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=LAPTOP NEWS=
=LAPTOP NEWS=


1. Khaled Hassounah worked this week on identifying the issues facing
1. Brazil: The presidency has created a new working group inside the
Arabic support in Sugar and then coordinated with Marco Gritti to apply the
Ministry of Education to focus solely on laptops and learning. The group is
required fixes. As of Build 131, it is possible to use Arabic not just in
comprehensive, covering all the necessary departments: basic education;
the browser, but the whole sugar interface; it looks beautiful.
teacher and content development; technology; distance support; and
integration and coordination. This group will coordinate all activities
needed for the deployment of laptops.


2. All eyes on Taiwan: The primary focus of the team this week has been on
2. Michail Bletsas and Barry Vercoe gave a 20-minute progress report in the
the last-minute debugging of the hardware and software in preparation for
Media Lab's Digital Life sponsor meeting followed by a flawless performance
the production of B1 machines. Engineers from Quanta, Marvell, AMD, Red
of Barry's laptop ensemble. OLPC monopolized the audience's questions and
Hat, Himax, and OLPC are working around the clock to meet the goal of an
overly positive feedback.
early November run of 1000 machines.


3. Nicholas Nicholas was the keynote for Forrester's annual Consumer Forum,
3. Display: Acceptance-criteria testing for the LCD panels began this week.
the theme of which for this year was: “Using Technology to Empower the
Various display artifacts were combined to create worst-case panel
Masses.” Offers of corporate help have poured in since.
configurations. These panels were graded by Mary Lou. Most artifacts were
barely (if at all) noticeable. More detailed acceptance criteria will be
established (called fitness-of-use testing) in mid-November with materials
from the B1 build.


4. Mary Lou keynoted the mLearn mobile learning conference in Banff. This
4. This week Marcelo Tosatti and Dan Williams continued work on the Marvell
is the crowd that thinks cellphones, PDAs and the ilk are the way to cross
Libertas driver, trying to get it into shape to use in B1. This requires
the digital divide. Their response to the presentation: they'd like to
getting enough things working to be able to use it with NetworkManager, one
ditch their cell phones and start writing and working with the laptop.
of the standard Linux utilities. The driver, as it came from Marvell, is
adequate for embedded platforms, but isn't ready for desktop use. A lot of
work has gone into getting things into shape. Dan and John Palmieri also
spent time building a NetworkManager front end for B1.


5. Chris Blizzard presented at the Seneca Free Software and Open Source
5. Dan also worked with the Thai team to get a group of demos together to
Symposium. His talk was taped and will be made available on the web.
take back with them (they returned home after a three-week stay at OLPC).


6. Wireless: Marcelo Tosatti has been working with Ronak Chokshi and others
6. Marco Gritti and Dan have done a huge amount of work over the last
of Marvell to update Marvell's driver development environment to that we
couple of weeks on Sugar, getting ready for the B1. The shell is working
use for development, and to integrate code from Marvell into the wireless
pretty well and the browser activity has a lot of the nice style elements
driver for reprogramming the Marvell chip wireless firmware. As of late
that Eben Eliason and the Pentagram team have worked on. They also have
Friday, this code was seen to work in the Libertas wireless driver we are
some group-browsing functions done. The Sugar frame now supports the system
using.
tray spec, so other programs can embed icons and functionality into the
frame. We'll use this for our network and power status at some point.


7. Embedded Controller code: Ray Tseng of Quanta has provided several new
7. Chris Blizzard reports that the team is generating builds at 4PM every
versions of the EC code this week to help fix problems with power on and
day. The team at Red Hat is adding their daily work, as appropriate, to
with battery charging.
those builds. This means that we can test drivers, package updates and
changes every morning when we come in. It has also set internal deadlines
so that everyone integrates around the same time.


8. Camera: The CAFE FPGA implementation of the camera is now working. Jon
8. We've also started to include a newer D-Bus to our builds to fix a
Corbet has restructured the driver to meet the requirements of the V4L2
number of bugs and a newer copy of HAL which saves a lot of memory and is
maintainer. QVGA mode is working (which, among other things, means that
much faster.
XawTV, an X application for watching television, now works); CIF and QCIF
require some register “magic” that we don't yet understand, which Jon has
asked Omnivision to clarify. Some new controls are wired up, including
horizontal and vertical flip. Nobody had yet noticed that the image was
mirrored, including Jon, until adding the flip option showed it was wrong
all this time.


9. NAND flash: Dave Woodhouse's NAND flash driver is complete now, and has
9. Mitch cleaned up the SPI (system programming interface) recovery code,
uncovered several problems in the CAFE implementation which have been
merged it with the in-system re-flashing code in OFW, and tested it. In the
fixed. It now works well enough that the BTest systems are able to boot
process of testing CAFE NAND support, Mitch solidified support in the OFW
from CAFE NAND flash, and ECC has been implemented.
code base and developed some diagnostics for the NAND chips themselves.


10. BIOS: Wednesday, we had no fully functioning BIOS for use with CAFE. We
10. Chris Ball has set up a software stress-test environment and has run it
had intended to use LinuxBIOS with Linux as bootloader for B1 with a
on each of the configurations of our boards, helping to expose an
transition to Open Firmware (OFW) as bootloader before B2. We continued
unreliable RAM part, which has now been disqualified from our second-source
with both possibilities in parallel, such that by Friday we had both
parts list. The tinderbox has its first performance test, tracking general
working. Testing of OFW's new USB stack has succeeded, so we have decided
Python performance for each of our OS builds. The tinderbox will also be
to use OFW immediately. Our efforts will now focus on the LinuxBIOS/OFW
used for stress testing of the B1 board in the coming week.
combination.


11. Battery driver: A preliminary version of a battery driver was checked
11. Multi-media: Scott Nelson and Greg Wright from Real Networks performed
in by Dave Woodhouse; what is remaining is interrupt-driven detection of
detailed testing of an A1 board. While their findings were “a result of
state changes in the battery, to avoid polling. Dave is working in the
only a few days research and therefore should not be considered final or
Linux community to define a new battery interface, as battery kernel
complete,” they nonetheless give an idea of the lower bound of the laptop's
interface(s) in Linux is a mess and people are looking for a better design
capabilities, which will only improve. Their conclusion: the device is “a
to standardize around.
capable multi-media platform for everything short of high bit-rate video
content and large frame sizes.”


12. Sugar UI: Dan Williams has made progress with getting NetworkManager
working on the laptop and fitting it to the designs that Eben Eliason and
Marco Gritti have been working on to control networking. Marco is adding a
new build nearly every day to the image snapshots, reflecting the fast pace
of work.

13. We've had some additions to our builds which will make the
out-of-the-box experience for the beta builds a lot better. eToys is now
part of the image builds and Dan has been doing a lot of work trying to get
Barry Vercoe's Csound package into the build as well. (Barry was successful
in getting real-time pitch tracking through the microphone input working on
the laptop this week!)

14. We are working hard to create a rich-text editor based on the code from
a popular free-software program called Abiword. There's also work being
done to finish the Sugar port of the PDF reader Evince by Marco and
Manusheel Gupa (a summer intern). It feels like we've reached a tipping
point with the user interface.


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 19:45, 28 October 2006

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.


LAPTOP NEWS

1. Khaled Hassounah worked this week on identifying the issues facing Arabic support in Sugar and then coordinated with Marco Gritti to apply the required fixes. As of Build 131, it is possible to use Arabic not just in the browser, but the whole sugar interface; it looks beautiful.

2. All eyes on Taiwan: The primary focus of the team this week has been on the last-minute debugging of the hardware and software in preparation for the production of B1 machines. Engineers from Quanta, Marvell, AMD, Red Hat, Himax, and OLPC are working around the clock to meet the goal of an early November run of 1000 machines.

3. Nicholas Nicholas was the keynote for Forrester's annual Consumer Forum, the theme of which for this year was: “Using Technology to Empower the Masses.” Offers of corporate help have poured in since.

4. Mary Lou keynoted the mLearn mobile learning conference in Banff. This is the crowd that thinks cellphones, PDAs and the ilk are the way to cross the digital divide. Their response to the presentation: they'd like to ditch their cell phones and start writing and working with the laptop.

5. Chris Blizzard presented at the Seneca Free Software and Open Source Symposium. His talk was taped and will be made available on the web.

6. Wireless: Marcelo Tosatti has been working with Ronak Chokshi and others of Marvell to update Marvell's driver development environment to that we use for development, and to integrate code from Marvell into the wireless driver for reprogramming the Marvell chip wireless firmware. As of late Friday, this code was seen to work in the Libertas wireless driver we are using.

7. Embedded Controller code: Ray Tseng of Quanta has provided several new versions of the EC code this week to help fix problems with power on and with battery charging.

8. Camera: The CAFE FPGA implementation of the camera is now working. Jon Corbet has restructured the driver to meet the requirements of the V4L2 maintainer. QVGA mode is working (which, among other things, means that XawTV, an X application for watching television, now works); CIF and QCIF require some register “magic” that we don't yet understand, which Jon has asked Omnivision to clarify. Some new controls are wired up, including horizontal and vertical flip. Nobody had yet noticed that the image was mirrored, including Jon, until adding the flip option showed it was wrong all this time.

9. NAND flash: Dave Woodhouse's NAND flash driver is complete now, and has uncovered several problems in the CAFE implementation which have been fixed. It now works well enough that the BTest systems are able to boot from CAFE NAND flash, and ECC has been implemented.

10. BIOS: Wednesday, we had no fully functioning BIOS for use with CAFE. We had intended to use LinuxBIOS with Linux as bootloader for B1 with a transition to Open Firmware (OFW) as bootloader before B2. We continued with both possibilities in parallel, such that by Friday we had both working. Testing of OFW's new USB stack has succeeded, so we have decided to use OFW immediately. Our efforts will now focus on the LinuxBIOS/OFW combination.

11. Battery driver: A preliminary version of a battery driver was checked in by Dave Woodhouse; what is remaining is interrupt-driven detection of state changes in the battery, to avoid polling. Dave is working in the Linux community to define a new battery interface, as battery kernel interface(s) in Linux is a mess and people are looking for a better design to standardize around.

12. Sugar UI: Dan Williams has made progress with getting NetworkManager working on the laptop and fitting it to the designs that Eben Eliason and Marco Gritti have been working on to control networking. Marco is adding a new build nearly every day to the image snapshots, reflecting the fast pace of work.

13. We've had some additions to our builds which will make the out-of-the-box experience for the beta builds a lot better. eToys is now part of the image builds and Dan has been doing a lot of work trying to get Barry Vercoe's Csound package into the build as well. (Barry was successful in getting real-time pitch tracking through the microphone input working on the laptop this week!)

14. We are working hard to create a rich-text editor based on the code from a popular free-software program called Abiword. There's also work being done to finish the Sugar port of the PDF reader Evince by Marco and Manusheel Gupa (a summer intern). It feels like we've reached a tipping point with the user interface.

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

Oct. 2006 B-test boards become available
Aug. 2006 Working prototype of the dual-mode display
06 Jun. 2006 First video with working prototype [1]
May 2006 A-test boards become available
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

24 Oct. 2006 LA Times | Upward Mobility in a Laptop
24 Oct. 2006 Fortune | This PC wants to save the world
11 Oct. 2006 New York Times | U.S. Group Reaches Deal to Provide Laptops to All Libyan Schoolchildren
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
21 Aug. 2006 EWeek.com | Knocking Down Barriers to the $100 Laptop
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
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.
11 Dec. 2005 NYTimes | NY Times: 5th Annual Year in Ideas $100 Laptop
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.
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
  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
  CNET | $100 Laptop Takes World Stage
  CNET | $100 Laptop Expected in Late 2006
  Christian Science Monitor | A Low-Cost Laptop for Every Child
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.
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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