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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].
__TOC__
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To contribute a story or news idea, see the '''[[OLPC:Newsroom|OLPC newsroom]]'''.
=Laptop News 2007-10-13=
1. Indianapolis: Benjamin Mako Hill and David Cavallo gave keynote talks and led a session on the laptop at the OpenMinds conference in Indianapolis this week. Indiana is in the vanguard in the US on laptops for learning (over 110,000 already deployed) and in using free and open-source software (FOSS) for learning. The conference brought together educators and developers to discuss issues and share experiences. OLPC was highlighted for making laptops more affordable everywhere and for our commitment to FOSS. In attendance were various governmental entities about to begin 1:1 laptop initiatives.


For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our [[twitter]] feed and [http://blog.laptop.org OLPC blog].
2. Suspend/resume: John Watlington has written a long description of the B3/B4/C1 suspend/resume problems, along with what it takes to modify a B4 to correct the problems can be found at in the wiki (See [[B4_Suspend_ECR]]). A small pre-build will be assembled next week to test the circuit changes introduced since the C1 build.


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.
3. Schedules: The Trial-3 Open Firmware (OFW) first code-drop is scheduled for Monday. Testing of the Q2C28i is happening this weekend, and a final drop will be available for Quanta next Wednesday. Trial-3 is essentially complete, but we do not need to drop it to Quanta for another week or two, so we will consider critical bug fixes—if there is adequate time for testing. Everyone should please be focusing on First Deployment bug fixes, minor features, and, most especially, testing.


== Upcoming pieces ==
4. Test: Alex Latham spent most of the week performing suspend/resume testing. We now have a setup that is pretty easy to get running and keep running. Yani Galanis has spent the week documenting and testing various network configurations. There were a number of bugs/enhancements found this week that will help people who have recently been experiencing problems connecting to their home access points; for example, now that we support multiple key types, it is necessary to type $: in front of a hex key for a WEP connection.
; 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 ==
Michael Stone is spear-heading a “Test Sprint” day to review test plans, automation, and finding ways to make it easy others community to help out. Next Wednesday will the the test sprint day. Please join in. (Details will be sent to devel, sugar, and testing mailing lists.) SJ Klein will be getting the wiki to produce inline diffs of watched pages in response to changes to those pages so that we can more efficiently track the progress of the sprint.


'''[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. Mesh view: Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos has developed a new activity, “Space,” which displays an alternative mesh network neighborhood; it offers a sense of space by placing you in the center and everyone else in the mesh network at a distance proportional to link quality between you and the node that is being displayed (See http://web.media.mit.edu/~ypod/mesh/).


Archives: [[OLPC:News/Archive 1|2005-2006]]
6. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent much of the week debugging suspend/resume patches related to the display controller (DCON). He also worked with upstream, massaging patches in, getting more patches ready, and helping others with their patches.
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 2|2007]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 3|2008]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 4|2009-10]]


=== Translations ===
7. Sugar activities: Simon Schampijer set up a page in the wiki for the activity template (See [[Activity_Template]]) in order to set a standard by which activity developers communicate about their projects. (Now that loading new activities is as easy as clicking on an .xo bundle from the browser, there is certain to be more activity-related traffic in the wiki.) Simon also implemented the standard control for providing in-activity alerts (See https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2822); these can be used in the activities and can be placed at the top or bottom of the window. He has also begun work on a Sugar control-panel window.
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. X Window System: Bernardo Innocenti has gotten Xorg 1.4 fully packaged and available for general testing; while we haven’t done any benchmarking yet, it seems to be quite a bit faster. There is still need for a “kludge” in the kernel to help the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and evdev_drv see the glide sensor as a normal mouse, but that will soon be fixed.
For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see [http://olpc.tv olpc.tv] and [[OLPC:Videos]].


== Sugar news ==
Bernie also reports that we have a fix for the glibc problems affecting Ethiopian, but it requires upgrading to the F8 version of the library. Replacing glibc at this later stage isn't as destabilizing as it may seem: the only fallout Bernie can see is the exposure of a latent memory allocation bug in the olpc-dm program, which he has already fixed. Of course, we have more testing to do. Rob Savoye may be helping us with the Geode specific optimizations in glibc, for the benefit of Gnash and all other applications that rely heavily on memcpy() and similar functions.
Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development '''[http://walterbender.org/?cat=3 on his blog]'''.


== Press ==
Walter Bender has been working with Bernie, Tushar Sayankar, Jens Petersen, Parag Nemade, Manusheel Gupta, and Rosh Kamath on a Devanagari keyboard for the laptop that will be deployed in Mumbai (See [[Devanagari_keyboard]]).
For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the [[OLPC:Press/2005-2008|2005-2008 press archives]].


== Past announcements ==
9. Build system: Scott Ananian has made significant progress on our internal build system. We had our first “joyride” builds this week and hope to open it up to the rest of the developers next week. Scott also continued to work on the new hourly build system, creating “Joyride,” “Meshtest,” “Rainbow,” and “Xtest” branches of the main build. Joyride is the current unstable build; Meshtest is a fork for network testing; Rainbow is a fork for testing security-related patches; and Xtest is a fork for testing the Xorg 1.4 bits. (The Meshtest branch contains configuration and testing code to run on the OLPC mesh testbed; Scott has not quite gotten to the point where he can manage the build installed on the entire mesh at once, but he is getting very close.) Michael Stone has begun the process of cloning our build-system onto teach.laptop.org so that he can fully duplicate Scott's knowledge and so that he can document the process of constructing a build machine as he goes. Scott, Michael, and Chris Ball also have made plans for automated changelog collection that they hope to help implement next week.
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
10. Incremental updates: Michael worked closely with James Cameron and Reynaldo Verdejo to implement several small enhancements to our present incremental update strategy that user-testing suggested would be particularly valuable. These enhancements include:
* 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.
• better documentation of available update options;
* 2008-05-15 : [[Media:XP-on-XO.doc|Microsoft Windows XP is now available on the XO laptop]]
• the ability to list all available builds;
* 2008-05-03 : [[Media:Kane-appointment.doc|One Laptop per Child appoints Charles Kane as President and Chief Operating Officer]]
• better generic error-reporting;
* 2008-01-07 : [[Media:G1G1-results.doc|One Laptop per Child Giving Campaign Raises $35 Million]] in 2007
• retargetable updates, which give us XO-to-XO updates (See [[SoftwareBinaryDifferentialUpdates]]);
* 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]
• updates that are more robust in the face of intermittent network connectivity (diagnosed and implemented by Reynaldo).
* 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]


11. Activiation/leases: Scott also finalized MP security requirements with Mitch Bradley; they ensure that we can seamlessly upgrade to new signing keys even after machines are in the field. Scott also prototyped a “manufacturing-server-less” activation process, to reduce our deployment risk; and he began to prototype a simple lease-creation server.


12. Activity Containerization: Michael Stone reports that you can now update to Rainbow (security-enabled) builds by running


[[Category:OLPC]]
# olpc-update rainbow-7

Build rainbow-7 comes almost ready to use; you just need to

# touch /etc/olpc-security

and reboot. The resulting system will demonstrate the current state of
activity containerization.

This state can be inspected in two places:

/var/log/rainbow/stdout
/var/rainbow/debrief/<id>/stdout
/stderr
/strace

The Rainbow stdout log records a running commentary on Rainbow's actions as the system runs. The per-activity-invocation stdout and stderr files record data printed by activities (including exception traces printed by failing Python activities). The strace log contains a detailed log of all actions performed by activities that can be used to diagnose the causes of activity failure.

13. Language: Ben Lowenstein of Colingo has released Spanish 1-2-3 and Portuguese 1-2-3 and is looking for feedback (See http://dev.colingo.org/media/123/).

14. Music: The music curation team had a listening jam last week, pulling together works from individual artists and DJs, from the Beatpick and the Free Music Project. This is being coordinated by Romain Becker and Sylvain Zimmer of Jamendo, and by Elizabeth Stark, who are processing the faxed copyright releases and attribution needs of the artists. Artists and bands on-board since last week include DJ C, DJ Spooky, Tripwire (tripwire.in), Rainvan, and Split. All have contributed songs under an attribution license and at least one collection under a non-commercial license (for school libraries).

15. Books: Arjun Sarwal is working with Hemant Goyal and Assim Deodia on a text-to-speech synthesizer for the Read activity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/E-Book_Reader). Biguniverse has 12 authors who have offered OLPC use of their stories.

16. Wikitext: Zdenek Broz has been improving the format of topical bundles of articles (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arael/preview/wikislice-physics-en/wikislice-physics-en.xol/index.html). The newer templates now need to be ported to other languages.
The Fudia team developing the “Ksana” multilingual wiki reader are close to releasing a version of their reader/search platform that supports
editing. Fudia wants to sponsor 8G “wikisticks” or SD cards for our partner schools.

The MindTouch team, developers of DekiWiki—a popular derivative of MediaWiki with a “more friendly” editing interface—are working with Mako Hill to make their platform one of the backends that MikMik supports.

17. Community journalism: The Report activity has been updated (See [[Report]]); Dan Sutera and his team have put together a Knight Foundation grant to support making it a scalable platform for local and regional news. They now have the site xotimes.org set up (but broken--site is forwarding to elsewhere) as the global overview of news reported with the activity.

18. Games: A group blog has been set up for OLPC games by the group at the Education and Technology Center at CMU working on a soccer game for the laptop (See http://www.olpcgames.org/). They are running a Pittsburgh Game Jam Nov 16–18 (See http://www.olpcgames.org/?p=16
and http://www.olpcgames.org/?p=18).

Game Jam Brasil was moved to November 10–11, and looks as though it may be larger than previously expected (See [[Game_Jam_Brasil/Organiza%C3%A7%C3%A3o]]).

GAMBIT at MIT are developing a card-game platform on which one could
define and share new card games.

Mind Candy software is turning out a new global puzzle game that they'd love to have as a channel connecting children in the developing world with their core audience in the US. Michael Smith there is planning to turn a developer or two onto making an XO web interface (e.g., no Flash) as soon as their site goes live next month.

19. Other content actvities: Hemant Goyal and a small team is working with Arjun Sarwal in India to develop digital signal processing tools to work with measure. They are going to implement the filters in CSound this coming week.

20. Java: Adam Bouhenguel has an interest in evaluating and benchmarking light-weight versions of Java for the laptop. He would appreciate input from others who have considered the same questions.

=More News=
Laptop News is archived [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf here] and [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/ here].

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]]=
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}}
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"