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=Laptop News 2008-03-01=
=Laptop News 2008-03-08=


1. John Watlington, Walter Bender, and Edgar Ceballos (Brightstar) spent this past week in Huampani (Lima) participating in Peru's first train-the-trainers workshop. (143 of the participants will be staffing regional support centrals scatter throughout every corner of the country.)
1. Learning learning: Darah Tappitake and David Cavallo are preparing for March Learning Workshop with confirmed participations from Thailand, Mali, and the Committee for Democracy in Information Technology.


Using a custom image prepared by Chris Ball and Michael Stone, the teachers made great progress throughout the course of the week. They are all completely comfortable with the UI, the Journal, and the pedagogy. They readily navigated the various issues associated with an overloaded network and as was made clear in a Q&A session towards the end of the week, they really appreciate that everything on the laptop is open (and free as in speech); and they appreciate the mandate to take both ownership and the responsibility that comes with it.
2. Lima: The Peru deployment continues to progress. 40K laptops arrived in Lima this week and are being sorted by distribution district and school in anticipation of delivery and activation. Ivan Krstić and Scott Ananain have been working with Hernán Pachas Magallanes on a mechanism to map CSV files into activation leases that will be useful across all of our deployments.


They got deep into programming—for most, their first such experience—developing projects with Turtle Art, Scratch, and Etoys. (No Pippy hackers yet, but there was certainly interest expressed.) The workshop culminated with a Media-Lab-style open house, where each teacher demonstrated something they did with the laptop during a week of Constructionist learning.
The first tranch of training in Peru begins on Monday. The 143 representatives from the regional distribution centers (UGELs) and 20 ministry of education personnel will attend a 5-day workshop on all aspects of the XO laptop, school server, and the learning models. John Watlington and Walter Bender are heading to Lima to help with final preparations over the weekend. In the following weeks, teachers and university students will also be attending workshops throughout the country.


Meanwhile, the Peru support volunteers met again Wednesday night and decided among other things that they will contact local universities to organize an event of their own around developing networks of educators and creators working with OLPC schools.
3. Assessment: David Cavallo, Edith Ackermann of the learning team, and Tony Earls and Maya Carlson of the Harvard School of Public Health are developing a new framework for assessment that goes beyond typical school approaches to enable accurate sensing of the overall mission of OLPC. In particular, the framework will enable a more scientific evaluation of the whole child and the community. The framework will also permit a more contextualized view as conditions and goals will vary from site to site (e.g. from Haiti to Uruguay to rural Peru to Afghanistan). Haiti will serve as the first instance for applying the framework.


2. Antonio Battro was a keynote speaker at the Las Vegas International Conference of SITE, the Society of Information Technology and Teacher Education. Some 1,300 teachers and educators from many countries attended the Conference. Antonio's talk "OLPC: the cognitive challenges" had one of the largest audiences and was followed by an engaging discussion. The interest and the will to participate at OLPC was significant among the participants.
4. Ceibal: Plans are moving forward for an OLPC/Ceibal children's festival in Uruguay in March. The festival will not only provide an environment for children to explore construction and collaboration on the laptop, but also a means for team development in Uruguay. We expect many guests from other countries to visit for both the festival and to visit the initial school in Vila Cardal.


3. EC: The saga of the Embedded Controller continues. The code that handles shuttling bytes from the touchpad and keyboard up to the host has problems if the host does not read the data fast enough. This might be at the root of some of our touchpad problems. Fixing this will require a significant rewrite. Richard Smith feels he now understand
5. Sugar: The Sugar team has posted some new designs for the Home view, Journal, and Frame (See [[Design]]). The gist of the proposed changes is to swap the roles of the Frame and Home view in regard to activities: they'll be launched from the Home view and active activities will be carried from view to view on the Frame. The intention is to make it easier to issue invitation and notifications and manage the growing number of activities in our builds (Peru will have more than 30 activities loaded on the laptop by default).
things enough to do the rework, but it will not be available for Update.1.


4. Multi-battery charger: Bitwork's has assembled a new PCB in and it is functioning as expected. Richard and Lilian Walter added some hardware debugging routines to the firmware to assist Bitworks in their testing. We are still awaiting the larger parts back from the reworked tooling.
6. Wikireaders: A dozen different development projects related to wikireaders are now signed up to our new wikireader@lists mailing list, to work out how to coordinate Google Gears, pyxpcom, and existing python and php codebases to generate and browse readers. An old "static content" project on Wikipedia is being revived around the same themes.


5. Q2D14 firmware release: Richard pulled a few new fixes from Mitch Bradly into the current release tree of the system firmware and is preparing to release a Q2D14. The primary reason is to fix an issue with forced upgrades. Once an upgrade has been downloaded, it will be installed on the next reboot. But if the firmware is being upgraded, that reboot will hang unless an external source of power is available (Ticket #6245). The suggestion is to either defer the firmware upgrade until power is available. This will hopefully help in places such as Peru, where many laptops will be off the power grid, when they mass upgrade machines.
7. Phil Carrizzi, a professor at the Kendall College of Art in Grand Rapids has created an XO viewfinder on his FDM machine (See [http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/2225021496/in/set-72157603547309133/]).


6. Battery failures: Richard finished his analysis on the six batteries that were provided to him from laptops returned with charging problems. He's satisfied that its not a charging problem with the laptop circuitry and will be returning the batteries back the the manufacturer for deeper failure analysis.
8. Help wanted: There have been several requests for "typing tutor" software on the XO coming from the various pilots. If anyone is interested in breathing some life into the Typing Tutor Activity, please contact the devel list.
9. Support: Adam Holt reports that discussions are under way regarding setting up repair centers with Moraine Valley Community College (we gave them 12 broken XO laptops towards prototyping a repair center) and IMSA.edu.


7. School server: John Watlington reports that after last weeks testing, the current advice to trials and early deployments about wireless interconnection in the schools is the following:
Darah Tappitake discussed the long-term challenges of volunteerism at last Sunday's support volunteers meeting.


* Up to 10 (hopefully 20) laptops will work fine without any infrastructure; Groups of children away from school can share and collaborate;
Adam worked with Sandy Culver and Brightstar on shipping out outstanding RMA machines and Fedex "undeliverables"; and he worked with Alan Claver who's resolving dozens of escalated support tickets daily.
* Up to 40 laptops are supported either by using a single access point, or a school server with one Active Antenna;
* Between 40 and 80 laptops are best served by a school server with two active antennas;
* Between 80 and 120 laptops can be served by a school server with three active antennas;
* Over 120 students, the schools need to move to more traditional access points to support the network loading.


We will be setting up a longer term (and larger) mesh testbed in a location near Boston where the RF environment is less variable than 1CC, to continue testing improvements to the software. We hope to improve the above numbers! (Chris Ball and Dafydd Harries tested laptops in mesh mode against a school server running a Jabber server—with 32 laptops connected to the school server, the laptops were all able to share a Chat session and a PDF file between themselves without any failures.)
10. Meshing: This week we held a tech meeting in Cambridge to work on issues of scaling our collaboration technology. In attendance were OLPC staff, Dave Woodhouse and Marco Presenti-Gritti of Red Hat, Dafydd Harries and Guillaume Desmottes of Collabora, and Javier Cardona of Cozybit. Several new bugs were identified and characterized; some short-term fixes were adopted; testing of the fixes was started. The longer-term strategy for achieving more scaling was discussed extensively. The actual characterization of the result awaits testing in a quieter network environment—there are over 100 access points that can be detected from the OLPC office, one ofthe most severe network environments anyone has ssen.


8. Peru connectivity: As mentioned above, John accompanied Walter to Peru in order to set up servers and network access for participants in their regionals leader training sessions. The sessions were held at Huampani, a small resort area about 25 km from Lima up the Rimac river valley. Four VSAT connections were set up to provide internet connectivity to the sessions. While John arrived expecting problems with the presence service and wireless network congestion, the real problems had were due to strange DNS interactions with the VSAT modem's transparent DNS proxy and the Peruvian Ministry of Education DNS service. A fix is being tested.
11. Custom builds: Scott Anaian and Michael Stone worked with Daniel Grajales Santana of Telmex and Hernán of the Ministry of Education in Peru on developing a customization key (See [[Customization_key]]) to create builds for Mexico and Peru.


9. EJabberd: We continue to have problems with obtaining a working ejabberd build with the latest fixes. Collabora is working on this, and as soon as it is available a new build will be announced on the server-devel mailing list.
12. FOSDEM: Simon Schampijer, Tomeu Vizoso, Benjamin Berg, and Bernardo Innocenti attended FOSDEM, a European meeting for Free and Open Source Software Developers, in Brussels over the weekend (See [http://www.codewiz.org/wiki/FosdemOlpcGroupTagged.jpg]). They improvised a booth at the GNOME stand to answer questions and offer their machines for people to try out. Besides questions about hardware specifications and the current status of the project the visitors were mostly interested in where to buy the laptop. Thanks to the GNOME people for sharing their facilities and helping answering questions.


Meanwhile, Morgan Collett has added improved documentation for setting up ejabberd from source for community jabber servers to the wiki ([[Installing ejabberd]]); so far one community server (for Chicago) has been successfully set up using these instructions, with more in progress ([[Community Jabber Servers]]).
FOSDEM was as well place for OLPC-Europe's (See [[OLPC_Europe]]) kickoff meeting where the idea behind this initiative was outlined. The different grassroots projects and European OLPC communities (Greece, Netherlands, Bulgaria and Germany) gave an overview about their work and goals and described the efforts already made.


10. Active Antennas are now available for developers, and will be shipped out soon to people who have already requested them. (See the OLPC wiki for further details.)
13. Sugar: Tomeu, Benjamin and Simon stayed in Brussels for a few days where they worked together on the XO laptop. Tomeu started work on the infrastructure needed for adding keyboard bindings (accelerators) to activities; he discussed with Simon about the best way to implement the UI for the control panel.


11. Activities: Chris Ball made Pippy collaborative, such that joining a shared Pippy activity now gets you a copy of the source-code buffer of the host at the time you joined.
14. Power management: Chris Ball released a version of OHM that asks NetworkManager to rescan and reconnect when coming out of sleep—amongst other things, this should make sure that we don't continue to use the link-local mesh after the laptops arrive at school in the morning.


One of the newest activities developed for the XO laptop is called StarChart. It was created by hobbyist, David Wallace. Dave received his XO via the Give One Get One program at the end of 2007 (See [[StarChart]]).
Andres Salomon worked more work on framebuffer code, testing, and debugging a lid close bug with Jordan Crouse of AMD and Richard Smith.


Qirat Activity Version 1.0 is complete and runs as sugar Activity. Waqas Toor is working on making the Surahs (chapters) more presentable when drawn on the Sugar UI canvas.
15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have a new Pootle project for Khmer—volunteers are welcome. Sayamindu is also testing out an experimental system to generate language packs for the languages that are in Pootle. (Current packs are in http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/langpacks/). Users simply need to run them in an XO (emulated or real) laptop and the latest translations will automagically get installed. The primary focus now is to enable translators to test out their translations more easily.


12. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes implemented and tested flow control in Salut stream tubes (Ticket #6647). As discussed with Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos last week, Salut should be able to use different backends to announce and discover services. Then we could switch from Avahi to Cerebro. That's a lot easier than writing a new Cerebro connection manager as we can reuse the muc and tubes codes (and all the Telepathy interfaces). So Guillame started to design an abstraction layer that will be implemented by Salut and Cerebro (Ticket #6658).
There has been much discussion about how to localize Turtle Art, which is currently in English and Spanish only. The issue is that Turtle Art is rendered using GIF files. Alexander Todorov is exploring using ImageMagic to generate the GIFs from Pootle. Something similar could be done using the Scheme extensions for The Gimp. Tomeu has suggested that we design icons for the program blocks and use rollovers for the text. (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3585 for details.)


Guillaime also did a few tests and reconsidered Ticket #6585 (PS must reconnect server_plugin when NM changes IP addresses). We agreed with Morgan and Sjoerd this was not a problem and closed the ticket.
We've finalized the keyboard design for Kreyòl thanks to the efforts of Guy Serge Pompi, Michel DeGraff, Arjun Sarwal, Dale Joachim, and David Cavallo. Bernie helped to finalize Italian as well. Both keyboard layouts have been sent to Quanta for mass production.


Morgan worked on Ticket #6572 (Replace key with hash to reduce Avahi TXT size) as it currently breaks "friending". The #6572 issue is not as straightforward as it seemed. We derive participants' JIDs from their keys, and friend them using the key as the identifier. So the current patch is for testing the impact on network congestion of a shorter value there but the solution would be more intrusive. (If the current approach doesn't actually improve network performance, it is not worth rearchitecting how PS identifies buddies—which is done using their keys—so testing would be helpful.)
Thanks to the efforts of e have Mike Dawson, Dr. Habib Khan, Waqas Toor, Salman Minhas, Ebtihaj Obaidi, and Usman Mansour Ansari, we have almost finalized a new layout for Afghanistan that is compatible with both Pashto and Dari. (See http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/b5/Pashto-v2.png for details.)


Dennis Gilmore and Dafydd Harries spent time this week trying to get ejabberd running with updated patches from Process One. They had trouble with compilation problems, patches not applying, etc.; also with reproducing the builds that we are currently running. It turns out that the problems were due to newer builds being done with a newer version of Erlang. Dafydd may finally have a version that works, but it needs testing to be sure.
We have been making similar advances in Khmer. Chea Sok Hour and Noy Shoung have provided invaluable guidance (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/images/c/c2/Khmer-v2.png).


13. Sugar UI: Eben Eliason made some new designs for Journal, Home, and Frame, which he posted to the wiki. New designs for toolbars and bulletin boards are in progress.
16. Jams: Fred Benenson of NY free culture held a jam at [http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/flash/Home NYU ITP], with ~30 attendees. They are planning for a larger jam at the end of the month hosted at UNICEF, and introducing a wider group to the XO laptops. Gian Pablo Villamil demoed [http://www.villamil.org/?p=106 Processing and Arduino] running on the OLPC. (http://wiki.freeculture.org/NYU_OLPC_Jam_Session).


The most recent designs have been posted as "slide shows" on the wiki for review and feedback. The first three available discuss plans for future activity management, including a repurposing of the Home circle, a completely reorganized Frame with clearer intent and support for notifications, and a brand new Journal which introduces action- and object- centric views, improves support for visual browsing, and offers a friendlier interface into ones interactions with the laptops.
Mel Chua and Christopher Fabian are helping organize a story-telling jam March 28-30. Building on the Journalism Jam from last fall and our experience to date with Our Stories, but also telling the stories of people of all ages interested in storytelling and in OLPC. They expect ~150 people (See [[Story_Jam_New_York]]).


We are in the process of generating new designs for toolbars as well as beginning to consider future designs for the bulletin boards (and, more near term, designs for standard file transfer). All of these designs are or will be posted to wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs. We encourage those interested to review the images and descriptions posted, and to provide feedback within the discussion pages or on the mailing lists, as appropriate. Thanks!
17. Collections: Erik Zachte has tools for making compact Tomeraider collections that deal intelligently with images.


Tomeu Visozo has been working implementing on the home view redesign. The main changes have been completed and the code is being reviewed. Next step is to discuss
18. Health: Chris Leonard, a medical researcher, is organizing material related to animals and agriculture. He and his wife are both editors and writers, and he has been working with a few people on an index for an animal health collection (See [[Animal health]]).
the work done so far with the design team and agree on the several details left to work through.


14. Kernel: Andres Salomon did further work in the lxfb/gxfb drivers. He got suspend/resume working properly, prepared more patches, etc.
19. Music: Our music collections are growing : this week the full 9GB of sound samples from the "Boulanger" collection can be found on dev.laptop.org. Andriani Ferti is working with Charlotte Landrum, director of the Gardner Museum podcast series, which will be contributing their concerts in some form for use by our schools.


15. Update.1: Scott Ananian reports on the current "state of update.1" including a discussion of the "core activity" changes at:
20. Pakistan: Habib reports that the first formal contact with the Government of Pakistan was successfully established this week through the delivering of a presentation to a group of 80 mid-level managers, who gathered for the purpose at the Academy of Educational Planning and Management in Islamabad from across Pakistan. Habib made a three-hour detailed presentation on all facets of OLPC with a key focus on the educational aspects, implications for policy makers and budget.He also dedicated ninety minutes for special hands-on training/familiarization on 20 XO laptops that he carries with him for that purpose. The event left a magical impact on all present.
[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/011537.html] and
[http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/011538.html]
21. XOctoPlug: Resulting from extensive school implementation experience Carla Gomez Monroy presented the idea for an 8 in 1 power supply to maximize safety, convenience and battery life. Carla named it the XOctoPlug (See [[Peripherals/XOctoPlug]]). The first prototypes arrived at OLPC this week. The design comes from close collaboration between Carla and Joshua Seal of Belkin. It is anticipated the final design will incorporate magnetic quick release connectors to prevent tripping and be fully sealed to maximize robustness.
(devel archive seems to be broken? split his message in two.)


16. Localization: Scott prepared translations for the activation server (including translations for the developer key request form) (See https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/act_server/).
22. Waveplace: Timothy Falconer and William Stelzer report on St John and Haiti Pilots ([http://waveplace.com/news/newsletter/web.jsp?id=4]).


Sayamindu Dasgupta has started the migration process to a newer version of Pootle and fixed a few bugs in some of the helper scripts that he uses to manage Pootle.
23. The OLPC Learning Club-DC met in the Capitol Hill offices of Nortel Networks last Saturday. Attendees of every generation got technical help with developer's keys, meshed with a school server and shared ideas on software projects. Host Michael Connet staged a teleconference with Nortel staffers in Ottawa. Student videographers captured footage for a future installment of LearnIT. (See http://www.olpclearningclub.org and http://www.nortellearnit.org for details.)


Tomeu has been doing more work on keyboard bindings for the shell and activities in light of localization.
24. Yesterday, 29 February, was Seymour Papert's 20th birthday!!

Waqas Toor reports that the Tahoma font seems most suitable for Urdu on the XO laptop, as Nafees font has some problems when it comes to binding Urdu characters in smaller font size. For Pashto and Dari, we have found Pashto Pasarlai font suitable yet, but it has some problems. Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj” are looking for other font options that contain the complete Pashto and Dari character set on Linux platform.

Mako Hill finished a localization patch for the library, implementing a check for localized start-pages when viewing library collections. The next update of library-core should have at least English and Spanish locales. (While he was in Lima, Walter finished building the Getting Started Guide bundle for Peru. Many thanks to Edgar for the help with the Spanish translation.)

Oz Wilder and Alon Carmeli of Babylon Dictionaries started work two weeks ago on 16 language translations of a basic 2500-word dictionary, to expand our current collection. They are now 99% complete, pending final proofreading, and can be seen on the wiki ([[Dictionary]]). Zdenek Broz is working to include these in our multilingual dictionary bundle.

17. Sugar-control-panel: Simon Schampijer is working on the GUI for the sugar control panel.

18. Support: Adam Holt reports progress on a new "Projects DB" Developers Program with Aaron Kaplan et al. in Vienna. (Jim Gettys has been a huge help laying this out.) Usability and features are improving towards release, hopefully later this month.

Alan Claver helped with countless HW / pre-RMA support tickets. Volunteers are doing so much great work behind the scenes we cannot even keep track of it all. Adam shared Scott's deployment maps (with disclaimer) (See http://dev.laptop.org/~cscott/stats-20080201.html).

Adam organized another Sunday Support meeting (Sunday's at 4PM EST) with Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin from Mongolia, who spoke about their ongoing deployment; several new volunteers participated. Yani Galanis will be our guest speaker this coming Sunday; topic: our wireless/mesh testing's results/outlook!

19. Help wanted:

* A request has come in from Cambodia for help in setting up mysql in Khmer;
* We are looking for someone to "Sugarize" the GCompris icons;
* Girlstart is looking for graphic artists and designers to make their games attractive through professional graphics (Please see the project website http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Project_IT_Girl).

20. CeBIT/OLPC Deutschland: Holger Levsen and Christoph Derndorfer both reported on the OLPC presense at CeBIT, the largest IT show in Europe.

Holger reports that "OLPC Deutschland" had its first "real life" meeting at the meeting (See http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/104668), just after having decided by voting via mailinglist (http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-de) on the final name of the project three days earlier. The group is planning to have a workshop weekend in Berlin this spring, to develope its visions and structures. A longer workshop which children and teachers called summer camp is also in its early planning stages.

Christoph reports that the feedback at CeBIT has simply "blown us away". They had hundreds of people at their booth: the main reaction always along the lines of "I've read about the OLPC project for two years, it's great to finally have the chance to actually look at and use one". The most common questions "where can I get one?", "are they already being produced and used somewhere?" and, of course, "where is the crank?" (See http://olpcaustria.soup.io/).

21: Debian: Holger also reports that sugar 0.79 has been uploaded by Jonas Smedegaard to Debian today, fixing Debian bug #444021. The packaging consists of three source packages: sugar-base, sugar and sugar-artwork.

22. Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports that they had two very educative events this week as part of our awareness campaign: The first one was introducing OLPC to street children in Islamabad’s vicinity. The aim was to observe the reaction of children who have never been to a school. Habib and his team spend half a day with these children and this generated enough curiosity in the community–mostly Afghan refugees. Though out of school, these children were quite smart and quickly learned to operate the camera and play around with music.

The second event was an announced Open Air workshop for graduate students of IIU. Twenty students had registered to participate in this event and more than 50 students showed up and remained throughout. Salman Minhas, Waqas and Sohaib gave demonstrations and assisted students with in understanding the 20 XO laptops that we had readied for the workshop. We expect volunteers from this lot to come forward and help us in the localization and software projects.

23. IDCL: Ben Bederson, Tim Browne, and SJ Klein reviewed what they need to integrate the International Digital Children's Library (IDCL) server infrastructure (Tomcat, mysql, and some custom scripts) into our builds.

24. GSoC: Our Google Summer of Code organization application has been sent in. Now we need more mentors and mre project ideas. Please add ideas to the [[Summer of Code/Ideas]] page in the wiki and contact either Michael Stone or SJ if you are interested in being a mentor. Also, please start spreading the word that we are looking for SoC students this summer—students are welcome to add their own ideas to our list.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 03:58, 9 March 2008

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Laptop News 2008-03-08

1. John Watlington, Walter Bender, and Edgar Ceballos (Brightstar) spent this past week in Huampani (Lima) participating in Peru's first train-the-trainers workshop. (143 of the participants will be staffing regional support centrals scatter throughout every corner of the country.)

Using a custom image prepared by Chris Ball and Michael Stone, the teachers made great progress throughout the course of the week. They are all completely comfortable with the UI, the Journal, and the pedagogy. They readily navigated the various issues associated with an overloaded network and as was made clear in a Q&A session towards the end of the week, they really appreciate that everything on the laptop is open (and free as in speech); and they appreciate the mandate to take both ownership and the responsibility that comes with it.

They got deep into programming—for most, their first such experience—developing projects with Turtle Art, Scratch, and Etoys. (No Pippy hackers yet, but there was certainly interest expressed.) The workshop culminated with a Media-Lab-style open house, where each teacher demonstrated something they did with the laptop during a week of Constructionist learning.

Meanwhile, the Peru support volunteers met again Wednesday night and decided among other things that they will contact local universities to organize an event of their own around developing networks of educators and creators working with OLPC schools.

2. Antonio Battro was a keynote speaker at the Las Vegas International Conference of SITE, the Society of Information Technology and Teacher Education. Some 1,300 teachers and educators from many countries attended the Conference. Antonio's talk "OLPC: the cognitive challenges" had one of the largest audiences and was followed by an engaging discussion. The interest and the will to participate at OLPC was significant among the participants.

3. EC: The saga of the Embedded Controller continues. The code that handles shuttling bytes from the touchpad and keyboard up to the host has problems if the host does not read the data fast enough. This might be at the root of some of our touchpad problems. Fixing this will require a significant rewrite. Richard Smith feels he now understand things enough to do the rework, but it will not be available for Update.1.

4. Multi-battery charger: Bitwork's has assembled a new PCB in and it is functioning as expected. Richard and Lilian Walter added some hardware debugging routines to the firmware to assist Bitworks in their testing. We are still awaiting the larger parts back from the reworked tooling.

5. Q2D14 firmware release: Richard pulled a few new fixes from Mitch Bradly into the current release tree of the system firmware and is preparing to release a Q2D14. The primary reason is to fix an issue with forced upgrades. Once an upgrade has been downloaded, it will be installed on the next reboot. But if the firmware is being upgraded, that reboot will hang unless an external source of power is available (Ticket #6245). The suggestion is to either defer the firmware upgrade until power is available. This will hopefully help in places such as Peru, where many laptops will be off the power grid, when they mass upgrade machines.

6. Battery failures: Richard finished his analysis on the six batteries that were provided to him from laptops returned with charging problems. He's satisfied that its not a charging problem with the laptop circuitry and will be returning the batteries back the the manufacturer for deeper failure analysis.

7. School server: John Watlington reports that after last weeks testing, the current advice to trials and early deployments about wireless interconnection in the schools is the following:

  • Up to 10 (hopefully 20) laptops will work fine without any infrastructure; Groups of children away from school can share and collaborate;
  • Up to 40 laptops are supported either by using a single access point, or a school server with one Active Antenna;
  • Between 40 and 80 laptops are best served by a school server with two active antennas;
  • Between 80 and 120 laptops can be served by a school server with three active antennas;
  • Over 120 students, the schools need to move to more traditional access points to support the network loading.

We will be setting up a longer term (and larger) mesh testbed in a location near Boston where the RF environment is less variable than 1CC, to continue testing improvements to the software. We hope to improve the above numbers! (Chris Ball and Dafydd Harries tested laptops in mesh mode against a school server running a Jabber server—with 32 laptops connected to the school server, the laptops were all able to share a Chat session and a PDF file between themselves without any failures.)

8. Peru connectivity: As mentioned above, John accompanied Walter to Peru in order to set up servers and network access for participants in their regionals leader training sessions. The sessions were held at Huampani, a small resort area about 25 km from Lima up the Rimac river valley. Four VSAT connections were set up to provide internet connectivity to the sessions. While John arrived expecting problems with the presence service and wireless network congestion, the real problems had were due to strange DNS interactions with the VSAT modem's transparent DNS proxy and the Peruvian Ministry of Education DNS service. A fix is being tested.

9. EJabberd: We continue to have problems with obtaining a working ejabberd build with the latest fixes. Collabora is working on this, and as soon as it is available a new build will be announced on the server-devel mailing list.

Meanwhile, Morgan Collett has added improved documentation for setting up ejabberd from source for community jabber servers to the wiki (Installing ejabberd); so far one community server (for Chicago) has been successfully set up using these instructions, with more in progress (Community Jabber Servers).

10. Active Antennas are now available for developers, and will be shipped out soon to people who have already requested them. (See the OLPC wiki for further details.)

11. Activities: Chris Ball made Pippy collaborative, such that joining a shared Pippy activity now gets you a copy of the source-code buffer of the host at the time you joined.

One of the newest activities developed for the XO laptop is called StarChart. It was created by hobbyist, David Wallace. Dave received his XO via the Give One Get One program at the end of 2007 (See StarChart).

Qirat Activity Version 1.0 is complete and runs as sugar Activity. Waqas Toor is working on making the Surahs (chapters) more presentable when drawn on the Sugar UI canvas.

12. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes implemented and tested flow control in Salut stream tubes (Ticket #6647). As discussed with Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos last week, Salut should be able to use different backends to announce and discover services. Then we could switch from Avahi to Cerebro. That's a lot easier than writing a new Cerebro connection manager as we can reuse the muc and tubes codes (and all the Telepathy interfaces). So Guillame started to design an abstraction layer that will be implemented by Salut and Cerebro (Ticket #6658).

Guillaime also did a few tests and reconsidered Ticket #6585 (PS must reconnect server_plugin when NM changes IP addresses). We agreed with Morgan and Sjoerd this was not a problem and closed the ticket.

Morgan worked on Ticket #6572 (Replace key with hash to reduce Avahi TXT size) as it currently breaks "friending". The #6572 issue is not as straightforward as it seemed. We derive participants' JIDs from their keys, and friend them using the key as the identifier. So the current patch is for testing the impact on network congestion of a shorter value there but the solution would be more intrusive. (If the current approach doesn't actually improve network performance, it is not worth rearchitecting how PS identifies buddies—which is done using their keys—so testing would be helpful.)

Dennis Gilmore and Dafydd Harries spent time this week trying to get ejabberd running with updated patches from Process One. They had trouble with compilation problems, patches not applying, etc.; also with reproducing the builds that we are currently running. It turns out that the problems were due to newer builds being done with a newer version of Erlang. Dafydd may finally have a version that works, but it needs testing to be sure.

13. Sugar UI: Eben Eliason made some new designs for Journal, Home, and Frame, which he posted to the wiki. New designs for toolbars and bulletin boards are in progress.

The most recent designs have been posted as "slide shows" on the wiki for review and feedback. The first three available discuss plans for future activity management, including a repurposing of the Home circle, a completely reorganized Frame with clearer intent and support for notifications, and a brand new Journal which introduces action- and object- centric views, improves support for visual browsing, and offers a friendlier interface into ones interactions with the laptops.

We are in the process of generating new designs for toolbars as well as beginning to consider future designs for the bulletin boards (and, more near term, designs for standard file transfer). All of these designs are or will be posted to wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs. We encourage those interested to review the images and descriptions posted, and to provide feedback within the discussion pages or on the mailing lists, as appropriate. Thanks!

Tomeu Visozo has been working implementing on the home view redesign. The main changes have been completed and the code is being reviewed. Next step is to discuss the work done so far with the design team and agree on the several details left to work through.

14. Kernel: Andres Salomon did further work in the lxfb/gxfb drivers. He got suspend/resume working properly, prepared more patches, etc.

15. Update.1: Scott Ananian reports on the current "state of update.1" including a discussion of the "core activity" changes at: [1] and [2] (devel archive seems to be broken? split his message in two.)

16. Localization: Scott prepared translations for the activation server (including translations for the developer key request form) (See https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/act_server/).

Sayamindu Dasgupta has started the migration process to a newer version of Pootle and fixed a few bugs in some of the helper scripts that he uses to manage Pootle.

Tomeu has been doing more work on keyboard bindings for the shell and activities in light of localization.

Waqas Toor reports that the Tahoma font seems most suitable for Urdu on the XO laptop, as Nafees font has some problems when it comes to binding Urdu characters in smaller font size. For Pashto and Dari, we have found Pashto Pasarlai font suitable yet, but it has some problems. Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj” are looking for other font options that contain the complete Pashto and Dari character set on Linux platform.

Mako Hill finished a localization patch for the library, implementing a check for localized start-pages when viewing library collections. The next update of library-core should have at least English and Spanish locales. (While he was in Lima, Walter finished building the Getting Started Guide bundle for Peru. Many thanks to Edgar for the help with the Spanish translation.)

Oz Wilder and Alon Carmeli of Babylon Dictionaries started work two weeks ago on 16 language translations of a basic 2500-word dictionary, to expand our current collection. They are now 99% complete, pending final proofreading, and can be seen on the wiki (Dictionary). Zdenek Broz is working to include these in our multilingual dictionary bundle.

17. Sugar-control-panel: Simon Schampijer is working on the GUI for the sugar control panel.

18. Support: Adam Holt reports progress on a new "Projects DB" Developers Program with Aaron Kaplan et al. in Vienna. (Jim Gettys has been a huge help laying this out.) Usability and features are improving towards release, hopefully later this month.

Alan Claver helped with countless HW / pre-RMA support tickets. Volunteers are doing so much great work behind the scenes we cannot even keep track of it all. Adam shared Scott's deployment maps (with disclaimer) (See http://dev.laptop.org/~cscott/stats-20080201.html).

Adam organized another Sunday Support meeting (Sunday's at 4PM EST) with Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin from Mongolia, who spoke about their ongoing deployment; several new volunteers participated. Yani Galanis will be our guest speaker this coming Sunday; topic: our wireless/mesh testing's results/outlook!

19. Help wanted:

  • A request has come in from Cambodia for help in setting up mysql in Khmer;
  • We are looking for someone to "Sugarize" the GCompris icons;
  • Girlstart is looking for graphic artists and designers to make their games attractive through professional graphics (Please see the project website http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Project_IT_Girl).

20. CeBIT/OLPC Deutschland: Holger Levsen and Christoph Derndorfer both reported on the OLPC presense at CeBIT, the largest IT show in Europe.

Holger reports that "OLPC Deutschland" had its first "real life" meeting at the meeting (See http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/104668), just after having decided by voting via mailinglist (http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-de) on the final name of the project three days earlier. The group is planning to have a workshop weekend in Berlin this spring, to develope its visions and structures. A longer workshop which children and teachers called summer camp is also in its early planning stages.

Christoph reports that the feedback at CeBIT has simply "blown us away". They had hundreds of people at their booth: the main reaction always along the lines of "I've read about the OLPC project for two years, it's great to finally have the chance to actually look at and use one". The most common questions "where can I get one?", "are they already being produced and used somewhere?" and, of course, "where is the crank?" (See http://olpcaustria.soup.io/).

21: Debian: Holger also reports that sugar 0.79 has been uploaded by Jonas Smedegaard to Debian today, fixing Debian bug #444021. The packaging consists of three source packages: sugar-base, sugar and sugar-artwork.

22. Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports that they had two very educative events this week as part of our awareness campaign: The first one was introducing OLPC to street children in Islamabad’s vicinity. The aim was to observe the reaction of children who have never been to a school. Habib and his team spend half a day with these children and this generated enough curiosity in the community–mostly Afghan refugees. Though out of school, these children were quite smart and quickly learned to operate the camera and play around with music.

The second event was an announced Open Air workshop for graduate students of IIU. Twenty students had registered to participate in this event and more than 50 students showed up and remained throughout. Salman Minhas, Waqas and Sohaib gave demonstrations and assisted students with in understanding the 20 XO laptops that we had readied for the workshop. We expect volunteers from this lot to come forward and help us in the localization and software projects.

23. IDCL: Ben Bederson, Tim Browne, and SJ Klein reviewed what they need to integrate the International Digital Children's Library (IDCL) server infrastructure (Tomcat, mysql, and some custom scripts) into our builds.

24. GSoC: Our Google Summer of Code organization application has been sent in. Now we need more mentors and mre project ideas. Please add ideas to the Summer of Code/Ideas page in the wiki and contact either Michael Stone or SJ if you are interested in being a mentor. Also, please start spreading the word that we are looking for SoC students this summer—students are welcome to add their own ideas to our list.

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.

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

Laptop News 2008-03-08

1. John Watlington, Walter Bender, and Edgar Ceballos (Brightstar) spent this past week in Huampani (Lima) participating in Peru's first train-the-trainers workshop. (143 of the participants will be staffing regional support centrals scatter throughout every corner of the country.)

Using a custom image prepared by Chris Ball and Michael Stone, the teachers made great progress throughout the course of the week. They are all completely comfortable with the UI, the Journal, and the pedagogy. They readily navigated the various issues associated with an overloaded network and as was made clear in a Q&A session towards the end of the week, they really appreciate that everything on the laptop is open (and free as in speech); and they appreciate the mandate to take both ownership and the responsibility that comes with it.

They got deep into programming—for most, their first such experience—developing projects with Turtle Art, Scratch, and Etoys. (No Pippy hackers yet, but there was certainly interest expressed.) The workshop culminated with a Media-Lab-style open house, where each teacher demonstrated something they did with the laptop during a week of Constructionist learning.

Meanwhile, the Peru support volunteers met again Wednesday night and decided among other things that they will contact local universities to organize an event of their own around developing networks of educators and creators working with OLPC schools.

2. Antonio Battro was a keynote speaker at the Las Vegas International Conference of SITE, the Society of Information Technology and Teacher Education. Some 1,300 teachers and educators from many countries attended the Conference. Antonio's talk "OLPC: the cognitive challenges" had one of the largest audiences and was followed by an engaging discussion. The interest and the will to participate at OLPC was significant among the participants.

3. EC: The saga of the Embedded Controller continues. The code that handles shuttling bytes from the touchpad and keyboard up to the host has problems if the host does not read the data fast enough. This might be at the root of some of our touchpad problems. Fixing this will require a significant rewrite. Richard Smith feels he now understand things enough to do the rework, but it will not be available for Update.1.

4. Multi-battery charger: Bitwork's has assembled a new PCB in and it is functioning as expected. Richard and Lilian Walter added some hardware debugging routines to the firmware to assist Bitworks in their testing. We are still awaiting the larger parts back from the reworked tooling.

5. Q2D14 firmware release: Richard pulled a few new fixes from Mitch Bradly into the current release tree of the system firmware and is preparing to release a Q2D14. The primary reason is to fix an issue with forced upgrades. Once an upgrade has been downloaded, it will be installed on the next reboot. But if the firmware is being upgraded, that reboot will hang unless an external source of power is available (Ticket #6245). The suggestion is to either defer the firmware upgrade until power is available. This will hopefully help in places such as Peru, where many laptops will be off the power grid, when they mass upgrade machines.

6. Battery failures: Richard finished his analysis on the six batteries that were provided to him from laptops returned with charging problems. He's satisfied that its not a charging problem with the laptop circuitry and will be returning the batteries back the the manufacturer for deeper failure analysis.

7. School server: John Watlington reports that after last weeks testing, the current advice to trials and early deployments about wireless interconnection in the schools is the following:

  • Up to 10 (hopefully 20) laptops will work fine without any infrastructure; Groups of children away from school can share and collaborate;
  • Up to 40 laptops are supported either by using a single access point, or a school server with one Active Antenna;
  • Between 40 and 80 laptops are best served by a school server with two active antennas;
  • Between 80 and 120 laptops can be served by a school server with three active antennas;
  • Over 120 students, the schools need to move to more traditional access points to support the network loading.

We will be setting up a longer term (and larger) mesh testbed in a location near Boston where the RF environment is less variable than 1CC, to continue testing improvements to the software. We hope to improve the above numbers! (Chris Ball and Dafydd Harries tested laptops in mesh mode against a school server running a Jabber server—with 32 laptops connected to the school server, the laptops were all able to share a Chat session and a PDF file between themselves without any failures.)

8. Peru connectivity: As mentioned above, John accompanied Walter to Peru in order to set up servers and network access for participants in their regionals leader training sessions. The sessions were held at Huampani, a small resort area about 25 km from Lima up the Rimac river valley. Four VSAT connections were set up to provide internet connectivity to the sessions. While John arrived expecting problems with the presence service and wireless network congestion, the real problems had were due to strange DNS interactions with the VSAT modem's transparent DNS proxy and the Peruvian Ministry of Education DNS service. A fix is being tested.

9. EJabberd: We continue to have problems with obtaining a working ejabberd build with the latest fixes. Collabora is working on this, and as soon as it is available a new build will be announced on the server-devel mailing list.

Meanwhile, Morgan Collett has added improved documentation for setting up ejabberd from source for community jabber servers to the wiki (Installing ejabberd); so far one community server (for Chicago) has been successfully set up using these instructions, with more in progress (Community Jabber Servers).

10. Active Antennas are now available for developers, and will be shipped out soon to people who have already requested them. (See the OLPC wiki for further details.)

11. Activities: Chris Ball made Pippy collaborative, such that joining a shared Pippy activity now gets you a copy of the source-code buffer of the host at the time you joined.

One of the newest activities developed for the XO laptop is called StarChart. It was created by hobbyist, David Wallace. Dave received his XO via the Give One Get One program at the end of 2007 (See StarChart).

Qirat Activity Version 1.0 is complete and runs as sugar Activity. Waqas Toor is working on making the Surahs (chapters) more presentable when drawn on the Sugar UI canvas.

12. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes implemented and tested flow control in Salut stream tubes (Ticket #6647). As discussed with Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos last week, Salut should be able to use different backends to announce and discover services. Then we could switch from Avahi to Cerebro. That's a lot easier than writing a new Cerebro connection manager as we can reuse the muc and tubes codes (and all the Telepathy interfaces). So Guillame started to design an abstraction layer that will be implemented by Salut and Cerebro (Ticket #6658).

Guillaime also did a few tests and reconsidered Ticket #6585 (PS must reconnect server_plugin when NM changes IP addresses). We agreed with Morgan and Sjoerd this was not a problem and closed the ticket.

Morgan worked on Ticket #6572 (Replace key with hash to reduce Avahi TXT size) as it currently breaks "friending". The #6572 issue is not as straightforward as it seemed. We derive participants' JIDs from their keys, and friend them using the key as the identifier. So the current patch is for testing the impact on network congestion of a shorter value there but the solution would be more intrusive. (If the current approach doesn't actually improve network performance, it is not worth rearchitecting how PS identifies buddies—which is done using their keys—so testing would be helpful.)

Dennis Gilmore and Dafydd Harries spent time this week trying to get ejabberd running with updated patches from Process One. They had trouble with compilation problems, patches not applying, etc.; also with reproducing the builds that we are currently running. It turns out that the problems were due to newer builds being done with a newer version of Erlang. Dafydd may finally have a version that works, but it needs testing to be sure.

13. Sugar UI: Eben Eliason made some new designs for Journal, Home, and Frame, which he posted to the wiki. New designs for toolbars and bulletin boards are in progress.

The most recent designs have been posted as "slide shows" on the wiki for review and feedback. The first three available discuss plans for future activity management, including a repurposing of the Home circle, a completely reorganized Frame with clearer intent and support for notifications, and a brand new Journal which introduces action- and object- centric views, improves support for visual browsing, and offers a friendlier interface into ones interactions with the laptops.

We are in the process of generating new designs for toolbars as well as beginning to consider future designs for the bulletin boards (and, more near term, designs for standard file transfer). All of these designs are or will be posted to wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs. We encourage those interested to review the images and descriptions posted, and to provide feedback within the discussion pages or on the mailing lists, as appropriate. Thanks!

Tomeu Visozo has been working implementing on the home view redesign. The main changes have been completed and the code is being reviewed. Next step is to discuss the work done so far with the design team and agree on the several details left to work through.

14. Kernel: Andres Salomon did further work in the lxfb/gxfb drivers. He got suspend/resume working properly, prepared more patches, etc.

15. Update.1: Scott Ananian reports on the current "state of update.1" including a discussion of the "core activity" changes at: [3] and [4] (devel archive seems to be broken? split his message in two.)

16. Localization: Scott prepared translations for the activation server (including translations for the developer key request form) (See https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/act_server/).

Sayamindu Dasgupta has started the migration process to a newer version of Pootle and fixed a few bugs in some of the helper scripts that he uses to manage Pootle.

Tomeu has been doing more work on keyboard bindings for the shell and activities in light of localization.

Waqas Toor reports that the Tahoma font seems most suitable for Urdu on the XO laptop, as Nafees font has some problems when it comes to binding Urdu characters in smaller font size. For Pashto and Dari, we have found Pashto Pasarlai font suitable yet, but it has some problems. Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj” are looking for other font options that contain the complete Pashto and Dari character set on Linux platform.

Mako Hill finished a localization patch for the library, implementing a check for localized start-pages when viewing library collections. The next update of library-core should have at least English and Spanish locales. (While he was in Lima, Walter finished building the Getting Started Guide bundle for Peru. Many thanks to Edgar for the help with the Spanish translation.)

Oz Wilder and Alon Carmeli of Babylon Dictionaries started work two weeks ago on 16 language translations of a basic 2500-word dictionary, to expand our current collection. They are now 99% complete, pending final proofreading, and can be seen on the wiki (Dictionary). Zdenek Broz is working to include these in our multilingual dictionary bundle.

17. Sugar-control-panel: Simon Schampijer is working on the GUI for the sugar control panel.

18. Support: Adam Holt reports progress on a new "Projects DB" Developers Program with Aaron Kaplan et al. in Vienna. (Jim Gettys has been a huge help laying this out.) Usability and features are improving towards release, hopefully later this month.

Alan Claver helped with countless HW / pre-RMA support tickets. Volunteers are doing so much great work behind the scenes we cannot even keep track of it all. Adam shared Scott's deployment maps (with disclaimer) (See http://dev.laptop.org/~cscott/stats-20080201.html).

Adam organized another Sunday Support meeting (Sunday's at 4PM EST) with Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin from Mongolia, who spoke about their ongoing deployment; several new volunteers participated. Yani Galanis will be our guest speaker this coming Sunday; topic: our wireless/mesh testing's results/outlook!

19. Help wanted:

  • A request has come in from Cambodia for help in setting up mysql in Khmer;
  • We are looking for someone to "Sugarize" the GCompris icons;
  • Girlstart is looking for graphic artists and designers to make their games attractive through professional graphics (Please see the project website http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Project_IT_Girl).

20. CeBIT/OLPC Deutschland: Holger Levsen and Christoph Derndorfer both reported on the OLPC presense at CeBIT, the largest IT show in Europe.

Holger reports that "OLPC Deutschland" had its first "real life" meeting at the meeting (See http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/104668), just after having decided by voting via mailinglist (http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-de) on the final name of the project three days earlier. The group is planning to have a workshop weekend in Berlin this spring, to develope its visions and structures. A longer workshop which children and teachers called summer camp is also in its early planning stages.

Christoph reports that the feedback at CeBIT has simply "blown us away". They had hundreds of people at their booth: the main reaction always along the lines of "I've read about the OLPC project for two years, it's great to finally have the chance to actually look at and use one". The most common questions "where can I get one?", "are they already being produced and used somewhere?" and, of course, "where is the crank?" (See http://olpcaustria.soup.io/).

21: Debian: Holger also reports that sugar 0.79 has been uploaded by Jonas Smedegaard to Debian today, fixing Debian bug #444021. The packaging consists of three source packages: sugar-base, sugar and sugar-artwork.

22. Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports that they had two very educative events this week as part of our awareness campaign: The first one was introducing OLPC to street children in Islamabad’s vicinity. The aim was to observe the reaction of children who have never been to a school. Habib and his team spend half a day with these children and this generated enough curiosity in the community–mostly Afghan refugees. Though out of school, these children were quite smart and quickly learned to operate the camera and play around with music.

The second event was an announced Open Air workshop for graduate students of IIU. Twenty students had registered to participate in this event and more than 50 students showed up and remained throughout. Salman Minhas, Waqas and Sohaib gave demonstrations and assisted students with in understanding the 20 XO laptops that we had readied for the workshop. We expect volunteers from this lot to come forward and help us in the localization and software projects.

23. IDCL: Ben Bederson, Tim Browne, and SJ Klein reviewed what they need to integrate the International Digital Children's Library (IDCL) server infrastructure (Tomcat, mysql, and some custom scripts) into our builds.

24. GSoC: Our Google Summer of Code organization application has been sent in. Now we need more mentors and mre project ideas. Please add ideas to the Summer of Code/Ideas page in the wiki and contact either Michael Stone or SJ if you are interested in being a mentor. Also, please start spreading the word that we are looking for SoC students this summer—students are welcome to add their own ideas to our list.

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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