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=Laptop News 2007-06-09=
=Laptop News 2007-06-09=


1. Montevideo: On Friday, the Technology Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU)
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.
released a bid for Project Ceibal (Conectividad Educativa de
Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea)—one laptop per child
in Uruguay.


2. Olin College hosted the first OLPC Game Jam (See
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.
[[Game_Jam]]) last weekend, bringing together
ten teams of game developers and some freelance artists, musicians,
and programmers, to make games for the XO. Organizers Mel Chua and SJ
Klein are working on general notes re: organizing game jams and other
local community events to develop materials for the XO. Most of the
teams chose to work in Python, though a few developed in Flash. (A
Flash developer who had rather vehemently against Python at the start
of the weekend, wouldn't stop talking about how nice Python was by
Sunday.) Teams collaborated with one another, in addition to competing
to make the best game; they shared music and artistic expertise, and
code snippets and coding advice. (The Flash developers uniformly
wanted to write things that would work in Gnash on our platform, not
standard Flash 9; they spent part of Friday and Saturday working with
the Gnash team to help improve its utility for game development.)


The two best reviewed games both used PyGame; they were a version of
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.
3D Pong and a version of the old Crossfire game called Spray Play (See
[[3dpong.activity.zip]] and
http://sprayplay.googlecode.com/svn/).


3. Taking the heat: We have decided to see how much heat XO can take.
4. Product line up: We are shipping five products this fall: (1) the XO laptop; (2) a school server; (3) a multi-battery charger; (4) 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.
Mary Lou Jepsen has instructed UL to test our laptop for a 50C (122F)
operating temperature. Typical laptops are only tested to 35C (95F) or
40C (104F), which is unacceptable for the children who will be using
our laptops in hot temperatures (e.g., in direct sunlight and of
course without air conditioning). Mary Lou and Tracy Price are also
running a simple bake test at the OLPC office. The
laptop is running days at 52C (125F), and nights at 22C (72F). UL and
Quanta are doing more extensive testing, but shown is a laptop,
running the eToys demo that sits in the oven night and day. Try that
with a conventional laptop!


4. Green: Mary Lou and Robert Fadel have started the application
5. Active antennas: Thanks to John Watlington and the team from Cozybit, we have our 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.
process for EPEAT Gold—the highest award given to laptops; one no
other laptop has yet received. Also, late last week Google's Ethan
Beard and Megan Smith, and Red Hat's Mike Evans invited OLPC to join
with Google, Intel, Quanta, Red Hat, AMD, HP and others in the IT
industry to launch Climate Savers, an organization dedicated to
lowering the power consumption of computers through better power
management systems, and more efficient AC adaptors. Climate Savers
picked lower power as the single thing on which to concentrate in
order to have the biggest positive impact on the environment. OLPC
concurs with this believe. At first those that join Climate Savers
agree to meet the Energy Star goals—OLPC is already 14× better than
Energy Star.


5. $1 video microscope: Inspired by SJ Klein and EO Smith, Mary Lou
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.
made a 100× video microscope for her XO for $1 (three plastic lenses
in plastic housing). She made videos of the XO screen compared with a
standard LCD screen, where the details of the pixel structure can be
clearly seen. She will be compiling a video for youtube.com in the
coming days.


6. Sugar: Eben Eliason has continued to refine a series of mock-ups
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.
for rollovers, invitations, and notifications. He has created a new
series of Activity mockups, including Browse, Read, Write, Memorize,
Calculate, Photograph/Capture/Record, and TamTam that feature tagging
and tabs. He also created a preliminary specification for keyboard
shortcut design, now open for discussion. Also he worked with Jim
Gettys to figure out some logic for the hand-held buttons in terms of
desired functionality and semantic meaning. Marco Gritti has been
making changes to the GTK theme to incorporate many of these
improvements.


7. Marc Maurer continues work on the Write activity, with his focus
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.
mostly around collaboration. He has been working on a new algorithm to
handle collisions in documents when people are editing the same part
of a document. He also spent a lot of time fixing bugs in Abiword to
close a blocker bug in the 406 Build.


8. Muriel de Souza Godoi updated the Memory Activity to the new sugar
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
API; now all the memory games were unified in one activity. He also
wireless can now wake up the processor. Thanks to Javier Cardona who also helped with the wireless firmware.
worked Eben designed a new Memorize Game UI; the new scoreboard was
developed as a component, with methods such as: set fill color, set
stroke color, increase score, set_current_player, etc. The new card
table was also developed as a component and can be controlled using
the hand-held-mode buttons. These UI components are designed to be as
flexible as possible, focusing on reusing components.


9. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso has been working on the Journal; he has added
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.
the ability to do screen capture by typing Alt-1; the image is saved
to the Journal. He also has been working to make it possible to launch
downloaded activities directly from the Journal. He has been updating
the web browser in order making it work with the new Journal code as
well as the new code to interface with Python. Ben Saller has been
working on how to get the Journal to support alternate media such as
USB drives. Eben created a new series of Journal mock-ups that
incorporate tabbed toolbars, address support for "sort by, then by,"
and for versioning.


10. Mesh Activities: Dan Williams made progress with Network Manager
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.
(NM) and the mesh. NM will now automatically scan and get an address
on the mesh network. The Collabora folks continue down the path of
making the peer-to-peer presence-discovery code and tubes code work.
They also added a "Hellomesh" Activity that shows how to build a
tubes-enabled activity. (Please note that the activity will change
over time as the tubes API stabilizes.) Eben worked extensively back
and forth with Pentagram on an updated UI design for the mesh view.


11. Fedora Core 7: John Palmieri has been moving our builds to a
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).
Fedora 7 base. Once that is done we will have a lot more opportunity
to collaborate with the community and also get more direct help from
the 1200 or so Fedora contributors. Moving to Fedora 7 also means that
many of our modified packages are rolled up into the main repository.


12. Build 406.14: Firmware and a stable kernel were released to Quanta
13. Test environment: Chris Ball rewrote the tinderbox web site
for the Btest-4 build, derived from Build 406. Suspend and resume are
(http://dev.laptop.org/tinderbox/) and added activity support to the
working in a full build for the first time, including autonomous mesh
Sugar tinderbox. Every day, Sugar is built on two machines (one running
networking, a first for any system anywhere! It is almost, but not
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
quite stable enough for widespread use; a few remaining bugs need to
is sent to the Sugar mailing list.
be squashed before deployment to a large audience.


13. Firmware: This week, Mitch Bradley worked on stabilizing software
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.
and firmware for the B4 build. Mitch also merged ECC checking code
(written by Segher Boessenkool) into CAFE NAND driver and worked out a
plan for storage of the public key that secures firmware updates.


14. X Window System: Richard Smith worked with Adam Jackson of Red Hat
There was a massive libertas merge into stable as well; it appears to be
to figure out why his DCON mode patches to the X driver were causing
working without too many problems. Dan Williams did some nice work: between the last stable (kernel) release and the upcoming stable
the DCON to flicker and glitch on the switch from DCON mode to GPU
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
mode. This will enable the window system to disable the video unit and
programs to easily access the hardware configuration and data (e.g.
allow the GPU to idle when not in use.
serial number, UUID, etc.).


Bernardo Innocenti has been enhancing our X keyboard definitions to
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.
include all the missing keyboard symbols and working with upstream to
cleanup and merge our changes into the official repository. Miles
Grimshaw has designed two new keyboards for the XO: Turkish and
Ethiopic.


Daniel Stone of Nokia suggested to Jim that our slider keys be
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.
represented in the X input extension in a better way: we're going to
have three "analog" sliders on the first row of the keyboard, which
will look like absolute axes to programs. This requires some kernel
work that Bernie has not yet started.


Generally, we are in a much better shape this week. The new input
Bernardo is also worked on “beautifying” our startup sequence, but this work didn't make it for B4 unfortunately. There are also concerns that
framework in X works already, EXA rendering pretty much works too.
upstream will never accept a patch for making the Linux console
Next week Bernie will look into packaging issues with Adam. Jordan
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.
Crouse has fixed many bugs in the X driver, and the he number of bugs
blocking #1604 is quickly shrinking, so we may be able to push this
upgrade just in time for the Fedora Core 7 migration.


15. Kernel: Andres Salomon merged the device-tree patch, giving access
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.
to hardware and manufacturing information. The wireless-driver version
supporting suspend/resume was also merged. The EC protocol was
debugged, and debugged some more, and is now mostly fixed. We have a
kernel/firmware combination that suspends/resumes in about two
seconds. The delay is mostly from libertas and USB; Marcelo Tosatti
and the Cozybit team are actively working on these drivers.


Chris Ball did a lot of stable-build debugging. He found that our
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.
camera's colormap becomes strange after resume and that the
"camera-active" LED comes on at resume even when the camera isn't
being used. Chris wrote a kernel patch to only power up the camera
when a user wants it; Jon Corbet is reviewing the patch.


16. IPV6: Scott Ananian began the week by trying to cram the entirety
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).
of "Essential IPv6 Networking" into his head. He set up some IPv6
tunnels and IPv6-enabled his home site to: (A) make sure he knew how
things worked; and (B) serve as a testbed for the school server
environment, which will likely be behind similar NATs. He took over as
the liaison to SIXXS, which is going to be providing our IPv6
connectivity via tunnels for the short term, at least until we set up
infrastructure (and possibly write some code) to terminate
NAT-tunneling IPv6 tunnels ourselves here in Cambridge. Scott also
confirmed that private IPv4 addresses are properly assigned to the
laptops if a DHCP server cannot be found.

Scott's second network-manager-related task was to get it to
understand DNS information sent via Router Advertisement messages as
part of IPv6
autoconfiguration, so that the machines "just work" without requiring
round-trips to a DHCP server or other setup. Scott noticed that radvd
on our local (OLPC) network (tubes) was giving out "bogus"
information, and wrote a patch for radvdump and sent the patch
upstream in the process. As it turns out, radvd was still using a
stale config and just needed to be sent SIGHUP, which was simple
enough. Scott sent mail to a number of people (including the
appropriate kernel mailing list) outlining a plan to add support for
DNS-in-RA to the Linux kernel and to Network Manager. Scott hasn't
heard any objections yet, so will assume
the plan is good and code up a first-draft implementation next week.

17. Hardware: The asynchronous input/output (SPD) bus on the XOs has
problems when coming out of suspend/resume and was causing write to
the display controller (DCON) to fail. Mitch figured out the root
cause of a failure to resume that only shows up on some machines: a
DCON/system-management (SM) bus bug was found and a DCON hardware bug
discovered. Richard, Mitch, Andres, Chris, and Jordan Crouse worked
together to find and produce a fix.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 20:28, 16 June 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 43877]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-06-09

1. Montevideo: On Friday, the Technology Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU) released a bid for Project Ceibal (Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea)—one laptop per child in Uruguay.

2. Olin College hosted the first OLPC Game Jam (See Game_Jam) last weekend, bringing together ten teams of game developers and some freelance artists, musicians, and programmers, to make games for the XO. Organizers Mel Chua and SJ Klein are working on general notes re: organizing game jams and other local community events to develop materials for the XO. Most of the teams chose to work in Python, though a few developed in Flash. (A Flash developer who had rather vehemently against Python at the start of the weekend, wouldn't stop talking about how nice Python was by Sunday.) Teams collaborated with one another, in addition to competing to make the best game; they shared music and artistic expertise, and code snippets and coding advice. (The Flash developers uniformly wanted to write things that would work in Gnash on our platform, not standard Flash 9; they spent part of Friday and Saturday working with the Gnash team to help improve its utility for game development.)

The two best reviewed games both used PyGame; they were a version of 3D Pong and a version of the old Crossfire game called Spray Play (See 3dpong.activity.zip and http://sprayplay.googlecode.com/svn/).

3. Taking the heat: We have decided to see how much heat XO can take. Mary Lou Jepsen has instructed UL to test our laptop for a 50C (122F) operating temperature. Typical laptops are only tested to 35C (95F) or 40C (104F), which is unacceptable for the children who will be using our laptops in hot temperatures (e.g., in direct sunlight and of course without air conditioning). Mary Lou and Tracy Price are also running a simple bake test at the OLPC office. The laptop is running days at 52C (125F), and nights at 22C (72F). UL and Quanta are doing more extensive testing, but shown is a laptop, running the eToys demo that sits in the oven night and day. Try that with a conventional laptop!

4. Green: Mary Lou and Robert Fadel have started the application process for EPEAT Gold—the highest award given to laptops; one no other laptop has yet received. Also, late last week Google's Ethan Beard and Megan Smith, and Red Hat's Mike Evans invited OLPC to join with Google, Intel, Quanta, Red Hat, AMD, HP and others in the IT industry to launch Climate Savers, an organization dedicated to lowering the power consumption of computers through better power management systems, and more efficient AC adaptors. Climate Savers picked lower power as the single thing on which to concentrate in order to have the biggest positive impact on the environment. OLPC concurs with this believe. At first those that join Climate Savers agree to meet the Energy Star goals—OLPC is already 14× better than Energy Star.

5. $1 video microscope: Inspired by SJ Klein and EO Smith, Mary Lou made a 100× video microscope for her XO for $1 (three plastic lenses in plastic housing). She made videos of the XO screen compared with a standard LCD screen, where the details of the pixel structure can be clearly seen. She will be compiling a video for youtube.com in the coming days.

6. Sugar: Eben Eliason has continued to refine a series of mock-ups for rollovers, invitations, and notifications. He has created a new series of Activity mockups, including Browse, Read, Write, Memorize, Calculate, Photograph/Capture/Record, and TamTam that feature tagging and tabs. He also created a preliminary specification for keyboard shortcut design, now open for discussion. Also he worked with Jim Gettys to figure out some logic for the hand-held buttons in terms of desired functionality and semantic meaning. Marco Gritti has been making changes to the GTK theme to incorporate many of these improvements.

7. Marc Maurer continues work on the Write activity, with his focus mostly around collaboration. He has been working on a new algorithm to handle collisions in documents when people are editing the same part of a document. He also spent a lot of time fixing bugs in Abiword to close a blocker bug in the 406 Build.

8. Muriel de Souza Godoi updated the Memory Activity to the new sugar API; now all the memory games were unified in one activity. He also worked Eben designed a new Memorize Game UI; the new scoreboard was developed as a component, with methods such as: set fill color, set stroke color, increase score, set_current_player, etc. The new card table was also developed as a component and can be controlled using the hand-held-mode buttons. These UI components are designed to be as flexible as possible, focusing on reusing components.

9. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso has been working on the Journal; he has added the ability to do screen capture by typing Alt-1; the image is saved to the Journal. He also has been working to make it possible to launch downloaded activities directly from the Journal. He has been updating the web browser in order making it work with the new Journal code as well as the new code to interface with Python. Ben Saller has been working on how to get the Journal to support alternate media such as USB drives. Eben created a new series of Journal mock-ups that incorporate tabbed toolbars, address support for "sort by, then by," and for versioning.

10. Mesh Activities: Dan Williams made progress with Network Manager (NM) and the mesh. NM will now automatically scan and get an address on the mesh network. The Collabora folks continue down the path of making the peer-to-peer presence-discovery code and tubes code work. They also added a "Hellomesh" Activity that shows how to build a tubes-enabled activity. (Please note that the activity will change over time as the tubes API stabilizes.) Eben worked extensively back and forth with Pentagram on an updated UI design for the mesh view.

11. Fedora Core 7: John Palmieri has been moving our builds to a Fedora 7 base. Once that is done we will have a lot more opportunity to collaborate with the community and also get more direct help from the 1200 or so Fedora contributors. Moving to Fedora 7 also means that many of our modified packages are rolled up into the main repository.

12. Build 406.14: Firmware and a stable kernel were released to Quanta for the Btest-4 build, derived from Build 406. Suspend and resume are working in a full build for the first time, including autonomous mesh networking, a first for any system anywhere! It is almost, but not quite stable enough for widespread use; a few remaining bugs need to be squashed before deployment to a large audience.

13. Firmware: This week, Mitch Bradley worked on stabilizing software and firmware for the B4 build. Mitch also merged ECC checking code (written by Segher Boessenkool) into CAFE NAND driver and worked out a plan for storage of the public key that secures firmware updates.

14. X Window System: Richard Smith worked with Adam Jackson of Red Hat to figure out why his DCON mode patches to the X driver were causing the DCON to flicker and glitch on the switch from DCON mode to GPU mode. This will enable the window system to disable the video unit and allow the GPU to idle when not in use.

Bernardo Innocenti has been enhancing our X keyboard definitions to include all the missing keyboard symbols and working with upstream to cleanup and merge our changes into the official repository. Miles Grimshaw has designed two new keyboards for the XO: Turkish and Ethiopic.

Daniel Stone of Nokia suggested to Jim that our slider keys be represented in the X input extension in a better way: we're going to have three "analog" sliders on the first row of the keyboard, which will look like absolute axes to programs. This requires some kernel work that Bernie has not yet started.

Generally, we are in a much better shape this week. The new input framework in X works already, EXA rendering pretty much works too. Next week Bernie will look into packaging issues with Adam. Jordan Crouse has fixed many bugs in the X driver, and the he number of bugs blocking #1604 is quickly shrinking, so we may be able to push this upgrade just in time for the Fedora Core 7 migration.

15. Kernel: Andres Salomon merged the device-tree patch, giving access to hardware and manufacturing information. The wireless-driver version supporting suspend/resume was also merged. The EC protocol was debugged, and debugged some more, and is now mostly fixed. We have a kernel/firmware combination that suspends/resumes in about two seconds. The delay is mostly from libertas and USB; Marcelo Tosatti and the Cozybit team are actively working on these drivers.

Chris Ball did a lot of stable-build debugging. He found that our camera's colormap becomes strange after resume and that the "camera-active" LED comes on at resume even when the camera isn't being used. Chris wrote a kernel patch to only power up the camera when a user wants it; Jon Corbet is reviewing the patch.

16. IPV6: Scott Ananian began the week by trying to cram the entirety of "Essential IPv6 Networking" into his head. He set up some IPv6 tunnels and IPv6-enabled his home site to: (A) make sure he knew how things worked; and (B) serve as a testbed for the school server environment, which will likely be behind similar NATs. He took over as the liaison to SIXXS, which is going to be providing our IPv6 connectivity via tunnels for the short term, at least until we set up infrastructure (and possibly write some code) to terminate NAT-tunneling IPv6 tunnels ourselves here in Cambridge. Scott also confirmed that private IPv4 addresses are properly assigned to the laptops if a DHCP server cannot be found.

Scott's second network-manager-related task was to get it to understand DNS information sent via Router Advertisement messages as part of IPv6 autoconfiguration, so that the machines "just work" without requiring round-trips to a DHCP server or other setup. Scott noticed that radvd on our local (OLPC) network (tubes) was giving out "bogus" information, and wrote a patch for radvdump and sent the patch upstream in the process. As it turns out, radvd was still using a stale config and just needed to be sent SIGHUP, which was simple enough. Scott sent mail to a number of people (including the appropriate kernel mailing list) outlining a plan to add support for DNS-in-RA to the Linux kernel and to Network Manager. Scott hasn't heard any objections yet, so will assume the plan is good and code up a first-draft implementation next week.

17. Hardware: The asynchronous input/output (SPD) bus on the XOs has problems when coming out of suspend/resume and was causing write to the display controller (DCON) to fail. Mitch figured out the root cause of a failure to resume that only shows up on some machines: a DCON/system-management (SM) bus bug was found and a DCON hardware bug discovered. Richard, Mitch, Andres, Chris, and Jordan Crouse worked together to find and produce a fix.

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# 43877]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-06-09

1. Montevideo: On Friday, the Technology Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU) released a bid for Project Ceibal (Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea)—one laptop per child in Uruguay.

2. Olin College hosted the first OLPC Game Jam (See Game_Jam) last weekend, bringing together ten teams of game developers and some freelance artists, musicians, and programmers, to make games for the XO. Organizers Mel Chua and SJ Klein are working on general notes re: organizing game jams and other local community events to develop materials for the XO. Most of the teams chose to work in Python, though a few developed in Flash. (A Flash developer who had rather vehemently against Python at the start of the weekend, wouldn't stop talking about how nice Python was by Sunday.) Teams collaborated with one another, in addition to competing to make the best game; they shared music and artistic expertise, and code snippets and coding advice. (The Flash developers uniformly wanted to write things that would work in Gnash on our platform, not standard Flash 9; they spent part of Friday and Saturday working with the Gnash team to help improve its utility for game development.)

The two best reviewed games both used PyGame; they were a version of 3D Pong and a version of the old Crossfire game called Spray Play (See 3dpong.activity.zip and http://sprayplay.googlecode.com/svn/).

3. Taking the heat: We have decided to see how much heat XO can take. Mary Lou Jepsen has instructed UL to test our laptop for a 50C (122F) operating temperature. Typical laptops are only tested to 35C (95F) or 40C (104F), which is unacceptable for the children who will be using our laptops in hot temperatures (e.g., in direct sunlight and of course without air conditioning). Mary Lou and Tracy Price are also running a simple bake test at the OLPC office. The laptop is running days at 52C (125F), and nights at 22C (72F). UL and Quanta are doing more extensive testing, but shown is a laptop, running the eToys demo that sits in the oven night and day. Try that with a conventional laptop!

4. Green: Mary Lou and Robert Fadel have started the application process for EPEAT Gold—the highest award given to laptops; one no other laptop has yet received. Also, late last week Google's Ethan Beard and Megan Smith, and Red Hat's Mike Evans invited OLPC to join with Google, Intel, Quanta, Red Hat, AMD, HP and others in the IT industry to launch Climate Savers, an organization dedicated to lowering the power consumption of computers through better power management systems, and more efficient AC adaptors. Climate Savers picked lower power as the single thing on which to concentrate in order to have the biggest positive impact on the environment. OLPC concurs with this believe. At first those that join Climate Savers agree to meet the Energy Star goals—OLPC is already 14× better than Energy Star.

5. $1 video microscope: Inspired by SJ Klein and EO Smith, Mary Lou made a 100× video microscope for her XO for $1 (three plastic lenses in plastic housing). She made videos of the XO screen compared with a standard LCD screen, where the details of the pixel structure can be clearly seen. She will be compiling a video for youtube.com in the coming days.

6. Sugar: Eben Eliason has continued to refine a series of mock-ups for rollovers, invitations, and notifications. He has created a new series of Activity mockups, including Browse, Read, Write, Memorize, Calculate, Photograph/Capture/Record, and TamTam that feature tagging and tabs. He also created a preliminary specification for keyboard shortcut design, now open for discussion. Also he worked with Jim Gettys to figure out some logic for the hand-held buttons in terms of desired functionality and semantic meaning. Marco Gritti has been making changes to the GTK theme to incorporate many of these improvements.

7. Marc Maurer continues work on the Write activity, with his focus mostly around collaboration. He has been working on a new algorithm to handle collisions in documents when people are editing the same part of a document. He also spent a lot of time fixing bugs in Abiword to close a blocker bug in the 406 Build.

8. Muriel de Souza Godoi updated the Memory Activity to the new sugar API; now all the memory games were unified in one activity. He also worked Eben designed a new Memorize Game UI; the new scoreboard was developed as a component, with methods such as: set fill color, set stroke color, increase score, set_current_player, etc. The new card table was also developed as a component and can be controlled using the hand-held-mode buttons. These UI components are designed to be as flexible as possible, focusing on reusing components.

9. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso has been working on the Journal; he has added the ability to do screen capture by typing Alt-1; the image is saved to the Journal. He also has been working to make it possible to launch downloaded activities directly from the Journal. He has been updating the web browser in order making it work with the new Journal code as well as the new code to interface with Python. Ben Saller has been working on how to get the Journal to support alternate media such as USB drives. Eben created a new series of Journal mock-ups that incorporate tabbed toolbars, address support for "sort by, then by," and for versioning.

10. Mesh Activities: Dan Williams made progress with Network Manager (NM) and the mesh. NM will now automatically scan and get an address on the mesh network. The Collabora folks continue down the path of making the peer-to-peer presence-discovery code and tubes code work. They also added a "Hellomesh" Activity that shows how to build a tubes-enabled activity. (Please note that the activity will change over time as the tubes API stabilizes.) Eben worked extensively back and forth with Pentagram on an updated UI design for the mesh view.

11. Fedora Core 7: John Palmieri has been moving our builds to a Fedora 7 base. Once that is done we will have a lot more opportunity to collaborate with the community and also get more direct help from the 1200 or so Fedora contributors. Moving to Fedora 7 also means that many of our modified packages are rolled up into the main repository.

12. Build 406.14: Firmware and a stable kernel were released to Quanta for the Btest-4 build, derived from Build 406. Suspend and resume are working in a full build for the first time, including autonomous mesh networking, a first for any system anywhere! It is almost, but not quite stable enough for widespread use; a few remaining bugs need to be squashed before deployment to a large audience.

13. Firmware: This week, Mitch Bradley worked on stabilizing software and firmware for the B4 build. Mitch also merged ECC checking code (written by Segher Boessenkool) into CAFE NAND driver and worked out a plan for storage of the public key that secures firmware updates.

14. X Window System: Richard Smith worked with Adam Jackson of Red Hat to figure out why his DCON mode patches to the X driver were causing the DCON to flicker and glitch on the switch from DCON mode to GPU mode. This will enable the window system to disable the video unit and allow the GPU to idle when not in use.

Bernardo Innocenti has been enhancing our X keyboard definitions to include all the missing keyboard symbols and working with upstream to cleanup and merge our changes into the official repository. Miles Grimshaw has designed two new keyboards for the XO: Turkish and Ethiopic.

Daniel Stone of Nokia suggested to Jim that our slider keys be represented in the X input extension in a better way: we're going to have three "analog" sliders on the first row of the keyboard, which will look like absolute axes to programs. This requires some kernel work that Bernie has not yet started.

Generally, we are in a much better shape this week. The new input framework in X works already, EXA rendering pretty much works too. Next week Bernie will look into packaging issues with Adam. Jordan Crouse has fixed many bugs in the X driver, and the he number of bugs blocking #1604 is quickly shrinking, so we may be able to push this upgrade just in time for the Fedora Core 7 migration.

15. Kernel: Andres Salomon merged the device-tree patch, giving access to hardware and manufacturing information. The wireless-driver version supporting suspend/resume was also merged. The EC protocol was debugged, and debugged some more, and is now mostly fixed. We have a kernel/firmware combination that suspends/resumes in about two seconds. The delay is mostly from libertas and USB; Marcelo Tosatti and the Cozybit team are actively working on these drivers.

Chris Ball did a lot of stable-build debugging. He found that our camera's colormap becomes strange after resume and that the "camera-active" LED comes on at resume even when the camera isn't being used. Chris wrote a kernel patch to only power up the camera when a user wants it; Jon Corbet is reviewing the patch.

16. IPV6: Scott Ananian began the week by trying to cram the entirety of "Essential IPv6 Networking" into his head. He set up some IPv6 tunnels and IPv6-enabled his home site to: (A) make sure he knew how things worked; and (B) serve as a testbed for the school server environment, which will likely be behind similar NATs. He took over as the liaison to SIXXS, which is going to be providing our IPv6 connectivity via tunnels for the short term, at least until we set up infrastructure (and possibly write some code) to terminate NAT-tunneling IPv6 tunnels ourselves here in Cambridge. Scott also confirmed that private IPv4 addresses are properly assigned to the laptops if a DHCP server cannot be found.

Scott's second network-manager-related task was to get it to understand DNS information sent via Router Advertisement messages as part of IPv6 autoconfiguration, so that the machines "just work" without requiring round-trips to a DHCP server or other setup. Scott noticed that radvd on our local (OLPC) network (tubes) was giving out "bogus" information, and wrote a patch for radvdump and sent the patch upstream in the process. As it turns out, radvd was still using a stale config and just needed to be sent SIGHUP, which was simple enough. Scott sent mail to a number of people (including the appropriate kernel mailing list) outlining a plan to add support for DNS-in-RA to the Linux kernel and to Network Manager. Scott hasn't heard any objections yet, so will assume the plan is good and code up a first-draft implementation next week.

17. Hardware: The asynchronous input/output (SPD) bus on the XOs has problems when coming out of suspend/resume and was causing write to the display controller (DCON) to fail. Mitch figured out the root cause of a failure to resume that only shows up on some machines: a DCON/system-management (SM) bus bug was found and a DCON hardware bug discovered. Richard, Mitch, Andres, Chris, and Jordan Crouse worked together to find and produce a fix.

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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.


Press

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Video

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