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<div style="font-size:90%; float:right;">
=Laptop News 2007-07-21=
__TOC__
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).
</div>


To contribute a story or news idea, see the '''[[OLPC:Newsroom|OLPC newsroom]]'''.
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.


For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our [[twitter]] feed and [http://blog.laptop.org OLPC blog].
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.


This page historically hosted announcements and news about OLPC, along with the Sugar Labs [http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Current_Events '''current events'''] page.
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.


== Upcoming pieces ==
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]]).
; Claudia
: Learning Chat piece: 278 words, ready now. [[File:Learning Chat.docx]]
: Making Learning Visible: Claudia's (& Walter) original is 25 pages. Submitted to a journal. w/o OLPC Background it is down to 12-15 pages w/ screenshots.
: This can become a 4-part series.
; Antonio: Homo docens: 500+ words, Antonio approved my edits. [[File:Homo docens JLedits.docx]]
: Further work: we can definitely ask him to contribute on a quarterly basis but I've found that I have to be very specific as to what I am asking to do and he has to be comfortable that it is consistent with his academic work.
: Ask for a new piece on the epidemiology of learning
; Rodrigo:
: [[Ometepe]] - A beautiful piece with wonderful images. RAH posted a personal and lengthy version (1500+ words) that he shared with his private distribution list. I made an edited version (1200 words) that could be shared publicly. Must check with RAH on this. [[File:Ometepe articulo por Rodrigo Arboleda.pdf]] [[File:Ometepe by Rodrigo Arboleda (3).pdf]]
: I had hoped that we could do a video series with Rodrigo but the budget hasn't been approved. Giulia - can we get an answer on this?
; Rwanda:
: Rwanda case studies
: Ceri Whatley - summary of importance of headmasters - confirm subset to reuse
: Social mapping project - 1- or 2-part piece - check w/ Julia
: Grandmother project - 2- or 3-part piece - check w/ Julia (and is there more to that awesome series?)
; Other Africa
: So. Africa case studies
; Peru and Uruguay:
: ''Oscar B's piece on the IADB study?''
: You said that Uruguay and Peru produce a ton of content on a continuous basis. I'm struggling a bit with how we can easily get the content and translate it into English. Giulia - could Olga help? I don't want to burden her with more work. Maybe we do this every 2-3 months.
; Other LatAm:
: Colombia: Sandra's quarterly? newsletter and website could feed into this. Plus english translations.
: Nicaragua: Regular update, beyond Ometepe?
: Paraguay: Contact [[ParaguayEduca]]
: Mexico: Ask Mariana @ OLPCMexico
; OLPC Australia: Great text and videos.
; OLPC Europe: Quarterly update from them?
; OLPC Oceania: Quarterly updates from Mike Hutak
; OLPC Jamaica: Quarterly update from Sameer, good videos.
; North America
: Miami - David! and a story from Chester
: Canada - Jennifer Martino, Q


== News archives ==
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.


'''[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/ Weekly OLPC News postings]''' to the community-news mailing list give updates on recent work. Weekly summaries were also posted on-wiki during [[OLPC:News/2008|2008]]. Weekly postings to the list were put on hold at the start of 2009, and started again in 2010.
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).


Archives: [[OLPC:News/Archive 1|2005-2006]]
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.
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 2|2007]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 3|2008]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 4|2009-10]]


=== Translations ===
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.
Sporadic translations of news archives from 2008 and earlier can be found here:
: [[OLPC:News/lang-de|German]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-es|Spanish]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-ja|Japanese]] | [[OLPC:News/lang-ko|Korean]]


== [[OLPC:Videos|OLPC videos]] ==
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.
For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see [http://olpc.tv olpc.tv] and [[OLPC:Videos]].


== Sugar news ==
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.
Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development '''[http://walterbender.org/?cat=3 on his blog]'''.


== Press ==
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.
For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the [[OLPC:Press/2005-2008|2005-2008 press archives]].


== Past announcements ==
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.
Developed through 2011 by the Racepoint Group, OLPC's ''pro bono'' PR firm.


* 2008-08-06 : [[Media:OLPC-Asia.doc|One Laptop per Child expands its presence in Asia]] with project leads in India and China
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.
* 2008-05-20 : [[Media:XO-2-preview.doc|One Laptop per Child frames the next generation of the revolutionary XO laptop]], with a lighter dual-touchscreen design.
* 2008-05-15 : [[Media:XP-on-XO.doc|Microsoft Windows XP is now available on the XO laptop]]
* 2008-05-03 : [[Media:Kane-appointment.doc|One Laptop per Child appoints Charles Kane as President and Chief Operating Officer]]
* 2008-01-07 : [[Media:G1G1-results.doc|One Laptop per Child Giving Campaign Raises $35 Million]] in 2007
* 2007-12-12 : [http://www.smartbrief.com/news/aaaa/industryPR-detail.jsp?id=2FDAB6BE-AE3B-482F-A7B0-6570C75397E4 ''The Kite Runner'' Inspires Gift Through One Laptop]
* 2007-12-05 : [[Media:Peru-OLPC.doc|Peru launches OLPC with 40,000 laptops]], starting with one-classroom schools across the country.
* 2007-12-04 : [[Media:Birmingham-OLPC.doc|Birmingham, Alabama commits to One Laptop per Child]], with a pilot of 15,000 laptops across the city.
* 2007-11-24 : [http://www.50x15.com/en-us/sol_results_xo.aspx The Holiday Season Starts with Giving One Laptop]
* 2007-10-29 : [[Media:Uruguay-launch.doc|OLPC wins a bid to provide 100,000 laptops to children in Uruguay]], to be overseen by the Uruguayan CEIBAL project
* 2007-10-22 : [http://www.businesswire.com/news/google/20071022005302/en One Laptop per Child creates the world's "greenest" laptop computer]
* 2007-06-11 : [[Media:Mass-production.doc|Mass Production of XO's begins!]] at Quanta's Chinese facilities.
* 2007-01-03 : [http://www.businesswire.com/news/google/20070103005194/en OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer]


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.


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!)


[[Category:OLPC]]
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=
Laptop News [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf is archived] at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].
Also on [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/ community-news].

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

=[[Milestones]]=
Latest milestones:
{{:Milestones}} <!-- Translators, you can either include the english version or the translated version -- it does NOT work with redirects -->
All milestones can be found [[Milestones|here]].



=[[Press]]=
{{:Press}}
More articles can be found [[Press|here]].

=[[Video of the OLPC | Video]]=
Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found [[Video of the OLPC|here]].

* A collection of several videos can found at [http://www.olpc.tv OLPC.TV]
* IBM Podcast, Walter Bender on One Laptop per Child [http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int042407.html]
* Ivan Krstić delivers a [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4285568518538296189 technical presentation of OLPC] at the Google TechTalk series
*60 Minutes, What if Every Child had a Laptop [http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/05/20/60minutes/main2830058.shtml]
*CNN, Should Intel Fear $100 Laptop? [http://money.cnn.com/services/video/]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/07/25/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-04/ Episode Four]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/06/08/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-03/ Episode Three]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/04/25/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-02/ Episode Two]
*Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, [http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/03/23/inside-one-laptop-per-child-episode-one/ Episode One]
* OLPC [http://www.sf.tv/var/videoplayer.php?videourl=http%3A%2F%2Freal.xobix.ch%2Framgen%2Fsfdrs%2F10vor10%2F2007%2F10vor10_26012007.rm%3Fstart%3D0%3A05%3A20.498%26amp%3Bend%3D0%3A09%3A50.738 Video from Switzerland], 26.01.2007
*Interview with Nicholas Negroponte [http://www.acm.org/pubs/cie/jan2006/clips/nicholas_negroponte.mov on the &100 Laptop]
*Presentation by Jim Gettys at [http://www.techpresentations.com/2007/03/07/one-laptop-per-child/ FOSDEM 2007]
*GLOBO- BRASIL: Crianças testam computador portátil/ [http://video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM607884-7823-CRIANCAS+TESTAM+COMPUTADOR+PORTATIL,00.html Students test the laptop]
*Mark Foster delivers presentation to [http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx Stanford University]
* Technology Review [http://www.technologyreview.com/video/laptop Mini-Documentary]
* A Brief [http://www.radiofarda.com/Article/2007/01/04/f2_Interview-laptop.html Demo]

Latest revision as of 23:06, 5 August 2013

The contents of this page are considered outdated and some of the information may be stale. Please use information here with caution, or update it.
  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.

To contribute a story or news idea, see the OLPC newsroom.

For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our twitter feed and OLPC blog.

This page historically hosted announcements and news about OLPC, along with the Sugar Labs current events page.

Upcoming pieces

Claudia
Learning Chat piece: 278 words, ready now. File:Learning Chat.docx
Making Learning Visible: Claudia's (& Walter) original is 25 pages. Submitted to a journal. w/o OLPC Background it is down to 12-15 pages w/ screenshots.
This can become a 4-part series.
Antonio
Homo docens: 500+ words, Antonio approved my edits. File:Homo docens JLedits.docx
Further work: we can definitely ask him to contribute on a quarterly basis but I've found that I have to be very specific as to what I am asking to do and he has to be comfortable that it is consistent with his academic work.
Ask for a new piece on the epidemiology of learning
Rodrigo
Ometepe - A beautiful piece with wonderful images. RAH posted a personal and lengthy version (1500+ words) that he shared with his private distribution list. I made an edited version (1200 words) that could be shared publicly. Must check with RAH on this. File:Ometepe articulo por Rodrigo Arboleda.pdf File:Ometepe by Rodrigo Arboleda (3).pdf
I had hoped that we could do a video series with Rodrigo but the budget hasn't been approved. Giulia - can we get an answer on this?
Rwanda
Rwanda case studies
Ceri Whatley - summary of importance of headmasters - confirm subset to reuse
Social mapping project - 1- or 2-part piece - check w/ Julia
Grandmother project - 2- or 3-part piece - check w/ Julia (and is there more to that awesome series?)
Other Africa
So. Africa case studies
Peru and Uruguay
Oscar B's piece on the IADB study?
You said that Uruguay and Peru produce a ton of content on a continuous basis. I'm struggling a bit with how we can easily get the content and translate it into English. Giulia - could Olga help? I don't want to burden her with more work. Maybe we do this every 2-3 months.
Other LatAm
Colombia: Sandra's quarterly? newsletter and website could feed into this. Plus english translations.
Nicaragua: Regular update, beyond Ometepe?
Paraguay: Contact ParaguayEduca
Mexico: Ask Mariana @ OLPCMexico
OLPC Australia
Great text and videos.
OLPC Europe
Quarterly update from them?
OLPC Oceania
Quarterly updates from Mike Hutak
OLPC Jamaica
Quarterly update from Sameer, good videos.
North America
Miami - David! and a story from Chester
Canada - Jennifer Martino, Q

News archives

Weekly OLPC News postings to the community-news mailing list give updates on recent work. Weekly summaries were also posted on-wiki during 2008. Weekly postings to the list were put on hold at the start of 2009, and started again in 2010.

Archives: 2005-2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009-10

Translations

Sporadic translations of news archives from 2008 and earlier can be found here:

German | Spanish | Japanese | Korean

OLPC videos

For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see olpc.tv and OLPC:Videos.

Sugar news

Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development on his blog.

Press

For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the 2005-2008 press archives.

Past announcements

Developed through 2011 by the Racepoint Group, OLPC's pro bono PR firm.

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