this into Sugar, but it is a proof of principle nonetheless. |
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Camera driver: Jon Corbet, well known in the open source community as |
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the editor of LWN, wrote the camera driver under contract to OLPC: but |
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the frame work into which it fits is the Video-4-Linux project. |
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LED driver: Reynaldo Verdejo wrote our keyboard LED driver (which he |
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wrote without having access to a laptop!). |
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SD driver: Pierre Ossman is the maintainer of the Linux SD driver and |
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is an invaluable aide in ensuring proper correct support of SD for |
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OLPC. Richard Smith (OLPC) has been debugging the driver and hardware. |
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NAND Flash driver: Dave Woodhouse of Red Hat's OLPC team implemented |
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our NAND Flash driver and is the original author of the JFFS2 file |
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system, but we'd also like to thank the many people who have |
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contributed to that project over its life. |
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Power management: Matthew Garret, a PHD student in BioInformatics at |
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Cambridge University has been helping with power management, posting |
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an initial patch for suspend/resume for OLPC and much advice. He is |
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one of Linux's experts at suspend/resume. |
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Linux kernel: Our kernel, of course, is maintained by a community of |
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over a thousand people from all over the world, too innumerable to |
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name; our immediate thanks to Andy Tannenbaum, who with Minix inspired |
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Linus Torvalds to start Linux. The response of this community to OLPC |
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is overwhelming and our thanks to everyone who in their own way has |
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done their bit to help us. Dave Jones (Red Hat) is doing great work |
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finding performance problems in Linux applications and raising |
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community awareness. |
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X Window System: The X.org community maintains the window system on |
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OLPC. The template for rotation support in our driver that Jordan |
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Crouse implemented for this release comes from work of Eric Anholt and |
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Keith Packard of Intel, whom we would like to thank for the great work |
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that they are doing to improve the base driver infrastructure. Daniel |
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Stone of Nokia has been working on the new input system for X |
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(Zephaniah Hull has contributed to this work.) Open Hand's Matchbox |
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window manager has been the platform upon which we have been |
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developing our UI. |
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Cairo graphics: The Cairo Graphics library community started by Carl |
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Worth and Keith Packard has been rapidly improving its performance, |
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which forms the basis of the increasingly high quality of graphics on |
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our system. |
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GTK+ and Pango libraries: These form the GUI toolkit and |
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internationalization foundation, Behdad Esfahbod (Red Hat) has helped |
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greatly in our internationalization support as well as performance of |
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Pango and Cairo. |
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Python: The Python community lead by Guido Van Rossum provides the |
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language we use in Sugar, our user interface. They have already |
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started performance work that should appear immediately in our builds |
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after the B2 build. |
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Sugar: Red Hat's Marco Presenti Gritti has been the lead designer and |
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implementor of Sugar, our UI. Pentagram's Lisa Strausfeld, Christian |
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Marc Schmidt, and Takaaki Okada and OLPC's Eben Eliason and Walter |
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Bender have worked on the user interface and graphics design, the |
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"look and feel" of our system. |
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Camera: A new camera application written by Erik Blankinship and |
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Bakhtiar Mikhak of Media Mods replaces our quick and dirty video demo |
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on the B1 build. Eben Eliason, Dan Williams, and John Palmieri all |
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contributed to this effort. |
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Abiword: A new version of Abiword is in this release, which should be |
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able to handle complex writing scripts much better; this will also |
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form the input applet for our journal application, when it is ready. |
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xBook: Manusheel Gupta, Tomeu Vizoso, and Marco Gritti tuned up the |
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PDF viewer for the new build. |
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Etoys: The Squeak Etoys development is now so well integrated with |
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OLPC release engineering that it "just happens"; there are numerous |
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improvements, too many to note here. |
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Web Browser: Our web browser is based on the Gecko rendering engine of |
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the Firefox project. Our display, being significantly higher |
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resolution than conventional displays is presenting difficulties; but |
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the the Firefox community is hard at work on a new version which will |
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improve this situation at some point in the future. A new reflow |
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engine should also greatly improve performance in a future version of |
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our system. |
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Bug reporting: Often overlooked is the work that people do to record |
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bugs so that we can fix them. More and more are from users of our |
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systems, rather than those directly developing the software. |
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Network testing: James Cameron has been an immense aid at early |
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testing of the OLPC system in radio quiet areas (he lives in the |
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Australian outback). Two of our machines have been able to talk to |
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each other over 1.3km apart. |
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Infrastructure: It is easy to overlook the importance of |
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infrastructure work that people do. Reynaldo Verdejo's work is |
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essential to the tinderbox we use for performance. The Mozilla |
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organization originally developed the first tinderboxes for automated |
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build and performance regression testing. |
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Performance: Other often unsung heroes include those who work on |
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performance, only some of which has started to land in our builds. |
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Johan Dahlin wrote (http://blogs.gnome.org/view/johan/2007/01/18/0) a |
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Python-launcher prototype this week that cuts a full second of "import |
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GTK." This translates into at least one second off every activity |
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startup. Chris Ball also worked with Tomeu Vizoso, Adam Jackson (Red |
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Hat), and Dan Williams (Red Hat) on the activity launch notification |
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speedup. They have done numerous sysprof traces and benchmarking, and |
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found the right combination of MMX functions to use; our X performance |
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is much higher now as a result. |
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Release Engineering: At the inevitable danger of overlooking someone |
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(our apologies), we would like to to thank those directly contributing |
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to the release engineering of this software, including Chris Ball, |
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Walter Bender, Chris Blizzard (Red Hat), Mitch Bradley, Javier Cardona |
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(Cozybit), Ronak Chokshi (Marvell), Jordan Crouse (AMD), Eben Eliason, |
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Jim Gettys, Marco Presenti Gritti (Red Hat), Zephaniah Hull, Adam |
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Jackson (Red Hat), Vance Ke (Quanta), Ivan Krstić, Ted Juan (Quanta), |
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Aswath Mohan (Marvell), John Palmieri (Red Hat), Andres Salomon, |
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Richard Smith, Marcelo Tosatti (Red Hat), Lilian Walter, Bruce Wang |
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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 17:28, 27 January 2007
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Shanghai: The first 100 B2 laptops were assembled at the end of the week at Quanta Shanghai. David Woodhouse, Jim Gettys, and Mary Lou Jepsen are in Shanghai with Quanta squashing the bugs. Mitch Bradley, Richard Smith, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon have spun several firmware releases in the past several days and provided invaluable testing data that enable the builds on this tight schedule.
2. The new laptop.org website designed by Pentagram and powered by Nurun was turned live this week. The new website is a welcome upgrade from the one that was originally hobbled together last spring. Many thanks to the teams at Pentagram and Nurun, as well as to Stephen Michaud and Richard Rowe, who wrote much of the copy under a tight deadline. Special thanks to Serge Rosilio of Nurun, who led the effort from soup to nuts.
3. São Paulo and Porto Alegre: David Cavallo and Roseli de Deus Lopes ran a workshop for teachers in São Paulo at the University of São Paulo (USP) on Tuesday and Wednesday. David and Lea Fagundes ran second workshop in Porto Alegre at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) on Thursday and Friday. José Luiz Aquino, special advisor to President Lula, and OLPC advisor Rodrigo Mesquita attended throughout. Antonio Battro spoke about the OLPC educational concept; Sylvia Gonzales and Miguel Brechner, OLPC coordinators from Uruguay, and Laura Serra and Alejandro Piscitelli, OLPC coordinators from Argentina also presented.
4. Porto Alegre: Walter Bender met with the organizers of fisl8.0, the 8th annual international forum on free and open-source software. OLPC has had a presence at the forum the last two years. We discussed the possibility running sessions for both developers and educators. Since one of the test schools for OLPC in Brazil will be in Porto Alegre, the organizers are considering to showcase the kids using the OLPC machines.
5. Last-minute B2 mods: This week was dominated by final issues running up to the Beta-2 build of machines. There were a few last-minute surprises, but the team worked through them. These included:
Microphone problems. A new firmware update fixed problems with the microphone that were discovered with the Beta-2 build. The firmware was not properly detecting the B-2 board and hence was not setting a mode correctly on the cs5536.
Power and charging problems. There are still a number of battery-charging problems related to code in the embedded controller (EC). A new release of the EC code fixed a number of the issues.
6. Wireless: Dan Williams attended a wireless summit in London. Lots of people from the wireless world and Linux were in attendance. Intel, Broadcom and CSR were represented, as well as Cozybit, who was represented by Javier Cardona. (Javier and his colleagues have done a lot of work for Marvell and OLPC.) Red Hat sent Dan and John Linville, who is the upstream wireless maintained for the kernel. They discussed specific issues about the code in the kernel, including how to share more code and interfaces in the drivers. In the past, the drivers have all had their own interfaces and work has been underway for quite a while to unify them so that user space utilities will work better.
7. Sugar UI: Marco Gritti has been working hard to update Sugar to support newer versions of some of our libraries. He has moved most of the Sugar interface to support Python 2.5 (including support for building Python 2.5 as part of our build process) and Gecko 1.9. Python 2.5 is important for performance and startup issues and gives more longevity to our platform. Gecko 1.9 is the underlying engine that will be used in Firefox 3 and will be important because it will give us more control over font sizes and image zooming. Our 200DPI display needs a more flexible rendering system from the browser, something they are building into Gecko 1.9.
8. Ricardo Medina and Walter Bender got Sugar opening its windows on a remote display—mostly. While still buggy, this feature will be especially useful for debugging—e.g., opening the Memphis window on another laptop—and projecting from a laptop by mapping to the display to a conventional machine. More work is needed to smoothly integrate this into Sugar, but it is a proof of principle nonetheless.
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@laptop.org
MILESTONES
Jan. 2007 | Rwanda announced its participation in the project. |
Dec. 2006 | Uruguay announced its participation in the project. |
Nov. 2006 | First B1 machines are built; IDB and OLPC formalize an agreement regarding Latin American and Caribbean education. |
Oct. 2006 | B-test boards become available; Libya announces plans for one laptop for every child |
Sep. 2006 | UI designs presented; integrated software build released; SES-Astra joins OLPC |
Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
Jun. 2006 | 500 developer boards are shipped worldwide; WiFi operational; Csound demonstrated over the mesh network First video with working prototype [1] |
May 2006 | eBay joins OLPC; display specs set; A-test boards become available; $100 Server is announced |
Apr. 2006 | Pre-A test board boots; Squid and FreePlay present first human-power systems |
Mar. 2006 | Yves Behar and FuseProject are selected as industry designers |
Feb. 2006 | Marvell joins OLPC and continues to partner on network hardware |
Jan. 2006 | World Economic Forum, Switzerland UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement news release |
Dec. 2005 | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop (html)(pdf) |
Nov. 2005 | WSIS, Tunisia Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; Nortel joins OLPC Photos: (Image 1)
(Image 2) (Image 3) |
Aug. 2005 | Design Continuum starts design of first laptop |
Jul. 2005 | Formal signing of original members of OLPC |
Mar. 2005 | Brightstar and Red Hat come on board |
Jan. 2005 | Laptop initiative officially announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland; AMD, News Corp. and Google agree to join OLPC |
PRESS
PRESS RELEASES
Jan. 2007 | OLPC has No Plans to Commercialize XO Computer. |
Jan. 2007 | OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer. |
Jan. 2007 | Rwanda Commits to One Laptop per Child Initiative. |
Dec. 2006 | Low Cost Laptop Could Tranform Learning. |
Video
(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found.)
http://video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM607884-7823-CRIANCAS+TESTAM+COMPUTADOR+PORTATIL,00.html | Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop, GLOBO- BRASIL
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx | Mark Foster delivers presentation to Standford University
http://www.technologyreview.com/ | Technology Review Mini-Documentary
http://www.radiofarda.com/Article/2007/01/04/f2_Interview-laptop.html | A Brief Demo