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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].
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].


=Laptop News 2008-01-26=
=Laptop News 2008-02-02=


1. Active antennae: Another 90 prototype active antennae should be available in a couple of weeks, followed shortly by a large shipment of pre-build antennae scheduled to arrive in three or four weeks. The initial run will be used mostly for field testing, with the majority of the units going to Uruguay. They will be labeled as “engineering samples—not for sale.” We now have an update procedure for the prototype antennae that allows them to stay connected to a server. (These had been built with firmware that placed them in stand-alone mesh-repeater mode too quickly, thus requiring them to be connected only after a server is up and running.) See [[Active Antenna Reprogramming]].
1. Davos, Switzerland: Nicholas reports that the World Economic Forum, usually a storm, was a hurricane this year, with gale winds of press and interest in OLPC. The Intel debacle dominated the debate far less than he anticipated. The sheer existence of OLPC was marveled. The traditional Saturday-morning breakfast debate, at which Intel and OLPC have battled fiercely in the past, was not attended by Craig Barrett.


2. Firmware: Mitch Bradley fixed a problem with OFW reading JFFS2 images (Ticket #6291) encountered when using the multicast update method. (This was one of the bugs uncovered by David Woodhouse in Mongolia last week.)
2. OLPC and Brightstar, along with Quanta, are reviewing current inventory and the immediate production schedule to fulfill the balance of the Give One Get One program. At present their is a gap in supply, given the need for US keyboards and power supplies—most of the remaining “Get” laptops will likely ship in March.


3. School server: Power continues to concern us. John Watlington realized that the off-the-shelf server prototype he was looking at for rural environments actually came with a 19VDC power supply, not a 12VDC one. While 12V supplies are available, they don't work well with unregulated 12V input. With such a 12V supply, the server prototype required around 16W while idling, and up to 26W when running three meshes and doing heavy disk accesses. The current power consumption requires four hours of pumping on a Weza to keep the server operating for an eight hour day! We will also have to greatly improve the power consumption when the machine is idle to have any hope of the servers being left running when the schools aren't in session.
3. School server: John Watlington reports that the school server software is moving along: a new release, including web caching and minor bug fixes, is being tested and should be ready by Monday. This release will also allow web filtering—we plan to use DansGuardian for now—to be easily enabled. Countries will be responsible for selecting and providing a list of filtered sites/content, but there are a number of commercial suppliers of suitable lists as a starting point. Upcoming development will concentrate on a short-term laptop backup solution, the activation server, packaging the multicast updater that has been so useful this week in Mongolia, and improving the ease of configuration somewhat.


4. Embedded controller: Q2D10 had some battery charging regressions, so Richard Smith backed out the change that speed up the battery-processing state machine; that fixed the regressions. The EC command saga continues: a machine was brought in that had total EC command failure, yet after Richard started examining it, it magically cleared up. After a long spell of trying to reproduce the problem, Richard made a significant discovery: it appears that if the input-buffer-full (IBF) flag is set and the power to the processor is cut, then the EC can go into a state where it thinks that a constant stream of data is being received. This results in the IBF flag getting reset just a soon as you clear it. Richard is still researching/understanding the issue, but this may explain why the previous interrupt-driven protocol was having so much trouble.
We have painfully discovered the limitations of the mesh and current collaborative software in Mongolia, where the convolution of the number of laptops with bugs #5335 (more mDNS traffic than expected) and #5007 (mesh repeats multicast too much) make the perfect storm, which prevents anybody from using the network. We will continue to improve the mesh performance, but clear guidelines are needed as to what network infrastructure to deploy under what conditions. Once a certain density of students is exceeded, a wired backbone and conventional access points will be required.


5. Automated charging testbed: Richard has set up an automated charging testbed: four XO laptops are now in a suspend/resume testbed; these laptops are connected to a switch such that every three hours, a supervisor machine turns off the external power to each of them. Each laptop is running a small script that watches for when the battery capacity gets low. When low battery is detected the XO laptop turns its power back on.
4. Embedded controller: Richard Smith finished up a round of EC code changes for Update.1 and released PQ2D10, which went into system firmware Q2D10. This firmware should enable safe suspend/resume operation and it should be better at handling games key events as they wakeup the laptop from suspend. Richard won't claim the bugs (Ticket #6105: “New EC firmware in Q2D09 seems wonky”) are fixed until it has widespread testing. The keyboard handling code is quite complex. Richard also modified the firmware build scripts so that they will build a bootfw rpm package for inclusion into Joyride.


6. Power profiling: Now that we have automatic power management in the Update.1 builds we no longer have a simple power profile for measuring battery life. To get an accurate indication of what the “real world” battery life will be when power management is doing automatic suspend/resume we need to know what the power profile looks like while using the machine. We are gathering data from different use cases by running the olpc-logbat script while using the XO laptop: olpc-logbat samples the battery discharge information every 10 seconds. We can use much more data—please run the script yourself and send us the CSV files that it generates.
5. Batteries: Carla Gomez Monroy reports from Mongolia that the batteries are not lasting as long as expected. The extreme cold was the first suspect. Richard had Carla collect data via olpc-logbat and ran some tests of his own in the freezer (which isn’t as cold as Ulaanbaatar). These data, along with a closer examination of the GoldPeak data sheet, make it pretty obvious that batteries don't work so well in the –20 to –40C range. The extreme cold makes the output voltage drop considerably. The result is that at around the 50% capacity mark the voltage is so low that the low-voltage cutoff kicks in and shuts the laptop off. Richard does worry about when the children take their XO laptops outside while suspended; the power dissipation (and thus self-heating) is at its lowest. It may shut off. The question to work out with our battery vendors is that is it OK to de-rate the low-voltage shutoff when it’s so cold. Will this do any damage to the battery?


6. Testing: Chih-yu Chao spent most of the week on Update.1 testing and test-case development. Test cases include power management, suspend and ebook mode, activity isolation, network manager, scaling tests, and localization of content bundle. Please review and help execute these test cases ([[Update.1]]). Also the automated olpc-update feature was tested as part of the final testing for Ship.2-656.
7. Testing: Much thanks to Chih-Yu Chao, whose last full time day helping with QA and testing was Friday. This week she was focused on providing test cases, structure and encouragement to the community in our push for Update.1 testing. To help out, please review and execute test cases listed in the wiki ([[Update.1]]), or choose some test plans ([[Category:Test plans]]) and then post the results ([[Update.1#Test_Results]]). We can really use lots of help!


Yani Galanis has been testing avahi, telepathy, and general mesh capabilities with the latest Update1. He has helped open up some discussions of what we have today, what we would like in the future, and how we might get there. There is still some design work, coding, testing, and discussion needed in this area as some of our real deployments are pushing at our limitations.
Dennis Gilmore has released Update.1 Build 690 as the first release candidate for Update.1 (See http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/olpc/streams/update1/build690). Please give this build extensive testing. There have been some reports of WEP and WPA problems with this build—expect these issues to be addressed in a subsequent release candidate.


8. Support: This week Nicholas Negroponte sent out a letter to all donors who have not yet received their laptops apologizing for the problems and explaining some of the on-going issues. The remaining laptops should be shipped by the end of March. Many people can now track their order directly at the laptopgiving.org webpage, which has started to reduce the number of emails to the support team.
7. Schedule: Due to resources being diverted to help resolve some G1G1 issues; the Mongolia deployment; and the need to some bugs in OHM and security, the Update.1 release is slipping. The current schedule is reflected on the Roadmap page in the developer wiki (http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap). To help with triage, it would be great if people can look at the critical bugs that are currently assigned to this release as well as the bugs coming in from testing. Even more important: please help test! We can't say what the critical bugs are if we haven't found them yet!


There was a good discussion on Friday with Mel Chua, Nicki Lee, SJ Klein, Adam Holt, Walter Bender, Kim Quirk on the topic of grass-roots repair centers—more on that theme next weekend.
8. Support: Adam Holt and his support group continue to battle the question of “when will I get my laptop.” We are working with our partners on a daily basis to get the numbers, order information, production information, shipping information, and to compose emails and set donor policies.


Adam organized another Sunday meeting among ~20 support volunteers, with guest speaker Manusheel Gupta talking about entrepreneurship among children with XO laptops. The ~60 support volunteers continued to fend off shipping/billing questions this week by the 100s. The number of questions almost doubled in January; the percentage of questions pertaining to donor services increased four fold: almost a 700% increase from December!!
In Mongolia, Carla Gomez Monroy and Dave Woodhouse have been bringing up 1000 laptops, battling issues associated with RF connectivity, and the need to upgrade large numbers of laptops—because we rushed the initial order to Ulaanbaatar, we didn’t have time to update the build in the factory. We are also starting to get the first “support” issues for the laptops that have already been distributed to the children.


But there is lots of good news: even with the continuing onslaught regarding donor services, we've lowered our unresolved tickets queue from 500+ to about 350—and we have received many profuse thank-you letters from donors who had been fed up to the gills at being abandoned until now. Even with the increase in volume of laptops deployed, there was no corresponding increase in questions about connectivity, Flash support, or help getting started. It is safe to say that once people get their XO laptops, they are managing quite well.
Adam organized another very successful Sunday conference-call for the support team. This week’s guest speakers were Anders Mogensen, who discussed his observations of OLPC from a recent visit to Nigeria, and Joshua Beal from Belkin, who discussed new power options and their potential deployment consequences. Their generosity in speaking to the support team, and answering all sorts of great questions, was exactly the refresher the team needed among the shipping madness dragging it down.


Our thanks to dwa (David Aquilina) and alc (Alan Claver) and countless other volunteers working so hard to be supportive towards all.
Adam restructured the support team to more efficiently deal with the scourge of billing/shipping issues flooding in from the Give One Get One program, focusing on “one basically good response” for all, which will include more detailed order tracking. Sandy Culver, Steve Holton, Greg Babbing, and Guynn Prince have been of exceptional help dealing with RMAs and “undeliverables.”


9. Roadshow: Dave Woodhouse, Bernie Innocenti, and Jim Gettys attended Linux Conf Au (LCA), which is considered by many to be the best Linux conference in the world at this time. The LCA organizers and OLPC combined to distribute a 100 machines to developers at the conference. (The lack of G1G1 in Australia is, of course, frustrating to people here.)
9. Satellites: Michail Bletsas will be joining Thomas Jacobson and Roland Burger for a workshop at the upcoming Satellite 2008 conference in Washington DC on February 27 entitled: “Low-cost satellite Internet infrastructure to support education in remote and developing regions.” The goals of this informal workshop will be to gather and document design requirements and their justifications; to examine how current products might be used to meet them; and to identify areas where further research and development is needed. Exhibits-only registration (free if you use VIP code BOF) is all that is needed if you would like to join in the discussion.


10. Presence Service: Guillaume Desmottes ran more tests on Salut using “hyperactiviy.” He fix various memory leaks and other issues and helped Marco Gritti to use hyperactivity to debug a Sugar UI bug. He also reviewed Sjoerd Simons's Gibber DNS resolver branch; released telepathy-salut 0.2.2, which fixes some OLPC related issues (Ticket #6271); and discovered and tracked more Salut crashers (Tickets #6303, #6309, #6310). Morgan Collett used his new Fedora superpowers to build RPMs for Presence Service and Salut via koji. He has been working on Presence documentation and tested builds and
10. Mesh: Cramming 500 laptops under the same roof is a difficult (but tractable) engineering problem. We haven't done any testing of such deployment scenarios and Mongolia is not really the most convenient place for that testing. Despite that, common sense can still carry us a long way. We have set the limit of XO laptops to school servers to 180 (60 per channel in mesh mode)—after optimizing the laptop for “dense” deployment (which hasn't been a priority in our software development schedules). However, deploying more school servers under the same roof doesn't immediately translate to increased capacity, since school servers don't add spectrum. While a school server still costs several hundred dollars, it is more economical to install standard low-cost access points instead of multiple servers. (The OLPC mesh implementation was to maximize the “connected” time for sparse deployments (children in villages in Cambodia, rural schools in Rwanda) and to simplify and extend connectivity away from an access point.
presence service/telepathy related fixes. Sjoerd fixed several bugs in telepathy-salut that were discovered thanks to the hyperactivity stress testing tool.
11. OLPC infrastructure: Ivan Krstić completely overhauled the public-facing infrastructure (wiki, static web, git, trac, hosting, mail, mailing lists). We are now in much better shape and will hopefully see less downtime on key systems such as dev.laptop.org.


11. Sugar: Simon Schampijer worked with Marco Gritti and Sayamindu Dasgupta debugged and found the cause of the “Browser being slow after an update from ship.2 (653) to update.1(690)” issue (Ticket #6046). It turned out that timestamps of fonts were set in the future. xulrunner does check if fontconfig is up to date and if it is unsuccessful the fontconfig is reinitialized and the whole thing repeats itself again. The resulting loop is causing the slowdown. Sayamindu has provided a new fontconfig rpm which checks if mtimes are in the future and print a warning but does return true so Browse will not be slowed down. In addition Michael Stone has released a new rainbow-0.7.9 which symlinks '~/.fontconfig to ~/instance'. Simon also provided a patch that releases exported dbus objects (Ticket #6127), which is important for activities that run in a single process, such as Browse.
12. Datastore: Ivan continues to work on a new DS specification that was the outcome of the datastore summit held at the OLPC office in Cambridge last week. He plans to have something to vet with the community in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Marco Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, and Eben Eliason spent a second week in Cambridge working through a number of design changes for the Sugar user experience that are potentially targeted for Update.2. More on those proposals soon.


12. Etoys: The Etoys team is working toward delivering a package for Update.1. Scott Wallace, Bert Freudenberg, and Yoshiki Ohshima fixed various lingering bugs in the system. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness are revising the Quick Guide system and contents. From the effort, the candidate version for Update.1, Etoys-77.xo, was created. Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider keep working on the translation issue. Takashi discovered that Pootle cannot merge large sets of translations fast enough. He is looking into the issue. The interactive geometry system by Hilaire Fernandez is improved. Now, it is packaged as a .xo bundle ([[DrGeo]]). It contains the translation framework by Korakurider and others for activities written in Etoys.
13. Security: Nortel’s Marcus Leech continues his work on Rainbow, the isolation shell for the [[Bitfrost]] security mechanism. He has provided invaluable testing and patches, is developing a Rainbow filesystem verification tool, and generally being incredibly helpful in moving Rainbow development forward rapidly.


13. Spreadsheets: Dan Bricklin and Luke Cross are working on a port of the Sweet SocialCalc Project to the XO laptop. SocialCalc is a highly functional spreadsheet implemented in JavaScript. (To date, 39 functions have been developed: ABS, ACOS, ASIN, ATAN, ATAN2, AVERAGE, COS, COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTBLANK, DEGREES, EVEN, EXP, FACT, FALSE, IF, INT, LN, LOG10, MAX, MIN, MOD, NA, NOW, ODD, PI, POWER, PRODUCT, RADIANS, SIN, SUM, STDEV, STDEVP, TAN, TODAY, TRUE, TRUNC, VAR, and VARP.) Manusheel Gupta is helping them with the Sugar port. The first pass will be to leverage a general application that supports activities written in JavaScript, with Python-based Sugar binding.
Michael Stone worked with Blake Setlow, visiting from Tower Research, to rewrite the nss-rainbow module. Together, they succeeded in removing the need for Rainbow to modify /etc/passwd. Now that they understand the interface and the required debugging techniques, Michael anticipates that /etc/group will straight-forward to handle. He hopes to make a new Rainbow release early in the Update.2 cycle incorporating these improvements.


Another approach to developing a spreadsheet activity is to begin from the GNumeric code base. Manu is working with Jody Goldberg and Eben Eliason to port a simple version of GNumeric to the Sugar environment.
Michael also updated or rewrote lots of dated documentation:


14. Sensors and learning: Arjun Sarwal incorporated Spanish-language support into Turtle Art with Sensors and made a slightly modified icon of the original Turtle Art icon. The activity is now in Joyride Builds and is identifiable by a slightly modified icon of the Turtle. Arjun spent time discussing with Edward Baafi of the FabLab and Aaron Miller of MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten regarding how sensors, apart from acting like an interface to the physical world, could impact the XO laptop deployment communities. Aaron is working on integrating sensors into “Scratch” (which is now available for download from [[Activities]]); Edward Baafi is interested in exploring how general-purpose boards, which include sensors as well as I/O, can be used in conjunction with the XO laptop. Arjun continues to explore the wonderful possibilities of $2 sensor experiments through the XO laptop’s analog-input port. Documentation of the session with youth at FabLab Boston is in the wiki (See [[Measure/Turtle]]).
* [[Taste the Rainbow]]
* http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/mstone/security
* http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/mstone/horizon


15. OLPC Health: The OLPC Health initiative has gained good momentum. There are active discussions on the Library mailing lists and the wiki pages have also started to take shape (See [[Health]]). A vision document ([[Health/vision]]) is also in the works. The list of group of advisers to the OLPC-Health initiative includes Josh Hehner, Jim Hopper, Sv Subramanian and Ichiro Kawachi. More detailed introductions of the advisers will follow soon on the Library mailing list. There is a conference call on the 10th of Feb at 1pm EST. People are invited to propose agenda items by posting on the Health wiki pages.
Finally, he researched several mechanisms for controlling and monitoring network access, including SELinux, NetLabel, and a sys_disablenetwork() patch. Experimentation will soon follow.


16. Ethernet: Michail Bletsas hosted Jonathan Hsu, founder and CEO of Zoltantech at OLPC this week. He makes a very small, elegant and low cost (< $10) USB-Ethernet adapter that works well with the XO; it could be very useful to developers and advanced users.
14. Licensing: Jon Phillips, Rebecca Rojer, and a team from Creative Commons have put together an illustrated primer to “Sharing Creative Works” (See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works). Jon observes that “in developing for OLPC, we have had to learn much about licensing for kids and generally how to educate around the topics.” The primer will go into CC’s custom licensing activity, which allows for a disclaimer about child licensing, comics to describe the concepts, and a license chooser (See [[Creative Commons]]).


17. Localization: Arjun, Manu, Bernie, and Walter worked through integration of patches for Afghan (including Dari, Pashto and Uzbek variants), Mongolian, Ethiopian, Nepali, and Italian keyboard layouts. All of them (except Italian and Nepali) are expected to be integrated into Update. Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Italian, Marathi and Sinhala. Continuing on his recent efforts with QA and testing with respect to local-language support, Sayamindu has added notes in the wiki on how to utilize the translation testing features in our web-based translation management system, Pootle ([[Localization/Testing#Testing_the_PO_files]]).
15. Activities: Arjan Sarwal completed his integration of sensor input into Turtle Art. He has created a temporary fork called “Turtle Art with sensors” that included a new palette containing sensor blocks. It will be made available for download on the [[Activities]] page this weekend.
He also discovered a few cases where Pootle can become very slow, and discussed these with the upstream developers. They have suggested a few solutions; he is trying to implement them in our deployment. The shifting of Pootle to the new server had caused some issues to crop up with the Git integration; Sayamindu managed to track them down and fix them.


Localization of OLPC for Afghanistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports that they have started localization of Etoys (a major project, as it contains 23,000+ strings). They have done some work in Urdu localization of Etoys and almost 1000 strings are translated into the Dari language. The next step is localization of Etoys ino Pashto.
Arjan also undertook some experiments with the Measure activity with high- school students at the Boston “Fab Lab.” Children were introduced to the sensor concept and they caught on quite well. They arranged themselves into groups worked on projects: (A) using a touch sensor switch to count the number of times people enter through a particular door and display it in the form of a bar graph in Turtle Art;(B) plotting the temperature vs time graph in the form of points by using a temperature sensor connected to the XO laptop; and (C) making a turtle draw a smiling face when a high note was played and a sad face when the note was low note was played. Thanks to Edward Baafi for his help in the session.


OLPC User Manual: Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj” continue their efforts; translation of the user manual into the Dari language is complete and is now under review; the review of the translated version in Pashto is 90% complete.
Manusheel Gupta, Marco Gritti, and Tomeu Vizoso modified the Read activity to support DJVU and the TIFF format. Read activity can now be easily extended to support the other common formats.


Localization Tests: Habib also reports that they have successfully tested the Urdu localization .po files that Pootle generated on one of their test machines. There are some small issues with some of the character bindings; in addition, they are testing it with Dari and Pashto languages. The target is to have three XOs completely localized inUrdu, Dari, and Pashto by next week.
Manu also developed a framework and ideas for implementation of a spreasheet activity. With input from Jim Gettys and Eben Eliason, he has started an implementation based upon the GNumeric codebase. Manu be discussing implementation ideas with Jody Goldberg from GNumeric Team this week. Other people who are interested in working on the activity should please chime in.


18. In the community: On invitation by the Computer Society of Pakistan (CSP), Habib made a short presentation on OLPC to the participants and distributed a CD containing presentations on OLPC. The members of CSP are the leaders of Pakistani IT industry.
16. Keyboards: Bernardo Innocenti gave a tutorial to Arjan and Manu on xkeyboard-config, xkb files and keyboard package maintenance. With Bernie’s help, Arjan made and sent three patches upstream this week. Together with Walter Bender, they make some final touches to the Devanagari and Armenian keyboards and made much progress on the Nepali keyboard layout. (In regard to the latter, we are exploring the use of Compose within the X Window System as an alternative to SCIM.) Walter also roughed out Khmer and French keyboard layouts this week (See [[OLPC Keyboard layouts#OLPC keyboard layouts]]).


Mike Lee reports that the monthly grassroots OLPC Learning Club in Washington, D.C. had a record 48 attendees (including several children and teens) this past Thursday night at Greater DC Cares (See http://www.olpclearningclub.org). Their host, Curtis Cannon, talked about how DC Cares will use the seven laptops they acquired through a holiday fundraising effort called Technoliday organized by Peter Corbett to support their program of pro bono technology consulting for social change. Justin Thorp demoed the Library of Congress' World Digital Library, to which he contributed development effort. Mike demonstrated accessories for the XO including auto adapters, solar panels, the Weza foot treadle charger, clip on sports viewfinders for the camera and the new ZoWii miniature USB Ethernet adapter in OLPC green. Two iLite USB keyboard lights and an auto power adapter were raffled off. Attendees stayed for another hour to mesh. The first Mass XO Meet-up was also held this week (in Cambridge).
17. Localization: Dr. Habib Khan reports from Islamabad that Salman Minhas and Waqas Toor are progressing on Dari localization. Dari language support is completed in XO core, XO bundle, and Update.1; Etoys and Packaging are remaining. The strings in Pootle are now 100% translated in Dari language. Translation in Pashto is 88% completed. The XO core, Update.1, and Packaging are completed; Etoys and XO bundle strings that will follow next. Undaunted by a Pootle bug that was preventing them from committing strings in Pashto, Salman and Waqas continue to work together with Afghan volunteers and hope to accomplish the localization work in the near future.

A translation of an XO laptop user manual into the Dari and Pashto languages was completed this week by our [[Afghanistan|Afghan volunteers]] [[User:Usman_mansour|Usman Mansoor]] “Ansari” and [[User:Sohaib_obaidi|Sohaib Obaidi]] “Ebtihaj.” We appreciate their commitment and hard work. Next week, the OLPC Pakistan team will give it a trial with teachers from an Afghan local school in Islamabad. Their review and feed back will help them finalize the manual.

18. Accessibility: Jutta Treviranus, from the University of Toronto, and Cynthia Waddell, executive director of the International Centre for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI) and the government services accessibility expert for the United Nations Global Alliance for Inclusive ICTs, would like to get involved in our efforts to make the OLPC accessible. Jutta will try to organize a meet up of interested parties in the coming months. In parallel, Rob Taylor, Codethink, contacted Jim Gettys in regard to an investigation of moving AT-SPI over to D-Bus (See http://live.gnome.org/GAP/AtSpiDbusInvestigation).

19. Library: SJ Klein led a review of repository and bundle use cases; topics included the metadata needed for better tracking and sharing of bundles and specific use cases from India and Nepal (Bryan Berry was present). Lauren Klein, Martin Langhoff, Moodle, and Joshua Marks, Curriki, joined a discussion of how children and teachers should upload materials to the local network and to the Web. Curriki has recently added groups features that allow for a customized OLPC portal for educators (under development). They have an 80%-localized Hindi version available that can be used off line in India.

Regarding metadata, it was recommended that bundles should include: author, license, and URL. A new .info file format is being proposed and is open for discussion. Mako Hill and Dennis Gilmore have helped define how we should link to source information and identify contributors to bundles (See [[Bundle metadata]]).

Collections that are in development and testing this week include: an updated set of books from ICDL, with Mongolian stories and higher-resolution images; a PDF version of Where There is No Doctor; three language versions of the Holocaust Encyclopedia; flash math and language materials from AJ van der Voort and the EFK foundation; and compressed high-resolution PDFs from the Internet Archive curated by Marcus Lucero.

20. Game Jams: Rut Jesus and perhaps others from OLPC Nederlands will be joining some 150 developers at the Nordic Game Jam next weekend in Copenhagen.

21. Health: Adam Holt helped Arjun Sarwal to organize a group of volunteers around the theme of OLPC and health (See [[Health]]). Together, they have developed a leadership/coordination model to drive this initiative forward. Interest in Health collections has also spiked recently, with Arjan, David Greisen, Erica Frank, Anna Bershteyn, Mika Matsuzaki, Ian Daniher, and Seth Woodworth all working on related projects. Discussions around these topics are ongoing on the Library mailing list.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 18:28, 2 February 2008

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Laptop News 2008-02-02

1. Active antennae: Another 90 prototype active antennae should be available in a couple of weeks, followed shortly by a large shipment of pre-build antennae scheduled to arrive in three or four weeks. The initial run will be used mostly for field testing, with the majority of the units going to Uruguay. They will be labeled as “engineering samples—not for sale.” We now have an update procedure for the prototype antennae that allows them to stay connected to a server. (These had been built with firmware that placed them in stand-alone mesh-repeater mode too quickly, thus requiring them to be connected only after a server is up and running.) See Active Antenna Reprogramming.

2. Firmware: Mitch Bradley fixed a problem with OFW reading JFFS2 images (Ticket #6291) encountered when using the multicast update method. (This was one of the bugs uncovered by David Woodhouse in Mongolia last week.)

3. School server: Power continues to concern us. John Watlington realized that the off-the-shelf server prototype he was looking at for rural environments actually came with a 19VDC power supply, not a 12VDC one. While 12V supplies are available, they don't work well with unregulated 12V input. With such a 12V supply, the server prototype required around 16W while idling, and up to 26W when running three meshes and doing heavy disk accesses. The current power consumption requires four hours of pumping on a Weza to keep the server operating for an eight hour day! We will also have to greatly improve the power consumption when the machine is idle to have any hope of the servers being left running when the schools aren't in session.

4. Embedded controller: Q2D10 had some battery charging regressions, so Richard Smith backed out the change that speed up the battery-processing state machine; that fixed the regressions. The EC command saga continues: a machine was brought in that had total EC command failure, yet after Richard started examining it, it magically cleared up. After a long spell of trying to reproduce the problem, Richard made a significant discovery: it appears that if the input-buffer-full (IBF) flag is set and the power to the processor is cut, then the EC can go into a state where it thinks that a constant stream of data is being received. This results in the IBF flag getting reset just a soon as you clear it. Richard is still researching/understanding the issue, but this may explain why the previous interrupt-driven protocol was having so much trouble.

5. Automated charging testbed: Richard has set up an automated charging testbed: four XO laptops are now in a suspend/resume testbed; these laptops are connected to a switch such that every three hours, a supervisor machine turns off the external power to each of them. Each laptop is running a small script that watches for when the battery capacity gets low. When low battery is detected the XO laptop turns its power back on.

6. Power profiling: Now that we have automatic power management in the Update.1 builds we no longer have a simple power profile for measuring battery life. To get an accurate indication of what the “real world” battery life will be when power management is doing automatic suspend/resume we need to know what the power profile looks like while using the machine. We are gathering data from different use cases by running the olpc-logbat script while using the XO laptop: olpc-logbat samples the battery discharge information every 10 seconds. We can use much more data—please run the script yourself and send us the CSV files that it generates.

7. Testing: Much thanks to Chih-Yu Chao, whose last full time day helping with QA and testing was Friday. This week she was focused on providing test cases, structure and encouragement to the community in our push for Update.1 testing. To help out, please review and execute test cases listed in the wiki (Update.1), or choose some test plans () and then post the results (Update.1#Test_Results). We can really use lots of help!

Yani Galanis has been testing avahi, telepathy, and general mesh capabilities with the latest Update1. He has helped open up some discussions of what we have today, what we would like in the future, and how we might get there. There is still some design work, coding, testing, and discussion needed in this area as some of our real deployments are pushing at our limitations.

8. Support: This week Nicholas Negroponte sent out a letter to all donors who have not yet received their laptops apologizing for the problems and explaining some of the on-going issues. The remaining laptops should be shipped by the end of March. Many people can now track their order directly at the laptopgiving.org webpage, which has started to reduce the number of emails to the support team.

There was a good discussion on Friday with Mel Chua, Nicki Lee, SJ Klein, Adam Holt, Walter Bender, Kim Quirk on the topic of grass-roots repair centers—more on that theme next weekend.

Adam organized another Sunday meeting among ~20 support volunteers, with guest speaker Manusheel Gupta talking about entrepreneurship among children with XO laptops. The ~60 support volunteers continued to fend off shipping/billing questions this week by the 100s. The number of questions almost doubled in January; the percentage of questions pertaining to donor services increased four fold: almost a 700% increase from December!!

But there is lots of good news: even with the continuing onslaught regarding donor services, we've lowered our unresolved tickets queue from 500+ to about 350—and we have received many profuse thank-you letters from donors who had been fed up to the gills at being abandoned until now. Even with the increase in volume of laptops deployed, there was no corresponding increase in questions about connectivity, Flash support, or help getting started. It is safe to say that once people get their XO laptops, they are managing quite well.

Our thanks to dwa (David Aquilina) and alc (Alan Claver) and countless other volunteers working so hard to be supportive towards all.

9. Roadshow: Dave Woodhouse, Bernie Innocenti, and Jim Gettys attended Linux Conf Au (LCA), which is considered by many to be the best Linux conference in the world at this time. The LCA organizers and OLPC combined to distribute a 100 machines to developers at the conference. (The lack of G1G1 in Australia is, of course, frustrating to people here.)

10. Presence Service: Guillaume Desmottes ran more tests on Salut using “hyperactiviy.” He fix various memory leaks and other issues and helped Marco Gritti to use hyperactivity to debug a Sugar UI bug. He also reviewed Sjoerd Simons's Gibber DNS resolver branch; released telepathy-salut 0.2.2, which fixes some OLPC related issues (Ticket #6271); and discovered and tracked more Salut crashers (Tickets #6303, #6309, #6310). Morgan Collett used his new Fedora superpowers to build RPMs for Presence Service and Salut via koji. He has been working on Presence documentation and tested builds and presence service/telepathy related fixes. Sjoerd fixed several bugs in telepathy-salut that were discovered thanks to the hyperactivity stress testing tool.

11. Sugar: Simon Schampijer worked with Marco Gritti and Sayamindu Dasgupta debugged and found the cause of the “Browser being slow after an update from ship.2 (653) to update.1(690)” issue (Ticket #6046). It turned out that timestamps of fonts were set in the future. xulrunner does check if fontconfig is up to date and if it is unsuccessful the fontconfig is reinitialized and the whole thing repeats itself again. The resulting loop is causing the slowdown. Sayamindu has provided a new fontconfig rpm which checks if mtimes are in the future and print a warning but does return true so Browse will not be slowed down. In addition Michael Stone has released a new rainbow-0.7.9 which symlinks '~/.fontconfig to ~/instance'. Simon also provided a patch that releases exported dbus objects (Ticket #6127), which is important for activities that run in a single process, such as Browse.

12. Etoys: The Etoys team is working toward delivering a package for Update.1. Scott Wallace, Bert Freudenberg, and Yoshiki Ohshima fixed various lingering bugs in the system. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness are revising the Quick Guide system and contents. From the effort, the candidate version for Update.1, Etoys-77.xo, was created. Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider keep working on the translation issue. Takashi discovered that Pootle cannot merge large sets of translations fast enough. He is looking into the issue. The interactive geometry system by Hilaire Fernandez is improved. Now, it is packaged as a .xo bundle (DrGeo). It contains the translation framework by Korakurider and others for activities written in Etoys.

13. Spreadsheets: Dan Bricklin and Luke Cross are working on a port of the Sweet SocialCalc Project to the XO laptop. SocialCalc is a highly functional spreadsheet implemented in JavaScript. (To date, 39 functions have been developed: ABS, ACOS, ASIN, ATAN, ATAN2, AVERAGE, COS, COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTBLANK, DEGREES, EVEN, EXP, FACT, FALSE, IF, INT, LN, LOG10, MAX, MIN, MOD, NA, NOW, ODD, PI, POWER, PRODUCT, RADIANS, SIN, SUM, STDEV, STDEVP, TAN, TODAY, TRUE, TRUNC, VAR, and VARP.) Manusheel Gupta is helping them with the Sugar port. The first pass will be to leverage a general application that supports activities written in JavaScript, with Python-based Sugar binding.

Another approach to developing a spreadsheet activity is to begin from the GNumeric code base. Manu is working with Jody Goldberg and Eben Eliason to port a simple version of GNumeric to the Sugar environment.

14. Sensors and learning: Arjun Sarwal incorporated Spanish-language support into Turtle Art with Sensors and made a slightly modified icon of the original Turtle Art icon. The activity is now in Joyride Builds and is identifiable by a slightly modified icon of the Turtle. Arjun spent time discussing with Edward Baafi of the FabLab and Aaron Miller of MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten regarding how sensors, apart from acting like an interface to the physical world, could impact the XO laptop deployment communities. Aaron is working on integrating sensors into “Scratch” (which is now available for download from Activities); Edward Baafi is interested in exploring how general-purpose boards, which include sensors as well as I/O, can be used in conjunction with the XO laptop. Arjun continues to explore the wonderful possibilities of $2 sensor experiments through the XO laptop’s analog-input port. Documentation of the session with youth at FabLab Boston is in the wiki (See Measure/Turtle).

15. OLPC Health: The OLPC Health initiative has gained good momentum. There are active discussions on the Library mailing lists and the wiki pages have also started to take shape (See Health). A vision document (Health/vision) is also in the works. The list of group of advisers to the OLPC-Health initiative includes Josh Hehner, Jim Hopper, Sv Subramanian and Ichiro Kawachi. More detailed introductions of the advisers will follow soon on the Library mailing list. There is a conference call on the 10th of Feb at 1pm EST. People are invited to propose agenda items by posting on the Health wiki pages.

16. Ethernet: Michail Bletsas hosted Jonathan Hsu, founder and CEO of Zoltantech at OLPC this week. He makes a very small, elegant and low cost (< $10) USB-Ethernet adapter that works well with the XO; it could be very useful to developers and advanced users.

17. Localization: Arjun, Manu, Bernie, and Walter worked through integration of patches for Afghan (including Dari, Pashto and Uzbek variants), Mongolian, Ethiopian, Nepali, and Italian keyboard layouts. All of them (except Italian and Nepali) are expected to be integrated into Update. Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Italian, Marathi and Sinhala. Continuing on his recent efforts with QA and testing with respect to local-language support, Sayamindu has added notes in the wiki on how to utilize the translation testing features in our web-based translation management system, Pootle (Localization/Testing#Testing_the_PO_files). He also discovered a few cases where Pootle can become very slow, and discussed these with the upstream developers. They have suggested a few solutions; he is trying to implement them in our deployment. The shifting of Pootle to the new server had caused some issues to crop up with the Git integration; Sayamindu managed to track them down and fix them.

Localization of OLPC for Afghanistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports that they have started localization of Etoys (a major project, as it contains 23,000+ strings). They have done some work in Urdu localization of Etoys and almost 1000 strings are translated into the Dari language. The next step is localization of Etoys ino Pashto.

OLPC User Manual: Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj” continue their efforts; translation of the user manual into the Dari language is complete and is now under review; the review of the translated version in Pashto is 90% complete.

Localization Tests: Habib also reports that they have successfully tested the Urdu localization .po files that Pootle generated on one of their test machines. There are some small issues with some of the character bindings; in addition, they are testing it with Dari and Pashto languages. The target is to have three XOs completely localized inUrdu, Dari, and Pashto by next week.

18. In the community: On invitation by the Computer Society of Pakistan (CSP), Habib made a short presentation on OLPC to the participants and distributed a CD containing presentations on OLPC. The members of CSP are the leaders of Pakistani IT industry.

Mike Lee reports that the monthly grassroots OLPC Learning Club in Washington, D.C. had a record 48 attendees (including several children and teens) this past Thursday night at Greater DC Cares (See http://www.olpclearningclub.org). Their host, Curtis Cannon, talked about how DC Cares will use the seven laptops they acquired through a holiday fundraising effort called Technoliday organized by Peter Corbett to support their program of pro bono technology consulting for social change. Justin Thorp demoed the Library of Congress' World Digital Library, to which he contributed development effort. Mike demonstrated accessories for the XO including auto adapters, solar panels, the Weza foot treadle charger, clip on sports viewfinders for the camera and the new ZoWii miniature USB Ethernet adapter in OLPC green. Two iLite USB keyboard lights and an auto power adapter were raffled off. Attendees stayed for another hour to mesh. The first Mass XO Meet-up was also held this week (in Cambridge).

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

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

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2008-02-02

1. Active antennae: Another 90 prototype active antennae should be available in a couple of weeks, followed shortly by a large shipment of pre-build antennae scheduled to arrive in three or four weeks. The initial run will be used mostly for field testing, with the majority of the units going to Uruguay. They will be labeled as “engineering samples—not for sale.” We now have an update procedure for the prototype antennae that allows them to stay connected to a server. (These had been built with firmware that placed them in stand-alone mesh-repeater mode too quickly, thus requiring them to be connected only after a server is up and running.) See Active Antenna Reprogramming.

2. Firmware: Mitch Bradley fixed a problem with OFW reading JFFS2 images (Ticket #6291) encountered when using the multicast update method. (This was one of the bugs uncovered by David Woodhouse in Mongolia last week.)

3. School server: Power continues to concern us. John Watlington realized that the off-the-shelf server prototype he was looking at for rural environments actually came with a 19VDC power supply, not a 12VDC one. While 12V supplies are available, they don't work well with unregulated 12V input. With such a 12V supply, the server prototype required around 16W while idling, and up to 26W when running three meshes and doing heavy disk accesses. The current power consumption requires four hours of pumping on a Weza to keep the server operating for an eight hour day! We will also have to greatly improve the power consumption when the machine is idle to have any hope of the servers being left running when the schools aren't in session.

4. Embedded controller: Q2D10 had some battery charging regressions, so Richard Smith backed out the change that speed up the battery-processing state machine; that fixed the regressions. The EC command saga continues: a machine was brought in that had total EC command failure, yet after Richard started examining it, it magically cleared up. After a long spell of trying to reproduce the problem, Richard made a significant discovery: it appears that if the input-buffer-full (IBF) flag is set and the power to the processor is cut, then the EC can go into a state where it thinks that a constant stream of data is being received. This results in the IBF flag getting reset just a soon as you clear it. Richard is still researching/understanding the issue, but this may explain why the previous interrupt-driven protocol was having so much trouble.

5. Automated charging testbed: Richard has set up an automated charging testbed: four XO laptops are now in a suspend/resume testbed; these laptops are connected to a switch such that every three hours, a supervisor machine turns off the external power to each of them. Each laptop is running a small script that watches for when the battery capacity gets low. When low battery is detected the XO laptop turns its power back on.

6. Power profiling: Now that we have automatic power management in the Update.1 builds we no longer have a simple power profile for measuring battery life. To get an accurate indication of what the “real world” battery life will be when power management is doing automatic suspend/resume we need to know what the power profile looks like while using the machine. We are gathering data from different use cases by running the olpc-logbat script while using the XO laptop: olpc-logbat samples the battery discharge information every 10 seconds. We can use much more data—please run the script yourself and send us the CSV files that it generates.

7. Testing: Much thanks to Chih-Yu Chao, whose last full time day helping with QA and testing was Friday. This week she was focused on providing test cases, structure and encouragement to the community in our push for Update.1 testing. To help out, please review and execute test cases listed in the wiki (Update.1), or choose some test plans () and then post the results (Update.1#Test_Results). We can really use lots of help!

Yani Galanis has been testing avahi, telepathy, and general mesh capabilities with the latest Update1. He has helped open up some discussions of what we have today, what we would like in the future, and how we might get there. There is still some design work, coding, testing, and discussion needed in this area as some of our real deployments are pushing at our limitations.

8. Support: This week Nicholas Negroponte sent out a letter to all donors who have not yet received their laptops apologizing for the problems and explaining some of the on-going issues. The remaining laptops should be shipped by the end of March. Many people can now track their order directly at the laptopgiving.org webpage, which has started to reduce the number of emails to the support team.

There was a good discussion on Friday with Mel Chua, Nicki Lee, SJ Klein, Adam Holt, Walter Bender, Kim Quirk on the topic of grass-roots repair centers—more on that theme next weekend.

Adam organized another Sunday meeting among ~20 support volunteers, with guest speaker Manusheel Gupta talking about entrepreneurship among children with XO laptops. The ~60 support volunteers continued to fend off shipping/billing questions this week by the 100s. The number of questions almost doubled in January; the percentage of questions pertaining to donor services increased four fold: almost a 700% increase from December!!

But there is lots of good news: even with the continuing onslaught regarding donor services, we've lowered our unresolved tickets queue from 500+ to about 350—and we have received many profuse thank-you letters from donors who had been fed up to the gills at being abandoned until now. Even with the increase in volume of laptops deployed, there was no corresponding increase in questions about connectivity, Flash support, or help getting started. It is safe to say that once people get their XO laptops, they are managing quite well.

Our thanks to dwa (David Aquilina) and alc (Alan Claver) and countless other volunteers working so hard to be supportive towards all.

9. Roadshow: Dave Woodhouse, Bernie Innocenti, and Jim Gettys attended Linux Conf Au (LCA), which is considered by many to be the best Linux conference in the world at this time. The LCA organizers and OLPC combined to distribute a 100 machines to developers at the conference. (The lack of G1G1 in Australia is, of course, frustrating to people here.)

10. Presence Service: Guillaume Desmottes ran more tests on Salut using “hyperactiviy.” He fix various memory leaks and other issues and helped Marco Gritti to use hyperactivity to debug a Sugar UI bug. He also reviewed Sjoerd Simons's Gibber DNS resolver branch; released telepathy-salut 0.2.2, which fixes some OLPC related issues (Ticket #6271); and discovered and tracked more Salut crashers (Tickets #6303, #6309, #6310). Morgan Collett used his new Fedora superpowers to build RPMs for Presence Service and Salut via koji. He has been working on Presence documentation and tested builds and presence service/telepathy related fixes. Sjoerd fixed several bugs in telepathy-salut that were discovered thanks to the hyperactivity stress testing tool.

11. Sugar: Simon Schampijer worked with Marco Gritti and Sayamindu Dasgupta debugged and found the cause of the “Browser being slow after an update from ship.2 (653) to update.1(690)” issue (Ticket #6046). It turned out that timestamps of fonts were set in the future. xulrunner does check if fontconfig is up to date and if it is unsuccessful the fontconfig is reinitialized and the whole thing repeats itself again. The resulting loop is causing the slowdown. Sayamindu has provided a new fontconfig rpm which checks if mtimes are in the future and print a warning but does return true so Browse will not be slowed down. In addition Michael Stone has released a new rainbow-0.7.9 which symlinks '~/.fontconfig to ~/instance'. Simon also provided a patch that releases exported dbus objects (Ticket #6127), which is important for activities that run in a single process, such as Browse.

12. Etoys: The Etoys team is working toward delivering a package for Update.1. Scott Wallace, Bert Freudenberg, and Yoshiki Ohshima fixed various lingering bugs in the system. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness are revising the Quick Guide system and contents. From the effort, the candidate version for Update.1, Etoys-77.xo, was created. Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider keep working on the translation issue. Takashi discovered that Pootle cannot merge large sets of translations fast enough. He is looking into the issue. The interactive geometry system by Hilaire Fernandez is improved. Now, it is packaged as a .xo bundle (DrGeo). It contains the translation framework by Korakurider and others for activities written in Etoys.

13. Spreadsheets: Dan Bricklin and Luke Cross are working on a port of the Sweet SocialCalc Project to the XO laptop. SocialCalc is a highly functional spreadsheet implemented in JavaScript. (To date, 39 functions have been developed: ABS, ACOS, ASIN, ATAN, ATAN2, AVERAGE, COS, COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTBLANK, DEGREES, EVEN, EXP, FACT, FALSE, IF, INT, LN, LOG10, MAX, MIN, MOD, NA, NOW, ODD, PI, POWER, PRODUCT, RADIANS, SIN, SUM, STDEV, STDEVP, TAN, TODAY, TRUE, TRUNC, VAR, and VARP.) Manusheel Gupta is helping them with the Sugar port. The first pass will be to leverage a general application that supports activities written in JavaScript, with Python-based Sugar binding.

Another approach to developing a spreadsheet activity is to begin from the GNumeric code base. Manu is working with Jody Goldberg and Eben Eliason to port a simple version of GNumeric to the Sugar environment.

14. Sensors and learning: Arjun Sarwal incorporated Spanish-language support into Turtle Art with Sensors and made a slightly modified icon of the original Turtle Art icon. The activity is now in Joyride Builds and is identifiable by a slightly modified icon of the Turtle. Arjun spent time discussing with Edward Baafi of the FabLab and Aaron Miller of MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten regarding how sensors, apart from acting like an interface to the physical world, could impact the XO laptop deployment communities. Aaron is working on integrating sensors into “Scratch” (which is now available for download from Activities); Edward Baafi is interested in exploring how general-purpose boards, which include sensors as well as I/O, can be used in conjunction with the XO laptop. Arjun continues to explore the wonderful possibilities of $2 sensor experiments through the XO laptop’s analog-input port. Documentation of the session with youth at FabLab Boston is in the wiki (See Measure/Turtle).

15. OLPC Health: The OLPC Health initiative has gained good momentum. There are active discussions on the Library mailing lists and the wiki pages have also started to take shape (See Health). A vision document (Health/vision) is also in the works. The list of group of advisers to the OLPC-Health initiative includes Josh Hehner, Jim Hopper, Sv Subramanian and Ichiro Kawachi. More detailed introductions of the advisers will follow soon on the Library mailing list. There is a conference call on the 10th of Feb at 1pm EST. People are invited to propose agenda items by posting on the Health wiki pages.

16. Ethernet: Michail Bletsas hosted Jonathan Hsu, founder and CEO of Zoltantech at OLPC this week. He makes a very small, elegant and low cost (< $10) USB-Ethernet adapter that works well with the XO; it could be very useful to developers and advanced users.

17. Localization: Arjun, Manu, Bernie, and Walter worked through integration of patches for Afghan (including Dari, Pashto and Uzbek variants), Mongolian, Ethiopian, Nepali, and Italian keyboard layouts. All of them (except Italian and Nepali) are expected to be integrated into Update. Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Italian, Marathi and Sinhala. Continuing on his recent efforts with QA and testing with respect to local-language support, Sayamindu has added notes in the wiki on how to utilize the translation testing features in our web-based translation management system, Pootle (Localization/Testing#Testing_the_PO_files). He also discovered a few cases where Pootle can become very slow, and discussed these with the upstream developers. They have suggested a few solutions; he is trying to implement them in our deployment. The shifting of Pootle to the new server had caused some issues to crop up with the Git integration; Sayamindu managed to track them down and fix them.

Localization of OLPC for Afghanistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports that they have started localization of Etoys (a major project, as it contains 23,000+ strings). They have done some work in Urdu localization of Etoys and almost 1000 strings are translated into the Dari language. The next step is localization of Etoys ino Pashto.

OLPC User Manual: Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj” continue their efforts; translation of the user manual into the Dari language is complete and is now under review; the review of the translated version in Pashto is 90% complete.

Localization Tests: Habib also reports that they have successfully tested the Urdu localization .po files that Pootle generated on one of their test machines. There are some small issues with some of the character bindings; in addition, they are testing it with Dari and Pashto languages. The target is to have three XOs completely localized inUrdu, Dari, and Pashto by next week.

18. In the community: On invitation by the Computer Society of Pakistan (CSP), Habib made a short presentation on OLPC to the participants and distributed a CD containing presentations on OLPC. The members of CSP are the leaders of Pakistani IT industry.

Mike Lee reports that the monthly grassroots OLPC Learning Club in Washington, D.C. had a record 48 attendees (including several children and teens) this past Thursday night at Greater DC Cares (See http://www.olpclearningclub.org). Their host, Curtis Cannon, talked about how DC Cares will use the seven laptops they acquired through a holiday fundraising effort called Technoliday organized by Peter Corbett to support their program of pro bono technology consulting for social change. Justin Thorp demoed the Library of Congress' World Digital Library, to which he contributed development effort. Mike demonstrated accessories for the XO including auto adapters, solar panels, the Weza foot treadle charger, clip on sports viewfinders for the camera and the new ZoWii miniature USB Ethernet adapter in OLPC green. Two iLite USB keyboard lights and an auto power adapter were raffled off. Attendees stayed for another hour to mesh. The first Mass XO Meet-up was also held this week (in Cambridge).

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

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

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site. Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

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