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=Laptop News 2007-07-21=
=Laptop News 2007-07-28=
1. FCC certification: Quanta's Kenny Chung reported that XO has been granted full FCC certification. This includes SAR (specific absorb rate) at less than 20cm (the distance between the WiFI antennas and a child can be less than 20cm). Other tests passed: Conducted Emissions; Radiated Emissions; Power Harmonics; Electro-static Discharge; Fast Transients and Burst Immunity; Surge Immunity; Induced Radio-Frequency Immunity; Power Frequency Magnetic Field Immunity; and Voltage Dips. Further UL and CE certifications are in process; these will require C-build machines for final approvals.
1. Testing: We ran battery-life tests on 75 B4 laptops: results will be reported on the OLPC wiki this week. Next week we will use 100 B4s for mesh tests. Dafydd Harries and Simon McVittie of Collabora will be helping us with mesh-scaling and connectivity tests. The current software builds are progressing well. Most of the Trial-2 features are in Builds 528+; many activities (Read, Write, Chat, Connect4, Record) now have collaboration features enabled; the Journal is integrated, and small link-local mesh networks are working. Thanks to everyone who has been documenting, reviewing, and prioritizing bugs in Trac (http://dev.laptop.org); most have been triaged and will be fixed in the next release (Trial-3).


2. Free Drop: Mary Lou Jepsen and Quanta reviewed all the 10-point free-drop data that we have been collecting over since December 2006. The units are dropped on all corners, all side bumpers, and front and back. Initially, we had dropped onto plywood, but this spring we made the test tougher: we have been dropping on a hard steel plate, with and without a carpet. B4 units pass a 150cm 10-point drops onto a carpet-covered steel plate; a 105cm simulated slanted-desk "slide" onto a steel plate; and a 80cm 10-point free drop onto a steel plate. The laptop, when dropped on the antennas, withstands a 150cm drop. To put these data into perspective: a standard laptop only passes a 45cm 10-point drop on plywood (a much softer material than steel).
2. Trial-3: We've started discussions on the software release that will line up with the mass-production hardware build; it needs to be ready in early to mid September. This will be largely based on Trial-2 and will include many bug fixes and only small feature changes.


3. Trial-2 testing: Sometimes we easily miss the forest for all the trees, including the hundreds of bugs we deal with. This week we have a working mesh that does not require access points and operates across the full internet as well, the ability to share most of our basic activities including Chat, Write, Etoys, and Record. Kim Quirk and Jim Gettys conducted a “train” test (they commute by train without Internet access), which saw successful peer-to-peer picture sharing in the Record Activity and text, audio, and project sharing in the Etoys Activity. Sharing through the mesh is fun; it got the attention of a number of people on the train.
3. Sugar: Marco Gritti reports “really good progress!” He has chased down numerous bugs—in the clipboard, regarding themes, palette behavior, and the user interface (UI). He has completed much of work of integrating open hardware management (OHM) with the UI. Other details include reworking the brightness and volume key handling for the B3/B4 keyboards; tracking down the “white row” X11 bug; and getting the Totem media plug-in to work in the browser. Tomeu Vizoso also made fixes to the Clipboard; he integrated recent changes in the datastore into Sugar; implemented lazy (paged) scrolling in the Journal by caching more entries than can be shown on-screen and fetching them opportunistically; and fixed some Sugar and Activity file leaks in /tmp.


The functionality of Trial-2 code is at a very good state; it is now time to close it down and release it. To do that we are asking that no one checks in bug fixes or any code without an express OK from Jim, Kim or Dan Williams. At this point, we are only going to allow fixes associated with critical suspend/resume issues and critical regressions.
J.M. Maurer added a “zoom” signal to the libabiword widget, and hook it up in Write; added full justification to the Write activity; implement “buddy left” in Write and the AbiCollab Sugar back end; and he fixed a bug that was causing Write to crash when opening a second instance.


4. Trial-3 planning: Thanks to Simon McVittie and Dafydd Harries for coming to the OLPC office in Cambridge to work through some specific mesh, tubes, Salut, and Gabble issues and to help plan the Trial-3 feature set. Next week a team from OLPC and RedHat will be working with Pentagram to finalize the mesh, UI, and Journal features for Trial-3.
Arjun Sarwal worked further on optimizing the response time of the Measure activity (which turns the laptop into an oscilloscope). He has made improvements to the UI by adding a grid onto the background and he has chosen color scheme that improves contrast. New features include being able to start/stop the display and taking a snapshot of the currently displayed waveform. Data logging has also added. A version of the activity is available at the git repository under the category projects/measure (See [[Measure / Oscilloscope]]).


5. Etoys: The current focus of the Etoys team is stabilizing the Sugar integration. Bert Freudenberg led the effort and now an Etoy project can be saved into Journal. In the meantime, the other members of the team continue to improve the system. Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider are working on the interface with gettext; now, the phrases used in the Etoys system can be translated by standard external tools. Yoshiki Ohshima and Bert made the system locale conscious; the system switches language upon starting. Scott Wallace has made improvements to some UI elements, including simplifying the sound recorder. Scott also helped Kim Rose, Alan Kay, and Rebecca Cannara with the documentation effort. Ted Kaehler worked on improving some example Etoys that will be bundled with the distribution.
4. GNOME Mobile: John Palmieri was at GUADEC (GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference) this week, representing OLPC at the GNOME mobile and embedded (GMAE) meeting. The GNOME Mobile platform is a subset of the GNOME platform; it represents components that are currently shipping in the XO, the OpenMoko, the Nokia 800, and other devices.


6. Temperature testing: Joel Stanly and Arjun Sarual set up a food warming oven in the OLPC office. The oven is large enough to house eight fully opened XOs and allows us to examine the behavior of the laptops under temperatures ranging from a warm 40°C, up to a toasty 60°C and above. Some preliminary tests were conducted, examining the operation of the battery charging systems under the extreme heat that may be encountered by, say, a laptop sitting in full sunlight. One motivation for this testing is that the NiMH batteries that are used in some of the XOs lose the ability to be charged above 55°C. (The newer LiFePO4 technology allows charging above these temperatures, for when the need arises.) We are pleased to report the XOs ran flawlessly in the extreme heat, even when the oven’s unpredictable thermostat inadvertently allowed the temperature to reach 68°C. Further testing will take place over the coming weeks.
5. Salut/Gabble: John was joined at GUADEC by Sjoerd Simons, Guillaume Desmottes, Morgan Collett, and Simon McVittie. Between sessions they they worked on minor bug-fixes and updates in Salut (link-local XMPP connection manager). Sjoerd figured out why Salut sometimes “looses” contacts on bad networks. Together, they finished the new tubes specification. Simon also worked on fixing avatar (buddy picture) bugs in Gabble (the Jabber/XMPP connection manager we use for chat and video calls).


7. Touchpad: Joel also tested the new touchpad/keyboard subsystem from ALPS, verifying the new power-saving mode it allows. We can successfully power it down, saving almost 12mW, and bring it back out of power saving mode when the user requires it again.
6. Builds: Dan Winship cranked out multiple builds per day this week. (We are now up to Build 528.) He made a fix to Pilgrim to accommodate activities with spaces in their names; and he wrote some tools to help determine (and document) changes between builds.


8. Backup: Chris Ball worked with Scott Ananian on the USB backup/restore script for Trial-2. By putting restore into the activation ramdisk, we have backup/restore happening with one command (./usbupgrade) in the developer console. We would like to get that down to zero commands, though, by having the autoreinstallation image make the backup automatically too.
7. Mesh activities: Dan Williams debugged and fix various activity sharing and Mesh View bugs. He fixed Python 2.5 issue that broke sharing in Record and Read; and he wrote a Jukebox activity, a gstreamer-based media player with Journal integration. He also did some Libertas maintenance, patch review; made wireless scans “less hacky”; and fixed a wireless scanning issue in NetworkManager that caused access points to drop off the mesh view over time.


9. Performance: Marco Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, Dan Williams, and Chris Ball explored reducing our memory usage to make the current images usable on B2-1 laptops (with only 128M of DRAM). All in all, there should be 20M of (resident) memory that we can reclaim so far for Trial-2; 10M due to Sugar importing libraries and icons that it doesn't need, and 12M for the heavyweight DHCP server that we run when associated with an access point. We'll keep working on this, as it has a positive impact on performance on all versions of the XO.
8. Power measurement: This week saw a flurry of activity trying to reconcile the power draw of each XO subsystem with what we expected. John Watlington, Richard Smith, Joel Stanley and Jim Gettys working on detailed analyses of power consumption. The goal of the measurements has been verification we have hardware in place enabling us to turn off any component at will and that an “off” component really is powered off. This will mean that as software development progresses, we will be able to keep any unused circuitry off or at low power when it is unused. We now have 29 different measurement points on the XO, giving us fine- grained data on every power rail, covering all major subsystems.


10. School server: Scott Ananian, Dan Margo, and John Watlington pushed forward on School server software builds. A stumbling block is automating the install from a live CD. Dan ended his summer internship this week. His efforts in this area have been appreciated, and we hope that he continues to help remotely in the future.
If all subsystems are on and running at maximum power use, the XO can consume a maximum of approximately six watts (ignoring external USB devices). To verify this, we have put the XO in various states of display, wireless, USB and CPU usage. Normal usage when the system is idle, or in ebook suspend mode, or mesh only mode is very much less than this maximum, of course.


11. Embedded controller: Richard Smith discovered that the SCI wakeups were not handled properly and the power button was being asserted on resume (unnecessarily), causing spurious power button events. Richard also discovered a race condition that was the reason for some EC timeouts; Andres Salomon added a 2ms delay in the kernel as a workaround, while Richard is working on a proper fix for the EC. After three weeks of chasing a bug, the cause of a NiMH battery-charging problem has been found. Q2C19 will fix this bug. The source of the mistaken “power button” on resume was located and fixed. With these EC bugs fixed, suspend/resume code should begin to function as expected.
The wattage drawn from each power rail was carefully reviewed and audited to make sure we knew where each watt was going. We were not able to account for every watt of the system, but we are really close—close enough that we feel that all the components are functioning as specified. But “as specified” in a few cases it still a bit high. WLAN and DCON (display controller) are a bit problematic. We have promises from the WLAN team that there are lots of knobs to tweak to reduce power consumption and that they will now start tuning those.


12. Donations to the OLPC Foundation can now be made by credit card through Google Checkout or with a PayPal account. The link to the giving site is http://laptopfoundation.org/en/participate/. OLPCF continues to accept checks as well.
The word from HiMax on DCON though is that what they measure for sleep-mode power draw is the same as what we measured for sleep mode, approximately 150mW. This is not acceptable. When we go into sleep mode or low-power WLAN-only mode we will need to drop the power to the DCON. This means that the kernel will soon have to sprout knowledge of how to init the DCON from power up. Previously the kernel could rely on OpenFirmware (OFW) to have initialized the DCON. (We have verified under OFW that we can drop power to the DCON and then bring it back to life.


==Upcoming Highlights:==
Most other Linux power-management controls has been verified as now working correctly, e.g., audio, camera, etc. The surprise discovery is that our processor's power supply is not as efficient as it could be. On the more positive side, we shaved 30mW from the power required when the laptop is not turned off and another 35mW whenever the screen is turned on.
{|

|-
9. Performance: Chris Ball changed some of our power behavior; we now turn off the screen while suspended via the power button or lid close, saving power. Chris noticed that resume from suspend becomes unstable if we are stressing the wireless radio at the time of resume. This bug has been passed on to Marcelo and Cozybit for investigation. Chris also reported a problem with game keys and power management events being seen as power-button presses to AMD; this is putting us into suspend when we don't expect to be going there.
|Jul 31 – Aug 6 ||[http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikimania], Taipei

|-
Chris is investigating our memory use, which has crept up recently—we are running more Python processes than we use to without having them share libraries, and running a greedy DHCP server (taking 12–20MB!)
|Aug 1–3 ||[http://imamp.colum.edu/eceim/squeakfest07/index.php Squeakfest07], Chicago, IL

|}
Chris and Richard wrote a Python script to calculate the watt-hour value reached by the battery tests we are doing. This lets us make accurate calculations on the duration we'll get from measured power draws.

10. Firmware: Quanta released the 2nd test for what will turn out to be the PQ2C20 firmware. Richard Smith reviewed all the changes. The highlight feature of this is the removal of code supporting Atest (dropping ATest code removed 672 lines from the code base.)

Andres Salomon worked on a number of embedded controller (EC) fixes, including helping Richard debug EC issues by providing proper kernel support. Mitch Bradley got Forth running on the 8051 processor as a possible base for the open EC code and worked on a firmware release with activation support.

Lilian Walter got IPv4 and IPv6 dual stack ping and finger working. Lilian is researching on how to implement Teredo tunneling (Teredo tunneling is a protocol designed to grant IPv6 connectivity to nodes that are located behind IPv6-unaware NAT devices); this involves Ipv6 features such as router solicitation/advertisement and DNS AAAA packets.

James Cameron has started work on an open-source firmware implementation for the EC.

11. Kernel: Marcelo Tosatti did more parallel suspend/resume testing; found an unnecessary call to mdelay() in the CAFE driver; and investigated more Libertas suspend/resume problems and failures under high traffic. Andres Salomon worked on another Libertas merge, dealt with getting code upstream, got the wakeup-from-keyboard work properly: lots of fixed bugs and hopefully fewer introduced ones..

Remaining for completion of Linux kernel power management is powering the DCON down when not in use (saving 150mw in suspend, as noted above), and debugging of the DCON patch to enable the use of the DCON use when the window system is idle (saving more than 0.25 watts while running). We also need to explore how much power is saved by turning off the Dotclock PLL in the processor when it is not needed. These will improve further our battery life.

12. School server: Daniel Wyatt made the first installing, pre-configured school-server live image (See xs-dev.laptop.org/xs and the scripts in the git tree http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/livecd-data;a=summary ; the configuration files are at http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/xs-config;a=summary and the XS “call home” scripts are packaged at
http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/xs-callhome;a=summary).

13. Content bundles: With input from the community, Lauren Klein and Kathy Paur helped flesh out the content-bundle specification. Now we need to implement a mime-type hook for .xol (the extension name being considered) and a script to unpack it and regenerate a navigation templates in /home/olpc/Library. We have had some community members already uploading .xol files to the [[Library grid]] on the OLPC wiki.

14. Content Jams: CC-Taiwan is one of the largest Creative Commons chapters; and they are very excited about running a content jam around Wikimania. Another Jam is being planned around linuxconf.au.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 15:27, 28 July 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 55996]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-07-28

1. FCC certification: Quanta's Kenny Chung reported that XO has been granted full FCC certification. This includes SAR (specific absorb rate) at less than 20cm (the distance between the WiFI antennas and a child can be less than 20cm). Other tests passed: Conducted Emissions; Radiated Emissions; Power Harmonics; Electro-static Discharge; Fast Transients and Burst Immunity; Surge Immunity; Induced Radio-Frequency Immunity; Power Frequency Magnetic Field Immunity; and Voltage Dips. Further UL and CE certifications are in process; these will require C-build machines for final approvals.

2. Free Drop: Mary Lou Jepsen and Quanta reviewed all the 10-point free-drop data that we have been collecting over since December 2006. The units are dropped on all corners, all side bumpers, and front and back. Initially, we had dropped onto plywood, but this spring we made the test tougher: we have been dropping on a hard steel plate, with and without a carpet. B4 units pass a 150cm 10-point drops onto a carpet-covered steel plate; a 105cm simulated slanted-desk "slide" onto a steel plate; and a 80cm 10-point free drop onto a steel plate. The laptop, when dropped on the antennas, withstands a 150cm drop. To put these data into perspective: a standard laptop only passes a 45cm 10-point drop on plywood (a much softer material than steel).

3. Trial-2 testing: Sometimes we easily miss the forest for all the trees, including the hundreds of bugs we deal with. This week we have a working mesh that does not require access points and operates across the full internet as well, the ability to share most of our basic activities including Chat, Write, Etoys, and Record. Kim Quirk and Jim Gettys conducted a “train” test (they commute by train without Internet access), which saw successful peer-to-peer picture sharing in the Record Activity and text, audio, and project sharing in the Etoys Activity. Sharing through the mesh is fun; it got the attention of a number of people on the train.

The functionality of Trial-2 code is at a very good state; it is now time to close it down and release it. To do that we are asking that no one checks in bug fixes or any code without an express OK from Jim, Kim or Dan Williams. At this point, we are only going to allow fixes associated with critical suspend/resume issues and critical regressions.

4. Trial-3 planning: Thanks to Simon McVittie and Dafydd Harries for coming to the OLPC office in Cambridge to work through some specific mesh, tubes, Salut, and Gabble issues and to help plan the Trial-3 feature set. Next week a team from OLPC and RedHat will be working with Pentagram to finalize the mesh, UI, and Journal features for Trial-3.

5. Etoys: The current focus of the Etoys team is stabilizing the Sugar integration. Bert Freudenberg led the effort and now an Etoy project can be saved into Journal. In the meantime, the other members of the team continue to improve the system. Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider are working on the interface with gettext; now, the phrases used in the Etoys system can be translated by standard external tools. Yoshiki Ohshima and Bert made the system locale conscious; the system switches language upon starting. Scott Wallace has made improvements to some UI elements, including simplifying the sound recorder. Scott also helped Kim Rose, Alan Kay, and Rebecca Cannara with the documentation effort. Ted Kaehler worked on improving some example Etoys that will be bundled with the distribution.

6. Temperature testing: Joel Stanly and Arjun Sarual set up a food warming oven in the OLPC office. The oven is large enough to house eight fully opened XOs and allows us to examine the behavior of the laptops under temperatures ranging from a warm 40°C, up to a toasty 60°C and above. Some preliminary tests were conducted, examining the operation of the battery charging systems under the extreme heat that may be encountered by, say, a laptop sitting in full sunlight. One motivation for this testing is that the NiMH batteries that are used in some of the XOs lose the ability to be charged above 55°C. (The newer LiFePO4 technology allows charging above these temperatures, for when the need arises.) We are pleased to report the XOs ran flawlessly in the extreme heat, even when the oven’s unpredictable thermostat inadvertently allowed the temperature to reach 68°C. Further testing will take place over the coming weeks.

7. Touchpad: Joel also tested the new touchpad/keyboard subsystem from ALPS, verifying the new power-saving mode it allows. We can successfully power it down, saving almost 12mW, and bring it back out of power saving mode when the user requires it again.

8. Backup: Chris Ball worked with Scott Ananian on the USB backup/restore script for Trial-2. By putting restore into the activation ramdisk, we have backup/restore happening with one command (./usbupgrade) in the developer console. We would like to get that down to zero commands, though, by having the autoreinstallation image make the backup automatically too.

9. Performance: Marco Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, Dan Williams, and Chris Ball explored reducing our memory usage to make the current images usable on B2-1 laptops (with only 128M of DRAM). All in all, there should be 20M of (resident) memory that we can reclaim so far for Trial-2; 10M due to Sugar importing libraries and icons that it doesn't need, and 12M for the heavyweight DHCP server that we run when associated with an access point. We'll keep working on this, as it has a positive impact on performance on all versions of the XO.

10. School server: Scott Ananian, Dan Margo, and John Watlington pushed forward on School server software builds. A stumbling block is automating the install from a live CD. Dan ended his summer internship this week. His efforts in this area have been appreciated, and we hope that he continues to help remotely in the future.

11. Embedded controller: Richard Smith discovered that the SCI wakeups were not handled properly and the power button was being asserted on resume (unnecessarily), causing spurious power button events. Richard also discovered a race condition that was the reason for some EC timeouts; Andres Salomon added a 2ms delay in the kernel as a workaround, while Richard is working on a proper fix for the EC. After three weeks of chasing a bug, the cause of a NiMH battery-charging problem has been found. Q2C19 will fix this bug. The source of the mistaken “power button” on resume was located and fixed. With these EC bugs fixed, suspend/resume code should begin to function as expected.

12. Donations to the OLPC Foundation can now be made by credit card through Google Checkout or with a PayPal account. The link to the giving site is http://laptopfoundation.org/en/participate/. OLPCF continues to accept checks as well.

Upcoming Highlights:

Jul 31 – Aug 6 Wikimania, Taipei
Aug 1–3 Squeakfest07, Chicago, IL

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# 55996]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-07-28

1. FCC certification: Quanta's Kenny Chung reported that XO has been granted full FCC certification. This includes SAR (specific absorb rate) at less than 20cm (the distance between the WiFI antennas and a child can be less than 20cm). Other tests passed: Conducted Emissions; Radiated Emissions; Power Harmonics; Electro-static Discharge; Fast Transients and Burst Immunity; Surge Immunity; Induced Radio-Frequency Immunity; Power Frequency Magnetic Field Immunity; and Voltage Dips. Further UL and CE certifications are in process; these will require C-build machines for final approvals.

2. Free Drop: Mary Lou Jepsen and Quanta reviewed all the 10-point free-drop data that we have been collecting over since December 2006. The units are dropped on all corners, all side bumpers, and front and back. Initially, we had dropped onto plywood, but this spring we made the test tougher: we have been dropping on a hard steel plate, with and without a carpet. B4 units pass a 150cm 10-point drops onto a carpet-covered steel plate; a 105cm simulated slanted-desk "slide" onto a steel plate; and a 80cm 10-point free drop onto a steel plate. The laptop, when dropped on the antennas, withstands a 150cm drop. To put these data into perspective: a standard laptop only passes a 45cm 10-point drop on plywood (a much softer material than steel).

3. Trial-2 testing: Sometimes we easily miss the forest for all the trees, including the hundreds of bugs we deal with. This week we have a working mesh that does not require access points and operates across the full internet as well, the ability to share most of our basic activities including Chat, Write, Etoys, and Record. Kim Quirk and Jim Gettys conducted a “train” test (they commute by train without Internet access), which saw successful peer-to-peer picture sharing in the Record Activity and text, audio, and project sharing in the Etoys Activity. Sharing through the mesh is fun; it got the attention of a number of people on the train.

The functionality of Trial-2 code is at a very good state; it is now time to close it down and release it. To do that we are asking that no one checks in bug fixes or any code without an express OK from Jim, Kim or Dan Williams. At this point, we are only going to allow fixes associated with critical suspend/resume issues and critical regressions.

4. Trial-3 planning: Thanks to Simon McVittie and Dafydd Harries for coming to the OLPC office in Cambridge to work through some specific mesh, tubes, Salut, and Gabble issues and to help plan the Trial-3 feature set. Next week a team from OLPC and RedHat will be working with Pentagram to finalize the mesh, UI, and Journal features for Trial-3.

5. Etoys: The current focus of the Etoys team is stabilizing the Sugar integration. Bert Freudenberg led the effort and now an Etoy project can be saved into Journal. In the meantime, the other members of the team continue to improve the system. Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider are working on the interface with gettext; now, the phrases used in the Etoys system can be translated by standard external tools. Yoshiki Ohshima and Bert made the system locale conscious; the system switches language upon starting. Scott Wallace has made improvements to some UI elements, including simplifying the sound recorder. Scott also helped Kim Rose, Alan Kay, and Rebecca Cannara with the documentation effort. Ted Kaehler worked on improving some example Etoys that will be bundled with the distribution.

6. Temperature testing: Joel Stanly and Arjun Sarual set up a food warming oven in the OLPC office. The oven is large enough to house eight fully opened XOs and allows us to examine the behavior of the laptops under temperatures ranging from a warm 40°C, up to a toasty 60°C and above. Some preliminary tests were conducted, examining the operation of the battery charging systems under the extreme heat that may be encountered by, say, a laptop sitting in full sunlight. One motivation for this testing is that the NiMH batteries that are used in some of the XOs lose the ability to be charged above 55°C. (The newer LiFePO4 technology allows charging above these temperatures, for when the need arises.) We are pleased to report the XOs ran flawlessly in the extreme heat, even when the oven’s unpredictable thermostat inadvertently allowed the temperature to reach 68°C. Further testing will take place over the coming weeks.

7. Touchpad: Joel also tested the new touchpad/keyboard subsystem from ALPS, verifying the new power-saving mode it allows. We can successfully power it down, saving almost 12mW, and bring it back out of power saving mode when the user requires it again.

8. Backup: Chris Ball worked with Scott Ananian on the USB backup/restore script for Trial-2. By putting restore into the activation ramdisk, we have backup/restore happening with one command (./usbupgrade) in the developer console. We would like to get that down to zero commands, though, by having the autoreinstallation image make the backup automatically too.

9. Performance: Marco Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, Dan Williams, and Chris Ball explored reducing our memory usage to make the current images usable on B2-1 laptops (with only 128M of DRAM). All in all, there should be 20M of (resident) memory that we can reclaim so far for Trial-2; 10M due to Sugar importing libraries and icons that it doesn't need, and 12M for the heavyweight DHCP server that we run when associated with an access point. We'll keep working on this, as it has a positive impact on performance on all versions of the XO.

10. School server: Scott Ananian, Dan Margo, and John Watlington pushed forward on School server software builds. A stumbling block is automating the install from a live CD. Dan ended his summer internship this week. His efforts in this area have been appreciated, and we hope that he continues to help remotely in the future.

11. Embedded controller: Richard Smith discovered that the SCI wakeups were not handled properly and the power button was being asserted on resume (unnecessarily), causing spurious power button events. Richard also discovered a race condition that was the reason for some EC timeouts; Andres Salomon added a 2ms delay in the kernel as a workaround, while Richard is working on a proper fix for the EC. After three weeks of chasing a bug, the cause of a NiMH battery-charging problem has been found. Q2C19 will fix this bug. The source of the mistaken “power button” on resume was located and fixed. With these EC bugs fixed, suspend/resume code should begin to function as expected.

12. Donations to the OLPC Foundation can now be made by credit card through Google Checkout or with a PayPal account. The link to the giving site is http://laptopfoundation.org/en/participate/. OLPCF continues to accept checks as well.

Upcoming Highlights:

Jul 31 – Aug 6 Wikimania, Taipei
Aug 1–3 Squeakfest07, Chicago, IL

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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