OLPC:News: Difference between revisions

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=LAPTOP NEWS=
=LAPTOP NEWS=


1. Michail Bletsas worked with Professor George Sergiadis, Aristotle
1. The OLPC Board passed a resolution for the Luxembourg-based SES Global
University of Thessaloniki, on novel broadband antenna designs for the $100
to become its newest member. SES Astra and SES Americom will serve as
Server. These antennas can be constructed with adhesive copper foil and
worldwide partners to provide satellite connectivity and smart ground
glass at a very low cost and can support operation on both the 2.4 and 5.7
solutions for broadcasting, data, and Internet connections. SES Americom
Ghz bands.
CEO Ed Horowitz—a close collaborator for nearly 20 years ago—will represent
SES on the Board.


2. Alan Kay reports that Steve Jobs has agreed to relicense Squeak under
2. Nicholas spoke at AMD's Global Vision Conference, Agents of Change:
the Apache License so we can include it with the base software in the
Driving the Power of Innovation in Pasadena. The meeting featured a
laptop.
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. Mechanical design: Mark Foster reports a significant milestone: The
3. Alan Kay, Kim Rose and the eToys team finished up a two-week visit to
first release of the system's mechanical design is now completed; all of
the OLPC office in Cambridge. They made significant progress both in
the enclosure's component designs have been released for the creation of
porting their environment onto the Laptop and integrating the user
system tooling. These tools are hardened-steel molds that will be used to
interface into the Sugar environment. They also provided valuable feedback
form the actual enclosure components from different blends of PC/ABS
to the OLPC software team.
plastic. Many thanks to the team at Quanta for their incredibly hard work
to complete the mechanical design on-time for the upcoming B-Test build.


4. Electrical design: Mark also reports good progress on electrical design.
4. Display: LCD-B (with twice the reflectance of LCD-A) is still on track
With successful completion of the debugging of the initial version of the
for a 25 September demo. The reflective-mode resolution is 1200×900;
CAFE (Camera and Flash Enabler) prototype chip, the team at Marvell has
resolution in color mode (backlight on) may be higher than 800×600. A White
produced a second version of the CAFE design. The electrical team has also
Paper is being written to discuss the resolution of color mode.
made great progress on the system's motherboard. This new “B-Test”
motherboard is designed to work with the CAFE chip, as well as the DCON
(Display CONtroller) ASIC. The first batch of B-Test motherboards has been
fabricated and assembled.


C. Touch pad: The first full prototype of the system's touch pad, created
5. Software team: David Zeuthen will be leaving the Red Hat OLPC team. He's
by Alps, is scheduled to arrive early next week. Using an earlier
going back to work for Red Hat's desktop team, focusing on ongoing HAL
prototype, Andres Salomon has the dual-mode touch pad working on our
work, which will eventually filter back and benefit One Laptop per Child.
machines.
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.


5. Chris Blizzard reports that we've made some more progress in shrinking
6. Audio: Csound—the core of the music system on the Laptop—is now part of
the size of the OS. We've been able to remove some package dependencies in
Fedora Extras. The latest image builds include Csound in the distribution.
the gnome stack and work is underway to finally break the dependency on the
There are still a few outstanding patches being prepared by Barry Vercoe
old X font server, bitmap fonts and perl.
and Simon Schampijer to update to the latest Csound.


6. UI: The Sugar team has also been investigating a library called
7. Security: Ivan Kristić attended the HITB 2006 Security and Hacking
“HippoCanvas” that Havoc Pennington has been writing as part of his mugshot
conference in Malaysia to review the Laptop security model with the experts
work. It's a canvas that fits very well with our model—as opposed to the
convening there. Meanwhile, Simson Garfinkel has been doing interviews of
other GNOME canvas libraries. Marco Gritti has been working hard on getting
everyone involved in the project and based on that output (the first draft
the canvas building in our environment and has started on python bindings
of which has just now become available) we will be able to make the changes
for it.
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.


7. Camera: Jon Corbet reported that the CAFE camera is working at about
8. CAFE and DCON: David Woodhouse is preparing to test the CAFE FPGA
15FPS (VGA resolution) using the PCI FPGA CAFE development board, which is
hardware. Once that is done and comments are made on the NAND driver, the
about half of the ultimate hardware specification. A CAFE board was also
changes should be ready to push upstream into the kernel. David also made a
sent to Pierre Ossman for SDhci driver testing. A third board arrived in
new mtd-utils (utilities for managing memory technology) release and put it
Cambridge for additional driver testing.
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.


8. VSA: Jordan reports that AMD has released the Virtual System
9. Power management: Jordan has taken very preliminary power measurements
Architecture (VSA) code under an open license; this is a major transition
of the Laptop, with and without the DCON, with and without the color
in how Geodes are treated and will be beneficial to AMD customers in
display; it is a starting point for the power management work which is now
general.
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.


9. Test framework: AMD also released into open source a performance-test
framework and some specific implementations of high-use routines
implemented by John Zulauf. John did most of this work on a Geode LX, but
the GX and LX are similar in most areas.


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 16:43, 30 September 2006

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.


LAPTOP NEWS

1. Michail Bletsas worked with Professor George Sergiadis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, on novel broadband antenna designs for the $100 Server. These antennas can be constructed with adhesive copper foil and glass at a very low cost and can support operation on both the 2.4 and 5.7 Ghz bands.

2. Alan Kay reports that Steve Jobs has agreed to relicense Squeak under the Apache License so we can include it with the base software in the laptop.

3. Mechanical design: Mark Foster reports a significant milestone: The first release of the system's mechanical design is now completed; all of the enclosure's component designs have been released for the creation of system tooling. These tools are hardened-steel molds that will be used to form the actual enclosure components from different blends of PC/ABS plastic. Many thanks to the team at Quanta for their incredibly hard work to complete the mechanical design on-time for the upcoming B-Test build.

4. Electrical design: Mark also reports good progress on electrical design. With successful completion of the debugging of the initial version of the CAFE (Camera and Flash Enabler) prototype chip, the team at Marvell has produced a second version of the CAFE design. The electrical team has also made great progress on the system's motherboard. This new “B-Test” motherboard is designed to work with the CAFE chip, as well as the DCON (Display CONtroller) ASIC. The first batch of B-Test motherboards has been fabricated and assembled.

C. Touch pad: The first full prototype of the system's touch pad, created by Alps, is scheduled to arrive early next week. Using an earlier prototype, Andres Salomon has the dual-mode touch pad working on our machines.

5. Chris Blizzard reports that we've made some more progress in shrinking the size of the OS. We've been able to remove some package dependencies in the gnome stack and work is underway to finally break the dependency on the old X font server, bitmap fonts and perl.

6. UI: The Sugar team has also been investigating a library called “HippoCanvas” that Havoc Pennington has been writing as part of his mugshot work. It's a canvas that fits very well with our model—as opposed to the other GNOME canvas libraries. Marco Gritti has been working hard on getting the canvas building in our environment and has started on python bindings for it.

7. Camera: Jon Corbet reported that the CAFE camera is working at about 15FPS (VGA resolution) using the PCI FPGA CAFE development board, which is about half of the ultimate hardware specification. A CAFE board was also sent to Pierre Ossman for SDhci driver testing. A third board arrived in Cambridge for additional driver testing.

8. VSA: Jordan reports that AMD has released the Virtual System Architecture (VSA) code under an open license; this is a major transition in how Geodes are treated and will be beneficial to AMD customers in general.

9. Test framework: AMD also released into open source a performance-test framework and some specific implementations of high-use routines implemented by John Zulauf. John did most of this work on a Geode LX, but the GX and LX are similar in most areas.

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

25 Sep. 2006 vnunet.com | OLPC offered free satellite connections
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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