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=Laptop News 2007-06-24=
__TOC__
</div>


To contribute a story or news idea, see the '''[[OLPC:Newsroom|OLPC newsroom]]'''.
1. Shanghai: Mary Lou Jepsen, John Watlington, Richard Smith, and David Woodhouse joined the extensive team from Quanta in Shanghai for the B4 build. 2000 laptops are scheduled to be built by the end of Monday, more than half are already built. Things went so well that the build was started early, leaving the OLPC team ample time to work other components of the OLPC ecosystem: school server, multi-battery charger, active antennae, and WiFi repeaters. The B4 yield (so far) is approximately 99%—up substantially from previous builds. Improvements in B4 include: texture on the upper handle bar; increased hinge tilt; elimination of the hinge “squeak”; rabbit ears that click into place when put into the down position; elimination of a slight camera vignetting by the bezel; minor modifications to the motherboard; etc.


For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our [[twitter]] feed and [http://blog.laptop.org OLPC blog].
2. EC: Richard Smith and David Woodhouse have moved the kernel battery driver over to new embedded controller (EC) protocol. In the process, David had some some suggestions that Richard will be folding back into the EC code. Meanwhile, Richard has flushed out a few minor EC bugs and submitted fixes back to Quanta.


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. School server: Scott Ananian, John Watlington, and Dan Margo worked on school-server configuration management. The process—a combination of RedHat's RPM system and a version-control system—will allow system updates of OLPC specific configuration files while preserving local configuration modifications.


== Upcoming pieces ==
4. Firmware: Mitch Bradley started work on school-server firmware and integrated the cryptographic code into Open Firmware needed for our Bitfrost security system. Lilian Walter modified the TCP layer to support IPv6. She can successfully “finger” and “telnet” to her Fedora Core 7 PC.
; 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. System: Chris Ball wrote a script to backup and restore user data from a USB disk during OS build upgrades, so that laptops can be upgraded to newer builds without losing data. The script is still being tested, since there are some “corner cases” to deal with—for example, some old Sugar configuration files causes newer versions of Sugar to crash at startup.


'''[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.
Andres Salomon did some merging (we are up to 2.6.22-rc5 on master) and created a vserver branch and added the vserver patch (See http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/vserver). He also did some bug triaging and worked on merging in the persistence-USB code from Andrew Morton's -mm tree.


Archives: [[OLPC:News/Archive 1|2005-2006]]
Scott Ananian spend the week writing kernel patches for DNS autoconfiguration over Ipv6. The kernel functionality is now working; Scott still has to patch this into “userland” properly (glibc and/or network manager), and get the patches shipped and accepted upstream. In the process, Scott fixed another bug in the router advertisement daemon (radvd) this week, added some kernel documentation, and found a few minor bugs in the kernel to fix.
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 2|2007]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 3|2008]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 4|2009-10]]


=== Translations ===
Bernardo Innocenti has been looking into Geode optimizations of glibc—Rob Savoye had developed some optimizations working from code originally written by John Zulauf.
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]] ==
John Palmieri has been working on the Fedora 7 move. Most of the packages we need to worry about now in place. We will be pulling our builds together from three different repository: the F7/OLPC repository, dilinger's (Andres’s) kernel repository, and a temporary repository that exists until we have emergency builds and until Etoys can be put into the Fedora repositories.
For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see [http://olpc.tv olpc.tv] and [[OLPC:Videos]].


== Sugar news ==
Alex Larsson, who is on loan from the Red Hat desktop team, has been working on a new live-update system for the XO. He posted comments for review to the devel mailing list earlier this week and has since then been working on an implementation. He now has code that can update between image versions, including reverting back to older versions of an image. He also has working code that can detect an update that is available from another laptop on the mesh, and can download it locally instead of going to a central server over a potentially slow, high-latency, high-cost network. Finally, he has code that will host an update on a laptop and publish it on the mesh.
Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development '''[http://walterbender.org/?cat=3 on his blog]'''.


== Press ==
6. X11: The X11 update is only missing a few package rebuilds and a few new RPMs. The new keyboard descriptions are ready to go. Bernardo, Miles Grimshaw, and Walter Bender have been collecting more localized keyboards (Turkish, Ethiopic) and modularizing our changes to make them acceptable for upstream. Bernardo has gotten a positive response from Sergey Udaltsov regarding our changes and is waiting for final approval.
For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the [[OLPC:Press/2005-2008|2005-2008 press archives]].


== Past announcements ==
7. USB: Marcelo Tosatti, working with Cozybit and Marvell in California, made great progress in debugging our USB suspend/resume issues. Javier Cardona and Marcelo were able to acquire accurate traces of the activity on the USB bus. Those traces showed that the USB host controller is entering an invalid state during resume if the wireless device detaches after getting the host_sleep_active notification from the host. Their workaround is to have the wireless device idle for 3mS on the USB bus before detaching; they implemented that in wireless firmware version 5.110.16.p0. This is great progress towards fully working suspend/resume.
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
8. Wireless: Marvell's team in India released wireless firmware that incorporates the new mesh frame format as well as mesh beacon frames (5.110.15.p1). Their release was followed by the release of 5.110.16.p0, which incorporates the support for host sleep and the aforementioned workaround for the USB suspend/resume. Cozybit has also released patches for ethereal/wireshark that decode the new frame format. With this release, we are moving closer to the emerging 802.11s standard and we are also averting problems with existing access points that support lazy-WDS. Note that this firmware version is not interoperable with any previous released versions. Nodes running the new firmware will disrupt and be disrupted by nodes running older versions of the firmware. Q&A testing will be proceeding this week with the goal of incorporating the new frame format in the upcoming stable build. From a network-manager perspective this release greatly simplifies sensing for the presence of mesh nodes. Dan Williams continued work on the Libertas wireless driver. He also spent time getting Avahi ready for the network-manager auto-mesh code.
* 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.
* 2008-05-15 : [[Media:XP-on-XO.doc|Microsoft Windows XP is now available on the XO laptop]]
* 2008-05-03 : [[Media:Kane-appointment.doc|One Laptop per Child appoints Charles Kane as President and Chief Operating Officer]]
* 2008-01-07 : [[Media:G1G1-results.doc|One Laptop per Child Giving Campaign Raises $35 Million]] in 2007
* 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]


9. Sugar: Ben Saller continues work on the data store for the Journal. He has been working on support so that one can store Journal entries on pluggable media (such as USB keys) and access entries over the network. He also fixed several bugs that Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti needed.


Guillaume Desmottes spent the week working on peer-to-peer tubes support so that more than two people can join an activity (instead of
activities being strictly peer to peer). Large parts of this code are working today. There will be more progress next week.


[[Category:OLPC]]
Marco spent much of the week working on the Fedora 7 port. He also made a number of fixes in the Journal, the theme, and Sugar in general.
He is largely concentrating on Trial-2 bug fixes. He wrote a simple
activity to demonstrate how to integrate with the Journal (See http://dev.laptop.org/~marco/edit-activity).

Marco and Chris Blizzard worked with the Fedora Translation team to set up an easy-to-use interface for translators to be able to help translate Fedora. A Google Summer of Code student has been working on a web
interface that makes it easy for the several hundred Fedora translators
to interact with upstream projects like OLPC (As and example, see http://translate.fedoraproject.org/module/olpc-journal-activity). We do not have all of the work flow completed, but this is an important first step to closing the loop with translators.

Tomeu spent the week doing a lot of bug fixing in the web activity, the
Journal and the Sugar shell. He also did a lot of testing of the data
store and worked with Ben to fix bugs that he found. In addition he
added a lot of new stuff for Trial 2, including:
* implement of modal dialogs for the web browser;
* in the Journal:
** you can now change an entry title;
** install and execute activities you have downloaded (but are not on the main toolbar);
** take a screenshot of the activity's canvas and use it as a preview for an entry;
** add a save-in-journal button to the default activity toolbar to
** explicitly save something to the journal;
** drag entries from the journal into the clipboard; and
** use the object-type registry;
* in the sugar shell:
** add an option to save objects in the clipboard to the Journal;
** make the clipboard also use the object-type registry.

10. Sugar Activities in the community: Marc Maurer has been working on collision detection for multiple-document editing. He and the rest of the Abiword team have an algorithm they are happy with. The really adventurous can look at the document (See http://uwog.net/~uwog/abiword/abicollab.pdf).

Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger implemented the IPv6 support for
Squeak and ready for the testing. This will enable various collaborative tools in Etoys work over the IPv6 mesh network. Scott Wallace published the FunctionTile feature to the public image; this enables the Etoys user to write scripts with mathematical functions. Bert Freudenberg's recent work encompasses: patching Sugar; X Windows System display support code for the Squeak virtual machine; and an Etoys hook to enables smoother integration of Etoys to the Sugar environment. Ted Kaehler and Alan Kay are working on the kids version of text editor written in Etoys, as well as the simulation of colliding billiard balls. Takashi Yamamiya is now looking at the final integration of
a drag-and-drop mechanism. Yoshiki Ohshima helped the code generation part of FunctionTile, as well as the documentation of
projects.

Jean Piché and the core TamTam team spent the first half of the week at the OLPC office in Cambridge working closely with Eben Eliason on reworking the TamTam interface in light of Sugar “tabs” and some new functional and structural ideas that the team has been exploring. The result will be a recasting of MiniTamTam into TamTamJam, which will enable the explorations and improvisations we enjoy in TamTam to extend across multiple machines on the mesh; and a cleaner integration of the rich and varied functionality of TamTamEdit, making this powerful composition tool more accessible. They also did some preliminary exploration of Barry Vercoe’s fixed-point C-Sound implementation; evaluated TamTam on the B3 hardware; and discussed details of Journal integration with Tomeu.

Kent Quirk reports from the XO game-development front that Patrick DeJarnette has created the beginnings of a generic side-scroller
game toolkit and has a demonstration game that is beginning to feel a
lot “a-like a-Mario.” It hasn't yet been turned into an activity or tested
on the XO, but the approach is sound and we should see it running
next week. This toolkit is intended to allow children to easily create
arcade-like games on the XO.

Lincoln Quirk has been working on integrating PyGame with Sugar. He has taken Noah Kantrowitz's wrapper code and extended it, but there are problems integrating properly with GTK. For the last few days, he has been working on a Cairo-based implementation of PyGame, which is starting to work, but is so far quite a bit slower than the existing PyGame code. It may be fast enough to use for some games, it looks beautiful, and we hope it will get faster over time.

Roberto Fagá has been building an adventure game toolkit called ISIS intended to build text-based adventures with graphical illustrations. The longterm goal is to build a drag-and-drop storytelling game toolkit that kids can use. He just got his hands on an XO and is working on getting the graphics portion of the toolkit functional.

As a team, the gamers now have a git repository and have checked in all of their work, as well as other games from the OLPC game jam. There are several games that they hope to build on over the next few weeks, including a Mancala/Owari stone game that will support play either on a single machine or across the mesh.

Kuku Anakula, a flashcard-style game, has been polished for Trial 2; it can share configuration files and tile sets with the Memonumber game.

MaMaMedia has finished three activities: a slider puzzle, an e-poll generator, and a teacher center, the latter being a place for teachers to learn and contribute to how they can use activities to integrate XO programs (Paint, Camera, Write) into their teaching. In the teacher center, there are lesson ideas for exploring the XO and the activities, a glossary, some background on Constructionism, etc.

11. Content: SJ Klein and Mel Chua, who organized the Game jam, are working on a generalized notion of “jam,” for a broader community audience. The FHSST group in South Africa is running a jam out of Berkeley to make high school curricula and polish their texts. The Polish Free Texts project has their own variant on the theme for teachers. In progress: defining a space for collating links to such initiatives; developing a framework that allows for broad intake of all kinds of material, and for a refinement step that converts scans or documents into final formats for printing, storing in specialized repositories, storing on wikis and other collaboration sites. Meanwhile, SJ has been working on style guidelines for content contributions.

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is planning some content jams for educators and authors towards the end of the summer and early fall. They are expanding their collaboration on free textbooks starting with wikieducator, where public domain texts are being added to the “XXI texts” project, a project to find textbooks that have entered the public domain. They are working with educators to get primary texts online and developing an OLPC project on the site. A new mailing list for free texts has been set up, with COL, an Arabic texts project, the Polish Free Textbook project, Free Culture's college texts project, and OLPC. The Open Society Institute is looking into ways to fund a specific short-term effort to bootstrap these groups and bring their efforts together.

There was an entire track at the third annual iCommons summit dedicated to open education. OLPC and growing rural networks were highlighted as an example of the most revolutionary target audience. Over the course of a year or so, there are many projects aiming to develop free materials and interested n focusing on developing-world primary school; beginning with the Shuttleworth Foundation and FHSST and Schoolnet projects in southern Africa.

Google’s OurStories continues apace and is looking for active contacts in each country to help coordinate story gathering via activities.

=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]].

* A collection of several videos can found at [http://www.olpc.tv OLPC.TV]
* Ivan Krstić delivers a [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4285568518538296189 technical presentation of OLPC] at the Google TechTalk series
*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/2007/06/08/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-03/ Episode Three]
*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.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.laptop.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=OLPC:News&oldid=290742"