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[[Category:General Public]]
[[Category:General Public]]


=Laptop News 2007-05-26=
=Laptop News 2007-06-02=
1. NYC: OLPC, Quanta, Fuse, Gecko, and Pentagram met at the Pentagram office to do the final mechanical design review for B4. B4 build is scheduled for June 22. At least 2000 units will be built over a one-to-two week period; we are trying to find a way to build more units if possible.
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. Washington DC: Nicholas Negroponte and Walter Bender spent Thursday at the World Bank. Our host was Ruth Kagia, Education Director. A presentation to ~50 staffers and a hour-long Q&A session both dispelled much misinformation about OLPC and generated enthusiasm for the OLPC mission.
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. Power adaptors: Mary Lou Jepsen’s investigation of burn temperatures for children’s skin resulted in UL lowering their maximum temperature allowed for the OLPC AC adaptor from 85C to 75C. (When was the last time that a company seeking certification helped make the specifications tougher?)
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. Certification: 10 B3 laptops have been sent to UL for certification testing. They will be tested for UL60950. Uruguay has asked for our water-resistance certification. Mary Lou is investigating testing: we will likely be able to achieve IP42 and perhaps better. IP42 means that a test wire 1mm in diameter shall not penetrate the housing and water that is dripped at a rainfall rate for 2.5 minutes in each of 4 different positions shall also not penetrate the housing. We may be able achieve something better, such as IP54, which tests if a suspension of talcum powder ends up in the housing (unlikely due to our fanless operation) and water is sprayed for 10 minutes from a series of nozzles (might be possible in the closed tote-mode of the laptop).
4. [[Environmental Impact|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. Server: Fuse presented a new concept design for the server that allows fans outside the housing of the server to cool it down continuously in a chimney type.
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:


6. Batteries: MIT Materials Science Professor Sadoway visited OLPC this week to discuss battery chemistry Mary Lou, Richard Smith, and John Watlington. As a result of his visit we are investigating our own tests of charging LiFeP at higher ambient temperature, as well as sampling, lifetime recycling.
* 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.


7. Mesh: Marcelo Tosatti, who celebrated his birthday this week, working with Dan Williams, Javier Cardona (Cozybit), and Ronak Chokshi's team at Marvell, reached a milestone: working autonomous mesh operation while the XO is suspended. Richard Smith worked with Marcelo, CozyBit and Mitch Bradley to verify that the WLAN wake up is working. (Signals from the WLAN are causing the EC to generate system call interrupts, but the kernel is yet not waking up correctly.)
* 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.


Mesh testing also continues. In certain cases, having an environment without other radio sources is necessary in order to strongly correlate cause and effect. Michail Bletsas joined H.T. Kung's group at Harvard Univesity's Soldier's Field for testing a setup where the school gateway enforces fair internet access among a group of dispersed laptops.
* 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.


8. Network: Dan also continued to chase the libertas patches and has been driving the changes upstream into the kernel. He has also been spending time on NetworkManager upstream, trying to get the next release into shape for use in OLPC. There are a lot of features in the next planned release (0.7) that he's already back-ported into our build that will be picked up when we upgrade. Dan and the Collabora team continue work on the Presence Service; it is nearly feature completed with a stable API.
* 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.


9. Sugar: Ben Saller worked on text indexing in the data store, which should make it easy to search in the Journal. Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti have both been working on the browser and on the cleaning up the data store and Sugar interactions. They have also been refactoring code in preparation of putting it into new build images. John Palmieri spent time on the totem video player browser plugin. He also spent some time looking into what it will take to move to Fedora 7. (Fedora 7 was released on May 31st.) Chris Ball hooked up our ebook flip sensor to rotate the screen automatically, which involved patches to the kernel, the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and Sugar. Chris also established a Sugar tinderbox (See http://dev.laptop.org/sugar-tinder/). Upcoming features include runtime testing of activities and RSS and e-mail notification of new/failed builds. Muriel de Souza Godoi will be working Eben Eliason on refining the UI in many of our standard Sugar activities.
* 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.


10. X Window System: The Geode LX has a significantly more capable graphics engine than the GX, which makes investing in optimizing its driver more important. Further, it is time to complete work on the input issues relating to screen rotation; this requires working on the “master” branch of X.org. Bernie Innocenti and Jordan Crouse worked on updating the Geode driver to the current X.org master branch, and fought and fixed a number of rendering bugs. There are some more bugs to be chased and squashed exposed by testing, though it again functions
* Tomeu has also been working with Ben Saller to implement new features in the data store that are needed by the Journal.
adequately for Sugar's current use. Jim Gettys refreshed his knowledge of xkb in preparation to adding keysyms now that the keyboard is finalized and our UI needs more clearly understood.


11. Power management: Adam Jackson worked on display-controller (DCON) power management. The Geode has “compression buffers” that can greatly reduce bandwidth use for graphics by compressing pixels on their way to the screen. But even better is to be able to turn off the video output entirely, which the DCON makes possible, in which the Geode will entirely power down that part of the screen. A discovery by Mitch that enables us to restart the video unit on the Geode with almost no latency means that we can use DCON mode much more
* 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.
aggressively than we had expected, and may find it unnecessary to deal
with compression buffers. We also want to dynamically control the frame rate; we can save 60mw (significant in ebook mode) by driving the panel at 25hz rather than 50hz. Adam has started on this work.


12. Kernel: Andres Salomon synced the kernel up with 2.6.22-rc1. Unfortunately, this seemed rather broken; this week, Andres synced with 2.6.22-rc3, and it behaved much better. Andres also pulled in a new libertas driver. Marcelo discovered a bug in our suspend/resume code that was triggered by the updated kernel code; with that fixed, suspend/resume works in master again. (There is still some remaining console corruption that needs to be worked out.) Andres started digging into the vserver capabilities, which is key to the deployment of BitFrost.
* 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.


13. Firmware: Mitch worked on stabilizing the firmware for B4: he fixed minor bugs 1580, 1577, 498 and serious bug 1609. He reverted the automatic “freeze screen” (quiet boot) behavior due to the OS support not being ready for it. You can still use it by adding a “freeze” line in olpc.fth, and changed the startup sound so that you have to press a game key to hear it.
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]].


Note: Q2C14 is not recommended for general use; a new release will be issued as soon as Mitch get official EC bits from Quanta.
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.


14. Embedded controller: Mitch added support for a new embedded controller (EC) command protocol to Open Firmware (OFW). Richard Smith worked on implementing the protocol. The protocol is mostly complete and partially tested. Its currently working well enough to switch the kernel over to using these commands. The next firmware release will have this new protocol enabled. Richard also tested an EC code drop from Quanta which worked on resolving some of our blocker bugs.
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.


15. Hardware: John Watlington spent most of the week rewriting and updating the XO Hardware Design Specification. This is the document that describes the basic hardware features of the XO in detail. The electrical design of the B4 is completed. There are very few changes from the B3 design, just fixes for remaining small problems. The motherboard was released by Quanta for circuit board fabrication.
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.


16. From the community: Rob Savoye reports that since ffmpeg isn't (and probably will never be) included in the OLPC builds, he built a binary tarball of Gnash with full audio and video support. (The Gnash build for 406 has no video support enable for Flash codecs.) You can download this snapshot of the upcoming Gnash release from ttp://gnashdev.org/olpc/download.html. The tarball gets installed in /usr/local, and the plugin gets installed in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. The embedded video performance is adequate, streaming performance is around 3-5 fps max. (This was on a B1. B3 results will be reported soon.)
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=
=More News=

Revision as of 14:29, 2 June 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 40777]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-06-02

1. NYC: OLPC, Quanta, Fuse, Gecko, and Pentagram met at the Pentagram office to do the final mechanical design review for B4. B4 build is scheduled for June 22. At least 2000 units will be built over a one-to-two week period; we are trying to find a way to build more units if possible.

2. Washington DC: Nicholas Negroponte and Walter Bender spent Thursday at the World Bank. Our host was Ruth Kagia, Education Director. A presentation to ~50 staffers and a hour-long Q&A session both dispelled much misinformation about OLPC and generated enthusiasm for the OLPC mission.

3. Power adaptors: Mary Lou Jepsen’s investigation of burn temperatures for children’s skin resulted in UL lowering their maximum temperature allowed for the OLPC AC adaptor from 85C to 75C. (When was the last time that a company seeking certification helped make the specifications tougher?)

4. Certification: 10 B3 laptops have been sent to UL for certification testing. They will be tested for UL60950. Uruguay has asked for our water-resistance certification. Mary Lou is investigating testing: we will likely be able to achieve IP42 and perhaps better. IP42 means that a test wire 1mm in diameter shall not penetrate the housing and water that is dripped at a rainfall rate for 2.5 minutes in each of 4 different positions shall also not penetrate the housing. We may be able achieve something better, such as IP54, which tests if a suspension of talcum powder ends up in the housing (unlikely due to our fanless operation) and water is sprayed for 10 minutes from a series of nozzles (might be possible in the closed tote-mode of the laptop).

5. Server: Fuse presented a new concept design for the server that allows fans outside the housing of the server to cool it down continuously in a chimney type.

6. Batteries: MIT Materials Science Professor Sadoway visited OLPC this week to discuss battery chemistry Mary Lou, Richard Smith, and John Watlington. As a result of his visit we are investigating our own tests of charging LiFeP at higher ambient temperature, as well as sampling, lifetime recycling.

7. Mesh: Marcelo Tosatti, who celebrated his birthday this week, working with Dan Williams, Javier Cardona (Cozybit), and Ronak Chokshi's team at Marvell, reached a milestone: working autonomous mesh operation while the XO is suspended. Richard Smith worked with Marcelo, CozyBit and Mitch Bradley to verify that the WLAN wake up is working. (Signals from the WLAN are causing the EC to generate system call interrupts, but the kernel is yet not waking up correctly.)

Mesh testing also continues. In certain cases, having an environment without other radio sources is necessary in order to strongly correlate cause and effect. Michail Bletsas joined H.T. Kung's group at Harvard Univesity's Soldier's Field for testing a setup where the school gateway enforces fair internet access among a group of dispersed laptops.

8. Network: Dan also continued to chase the libertas patches and has been driving the changes upstream into the kernel. He has also been spending time on NetworkManager upstream, trying to get the next release into shape for use in OLPC. There are a lot of features in the next planned release (0.7) that he's already back-ported into our build that will be picked up when we upgrade. Dan and the Collabora team continue work on the Presence Service; it is nearly feature completed with a stable API.

9. Sugar: Ben Saller worked on text indexing in the data store, which should make it easy to search in the Journal. Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti have both been working on the browser and on the cleaning up the data store and Sugar interactions. They have also been refactoring code in preparation of putting it into new build images. John Palmieri spent time on the totem video player browser plugin. He also spent some time looking into what it will take to move to Fedora 7. (Fedora 7 was released on May 31st.) Chris Ball hooked up our ebook flip sensor to rotate the screen automatically, which involved patches to the kernel, the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and Sugar. Chris also established a Sugar tinderbox (See http://dev.laptop.org/sugar-tinder/). Upcoming features include runtime testing of activities and RSS and e-mail notification of new/failed builds. Muriel de Souza Godoi will be working Eben Eliason on refining the UI in many of our standard Sugar activities.

10. X Window System: The Geode LX has a significantly more capable graphics engine than the GX, which makes investing in optimizing its driver more important. Further, it is time to complete work on the input issues relating to screen rotation; this requires working on the “master” branch of X.org. Bernie Innocenti and Jordan Crouse worked on updating the Geode driver to the current X.org master branch, and fought and fixed a number of rendering bugs. There are some more bugs to be chased and squashed exposed by testing, though it again functions adequately for Sugar's current use. Jim Gettys refreshed his knowledge of xkb in preparation to adding keysyms now that the keyboard is finalized and our UI needs more clearly understood.

11. Power management: Adam Jackson worked on display-controller (DCON) power management. The Geode has “compression buffers” that can greatly reduce bandwidth use for graphics by compressing pixels on their way to the screen. But even better is to be able to turn off the video output entirely, which the DCON makes possible, in which the Geode will entirely power down that part of the screen. A discovery by Mitch that enables us to restart the video unit on the Geode with almost no latency means that we can use DCON mode much more aggressively than we had expected, and may find it unnecessary to deal with compression buffers. We also want to dynamically control the frame rate; we can save 60mw (significant in ebook mode) by driving the panel at 25hz rather than 50hz. Adam has started on this work.

12. Kernel: Andres Salomon synced the kernel up with 2.6.22-rc1. Unfortunately, this seemed rather broken; this week, Andres synced with 2.6.22-rc3, and it behaved much better. Andres also pulled in a new libertas driver. Marcelo discovered a bug in our suspend/resume code that was triggered by the updated kernel code; with that fixed, suspend/resume works in master again. (There is still some remaining console corruption that needs to be worked out.) Andres started digging into the vserver capabilities, which is key to the deployment of BitFrost.

13. Firmware: Mitch worked on stabilizing the firmware for B4: he fixed minor bugs 1580, 1577, 498 and serious bug 1609. He reverted the automatic “freeze screen” (quiet boot) behavior due to the OS support not being ready for it. You can still use it by adding a “freeze” line in olpc.fth, and changed the startup sound so that you have to press a game key to hear it.

Note: Q2C14 is not recommended for general use; a new release will be issued as soon as Mitch get official EC bits from Quanta.

14. Embedded controller: Mitch added support for a new embedded controller (EC) command protocol to Open Firmware (OFW). Richard Smith worked on implementing the protocol. The protocol is mostly complete and partially tested. Its currently working well enough to switch the kernel over to using these commands. The next firmware release will have this new protocol enabled. Richard also tested an EC code drop from Quanta which worked on resolving some of our blocker bugs.

15. Hardware: John Watlington spent most of the week rewriting and updating the XO Hardware Design Specification. This is the document that describes the basic hardware features of the XO in detail. The electrical design of the B4 is completed. There are very few changes from the B3 design, just fixes for remaining small problems. The motherboard was released by Quanta for circuit board fabrication.

16. From the community: Rob Savoye reports that since ffmpeg isn't (and probably will never be) included in the OLPC builds, he built a binary tarball of Gnash with full audio and video support. (The Gnash build for 406 has no video support enable for Flash codecs.) You can download this snapshot of the upcoming Gnash release from ttp://gnashdev.org/olpc/download.html. The tarball gets installed in /usr/local, and the plugin gets installed in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. The embedded video performance is adequate, streaming performance is around 3-5 fps max. (This was on a B1. B3 results will be reported soon.)

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

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 40777]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-06-02

1. NYC: OLPC, Quanta, Fuse, Gecko, and Pentagram met at the Pentagram office to do the final mechanical design review for B4. B4 build is scheduled for June 22. At least 2000 units will be built over a one-to-two week period; we are trying to find a way to build more units if possible.

2. Washington DC: Nicholas Negroponte and Walter Bender spent Thursday at the World Bank. Our host was Ruth Kagia, Education Director. A presentation to ~50 staffers and a hour-long Q&A session both dispelled much misinformation about OLPC and generated enthusiasm for the OLPC mission.

3. Power adaptors: Mary Lou Jepsen’s investigation of burn temperatures for children’s skin resulted in UL lowering their maximum temperature allowed for the OLPC AC adaptor from 85C to 75C. (When was the last time that a company seeking certification helped make the specifications tougher?)

4. Certification: 10 B3 laptops have been sent to UL for certification testing. They will be tested for UL60950. Uruguay has asked for our water-resistance certification. Mary Lou is investigating testing: we will likely be able to achieve IP42 and perhaps better. IP42 means that a test wire 1mm in diameter shall not penetrate the housing and water that is dripped at a rainfall rate for 2.5 minutes in each of 4 different positions shall also not penetrate the housing. We may be able achieve something better, such as IP54, which tests if a suspension of talcum powder ends up in the housing (unlikely due to our fanless operation) and water is sprayed for 10 minutes from a series of nozzles (might be possible in the closed tote-mode of the laptop).

5. Server: Fuse presented a new concept design for the server that allows fans outside the housing of the server to cool it down continuously in a chimney type.

6. Batteries: MIT Materials Science Professor Sadoway visited OLPC this week to discuss battery chemistry Mary Lou, Richard Smith, and John Watlington. As a result of his visit we are investigating our own tests of charging LiFeP at higher ambient temperature, as well as sampling, lifetime recycling.

7. Mesh: Marcelo Tosatti, who celebrated his birthday this week, working with Dan Williams, Javier Cardona (Cozybit), and Ronak Chokshi's team at Marvell, reached a milestone: working autonomous mesh operation while the XO is suspended. Richard Smith worked with Marcelo, CozyBit and Mitch Bradley to verify that the WLAN wake up is working. (Signals from the WLAN are causing the EC to generate system call interrupts, but the kernel is yet not waking up correctly.)

Mesh testing also continues. In certain cases, having an environment without other radio sources is necessary in order to strongly correlate cause and effect. Michail Bletsas joined H.T. Kung's group at Harvard Univesity's Soldier's Field for testing a setup where the school gateway enforces fair internet access among a group of dispersed laptops.

8. Network: Dan also continued to chase the libertas patches and has been driving the changes upstream into the kernel. He has also been spending time on NetworkManager upstream, trying to get the next release into shape for use in OLPC. There are a lot of features in the next planned release (0.7) that he's already back-ported into our build that will be picked up when we upgrade. Dan and the Collabora team continue work on the Presence Service; it is nearly feature completed with a stable API.

9. Sugar: Ben Saller worked on text indexing in the data store, which should make it easy to search in the Journal. Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti have both been working on the browser and on the cleaning up the data store and Sugar interactions. They have also been refactoring code in preparation of putting it into new build images. John Palmieri spent time on the totem video player browser plugin. He also spent some time looking into what it will take to move to Fedora 7. (Fedora 7 was released on May 31st.) Chris Ball hooked up our ebook flip sensor to rotate the screen automatically, which involved patches to the kernel, the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and Sugar. Chris also established a Sugar tinderbox (See http://dev.laptop.org/sugar-tinder/). Upcoming features include runtime testing of activities and RSS and e-mail notification of new/failed builds. Muriel de Souza Godoi will be working Eben Eliason on refining the UI in many of our standard Sugar activities.

10. X Window System: The Geode LX has a significantly more capable graphics engine than the GX, which makes investing in optimizing its driver more important. Further, it is time to complete work on the input issues relating to screen rotation; this requires working on the “master” branch of X.org. Bernie Innocenti and Jordan Crouse worked on updating the Geode driver to the current X.org master branch, and fought and fixed a number of rendering bugs. There are some more bugs to be chased and squashed exposed by testing, though it again functions adequately for Sugar's current use. Jim Gettys refreshed his knowledge of xkb in preparation to adding keysyms now that the keyboard is finalized and our UI needs more clearly understood.

11. Power management: Adam Jackson worked on display-controller (DCON) power management. The Geode has “compression buffers” that can greatly reduce bandwidth use for graphics by compressing pixels on their way to the screen. But even better is to be able to turn off the video output entirely, which the DCON makes possible, in which the Geode will entirely power down that part of the screen. A discovery by Mitch that enables us to restart the video unit on the Geode with almost no latency means that we can use DCON mode much more aggressively than we had expected, and may find it unnecessary to deal with compression buffers. We also want to dynamically control the frame rate; we can save 60mw (significant in ebook mode) by driving the panel at 25hz rather than 50hz. Adam has started on this work.

12. Kernel: Andres Salomon synced the kernel up with 2.6.22-rc1. Unfortunately, this seemed rather broken; this week, Andres synced with 2.6.22-rc3, and it behaved much better. Andres also pulled in a new libertas driver. Marcelo discovered a bug in our suspend/resume code that was triggered by the updated kernel code; with that fixed, suspend/resume works in master again. (There is still some remaining console corruption that needs to be worked out.) Andres started digging into the vserver capabilities, which is key to the deployment of BitFrost.

13. Firmware: Mitch worked on stabilizing the firmware for B4: he fixed minor bugs 1580, 1577, 498 and serious bug 1609. He reverted the automatic “freeze screen” (quiet boot) behavior due to the OS support not being ready for it. You can still use it by adding a “freeze” line in olpc.fth, and changed the startup sound so that you have to press a game key to hear it.

Note: Q2C14 is not recommended for general use; a new release will be issued as soon as Mitch get official EC bits from Quanta.

14. Embedded controller: Mitch added support for a new embedded controller (EC) command protocol to Open Firmware (OFW). Richard Smith worked on implementing the protocol. The protocol is mostly complete and partially tested. Its currently working well enough to switch the kernel over to using these commands. The next firmware release will have this new protocol enabled. Richard also tested an EC code drop from Quanta which worked on resolving some of our blocker bugs.

15. Hardware: John Watlington spent most of the week rewriting and updating the XO Hardware Design Specification. This is the document that describes the basic hardware features of the XO in detail. The electrical design of the B4 is completed. There are very few changes from the B3 design, just fixes for remaining small problems. The motherboard was released by Quanta for circuit board fabrication.

16. From the community: Rob Savoye reports that since ffmpeg isn't (and probably will never be) included in the OLPC builds, he built a binary tarball of Gnash with full audio and video support. (The Gnash build for 406 has no video support enable for Flash codecs.) You can download this snapshot of the upcoming Gnash release from ttp://gnashdev.org/olpc/download.html. The tarball gets installed in /usr/local, and the plugin gets installed in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. The embedded video performance is adequate, streaming performance is around 3-5 fps max. (This was on a B1. B3 results will be reported soon.)

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.


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Video

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