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<div style="font-size:90%; float:right;">
=Laptop News 2007-08-11=
__TOC__
1. C-Test: C-Test is underway. These XOs are fully textured (the flat exterior plastic has beaded surface); the keyboard is improved and included a beveled space bar. The most significant electrical change is the new ENE 3700B embedded controller (EC), which includes hardware support for the single-wire protocol used to communicate with the batteries.
</div>


To contribute a story or news idea, see the '''[[OLPC:Newsroom|OLPC newsroom]]'''.
2. Kathmandu: Shankar Pokharel, from the self-organized OLPC Nepal, organized a curriculum workshop in coordination with Nepalese department of education. Forty-eight educationists and developers participated in the workshop which was inaugurated by Minister of Education Pradip Nepal. The participants outlined the steps needed for local content creation and digitization.


For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our [[twitter]] feed and [http://blog.laptop.org OLPC blog].
3. Builds: Dan Winship, who joined the Red Hat team a month ago, had a busy week: he has branched x11-xorg-utils package so that we don't have to pull in libGL; made fallback X logins work; fixed some startup issues; and removed some packages to save some disk space. John Palmieri has been cleaning up start-up scripts—for both the machine itself and the graphical environment. Startup speed has improved and we are saving a significant amount of memory (and complexity). John is taking advantage the work that Red Hat's Richard Hughes has done around D-Bus system activation.


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.
4. Sugar: Dan modified the wedges in the “activity ring” on the home screen reflect memory usage. He also made added rollovers to the activity widgets for “resume” and “stop.” He ported our web activity to WebKit, the rendering engine used in both Apple's Safari and the KDE desktop. He found that memory usage was greatly reduced and performance much better. (The WebKit project is not quite ready for production use yet, but it shows real promise.) Finally, Dan got installation of activities from USB working.


== Upcoming pieces ==
Marco Gritti was (mostly) on vacation this week, but managed to rework the palette implementation to enable proper packaging of widgets; he made some API improvements and fix some bugs in the process; and he reviewed some patches and did some bug triage.
; 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 ==
Ben Saller spent most of the week fixing bugs and also working on a version of the data store that supports versioning.


'''[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.
Tomeu Vizoso moved the activity-registration service from the shell to a shell-service process. This service will contain the clipboard and the object-type registry. He moved Sugar, Journal and the Browse Activity to the new activity register.


Archives: [[OLPC:News/Archive 1|2005-2006]]
The Collabora team refined the definition of buddy and activity properties in anticipation of the first release of the software; once these properties are in the field, the are difficult to change.
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 2|2007]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 3|2008]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 4|2009-10]]


=== Translations ===
Simon Schamijer has been working on the sharing feature in the Browse Activity; a web page to be “shared” appears as a thumbnail in a tray at the bottom of the page. From there you can select which page you want to view. Most of the parts are working and Simon hopes to have something ready for testing soon. Simon has also been adding a simple opcode to Csound that enables the reading of ogg vorbis files. The reason to use Csound rather than gstreamer is that is uses less then half of the CPU power and due to the concept of instruments you can playback different files at the same time easily. John Fitch and Eric de Castro Lopo are currently working on getting the ogg playback upstream into libsndfile, which is normally used in Csound5 to handle I/O of sound files.
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]] ==
5. Repair: After Mitch Bradley asserted that a 10-year old could replace an XO motherboard, Joel Stanley was tasked with overseeing just that. On Tuesday, 10-year old Philip and his 8-year old sister Sophie were given an XO; using the instructions on the OLPC wiki they disassembled and reassembled it (for the most part independently). It didn't work the first time, so they proceeded to disassemble, troubleshoot a loose wire, and reassemble the XO. This second pass, when they were on their own, was successful (See http://dev.laptop.org/~joel/xo-video/).
For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see [http://olpc.tv olpc.tv] and [[OLPC:Videos]].


== Sugar news ==
6. Firmware: IPv6 in the firmware is basically working. Lilian Walter has succeeded in downloading files via HTTP from the IPv6 internet. In other words, she has implemented code to support router solicitation and advertisement. Lilian is currently working on DNS AAAA support via an IPv4 DNS server and then she will see if she can get to an IPv6 DNS server. Mitch Bradley still needs to do application testing with the school server. In coordination with with Ivan Krstić and Michael Stone, Mitch Bradley has defined the format for firmware security keys.
Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development '''[http://walterbender.org/?cat=3 on his blog]'''.


== Press ==
7. Manufacturing software installation: Dave Woodhouse and Mitch Bradley build a manufacturing software installation system using multicast. Rafael Ortiz and Chris Ball worked on testing it with them. Wireless installation of OS images to the NAND flash is looking promising—we now have a simple tool that sends NAND flash blocks in UDP packets (by IPv4 or IPv6, multicast or unicast), with one parity packet per erase block (to allow for a small amount of packet loss). We also have a corresponding client that listens for these packets, checks a
For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the [[OLPC:Press/2005-2008|2005-2008 press archives]].
simple CRC32 on each one, and reassembles the erase blocks, writing them to a file or to a flash device. Mitch is implementing the client side
for OpenFirmware.


== Past announcements ==
The interesting part turns out to be 802.11 multicast. First, the access point (AP) will retransmit any multicast packets generated by clients—so to avoid wasting bandwidth we actually want the AP itself to generate them in the first place (perhaps bridged from its wired interface). Second, and more importantly, most equipment sends multicasts at the lowest “basic rate”—rates which are mandatory for all clients to support—which tends to be 1Mb/s, and is not fast enough to be useful. One way to fix this is to configure the AP not to include the lower rates in its basic set. This approach has been successfully tested in QSMC, but only by using a Broadcom 4306 wireless device in a laptop as the AP, using the “hostapd” software. Unfortunately, the Broadcom drivers are not reliable at rates above 11Mb/s, so testing at higher rates has not been possible. We need to find a standalone access point where the basic rate can be tuned or, perhaps, find a way to use the Marvell “libertas” devices for this purpose. (There is a possibility that we could use mesh mode for this purpose, but we may have issues with nodes retransmitting multicast packets to each other.) Further testing of this aspect of the distribution system is required.
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
8. Testing infrastructure: Chris Ball worked on Tinderbox additions. Dan Williams gave Chris a recipe for measuring activity startup time; the tinderbox will soon to be able to measure whether each activity in a build starts up okay, and exactly how long each one takes to do so.
* 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. Wireless resume: Richard Smith, Ronak Chokshi, Marcelo Tosatti, Javier Cardona, Jordan Crouse and others did a full-court press on the wireless-resume problems. While several bugs were found that improved suspend/resume behavior greatly, there is still uncertainty to the cause of the remaining problem(s).


10. NAND data-corruption: Bug #1905, which has been seen in two XOs (one B2 and one B4) has gotten the attention of Mitch Bradley, Dave Woodhouse, Luna Huang, Brian Ma, and others.


[[Category:OLPC]]
11. Google Books: Luke Hutchison's team has metadata and cross-linkage for most of Google's scanned PD books and can readily share images, OCR text, and metadata for 100,000 volumes, given selection criteria. Luke's summer work has been creating a way to run queries on the existing metadata to make such selections. There are still issues with copyright, surprisingly, as “public domain” in the US does not mean public everywhere; their current stance is to avoid worrying about international copyright law by only providing works through US-based servers, but making a quick selection will soon be possible.

12. Our Stories: The Our Stories team is preparing interfaces for online browsing and uploading stories and have a localization team on reserve to localize interfaces and other materials the last week in August. John Huang, who is maintaining the client Activity for the project that records and uploads stories expects to publish some recording code by the end of August.

13. Wikireader: Renaud Gaudin of Mali has been working on Moulin, an off-line wikireader, and is working on making it display well on the XO (See http://moulinwiki.org/). He is also developing ways to let people pass edits upstream through a moderated proxy server.

14. Maps: Schuyler Erle and UNICEF are working on an implementation of OpenLayers and the related FeatureServer to support children creating local maps of their villages, and on building lightweight regional map packs from public data. OpenLayers runs smoothly on a B4 without modification, providing another format for creators: a map layer and associated data.

=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]].


{{anchor|PRESS}}
=[[PRESS|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.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.laptop.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=OLPC:News&oldid=290742"