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=Laptop News 2007-06-02=
=Laptop News 2007-06-09=
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. Heiligendamm, Germany: UNICEF’s Christopher Fabian and Merrick Schaefer organized a youth summit (called the “J8”), around the G8 Summit. The summit consists of 10 youth from each G8 country and 10 from the developing world, taking place before and during the G8; preparing position papers on the issues facing the world's youth, which they will present to the G8. They are using 90 XOs to capture images and video for interviews (of one another and other attendees) and to collaborate on their reports. They are also testing a distributed/off-line wiki for the XO designed by Mako Hill. For much of the week they have had no Internet connectivity, but they are collaborating over the mesh. Bert Freudenberg, a member of the Etoys team, helped to mentor the delegates.
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. Needham, MA: Mel Chua, Kent Quirk, and SJ Klein are hosting the first OLPC Game Jam this weekend a Olin College; the event is designed to encourage experimentation and innovation in the game industry and kick off development of open-source games for the XO. 40 game developers were off to a good start last night (with others participating remotely). Roberto Faga, a summer of code student working on game libraries, is planning another for Brazil, likely in October.
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. Scott Ananian will be starting at OLPC on Monday as a software engineer. Scott will be jumping right in after receiving his Ph.D. from EECS at MIT yesterday. He will bring to us an 10 years of experience hacking and debugging kernel patches and drivers. Besides the technical skills, Scott is deeply committed to the OLPC project.
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. Product line up: We are shipping five products this fall: (1) the XO laptop; (2) a school server; (3) a multi-battery charger; an active antenna; and (5) a solar-powered WiFi repeater. Much of the emphasis has been on the laptop, but a push from Quanta this week has resulted in firmer plans for the other products.
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. Active antennas: Thanks to John Watlington and the team from Cozybit, we have out first working “active antenna” prototypes. Attaching them to an XO lets you optimize the placement of the antenna: use with a mesh portal will double the network throughput. They can be used on the school servers or attached a 5V power supply to build a stand-alone WiFI repeater.
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.


6. AC Adaptor: Our thoroughness had led UL to lower the acceptable temperature for AC adaptors by 10C, down to 75C. This week Arnold Kao of Quanta reports testing on an improved AC adaptor—within our current form-factor—that now achieves delta-t of 15C at 50C ambient (65C maximum temperature), down from the 30C delta-t. In addition, if we limit input from the AC adaptor when the thermometer in the battery indicates it is over 45C ambient and the battery is in charge state, our AC adaptors will operate within acceptable range.
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.)


7. C build: Rubber feet, removable antennae, a better LCD shock mount, small adjustments to the keyboard, and an improvement of six-degree tilt on the hinge are all underway as the C-build design freeze occurred on Friday. Both “bunny ears” will be replaceable by removing just 8 screws—previously it took 20 screws and the display had to be removed.
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. Weigh in: Mary Lou Jepsen conducted a weigh in for the B3 units this week. B3 with NiMH is 1.5Kg, and B3 with LiFeP is 1.4Kg. These are up slightly from B2 which weighed in at 1.4Kg and 1.3 Kg respectively; although we reduced the battery size slightly, we added a steel plate to the base for stability and better touch-pad operation.
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. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti found and fixed couple of bugs: suspend/resume is now working on USB and wireless. The XO can now suspend and resume while leaving the wireless functional, and the
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.
wireless can now wake up the processor. Thanks to Javier Cardona who also helped with the wireless firmware.


10. Fedora: This week OLPC became an official Fedora project. We will be doing our development directly on the Fedora project's hardware and in their repositories. In the past we always had to do our builds on Red Hat's infrastructure. This means that anyone can contribute to the project directly, including Red Hat people, community members, and the OLPC team.
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. Activities: Work continues on the Journal and its underlying datastore. There were stabilization and performance changes this week, including fixing some problems with the clipboard that had prevented cut and paste across activities. Infrastructure work in support of the presence has also been a focus: it has been broken out into its own module and will support the local mesh network instead of just server mode.
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: the DCON makes it possible for the Geode to entirely power down parts 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. School server: Holger Levsen continued work on the school server installation. The mirror is now updated from the user mirror, via a cronjob at 6am BST daily. It carries Fedora Core 6 and Core 7 and updates Power PC, i386, and source. The live-installer CD is build daily at 8am BST by a cronjob running as builder user (See http://xs-dev.laptop.org/xs-live-installer/ and git://dev.laptop.org/projects/fai-config/fedora/mirror and .../live-installer).
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. Test environment: Chris Ball rewrote the tinderbox web site
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.
(http://dev.laptop.org/tinderbox/) and added activity support to the
Sugar tinderbox. Every day, Sugar is built on two machines (one running
Fedora, one running Ubuntu) using sugar-jhbuild; each activity is tested to see whether it starts up successfully. If an activity fails, an e-mail
is sent to the Sugar mailing list.


14. Linux kernel: This week was about stabilizing the kernel for B4. Richard Smith has been rewriting the EC protocol that the kernel uses for poking the EC and hardware; Chris updated the kernel code for that. Debugging the firmware/EC/hardware is ongoing.
Note: Q2C14 is not recommended for general use; a new release will be issued as soon as Mitch get official EC bits from Quanta.


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


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


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

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

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

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

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


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 16:43, 9 June 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 42387]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-06-09

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

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

3. Scott Ananian will be starting at OLPC on Monday as a software engineer. Scott will be jumping right in after receiving his Ph.D. from EECS at MIT yesterday. He will bring to us an 10 years of experience hacking and debugging kernel patches and drivers. Besides the technical skills, Scott is deeply committed to the OLPC project.

4. Product line up: We are shipping five products this fall: (1) the XO laptop; (2) a school server; (3) a multi-battery charger; an active antenna; and (5) a solar-powered WiFi repeater. Much of the emphasis has been on the laptop, but a push from Quanta this week has resulted in firmer plans for the other products.

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

6. AC Adaptor: Our thoroughness had led UL to lower the acceptable temperature for AC adaptors by 10C, down to 75C. This week Arnold Kao of Quanta reports testing on an improved AC adaptor—within our current form-factor—that now achieves delta-t of 15C at 50C ambient (65C maximum temperature), down from the 30C delta-t. In addition, if we limit input from the AC adaptor when the thermometer in the battery indicates it is over 45C ambient and the battery is in charge state, our AC adaptors will operate within acceptable range.

7. C build: Rubber feet, removable antennae, a better LCD shock mount, small adjustments to the keyboard, and an improvement of six-degree tilt on the hinge are all underway as the C-build design freeze occurred on Friday. Both “bunny ears” will be replaceable by removing just 8 screws—previously it took 20 screws and the display had to be removed.

8. Weigh in: Mary Lou Jepsen conducted a weigh in for the B3 units this week. B3 with NiMH is 1.5Kg, and B3 with LiFeP is 1.4Kg. These are up slightly from B2 which weighed in at 1.4Kg and 1.3 Kg respectively; although we reduced the battery size slightly, we added a steel plate to the base for stability and better touch-pad operation.

9. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti found and fixed couple of bugs: suspend/resume is now working on USB and wireless. The XO can now suspend and resume while leaving the wireless functional, and the wireless can now wake up the processor. Thanks to Javier Cardona who also helped with the wireless firmware.

10. Fedora: This week OLPC became an official Fedora project. We will be doing our development directly on the Fedora project's hardware and in their repositories. In the past we always had to do our builds on Red Hat's infrastructure. This means that anyone can contribute to the project directly, including Red Hat people, community members, and the OLPC team.

11. Activities: Work continues on the Journal and its underlying datastore. There were stabilization and performance changes this week, including fixing some problems with the clipboard that had prevented cut and paste across activities. Infrastructure work in support of the presence has also been a focus: it has been broken out into its own module and will support the local mesh network instead of just server mode.

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

13. Test environment: Chris Ball rewrote the tinderbox web site (http://dev.laptop.org/tinderbox/) and added activity support to the Sugar tinderbox. Every day, Sugar is built on two machines (one running Fedora, one running Ubuntu) using sugar-jhbuild; each activity is tested to see whether it starts up successfully. If an activity fails, an e-mail is sent to the Sugar mailing list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More News

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News. Also on community-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.


Press

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 42387]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-06-09

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

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

3. Scott Ananian will be starting at OLPC on Monday as a software engineer. Scott will be jumping right in after receiving his Ph.D. from EECS at MIT yesterday. He will bring to us an 10 years of experience hacking and debugging kernel patches and drivers. Besides the technical skills, Scott is deeply committed to the OLPC project.

4. Product line up: We are shipping five products this fall: (1) the XO laptop; (2) a school server; (3) a multi-battery charger; an active antenna; and (5) a solar-powered WiFi repeater. Much of the emphasis has been on the laptop, but a push from Quanta this week has resulted in firmer plans for the other products.

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

6. AC Adaptor: Our thoroughness had led UL to lower the acceptable temperature for AC adaptors by 10C, down to 75C. This week Arnold Kao of Quanta reports testing on an improved AC adaptor—within our current form-factor—that now achieves delta-t of 15C at 50C ambient (65C maximum temperature), down from the 30C delta-t. In addition, if we limit input from the AC adaptor when the thermometer in the battery indicates it is over 45C ambient and the battery is in charge state, our AC adaptors will operate within acceptable range.

7. C build: Rubber feet, removable antennae, a better LCD shock mount, small adjustments to the keyboard, and an improvement of six-degree tilt on the hinge are all underway as the C-build design freeze occurred on Friday. Both “bunny ears” will be replaceable by removing just 8 screws—previously it took 20 screws and the display had to be removed.

8. Weigh in: Mary Lou Jepsen conducted a weigh in for the B3 units this week. B3 with NiMH is 1.5Kg, and B3 with LiFeP is 1.4Kg. These are up slightly from B2 which weighed in at 1.4Kg and 1.3 Kg respectively; although we reduced the battery size slightly, we added a steel plate to the base for stability and better touch-pad operation.

9. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti found and fixed couple of bugs: suspend/resume is now working on USB and wireless. The XO can now suspend and resume while leaving the wireless functional, and the wireless can now wake up the processor. Thanks to Javier Cardona who also helped with the wireless firmware.

10. Fedora: This week OLPC became an official Fedora project. We will be doing our development directly on the Fedora project's hardware and in their repositories. In the past we always had to do our builds on Red Hat's infrastructure. This means that anyone can contribute to the project directly, including Red Hat people, community members, and the OLPC team.

11. Activities: Work continues on the Journal and its underlying datastore. There were stabilization and performance changes this week, including fixing some problems with the clipboard that had prevented cut and paste across activities. Infrastructure work in support of the presence has also been a focus: it has been broken out into its own module and will support the local mesh network instead of just server mode.

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

13. Test environment: Chris Ball rewrote the tinderbox web site (http://dev.laptop.org/tinderbox/) and added activity support to the Sugar tinderbox. Every day, Sugar is built on two machines (one running Fedora, one running Ubuntu) using sugar-jhbuild; each activity is tested to see whether it starts up successfully. If an activity fails, an e-mail is sent to the Sugar mailing list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More News

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News. Also on community-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.


Press

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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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