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=Laptop News 2007-05-19=
=Laptop News 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!!
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.


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.
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.


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:
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.


* 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.
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.)


* 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.
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.


* 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.
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.


* 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.
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.


* 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.
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.


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


* 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.
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.


* 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.
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.
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]].
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.


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.
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.


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.
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.


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.
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.


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.
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.)


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).
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.


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.
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.


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:
16. TamTam: Jean Piché reports that the TamTam team is making its summer plans:
* 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);
* 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.
* Thermal profile: taking the temperature of most chips on the motherboard, while running a suite of applications at 50C;
* merge TamTam Jam and miniTamTam into one integrated activity; the TamTam suite would revert to a three-prong affair: Play, Compose, Make sounds.
* Altitude testing: operation tested for 8 hrs at 5.5 Km;
* Sugar conformity and integration: the Sugar controller toolkit is almost complete enough for all of the TamTam purposes.
* Free-drop steel-ball test (onto LCD);
* TamTam tunes outside TamTam: a simple embeddable TamTam player so children can put their compositions into documents. (AbiWord would be the first target.)
* Free-throw test: simulating a child free throwing an XO, its battery, and power brick onto the floor.
* 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.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 15:56, 26 May 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
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Laptop News 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 Sadder 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.

More News

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

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

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

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Articles

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Laptop News 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 Sadder 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.

More News

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Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Articles

Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

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