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=Laptop News 2007-07-07=
=Laptop News 2007-07-14=
Congratulations to Chris Blizzard who welcomed home his new daughter, Samantha Snow Blizzard.
1. Arahuay, Peru: Carla Gomez Monroy has been helping the ministry of education with a school trial at the Institución Educativa Apóstol Santiago, a combination primary and secondary school in a small town in the Cordillera de la Viuda, 2600 m. above sea level.


1. Intel became the newest member of OLPC this week.
2. Taipei: Mary Lou Jepsen gave a keynote at a display manufacturing conference in Taipei where she highlighted the fact that the XO display took only six months to go from specification to full certification, ready for high-volume mass production product. This rapid development is unheard of in the display industry where 10-to-20 years is more the norm for a new display—and thus the XO was the center of much discussion at the conference. Other large display manufacturers are expressing interest in helping with Gen2 development as well as providing a second source of the Gen1 display. Of course Mary Lou explained our loyalty and strong relationship with ChiMei. The reception was quite different from 18 months ago, when getting buy-in from the display manufacturers was one of the largest challenges for OLPC.


2. Michail Bletsas attended Cisco's ConnectFest event at their Bay Area campus. It was organized by a group within Cisco with a strong interest towards the development of low cost, robust networking solutions for the developing world and was attended by a variety of people active in the area (Intel TIER lab, Meraki, Inveneo, Green WiFi, et al.).
3. OLPC was nominated and selected as a potential beneficiary of the American Express Card's Members Project (http://www.membersproject.com). Projects are voted for through several rounds and the winners are eligible for a grant of between $1–$5 million. OLPC is listed under project number 07229.


3. Trial-2: This week completes integration of major features for Trial-2. Kernels in our Fedora-Core-7-based builds include a new X driver, our power management work, and VServer. Code freeze will begin on Monday; we will triage all bugs to minimize the change to the code base; we aim for a final Release Candidate at the end of this upcoming week. The goal for next week is to reach stability and to be able to demonstrate: collaboration, Journal, activation, mesh connectivity, and suspend/resume.
4. XO testing: Quanta has put an enormous effort into testing the laptops in each of the five builds to date (A Test and B1–B4). The approximately 7000 prototypes have undergone temperature, electrical, mechanical, durability, and environmental testing:


4. Testing: Each new build is now subject to much testing. (Please refer to the test-group release notes when deciding to download a build that isn't stable yet: [[Test_Group_Release_Notes]].)
Temperature: 55C/40% relative humidity (RH) operation test, 32C/50% RH operation test, 30C/85% RH operation test, –0C operation test, 85C storage test, –40C storage test, thermal shock and profile test (60C to –20C);


5. Sugar: Red Hat’s Dan Winship also joins the Sugar team this week. He'll be working on builds while John Palmieri is on vacation; Dan has been working on Sugar bug-fixes.
Electrical: AC power, BIOS flashing, Open Firmware, power management, USB 2.0, NAND flash, Wireless LAN, camera, memory, battery, LED indicator, stress test, ESD, battery discharge, LCD module verification, line-voltage and frequency test, power-on/off test, altitude test, wave-form measurement, frequency response, speaker performance, touch-pad performance, S0 state, S3 states, driver level, frequency accuracy, oscillation allowance, negative resistance, load capacitance, DDR1, critical trace, power-rail ramp, voltage level and noise, USB 1.1, Radiation of EN 55022, EN 61000-4-4, skin/case temperature, etc.;


Tomeu Vizoso refactored removable devices support in the Journal for robustness to support manual mount and unmount and physical removal of devices before unmount. He test the performance of the data store inside Sugar (the new one is much faster); the new data store now only indexes meta data, not file contents while Ben Saller gets the asynchronous content-indexing working again. Ben refactored large pieces of the data store and the data store's dependencies for performance improvements. This work has resulted in much needed performance improvements to the Journal.
Mechanical environmental test: operating and non-operating vibration test, operating and non-operating shock test, package drop test, package storage test, tilt drop test, free drop test, LCD stress test, base pressure test, LCD-pressure vibration test, switch-protection test, LCD-twist test, connector-tension test, adapter-cable bending test, spill test, water test;


Marco Gritti packaged various Sugar pieces for builds and continued to hunt down and fix Sugar bugs. He also wrote new introductory screen for Sugar.
Durability test: hinge 65K cycles, battery 10K cycles, buttons 1M cycles, power button 700K cycles, touch-pad buttons 3M cycles, USB ports 10K cycles, DC in 20K cycles, DC-in, line-out, and mic-in 10K cycles, wireless-antenna 5K cycles, SD card 16K cycles;


6. Presence: Simon McVittie worked on medium- and long-term improvements to the dbus Python language bindings and made some short-term fixes. He also fixed a problem with Presence Service slowness (#1874 and #1927) and missing XO buddy names (#1967).
Special environmental test: sand and dust test, salt-fog test, solar- radiation test, rain test;


Sjoerd Simons has been testing and bug fixing in Salut (XMPP Link Local)—XMPP is the extensible messaging and presence protocol used in Sugar activity communication. He has hunted down some problems with Avahi service discovery and helped Guillaume Desmottes in designing some XMPP stream-manager improvements in Salut (for supporting streaming in tubes).
Abusive test: free-throw test, USB and SD card reverse test, tumbling test, water-sprinkle test, hinge max-angle test, tablet-mode max-angle test, antenna max-force test.


Morgan Collett finished the “buddy-left” code in the Sugar Mesh View. and reviewed and merged some of Simon's Presence Service patches. He updated the Connect and Chat Activity releases for builds and he made a fix to Gabble to stop it trying to use IRC. He is looking into Presence Service performance and Salut issues.
These are torture tests. Most of these tests are harder—by far—than that required for conventional laptops Currently, XO has passed the vast majority of tests. Provisions to pass the tough ESD, salt-fog, power-on/off test, and operating shock test are under way; as are even higher free-drop tests, more stringent hinge-torque tests; as well as stronger set of testing underway at UL as we enter C-Test phase in August.


Dan Williams made many NetworkManager testing and fixes for mesh beacons, DHCP, link-local presence support. He also tested a fix for the camera-driver delay and pulled in a new gstreamer release.
5. Mechanicals: Bret Recor of Fuse Project was in Shanghai this week to work closely with Frank Lee of Quanta on finalizing the texturing for plastic-housing parts. Bean texture will appear on the exterior white housing and a matte—“satin”—texture on the interior and the green parts.


7. Content distribution and updates: H.T. Kung's group at Harvard is working on a content distribution system for ad-hoc networks that utilizes network coding. The practical benefit of their approach is that distributing a large file among a number of laptops in a mesh network always completes within a determined amount of time, something not possible without network coding due to the inherent limitations of the wireless medium. They used 29 XOs to test their approach in Harvard's Soldier's Field during the hottest day of the summer. The XOs performed flawlessly!
6. Trial-2 software: At the beginning of the week we added the latest Marvell firmware to both the XO and the school server software images to get past “flag day” in Cambridge: builds before Build 486 (or Build 406.16) will not work with these later builds. Henceforth, as we send products out to the field, we need to know if the recipient already has XOs; any older machines will need to be upgraded so the new ones and old ones will work together. (The test group continues to keep a log of Release Notes for each build, which can be accessed at [[Test Group Release Notes]].


Alexander Larsson has been working on restructuring the “Updationator” repository format so that manifests are also stored as blobs. He created a repository at http://olpc.download.redhat.com and tested various upgrades of laptops from that. Updatinator 0.1 is in builds for testing.
7. Hardware management: Richard Hughes continued his work on our hardware policy manager. He is in the final stages of getting it into our builds by running it through the Fedora review process. Matthias Clasen has been helping him run through the process and has been pointing out improvements to be made. He also integrated open hardware manager (OHM) with the new X IDLETIME alarm interface. He also added support for the battery and AC adapter to the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) so that it is more easily exported to programs. Using this interface, Marco Gritti has added support to Sugar to extract the battery information from HAL.


8. Sugar activities: Marc Maurer has made numerous fixes to the collision handling in “AbiCollab”, the collaboration extensions to Abiword, AKA “Write” on the XO. It seems to now be quite robust, even on high-latency networks. Please test it. In the Write Activity itself, Marc has fix a problem with the font name/size combo-boxes; implemented a color-selection button that follows the cursor context; fix the insert-table button; and added a total page count to the View menu.
8. Mesh collaboration: The Collabora team had a busy week working on bug-fixes in the dbus-python bindings, debugging interactions between telepathy and the other modules, working through details of the tubes API, fixing issues with the peer-to-peer extensible messaging and presence protocol (XMPP), working on the multicast protocol for the mesh, finishing up the “hellomesh” activity, and fixing the chat activity.


Bert Freudenberg has been keeping pace with the changes in Sugar and has been producing a series of working .xo bundles of Etoys. Takashi Yamamiya and Ted Kaehler are working on the keyboard shortcuts that match with Sugar's conventions. Copy and paste also works due to Takashi's effort. Takashi also brought his ODE binding of Squeak up to date and made it compatible with the OLPC Etoys. Adjustment of buttons and menus are being made by Yoshiki Ohshima and Scott Wallace. Ian Piumarta, Bert, and Yoshiki are working on resolving a low-memory situation (that occurs on the B2-1 machines, which have only 28MB of DRAM). Ted, Kim Rose, Rebecca Cannara and Alan Kay continue on making more examples and demonstrations.
9. Building builds: John Palmieri continued pushing builds out the door. He has been splitting his time between trying to get Trial-2 work done and also working on a stable 406 build (the latter build includes power management and other low-level features, but not the new collaboration and Journal features). He also worked on getting QEMU (an open source machine emulator and virtualizer) and VirtualBox (a commercial virtualizer) working with our images again.


Arjun Sarwal has made further improvements to the Measure Activity, which utilizes the microphone and analog data ports of the XO as input to a graphing program. He has added buttons for three frequency ranges; features for logging data and writing it onto a file and drawing a graph based on the logged data have been tested in emulation and will be soon tested on an XO. In testing the Activity, Arjun discovered that one can use the built-in microphone to directly measure one’s pulse.
The basic Vmware image conversion process outlined at in the OLPC wiki (See [[Emulating the XO/UsingVMware]]) is also working. Scott Devine has been working on VMware mesh-network emulation and the XO images are now part of Vmware’s daily regression testing.


Eben Eliason and Manusheel Gutpa have been working with Irene Ficheman and the team from NATE-LSI (Integrated Systems Laboratory), in the Polytechnical School at University of São Paulo on a new Draw Activity for the XO that utilizes the new Sugar tabs and styles.
10. Sugar: Marco Gritti and Tomeu Vizoso continue to chase bugs in Sugar and the Journal as part of the Trial 2 work. Walter Bender and Eben Eliason revisited the XO color schemes; more vivid and legible color dyads will be available in the upcoming builds. Dan Williams worked on Network Manager, fixed an avahi bug, fought through numerous packaging issues as part of the Fedora Core 7 move, and also worked on some gstreamer issues around camera support.


Miguel Álvarez did more work on the shared-state implementation and the Calculate activity, which now supports algebraic variables to do calculations such as: apples = 18; bananas = 12; price = 3×apples + 4×bananas.
11. Updates: Scott Ananian wrote a recursive binary diff tool based on bsdiff/bspatch in order to investigate the lower limits of upgrade sizes. Comparisons with rsync and the Dan Williams patched version of “updatinator” showed that our various upgrade strategies are now not too far from optimal.


Eben and Muriel de Souza Godol have been integrating the memory game(s) into the new Sugar collaboration schema to allow for single- and multi-player gaming over the mesh. Next is adding a “view source” mode that lets the children design their own variants to the games.
12. X Window System: Bernie Innocenti spent much of the week working on bug #1837, the “fancy color on text” bug, which turned out to be pretty tough. The more he dug into it, the more he keep getting evidence pointing in opposite directions. We see similar text corruption on OLPC, F8 and Ubuntu Gutsy on the Geode LX (both 16bpp and 32bpp) and Radeon R200 (but only in 16bpp) in both with EXA and XAA. Disabling acceleration cures it. The plot thickens.


9. X Window System: Chris Ball took benchmarks for the fix to a long-standing font-corruption bug, which Bernardo Innocenti found and patched this week. Jordan Crouse and Adam Jackson are working out the right long-term fix for a very nasty class of bugs that affected a number of X drivers, not just the AMD driver. The benchmarks are inconclusive so far; more work needed to check that our fix is not causing a slowdown. Jordan also fixed some serious bugs in the X Server. Bernie resurrected our input driver: by the end of this week, the window system was again behaving properly, with the way paved for better performance in the long term.
Another serious bug that had been making the X server on the GX (B2 and B1) unusable in the development builds was found through work of Jordan Crouse and Adam Jackson late Friday afternoon.


10. Kernel: Linus Torvalds released 2.6.22 on Sunday, so this week started with more pushing of kernel changes upstream, including Dave Woodhouse's new battery-class driver, which is now in Linus' tree. During the week, Andres Salomon branched a few new stable kernel that included 2.6.22 final, a large libertas update, audio and camera LED fixes, and a number of DCON and LXFB fixes. The DCON freezing feature should be a lot more reliable now that we've switched to using a work-queue, and included a bunch of Adam Jackson's timing fixes.
13. Kernel: Andres Salomon worked on getting code upstream this week. The Geode support in master is mostly in Andrew Morton's tree; some is trickling into Linus's tree as well. Andres also did the standard merge dance (nothing exciting there, though we should be approaching a final 2.6.22 soon). Marcelo Tosatti spent time merging his USB changes to master.


In the process of testing, Andres discovered a bunch of fun new bugs:
Marcelo and Chris Ball looked into some suspend/resume failures. We can reliably suspend and resume wireless so long as the wireless module remains connected to the USB; Marcelo and Cozybit continue to investigate issues suspending and resuming with the wireless disconnected entirely.
JFFS2 corruption that ate the filesystem on a B4, libertas failing to associate, and not-yet-isolated USB-storage corruption issues. Dave Woodhouse is looking at “wireless in initrd” to enable boot, installation, and testing via the wireless network, without having to rely on the NAND flash.


Richard Smith and Andres are investigating missing keypresses after resume. The kernel is losing some of the PS2 interrupts. More work is needed to determine where the keypress is going.
The “pop” that we receive from the amplifier is barely audible on the B4 machines, but we will continue to investigate it—if the pop is caused by a hardware bug, now is the time to fix it.


11. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti merged the USB and libertas suspend/resume code to master kernel tree; he also conducted more suspend/resume tests. He wrote code to support new rtc-cmos driver (configurable wakeup) and added platform devices for the power button and the lid-closed detector. He investigated individual device power-down and determined that we cannot use Libertas power-save mode when mesh is active. He wrote patches to turn off more parts of the cs5535 audio and USB Host Controller. Finally, he wrote some parallel-driver resume code; we can clearly see the culprits of slow resume time.
The microphone LED was turning on regardless of whether we were using the audio device for playback or recording. Chris came up with logic to keep it turned off when we aren't recording, implemented it, and will send his patch to Jaya Kumar for review.


12. Power: John Watlington, Richard Smith Jim Gettys, Chris Ball and with Joel Stanley and Richard Smith on further power tests, trying to accurately determine which devices are responsible for our current power draw, and verify our design before the schematics are frozen for production. Joel, John and Richard took many power measurements with an instrumented XO attempting to verify all the power domains prior to the C Build. They took reading; added more channels; took more readings; and then added even more channels. The measurement system is now up to 22 channels. Things mostly look OK, but there is still some power draws that are not accounted for and are being investigated.
Scott imported glibc into git and (after some fighting) got it to build, so he is setup to write the glibc RDNSS-over-RA patches.


Kim Quirk and John Fuhrer have been conducting more battery-life tests this week. We are gathering baseline lifetime numbers to compare against as we make improvements and changes in power management. Battery life on B4 is substantially improved from B2 builds on B2 hardware while running; battery lifetime when running mesh only are currently less than expected: Michail says the Marvell wireless firmware power consumption can be significantly improved over our first measurements.
14. School server: Mitch Bradley got a preliminary version of PowerPC Open Firmware running on the school-server development machine. Mitch also released the core PowerPC Open Firmware code to openbios.org under an MIT license.


Richard Hughes continued work on the open hardware manager (OHM); OHM, which is our power-policy daemon, has landed in the builds. Richard is working on integrating OHM with the XO hardware. OHM handles suspend on power button press, configurable backlight dimming after idle time when on battery, and will soon handle going into suspend based on whether we're idle.
Dan Margo completed the scripts that will let us build OLPC-specific RPM configuration packages. These packages follow a fairly complex install-and-update policy that: (A) organizes OLPC-specific configurations into a central directory, etc.olpc; and (B) respects user's configuration changes, while clobbering RPM defaults. These scripts are in want of more debugging on large, serious use cases, but are concept-complete.


13. Security: Nelson Elhage and Michael Stone stress tested Vserver patch in preparation to its merger on Friday. Mitch Bradley, Ivan Krstić, and Scott Ananian hammered out a firmware security specification describing the interaction of Open Firmware and the kernel/ramdisk for activation, upgrades, and booting from a backup (See [[Firmware_Security]]).
Next week we plan to start building Fedora Core 7 livecd build scripts from a clean slate (and merge the work Holger has done based on Fedora 6) Once that is straightened out, we can start determining and then exporting the XS-specific configurations.


Ivan wrote some basic activation code, which Scott hacked a bit (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/krstic/leases and http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/cscott-leases-tmp).
Scott also fought the QEMU/KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) fight and got XO and (sort of) XSX images built and working under emulation. The ground is laid for Dan and Scott to create XSX builds based on Fedora Core 7 images next week using Dan's rpm-configuration code.


Scott created an initramfs for early-boot, which does activation and
15. Security: Mitch and Ivan Krstić hashed out firmware security issues around activation, firmware updates, and developer keys. Ivan, Mitch, and Scott defined three code-paths: (1) the chain from booting a signed kernel though invoking activation or pivoting to one of two base file-systems (upgrade or backup); (2) the anti-theft server, anti-theft client, and “invoke-upgrade-now” interactions; and (3) the fetch-upgrade hand-off to the security kernel, which validates the upgrade and tweaks some bits to signal the boot code (closing the circle). Implementation has begun: Ivan has built a skeleton antitheft server and client, and Scott has an initrd that takes control immediately after open firmware boots our (signed) kernel.
some upgrade and boot tasks (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/d-i and http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/rootskel-olpc).


Finally, Scott adopted the OLPC reinstallation script and is working on
16. Embedded controller: Mitch helped Joel Stanley (Richard Smith's Summer of Code intern) get started on embedded controller (EC) development and in the process discovered a fix for the flakiness of the EC recovery process.
adding support to have it generate a temporary-format of activation lease during installation, so that we can put activation in our builds and exercise it without “bricking” all our developers' machines.


Noah Kantrowitz and Michael Stone are continuing Bitfrost implementation work; Nelson Elhage ran stress tests on the VServer kernel (no problems) and verified it has undisturbed IPv6 connectivity; SecOps will provide a set of RPMs that allow for any machine running the Trial-2 build to experimentally enable Bitfrost by virtue of a simple 'yum install olpc-security'.
To help with the ongoing debugging efforts of Trac Bug #1752 Richard created a test version of the EC code that asserts the WLAN wakeup pin before issuing the SCI to the host. This allows the WLAN to have its USB bus up and running prior to the host. Experiments with WLAN firmware that does not detach from the USB bus works with suspend/resume. The EC test firmware was a possible workaround but Chris found that it still had issues.


14. Embedded controller: Richard Smith submitted a patch to back to Wuanta that fixes the on-board temperature sensor. It showed up in PQ2C19 which Quanta released on Friday.
David Woodhouse and Richard worked on making the PCB temp sensor work and verify that the resistor divider is set correctly. However, they found that the EC code is not working correctly. The voltage A/D readings do not appear to be updating. With a bit of Forth code under OFW to read the A/D directly and then they looked at the range of the sensor. The hardware is OK and there is enough resolution for our purposes


15. Laptop hardware: John Watlington worked on last-minute tweaks to the laptop electronics; these were tested this week, with the deadline for changes before mass production looming. These included adding an anti-aliasing filter to the microphone input, eliminating the speaker pop when suspending/resuming, and making sure that the EC is capable of waking up on all relevant events (WLAN packet received, lid opened/closed, etc.)
17. Content jams: The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is working actively on open content for educators and students, especially those in regions newly introduced to computers. They are interested in starting a Summer of Content project along with OLPC, supporting existing open content efforts and focusing on short-term goals that will lead to literacy and more content creation. They are starting work on a Spanish Wikieducator, and planning content-creation workshops in each of the 53 Commonwealth states. Mel Chua met with Wayne Mackintosh of COL and worked out some initial details. Summer of Content would provide visibility to open content projects that need help and a unified way for interested students and young teachers to intern for these projects, focusing on potential interns in the Southern Hemisphere and running two summers a year, starting at the end of this calendar year.


16. School Server: Daniel Margo gathered data about the modified packages and configuration files for the School Server and put the configuration files into a data repository (See http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=users/danmargo/livecd-data;a=summary). Dan made packages of these configuration files and put them in the repository (See http://fedora.laptop.org/olpc-local/i386). However, he could not get them to build into a working live CD. As an interim workaround, he had made a live CD with the packages that were on schoolserver (but not the configuration, so it is not particularly interesting yet).
18. Our Stories: UNICEF has presented “Our Stories” to their country offices in Uruguay, Brasil, Argentina, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Ethiopia, and are starting to collect stories that can be published and shared from their existing youth networks. Google's OurStories team now includes two engineering leads and website and interface leads.


17. Games: Kent Quirk reports much progress:
19. Educational activity guidelines: Lauren Klien has been working on templates for learning activities and guidelines for people writing them (See [[Educational activity guidelines]], [[Sample learning activities]], and [[Learning activities]]). If you are working on activities of your own, please post them to the wiki and add/suggest guidelines of your own that you have found useful.
* Roberto Fagá continued work on ISIS, the adventure game engine. It now supports variable phrase order for different languages in its text system; he is building out the object hierarchy for the datatypes and classes of game objects.
* Patrick DeJarnette has almost finished the Side-scroller game engine. The engine now has the ability to finish a level and display between-level and game-over screens, and it features multiple lives, multiple levels, and coin-collection. The Side-scroller system is complete enough to play and create levels. It could use help from a good artist, and it still needs to be packaged and to have some sample levels.
* Lincoln Quirk has been maintaining the PyGame wrapper and the OLPC wiki pages describing it ([[Game development HOWTO]] and [[Pygame wrapper]]). He addressed and fixed the problem with event-queue overflow and has implemented a Pango wrapper to render fonts onto SDL surfaces. It is not yet an ideal solution because some libraries are still lacking Python support. He has also been helping to support various people who are trying to use PyGame and the wrapper.


18. Content workshops: Mel Chua, Wayne Mackintosh (Commonwealth of Learning), and SJ Klein are looking for mentors and sponsoring groups at
20. Distributed content: Thibaut Lamadon is working on the next iteration of his MeshBoard activity—a community bulletin board that runs serverlessly on the mesh network. Thibaut is testing out a new implementation that uses Tubes APIs.
companies and universities to support a trial season of a Summer of Content effort, running from August 10 to September 23. This would be a way to support some of the authors and creators working to make materials for trial schools.


Summer of Content will run two summers a year (one each in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres); plans for a full summer starting in December will be in place by August 15. We are looking currently for mentors that speak Arabic, Portuguese, and Thai (See [[Summer_Of_Content_Proposal]]). We are aiming to have 50 small-stipend internships for 6–8 weeks this summer.
21. Wiki: A weekly review of the OLPC wiki changes (now ~1000 a week) began last week. Xavier Alvarez’s latest round of categorization and organization of the wiki includes a proposal for a standard set of information boxes covering licensing and subject matter and audience, where to get more information, and what features or WikiProjects something is associated with. Comments and suggestions welcome (See [[OBX proposals]]).


COL has committed to sponsoring and mentoring five interns from the Commonwealth states. COL is looking for supporting organizations in India and their network in the South. Name.org out of Denver (the non-profit branch of name.com) has committed to sponsoring interns (from anywhere); the EGAP public policy school at Tecnologico de Monterrey are also on board and have space and mentors for Spanish-speaking interns.
MaMaMedia has started to move content into the OLPC wiki (See [[World Wide Workshop Foundation]]).


Please send interest or potential contacts for mentorship/sponsorship to
22. Reading: David Teller reports that the Lector book-reading project, which is javascript-based and runs inside the browser without its own UI, has a new version. They are just now in touch with Ian Bicking and Stephen Thorne about integrating their work on an in-browser interface for XO. Ian has a simple booksplitter working to split large files into small readable chunks. Josh Gay is working on a proper annotation spec to send around for how a generalized stet implementation will work; for the coming week.
SJ and to Mel <mel@melchua.com>.


19. Creative Jams: A Guide to Jams will be published to the OLPC wiki soon. The general idea behind a jam is to: bring people together; provide food and feedback and good cheer; in less than three days, create and test a series of [activities, texts, videos, games] designed for children and for use with XOs.
23. Games: Julius Lucks and team continued to tweak their number munchers game, making sure it was properly localized and can share tilesets with the Memonumbers game (See [[Kuku]]).
20. Content bundles: After some discussion about how to define non-activity bundles, there is now a working spec for people who want to provide non-executable bundles that can be browsed or launched from a browser (See [[Creating_a_content_bundle]]).

21. Music: The Free Music Project is now synchronizing with Jamendo, which has an efficient way of verifying that submitters are the authors of the works they suggest is freely licensed, and have hundreds of CC-BY pieces. Jamendo is working on an OLPC portal of sorts; there is no spec yet. The Free Music folks have new DJs and modern musicians recording for the XO, including The Juan Maclean, Maga Bo, and DJ C (See http://www.thejuanmaclean.com/).


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 20:44, 14 July 2007

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Laptop News 2007-07-14

Congratulations to Chris Blizzard who welcomed home his new daughter, Samantha Snow Blizzard.

1. Intel became the newest member of OLPC this week.

2. Michail Bletsas attended Cisco's ConnectFest event at their Bay Area campus. It was organized by a group within Cisco with a strong interest towards the development of low cost, robust networking solutions for the developing world and was attended by a variety of people active in the area (Intel TIER lab, Meraki, Inveneo, Green WiFi, et al.).

3. Trial-2: This week completes integration of major features for Trial-2. Kernels in our Fedora-Core-7-based builds include a new X driver, our power management work, and VServer. Code freeze will begin on Monday; we will triage all bugs to minimize the change to the code base; we aim for a final Release Candidate at the end of this upcoming week. The goal for next week is to reach stability and to be able to demonstrate: collaboration, Journal, activation, mesh connectivity, and suspend/resume.

4. Testing: Each new build is now subject to much testing. (Please refer to the test-group release notes when deciding to download a build that isn't stable yet: Test_Group_Release_Notes.)

5. Sugar: Red Hat’s Dan Winship also joins the Sugar team this week. He'll be working on builds while John Palmieri is on vacation; Dan has been working on Sugar bug-fixes.

Tomeu Vizoso refactored removable devices support in the Journal for robustness to support manual mount and unmount and physical removal of devices before unmount. He test the performance of the data store inside Sugar (the new one is much faster); the new data store now only indexes meta data, not file contents while Ben Saller gets the asynchronous content-indexing working again. Ben refactored large pieces of the data store and the data store's dependencies for performance improvements. This work has resulted in much needed performance improvements to the Journal.

Marco Gritti packaged various Sugar pieces for builds and continued to hunt down and fix Sugar bugs. He also wrote new introductory screen for Sugar.

6. Presence: Simon McVittie worked on medium- and long-term improvements to the dbus Python language bindings and made some short-term fixes. He also fixed a problem with Presence Service slowness (#1874 and #1927) and missing XO buddy names (#1967).

Sjoerd Simons has been testing and bug fixing in Salut (XMPP Link Local)—XMPP is the extensible messaging and presence protocol used in Sugar activity communication. He has hunted down some problems with Avahi service discovery and helped Guillaume Desmottes in designing some XMPP stream-manager improvements in Salut (for supporting streaming in tubes).

Morgan Collett finished the “buddy-left” code in the Sugar Mesh View. and reviewed and merged some of Simon's Presence Service patches. He updated the Connect and Chat Activity releases for builds and he made a fix to Gabble to stop it trying to use IRC. He is looking into Presence Service performance and Salut issues.

Dan Williams made many NetworkManager testing and fixes for mesh beacons, DHCP, link-local presence support. He also tested a fix for the camera-driver delay and pulled in a new gstreamer release.

7. Content distribution and updates: H.T. Kung's group at Harvard is working on a content distribution system for ad-hoc networks that utilizes network coding. The practical benefit of their approach is that distributing a large file among a number of laptops in a mesh network always completes within a determined amount of time, something not possible without network coding due to the inherent limitations of the wireless medium. They used 29 XOs to test their approach in Harvard's Soldier's Field during the hottest day of the summer. The XOs performed flawlessly!

Alexander Larsson has been working on restructuring the “Updationator” repository format so that manifests are also stored as blobs. He created a repository at http://olpc.download.redhat.com and tested various upgrades of laptops from that. Updatinator 0.1 is in builds for testing.

8. Sugar activities: Marc Maurer has made numerous fixes to the collision handling in “AbiCollab”, the collaboration extensions to Abiword, AKA “Write” on the XO. It seems to now be quite robust, even on high-latency networks. Please test it. In the Write Activity itself, Marc has fix a problem with the font name/size combo-boxes; implemented a color-selection button that follows the cursor context; fix the insert-table button; and added a total page count to the View menu.

Bert Freudenberg has been keeping pace with the changes in Sugar and has been producing a series of working .xo bundles of Etoys. Takashi Yamamiya and Ted Kaehler are working on the keyboard shortcuts that match with Sugar's conventions. Copy and paste also works due to Takashi's effort. Takashi also brought his ODE binding of Squeak up to date and made it compatible with the OLPC Etoys. Adjustment of buttons and menus are being made by Yoshiki Ohshima and Scott Wallace. Ian Piumarta, Bert, and Yoshiki are working on resolving a low-memory situation (that occurs on the B2-1 machines, which have only 28MB of DRAM). Ted, Kim Rose, Rebecca Cannara and Alan Kay continue on making more examples and demonstrations.

Arjun Sarwal has made further improvements to the Measure Activity, which utilizes the microphone and analog data ports of the XO as input to a graphing program. He has added buttons for three frequency ranges; features for logging data and writing it onto a file and drawing a graph based on the logged data have been tested in emulation and will be soon tested on an XO. In testing the Activity, Arjun discovered that one can use the built-in microphone to directly measure one’s pulse.

Eben Eliason and Manusheel Gutpa have been working with Irene Ficheman and the team from NATE-LSI (Integrated Systems Laboratory), in the Polytechnical School at University of São Paulo on a new Draw Activity for the XO that utilizes the new Sugar tabs and styles.

Miguel Álvarez did more work on the shared-state implementation and the Calculate activity, which now supports algebraic variables to do calculations such as: apples = 18; bananas = 12; price = 3×apples + 4×bananas.

Eben and Muriel de Souza Godol have been integrating the memory game(s) into the new Sugar collaboration schema to allow for single- and multi-player gaming over the mesh. Next is adding a “view source” mode that lets the children design their own variants to the games.

9. X Window System: Chris Ball took benchmarks for the fix to a long-standing font-corruption bug, which Bernardo Innocenti found and patched this week. Jordan Crouse and Adam Jackson are working out the right long-term fix for a very nasty class of bugs that affected a number of X drivers, not just the AMD driver. The benchmarks are inconclusive so far; more work needed to check that our fix is not causing a slowdown. Jordan also fixed some serious bugs in the X Server. Bernie resurrected our input driver: by the end of this week, the window system was again behaving properly, with the way paved for better performance in the long term.

10. Kernel: Linus Torvalds released 2.6.22 on Sunday, so this week started with more pushing of kernel changes upstream, including Dave Woodhouse's new battery-class driver, which is now in Linus' tree. During the week, Andres Salomon branched a few new stable kernel that included 2.6.22 final, a large libertas update, audio and camera LED fixes, and a number of DCON and LXFB fixes. The DCON freezing feature should be a lot more reliable now that we've switched to using a work-queue, and included a bunch of Adam Jackson's timing fixes.

In the process of testing, Andres discovered a bunch of fun new bugs: JFFS2 corruption that ate the filesystem on a B4, libertas failing to associate, and not-yet-isolated USB-storage corruption issues. Dave Woodhouse is looking at “wireless in initrd” to enable boot, installation, and testing via the wireless network, without having to rely on the NAND flash.

Richard Smith and Andres are investigating missing keypresses after resume. The kernel is losing some of the PS2 interrupts. More work is needed to determine where the keypress is going.

11. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti merged the USB and libertas suspend/resume code to master kernel tree; he also conducted more suspend/resume tests. He wrote code to support new rtc-cmos driver (configurable wakeup) and added platform devices for the power button and the lid-closed detector. He investigated individual device power-down and determined that we cannot use Libertas power-save mode when mesh is active. He wrote patches to turn off more parts of the cs5535 audio and USB Host Controller. Finally, he wrote some parallel-driver resume code; we can clearly see the culprits of slow resume time.

12. Power: John Watlington, Richard Smith Jim Gettys, Chris Ball and with Joel Stanley and Richard Smith on further power tests, trying to accurately determine which devices are responsible for our current power draw, and verify our design before the schematics are frozen for production. Joel, John and Richard took many power measurements with an instrumented XO attempting to verify all the power domains prior to the C Build. They took reading; added more channels; took more readings; and then added even more channels. The measurement system is now up to 22 channels. Things mostly look OK, but there is still some power draws that are not accounted for and are being investigated.

Kim Quirk and John Fuhrer have been conducting more battery-life tests this week. We are gathering baseline lifetime numbers to compare against as we make improvements and changes in power management. Battery life on B4 is substantially improved from B2 builds on B2 hardware while running; battery lifetime when running mesh only are currently less than expected: Michail says the Marvell wireless firmware power consumption can be significantly improved over our first measurements.

Richard Hughes continued work on the open hardware manager (OHM); OHM, which is our power-policy daemon, has landed in the builds. Richard is working on integrating OHM with the XO hardware. OHM handles suspend on power button press, configurable backlight dimming after idle time when on battery, and will soon handle going into suspend based on whether we're idle.

13. Security: Nelson Elhage and Michael Stone stress tested Vserver patch in preparation to its merger on Friday. Mitch Bradley, Ivan Krstić, and Scott Ananian hammered out a firmware security specification describing the interaction of Open Firmware and the kernel/ramdisk for activation, upgrades, and booting from a backup (See Firmware_Security).

Ivan wrote some basic activation code, which Scott hacked a bit (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/krstic/leases and http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/cscott-leases-tmp).

Scott created an initramfs for early-boot, which does activation and some upgrade and boot tasks (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/d-i and http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/rootskel-olpc).

Finally, Scott adopted the OLPC reinstallation script and is working on adding support to have it generate a temporary-format of activation lease during installation, so that we can put activation in our builds and exercise it without “bricking” all our developers' machines.

Noah Kantrowitz and Michael Stone are continuing Bitfrost implementation work; Nelson Elhage ran stress tests on the VServer kernel (no problems) and verified it has undisturbed IPv6 connectivity; SecOps will provide a set of RPMs that allow for any machine running the Trial-2 build to experimentally enable Bitfrost by virtue of a simple 'yum install olpc-security'.

14. Embedded controller: Richard Smith submitted a patch to back to Wuanta that fixes the on-board temperature sensor. It showed up in PQ2C19 which Quanta released on Friday.

15. Laptop hardware: John Watlington worked on last-minute tweaks to the laptop electronics; these were tested this week, with the deadline for changes before mass production looming. These included adding an anti-aliasing filter to the microphone input, eliminating the speaker pop when suspending/resuming, and making sure that the EC is capable of waking up on all relevant events (WLAN packet received, lid opened/closed, etc.)

16. School Server: Daniel Margo gathered data about the modified packages and configuration files for the School Server and put the configuration files into a data repository (See http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=users/danmargo/livecd-data;a=summary). Dan made packages of these configuration files and put them in the repository (See http://fedora.laptop.org/olpc-local/i386). However, he could not get them to build into a working live CD. As an interim workaround, he had made a live CD with the packages that were on schoolserver (but not the configuration, so it is not particularly interesting yet).

17. Games: Kent Quirk reports much progress:

  • Roberto Fagá continued work on ISIS, the adventure game engine. It now supports variable phrase order for different languages in its text system; he is building out the object hierarchy for the datatypes and classes of game objects.
  • Patrick DeJarnette has almost finished the Side-scroller game engine. The engine now has the ability to finish a level and display between-level and game-over screens, and it features multiple lives, multiple levels, and coin-collection. The Side-scroller system is complete enough to play and create levels. It could use help from a good artist, and it still needs to be packaged and to have some sample levels.
  • Lincoln Quirk has been maintaining the PyGame wrapper and the OLPC wiki pages describing it (Game development HOWTO and Pygame wrapper). He addressed and fixed the problem with event-queue overflow and has implemented a Pango wrapper to render fonts onto SDL surfaces. It is not yet an ideal solution because some libraries are still lacking Python support. He has also been helping to support various people who are trying to use PyGame and the wrapper.

18. Content workshops: Mel Chua, Wayne Mackintosh (Commonwealth of Learning), and SJ Klein are looking for mentors and sponsoring groups at companies and universities to support a trial season of a Summer of Content effort, running from August 10 to September 23. This would be a way to support some of the authors and creators working to make materials for trial schools.

Summer of Content will run two summers a year (one each in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres); plans for a full summer starting in December will be in place by August 15. We are looking currently for mentors that speak Arabic, Portuguese, and Thai (See Summer_Of_Content_Proposal). We are aiming to have 50 small-stipend internships for 6–8 weeks this summer.

COL has committed to sponsoring and mentoring five interns from the Commonwealth states. COL is looking for supporting organizations in India and their network in the South. Name.org out of Denver (the non-profit branch of name.com) has committed to sponsoring interns (from anywhere); the EGAP public policy school at Tecnologico de Monterrey are also on board and have space and mentors for Spanish-speaking interns.

Please send interest or potential contacts for mentorship/sponsorship to SJ and to Mel <mel@melchua.com>.

19. Creative Jams: A Guide to Jams will be published to the OLPC wiki soon. The general idea behind a jam is to: bring people together; provide food and feedback and good cheer; in less than three days, create and test a series of [activities, texts, videos, games] designed for children and for use with XOs.

20. Content bundles: After some discussion about how to define non-activity bundles, there is now a working spec for people who want to provide non-executable bundles that can be browsed or launched from a browser (See Creating_a_content_bundle).

21. Music: The Free Music Project is now synchronizing with Jamendo, which has an efficient way of verifying that submitters are the authors of the works they suggest is freely licensed, and have hundreds of CC-BY pieces. Jamendo is working on an OLPC portal of sorts; there is no spec yet. The Free Music folks have new DJs and modern musicians recording for the XO, including The Juan Maclean, Maga Bo, and DJ C (See http://www.thejuanmaclean.com/).

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# 51167]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-07-14

Congratulations to Chris Blizzard who welcomed home his new daughter, Samantha Snow Blizzard.

1. Intel became the newest member of OLPC this week.

2. Michail Bletsas attended Cisco's ConnectFest event at their Bay Area campus. It was organized by a group within Cisco with a strong interest towards the development of low cost, robust networking solutions for the developing world and was attended by a variety of people active in the area (Intel TIER lab, Meraki, Inveneo, Green WiFi, et al.).

3. Trial-2: This week completes integration of major features for Trial-2. Kernels in our Fedora-Core-7-based builds include a new X driver, our power management work, and VServer. Code freeze will begin on Monday; we will triage all bugs to minimize the change to the code base; we aim for a final Release Candidate at the end of this upcoming week. The goal for next week is to reach stability and to be able to demonstrate: collaboration, Journal, activation, mesh connectivity, and suspend/resume.

4. Testing: Each new build is now subject to much testing. (Please refer to the test-group release notes when deciding to download a build that isn't stable yet: Test_Group_Release_Notes.)

5. Sugar: Red Hat’s Dan Winship also joins the Sugar team this week. He'll be working on builds while John Palmieri is on vacation; Dan has been working on Sugar bug-fixes.

Tomeu Vizoso refactored removable devices support in the Journal for robustness to support manual mount and unmount and physical removal of devices before unmount. He test the performance of the data store inside Sugar (the new one is much faster); the new data store now only indexes meta data, not file contents while Ben Saller gets the asynchronous content-indexing working again. Ben refactored large pieces of the data store and the data store's dependencies for performance improvements. This work has resulted in much needed performance improvements to the Journal.

Marco Gritti packaged various Sugar pieces for builds and continued to hunt down and fix Sugar bugs. He also wrote new introductory screen for Sugar.

6. Presence: Simon McVittie worked on medium- and long-term improvements to the dbus Python language bindings and made some short-term fixes. He also fixed a problem with Presence Service slowness (#1874 and #1927) and missing XO buddy names (#1967).

Sjoerd Simons has been testing and bug fixing in Salut (XMPP Link Local)—XMPP is the extensible messaging and presence protocol used in Sugar activity communication. He has hunted down some problems with Avahi service discovery and helped Guillaume Desmottes in designing some XMPP stream-manager improvements in Salut (for supporting streaming in tubes).

Morgan Collett finished the “buddy-left” code in the Sugar Mesh View. and reviewed and merged some of Simon's Presence Service patches. He updated the Connect and Chat Activity releases for builds and he made a fix to Gabble to stop it trying to use IRC. He is looking into Presence Service performance and Salut issues.

Dan Williams made many NetworkManager testing and fixes for mesh beacons, DHCP, link-local presence support. He also tested a fix for the camera-driver delay and pulled in a new gstreamer release.

7. Content distribution and updates: H.T. Kung's group at Harvard is working on a content distribution system for ad-hoc networks that utilizes network coding. The practical benefit of their approach is that distributing a large file among a number of laptops in a mesh network always completes within a determined amount of time, something not possible without network coding due to the inherent limitations of the wireless medium. They used 29 XOs to test their approach in Harvard's Soldier's Field during the hottest day of the summer. The XOs performed flawlessly!

Alexander Larsson has been working on restructuring the “Updationator” repository format so that manifests are also stored as blobs. He created a repository at http://olpc.download.redhat.com and tested various upgrades of laptops from that. Updatinator 0.1 is in builds for testing.

8. Sugar activities: Marc Maurer has made numerous fixes to the collision handling in “AbiCollab”, the collaboration extensions to Abiword, AKA “Write” on the XO. It seems to now be quite robust, even on high-latency networks. Please test it. In the Write Activity itself, Marc has fix a problem with the font name/size combo-boxes; implemented a color-selection button that follows the cursor context; fix the insert-table button; and added a total page count to the View menu.

Bert Freudenberg has been keeping pace with the changes in Sugar and has been producing a series of working .xo bundles of Etoys. Takashi Yamamiya and Ted Kaehler are working on the keyboard shortcuts that match with Sugar's conventions. Copy and paste also works due to Takashi's effort. Takashi also brought his ODE binding of Squeak up to date and made it compatible with the OLPC Etoys. Adjustment of buttons and menus are being made by Yoshiki Ohshima and Scott Wallace. Ian Piumarta, Bert, and Yoshiki are working on resolving a low-memory situation (that occurs on the B2-1 machines, which have only 28MB of DRAM). Ted, Kim Rose, Rebecca Cannara and Alan Kay continue on making more examples and demonstrations.

Arjun Sarwal has made further improvements to the Measure Activity, which utilizes the microphone and analog data ports of the XO as input to a graphing program. He has added buttons for three frequency ranges; features for logging data and writing it onto a file and drawing a graph based on the logged data have been tested in emulation and will be soon tested on an XO. In testing the Activity, Arjun discovered that one can use the built-in microphone to directly measure one’s pulse.

Eben Eliason and Manusheel Gutpa have been working with Irene Ficheman and the team from NATE-LSI (Integrated Systems Laboratory), in the Polytechnical School at University of São Paulo on a new Draw Activity for the XO that utilizes the new Sugar tabs and styles.

Miguel Álvarez did more work on the shared-state implementation and the Calculate activity, which now supports algebraic variables to do calculations such as: apples = 18; bananas = 12; price = 3×apples + 4×bananas.

Eben and Muriel de Souza Godol have been integrating the memory game(s) into the new Sugar collaboration schema to allow for single- and multi-player gaming over the mesh. Next is adding a “view source” mode that lets the children design their own variants to the games.

9. X Window System: Chris Ball took benchmarks for the fix to a long-standing font-corruption bug, which Bernardo Innocenti found and patched this week. Jordan Crouse and Adam Jackson are working out the right long-term fix for a very nasty class of bugs that affected a number of X drivers, not just the AMD driver. The benchmarks are inconclusive so far; more work needed to check that our fix is not causing a slowdown. Jordan also fixed some serious bugs in the X Server. Bernie resurrected our input driver: by the end of this week, the window system was again behaving properly, with the way paved for better performance in the long term.

10. Kernel: Linus Torvalds released 2.6.22 on Sunday, so this week started with more pushing of kernel changes upstream, including Dave Woodhouse's new battery-class driver, which is now in Linus' tree. During the week, Andres Salomon branched a few new stable kernel that included 2.6.22 final, a large libertas update, audio and camera LED fixes, and a number of DCON and LXFB fixes. The DCON freezing feature should be a lot more reliable now that we've switched to using a work-queue, and included a bunch of Adam Jackson's timing fixes.

In the process of testing, Andres discovered a bunch of fun new bugs: JFFS2 corruption that ate the filesystem on a B4, libertas failing to associate, and not-yet-isolated USB-storage corruption issues. Dave Woodhouse is looking at “wireless in initrd” to enable boot, installation, and testing via the wireless network, without having to rely on the NAND flash.

Richard Smith and Andres are investigating missing keypresses after resume. The kernel is losing some of the PS2 interrupts. More work is needed to determine where the keypress is going.

11. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti merged the USB and libertas suspend/resume code to master kernel tree; he also conducted more suspend/resume tests. He wrote code to support new rtc-cmos driver (configurable wakeup) and added platform devices for the power button and the lid-closed detector. He investigated individual device power-down and determined that we cannot use Libertas power-save mode when mesh is active. He wrote patches to turn off more parts of the cs5535 audio and USB Host Controller. Finally, he wrote some parallel-driver resume code; we can clearly see the culprits of slow resume time.

12. Power: John Watlington, Richard Smith Jim Gettys, Chris Ball and with Joel Stanley and Richard Smith on further power tests, trying to accurately determine which devices are responsible for our current power draw, and verify our design before the schematics are frozen for production. Joel, John and Richard took many power measurements with an instrumented XO attempting to verify all the power domains prior to the C Build. They took reading; added more channels; took more readings; and then added even more channels. The measurement system is now up to 22 channels. Things mostly look OK, but there is still some power draws that are not accounted for and are being investigated.

Kim Quirk and John Fuhrer have been conducting more battery-life tests this week. We are gathering baseline lifetime numbers to compare against as we make improvements and changes in power management. Battery life on B4 is substantially improved from B2 builds on B2 hardware while running; battery lifetime when running mesh only are currently less than expected: Michail says the Marvell wireless firmware power consumption can be significantly improved over our first measurements.

Richard Hughes continued work on the open hardware manager (OHM); OHM, which is our power-policy daemon, has landed in the builds. Richard is working on integrating OHM with the XO hardware. OHM handles suspend on power button press, configurable backlight dimming after idle time when on battery, and will soon handle going into suspend based on whether we're idle.

13. Security: Nelson Elhage and Michael Stone stress tested Vserver patch in preparation to its merger on Friday. Mitch Bradley, Ivan Krstić, and Scott Ananian hammered out a firmware security specification describing the interaction of Open Firmware and the kernel/ramdisk for activation, upgrades, and booting from a backup (See Firmware_Security).

Ivan wrote some basic activation code, which Scott hacked a bit (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/krstic/leases and http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/cscott-leases-tmp).

Scott created an initramfs for early-boot, which does activation and some upgrade and boot tasks (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/d-i and http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/rootskel-olpc).

Finally, Scott adopted the OLPC reinstallation script and is working on adding support to have it generate a temporary-format of activation lease during installation, so that we can put activation in our builds and exercise it without “bricking” all our developers' machines.

Noah Kantrowitz and Michael Stone are continuing Bitfrost implementation work; Nelson Elhage ran stress tests on the VServer kernel (no problems) and verified it has undisturbed IPv6 connectivity; SecOps will provide a set of RPMs that allow for any machine running the Trial-2 build to experimentally enable Bitfrost by virtue of a simple 'yum install olpc-security'.

14. Embedded controller: Richard Smith submitted a patch to back to Wuanta that fixes the on-board temperature sensor. It showed up in PQ2C19 which Quanta released on Friday.

15. Laptop hardware: John Watlington worked on last-minute tweaks to the laptop electronics; these were tested this week, with the deadline for changes before mass production looming. These included adding an anti-aliasing filter to the microphone input, eliminating the speaker pop when suspending/resuming, and making sure that the EC is capable of waking up on all relevant events (WLAN packet received, lid opened/closed, etc.)

16. School Server: Daniel Margo gathered data about the modified packages and configuration files for the School Server and put the configuration files into a data repository (See http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=users/danmargo/livecd-data;a=summary). Dan made packages of these configuration files and put them in the repository (See http://fedora.laptop.org/olpc-local/i386). However, he could not get them to build into a working live CD. As an interim workaround, he had made a live CD with the packages that were on schoolserver (but not the configuration, so it is not particularly interesting yet).

17. Games: Kent Quirk reports much progress:

  • Roberto Fagá continued work on ISIS, the adventure game engine. It now supports variable phrase order for different languages in its text system; he is building out the object hierarchy for the datatypes and classes of game objects.
  • Patrick DeJarnette has almost finished the Side-scroller game engine. The engine now has the ability to finish a level and display between-level and game-over screens, and it features multiple lives, multiple levels, and coin-collection. The Side-scroller system is complete enough to play and create levels. It could use help from a good artist, and it still needs to be packaged and to have some sample levels.
  • Lincoln Quirk has been maintaining the PyGame wrapper and the OLPC wiki pages describing it (Game development HOWTO and Pygame wrapper). He addressed and fixed the problem with event-queue overflow and has implemented a Pango wrapper to render fonts onto SDL surfaces. It is not yet an ideal solution because some libraries are still lacking Python support. He has also been helping to support various people who are trying to use PyGame and the wrapper.

18. Content workshops: Mel Chua, Wayne Mackintosh (Commonwealth of Learning), and SJ Klein are looking for mentors and sponsoring groups at companies and universities to support a trial season of a Summer of Content effort, running from August 10 to September 23. This would be a way to support some of the authors and creators working to make materials for trial schools.

Summer of Content will run two summers a year (one each in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres); plans for a full summer starting in December will be in place by August 15. We are looking currently for mentors that speak Arabic, Portuguese, and Thai (See Summer_Of_Content_Proposal). We are aiming to have 50 small-stipend internships for 6–8 weeks this summer.

COL has committed to sponsoring and mentoring five interns from the Commonwealth states. COL is looking for supporting organizations in India and their network in the South. Name.org out of Denver (the non-profit branch of name.com) has committed to sponsoring interns (from anywhere); the EGAP public policy school at Tecnologico de Monterrey are also on board and have space and mentors for Spanish-speaking interns.

Please send interest or potential contacts for mentorship/sponsorship to SJ and to Mel <mel@melchua.com>.

19. Creative Jams: A Guide to Jams will be published to the OLPC wiki soon. The general idea behind a jam is to: bring people together; provide food and feedback and good cheer; in less than three days, create and test a series of [activities, texts, videos, games] designed for children and for use with XOs.

20. Content bundles: After some discussion about how to define non-activity bundles, there is now a working spec for people who want to provide non-executable bundles that can be browsed or launched from a browser (See Creating_a_content_bundle).

21. Music: The Free Music Project is now synchronizing with Jamendo, which has an efficient way of verifying that submitters are the authors of the works they suggest is freely licensed, and have hundreds of CC-BY pieces. Jamendo is working on an OLPC portal of sorts; there is no spec yet. The Free Music folks have new DJs and modern musicians recording for the XO, including The Juan Maclean, Maga Bo, and DJ C (See http://www.thejuanmaclean.com/).

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

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

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

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