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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__
</div>


To contribute a story or news idea, see the '''[[OLPC:Newsroom|OLPC newsroom]]'''.
=Laptop News 2007-11-17=
1. Nationwide: This week we launched Give One Get One (See http://laptopgiving.org). eBay reports the fastest ramp-up they have ever seen.


For coverage of recent OLPC updates, see our [[twitter]] feed and [http://blog.laptop.org OLPC blog].
2. Changshu: Richard Smith and Gary Chiang found the root cause of many if not all of our “hardware” suspend/resume problems. They were caused unexpected interrupts being generated by the embedded controller (EC) just as the laptop was going to sleep; the problem can be corrected with a firmware upgrade. We will continue to test to ensure that we can suspend and resume for a million cycles. This development ends a four-month struggle to identify and fix major problems associated with suspend and resume.


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. Mass Production: We had a glorious end to a near sleepless few weeks for many. On Friday, we made a firmware fix to arguably our most troublesome blocker bug. This suspend/resume bug could have limited our battery life (between charges) when using collaborative applications and mesh (details below). Thanks to all who helped from OLPC, Quanta, Red Hat, AMD, plus many individual contributors; special thanks to Richard Smith, John Watlington, Gary Chaing, and Mary Lou Jepsen.


== Upcoming pieces ==
The Pentagram designed OLPC boxes, both the five-pack and single-pack look great, and are in stark contrast to all the other boxes in the factory.
; 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. Firmware: Mitch Bradley fixed some bugs in the OFW JFFS2 driver. They impact olpc-update, so we will need a new firmware release—Q2D05—for the update. Mitch also installed the school-server software and did some OFW network update testing. There is an issue with the way that OFW associates with the mesh—currently OFW-based updates only work with infrastructure mode. He sorted out some issues surrounding keyboard tags in manufacturing data and specified a new SK manufacturing data tag to report the SKU number. This will let us identify G1G1 machines in the data we get back from Quanta, so we can generate developer keys for those machines.


'''[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. Schedules: Many thanks to C. Scott Ananian who has led the team to get to build a new in-house build system; as a result, we have a better handle on the process, repeatability, and tracing to source files. Some issues such as security and mesh sharing are taking longer than expected to stabilize, so we are evaluating the impact on the “Update.1” release schedule.


Archives: [[OLPC:News/Archive 1|2005-2006]]
6. Testing: Dafydd Harries and Robert McQueen from Collabra visited OLPC’s Cambridge office for a week of “larger-scale” mesh testing and debugging; lots of good progress was made. David Woodhouse was also in town, working with Marvell, CozyBit, Ricardo Carrano, Marcelo Tosatti, and Michail Bletsas to help debug Ticket 4470 (WLAN hang). We have a much better understanding of this bug (See below) and hope to begin testing a work around soon.
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 2|2007]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 3|2008]]
| [[OLPC:News/Archive 4|2009-10]]


=== Translations ===
Simon Schampijer spent a number of hours at the local Starbuck's testing various browser versions and settings with T-Mobile service. He has narrowed down some slow response issues to a specific version of our browser and is working with both Mozilla and T-Mobile to get to the root cause.
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]] ==
Alex Latham spent another week in suspend/resume testing as well as latest-build tests and various combinations of OS and kernel to help identify problem areas. Ricardo is working on a test bed to recreate Ticket 1863 (the LazyWDS bug) and help understand association problems with various access points (Linksys mostly). He has also provided data related to the amount of beaconing traffic from XOs.
For a history of videos about OLPC and the XO, see [http://olpc.tv olpc.tv] and [[OLPC:Videos]].


== Sugar news ==
7. Suspend/resume: As mentioned above, Richard Smith and Gary Chaing solved the mystery of our suspend and resume problems (Ticket 1835) that were bedeviling us in the factory. A well placed SCI just before MAIN_ON goes low (i.e., during the suspend code) hangs the system. The (primary) source of this SCI is from an wake up event generated by traffic from one of the PS2 devices. The wonderful news is that this is a firmware problem with the embedded controller, so our hardware manufactured to date will work correctly once the firmware is upgraded. A test bed of 41 laptops executed over 20,000 cycles without a single 1835 error.
Walter continues to post summaries of Sugar development '''[http://walterbender.org/?cat=3 on his blog]'''.


== Press ==
8. Sugar/activities: Simon Schampijer worked with Michael Stone on Rainbow integration for the Browse activity and with Bernie Innocenti on a change in the X11 symbol tables that caused the View Source key to stop working. Bernie has requested to revert this change upstream. Another bug was fixed in the full-screen mode.
For an archive of OLPC media coverage, see the [[OLPC:Press/2005-2008|2005-2008 press archives]].


== Past announcements ==
Tomeu Vizoso fixed some bugs in the DataStore related to security, USB sticks, and activity custom metadata properties. He also helped to track down some bugs in Browse related to downloads and bugs in the Journal in regard to bundle installation, updating of relative dates in the list view and usability of the search entry.
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
Reinier Herres has been working on the Calculate activity. It can now parse Unicode, thus its internationalization is somewhat improved.
* 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.
Reinier also wrote a patch to enable “exit from full-screen” in the the Browse activity. He also wrote a patch to display those activities where a friend is participating in the Friends/Group view.
* 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]


Sayamindu Dasgupta fixed a problem with font caching (Ticket 1525) by backporting some changes from fontconfig 2.4.92 to 2.4.2 (the version being used in the builds). This leads to more robust font caching, and hopefully will resolve the issue of Activities taking up 100% of the CPU due to an incorrectly set real-time clock and the issue of newly added fonts not beng recognized by the system. Sayamindu has also been helping with the final phase of our Pootle deployment: GIT integration has begun and http://dev.laptop.org/translate should be fully open for translation very soon.


Gabriel Burt posted a Pippy library to the Sugar list: the library allows access to the camera from Pippy and can easily be used to create
time-lapse photography—thanks, Gabriel! An intuitive extension would be to add a slide-show image viewer to Pippy for viewing these images. There is a initial pass at a “Thanks” program in the Pippy library. Please add any names we have inadvertently overlooked—in addition to demonstrating table use, we are also using it to acknowledge community contributions to the project.


[[Category:OLPC]]
Muriel Godoi release Memorize Version 20, which uses the new tubes interface and has some fixes to collaboration mode. However, he has some problems due to Rainbow issues (Ticket 4872) regarding loading journal objects using objectchooser. Muriel is also making progress on Food Force. He has the main interface coded in pgu, the GUI library for pygame; there is a Sugar skin to widgets in pgu; and the first version of the three basic classes that compose the game model—resource, facility, and indicator—are running.

Bernie has integrated a few more keyboard changes and sent them upstream. There are still a few pending keyboard changes unmerged, e.g., Walter Bender has finished [[Dari_Keyboard|Dari]] and [[Uzbek Keyboard|Uzbek]] keyboard layouts that need merging. Bernie also released an updated version of olpc-utils with bug fixes and simplifications. He is backporting it to our old builds to enable localization on the stable builds too. He has integrated more of his packages upstream and built them with Koji.

9. Power management: Chris Ball added more features to the power manager, including a way to disable automatic suspend (run “touch /etc/ohm/inhibit-suspend”), a shortening of the automatic timeouts (25 seconds until screen dim; a further 5 seconds until suspend), and disabling these features when plugged into AC (or on an early-model XO without reliable suspend support).

10. Builds: Dennis Gilmore joined OLPC this week to become our “buildmeister.” Dennis has been a mainstay in the Fedora build community and with his joining the team, we hope to make integration easier for community contributors. This week Dennis has been working on automating conversion of .xo to .rpm—useful for when we build our images. He also spent some time teaching SJ Klein and and Mako Hill how to write spec files. And he has been working on getting those pieces we have outside of Fedora back into Fedora; Dennis has branched all the X packages Bernie has had separated for OLPC-2 and generally trying to work out what is where, how, and why.

As noted above, C. Scott Ananian has continued work on build maintenance. He also rewrote olpc-update, which is back in the builds for those of you who’d prefer to update over the network. He also has made a preliminary auto-update/theft-deterrence server implementation.

11. Kernel: Andres Salomon attempted to fix the double mouse-click bug, which led him to attempt to build the xorg evdev driver, which in turn required him to find all the appropriate RPMs—which were not all that easy to find—and required him to set up an FC7+OLPC build machine, which led to him to upgrading the kernel build machine (from FC6) to FC7+OLPC, which has reaffirmed his great dislike of yum (and rpm), caused kernel builds no longer worked, which thus required a bunch of changes to the kernel spec file. He then decided that because some of his sanity was still intact and because he could not get his XO online to actually test the freshly built evdev driver, he would start fixing Libertas (wireless driver) problems. He is now looking for a brick wall to pound his head against.

12. Wireless: Dave Woodhouse spent the week working on the critical wireless bug (Ticket 4470). Although the driver was misbehaving, we have improved its behavior (the driver is now properly serializing commands sent to the 8388's firmware) and we have fairly much eliminated the possibility that the problem is caused by driver misbehavior. Thanks also to Marcelo Tossati and Asish Shukla. Marvell's team in Pune discovered that a wireless scan command would occasionally timeout without a response, triggering a halt in further command processing by the firmware. This seems to explain the behavior noticed by David. There are plenty of issues with the driver—which may well be causing less frequent problems—and the whole of the command queuing needs to be rewritten. But not this week.

13. Presence: Robert McQueen and Dafydd Harries resolved a number of issues this week: they learned how to make RPMs and became a Fedora committer on the relevant packages; they found and fixed a very reproducible bug where telepathy-gabble crashed due to buggy resolver result retry code in loudmouth; they tested the benefits of and then enabled SSL-level DEFLATE compression with appropriate patches to loudmouth and presence service; they tested and pushed fixes for telepathy-gabble and telepathy-salut into Joyride to make activity sharing work when Rainbow is enabled; they perpetrated a nasty Network Manager hack to disable scanning while connected, to try and help avoid the perils of #4470 when testing collaboration stuff (thanks dcbw); they discussed various UI strategies regarding scaling with Eben Eliason, and they set up a cron job to remind them to file these weekly reports :).

Rob also made a wiki page documenting how to set up ejabberd in the way that jabber.laptop.org is configured (See [[Ejabberd_Configuration]]). This will allow anyone to create separate (or local servers) for experimentation purposes, collaborating without network access, or just easing load on jabber.laptop.org. Rob is also working on a page to document the server extensions we currently rely on, and our plans to replace them with an OLPC-specific Jabber component which should be more scalable and can be attached to any unmodified Jabber server (See [[XMPP_Extensions]]).

Guillaume Desmottes engaged in on-going testing of activity sharing. He tested the Salut fragmentation fix and fixed a Presence Service regression regarding the Share property (Ticket 4660); he reported and started to investigate a Gabble problem with sharing (Ticket 4809); he fixed two sources of Salut crashing (Tickets 4885 and 4903); he changed the Salut debug-flag behavior to make it consistent with Gabble (Ticket 4886); he created a wiki page explaining how to enable Telepathy log files (See [[Telepathy-debug]]); he found and fixed a Presence Service bug: it didn't try to reconnect Gabble when the initial connect attempt failed (Ticket 4907); he added an exponential backoff in retrying Gabble connection (Ticket 2522); and he wrote a workaround for D-Bus tubes within Rainbow (Tickets 4947 and 4948).

Morgan Collett fixed in Sugar regarding handling non-OLPC buddies; buddies are tracked by key in Sugar but non-OLPC buddies have no key (Ticket 4656). However, the fix is deemed too invasive for Update.1. Morgan also assisted some activity authors with Tubes stuff, did some Presense Service testing on Joyride; he reverted the [[HelloMesh]] activity tutorial to previous method of getting buddies from handles and Worked on Tubes tutorial.

Simon McVittie has also been doing a bit of bug herding and build support. Also he has been doing upstream work on the development version of telepathy-glib. Sjoerd Simons fixed and helped fixing some of the bugs that were discovered during testing of Salut.

=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"