OLPC:News/Archive 2

2007-05-26

1. 80 B3 machines arrived at the OLPC offices in Cambridge on Friday. These machines, which are close to final, feature the Geode LX processor, improved keyboard and touch pad, many electrical and mechanical enhancements, and a brightly colored XO logo on the back. First impression: Wow!!

2. Dorchester: Walter Bender paid a brief visit to the Lilla G. Fredrick Pilot Middle School, one of three one-to-one computing programs funded by the State of Massachusetts. Although they are not (yet) using XOs, Principal Debra Socia has observed all things we have come to expect: more teacher and student engagement, more parent and community involvement, a higher level of discourse around learning, more writing, etc.

3. UL: Quanta and OLPC met with UL this week to determine the exact strategy for certification of the laptops. Nearly all testing will be done by UL Taiwan, close to the Quanta offices to allow close communication. The B3 units will undergo test starting end of next week. The main areas of test are thermal, electro-magnetic interference, and radio-frequency noise (from WiFi). We will test at 40C, 45C and 50C to determine our maximum sustained ambient operating temperature.

4. Green: Mary Lou Jepsen met with John Bullock, the author of the Basel Convention take-back protocol for mobile telephones. The Basel Convention was started in 1987 as a way to globally address toxic dumping through recycling and take-back programs. It has been ratified by almost all countries, a notable exception in the USA. John, a recycling expert, said “OLPC has set a new environmental standard with XO” and wants to find a way to both help us continue, and to get the story out to other CE manufacturers. He offered many suggestions for improving our environmental position.

5. Sugar: Over the last couple of weeks we have seen great advances in the Sugar user-interface and the underlying systems that support it. A particular ficus has been on the mechanisms for collaboration:

• Marc Maurer has the Abiword-based Write activity hooked up to the Presence Service and Tubes API so it can find other people on the network. He is the first person who has tried to do it from C/C++; we are interested in seeing that experience documented.

• The Collabora team has been making a lot of fixes to the Presence Service. They have also been working on patches to dbus to fix some issues and are pushing for a new dbus release. John Palmieri is integrating those patches and working on a new release.

• The Collabora team has also been working on a stream API that will make it very easy for activities that want to talk directly with each other to do so from the Presence Service. And they have started work on integrating the peer-to-peer (called salut) XMPP code into the Presence Service.

• Marco Gritti and Tomeu Vizoso have been very busy working on new web activity features. They have a new feature that makes if very easy to embed the browser directory into a python program and makes it possible to access the DOM directly from python instead of having to do it from C++. As a result, they were able to implement session restoration and saving of data to the Journal.

• Marco also hooked up the xdg mime system into Sugar. This is one of the pieces required to let activities say which mime types they handle and how to associate them in the Journal.

• Tomeu has also been working with Ben Saller to implement new features in the data store that are needed by the Journal.

• Chris Ball began work setting up a tinderbox for Sugar, so that our activity and Sugar developers can see whether a Sugar build will succeed before trying it themselves. This should save them a lot of time as the Sugar build pulls in many external modules and often fails.

• Chris also came up with a kernel patch to expose our ebook-mode “flip” kernel events to the input layer, which is where HAL listens for them. Once that's tested, we can have rotate on ebook-flip happening through Sugar, on a per-activity basis.

6. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg continues on dbus support in Etoys; bypassing the launcher program written in Python, the start up time of Etoys will be much shorter. Takashi Yamamiya's work on clipboard is also continuing: he is experimenting with the X protocol to copy objects from Etoys to Sugar, where they can be accessed by other activities, including the Journal. Yoshiki Ohshima is working on the integration with Pango. which will allow more and better language support in Etoys. Scott Wallace has been experimenting expression tiles and Ted Kaehler continues work on an Etoy example of physics simulation.

7. School server: Dave Woodhouse worked with John Watlington on the configuration of IPv6 and the school server. Holger Levsen has built a local mirror that now carries the Fedore Core 6 and 7 source for i386, PowerPC. Building the livecd now only takes 33 minutes compared to 45 minutes against a remote mirror. The mirror is located at http://fedora.laptop.org. Holger reports that last week’s issues in Anaconda were fixed by upstream, but he found a new bug, which prevents using a kickstart-file and thus automated installations at the moment. Luckily this error happens in textmode and graphical mode, so I expect it to be fixed soon. (The manual workaround for the moment is to not use a kickstart file and answer the questions about partitioning and networking manually.) Builds are available at http://xs-dev.laptop.org/holger/ and documentation is found at User:Holger.

8. Power management: Chris Ball talked with David Zeuthen (HAL maintainer) and Richard Hughes (gnome-power-manager maintainer) about the best way to design our power manager. Chris upgraded to the latest version of HAL and tested that it can expose our lid open/close events over dbus. Adding functionality to go to sleep with the backlight off when the lid is closed is only a few lines of code away now.

9. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti has been working on USB suspend/resume. He also has been working with Cozybit on trying to track down some suspend/resume issues with the wireless firmware. And he has been verifying another fix related to suspend with a starvation problem for the gc thread for the jffs2 filesystem; it sounds like this is fixed. Bernardo Innocenti and Dave Woodhouse also fixed a bug in the kernel serial driver on LX resume.

10. Systems infrastructure: Mitch Bradley investigated redoing the startup scripts in our system, which will end up being about 1/6th the previous size, understandable by mere mortals, and speed boot time. Chris Ball took a tcpdump of the web browser rendering over Ethernet for analysis with netplot. Rob Savoye has been working with Bernardo Innocenti on integrating Geode specific GLibc functions, which will improve performance in a number of areas. Bernardo is also worked on setting up to do the X Window System build environment for power management and for better handling of our input devices.

11. Kernel: Jon Corbet has a patch to turn off the camera LED when it is not in use. Andres Salomon worked on a DCON bug that appeared in some B3 hardware; after a resume, some of the GPIOs were in an inconsistent state, resulting in problems with DCON interrupt handling. The real cause is still unknown, but open firmware (OFW) has been changed to ensure that the necessary GPIO bits become unset after resume. Richard Smith is investigating further. Andres also worked on branching a new stable kernel, syncing the libertas tree up with master, and also syncing master up with Linux 2.6.22-rc1.

12. Firmware: Lilian Walter been making sure that power on/off audio, SD and the camera work on B3. Lilian is also working on the IPv6 and ping6. She has some very simple code for the IP layer (no extra headers for now). Next is to work on the address resolution bit (maybe hard code it just to test the Ipv6 layer so far with ping6).

Mitch Bradley released released new firmware Q2C14 with several bug fixes, a first pass at “quiet” boot screen support, wireless LAN auto-boot support for manufacturing, microphone LED blink reduction code (reduces the cost of the hardware workaround. Mitch also showed Quanta how to make an initrd image for manufacturing diagnostics and rrticulated a scheme for the mechanics of quiet boot across the firmware, kernel, userspace, and X transitions.

13. Hardware testing: Richard Smith worked on the B3 hardware checkout. Helped John Watlington test all parts of the system, including the firmware protect circuitry. Further testing (separate from the tens of functional tests that each XO is subjected to as part of the manufacturing process) includes such favorites as:

• Thermal shock: spending twenty minutes at –20C, then jumping to 60C in less than two minutes; staying at 60C for 20 minutes, then dropping back to –20C in less than two minutes (the whole process is repeated 50 times);
• Thermal profile: taking the temperature of most chips on the motherboard, while running a suite of applications at 50C;
• Altitude testing: operation tested for 8 hrs at 5.5 Km;
• Free-drop steel-ball test (onto LCD);
• Free-throw test: simulating a child free throwing an XO, its battery, and power brick onto the floor.

2007-05-19

1. Taiwan: Mary Lou Jepsen gave a keynote address at inauguration of the Taiwan ICT Alliance, where she featured a fact that many in Taiwan didn’t know: by part count the XO hardware is 92% Taiwanese. Ambassadors from Paraguay, Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Panama, Burkino Faso, Malawi, Sao Tome and Principe, Swaziland, Gambia, Palau, Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands and Nauru, and representatives from Brazil, Fiji, Indonesia, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand, Mongolia, as well as 40 CEOs from Taiwanese IT companies attended. The ambassadors showed strong enthusiasm for XO and strong desire to become launch countries.

2. Villa Cardal, Uruguay: Walter Bender visited with the Ceibal Project team at their test site in a small country town about 80K from Montevideo. What was most impressive about the deployment is how comfortable the children and teachers seem with their Xos after only one week. The children are making extensive use of the video camera and word-processor to create multimedia documents. The teachers are comfortable with letting the children explore and then present their findings to the class. The school deployment team, led by Fiorella Haim, has been focusing on the mesh network—making sure that the children and their families will have Internet access both at school and home. The XO's sunlight-readable display came in handy—both for the children, who spend time with their XOs outdoors and for the towns people, who have some lovely parks for sitting, surfing, and reading.

3. Buenos Aires: Walter gave a demonstration of the XO to the Argentine ministry of education. Vice Minister Juan Carlos Tedesco was the senior member of a group about 15 people, including Gustavo Peyrano, Chief of Advisors, Olga Cavalli and Adrian Carvallo of the Foreign Offices Ministry (technology experts), Susana Montaldo, Minister of Education of Tucuman, and Adriana Canal, Advisor for Minister of Education of Buenos Aires. (Tucuman and Buenos Aires have been selected to be the sites of test schools.) The demo was mesh-centric; it highlighted the Layer 2 routing—browsing through a mesh point portal (MPP) was enabled by the presence of a relay mesh point—and mesh-enabled applications, including video conferencing, Connect-4, sharing of ebooks, and automatic backup and restore to and from a school server. Other demos included a demonstration of the journal, a test of extended battery-lifetime (more than 12 hours in ebook-mode), full-screen video, web browsing, eToys (including World Stethoscope—a means of sending data into eToys from the XO's microphone input), Turtle Art (a simple graphical environment for programming in Logo), and a serverless (mesh-enabled) listserv for posting community notices. The discussion that followed highlighted the unique features of the XO hardware, including the advantages of the display, low power, robustness, low environmental impact; software, including the collaboration features of the Sugar user interface and the Bitfrost security system; and the laptop ecosystem, including gang-chargers, solar-powered mesh repeaters, etc. Also discussed were observations from how children and teachers are using the XOs in Brazil, Nigeria, and Thailand.

Many thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make the demonstration a success, including Richard Smith, Chris Ball, Michail Bletsas, John Watlington, Dan Williams, John Palmieri, Marco Gritti, Chris Blizzard, Tomeu Vizoszo, the Collabora team, the eToys team, Erik Blankinship, Bahktiar Mikhak, Don Hopkins, Mitch Bradley, Andres Salomon, SJ Klein, Felice Gardner, and Jim Gettys.

4. Google’s Stephen Cho organized a day of discussions around an “Our Stories” project, including Sharad Sapra, head of UNICEF's Communications division, Dave Isay of StoryCorps, and Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling. The goal was to refine milestones and support for both on-line and XO activities to help children interview people in their community and share those stories, to encourage teachers to work this into a class/community exercise, and to visualize the results on a world map. A public presentation was well received; around a dozen Googlers signed up to help make the project happen. The initial focus is on having a simple prototype ready by early June; Stephen hopes to host five-million stories from OLPC countries after three years. Similar works underway such as Brazil's Million Stories of Youth could use the same interfaces.

5. Taipei: Michail Bletsas spoke at the annual Taipei Summit conference, whose theme this year was WiMax. Michail expressed the opinion that WiMax is drifting away from relevance by focusing on licensed spectrum in the developed world. (OLPC's interest of course is unlicensed spectrum in the developing world.)

Prof. H.T. Kung of Harvard University showed up a demo of his collaboration with OLPC running on six XO laptops. These laptops—in the official Taipei booth—were accessing the Internet via a WiFi/WiMax gateway router. One of the XO's was running a traffic-management module, refereeing traffic for the other five and enforcing fairness in downloads over TCP.

6. Environmental: Several environmental groups have been in contact with Mary Lou Jepsen about our “greenness” and are duly impressed at how we go above and beyond EPEAT environmental specifications. Notably:

• XO batteries last 4× longer than standard rechargeable batteries; long lifetime of batteries is not an EPEAT requirement.
• Idle power consumption: Energy-Star compliance is mandated by EPEAT, but the idle power consumption of the XO laptop is 14× better.
• 5-year laptop lifetime; long lifetime of laptop before obsolescence is not an EPEAT requirement.
• Half the size and weight of a typical laptop; energy and resources used to make an XO are less; also not an EPEAT requirement and relevant for recycling

These groups are helping with the various aspects of our environmental statements and policies. In particular they are helping us craft the best “take-back” system we can, to assure XO laptops don’t end up in landfills, ever.

7. Human power: Pedal Power Haiti wants to try our laptops with the pedal power system they are using from Dissigno (a San Francisco-based human-power startup). This system is big, but folds up, and is in test already in Nepal and Haiti. The output is between 12–14.6 volts at 50–70 Watts. The system was designed to charge a car battery, and can work with our gang charger systems as well.

8. Power management: This week we passed a major milestone: working ebook mode using the read activity as vehicle. Suspend and resume are working on both GX and LX--although we have a few bugs left on the LX. Walter Bender demonstrated the fruits of many people's labor in Argentina, Peru, and Uruguay. In one test--with the caveat that the the WiFi was off, an XO ran for 23 hours on a 92% battery charge. Even with the backlight on, we have seen ebook mode run for more than 13 hours. Thanks go to Don Hopkins, Chris Ball, Mitch Bradley, and Andres Salomon.

The last major functional piece of resume is working; Marcelo Tosatti reports that it appears that basic functionality (detection of device insertion) is now working, even though he has no idea why (perhaps some change in mainline). All we need to do is to power up the USB ports after resume. Once this is done, we should have completed basic suspend and resume work, and move on to performance (both speed of resume, and power management in general. This will also allow us to have the mesh alive in ebook mode as soon as we have completely autonomous mesh firmware.

9. Suspend/resume: Chris Ball has prepared a jffs2 image that Quanta can use for testing LX suspend/resume. Resume is stable when done from the console, but not yet from inside X. Bernardo Innocenti found and helped to diagnose a problem with the serial port on LX after resume, and Dave Woodhouse came up with a fix.

We also looked at optimizations: with our standard kernel, resume takes 2–3 seconds from when the kernel starts up to when it finishes initializing. After disabling USB, we are down to about 1 second. Since the touchpad and keyboard remain powered up during suspend, we can skip the suspend/resume code for them—an additional savings of 0.5 seconds.

10. Kernel: At Dave Woodhouse's behest, Andres Salomon started looking at LOGFS, a potential successor to JFFS2. We won't ship it with Gen1, but it is something we are exploring for use after our initial release and an eventual Gen-2 system. Greg Kroah-Hartman is working on binding multiple PCI drivers to a single PCI device by way of a “piggy” bus driver: the piggy driver binds to all PCI devices; then other drivers can go through the piggy layer. It's still in active development: the code can be found in the -mm tree. Andres is finishing up the open firmware device-tree work. Bernardo also extended the kernel debugger (kdb) to be able to read and write model-specific registers (MSRs). Pierre Ossman tells us that an 8GB SD card worked on his XO, so now we know that we support 8G+ cards. Pierre also has a patch to significantly increase the speed of SD on our hardware.

11. X Window System: Bernardo is chasing X crashing on XVideo and RANDR; he has had a hard time reproducing the bug: he only sees it on a B2 machine with his own kernel—not with the stock 406 kernel. Jim Gettys is investigating the current state of X Window System as it pertains to the XO. We need to deal properly with ebook mode (the game buttons and the touchpad need to rotate along with the screen); the new input system hasn't landed in X.org head yet. We also have power-related work in both the X Window System and kernel driver teed up. Jordon Crouse implemented the X DPMS extension (screen saver) this week as well, completing another piece of what is needed for power management.

12. Firmware: Mitch Bradley has been busy. He

• discovered a way to eliminate 64 mS from the resume time, using a barely-documented AMD test register;
• discovered a problem with the microphone LED blinking at suspend/resume (John Watlington has a proposed fix);
• improved firmware audio self-test for frequency response and distortion measurements;
• analyzed speaker audio quality and proposed a zero-cost hardware mod to reduce distortion;
• reduced the memory use of the firmware JFFS2 driver by a factor of ~8;
• incorporated lovely new boot progress icons designed by Eben Eliason;
• specified in great detail a new protocol for CPU/EC command interactions, to improve speed and reliability;
• revised, corrected, and documented the interrupt routing for the B3 systems;
• determined the correct software fix for the camera-light-left-on problem;
• corrected network boot problems that were holding up manufacturing;
• added manufacturing data strings to the device tree in support of school server interactions;
• added MSR, DCON, display registers, and manufacturing data support to the Linux-hosted Forth debug tool;
• added SD high-capacity support to the firmware SD driver;
• provided support and training for new Quanta software engineers; and
• provided technical support for country evaluators late at night on IRC.

Lilian Walter read up on IPv6, came up with a plan and started some coding. That stopped in order to get the power management code working on the B3.

13. School server: John Watlington reports that the school server is on track, with schematic-level design starting. A batch of Active Antennas is back from assembly. Holger Levsen reports:

• Automatic livecd is almost working. He found three bugs in livecd-installer in textmode: two of them are fixed; the remaining problem is trivial to workaround. The installed system boots fine.
• Fully automatic installation (FAI) is working. We need to put the server applications in FAI to have them automatically installed. (A how-to for using FAI needs to be written.)

14. Multicast: Miguel Álvarez finished implementing and debugging a new version of Dan William's “MostlyReliablePipe.” This one is based on the scalable reliable multicast (SRM) protocol, and so far the results seem interesting: in his first test-bed with four nodes—all transmitting at a rate of one message/s and with an induced continuous error-rate of 30% (which I hope is far worse than any situation the mesh will face), no packets get lost, and the overhead in terms of traffic oscillates between 1-5% of the total data transmitted. He will be conducting a much larger test and will upload the code to git for everyone to use, critique, comment and modify.

15. Sugar design: Eben Eliason:

• uploaded a number of new screen shots to the Activities section of the wiki;
• created a series of find/replace dialog mock ups that employ some new approaches to the problem;
• created an extensive section in the human interface guidelines about the new toolbar design;
• created a series of icons for status indication during the boot process which integrate neatly with the OLPC logo graphic style;
• worked with Marco Gritti to spec the visual style for “inactive” controls and buttons in the UI;
• began working on a series of mock ups specifying the various invitation methods, receiving invitations, and the notification system;
• continue working back and forth with Manusheel Gupta to “Sugarize” the Paint activity;
• worked with Pentagram on the mesh UI design; and
• continue working back and forth with the Abiword team to Sugarize the Write activity.

16. TamTam: Jean Piché reports that the TamTam team is making its summer plans:

• solidify TamTam on the B4 and C machines: better keyboard response; a possible move to a 22k sampling rate (This would improve audio quality famously, specially where headphones or external speakers are used.); reinstate microphone and keyboard recording; and solve all pop-up window issues.
• merge TamTam Jam and miniTamTam into one integrated activity; the TamTam suite would revert to a three-prong affair: Play, Compose, Make sounds.
• Sugar conformity and integration: the Sugar controller toolkit is almost complete enough for all of the TamTam purposes.
• TamTam tunes outside TamTam: a simple embeddable TamTam player so children can put their compositions into documents. (AbiWord would be the first target.)
• tutorials and field trials: text-free tutorials to show children how to use the applications;
• The sound bank will be fully overhauled (hopefully at a 22k sampling rate).

17. Ebook: Josh Gay and Ian Bicking spent two days at OLPC working through our infrastructure for recording and aggregating comments. Josh is currently finishing a port of Stet, the 'heat map'-style commenting system used for the GPLv3 draft, which will be usable for commenting on any web page(See http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gplv3-draft-3.html). Ian is looking into a simple reader interface that renders any HTML page, not only those that have been preprocessed, as a way of integrating our current book-reader concept more neatly with the browser. Marco Gritti and Ian suggested pyxpcom might be the right way to proceed, with some success (See http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2007-May/002396.html).

18. In the community: Bernardo Innocenti has started volunteering his time at OLPC working on kernel and other low level software. Hal Murray is helping out Lilian Walter testing that our power management hardware controls are all correct and understood.

19. Etoys. Works continue to match the Etoys' Look better with the Sugar environment. Takashi Yamamiya has been working on copy and paste multimedia objects between EToys and other sugar activities. Bert Freudenberg built a new VM with preliminary D-Bus support for Etoys with Takashi's clipboard support. Andreas Raab's "virtual display" code is incorporated so that people can make a content for XO's 1200x900 pixel screen regardless the actual size of display. A Sugar-like menu bar is added by Yoshiki Ohshima. Scott Wallace's enhancement of "property sheet" provides better interface to manipulates the graphical properties of user objects. Alan Kay and Ted Kaehler continue on making more educational examples and documents in and for Etoys.

2007-05-12

1. Ceibal Project, Villa Cardal, Uruguay: President Vasquez inaugurated the first laptop school on Thursday. Villa Cardal is a small community with only one school of 150 children, so it is truly 1:1. As you might imagine there was tremendous excitement: the children and their families were ecstatic.

Despite the fact that none of the teachers have had experience with computing, they diagnosed a bug in the software: a few of the machines were hanging—nothing could get them to boot fully. The teachers discovered that this was only happening to children with a tilde or ñ in their names. An impressive example of teachers learning to learn! (The bug has been fixed.)

2. Alan Kay, Kim Rose, and the Etoys team (Bert Freudenberg, Ian Piumarta, Yoshiki Ohshima, Scott Wallace, Kazuhiro Abe, and Maic Masuch) came together for a week-long mini Squeakfest at the OLPC office. It was week of a remarkable progress; highlights include: Burt and Yoshiki's integration of the Sugar presence service into eToys—eToys now supports collaboration over the mesh for sharing eToy objects and scripts, a shared workspace, VOIP, chat, etc; an update on Ian's “dynamically reconfigurable virtual machine”; and Kazuhiro's World Stethoscope project—an eToys extension that takes advantage of the XO's microphone jack to import data into projects (See http://squeakland.jp/abee/tmp/WSN-3A_QuickReference.pdf). Squeakfest07 will be held August 1–3 in Chicago (See http://imamp.colum.edu/eceim/squeakfest07/index.php).

3. The XO is one of the featured designs at the “Design for the Other 90%” exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York. “Ninety-five percent of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10 percent of the world’s customers,” said Dr. Paul Polak, president of International Development Enterprises and a member of the exhibition’s advisory council. “Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90 percent,” he added.

4. B3 build: Quanta, Mary Lou Jepsen and David Woodhouse arrived in Shanghai (this morning) and have started in on the B3 build. Five B3 laptops are sitting in front of them at the moment, all working. David is working on a debug of suspend/resume. Mary Lou is focusing on the mechanical issues, safety and certification issues. OLPC will get 70 B3 machines for developers.

5. B3 housing: The B3 housing arrived in Cambridge this week. The most prominent new feature is the brightly colored XO on the back cover of the laptop. Other changes include a clean line on the battery housing and thinned out plastic on the front bezel for “glowing” camera and microphone “in-use” indicators. Improvements for robustness include: a steel plate in the keyboard area; a smaller battery cavity; rubber “bunny ears”, thicker bumpers and ribbing made out of pure polycarbonate, a longer keyboard cable, and a water resistance in touch-pad area. Improvements for usage include: increased display tilt; improved keyboard feel and responsiveness; improved touch-pad responsiveness; a gray bezel around the display; improved fit and finish of the buttons; X and O indicators on the touch-pad buttons; and the 400 unique XO color combinations (for IDing laptops in a crowded classroom).

6. Power measurement: Steve Smith and Chris Ball have a B3 XO connected to the tinderbox and have instrumented the power rails. Readings are obtained through a Python program.

7. Power management: This week we merged suspend/resume support in master. So far, it only works on the GX; LX resume is still not working in Linux (it works correctly in firmware testing). Andres Salomon is working on it.

8. Firmware: Mitch Bradley figured out how to access the new EC commands reliably, and documented it. Mitch also improved the audio self-test and used it to measure the speaker performance. Mitch is still working on B3 NAND FLASH issues. Lilian Walter added functionality to play PCM .wav files (in addition to IMA ADPCM .wav files) and is researching IPv6.

9. Presence service: This week was dominated by the run up to get sharing over the mesh working. Lots of bug fixes are in place and the first connect activities are in place and working. Thanks to the Collabora team, Dan Williams, John Palmieri and Marco Gritti. (The video-call activity also made a lot of progress this week.)

10. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso, Marco, and Ben Sadder also made a lot of progress on the data store and Sugar integration. The write and web activity now use the Journal and the data store. Most of the integration work on the Journal-side is largely complete. Marco also spent a lot of time working on the GTK theme that we're going to use with the new images since we're going down that path. Lots of progress has been made here as well.

11. In the community: Marc Maurer is making use of the presence service from a C/C++ application, Abiword. He has spent time working on the Abiword collaboration code and added functions to the XO write activity: the ability to set colors and font attributes, implemented more table support, and simple zooming functions. He also cleaned up a lot of the icons in the activity.

At the MIT Media Lab, students of MAS.964 (One Laptop Per Child) have been working since the winter on projects relating to the XO. They will be holding a poster and live demonstration session on Tuesday, May 15, from 2–4 PM at the Media Lab, lower-level atrium (http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=E15).

Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos set up a mesh demo where each laptop takes a picture at random times and tries to send it over to all other nodes in the mesh network. He has a web page where the aggregate data are displayed, based upon the number of hops between nodes. You can click on the pictures and see what the respective direct neighbors and nodes further than one hop are for the next node (See http://lyme.media.mit.edu/mesh.php). He also measures the rate at which presence information arrives at each node from every other node in the mesh, without doing a single broadcast, but only send frames from neighbor to neighbor. He can thus predict with fairly good accuracy if a node is still present in the mesh.

Junia Anacleto, a visiting scientist at MIT from the Federal University of San Carlos, Brazil, has been working with a small group of Portuguese-speaking students at the King School in Cambridge. The children took to the laptops immediately; they have blogged their experiences (See http://lia.dc.ufscar.br/olpcod), making extensive use of videos they have posted to youtube.

2007-05-05

1. Green laptop: By concentrating on low-cost, low-power, long-life, and field repair, we have achieved what many assume costs extra (and many corporations would ordinarily charge more for): XO is the most environmentally friendly laptop ever made. At one point we had heard from very knowledgeable manufacturers that it would cost us at least US $20 extra just to meet the EU environmental requirements. This was not true. In fact, if every laptop and desktop user in the world switched to an XO right now, about 85 terawatt-hours of energy could be saved. The energy-bill savings alone could fund the outright purchase of 50-million XO laptops. In addition, 50M barrels of oil could saved, which is an additional US $500M in carbon-offset dollars, yearly.

2. Vatican City: Antonio Battro participated in the XIII Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which was dedicated to “charity and justice in the relations among peoples and nations.” He presented the OLPC program at the round-table on the Millennium Goals on education.

3. Brasilia hosted a conference on digital inclusion on Thursday. Prof. Lea Fagundes stole the show with an impassioned talk about olpc, showing the work and sharing the words of the children involved.

4. OLPC is very pleased to announce the hiring of Kim Quirk as Project Manager. Kim comes to OLPC with over 20 years experience managing projects in industries ranging from network products to e-commerce to educational software.

5. Mesh: Michail Bletsas evaluated three sets of rubber rabbit ears (WiFi antennae); one is much better than the others. Quanta will use these ears for all the B4 units. Look for the WiFi range on your XO to increase by at least 50%.

6. B3 build will start on May 11 in Shanghai. B3 is essentially the mass- production laptop (without texture on the plastic surfaces).

7. Richard Smith and John Watlington wired up a pre-B3 to the voltmeter, allowing detailed measurements of power consumption, broken down component by component (LCD, CPU/Southbridge, EC, WLAN, etc.) This work will continue next week as more components are gradually added.

8. Work on the School Server hardware design continued this week. It was decided to attempt a sealed case design for areas of high humidity and salt exposure, but we are still exploring the thermal issues. Processor selection will be completed by the middle of next week. The industrial and mechanical design have begun.

9. The Collabora team continues work on a video-chat application and have found (what we hope are) the remaining bugs in the video stack. They are working with John Palmieri to get the code packaged up and into our builds.

10. J.M. Maurer made progress on a syntax-highlighting plugin for Abiword. This will be useful for children (and adults) who want to develop software on the laptop. Right now it supports syntax highlighting for both Python and C++.

11. Data store and journal work continues. Tomeu Vizoso has hooked the browser history into the journal and Ben Saller continues working on various parts of the data store. Ben is currently working on getting the data store properly exposed through DBus.

12. Dan Williams and Jordan Crouse fixed some problems in the X server on the GX and the video stack. Dan also demonstrated a version of the Read activity that can show itself in the mesh view: you can click on it and a PDF is downloaded between two machines—suddenly two kids are reading it.

13. Mitch Bradley released candidate firmware for the B3 SMT build, with:

• enhance diagnostics suitable for manufacturing burn-in tests;
• fast-boot using game keys to force interaction;
• more secure EC command access; and
• a larger frame buffer to prevent pixmap starvation.

14. Andres Salomon spent this week on pre-B3/LX debugging. A NAND chip-select fix (to enable doubling the size of NAND on B3), audio and camera fixes, etc. were committed to the stable kernel. (The image quality of the camera is much improved as a result.)

15. Chris Ball compiled a collector bug of issues to fix before the B3 build (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1403).

16. Jim Gettys worked on a system-software (primarily power-management-related) specification (See Power_Management).

2007-04-28

1. Cambridge: Delegations from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Libya, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay attended a week-long meeting at the OLPC headquarters to discuss the current status of the program, share ideas, and plan next steps.

Just seeing and hearing the diversity of faces and voices around the table was remarkable. Although the discussion was occasionally heated, every attendee was convinced that OLPC is something they should and must do for the children of their countries. Passion was infectious; and most important: there was a vibrant exchange among the attendees of their experiences and ideas about how to move forward together.

2. A pivotal moment was when Marta Voelcker showed videos from the work being done with XOs by Léa Fagundes and her colleagues at the University of Rio Grande do Sul in a school in Porto Alegre; this was followed by Irene Ficheman, who showed videos from the work she and her colleagues from University of São Paulo are doing with XOs in a school in that city. We were able to see how the teachers there worked with the XO and each other (a priceless moment was helping each other open the XO for the first time) and heard how students do not want to go home—even when dismissed early. (The children without laptops at the school in the Porto Alegre—only one in four have an XO—are emulating the landless movement in Brazil—Movimento Sem Terra—they have created a laptop-less student movement.)

3. OLPC added a new country this week: the USA. This move will engage a wider developer community, impacting and improving software and content. Please note that such a move into schools and learning in the USA is not necessarily a commercial machine. Several options are under consideration. More details when they are available.

4. One of the pleasant surprises of the week was the extent to which software development for the XO is beginning to take a life of its own. A developer in Pakistan is building a Qur'anic Studies for the laptop; a team from Uruguay surprised us with a demonstration of an activity for using USB “dongles” on the laptop; a team from Brazil has built some original “learning” games for the laptop; and a team from Argentina has been continuing to work on a wide variety of activities, including a calculator activity that “shows its work.”

5. Environmental impact: Mary Lou Jepsen has compiling data to determine the environmental impact of the XO. Of course XO is literally the greenest laptop on the planet, but it is also figuratively the greenest: having less environmental impact than any laptop ever made. Mary Lou is working with EPEAT, “a procurement tool to help institutional purchasers in the public and private sectors evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes.” EPEAT provides “a clear and consistent set of performance criteria for the design of products, and provides an opportunity for manufacturers to secure market recognition for efforts to reduce the environmental impact of their products.” Details will be available next soon.

6. Weather-proofing: XO is made for use outdoors. On a rainy day in Boston, Mary Lou decided to let the BBC film her testing the XO in a downpour. She worked with the laptop for an hour in the pouring rain while they filmed; both she and the laptop got drenched. XO worked fine; the crew were to be able to see the screen clearly outside—it was bright despite the rain.

7. B3 Hardware and Firmware: Mitch Bradley, John Watlington, and Richard Smith returned from Taipei after a successful bring-up of preB3. Together with the team from Quanta, they:

• solved a camera-noise problem that has been plaguing us for months;
• with help from Tom Sylla fixed the RAM stability problem by improved settings of RAM timing registers—10 boards with 3 different RAM vendors ran memtest overnight with no errors; and
• stabilized suspend/resume with the OFW test.

Gary Chiang made a test rig whereby one XO can force another to do repetitive suspend/resume cycles. We used it to perform 14,000 consecutive suspends of 1-second duration and 234 consecutive 2-minute suspends. Tom has been extremely helpful in debugging video and suspend problems this week.

Mitch trained some of the Quanta software people in the use of open firmware(OFW). They succeeded in doing their own OFW build, and used it to test a fix for a GPIO-related leakage issue.

Lilian Walter's OFW-based hardware test suite proved invaluable in the preB3 bring-up. It let us prove that various hardware features were working very quickly, without the “is the problem caused by hardware or software” issue that often arises when trying to use OS drivers for testing.

Quanta has implemented most of the new EC commands that Richard specified, so we can migrate away from direct access to EC GPIO ports (which was a latent security hole). Mitch have written and tested OFW interfaces to those new functions.

Jordan Crouse, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon worked on the LX graphics driver to shake it down (the LX has a significantly better graphics processor requiring significant changes and additions to the drivers). Chris and Jordan debugged an X cursor problem on the pre-B3 with Jordan Crouse. Andres worked with Jordan on lxfb and DCON drivers, and committed them. The DCON support is now broken out, and both the LX and GX frame-buffer drivers can control it.

Chris Ball took Quanta's testing spreadsheet and added missing bugs to Trac. He also wrote a kernel patch to fix an audio bug (by inverting EAPD) on B3, and submitted it to Jaya Kumar who maintains the audio driver we use.

8. System software: Andres committed initial code for calling into OFW, and changed the platform detection code to use OFW rather than dealing with GPIOs.

Chris also brought up Sugar under Python 2.5 on an XO using the Fedora 7 packages, which we'd previously thought to be impractical. He is in the middle of taking performance measurements which we can use to help decide whether and when we want to migrate the build to it.

9. Localization: Jim Gettys gave a presentation on localization at the Country Meeting. The “meat” of the presentation can be found in the wiki (See Localization). He also gave a presentation on the design of the X0-1 at MIT; a video of this presentation can be found at: http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3417. It was attended by about 100 people, and may result in a number of people contributing to the project.

10. Journal: This week Ben Saller joined the software team to work on the Sugar data store. Welcome, Ben. He's based in San Fransisco and is working remotely. Ben already has a few things working in the data store including a working query engine, a simple file-based back-end data store and full-text indexing. Marco Gritti has integrated it into jhbuild (our sugar build script) and Tomeu Vizoso has started on integrating into the Journal activity. It's great to see this work finally underway.

11. Presence: The new presence service based on the work that Dan Williams and the Collabora team have been working on has landed in jhbuild. This means we can use the XMPP/server-based bits for collaboration and move to the new “tubes” model for activities. This code is still under heavy development so expect some bumps, but this is a big step that a lot of people have been working on for a long time.

12. Sugar: This week Tomeu, Marco and Eben Eliason met in Italy to work through a number of design issues surrounding controls and look and feel. Those notes have been posted to the mailing list and a full overview is in the wiki for anyone interested.

13. Collaboration: Guillaume Desmottes from Collabora has been working on the “collaboration bits” and has a sample activity (based on Connect-4) working on top of the new tubes/collaboration API working in the sugar environment. He also spent a lot of time debugging video and VOIP problems. There turned out to be an incompatibility between gstreamer and one of the streaming libraries. Most of the UI for the video-call activity is done; the streaming issue is being fixed; once that's completed, we should have a very nice video call activity on the XO.

14. Erik Blankinship and Bakhtiar Mikhak from Media Mods demonstrated a shared camera activity this week. While it doesn't yet leverage the tubes/collaboration API, it is a harbinger of some of the new modes of interactive learning enabled by the XO/Sugar architecture.

15. Connectivity: Mesh testing continues and this time we have some nice results to report from our friends at UFF in Rio de Janeiro. In one test they placed five laptops in five different floors in their building and they measured application throughput—copying a file using the Linux SCP command. After four hops, there was 500 kilobits of real application throughput!! They also measured (in the lab) throughput via a chain of ten laptops. (A long chain of laptops can be created by means of special debugging features in the laptop's firmware.) Using the iperf benchmarking program, they got over 2 megabits over 9 hops.

2007-04-28

1. Cambridge: Delegations from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Libya, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay attended a week-long meeting at the OLPC headquarters to discuss the current status of the program, share ideas, and plan next steps.

Just seeing and hearing the diversity of faces and voices around the table was remarkable. Although the discussion was occasionally heated, every attendee was convinced that OLPC is something they should and must do for the children of their countries. Passion was infectious; and most important: there was a vibrant exchange among the attendees of their experiences and ideas about how to move forward together.

2. A pivotal moment was when Marta Voelcker showed videos from the work being done with XOs by Léa Fagundes and her colleagues at the University of Rio Grande do Sul in a school in Porto Alegre; this was followed by Irene Ficheman, who showed videos from the work she and her colleagues from University of São Paulo are doing with XOs in a school in that city. We were able to see how the teachers there worked with the XO and each other (a priceless moment was helping each other open the XO for the first time) and heard how students do not want to go home—even when dismissed early. (The children without laptops at the school in the Porto Alegre—only one in four have an XO—are emulating the landless movement in Brazil—Movimento Sem Terra—they have created a laptop-less student movement.)

3. OLPC added a new country this week: the USA. This move will engage a wider developer community, impacting and improving software and content. Please note that such a move into schools and learning in the USA is not necessarily a commercial machine.

4. One of the pleasant surprises of the week was the extent to which software development for the XO is beginning to take a life of its own. A developer in Pakistan is building a Qur'anic Studies for the laptop; a team from Uruguay surprised us with a demonstration of an activity for using USB “dongles” on the laptop; a team from Brazil has built some original “learning” games for the laptop; and a team from Argentina has been continuing to work on a wide variety of activities, including a calculator activity that “shows its work.”

5. Environmental impact: Mary Lou Jepsen has compiling data to determine the environmental impact of the XO. Of course XO is literally the greenest laptop on the planet, but it is also figuratively the greenest: having less environmental impact than any laptop ever made. Mary Lou is working with EPEAT, “a procurement tool to help institutional purchasers in the public and private sectors evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes.” EPEAT provides “a clear and consistent set of performance criteria for the design of products, and provides an opportunity for manufacturers to secure market recognition for efforts to reduce the environmental impact of their products.” Details will be available next soon.

6. Weather-proofing: XO is made for use outdoors. On a rainy day in Boston, Mary Lou decided to let the BBC film her testing the XO in a downpour. She worked with the laptop for an hour in the pouring rain while they filmed; both she and the laptop got drenched. XO worked fine; the crew were to be able to see the screen clearly outside—it was bright despite the rain.

7. B3 Hardware and Firmware: Mitch Bradley, John Watlington, and Richard Smith returned from Taipei after a successful bring-up of preB3. Together with the team from Quanta, they:

• solved a camera-noise problem that has been plaguing us for months;
• with help from Tom Sylla fixed the RAM stability problem by improved settings of RAM timing registers—10 boards with 3 different RAM vendors ran memtest overnight with no errors; and
• stabilized suspend/resume with the OFW test.

Gary made a test rig whereby one XO can force another to do repetitive suspend/resume cycles. We used it to perform 14,000 consecutive suspends of 1-second duration and 234 consecutive 2-minute suspends. Tom has been extremely helpful in debugging video and suspend problems this week.

Mitch trained some of the Quanta software people in the use of open firmware(OFW). They succeeded in doing their own OFW build, and used it to test a fix for a GPIO-related leakage issue.

Lilian Walter's OFW-based hardware test suite proved invaluable in the preB3 bring-up. It let us prove that various hardware features were working very quickly, without the “is the problem caused by hardware or software” issue that often arises when trying to use OS drivers for testing.

Quanta has implemented most of the new EC commands that Richard specified, so we can migrate away from direct access to EC GPIO ports (which was a latent security hole). Mitch have written and tested OFW interfaces to those new functions.

Jordan Crouse, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon worked on the LX graphics driver to shake it down (the LX has a significantly better graphics processor requiring significant changes and additions to the drivers). Chris and Jordan debugged an X cursor problem on the pre-B3 with Jordan Crouse. Andres worked with Jordan on lxfb and DCON drivers, and committed them. The DCON support is now broken out, and both the LX and GX frame-buffer drivers can control it.

Chris Ball took Quanta's testing spreadsheet and added missing bugs to Trac. He also wrote a kernel patch to fix an audio bug (by inverting EAPD) on B3, and submitted it to Jaya Kumar who maintains the audio driver we use.

8. System software: Andres committed initial code for calling into OFW, and changed the platform detection code to use OFW rather than dealing with GPIOs.

Chris also brought up Sugar under Python 2.5 on an XO using the Fedora 7 packages, which we'd previously thought to be impractical. He is in the middle of taking performance measurements which we can use to help decide whether and when we want to migrate the build to it.

9. Localization: Jim Gettys gave a presentation on localization at the Country Meeting. The “meat” of the presentation can be found in the wiki (See Localization). He also gave a presentation on the design of the X0-1 at MIT; a video of this presentation can be found at: http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3417. It was attended by about 100 people, and may result in a number of people contributing to the project.

10. Journal: This week Ben Saller joined the software team to work on the Sugar data store. Welcome, Ben. He's based in San Fransisco and is working remotely. Ben already has a few things working in the data store including a working query engine, a simple file-based back-end data store and full-text indexing. Marco Gritti has integrated it into jhbuild (our sugar build script) and Tomeu Vizoso has started on integrating into the Journal activity. It's great to see this work finally underway.

11. Presence: The new presence service based on the work that Dan Williams and the Collabora team have been working on has landed in jhbuild. This means we can use the XMPP/server-based bits for collaboration and move to the new “tubes” model for activities. This code is still under heavy development so expect some bumps, but this is a big step that a lot of people have been working on for a long time.

12. Sugar: This week Tomeu, Marco and Eben Eliason met in Italy to work through a number of design issues surrounding controls and look and feel. Those notes have been posted to the mailing list and a full overview is in the wiki for anyone interested.

13. Collaboration: Guillaume Desmottes from Collabora has been working on the “collaboration bits” and has a sample activity (based on Connect-4) working on top of the new tubes/collaboration API working in the sugar environment. He also spent a lot of time debugging video and VOIP problems. There turned out to be an incompatibility between gstreamer and one of the streaming libraries. Most of the UI for the video-call activity is done; the streaming issue is being fixed; once that's completed, we should have a very nice video call activity on the XO.

14. Erik Blankinship and Bakhtiar Mikhak from Media Mods demonstrated a shared camera activity this week. While it doesn't yet leverage the tubes/collaboration API, it is a harbinger of some of the new modes of interactive learning enabled by the XO/Sugar architecture.

15. Connectivity: Mesh testing continues and this time we have some nice results to report from our friends at UFF in Rio de Janeiro. In one test they placed five laptops in five different floors in their building and they measured application throughput—copying a file using the Linux SCP command. After four hops, there was 500 kilobits of real application throughput!! They also measured (in the lab) throughput via a chain of ten laptops. (A long chain of laptops can be created by means of special debugging features in the laptop's firmware.) Using the iperf benchmarking program, they got over 2 megabits over 9 hops.

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

2007-04-21

1. Taiwan: John Watlington, Mitch Bradley, and Richard Smith traveled to Quanta in Taiwan to work with Victor Chao, Arnold Kao and their team on the “bring up” of the pre-B3 boards. Jordan Crouse, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon helped the team in Taiwan from afar (Colorado and Cambridge). Bottom line: it works.

2. São Paulo: Work began at a school on the periphery of the city with the XO this week. Naturally, every kid is totally excited. The only question anyone in the school, whether kid, teacher, administrator or parent, has is “When can I get one?” Teachers are staying up late to play with their machines and show the kids what they learned. Kids are teaching other kids reducing the burdens of class size and different levels. The school is transforming into a place of joy and excitement. They are beginning work on their wiki-based local-history project which they plan to collaborate with other schools.

3. New “rabbit ears” arrived in Cambridge this week for our evaluation. Notably, these ears, when attached to a laptop, survive a five-foot drop test with direct impact on the ears in their extended (out) position. We will be testing them to higher drop heights in the coming weeks.

4. Sugar: This week saw numerous small fixes in the UI to improve the zoom experience. Marco Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, and Eben Eliason have reached a consensus about how to handle controls in the UI, which is an important part of our developer story. Some of the compromises we have made won't give us the exact experience we are looking for, but they minimize risk to the project.

5. Chat: A simple chat activity for the XO is coming together thanks to the joint efforts of Dan Williams and the Collabora team. Collabora is also putting together a video-call activity.

6. Mesh portals: Dan Williams wrote up instructions on using B2s as mesh portals. Chris Ball tested and released the instructions in the wiki (See Establishing_a_Mesh_Portal).

7. Firmware: Chris and Mitch also tested OFW's wifi driver; it works. Having a wifi driver in the firmware allows us to build a script that can update our laptops with a button-press rather than carrying USB keys around.

8. Kernel: Andres worked with the Sparc and Power PC folks (upstream) on getting a device tree API that makes everyone happy. He also had his typical weekly adventure: he synched master up w/ Linus Torvalds; we now have 2.6.21-rc7 working.

9. Libraries: Christine Madsen has been working on visualizations of how different archives and libraries can work together to form an open library exchange. Justin Thorp from the Library of Congress's World Digital Library (WDL) project came to OLPC for two days of library discussions, and met with SJ Klein, Eben, Adam Brandi, Todd Kelsey, and Mel Chua. WDL is developing the next release of their interface and collection with target of the end of the summer.

10. Wikis: The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) hosted an annual conference about collaborative production of learning materials in Vancouver, Wednesday through Friday. Attendees included Merrick Schaefer of UNICEF, Murugan Pal of CK12, Erik Moeller of Wikimedia and Open Progress, and Joel Thierstein of Connexions; who are all working towards a global collection of CC-BY and locally-developed works. We set immediate goals for sharing materials across these projects; and identifying collections. COL offered broad support across their network of teachers and volunteers, especially in Nigeria. Erik and Brion Vibber from Wikimedia discussed how MediaWiki is planning to support asynchronous and offline editing; and 'live' off-line snapshots that people can edit. The Wikipedia 0.5 static snapshot was released last week; it can be downloaded via torrent. A child-friendly selection of topics is being developed; but still written at a high language level. A proper kid's-encyclopedia is still in the future.

11. Remote display: Zvi Devir documented a second method for remote display of an XO laptop in the wiki (See Remote_display). The trick is to install RealVNC and run x0vncserver on the XO. The remote computer, which can be connected to a video projector, runs a vncviewer that clones the XO display. (Note that this method will not yet workwhen the laptops are in mesh mode—we need to enable packet-forwarding on the School Server for the vnc connection. Until then, the XO must be used in infrastructure mode.)

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

2007-04-14

1. São Paulo: Roseli de Deus Lopes and her team have been working with the teachers for a smooth introduction and work began with XOs in the school in this week. Naturally, even though there are only 100 laptops initially, word spread throughout the school and all the children and teachers are anxious to participate. David Cavallo met with the teachers for several days: the teachers and children will work in groups in inter-disciplinary projects, including a local-history project to grow and combine with all laptop schools.

2. Porto Alegre: Lea Fagundes and her team have been working with the XO in the Luciana de Abreu Elementary School for three weeks and already is having tremendous impact. The children of course are doing fantastic work and you see them moving around the school, taking pictures, working on projects, and truly engaged in their learning. Yesterday two teachers were unable to come to school due to family emergencies and the principal could not get substitutes; they dismissed the children of those classes early. For the first time in anyone's recollection, no one left when dismissed, preferring to stay and work with the laptops. The school had record attendance by parents for a meeting, with more than 10× the usual number attending. The teachers and children are ecstatic. The concrete example of chidlren, teachers, laptops and learning is changing the minds of doubters.

3. Rio de Janeiro: Michail Bletsas attended a two-day meeting organized by Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP), the organization that runs Brazil's academic network. The main theme of the meeting was digital inclusion and a people from the USP and Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) presented their first results from testing wireless connectivity on the XO laptop. Their conclusion: it works.

4. FISL8.0: Michail and Javier Cardona delivered back-to-back presentations on the various aspects of the OLPC mesh. Javier concluded with a nice audio-streaming demo via the mesh. Two XOs were streaming audio between them, their transmission power was limited to 1mW (from 60), so that the range between them was limited—about 40m with the rabbit ears down. One person went to the end of the lecture hall with one of the XOs and the audio stopped; another person went to the middle of the room with a third XO, which restored the audio flow.

John Palmieri, Tomeu Vizoso, Marcelo Tosatti, David Cavallo, and Jim Gettys also attended the conference, which is the largest free software conference in the developing world (~5000 people pre-registered for the conference). Attendance at the OLPC booth was at times a crush and was always very busy.

5. Carla Gomez-Monroy, a former student of Walter's from the MIT Media Lab, will be helping us with the test school deployments. Carla spent several years working with the Schlumberger Excellence in Educational Development (SEED) Foundation, doing constructionist projects in schools in the developing world, including Nigeria.

6. Is XO the “greenest” laptop on the planet? This seems not to be just literal but also appears figurative: Mary Lou and Robert spent some time talking to various environmental agencies last week. Our low-power design, RoHS compliance, LED backlight (rather than mercury-containing CCFL), battery with 4× the standard battery lifetime, elimination of PVCs and Brominated flame retardants, etc., may actually spur environmentalists to create a new category for our laptop. More on this in the coming weeks.

7. B3: Pre-B3 motherboards will be made today (Saturday) at Quanta. The pre-B3 bring up in Taipei will commence on April 18 in Taipei with Richard Smith, John Watlington, Mitch Bradley, and David Woodhouse present.

8. New rubber ears: 30 sets of rubber bunny ears arrived Friday at OLPC; we will use them for drop testing to new heights early next week. Current testing shows our laptops survive a five-foot drop tests on the “open” ears.

9. Firmware/kernel: Mitch and Andres Salomon have succeeded in a complete boot off an SD card using a custom kernel and a few tweaks to OS Build 385. They are working on making it require fewer custom changes, so that booting off SD can be done routinely. Mitch and Richard worked on preparations for the LX processor (B3) board bring up next week. Mitch provided a version of the firmware to Quanta for initial debug.

10. User interface: Eben Eliason has developed a new tabbed toolbar system for Sugar that he has documented in the wiki. He also made yet another significant pass over the UI controls and will be meeting Marco Gritti and Tomeu Vizoso to get an API implemented for them. He has sketched mock-ups for our core activities (Write, Browser, etc.) using the new system and the team at Abiword has already begun implementing many of the new features.

Eben also specified a more detailed interaction for the clipboard, which will be consistent with current UI expectations while providing the additional features we want. The basic interaction is a clipboard stack, with the most recently copied item on top, which also acts as a push through queue when it fills up, dropping the bottom element from the stack when new items come in. And he prepared a refined “introductory sequence” for entering name, choosing colors, and taking a photo on first boot. Marco has this design and is working on implementation.

11. School server: Web caching is configured and running on the school server in the OLPC office in Cambridge. All XOs in the area running a current build are using it for network access.

12. From the community: Marc Maurer reports that his work on adding syntax coloring to AbiWord for the purposes of the develop activity is beginning to work. John Resig has been making progress on an eBook reader (See http://ejohn.org/apps/ebook/ for a live demo). Bruno Coudoin reports that GCompris is running on the XO. (GCompris is education software targeting young children that has been translated in more than 40 languages.) While it doesn't yet follow all of the design rules of Sugar, it is fun to see working. Ignatz Heinz at Avallain Learning is working on making an open-source version of their language-learning and literacy tools available for the XO. Google has just come out with a beta API to their new translation engine. Franz Och, one of their lead researchers, thinks it can be used for IM translation for the XO and would like to see this tested.

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

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

2007-04-07

1. OLPC “Game Jam”—a game design and programming event designed to encourage development of open-source games for the OLPC platform (the XO)—is being held at Olin College next weekend. A group of game developers will get together over a three-day period to make as many innovative games as possible for the laptop. “Our goal is not just some great games and experimentation for the XO but also to bring the unique constraints and output of this project to next year's GDC Experimental Gameplay Workshop.” Code will be released on SourceForge under the GNU General Public License so everyone can freely experiment with the source and games.

2. Mechanicals/ID: The XO mechanical design is finally complete. The last major item—the insert molded rubber/plastic bunny ears—was approved on April 4th. The core team responsible for this milestone: Frank Lee and Victor Chau of Quanta, Yves Behar and Bret Recor of Fuse, Jacques Gagne of Gecko, and Mary Lou Jepsen of OLPC. This is the culmination of nearly two years of efforts on the ID and mechanicals. It bears mention that many contributed to the ID/ME over this time on the laptop, and in addition to the above, we would especially like to acknowledge the following who at various times shouldered large parts of this effort: Quanta: Ben Chuang, Johnson Huang, Sam Chang, Alex Chu, and Roger Huang Fuse Project: Mitch Pergola and Martin Schnitzer Design Continuum: Kenneth Jewell and Kevin Young MIT Media Lab: Ted Selker ChiLin: Albert Hsu, HT Chen and Scott Soong OLPC: Nicholas Negroponte, Rebecca Allen, Mark Foster, Walter Bender, and Michail Bletsas

3. System software: Build 385 and firmware Q2B87 form a new stable build. We do not anticipate another stable build for approximately 3–5 weeks, as we work on suspend and resume, power management, and the Geode LX bringup. Please update your systems to this build. Key changes and improvements include:

• a fix for a number of crashes in Sugar, which have been seen occasionally became much more common in Build 368 was finally traced to a bug in the fontconfig library;
• updated library content;
• improved UI for selecting networks, and further bug fixes in the network driver;
• fix for LiFePo battery problems (This is the last known battery problem.);
• memory of the WEP wireless key should be much improved;
• updated TamTam bundle (save and restore work properly);
• a new, improved calculator program from Reinier Heeres;
• a temporary workaround for a presence-service problem is in place; and
• sufficient aliases for old X11 core fonts that most applications not yet updated to the current X client-side font model should work (specifically, this fixes a crash in the Adobe Flash 9 plug-in for Linux).

We will have a automated backup script before the next stable build for backup of laptop contents to the school server; this is simply using the "rsync" command which is already included in current builds.

4. Firmware: Mitch Bradley completed preparations to cut over to fastboot/suspend/resume firmware. The Q2Cxx series will include these new features:

• suspend/resume support;
• memtest86 built in to firmware;
• keyboard diagnostic that displays key presses graphically;
• explicit probe-usb no longer needed: attempts to open the USB node automatically handle connection-status changes;
• new boot flash layout per Quanta's request, plus tools to inspect manufacturing data and save it to a disk file; and
• faster boot time.

Lilian Walters released to Mitch the keyboard self-test code and the auto reprobe for USB. Richard Smith released q2b86 and q2b87 with new EC bits that fix outstanding LiFe battery problems.

5. Power management: As mentioned above, we are cutting over to the “C” series of firmware releases as we develop our suspend/resume work. Richard worked on resume SD bug with Pierre Ossman. It seems that after a resume, the clock on the SD is not coming back up right. It starts but then goes away. Richard is still trying to hunt this down. Only SD is not resuming properly now. The resume time without SD is down to 0.23 seconds!

6. Kernel: Andres Salomon did the regular Linux tree merge, merged the libertas wireless driver into the stable tree, and worked on the open firmware (OFW) device-tree kernel patch. The device-tree implementation is going to require a lot of tender-loving-care to get it upstream, unfortunately. Dave Woodhouse diagnosed a latent bug in the JFFS2 file system caused by pretty pathological logging behavior; it will require some work to fix. Jordan Crouse worked on the Geode LX frame buffer driver (lxfb).

7. User environment: Jim Gettys figured out how the old core X font system worked, to enable applications using the obsolete X core font system (e.g., Adobe's Flash 9 plugin) to work properly on our system. Chris Ball tested fontconfig-2.4.2, which Jim correctly predicted as the fix to Sugar crashes that had become very common in Build 368. We had been about to revert the branch prediction firmware workaround instead. Both Chris Ball and Chris Blizzard have confirmed that the crash disappears as of Build 380. Chris also tracked down the Unicode scripts as the cause of our console font becoming tiny. John Palmieri came up with a fix, which is in the latest build.

8. School server: John Watlington reports that we have a school server up and running as a mesh portal in Cambridge. Up to three mesh networks are supported, with routing supplied between each other and the Internet.

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