OLPC:News: Difference between revisions
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=LAPTOP NEWS= |
=LAPTOP NEWS= |
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1. Mark Foster happily reports that the DCON ASIC is up and running, and first pass silicon is fully functional. While the chip has a few bugs that will be corrected for future builds—including higher power consumption than planned—we will be able to exercise all the planned capabilities of the chip on the B1 systems. |
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2. Mark also reports that the CAFE (Camera and Flash Enabler) FPGA is now fully functional, with all three of the device subsystems working flawlessly. The camera, SD card slot, and NAND Flash controllers have not only been tested, they are fully integrated into the OLPC Linux kernel, with complete device drivers also working perfectly. Performance on the crucial NAND Flash controller—the laptop's primary storage device—is already much faster than that of the Geode, and will double again when the CAFE ASIC arrives. Many thanks to the great work by the CAFE team at Marvell, as well as the software team who pulled off the necessary device drivers in record time. |
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1. Khaled Hassounah worked this week on identifying the issues facing |
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Arabic support in Sugar and then coordinated with Marco Gritti to apply the |
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required fixes. As of Build 131, it is possible to use Arabic not just in |
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the browser, but the whole sugar interface; it looks beautiful. |
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3. For B1 we plan to use a Linux 2.6.19 OLPC kernel with a Red Hat Fedora Core 6 run-time environment; this is lower risk than combining our own work with Fedora changes that might affect us that would not be of benefit. |
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2. All eyes on Taiwan: The primary focus of the team this week has been on |
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the last-minute debugging of the hardware and software in preparation for |
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the production of B1 machines. Engineers from Quanta, Marvell, AMD, Red |
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Hat, Himax, and OLPC are working around the clock to meet the goal of an |
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early November run of 1000 machines. |
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4. Chris Blizzard reports that this was an exciting week for the software team. On the UI front we've had a lot of progress. Marco Gritti has moved from working on the shell and presentation bits to getting ready to start taking community contributions. This means starting on the parts of the code that allow anyone to build and deploy an activity that they have built. |
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3. Nicholas Nicholas was the keynote for Forrester's annual Consumer Forum, |
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the theme of which for this year was: “Using Technology to Empower the |
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Masses.” Offers of corporate help have poured in since. |
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The B1 build will include basic support for: |
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4. Mary Lou keynoted the mLearn mobile learning conference in Banff. This |
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* Chat |
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is the crowd that thinks cellphones, PDAs and the ilk are the way to cross |
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* Web Browser |
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the digital divide. Their response to the presentation: they'd like to |
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* Demo Sketching Program |
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ditch their cell phones and start writing and working with the laptop. |
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* Etoys |
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* TamTam (for creating sounds) |
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* Musical Memory Game |
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* Xbook PDF reader |
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Community work going on as well: we are starting to see activity builds of Abiword (a popular document editor and our probably route to supporting Microsoft document types), and an RSS reader called PenguinTV. |
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5. Chris Blizzard presented at the Seneca Free Software and Open Source |
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Symposium. His talk was taped and will be made available on the web. |
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5. Chris also reports that we made a lot of positive changes in the OS images this week as well. We've moved from the upstream Fedora kernels to our own builds to enable closer collaboration and faster turn around on builds. This won't work over the long term but it has enabled us to work faster and smarter in our current mode of development. |
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6. Wireless: Marcelo Tosatti has been working with Ronak Chokshi and others |
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of Marvell to update Marvell's driver development environment to that we |
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use for development, and to integrate code from Marvell into the wireless |
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driver for reprogramming the Marvell chip wireless firmware. As of late |
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Friday, this code was seen to work in the Libertas wireless driver we are |
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using. |
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6. Crossmark, OLPC's lightweight markup language, has a dual purpose: in the strict sense, it's a markup for (collaborative) authoring environments such as our wiki and blogs; at the same time, it serves as an actual document format, suitable for use in the e-book reader, as well as for conversion to other output formats. Crossmark is designed to be read and written by humans, and only incidentally by computers, although it is parsable unambiguously. Crossmark draft-4 has received positive feedback from community and publishers, mostly trivial changes and clarifications are being incorporated into what will become draft-5 next week. |
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7. Embedded Controller code: Ray Tseng of Quanta has provided several new |
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versions of the EC code this week to help fix problems with power on and |
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with battery charging. |
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8. Camera: The CAFE FPGA implementation of the camera is now working. Jon |
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Corbet has restructured the driver to meet the requirements of the V4L2 |
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maintainer. QVGA mode is working (which, among other things, means that |
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XawTV, an X application for watching television, now works); CIF and QCIF |
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require some register “magic” that we don't yet understand, which Jon has |
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asked Omnivision to clarify. Some new controls are wired up, including |
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horizontal and vertical flip. Nobody had yet noticed that the image was |
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mirrored, including Jon, until adding the flip option showed it was wrong |
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all this time. |
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9. NAND flash: Dave Woodhouse's NAND flash driver is complete now, and has |
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uncovered several problems in the CAFE implementation which have been |
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fixed. It now works well enough that the BTest systems are able to boot |
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from CAFE NAND flash, and ECC has been implemented. |
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10. BIOS: Wednesday, we had no fully functioning BIOS for use with CAFE. We |
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had intended to use LinuxBIOS with Linux as bootloader for B1 with a |
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transition to Open Firmware (OFW) as bootloader before B2. We continued |
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with both possibilities in parallel, such that by Friday we had both |
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working. Testing of OFW's new USB stack has succeeded, so we have decided |
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to use OFW immediately. Our efforts will now focus on the LinuxBIOS/OFW |
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combination. |
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11. Battery driver: A preliminary version of a battery driver was checked |
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in by Dave Woodhouse; what is remaining is interrupt-driven detection of |
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state changes in the battery, to avoid polling. Dave is working in the |
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Linux community to define a new battery interface, as battery kernel |
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interface(s) in Linux is a mess and people are looking for a better design |
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to standardize around. |
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12. Sugar UI: Dan Williams has made progress with getting NetworkManager |
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working on the laptop and fitting it to the designs that Eben Eliason and |
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Marco Gritti have been working on to control networking. Marco is adding a |
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new build nearly every day to the image snapshots, reflecting the fast pace |
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of work. |
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13. We've had some additions to our builds which will make the |
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out-of-the-box experience for the beta builds a lot better. eToys is now |
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part of the image builds and Dan has been doing a lot of work trying to get |
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Barry Vercoe's Csound package into the build as well. (Barry was successful |
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in getting real-time pitch tracking through the microphone input working on |
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the laptop this week!) |
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14. We are working hard to create a rich-text editor based on the code from |
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a popular free-software program called Abiword. There's also work being |
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done to finish the Sugar port of the PDF reader Evince by Marco, Tomeu Vizoso, and |
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Manusheel Gupa (a summer intern). It feels like we've reached a tipping |
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point with the user interface. |
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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]. |
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Revision as of 03:28, 6 November 2006
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Mark Foster happily reports that the DCON ASIC is up and running, and first pass silicon is fully functional. While the chip has a few bugs that will be corrected for future builds—including higher power consumption than planned—we will be able to exercise all the planned capabilities of the chip on the B1 systems.
2. Mark also reports that the CAFE (Camera and Flash Enabler) FPGA is now fully functional, with all three of the device subsystems working flawlessly. The camera, SD card slot, and NAND Flash controllers have not only been tested, they are fully integrated into the OLPC Linux kernel, with complete device drivers also working perfectly. Performance on the crucial NAND Flash controller—the laptop's primary storage device—is already much faster than that of the Geode, and will double again when the CAFE ASIC arrives. Many thanks to the great work by the CAFE team at Marvell, as well as the software team who pulled off the necessary device drivers in record time.
3. For B1 we plan to use a Linux 2.6.19 OLPC kernel with a Red Hat Fedora Core 6 run-time environment; this is lower risk than combining our own work with Fedora changes that might affect us that would not be of benefit.
4. Chris Blizzard reports that this was an exciting week for the software team. On the UI front we've had a lot of progress. Marco Gritti has moved from working on the shell and presentation bits to getting ready to start taking community contributions. This means starting on the parts of the code that allow anyone to build and deploy an activity that they have built.
The B1 build will include basic support for:
- Chat
- Web Browser
- Demo Sketching Program
- Etoys
- TamTam (for creating sounds)
- Musical Memory Game
- Xbook PDF reader
Community work going on as well: we are starting to see activity builds of Abiword (a popular document editor and our probably route to supporting Microsoft document types), and an RSS reader called PenguinTV.
5. Chris also reports that we made a lot of positive changes in the OS images this week as well. We've moved from the upstream Fedora kernels to our own builds to enable closer collaboration and faster turn around on builds. This won't work over the long term but it has enabled us to work faster and smarter in our current mode of development.
6. Crossmark, OLPC's lightweight markup language, has a dual purpose: in the strict sense, it's a markup for (collaborative) authoring environments such as our wiki and blogs; at the same time, it serves as an actual document format, suitable for use in the e-book reader, as well as for conversion to other output formats. Crossmark is designed to be read and written by humans, and only incidentally by computers, although it is parsable unambiguously. Crossmark draft-4 has received positive feedback from community and publishers, mostly trivial changes and clarifications are being incorporated into what will become draft-5 next week.
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) |
| Jan. 2005 | Laptop Intiative Officially Announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland |
PRESS
Video
(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found here.)