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=LAPTOP NEWS=
=LAPTOP NEWS=


1. The OLPC Board passed a resolution for the Luxembourg-based SES Global
1. Nicholas, Khaled Hassounah, Michail Bletsas, SJ Klein, and Stephen
to become its newest member. SES Astra and SES Americom will serve as
Michaud participated in Nigeria's two-day Digital Africa Conference, with
worldwide partners to provide satellite connectivity and smart ground
one or the other of them being the keynote speaker, chairman, or panelist
solutions for broadcasting, data, and Internet connections. SES Americom
literally in every session. OLPC was omnipresent in the press and for the
CEO Ed Horowitz—a close collaborator for nearly 20 years ago—will represent
400 delegates from 30 countries.
SES on the Board.


2. Nicholas spoke at AMD's Global Vision Conference, Agents of Change:
2. Alan Kay, Kim Rose, and the eToys team spent the week in Cambridge at
Driving the Power of Innovation in Pasadena. The meeting featured a
the OLPC offices. They continue to make rapid progress towards the
blue-ribbon cast of speakers and an audience that included many old friends
integration of eToys into the laptop software environment (they also
from the Media Lab, including Lego, Dreamworks, Sun, and many others.
provided useful feedback) and have eToys running on the laptop. Ian
Piumarta gave the OLPC team an update on his “dynamically reconfigurable
virtual machine”, which may be—in the longer term—the basis of programming
environment for the Laptop, in that it is simple, fast, extremely flexible
and quite eloquent.


3. Alan Kay, Kim Rose and the eToys team finished up a two-week visit to
3. Welcome Jenn Lucien to OLPC. Jenn will be working with the
the OLPC office in Cambridge. They made significant progress both in
administrative team and covering the reception area. Originally from O`ahu,
porting their environment onto the Laptop and integrating the user
she served as the office manager to the Hawai`i Legislative Committee on
interface into the Sugar environment. They also provided valuable feedback
Energy and Environmental Protection for five years. She spent the last year
to the OLPC software team.
traveling in Asia and the Pacific and is excited join a project that aims
to help the developing world. She holds a BA in Communication Studies from
University of California at Santa Barbara.


4. Display: LCD-B (with twice the reflectance of LCD-A) is still on track
4. Mark Foster reports that the CAFE ASIC debugging has proceeded well
for a 25 September demo. The reflective-mode resolution is 1200×900;
beyond expectations. To begin with, all three subsystems (NAND Flash, SD
resolution in color mode (backlight on) may be higher than 800×600. A White
card slot, and camera controller) were already functional, with full DMA
Paper is being written to discuss the resolution of color mode.
capability, by the time of the scheduled CAFE FPGA debugging /start/ date.
Following the very successful debugging sessions by the software team, the
CAFE is being enhanced to improve its capabilities and to simplify software
development and robustness. As one example, the SD card controller is being
modified to strictly match the public SDHCI specification. To the best of
our knowledge, this should be the first truly Open Source SD
implementation, with no need to obtain an SDI license or sign NDAs to
create SD drivers or applications.


5. Software team: David Zeuthen will be leaving the Red Hat OLPC team. He's
5. Mark also reports that the team has decided to extend support for USB
going back to work for Red Hat's desktop team, focusing on ongoing HAL
2.0. Initially, the Laptop was designed to offer support for limited power
work, which will eventually filter back and benefit One Laptop per Child.
consumption USB devices in order to ensure sufficient battery life. After
He will be replaced by John Palmieri, who comes from the desktop team. John
real-world experience with the prototype systems, it has been decided to
is one of the upstream maintainers of the D-Bus program, one of the
remove this artificial power limitation and support full 2.5W power
fundamental components in the Laptop software. He will be focusing on
consumption on each of the three USB ports simultaneously, or even higher
general distribution issues and assisting Dan Williams and Marco Gritti
power consumption per port when all three ports are not being used (in
with working on Sugar.
fact, going beyond the power limits of the USB specification). These
changes should significantly expand the universe of supported USB devices
and peripherals.


6. Audio: Csound—the core of the music system on the Laptop—is now part of
6. Jim Gettys reports that Carl-Daniel Hailfinger and the LinuxBIOS team
Fedora Extras. The latest image builds include Csound in the distribution.
have implemented the LZMA compression system
There are still a few outstanding patches being prepared by Barry Vercoe
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZMA) for the BIOS ROM, resulting in a
and Simon Schampijer to update to the latest Csound.
substantial savings in size.


7. Security: Ivan Kristić attended the HITB 2006 Security and Hacking
7. Zephaniah Hull got the X driver for the touchpad functioning last
conference in Malaysia to review the Laptop security model with the experts
weekend. Andres Salomon started contracting with OLPC this week and worked
convening there. Meanwhile, Simson Garfinkel has been doing interviews of
with
everyone involved in the project and based on that output (the first draft
Jim on setting up an X Window System build environment for debugging the
of which has just now become available) we will be able to make the changes
touchpad. Next: experimentation on how to use the novel capabilities of the
required to the OS to support the recommendations. Chris Blizzard has also
device.
been gathering expertise inside of Red Hat to help consult on Laptop
security.

8. CAFE and DCON: David Woodhouse is preparing to test the CAFE FPGA
hardware. Once that is done and comments are made on the NAND driver, the
changes should be ready to push upstream into the kernel. David also made a
new mtd-utils (utilities for managing memory technology) release and put it
into Extras, which means we are able to report information about
compression savings during file-system creation. This feature will be very
important when we are ready to make our push to get the size of the OS
down, since we can know how much space we're saving with any particular
file or package. David has also been assisting Jordan Crouse of AMD
completing the kernel-level DCON code. The kernel changes required are
largely complete. It is an important first step.

9. Power management: Jordan has taken very preliminary power measurements
of the Laptop, with and without the DCON, with and without the color
display; it is a starting point for the power management work which is now
starting up. Measurement is particularly important, and we have been
exploring ways to make these measurements, which will be key to making
software progress and preventing regressions. Our power consumption has
started to be noticed in the Linux community:
http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/tag/olpc. It will only improve from
here.

10. Touchpad: Jim Gettys reports that the dual-mode touch pad is now
working properly on the Laptop. The pieces of the puzzle were put together
across the entire team and finally nailed by Vance Ke and and Ray Tseng at
Quanta, who identified some incorrectly set registers (used to enable the
PS/2 ports interrupts). This has highlighted the value of the PRS tools
(preferred register setting tools) of AMD, which we had not properly
appreciated to audit the internal register settings of the Geode. Mitch
Bradley is working his way through the settings to verify that the Geode's
internal registers are all properly set.

11. BIOS: LZMA compression was added to LinuxBIOS this week; this is a much
more efficient compression algorithm than we had been using and freed
significant flash space, which, of course, we can (and did) immediately
fill: Carl-Daniel Hailfinger added the Libertas wireless driver, its
firmware, and TCP/IPv4. We'd like to be able to use wireless for
installation in the field; whether all this can fit into the serial BIOS
ROM—the most robust solution—or will require additional space on NAND
flash, is still not known. Another issue with RAM timing was diagnosed and
fixed in LinuxBIOS this week; this one was was, ironically, observed only
when running the machine slower.

12. Diagnostics: Mitch has been working on a diagnostic framework for the
Laptop, both for hardware failures and as a framework for testing the
myriad of power domains (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_Power_Domains). Each and every domain
must be properly tested before we can commit the hardware to mass
production and this testing needs to be complete before we are likely to
have completed all the Linux work for power management. Mitch now has
drivers for NAND flash (both GX and CaFe), GX frame buffer, USB mass
storage, keyboard, and ethernet. The diagnostic can run in any
environment—from ROM as a LinuxBIOS payload, booted from USB via LinuxBIOS,
or booted from USB via Insyde BIOS.

13. UI: Walter Bender and Chris Blizzard meet with the Pentagram team about
the latest user-interface design. We discussed various issues including the
journal and how the touchpad might be interfaced.

14. Sugar update: Marco Gritti has implemented the basic grid design and
the zoom. In the Mesh View we are currently displaying only the activity
icons, but it's possible to join activities. In the Friends View you can
add and remove friends and you can invite your friends to activities by
picking actions from the hovering menu. Dan has implemented the active
activity logic, propagation over the network and has partially hooked it up
on the friends view. Marco has also implemented the frame
activation/deactivation logic and has made a first pass at the animation
API. From the frame you can now launch new activities, share them on the
network through the application menu, and join activities from the
invitations that appears on the bottom of the Frame. On the right edge of
the Frame we display the XO icons of the buddies participating to the
activity. You can “make them friends” from a menu. Marco has done some
testing, bug fixing, performance enhancements, and code refactoring. He has
also integrated some of the icons designed by Pentagram.

15. In a related effort, Ivan has frozen Verison 1.0 of the document format
used in the Journal (and wiki). The general datastore, differential storage
engine, and indexing engine are also largely finished. A WYSIWYG (what you
see is what you get) editor in progress, as well as a reference identity
service/emergent public key infrastructure implementation.


8. John Zulauf, formerly of AMD's Geode team, has worked with AMD to free
the optimization work—100–200% improvement—he did on many basic library
functions: memcmp; memcpy; memset; strcmp; strcpy; and strlen. We look
forward to integrating these performance improvements.


Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].
Laptop News is archived at [http://laptop.media.mit.edu/laptopnews.nsf/latest/news Laptop News].

Revision as of 19:57, 23 September 2006

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.


LAPTOP NEWS

1. The OLPC Board passed a resolution for the Luxembourg-based SES Global to become its newest member. SES Astra and SES Americom will serve as worldwide partners to provide satellite connectivity and smart ground solutions for broadcasting, data, and Internet connections. SES Americom CEO Ed Horowitz—a close collaborator for nearly 20 years ago—will represent SES on the Board.

2. Nicholas spoke at AMD's Global Vision Conference, Agents of Change: Driving the Power of Innovation in Pasadena. The meeting featured a blue-ribbon cast of speakers and an audience that included many old friends from the Media Lab, including Lego, Dreamworks, Sun, and many others.

3. Alan Kay, Kim Rose and the eToys team finished up a two-week visit to the OLPC office in Cambridge. They made significant progress both in porting their environment onto the Laptop and integrating the user interface into the Sugar environment. They also provided valuable feedback to the OLPC software team.

4. Display: LCD-B (with twice the reflectance of LCD-A) is still on track for a 25 September demo. The reflective-mode resolution is 1200×900; resolution in color mode (backlight on) may be higher than 800×600. A White Paper is being written to discuss the resolution of color mode.

5. Software team: David Zeuthen will be leaving the Red Hat OLPC team. He's going back to work for Red Hat's desktop team, focusing on ongoing HAL work, which will eventually filter back and benefit One Laptop per Child. He will be replaced by John Palmieri, who comes from the desktop team. John is one of the upstream maintainers of the D-Bus program, one of the fundamental components in the Laptop software. He will be focusing on general distribution issues and assisting Dan Williams and Marco Gritti with working on Sugar.

6. Audio: Csound—the core of the music system on the Laptop—is now part of Fedora Extras. The latest image builds include Csound in the distribution. There are still a few outstanding patches being prepared by Barry Vercoe and Simon Schampijer to update to the latest Csound.

7. Security: Ivan Kristić attended the HITB 2006 Security and Hacking conference in Malaysia to review the Laptop security model with the experts convening there. Meanwhile, Simson Garfinkel has been doing interviews of everyone involved in the project and based on that output (the first draft of which has just now become available) we will be able to make the changes required to the OS to support the recommendations. Chris Blizzard has also been gathering expertise inside of Red Hat to help consult on Laptop security.

8. CAFE and DCON: David Woodhouse is preparing to test the CAFE FPGA hardware. Once that is done and comments are made on the NAND driver, the changes should be ready to push upstream into the kernel. David also made a new mtd-utils (utilities for managing memory technology) release and put it into Extras, which means we are able to report information about compression savings during file-system creation. This feature will be very important when we are ready to make our push to get the size of the OS down, since we can know how much space we're saving with any particular file or package. David has also been assisting Jordan Crouse of AMD completing the kernel-level DCON code. The kernel changes required are largely complete. It is an important first step.

9. Power management: Jordan has taken very preliminary power measurements of the Laptop, with and without the DCON, with and without the color display; it is a starting point for the power management work which is now starting up. Measurement is particularly important, and we have been exploring ways to make these measurements, which will be key to making software progress and preventing regressions. Our power consumption has started to be noticed in the Linux community: http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/tag/olpc. It will only improve from here.

10. Touchpad: Jim Gettys reports that the dual-mode touch pad is now working properly on the Laptop. The pieces of the puzzle were put together across the entire team and finally nailed by Vance Ke and and Ray Tseng at Quanta, who identified some incorrectly set registers (used to enable the PS/2 ports interrupts). This has highlighted the value of the PRS tools (preferred register setting tools) of AMD, which we had not properly appreciated to audit the internal register settings of the Geode. Mitch Bradley is working his way through the settings to verify that the Geode's internal registers are all properly set.

11. BIOS: LZMA compression was added to LinuxBIOS this week; this is a much more efficient compression algorithm than we had been using and freed significant flash space, which, of course, we can (and did) immediately fill: Carl-Daniel Hailfinger added the Libertas wireless driver, its firmware, and TCP/IPv4. We'd like to be able to use wireless for installation in the field; whether all this can fit into the serial BIOS ROM—the most robust solution—or will require additional space on NAND flash, is still not known. Another issue with RAM timing was diagnosed and fixed in LinuxBIOS this week; this one was was, ironically, observed only when running the machine slower.

12. Diagnostics: Mitch has been working on a diagnostic framework for the Laptop, both for hardware failures and as a framework for testing the myriad of power domains (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_Power_Domains). Each and every domain must be properly tested before we can commit the hardware to mass production and this testing needs to be complete before we are likely to have completed all the Linux work for power management. Mitch now has drivers for NAND flash (both GX and CaFe), GX frame buffer, USB mass storage, keyboard, and ethernet. The diagnostic can run in any environment—from ROM as a LinuxBIOS payload, booted from USB via LinuxBIOS, or booted from USB via Insyde BIOS.

13. UI: Walter Bender and Chris Blizzard meet with the Pentagram team about the latest user-interface design. We discussed various issues including the journal and how the touchpad might be interfaced.

14. Sugar update: Marco Gritti has implemented the basic grid design and the zoom. In the Mesh View we are currently displaying only the activity icons, but it's possible to join activities. In the Friends View you can add and remove friends and you can invite your friends to activities by picking actions from the hovering menu. Dan has implemented the active activity logic, propagation over the network and has partially hooked it up on the friends view. Marco has also implemented the frame activation/deactivation logic and has made a first pass at the animation API. From the frame you can now launch new activities, share them on the network through the application menu, and join activities from the invitations that appears on the bottom of the Frame. On the right edge of the Frame we display the XO icons of the buddies participating to the activity. You can “make them friends” from a menu. Marco has done some testing, bug fixing, performance enhancements, and code refactoring. He has also integrated some of the icons designed by Pentagram.

15. In a related effort, Ivan has frozen Verison 1.0 of the document format used in the Journal (and wiki). The general datastore, differential storage engine, and indexing engine are also largely finished. A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor in progress, as well as a reference identity service/emergent public key infrastructure implementation.


Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

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

Press requests: please send email to press at laptop dot org.

MILESTONES

Aug. 2006 Working prototype of the dual-mode display
06 Jun. 2006 First video with working prototype [1]
28 Jan. 2006 World Economic Forum, Switzerland
UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement
news release
13 Dec. 2005 Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop
(html)(pdf)
16 Nov. 2005 WSIS, Tunisia
Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan

Photos: (Image 1) (Image 2) (Image 3)
Webcast: (Arabic) (English) (French) (original)
Webcast provided by the ITU and UN Webcast Services with the support of RealNetworks Ltd. RealPlayer is required to view the webcast (available at no cost).

Jan. 2005 Laptop Intiative Officially Announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland

PRESS

14 Sep. 2006 Vanguard | Keyboard In Three Nigerian Languages Ready-Obasanjo
08 Sep. 2006 Technology Review | Hack: The Hundred Dollar Laptop
06 Sep. 2006 nacion.com | Computadoras de $100 estarán listas en el 2007
 Aug. 2006 Wired | The Laptop Crusade
07 Jul. 2006 San Diego Union-Tribune | U.S. and international educators show great interest in prototype
Jul. 2006 SPIE Professional | $100 laptop nears launch
21 Jun. 2006 BusinessWeek online | For Brazil's Poor, a Digital Deliverance?
24 May 2006 CNET News.com | $100 laptop gets working prototype
07 Apr. 2006 rediff.com | Our $100 laptops will run on human power
02 Apr. 2006 O Estado de S.Paulo | Fazer a diferença
28 Mar. 2006 FT.com | Waking up to a laptop revolution
24 Mar. 2006 Diário do Comércio | Um Laptop por Crianca
22 Mar. 2006 Times Online | Getting the world's poor logged on
09 Mar. 2006 Correio Popular | País disputa fabricação de laptop de US$ 100
  Folha de S. Paulo | Governo quer comprar 1 milhão de laptops
  Info Exame On Line | Governo quer um milhão de laptops de US$ 100
08 Mar. 2006 IDG Now | Faculdade abre programa de inclusão digital para alunos
  Folha de S. Paulo | Governo negocia fabricação do laptop de US$ 100 no Brasil
  Agência Globo | Governo estuda possibilidade de produção de computador de US$ 100 no país
  Teletime News | DVB detalha contrapartidas oferecidas ao Brasil
05 Mar. 2006 ACM/CIE | Interview with Nicholas Negroponte on the $100 laptop
16 Feb. 2006 MITIR | Podcast of Walter Bender's MURJ lecture on One Laptop per Child
15 Feb. 2006 CNET | PCs for the poor: Which design will win?
10 Feb. 2006 CNET | Perspective: Will the $100 PC fly?
09 Feb. 2006 NYTimes | A Plug for the Unplugged $100 Laptop Computer for Developing Nations
  UPI | One Laptop Project reaches critical stages
31 Jan. 2006 Slashdot | Microsoft OS Smart Phone for Developing Nations
  USA Today | Gates sees cellphones as way to help Third World
  Macworld | Red Hat officially commits to MIT's $100 laptop
28 Jan. 2006 UNDP | $100 Laptop Project Moves Closer to Narrowing Digital Divide
20 Dec. 2005 BusinessWeek online | Quanta faces challenges in making "millions and millions" of $100 laptops.
19 Dec. 2005 Forbes.com | China to decide by March whether to join OneLaptopPerChild project.
14 Dec. 2005 UPI | Nortel to take part in OneLaptopPerChild endeavor.
13 Dec. 2005 Red Herring | Quanta to manufacture laptops; expects deliveries in 2006 4th quarter.
  OLPC | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture $100 Laptop
11 Dec. 2005 NYTimes | NY Times: 5th Annual Year in Ideas $100 Laptop
04 Dec. 2005 Guardian Unlimited | The $100 laptop question
01 Dec. 2005 RFDESIGN | $100 Laptops Feature Novel Peer-to-Peer Wireless Connectivity
30 Nov. 2005 FT.com | Five companies in Asia making bids to manufacture $100 laptop.
28 Nov. 2005 Fortune Magazine | THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: I'd Like to Teach the World to Type
25 Nov. 2005 People's Daily Online | Nigerian president says government has budgeted for a million $100 laptops.
18 Nov. 2005 The Electric New Paper | Gramophone? No, Laptop
17 Nov. 2005 BBC News | UN Debut for $100 Laptop for Poor
  Seattle Times | $100 Laptops Aim to Bring Children the World
  TechWhack | MIT Unveils their USD 100 Laptop
  TeitB | 100 US Dollar Laptop Computer Launched
  ZDNet | '$100 Laptops' Here by Next Year
  ABC | $100 Laptop Bridges Digital Divide
  Financial Express | Laptop @$100!
16 Nov. 2005 MIT News Office | Annan to Present Prototype $100 Laptop at World Summit on Information Society
  Reuters | Researchers Unveil $100 Laptop for Schoolkids
  CNET | $100 Laptop Takes World Stage
  CNET | $100 Laptop Expected in Late 2006
  Christian Science Monitor | A Low-Cost Laptop for Every Child
  ADNKronos International | Internet: Wind-Up, Budget Laptop Unveiled
14 Nov. 2005 WSJ | The $100 Laptop Moves Closer to Reality
13 Nov. 2005 The Inquirer | Hubris over $100 Laptop idea
New York Times | Google Earmarks $265million for Charity and Social Causes
13 Oct. 2005 Technology Review | The Hundred Dollar Man: Technology Review's editor in chief, Jason Pontin, talk with Nicholas Negroponte about the Hundred Dollar Computer.
30 Sep. 2005 Times Online | A $100 clockwork computer to help the poor to learn
29 Sep. 2005 I4U News | Sub-$100 Laptop design unveiled
28 Sep. 2005 Boston Globe | Prototypes of $100 laptop with hand crank planned by early next year.
  MIT World | NN at Technology Review
27 Sep. 2005 Datamation | Low cost PCs for the Enterprise
06 Jun. 2005 estadao.com.br | Cada criança na escola com um laptop a tiracolo

Video

(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found here.)

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