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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].


=Laptop News 2008-04-26=
=Laptop News 2008-05-04=
:A note from the editor:
:I have been reading the discussions this past week on the mission and direction of OLPC and OLPC's outreach to the community. I'd like to reiterate that we at OLPC are committed to create Sugar as an open source project, as it provides a great opportunity for both learners and for contributors. Sugar in combination with the XO hardware extends this opportunity even further through the mesh, power management, and robustness features of the hardware required for many of the environments where we want to provide help. We have sold or given away hundreds of thousands of laptops running Sugar on GNU/Linux on the XO. We plan to continue to do that. This year's Tech Team budget allows us to almost double our personnel in development, test, and support. We are very excited about being able to hire at this level over the next few months.
:OLPC has had an amazing amount of contributions from volunteers in the community in all areas including development, test, support, translations, documentation, marketing/messaging, and even business expertise. We truly value these contributions. What we haven't done well (at least recently) is to support people who are trying to help us. We need to fix our communications with volunteers and community groups. We need to be open and transparent without compromising the confidentiality of others that we might do business with. This is difficult but it is not rocket science. I think we can do it. Sometimes when everyone is overworked, it is much easier to focus on the details of the day than to see the bigger problems. I intend to make some specific recommendations towards better communications in the next few weeks. Your comments, thoughts, and ideas are welcome.
::- [[User:Kimquirk|Kim Quirk]]
::Dir of Tech Team


==Tech Team in Deployments==
==Power and Hardware==
The first Multi-Battery Charger sample parts off of the tooling made it to 1cc this week. Richard has been spending most of his time purchasing, scrounging up, and assembling all the other parts in order to create a working prototype. Once assembled it will start to get used at 1cc.
In Montevideo two weeks ago, team Ceibal and Martin Langhoff worked together for two days. Focus was on mapping a road to convergence with the NOC that looks after School servers, and better communication with 1CC. The Ceibal team has significant depth of experience with XOs in the field, their lessons learned and effective scripts are gold.


Richard has modified his power logging script to try and do battery life estimation calculations as a first try for something that can be used
In Lima more than a week ago, Martin worked with the local team, fleshing out AP testing strategies, XS roadmap, and XS administration infrastructure.
for the battery monitor in sugar. Its available here: http://dev.laptop.org/~rsmith/olpc-bat_ttl


==Tech Team in Deployments==
John Watlington, in Peru this week, has been in discussion about school server specifications. It became clear once again that cheap, and environmentally robust school server hardware is a missing part of the OLPC system. Peru's previous experience with using traditional PC hardware in the jungle and the Andes was that the machines failed frequently, due to the heat. Listing the required environmental
While in Peru over the past week, John Watlington queried individuals in the MED to prioritize software improvements being considered.
requirements in the specifications results in a multiplication of the price. Complicating the process is the fact that most bidders are assembling the units from whatever components they have on hand, resulting in varying quality across the entire lot.
Speeding up the user interface was high on everybody's list of improvements, with the proposed Sugar UI changes a close second. He showed them Joyride 1892 to illustrate the proposed changes, and discussed changes to the activity menu bar. Some of the technical team got excited and started downloading it to play with.


A close third was improving the power management of the laptop to extend the life of a single battery charge. Following were improvements to the group model (specifically, they are looking at support of multiple groups, possibly defined and shared between users --- e.g. the teacher makes a group that is "first grade", so it is easy to invite only the first graders to join an activity.
==School Server==
Martin Langhoff reports lots of hacking around xs-config. He shaved all the yaks necessary to get portable xs-build actually building live CDs
successfully. PyAr programmers Alejandro Cura, Lucio Torre and Ricardo Quesada worked with Martin and held 2 XS-focused Sprints, working on idmgr (security and registration lag) and CDpedia (yet another wikipedia slicer). (2 weeks ago, catching up on weekend reports)


Improvements in the network association algorithm (the laptop needs to automatically identify school servers, irrespective of the connection method, mesh or AP, #6855) were assumed. We also need to continue the work on improving the reliability of the collaboration middleware under lossy network conditions. Several new patches have arrived from Collabora to test in the (in limbo) mesh testbed! Re-enabling support for automatic mesh portal is a topic of increasing importance. A very strong requirement is that further machines arrive in Peru from manufacturing with build 703 and the Peru activity bundle installed.
With Tomeu Visozo's help, XO-to-XS backups are finally moving forward. The XS image is seeing some progress in minor installation bugs.


Backup to the school server wasn't highly rated, perhaps not surprising given the sample set. Unfortunately, deployments haven't gotten to the point of obtaining feedback directly from the field on Update.1. (Arahuay just upgraded from B2 machines to mass production XOs and Update.1 two weeks ago.).
==Power==
A build of the Multi-Battery Charger of 50 units is in the planning stages. The final few tweaks to the tooling are happening this week. It currently looks like this will happen the 2nd or 3 week in May.


==Hardware==
Richard Smith, Scott Ananian, Andres Salomon, & Chris Ball discussed some possibilities for enhanced power management. Ideas are brewing, more structured planning should occur soon. Andres and Richard began to lay out the plan of attack for achieving the sub-200ms resume goal. Work will begin as soon as Andres is finished with his upstream kernel merge.
A meeting was held at 1CC this week to kick-off the second generation of OLPC laptop hardware. The overall goals of this generation have been established for some time: 1) Much Lower Power, 2) Lower Cost, 3) More robust and easier to repair, and 4) Increased performance without sacrificing any more important goal. A surprising amount of consensus was reached on the overall form factor and look and feel, and more information will be publicly announced soon.


==Software==
Chris Ball began thinking about a user-selected low-power mode for the XO, to showcase our power management work, Trac #6935. This would be an "under the covers" mode where we prolong your battery life by any means necessary, including disabling networking (which is currently the major obstacle to pervasive power management all the time).
===Scott Ananian===
* Most of my time was spent on networking issues. I wrote up a set of networking principles to guide deployment networking assumptions: [[Network principles]]. This document is still a work-in-progress; I'm working on integrating comments and prototyping some ideas to firm up proposals.
* Towards the end of the week, I investigated the skype, Ubuntu Mobile, and Edubuntu ports to the XO.


==Software Development==
===Chris Ball===
* Working on a manual "extreme low-power" mode. Came up against obstacles one and two: the EC commands for turning off the wireles device by putting it into reset are not implemented in the driver, and we'll need to be able to create per-kernel initrds before we can make the USB controller modular. Started work on both of these.
Eben Eliason cleaned up and pushed Journal redesigns, now in joyride, and worked with Martin Dengler on improving/adding devices to the Frame.
* Once these are done, we can add a manual UI switch that turns off the wireless chip and unloads the host controller (which will give us about 300ms resume time and large power saving) before enabling OHM's idle suspend mode and backlight dimming.
* Realized that the "wikipedia-iphone" open-source project (which stores compressed wikipedia snapshots on the iPhone and allows browsing of the snapshot by decompressing articles on-the-fly) is a great fit for us. Worked with Mel Chua to document what the steps to port it to an XO activity would be. Please see Mel's write up: [[Wiki server]]. The full text of the Spanish Wikipedia is 400M compressed; by selecting only popular, well-linked, regularly-edited articles, this could drop to a size where it makes sense to put it on XOs directly. 400M is already appropriate for putting on a school server.


===Javier Cardona on the thin firmware project or soft AP===
Scott Ananian spent some time this week assessing the technical viability of Sugar on Windows. Please look for his Mini-conference video postings at [[Apr_3-4_Mini-conference]]. Also, he started gathering useful content from his FISL trip at
* 8388 mac80211 driver and firmware are functional for infra and monitor mode.
http://download.laptop.org/content/conf/20080417-fisl08/
* device can scan, associate and transfer data (for now with no security and at fixed rate).
* b43 (broadcom) + mac80211 + hostapd AP solution has been tested with latest hostapd and wireless kernel + necessary patches. This will be the golden system that we'll compare our libertas based solution with.
* build and testing procedures have been documented.
* we should be able to make a first development release in two weeks (it will not include AP functionality yet).


===Morgan Collett===
Chris Ball resurrected our Tinderbox tool, and told it all about the joyride, faster and update.1 build streams as well as how to build sugar-jhbuild regularly. Michael Stone began to outline some documentation for how volunteers can help us by running and improving it themselves at [[Tinderbox]].
* worked on [[Tubes Tutorial]] to get it in line with changes to HelloMesh
* worked on a proof of concept to launch Chat when a non-Sugar Jabber client initiates a connection (testing, almost ready for review)


===Guillaume Desmottes===
Michael Stone prepared rainbow patches allowing faster activity launching and sugarization. He submitted them for review to code review. He also reviewed backup bugs, then organized a software status meeting on datastore and backup bugs.
- Investigated few presence related bugs
- Continue to implement Gadget client. Most of it is done now.


===Ricardo Carrano===
There was much discussion this week on the mailing lists and in forums regarding OLPC's commitment to open source, transparency, and how to improve communications. Most of the team spent time working with the community, in discussion and in writing their own thoughts on how to move forward. There will be more discussions and a meeting with Nicholas next week when he is back in town.
* Finished testing firmware release 22.p10. It fixes many bugs (#4616, #6709, #4927, #6589) and it will be released to joyride as soon as Javier Cardona rewrites/approves the necessary driver patches.
* Summarized a list of current wireless issues in [[Wireless Issues Apr08]] and started the [[Network Issues May08]] to collect contributions for a new list with the more ambitious goal of concentrating all network-related issues. Please contribute!


===Andres Salomon===
Sayamindu Dasgupta took the existing Pootle user's Guide presentation created by Sameer Verma and updated it to reflect the new look and feel of our Pootle installation. He also added a few more slides, highlighting some of the special cases one might encounter while working on the translations, as well as some tricks that might make the translation easier. The slides are available at https://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.odp and https://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.pdf.
* worked on getting more stuff upstream.
* merged master up w/ 2.6.25, discussed branching a new stable from it
* created and merged newmaster up w/ linus
* fixed a number of bugs in master and newmaster
Linus's 2.6.26 will be the first upstream kernel capable of booting on an XO.


===Michael Stone===
Simon Schampijer has been doing stabilizing work by cleaning the sugar code using pylint.
This week, I reviewed touchpad bugs and prepared some straw-man text around which to organize further development. I also helped Dennis

experiment with Sugar-on-F-9-on-XO with Dennis, critiqued several patches by Martin Dengler, critiqued Eben's Journal redesign work
==Network/Collaboration==
with Ben Schwartz and Jameson Quinn, and reviewed parts of Scott's "Network Principles" document with Daf.
Guillaume Desmottes ressurected the video-chat-activity and packaged the needed bits to make it work with current Joyride. It's far from
being perfect but it should be usable for simple tests (he successfully established audio/video calls between 2 XO's and between 1 XO and
Empathy). See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/013227.html for details.

It appeared than some collaboration problems are due to ejabberd bugs. Need to contact Process-1 guys. Maybe we could add a "ejabberd" component to trac assigned to them?

Morgan Collett tested ejabberd installation instructions ([[Installing_ejabberd]]) with Ubuntu 8.04. He also worked on Sugar in Ubuntu 8.04. He extended the HelloMesh collaboration example to send a simple text control over the Tube, with alerts to show what is happening. He fixed a bundlebuilder problem in Sugar introduced by the pylint patches and worked on Chat UI. Please send Morgan any collaboration-related news, or add it to [[Collaboration_Central]].

Dafydd Harries worked on introductory documentation to Telepathy framework, helped Guillaume get started on working on Gadget, and began mentoring Assim in his Summer of Code project.

Dennis Gilmore reports that we can now submit activities for review. Fedora 9 has working support in GDM/KDM to log into sugar. Draft guidelines can be found here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DennisGilmore/SugarActivityGuidelines. They will be moved to the final location very soon. This will offer a great platform for developing activities. it will also help sugar be more accessible to people. Please package and submit your activity. Please ask Dennis if you have questions.

==Testing==
John Watlington, in Peru this week, performed tests against different access points, while the Collaboration and Mesh Testbed in Peabody was dismantled and is in search for its new home. Two more low-cost access points (one from Linksys and one from DLink) have been tested against a classroom of fifty XOs, and seemed to perform fine.

Ricardo Carrano reports that tests with firmware 22.p10 during the week revealed that we seen to be free of #6589, but we still have issues with the multicast filter (new issues were found in the proposed path and addressed during the week). With a test kernel, we can now run firmware 22.p10 without problems in nodes were idle suspend is not active, but a suspended node still does not react as expected (it is incapable of detecting a new neighbor or shared activity). The next step is determining if there are issues in the firmware or if the driver patch is still not satisfactory.

He is attempting to build a clear view of current wireless issues and started a wiki page which focus on problems to be addressed in the libertas firmware or driver but which also lists other network-related issues like middleware, hardware, school server or applications ([[Wireless_Issues_Apr08]]) On the same note, I am trying to update the open tickets and close the fixed ones. Contributions to the page and to the tickets are more than welcome.


==Support==
==Support==
Kim Quirk and Adam Holt held a G1G1 post mortem review to capture the important things that were done right and done wrong. We will deliver a summary of this to all interested people at OLPC in another week. Attending the meeting were representatives from all our partners. Some highlights: It is critical to appoint someone with oversight and accountability for the entire program as too many things fell into holes with no owner. Also most people felt that they 'pulled out all the stops' for this program to the point of burning bridges and burning out. Every partner ended up getting involved in the time-consuming and stressful job of supporting people who were very upset.
Richard Smith helped out with the OLPC manufacturing server some more this week. Turns out some of the issues were not as bad as originally thought and we were able to work out most of the issues with the erroneous data we got from Quanta. They claim to have added some checks that will help prevent future occurrences.


===Emily Smith===
Richard Smith wrote to the community to address issues with keyboard failures due to sticky keys. The manufacturers of the keyboard have worked with OLPC to make changes to the internal construction of the keyboard. We strongly believe that these changes should fix the sticky keys issue. These changes have been rolled in over the last few weeks of production.
* sent out 50+ tax receipts for donated XOs

* continued to work on shipping problems for G1G1
If indeed the problem is much more widespread then OLPC needs more accurate data on the failure rate. OLPC invites the community to help.
* continued to send out replacement machines for RMAs
If you currently have an XO with a sticky key then please add your serial number to the following wiki page and what key(s) appear to be
* Began manually notifying RMA recipients of their FedEx tracking numbers
sticking. [[Stuck_keys_SN]]
* Found that about 10% of RMAs reshipped have problems with delivery (address change, requested refund not reshipment, etc)

Emily Smith reports that she and Adam Holt have successfully created a shipping order to Brightstar for 122 replacement laptops, and for spare parts for our first potential repair centers. No replacements had been going out in the last several weeks due to problems ranging from oversight of the RMA program to detailed format problems with our ship orders. Communicating shipping orders with BStar has been a problem for weeks and donors continue to be frustrated with these delays. We hope we have the ship order detail figured out by early next week with much help from Christine Myrick and Gustavo Mariotto.

Emily spoke with about 5 donors on the phone regarding G1G1 refunds and Getting Started questions. The majority of her time is spent answering emails regarding G1G1 questions ("where's my laptop?" is most common, followed by "how do I use this thing?" and "It's too difficult to use, I want my money back!"). She also sends out tax receipts for people who have re-donated their laptops back to us (about 70 in that queue).

Adam Holt reports that he continues to work on tons of escalated shipping and billing tickets. He is very hopeful that the deluge will ease by around May 1. Adam is working with 15 worldwide community repair centers' and sent out the first broken laptops to them to seed their centers. He is also collecting updates from the Support Gang for next week's G1G1 PostMortem, lessons learned, so that the extensive experience can be used in future programs.


==SysAdmin==
==SysAdmin==
===Henry Hardy===
Henry Edward Hardy placed the order for three new servers to replace pedal,crank and xs-dev. We expect to receive these within a few weeks and start configuring them. Thanks to everyone who helped with the specification and ordering process!
* All monitored systems had 100% uptime.

* Crank (dev, trac, git) continues to be slow. On April 28, a small problem caused by an apparent hash collision between 2 tickets which contributed to added slowness of trac occured and was resolved.
We experienced significant downtime at 1cc this week due to an unscheduled electric power interruption. Everything at 1cc was down for several hours. Public facing services on crank and pedal such as git repositories, mailing lists and mail aliases, OLPC website and wikis, were apparently unaffected.
* Upgrade of grinch filer is scheduled for this upcoming weekend. We plan to add nine 1 terabyte disks to the coraid 1521 filer. Grinch will be unavailable from Saturday at noon EDT Saturday May 3 to Monday May 5 at 09:00 EDT.

We are done with testing and pre-configuring the Big Sister monitoring service. This will assist in monitoring the health of our systems and give us some metrics for uptime and service accessibility and response times. We plan to deploy the Big Sister server on the xs-dev replacement.

There has been a power-related crash which has damaged the filestructure on the Chinese-deployed OLPC manufacturing data server. Richard Smith and Henry are assisting in the recovery efforts.

==Other==
Charles Kane has produced a wonderful Internet slideshow which is posted on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4ojFcZIqRU. He was assisted by Michail Bletsas, Darah Tappitake, Jennifer Amaya, Henry Edward Hardy and Bernie Innocenti of OLPC-Europe.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 15:22, 7 May 2008

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 129743]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-05-04

A note from the editor:
I have been reading the discussions this past week on the mission and direction of OLPC and OLPC's outreach to the community. I'd like to reiterate that we at OLPC are committed to create Sugar as an open source project, as it provides a great opportunity for both learners and for contributors. Sugar in combination with the XO hardware extends this opportunity even further through the mesh, power management, and robustness features of the hardware required for many of the environments where we want to provide help. We have sold or given away hundreds of thousands of laptops running Sugar on GNU/Linux on the XO. We plan to continue to do that. This year's Tech Team budget allows us to almost double our personnel in development, test, and support. We are very excited about being able to hire at this level over the next few months.
OLPC has had an amazing amount of contributions from volunteers in the community in all areas including development, test, support, translations, documentation, marketing/messaging, and even business expertise. We truly value these contributions. What we haven't done well (at least recently) is to support people who are trying to help us. We need to fix our communications with volunteers and community groups. We need to be open and transparent without compromising the confidentiality of others that we might do business with. This is difficult but it is not rocket science. I think we can do it. Sometimes when everyone is overworked, it is much easier to focus on the details of the day than to see the bigger problems. I intend to make some specific recommendations towards better communications in the next few weeks. Your comments, thoughts, and ideas are welcome.
- Kim Quirk
Dir of Tech Team

Power and Hardware

The first Multi-Battery Charger sample parts off of the tooling made it to 1cc this week. Richard has been spending most of his time purchasing, scrounging up, and assembling all the other parts in order to create a working prototype. Once assembled it will start to get used at 1cc.

Richard has modified his power logging script to try and do battery life estimation calculations as a first try for something that can be used for the battery monitor in sugar. Its available here: http://dev.laptop.org/~rsmith/olpc-bat_ttl

Tech Team in Deployments

While in Peru over the past week, John Watlington queried individuals in the MED to prioritize software improvements being considered. Speeding up the user interface was high on everybody's list of improvements, with the proposed Sugar UI changes a close second. He showed them Joyride 1892 to illustrate the proposed changes, and discussed changes to the activity menu bar. Some of the technical team got excited and started downloading it to play with.

A close third was improving the power management of the laptop to extend the life of a single battery charge. Following were improvements to the group model (specifically, they are looking at support of multiple groups, possibly defined and shared between users --- e.g. the teacher makes a group that is "first grade", so it is easy to invite only the first graders to join an activity.

Improvements in the network association algorithm (the laptop needs to automatically identify school servers, irrespective of the connection method, mesh or AP, #6855) were assumed. We also need to continue the work on improving the reliability of the collaboration middleware under lossy network conditions. Several new patches have arrived from Collabora to test in the (in limbo) mesh testbed! Re-enabling support for automatic mesh portal is a topic of increasing importance. A very strong requirement is that further machines arrive in Peru from manufacturing with build 703 and the Peru activity bundle installed.

Backup to the school server wasn't highly rated, perhaps not surprising given the sample set. Unfortunately, deployments haven't gotten to the point of obtaining feedback directly from the field on Update.1. (Arahuay just upgraded from B2 machines to mass production XOs and Update.1 two weeks ago.).

Hardware

A meeting was held at 1CC this week to kick-off the second generation of OLPC laptop hardware. The overall goals of this generation have been established for some time: 1) Much Lower Power, 2) Lower Cost, 3) More robust and easier to repair, and 4) Increased performance without sacrificing any more important goal. A surprising amount of consensus was reached on the overall form factor and look and feel, and more information will be publicly announced soon.

Software

Scott Ananian

  • Most of my time was spent on networking issues. I wrote up a set of networking principles to guide deployment networking assumptions: Network principles. This document is still a work-in-progress; I'm working on integrating comments and prototyping some ideas to firm up proposals.
  • Towards the end of the week, I investigated the skype, Ubuntu Mobile, and Edubuntu ports to the XO.

Chris Ball

  • Working on a manual "extreme low-power" mode. Came up against obstacles one and two: the EC commands for turning off the wireles device by putting it into reset are not implemented in the driver, and we'll need to be able to create per-kernel initrds before we can make the USB controller modular. Started work on both of these.
  • Once these are done, we can add a manual UI switch that turns off the wireless chip and unloads the host controller (which will give us about 300ms resume time and large power saving) before enabling OHM's idle suspend mode and backlight dimming.
  • Realized that the "wikipedia-iphone" open-source project (which stores compressed wikipedia snapshots on the iPhone and allows browsing of the snapshot by decompressing articles on-the-fly) is a great fit for us. Worked with Mel Chua to document what the steps to port it to an XO activity would be. Please see Mel's write up: Wiki server. The full text of the Spanish Wikipedia is 400M compressed; by selecting only popular, well-linked, regularly-edited articles, this could drop to a size where it makes sense to put it on XOs directly. 400M is already appropriate for putting on a school server.

Javier Cardona on the thin firmware project or soft AP

  • 8388 mac80211 driver and firmware are functional for infra and monitor mode.
  • device can scan, associate and transfer data (for now with no security and at fixed rate).
  • b43 (broadcom) + mac80211 + hostapd AP solution has been tested with latest hostapd and wireless kernel + necessary patches. This will be the golden system that we'll compare our libertas based solution with.
  • build and testing procedures have been documented.
  • we should be able to make a first development release in two weeks (it will not include AP functionality yet).

Morgan Collett

  • worked on Tubes Tutorial to get it in line with changes to HelloMesh
  • worked on a proof of concept to launch Chat when a non-Sugar Jabber client initiates a connection (testing, almost ready for review)

Guillaume Desmottes

- Investigated few presence related bugs - Continue to implement Gadget client. Most of it is done now.

Ricardo Carrano

  • Finished testing firmware release 22.p10. It fixes many bugs (#4616, #6709, #4927, #6589) and it will be released to joyride as soon as Javier Cardona rewrites/approves the necessary driver patches.
  • Summarized a list of current wireless issues in Wireless Issues Apr08 and started the Network Issues May08 to collect contributions for a new list with the more ambitious goal of concentrating all network-related issues. Please contribute!

Andres Salomon

  • worked on getting more stuff upstream.
  • merged master up w/ 2.6.25, discussed branching a new stable from it
  • created and merged newmaster up w/ linus
  • fixed a number of bugs in master and newmaster

Linus's 2.6.26 will be the first upstream kernel capable of booting on an XO.

Michael Stone

This week, I reviewed touchpad bugs and prepared some straw-man text around which to organize further development. I also helped Dennis experiment with Sugar-on-F-9-on-XO with Dennis, critiqued several patches by Martin Dengler, critiqued Eben's Journal redesign work with Ben Schwartz and Jameson Quinn, and reviewed parts of Scott's "Network Principles" document with Daf.

Support

Kim Quirk and Adam Holt held a G1G1 post mortem review to capture the important things that were done right and done wrong. We will deliver a summary of this to all interested people at OLPC in another week. Attending the meeting were representatives from all our partners. Some highlights: It is critical to appoint someone with oversight and accountability for the entire program as too many things fell into holes with no owner. Also most people felt that they 'pulled out all the stops' for this program to the point of burning bridges and burning out. Every partner ended up getting involved in the time-consuming and stressful job of supporting people who were very upset.

Emily Smith

  • sent out 50+ tax receipts for donated XOs
  • continued to work on shipping problems for G1G1
  • continued to send out replacement machines for RMAs
  • Began manually notifying RMA recipients of their FedEx tracking numbers
  • Found that about 10% of RMAs reshipped have problems with delivery (address change, requested refund not reshipment, etc)

SysAdmin

Henry Hardy

  • All monitored systems had 100% uptime.
  • Crank (dev, trac, git) continues to be slow. On April 28, a small problem caused by an apparent hash collision between 2 tickets which contributed to added slowness of trac occured and was resolved.
  • Upgrade of grinch filer is scheduled for this upcoming weekend. We plan to add nine 1 terabyte disks to the coraid 1521 filer. Grinch will be unavailable from Saturday at noon EDT Saturday May 3 to Monday May 5 at 09:00 EDT.

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

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

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

Milestones

Latest milestones:

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

All milestones can be found here.


Press

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

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 129743]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-05-04

A note from the editor:
I have been reading the discussions this past week on the mission and direction of OLPC and OLPC's outreach to the community. I'd like to reiterate that we at OLPC are committed to create Sugar as an open source project, as it provides a great opportunity for both learners and for contributors. Sugar in combination with the XO hardware extends this opportunity even further through the mesh, power management, and robustness features of the hardware required for many of the environments where we want to provide help. We have sold or given away hundreds of thousands of laptops running Sugar on GNU/Linux on the XO. We plan to continue to do that. This year's Tech Team budget allows us to almost double our personnel in development, test, and support. We are very excited about being able to hire at this level over the next few months.
OLPC has had an amazing amount of contributions from volunteers in the community in all areas including development, test, support, translations, documentation, marketing/messaging, and even business expertise. We truly value these contributions. What we haven't done well (at least recently) is to support people who are trying to help us. We need to fix our communications with volunteers and community groups. We need to be open and transparent without compromising the confidentiality of others that we might do business with. This is difficult but it is not rocket science. I think we can do it. Sometimes when everyone is overworked, it is much easier to focus on the details of the day than to see the bigger problems. I intend to make some specific recommendations towards better communications in the next few weeks. Your comments, thoughts, and ideas are welcome.
- Kim Quirk
Dir of Tech Team

Power and Hardware

The first Multi-Battery Charger sample parts off of the tooling made it to 1cc this week. Richard has been spending most of his time purchasing, scrounging up, and assembling all the other parts in order to create a working prototype. Once assembled it will start to get used at 1cc.

Richard has modified his power logging script to try and do battery life estimation calculations as a first try for something that can be used for the battery monitor in sugar. Its available here: http://dev.laptop.org/~rsmith/olpc-bat_ttl

Tech Team in Deployments

While in Peru over the past week, John Watlington queried individuals in the MED to prioritize software improvements being considered. Speeding up the user interface was high on everybody's list of improvements, with the proposed Sugar UI changes a close second. He showed them Joyride 1892 to illustrate the proposed changes, and discussed changes to the activity menu bar. Some of the technical team got excited and started downloading it to play with.

A close third was improving the power management of the laptop to extend the life of a single battery charge. Following were improvements to the group model (specifically, they are looking at support of multiple groups, possibly defined and shared between users --- e.g. the teacher makes a group that is "first grade", so it is easy to invite only the first graders to join an activity.

Improvements in the network association algorithm (the laptop needs to automatically identify school servers, irrespective of the connection method, mesh or AP, #6855) were assumed. We also need to continue the work on improving the reliability of the collaboration middleware under lossy network conditions. Several new patches have arrived from Collabora to test in the (in limbo) mesh testbed! Re-enabling support for automatic mesh portal is a topic of increasing importance. A very strong requirement is that further machines arrive in Peru from manufacturing with build 703 and the Peru activity bundle installed.

Backup to the school server wasn't highly rated, perhaps not surprising given the sample set. Unfortunately, deployments haven't gotten to the point of obtaining feedback directly from the field on Update.1. (Arahuay just upgraded from B2 machines to mass production XOs and Update.1 two weeks ago.).

Hardware

A meeting was held at 1CC this week to kick-off the second generation of OLPC laptop hardware. The overall goals of this generation have been established for some time: 1) Much Lower Power, 2) Lower Cost, 3) More robust and easier to repair, and 4) Increased performance without sacrificing any more important goal. A surprising amount of consensus was reached on the overall form factor and look and feel, and more information will be publicly announced soon.

Software

Scott Ananian

  • Most of my time was spent on networking issues. I wrote up a set of networking principles to guide deployment networking assumptions: Network principles. This document is still a work-in-progress; I'm working on integrating comments and prototyping some ideas to firm up proposals.
  • Towards the end of the week, I investigated the skype, Ubuntu Mobile, and Edubuntu ports to the XO.

Chris Ball

  • Working on a manual "extreme low-power" mode. Came up against obstacles one and two: the EC commands for turning off the wireles device by putting it into reset are not implemented in the driver, and we'll need to be able to create per-kernel initrds before we can make the USB controller modular. Started work on both of these.
  • Once these are done, we can add a manual UI switch that turns off the wireless chip and unloads the host controller (which will give us about 300ms resume time and large power saving) before enabling OHM's idle suspend mode and backlight dimming.
  • Realized that the "wikipedia-iphone" open-source project (which stores compressed wikipedia snapshots on the iPhone and allows browsing of the snapshot by decompressing articles on-the-fly) is a great fit for us. Worked with Mel Chua to document what the steps to port it to an XO activity would be. Please see Mel's write up: Wiki server. The full text of the Spanish Wikipedia is 400M compressed; by selecting only popular, well-linked, regularly-edited articles, this could drop to a size where it makes sense to put it on XOs directly. 400M is already appropriate for putting on a school server.

Javier Cardona on the thin firmware project or soft AP

  • 8388 mac80211 driver and firmware are functional for infra and monitor mode.
  • device can scan, associate and transfer data (for now with no security and at fixed rate).
  • b43 (broadcom) + mac80211 + hostapd AP solution has been tested with latest hostapd and wireless kernel + necessary patches. This will be the golden system that we'll compare our libertas based solution with.
  • build and testing procedures have been documented.
  • we should be able to make a first development release in two weeks (it will not include AP functionality yet).

Morgan Collett

  • worked on Tubes Tutorial to get it in line with changes to HelloMesh
  • worked on a proof of concept to launch Chat when a non-Sugar Jabber client initiates a connection (testing, almost ready for review)

Guillaume Desmottes

- Investigated few presence related bugs - Continue to implement Gadget client. Most of it is done now.

Ricardo Carrano

  • Finished testing firmware release 22.p10. It fixes many bugs (#4616, #6709, #4927, #6589) and it will be released to joyride as soon as Javier Cardona rewrites/approves the necessary driver patches.
  • Summarized a list of current wireless issues in Wireless Issues Apr08 and started the Network Issues May08 to collect contributions for a new list with the more ambitious goal of concentrating all network-related issues. Please contribute!

Andres Salomon

  • worked on getting more stuff upstream.
  • merged master up w/ 2.6.25, discussed branching a new stable from it
  • created and merged newmaster up w/ linus
  • fixed a number of bugs in master and newmaster

Linus's 2.6.26 will be the first upstream kernel capable of booting on an XO.

Michael Stone

This week, I reviewed touchpad bugs and prepared some straw-man text around which to organize further development. I also helped Dennis experiment with Sugar-on-F-9-on-XO with Dennis, critiqued several patches by Martin Dengler, critiqued Eben's Journal redesign work with Ben Schwartz and Jameson Quinn, and reviewed parts of Scott's "Network Principles" document with Daf.

Support

Kim Quirk and Adam Holt held a G1G1 post mortem review to capture the important things that were done right and done wrong. We will deliver a summary of this to all interested people at OLPC in another week. Attending the meeting were representatives from all our partners. Some highlights: It is critical to appoint someone with oversight and accountability for the entire program as too many things fell into holes with no owner. Also most people felt that they 'pulled out all the stops' for this program to the point of burning bridges and burning out. Every partner ended up getting involved in the time-consuming and stressful job of supporting people who were very upset.

Emily Smith

  • sent out 50+ tax receipts for donated XOs
  • continued to work on shipping problems for G1G1
  • continued to send out replacement machines for RMAs
  • Began manually notifying RMA recipients of their FedEx tracking numbers
  • Found that about 10% of RMAs reshipped have problems with delivery (address change, requested refund not reshipment, etc)

SysAdmin

Henry Hardy

  • All monitored systems had 100% uptime.
  • Crank (dev, trac, git) continues to be slow. On April 28, a small problem caused by an apparent hash collision between 2 tickets which contributed to added slowness of trac occured and was resolved.
  • Upgrade of grinch filer is scheduled for this upcoming weekend. We plan to add nine 1 terabyte disks to the coraid 1521 filer. Grinch will be unavailable from Saturday at noon EDT Saturday May 3 to Monday May 5 at 09:00 EDT.

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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