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[[Category:General Public]]


=Laptop News 2007-09-15=
=Laptop News 2007-09-22=
1. David Cavallo has formed a learning team that will work with countries to develop their own learning teams. The goal is to help each country develop a deeper understanding and richer practice in using laptops for learning. We will hold workshops at OLPC each month, work in countries, and collaborate internationally. The first workshops in countries will be in Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda and Nigeria during October.
1. Thomas Jacobson, a network consultant with over 30 years of experience with Internet and satellite communications, spent two days at OLPC discussing how we can best take advantage of satellites for very low-cost bit distribution (updates and content). He gave a talk on Thursday (See http://www.tcjnet.com/xosat.html).


2. Schedule: We still have not gotten to a full code freeze as there are too many open critical bugs. If you have blocking or high-priority bugs open for Trial-3, please help us by analyzing the work load, making a suggestion for a work-around or how to document the issue, and setting the bug to “untriaged” so that the triage team will review it. Please check with Jim Gettys or Kim Quirk before checking in any code changes.
2. Nortel CTO John Roese has been blogging about the XO (See http://blogs.nortel.com/ctoblog/2007/09/12/one-laptop-per-child-where-in-the-world-is-that-cool-green-and-white-laptop).


3. Test: Alex Latham updated the test configuration notes in the wiki to address network-access configuration scenarios: two laptops under a tree; laptop connected to an access point; and laptop connected to a school server mesh. There are also some additional configuration notes and test plans for localization (See [[Test_issues]]). Alex Khitrick and Yani Galanis have both “joined” the test team this week to help with executing test cases, debugging, and writing up bugs.
3. Microscope: Professor Robert Shapiro visited Mary Lou Jepsen at OLPC last week to discuss more issues of optimal microscope design to allow the XO to provide diagnosis of HIV/AIDs, TB, and malaria, which kill more than six-million people every year, worldwide. Low-cost detection of these diseases could save many lives. Surprisingly, the key for detection is not high magnification; low magnification of a large image area and a dye coupled with violet-colored LEDs for illumination can be combined with image processing is sufficient. Professor Shapiro showed a prototype microscope to Mary Lou and discussed the basic requirements. Barrett Comiskey (whose has been designing a periscope) is also working on a low-cost microscope for the XO.


4. Hardware: The hardware team (which includes people from Quanta and AMD) spent this week trying to track down some of the remaining problems with suspend/resume. We have reached a point where many laptops are running for hundreds of thousands of cycles without crashing, but occasional crashes still occur (and some laptops are more susceptible than others.) No other laptop comes close; but neither do they have our ambition to suspending between each page read (or maybe even suspending between keystrokes), with potentially thousands of page views/day.
4. Testing: Translation of Sugar and the various core activities has begun in earnest. Alex Latham and Rafael Ortiz worked this week with John Palmieri to produce a build that properly supports multiple languages. (Spanish had been broken for the last few builds due to some translation problems.) Alex has plans for testing all of our international keyboard mappings.


The low noise margin of the +3.3V line that powers most inter-chip communication (and the WLAN) on the laptop was the big surprise. An even bigger surprise was that the margin was critically dependent on battery voltage! When the battery was low, our 3.3V supply was dropping to below 3.15V, due to insufficiently turning on the transistor used to switch +3.3V off during suspend.
There is now a link from the sidebar on the OLPC Wiki home page to “[[Test_issues|Test]]”, where you can get information on the latest build before you load it, test configuration notes, and review our current set of test plans. If you would like to help with our testing, there are lots of bug fixes that need verification and lots of test plans to get through.


John Watlington and Quanta have a proposed solution which is being tested. We hope that improving this will close out the “unable to resume via power button or wireless” bug completely (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1835)—it was actually two distinct problems, one of which was fixed last week—and we have reason to hope that it might be at least partially responsible for the “USB wireless suspend/resume failure at setup phase” bugs (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1752 and 2621).
5. Schedule: There are still some bugs that need triage in Trial-3. We want to be at code freeze on Monday, so please do the best you can to get your bug fixes checked in this weekend. Starting Monday we want to get approval from Jim Gettys for every code change (bug fix) before committing.


Note: anyone working on a suspend/resume problem should keep their machine plugged into line power until it has been properly modified.
6. Suspend/resume problem resolution: This week the team working on the suspend/resume problems (including among others, Chris Ball, Mitch Bradley, Javier Cardona, Jordan Crouse, Richard Smith, John Watlington, and Gary Chiang) found the root cause of our “crashes upon resume” bug (the infamous bug #1835). The hardware was not allowing enough time after powering up the system clocks before bringing the Southbridge out of reset. This requires a minor hardware change to correct. A dozen machines in Cambridge have been modified, and are being used in the search for remaining suspend/resume problems. One of Chris Ball's tests passed 25,000 successful resumes in Open Firmware with the fix. Testing now shifts to wireless suspend/resume again (#1752).


Chris Ball ran overnight tests on many of the proposed hardware changes. The wireless resume bugs are now occurring rarely enough to have taken a backseat to other kernel bugs related to resume (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3477 and 3479).
7. Activities and infrastructure: Many fixes for Sugar, telepathy, the presence service, the Journal and datastore, and various system components were checked in during the week:
* Mime-type invocation was cleaned up in order to invoke the proper activities at the right time;
* The security infrastructure for Bitfrost is now in the builds (turned off by default) to enable easier/faster testing of activity adherence to the security model;
* Simon Schamijer added a hide/show tray button to the browser (which contains thumbnails of shared bookmarks) and a view-source feature in the browser (See [[Web_Browser]]);
* Simon also got sound working in the Memorize Game, which uses Csound to play ogg files;
* Ranier Herres completed a much improved version of the calculator, including plotting of functions;
* Improvement on Etoys continues: Bert Freudenberg has been keeping up changes in Sugar and the datastore; Kathleen Harness, Kim Rose and Yoshiki Ohshima worked on quick-help contents; Takashi Yamamiya adjusted the color picker and fonts to the XO display; Ted Kaehler is fixing the painting system; and Scott Wallace fixed various issues around fonts and scriptors.
* Gnash has been updated to Version 0.8.1; it is much improved, although patent concerns still prevent us from shipping the ffmpeg library used by many common codecs (the Adobe Flash player has also been tested extensively);
* Measure can now be safely used with other audio applications, thanks in part to an audio-driver cleanup that Andres Salomon has completed (the driver allows for independent control of the bias voltage and AC/DC coupling); Arjun Sarwal and Eben Eliason have modified the user interface to use a graphical representation of functions to encourage children to “see what this button does.”
* The TamTam team, led by Jean Piché, has been busy: TamTam has been split into three activities—TamTamJam, TamTamSynthlab and TamTamEdit—each with a massively reworked user interface;
* Mark Maurer fixed bugs in the Write Activity, most notably some synchronization bugs that manifest themselves during collaborative writing sessions; Marc Oude Kotte fixed some bugs in libabiword; and
* The Read Activity now support zoom and copy to the clipboard.


5. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2C27, the firmware released planned for Trial-3. It includes secure boot capability (but can also boot in a non-secure fashion). It has been tested on B1, B2-1, pre-B3, B3, and B4 systems. Do not use it on pre-B1 boards—it will brick them because of changes to the embedded controller (EC) microcode. Also note that it does not work on A-Test boards as support for A-Test has been eliminated from the EC microcode.
8. Keyboards: Sarmad Hussain, Tariq Badsha, Babar Haq, Salman Minhas, Naveed Ikram, and Sufyan Kakakhel have been advising Walter Bender on the design of an Urdu keyboard for Pakistan. Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin has done the same for Mongolian.


6. EC code: Richard Smith re-factored the way the EC does its startup procedure so that an automatic restart now happens after a reflash. This involved re-working the way the IO maps (B2,B3,B4,C1) were detected. Alas, the rework seems to have broken the power button; when Richard gets that issue sorted out, we should be able to to fully automatic firmware updates.
9. X Window System: Ethiopian support is improving; Bernardo Innocenti filed some bug reports to upstream projects and built packages for the builds. We also have user-oriented installation instructions for testing.


7. X Window System: Bernie Innocenti has been working mostly on visual bugs this week. The “iGoogle” bug was hard to find and easy to fix. The “green icons” bug was easy to find and hard to fix. Bernie has also pushed the Ethiopian and Urdu fonts in the builds.
On the Xorg front, Bernie started to look at a hard-crash bug in amd_drv, triggered when the Browse Activity renders a complex iGoogle page.


8. Security and updates: Scott Ananian and Michael Stone worked closely together to implement the “live updates” feature (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2517). This feature, available since Build 595, allows the laptop user to run the command “olpc-update NNN” to update to Build NNN. Scott worked with Michael Stone to get an initial in-system network upgrade in place. After completing live updates, they discovered certain inefficiencies in our implementation of manifest verification. Michael profiled the software and, with Scott and Ivan Krstić's help, developed an enhancement that halves the time required to verify a manifest. Scott improved the speed of the in-place upgrade by 10× by rewriting contents verification.
Bernie also make a lucky discovery: setting LANG=C take 5 seconds off the boot time, and possibly saves some memory too! We can set the proper locale later in the boot process: just before starting Sugar.


Scott worked with Mitch Bradley on shaking out the secure-boot process. Among other things, they tweaked the developer and activation lease
Stefano Fedrigo has backported promising EXA performance patches to Version 1.4. So far they resulted in a crashing server, but there is hope: while this server wont make Trial-3, it may be ready for our first deployment system.
formats based on suggestions from Michael Stone and SJ Klein. Scott also worked on creating a pure-Linux reimplementation of the
auto-reinstallation process, eliminating the two reboots into OFW and making it more compatible with the secure-boot process.


9. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent the week testing open bugs; he helped folks who were working on the i2c timeout issues, prepared patches for upstream, reviewed lots of patches, and did a cleanup of the olpc-2.6 git repository. The git cleanup means a clone takes only 15 minutes, down from 90 minutes.
Jim Gettys attended part of the X developer's summit (XDS), where he discussed how to best secure the X Window System with Eamon Walsh's XACE extension. This is nearing completion, but will not be ready until early next year. He also investigated solutions of how to improve drag and drop onto the Sugar frame; there are several possibilities we will
follow up on.


10. Licensing content: Jon Phillips has been leading an effort to integrate Creative Commons licenses into the Journal. Screen shots of his mock ups are in the trac system (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3529).
In the serendipity department, one of the talks at the XDS included
information about a useful USB to VGA product on the market; there have been many requests for this capability for better use with projectors than our current network-based solutions, and this may be it.


11. Sound samples: Dr. Richard Boulanger continues to gather together collections of sound samples recorded specifically for OLPC by the team at Open Path Music. The most recent additions are are vocal sounds: animal noises, grunts, groans, growls, etc., plus some singing. These samples are being incorporated into activities such as TamTam.
10. Kernel: Andres Salomon committed audio-driver fixes (the capture device should now be in a sane state when the device is opened/closed, HPF and V_REF are no longer coupled, etc.), enabled the es1371 module for VMware users, and included a missing battery feature (accumulated_current) into the stable tree. The other major effort this week was in support of fine-tuning power usage; Andres has started working on tests using the battery's ACR registers to get better measurements of power savings that result from various tweaks.


12. Library: Mako Hill helped rewrite the Javascript bits of the library to use Python templates using the Jinja templating system (See http://jinja.pocoo.org/). This is a more robust implementation if Javascript is turned off. The templates will be reused once we turn on a web server in the builds and change from a model of “update bundle-list on download” to a dynamic view that checks the filesystem.
11. Updates: Scott Ananian pushed manifests, upgrades, and OS signing into the build process and is working on updating our activation process with “real” cryptography. Scott also documented Eben Eliason and Rebecca Allen's startup UI design (See [[Startup_Sequence]]) and split it into a number of manageable implementation steps.


The default browser page will point to the local content repository and have links to browse the web. Currently, there is are links to:
12. Firmware: Mitch Bradley continuing work this on firmware security, and on better tools for checking NAND FLASH integrity. Two bugs consumed 98% of Richard Smith's time this week:
* google.com, which will auto-redirect to the proper language for the country;
(1) the resume problem as reported above, which was resolved; and
* the school server;
(2) a mysterious “turn off” problem—the core of the problem is that the timing used by the embedded controller (EC) to assert the PWR_BUT# signal is based a loop counter rather than a timer; Richard is looking into fixing this.
* wiki.laptop.org/go/Home (initially English by default) from which the activity and content bundle download pages will be more prominently linked;
* wiki.clusty.com, to search Wikipedia (initially English by default)
Additional suggestions are welcome.


13. Biology activities: David Stang of ZipcodeZoo is working with Lauren Klein to provide a kid-friendly interface to his database of bug information for bug blitzes. Charles Smith at the EOWilson foundation is working on basic ideas and background information for classes running blitzes. Misha Herscu, a teenager who has already published his first book on herpetology in Massachusetts, is helping organize the work with zipcodezoo. Misha also helped connect the Thai group that was doing their own bug-finding activity with an unusual bug zoo in northern Thailand, who may be able to help them extend the work they have done. and perhaps take some of the first online photos of certain species (See http://www.malaeng.com/).
13. World Digital Library: The World Digital Library team, under the direction of John van Oudenaren and Michelle Rago, is finishing a working model of their visual seven-language library interface this month in preparation for a public demonstration at the UNESCO general conference October 15. The demonstration will draw on 60GB of materials from around the world, with highlights from the history of India. They will be showcasing the demo on three devices: the XO, the Classmate, and the iPhone.


14. Schuyler Erle, working on mapping and radio projects for UNICEF, has gotten a radio program to work on the XO, which can make the XO an audio receiver and broadcaster.
14. Help wanted: ePals wants to hire a Python developer next week to finish a Sugarized activity that offers access to their PenPal services. They have a design almost completed, and expect this to be around 40 hours of work. The Library of Congress is considering up to three unpaid internships this fall with office space in their Science and Technology Sections, to identify educational and illustrative materials in the public domain and to get digital versions of them online and bundled for their own website and for OLPC collections. This is an opportunity to have unlimited access to their stacks and to get experience with modern digitization processes. Contact SJ Klein (sj at laptop dot org) for details regarding both positions.

15. Ethiopian texts: Emma Shercliffe of Macmillan and Ignatz Heinz of Avallain are finishing work on a language-learning tool this month, and a collection of Ethiopian texts and materials for the team in Addis. They will make this material available to the world. Macmillan is also interested in working with local teams across Africa to help share their experiences working with education ministries and schools; they have local authors and publishing branches in around half of the countries there.

16. Character recongnition: Thomas Breuel, a computer science professor at Kaiserslautern who is working on some of the harder character-recognition problems for Google's book scanning project, has been testing a handwriting-recognition application with the XO touchpad.

17. Email client: Mark Doffman has been working on the Python bindings for Tinymail. He could use some help with the actual “Sugarization” to complete a production client for an XO (See http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2007/09/05/python-bindings-of-tinymail and http://mail.gnome.org/archives/tinymail-devel-list/2007-September/msg00000.html).

18. Off-line wiki: Renaud Gaudin of moulin-wiki is working with the French
development team at Linterweb (an open-source data-mining group) and the French Wikipedians. Together, they are building an off-line wiki reader.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 19:40, 22 September 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 65973]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-09-22

1. David Cavallo has formed a learning team that will work with countries to develop their own learning teams. The goal is to help each country develop a deeper understanding and richer practice in using laptops for learning. We will hold workshops at OLPC each month, work in countries, and collaborate internationally. The first workshops in countries will be in Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda and Nigeria during October.

2. Schedule: We still have not gotten to a full code freeze as there are too many open critical bugs. If you have blocking or high-priority bugs open for Trial-3, please help us by analyzing the work load, making a suggestion for a work-around or how to document the issue, and setting the bug to “untriaged” so that the triage team will review it. Please check with Jim Gettys or Kim Quirk before checking in any code changes.

3. Test: Alex Latham updated the test configuration notes in the wiki to address network-access configuration scenarios: two laptops under a tree; laptop connected to an access point; and laptop connected to a school server mesh. There are also some additional configuration notes and test plans for localization (See Test_issues). Alex Khitrick and Yani Galanis have both “joined” the test team this week to help with executing test cases, debugging, and writing up bugs.

4. Hardware: The hardware team (which includes people from Quanta and AMD) spent this week trying to track down some of the remaining problems with suspend/resume. We have reached a point where many laptops are running for hundreds of thousands of cycles without crashing, but occasional crashes still occur (and some laptops are more susceptible than others.) No other laptop comes close; but neither do they have our ambition to suspending between each page read (or maybe even suspending between keystrokes), with potentially thousands of page views/day.

The low noise margin of the +3.3V line that powers most inter-chip communication (and the WLAN) on the laptop was the big surprise. An even bigger surprise was that the margin was critically dependent on battery voltage! When the battery was low, our 3.3V supply was dropping to below 3.15V, due to insufficiently turning on the transistor used to switch +3.3V off during suspend.

John Watlington and Quanta have a proposed solution which is being tested. We hope that improving this will close out the “unable to resume via power button or wireless” bug completely (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1835)—it was actually two distinct problems, one of which was fixed last week—and we have reason to hope that it might be at least partially responsible for the “USB wireless suspend/resume failure at setup phase” bugs (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1752 and 2621).

Note: anyone working on a suspend/resume problem should keep their machine plugged into line power until it has been properly modified.

Chris Ball ran overnight tests on many of the proposed hardware changes. The wireless resume bugs are now occurring rarely enough to have taken a backseat to other kernel bugs related to resume (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3477 and 3479).

5. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2C27, the firmware released planned for Trial-3. It includes secure boot capability (but can also boot in a non-secure fashion). It has been tested on B1, B2-1, pre-B3, B3, and B4 systems. Do not use it on pre-B1 boards—it will brick them because of changes to the embedded controller (EC) microcode. Also note that it does not work on A-Test boards as support for A-Test has been eliminated from the EC microcode.

6. EC code: Richard Smith re-factored the way the EC does its startup procedure so that an automatic restart now happens after a reflash. This involved re-working the way the IO maps (B2,B3,B4,C1) were detected. Alas, the rework seems to have broken the power button; when Richard gets that issue sorted out, we should be able to to fully automatic firmware updates.

7. X Window System: Bernie Innocenti has been working mostly on visual bugs this week. The “iGoogle” bug was hard to find and easy to fix. The “green icons” bug was easy to find and hard to fix. Bernie has also pushed the Ethiopian and Urdu fonts in the builds.

8. Security and updates: Scott Ananian and Michael Stone worked closely together to implement the “live updates” feature (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2517). This feature, available since Build 595, allows the laptop user to run the command “olpc-update NNN” to update to Build NNN. Scott worked with Michael Stone to get an initial in-system network upgrade in place. After completing live updates, they discovered certain inefficiencies in our implementation of manifest verification. Michael profiled the software and, with Scott and Ivan Krstić's help, developed an enhancement that halves the time required to verify a manifest. Scott improved the speed of the in-place upgrade by 10× by rewriting contents verification.

Scott worked with Mitch Bradley on shaking out the secure-boot process. Among other things, they tweaked the developer and activation lease formats based on suggestions from Michael Stone and SJ Klein. Scott also worked on creating a pure-Linux reimplementation of the auto-reinstallation process, eliminating the two reboots into OFW and making it more compatible with the secure-boot process.

9. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent the week testing open bugs; he helped folks who were working on the i2c timeout issues, prepared patches for upstream, reviewed lots of patches, and did a cleanup of the olpc-2.6 git repository. The git cleanup means a clone takes only 15 minutes, down from 90 minutes.

10. Licensing content: Jon Phillips has been leading an effort to integrate Creative Commons licenses into the Journal. Screen shots of his mock ups are in the trac system (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3529).

11. Sound samples: Dr. Richard Boulanger continues to gather together collections of sound samples recorded specifically for OLPC by the team at Open Path Music. The most recent additions are are vocal sounds: animal noises, grunts, groans, growls, etc., plus some singing. These samples are being incorporated into activities such as TamTam.

12. Library: Mako Hill helped rewrite the Javascript bits of the library to use Python templates using the Jinja templating system (See http://jinja.pocoo.org/). This is a more robust implementation if Javascript is turned off. The templates will be reused once we turn on a web server in the builds and change from a model of “update bundle-list on download” to a dynamic view that checks the filesystem.

The default browser page will point to the local content repository and have links to browse the web. Currently, there is are links to:

  • google.com, which will auto-redirect to the proper language for the country;
  • the school server;
  • wiki.laptop.org/go/Home (initially English by default) from which the activity and content bundle download pages will be more prominently linked;
  • wiki.clusty.com, to search Wikipedia (initially English by default)

Additional suggestions are welcome.

13. Biology activities: David Stang of ZipcodeZoo is working with Lauren Klein to provide a kid-friendly interface to his database of bug information for bug blitzes. Charles Smith at the EOWilson foundation is working on basic ideas and background information for classes running blitzes. Misha Herscu, a teenager who has already published his first book on herpetology in Massachusetts, is helping organize the work with zipcodezoo. Misha also helped connect the Thai group that was doing their own bug-finding activity with an unusual bug zoo in northern Thailand, who may be able to help them extend the work they have done. and perhaps take some of the first online photos of certain species (See http://www.malaeng.com/).

14. Schuyler Erle, working on mapping and radio projects for UNICEF, has gotten a radio program to work on the XO, which can make the XO an audio receiver and broadcaster.

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# 65973]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-09-22

1. David Cavallo has formed a learning team that will work with countries to develop their own learning teams. The goal is to help each country develop a deeper understanding and richer practice in using laptops for learning. We will hold workshops at OLPC each month, work in countries, and collaborate internationally. The first workshops in countries will be in Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda and Nigeria during October.

2. Schedule: We still have not gotten to a full code freeze as there are too many open critical bugs. If you have blocking or high-priority bugs open for Trial-3, please help us by analyzing the work load, making a suggestion for a work-around or how to document the issue, and setting the bug to “untriaged” so that the triage team will review it. Please check with Jim Gettys or Kim Quirk before checking in any code changes.

3. Test: Alex Latham updated the test configuration notes in the wiki to address network-access configuration scenarios: two laptops under a tree; laptop connected to an access point; and laptop connected to a school server mesh. There are also some additional configuration notes and test plans for localization (See Test_issues). Alex Khitrick and Yani Galanis have both “joined” the test team this week to help with executing test cases, debugging, and writing up bugs.

4. Hardware: The hardware team (which includes people from Quanta and AMD) spent this week trying to track down some of the remaining problems with suspend/resume. We have reached a point where many laptops are running for hundreds of thousands of cycles without crashing, but occasional crashes still occur (and some laptops are more susceptible than others.) No other laptop comes close; but neither do they have our ambition to suspending between each page read (or maybe even suspending between keystrokes), with potentially thousands of page views/day.

The low noise margin of the +3.3V line that powers most inter-chip communication (and the WLAN) on the laptop was the big surprise. An even bigger surprise was that the margin was critically dependent on battery voltage! When the battery was low, our 3.3V supply was dropping to below 3.15V, due to insufficiently turning on the transistor used to switch +3.3V off during suspend.

John Watlington and Quanta have a proposed solution which is being tested. We hope that improving this will close out the “unable to resume via power button or wireless” bug completely (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1835)—it was actually two distinct problems, one of which was fixed last week—and we have reason to hope that it might be at least partially responsible for the “USB wireless suspend/resume failure at setup phase” bugs (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1752 and 2621).

Note: anyone working on a suspend/resume problem should keep their machine plugged into line power until it has been properly modified.

Chris Ball ran overnight tests on many of the proposed hardware changes. The wireless resume bugs are now occurring rarely enough to have taken a backseat to other kernel bugs related to resume (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3477 and 3479).

5. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2C27, the firmware released planned for Trial-3. It includes secure boot capability (but can also boot in a non-secure fashion). It has been tested on B1, B2-1, pre-B3, B3, and B4 systems. Do not use it on pre-B1 boards—it will brick them because of changes to the embedded controller (EC) microcode. Also note that it does not work on A-Test boards as support for A-Test has been eliminated from the EC microcode.

6. EC code: Richard Smith re-factored the way the EC does its startup procedure so that an automatic restart now happens after a reflash. This involved re-working the way the IO maps (B2,B3,B4,C1) were detected. Alas, the rework seems to have broken the power button; when Richard gets that issue sorted out, we should be able to to fully automatic firmware updates.

7. X Window System: Bernie Innocenti has been working mostly on visual bugs this week. The “iGoogle” bug was hard to find and easy to fix. The “green icons” bug was easy to find and hard to fix. Bernie has also pushed the Ethiopian and Urdu fonts in the builds.

8. Security and updates: Scott Ananian and Michael Stone worked closely together to implement the “live updates” feature (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2517). This feature, available since Build 595, allows the laptop user to run the command “olpc-update NNN” to update to Build NNN. Scott worked with Michael Stone to get an initial in-system network upgrade in place. After completing live updates, they discovered certain inefficiencies in our implementation of manifest verification. Michael profiled the software and, with Scott and Ivan Krstić's help, developed an enhancement that halves the time required to verify a manifest. Scott improved the speed of the in-place upgrade by 10× by rewriting contents verification.

Scott worked with Mitch Bradley on shaking out the secure-boot process. Among other things, they tweaked the developer and activation lease formats based on suggestions from Michael Stone and SJ Klein. Scott also worked on creating a pure-Linux reimplementation of the auto-reinstallation process, eliminating the two reboots into OFW and making it more compatible with the secure-boot process.

9. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent the week testing open bugs; he helped folks who were working on the i2c timeout issues, prepared patches for upstream, reviewed lots of patches, and did a cleanup of the olpc-2.6 git repository. The git cleanup means a clone takes only 15 minutes, down from 90 minutes.

10. Licensing content: Jon Phillips has been leading an effort to integrate Creative Commons licenses into the Journal. Screen shots of his mock ups are in the trac system (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3529).

11. Sound samples: Dr. Richard Boulanger continues to gather together collections of sound samples recorded specifically for OLPC by the team at Open Path Music. The most recent additions are are vocal sounds: animal noises, grunts, groans, growls, etc., plus some singing. These samples are being incorporated into activities such as TamTam.

12. Library: Mako Hill helped rewrite the Javascript bits of the library to use Python templates using the Jinja templating system (See http://jinja.pocoo.org/). This is a more robust implementation if Javascript is turned off. The templates will be reused once we turn on a web server in the builds and change from a model of “update bundle-list on download” to a dynamic view that checks the filesystem.

The default browser page will point to the local content repository and have links to browse the web. Currently, there is are links to:

  • google.com, which will auto-redirect to the proper language for the country;
  • the school server;
  • wiki.laptop.org/go/Home (initially English by default) from which the activity and content bundle download pages will be more prominently linked;
  • wiki.clusty.com, to search Wikipedia (initially English by default)

Additional suggestions are welcome.

13. Biology activities: David Stang of ZipcodeZoo is working with Lauren Klein to provide a kid-friendly interface to his database of bug information for bug blitzes. Charles Smith at the EOWilson foundation is working on basic ideas and background information for classes running blitzes. Misha Herscu, a teenager who has already published his first book on herpetology in Massachusetts, is helping organize the work with zipcodezoo. Misha also helped connect the Thai group that was doing their own bug-finding activity with an unusual bug zoo in northern Thailand, who may be able to help them extend the work they have done. and perhaps take some of the first online photos of certain species (See http://www.malaeng.com/).

14. Schuyler Erle, working on mapping and radio projects for UNICEF, has gotten a radio program to work on the XO, which can make the XO an audio receiver and broadcaster.

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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