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<div style="font-size:90%; float:right;">
=Laptop News 2007-06-09=
__TOC__
</div>


To contribute a story or news idea, see the '''[[OLPC:Newsroom|OLPC newsroom]]'''.
1. Heiligendamm, Germany: UNICEF’s Christopher Fabian and Merrick Schaefer organized a youth summit (called the “J8”), around the G8 Summit. The summit consists of 10 youth from each G8 country and 10 from the developing world, taking place before and during the G8; preparing position papers on the issues facing the world's youth, which they will present to the G8. They are using 90 XOs to capture images and video for interviews (of one another and other attendees) and to collaborate on their reports. They are also testing a distributed/off-line wiki for the XO designed by Mako Hill. For much of the week they have had no Internet connectivity, but they are collaborating over the mesh. Bert Freudenberg, a member of the Etoys team, helped to mentor the delegates.


For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our [[twitter]] feed and [http://blog.laptop.org OLPC blog].
2. Needham, MA: Mel Chua, Kent Quirk, and SJ Klein are hosting the first OLPC Game Jam this weekend a Olin College; the event is designed to encourage experimentation and innovation in the game industry and kick off development of open-source games for the XO. 40 game developers were off to a good start last night (with others participating remotely). Roberto Faga, a summer of code student working on game libraries, is planning another for Brazil, likely in October.


This page historically hosted announcements and news about OLPC, along with the Sugar Labs [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events '''current events'''] page.
3. Scott Ananian will be starting at OLPC on Monday as a software engineer. Scott will be jumping right in after receiving his Ph.D. from EECS at MIT yesterday. He will bring to us an 10 years of experience hacking and debugging kernel patches and drivers. Besides the technical skills, Scott is deeply committed to the OLPC project.


== Upcoming pieces ==
4. Product line up: We are shipping five products this fall: (1) the XO laptop; (2) a school server; (3) a multi-battery charger; an active antenna; and (5) a solar-powered WiFi repeater. Much of the emphasis has been on the laptop, but a push from Quanta this week has resulted in firmer plans for the other products.
; Claudia
: Learning Chat piece: 278 words, ready now. [[File:Learning Chat.docx]]
: Making Learning Visible: Claudia's (& Walter) original is 25 pages. Submitted to a journal. w/o OLPC Background it is down to 12-15 pages w/ screenshots.
: This can become a 4-part series.
; Antonio: Homo docens: 500+ words, Antonio approved my edits. [[File:Homo docens JLedits.docx]]
: Further work: we can definitely ask him to contribute on a quarterly basis but I've found that I have to be very specific as to what I am asking to do and he has to be comfortable that it is consistent with his academic work.
: Ask for a new piece on the epidemiology of learning
; Rodrigo:
: [[Ometepe]] - A beautiful piece with wonderful images. RAH posted a personal and lengthy version (1500+ words) that he shared with his private distribution list. I made an edited version (1200 words) that could be shared publicly. Must check with RAH on this. [[File:Ometepe articulo por Rodrigo Arboleda.pdf]] [[File:Ometepe by Rodrigo Arboleda (3).pdf]]
: I had hoped that we could do a video series with Rodrigo but the budget hasn't been approved. Giulia - can we get an answer on this?
; Rwanda:
: Rwanda case studies
: Ceri Whatley - summary of importance of headmasters - confirm subset to reuse
: Social mapping project - 1- or 2-part piece - check w/ Julia
: Grandmother project - 2- or 3-part piece - check w/ Julia (and is there more to that awesome series?)
; Other Africa
: So. Africa case studies
; Peru and Uruguay:
: ''Oscar B's piece on the IADB study?''
: You said that Uruguay and Peru produce a ton of content on a continuous basis. I'm struggling a bit with how we can easily get the content and translate it into English. Giulia - could Olga help? I don't want to burden her with more work. Maybe we do this every 2-3 months.
; Other LatAm:
: Colombia: Sandra's quarterly? newsletter and website could feed into this. Plus english translations.
: Nicaragua: Regular update, beyond Ometepe?
: Paraguay: Contact [[ParaguayEduca]]
: Mexico: Ask Mariana @ OLPCMexico
; OLPC Australia: Great text and videos.
; OLPC Europe: Quarterly update from them?
; OLPC Oceania: Quarterly updates from Mike Hutak
; OLPC Jamaica: Quarterly update from Sameer, good videos.
; North America
: Miami - David! and a story from Chester
: Canada - Jennifer Martino, Q


== News archives ==
5. Active antennas: Thanks to John Watlington and the team from Cozybit, we have out first working “active antenna” prototypes. Attaching them to an XO lets you optimize the placement of the antenna: use with a mesh portal will double the network throughput. They can be used on the school servers or attached a 5V power supply to build a stand-alone WiFI repeater.


'''[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/ Weekly OLPC News postings]''' to the community-news mailing list give updates on recent work. Weekly summaries were also posted on-wiki during [[OLPC:News/2008|2008]]. Weekly postings to the list were put on hold at the start of 2009, and started again in 2010.
6. AC Adaptor: Our thoroughness had led UL to lower the acceptable temperature for AC adaptors by 10C, down to 75C. This week Arnold Kao of Quanta reports testing on an improved AC adaptor—within our current form-factor—that now achieves delta-t of 15C at 50C ambient (65C maximum temperature), down from the 30C delta-t. In addition, if we limit input from the AC adaptor when the thermometer in the battery indicates it is over 45C ambient and the battery is in charge state, our AC adaptors will operate within acceptable range.


Archives: [[OLPC:News/Archive 1|2005-2006]]
7. C build: Rubber feet, removable antennae, a better LCD shock mount, small adjustments to the keyboard, and an improvement of six-degree tilt on the hinge are all underway as the C-build design freeze occurred on Friday. Both “bunny ears” will be replaceable by removing just 8 screws—previously it took 20 screws and the display had to be removed.
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 2|2007]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 3|2008]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 4|2009-10]]


=== Translations ===
8. Weigh in: Mary Lou Jepsen conducted a weigh in for the B3 units this week. B3 with NiMH is 1.5Kg, and B3 with LiFeP is 1.4Kg. These are up slightly from B2 which weighed in at 1.4Kg and 1.3 Kg respectively; although we reduced the battery size slightly, we added a steel plate to the base for stability and better touch-pad operation.
Sporadic translations of news archives from 2008 and earlier can be found here:
: [[OLPC:News/lang-de|German]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-es|Spanish]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-ja|Japanese]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-ko|Korean]]


== [[OLPC:Videos|OLPC videos]] ==
9. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti found and fixed couple of bugs: suspend/resume is now working on USB and wireless. The XO can now suspend and resume while leaving the wireless functional, and the
For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see [http://olpc.tv olpc.tv] and [[OLPC:Videos]].
wireless can now wake up the processor. Thanks to Javier Cardona who also helped with the wireless firmware.


== Sugar news ==
10. Fedora: This week OLPC became an official Fedora project. We will be doing our development directly on the Fedora project's hardware and in their repositories. In the past we always had to do our builds on Red Hat's infrastructure. This means that anyone can contribute to the project directly, including Red Hat people, community members, and the OLPC team.
Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development '''[http://walterbender.org/?cat=3 on his blog]'''.


== Press ==
11. Activities: Work continues on the Journal and its underlying datastore. There were stabilization and performance changes this week, including fixing some problems with the clipboard that had prevented cut and paste across activities. Infrastructure work in support of the presence has also been a focus: it has been broken out into its own module and will support the local mesh network instead of just server mode.
For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the [[OLPC:Press/2005-2008|2005-2008 press archives]].


== Past announcements ==
12. School server: Holger Levsen continued work on the school server installation. The mirror is now updated from the user mirror, via a cronjob at 6am BST daily. It carries Fedora Core 6 and Core 7 and updates Power PC, i386, and source. The live-installer CD is build daily at 8am BST by a cronjob running as builder user (See http://xs-dev.laptop.org/xs-live-installer/ and git://dev.laptop.org/projects/fai-config/fedora/mirror and .../live-installer).
Developed through 2011 by the Racepoint Group, OLPC's ''pro bono'' PR firm.


* 2008-08-06 : [[Media:OLPC-Asia.doc|One Laptop per Child expands its presence in Asia]] with project leads in India and China
13. Test environment: Chris Ball rewrote the tinderbox web site
* 2008-05-20 : [[Media:XO-2-preview.doc|One Laptop per Child frames the next generation of the revolutionary XO laptop]], with a lighter dual-touchscreen design.
(http://dev.laptop.org/tinderbox/) and added activity support to the
* 2008-05-15 : [[Media:XP-on-XO.doc|Microsoft Windows XP is now available on the XO laptop]]
Sugar tinderbox. Every day, Sugar is built on two machines (one running
* 2008-05-03 : [[Media:Kane-appointment.doc|One Laptop per Child appoints Charles Kane as President and Chief Operating Officer]]
Fedora, one running Ubuntu) using sugar-jhbuild; each activity is tested to see whether it starts up successfully. If an activity fails, an e-mail
* 2008-01-07 : [[Media:G1G1-results.doc|One Laptop per Child Giving Campaign Raises $35 Million]] in 2007
is sent to the Sugar mailing list.
* 2007-12-12 : [http://www.smartbrief.com/news/aaaa/industryPR-detail.jsp?id=2FDAB6BE-AE3B-482F-A7B0-6570C75397E4 ''The Kite Runner'' Inspires Gift Through One Laptop]
* 2007-12-05 : [[Media:Peru-OLPC.doc|Peru launches OLPC with 40,000 laptops]], starting with one-classroom schools across the country.
* 2007-12-04 : [[Media:Birmingham-OLPC.doc|Birmingham, Alabama commits to One Laptop per Child]], with a pilot of 15,000 laptops across the city.
* 2007-11-24 : [http://www.50x15.com/en-us/sol_results_xo.aspx The Holiday Season Starts with Giving One Laptop]
* 2007-10-29 : [[Media:Uruguay-launch.doc|OLPC wins a bid to provide 100,000 laptops to children in Uruguay]], to be overseen by the Uruguayan CEIBAL project
* 2007-10-22 : [http://www.businesswire.com/news/google/20071022005302/en One Laptop per Child creates the world's "greenest" laptop computer]
* 2007-06-11 : [[Media:Mass-production.doc|Mass Production of XO's begins!]] at Quanta's Chinese facilities.
* 2007-01-03 : [http://www.businesswire.com/news/google/20070103005194/en OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer]


14. Linux kernel: This week was about stabilizing the kernel for B4. Richard Smith has been rewriting the EC protocol that the kernel uses for poking the EC and hardware; Chris updated the kernel code for that. Debugging the firmware/EC/hardware is ongoing.


There was a massive libertas merge into stable as well; it appears to be
working without too many problems. Dan Williams did some nice work: between the last stable (kernel) release and the upcoming stable
release, some 3000 lines of code were deleted from the libertas driver. The device-tree code has been committed to stable, providing a way for
programs to easily access the hardware configuration and data (e.g.
serial number, UUID, etc.).


[[Category:OLPC]]
15. X Window System: Adam Jackson has made progress toward what is being called “DCON mode,” not to be confused with “ebook mode.” This is using the DCON to take over the display from the Geode so that the video drivers, video subsystem, the fetches from RAM for the video, and the GPU can all be off when the screen is not changing, all to save power, even while the CPU is still powered.

Our Xorg 1.3 porting effort is progressing; it is semi-usable now on Bernardo Innocenti 's desktop. Input rotation has also been seen to work, but only for a brief lucky moment. We still have bugs to fix, but Adam Jackson is already starting to package things for us so that we'll be able to move to 1.3 consistently with the F7 upgrade.

Bernardo is also worked on “beautifying” our startup sequence, but this work didn't make it for B4 unfortunately. There are also concerns that
upstream will never accept a patch for making the Linux console
black-on-white. Jim Gettys wandered through the X keyboard configuration maze to figure out how to map our keyboard, game buttons and game pad properly.

16. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released the B4 firmware, and is beginning to look at firmware for school server. Lilian Walters had a week of one step forward and two steps back. She was all set to test the new nfs/rpc/udp stack using IPv6. Then she found out that her old linux setup just did not cut it. Fortunately, Fedora 7 was released last week claiming to support nfs IPv6. So, she installed F7 on a PC, which also has Windows Vista. She's getting geared up to test again.

17. Etoys: Yoshiki Ohshima continues to work on the Pango support; it is almost ready for the internal testing. Scott Wallace wrote a fix the UI of extending expressions. Takashi Yamamiya's copy-and-paste is coming along: a text in Etoys can now be dragged out to other activities.

18. Gaming: In preparation for the Game Jam we have made a few updates to the game-key mappings (the left and right controllers now map to different things) and PyGameCanvas (to make it work better in a game environment).

=More News=
Laptop News [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf is archived] at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].
Also on [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/ community-news].

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

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

=[[Milestones]]=
Latest milestones:
{{:Milestones}} <!-- Translators, you can either include the english version or the translated version -- it does NOT work with redirects -->
All milestones can be found [[Milestones|here]].



=[[Press]]=
{{:Press}}
More articles can be found [[Press|here]].

=[[Video of the OLPC | Video]]=
Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found [[Video of the OLPC|here]].

* Ivan Krstić delivers a [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4285568518538296189 technical presentation of OLPC] at the Google TechTalk series
* A collection of several videos can found at [http://www.olpc.tv OLPC.TV]
*60 Minutes, What if Every Child had a Laptop [http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/20/60minutes/main2830058.shtml]
*CNN, Should Intel Fear $100 Laptop? [http://money.cnn.com/services/video/]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/04/25/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-02/ Episode Two]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/03/23/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-one/ Episode One]
* OLPC [http://www.sf.tv/var/videoplayer.php?videourl=http%3A%2F%2Freal.xobix.ch%2Framgen%2Fsfdrs%2F10vor10%2F2007%2F10vor10_26012007.rm%3Fstart%3D0%3A05%3A20.498%26amp%3Bend%3D0%3A09%3A50.738 Video from Switzerland], 26.01.2007
*Interview with Nicholas Negroponte [http://www.acm.org/pubs/cie/jan2006/clips/nicholas_negroponte.mov on the &100 Laptop]
*Presentation by Jim Gettys at [http://www.techpresentations.com/2007/03/07/one-laptop-per-child/ FOSDEM 2007]
*GLOBO- BRASIL: Crianças testam computador portátil/ [http://video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM607884-7823-CRIANCAS+TESTAM+COMPUTADOR+PORTATIL,00.html Students test the laptop]
*Mark Foster delivers presentation to [http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx Stanford University]
* Technology Review [http://www.technologyreview.com/video/laptop Mini-Documentary]
* A Brief [http://www.radiofarda.com/Article/2007/01/04/f2_Interview-laptop.html Demo]

Latest revision as of 23:06, 5 August 2013

The contents of this page are considered outdated and some of the information may be stale. Please use information here with caution, or update it.
  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.

To contribute a story or news idea, see the OLPC newsroom.

For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our twitter feed and OLPC blog.

This page historically hosted announcements and news about OLPC, along with the Sugar Labs current events page.

Upcoming pieces

Claudia
Learning Chat piece: 278 words, ready now. File:Learning Chat.docx
Making Learning Visible: Claudia's (& Walter) original is 25 pages. Submitted to a journal. w/o OLPC Background it is down to 12-15 pages w/ screenshots.
This can become a 4-part series.
Antonio
Homo docens: 500+ words, Antonio approved my edits. File:Homo docens JLedits.docx
Further work: we can definitely ask him to contribute on a quarterly basis but I've found that I have to be very specific as to what I am asking to do and he has to be comfortable that it is consistent with his academic work.
Ask for a new piece on the epidemiology of learning
Rodrigo
Ometepe - A beautiful piece with wonderful images. RAH posted a personal and lengthy version (1500+ words) that he shared with his private distribution list. I made an edited version (1200 words) that could be shared publicly. Must check with RAH on this. File:Ometepe articulo por Rodrigo Arboleda.pdf File:Ometepe by Rodrigo Arboleda (3).pdf
I had hoped that we could do a video series with Rodrigo but the budget hasn't been approved. Giulia - can we get an answer on this?
Rwanda
Rwanda case studies
Ceri Whatley - summary of importance of headmasters - confirm subset to reuse
Social mapping project - 1- or 2-part piece - check w/ Julia
Grandmother project - 2- or 3-part piece - check w/ Julia (and is there more to that awesome series?)
Other Africa
So. Africa case studies
Peru and Uruguay
Oscar B's piece on the IADB study?
You said that Uruguay and Peru produce a ton of content on a continuous basis. I'm struggling a bit with how we can easily get the content and translate it into English. Giulia - could Olga help? I don't want to burden her with more work. Maybe we do this every 2-3 months.
Other LatAm
Colombia: Sandra's quarterly? newsletter and website could feed into this. Plus english translations.
Nicaragua: Regular update, beyond Ometepe?
Paraguay: Contact ParaguayEduca
Mexico: Ask Mariana @ OLPCMexico
OLPC Australia
Great text and videos.
OLPC Europe
Quarterly update from them?
OLPC Oceania
Quarterly updates from Mike Hutak
OLPC Jamaica
Quarterly update from Sameer, good videos.
North America
Miami - David! and a story from Chester
Canada - Jennifer Martino, Q

News archives

Weekly OLPC News postings to the community-news mailing list give updates on recent work. Weekly summaries were also posted on-wiki during 2008. Weekly postings to the list were put on hold at the start of 2009, and started again in 2010.

Archives: 2005-2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009-10

Translations

Sporadic translations of news archives from 2008 and earlier can be found here:

German | Spanish | Japanese | Korean

OLPC videos

For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see olpc.tv and OLPC:Videos.

Sugar news

Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development on his blog.

Press

For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the 2005-2008 press archives.

Past announcements

Developed through 2011 by the Racepoint Group, OLPC's pro bono PR firm.