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=LAPTOP NEWS= |
=LAPTOP NEWS= |
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1. Dick Rowe has joined us as President of the OLPC Foundation. Former associate dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, and Chair of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, Dick spend several years working in Nigeria with the West African Examinations Council and more recently directed the Internet and Information Services team of the Howard Dean Campaign. |
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1. Shanghai: The first 100 B2 laptops were assembled at the end of the week at Quanta Shanghai. David Woodhouse, Jim Gettys, and Mary Lou Jepsen are in Shanghai with Quanta squashing the bugs. Mitch Bradley, Richard Smith, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon have spun several firmware releases in the past several days and provided invaluable testing data that enable the builds on this tight schedule. |
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With Dick's leadership, the Foundation will be responsible for the "bottoms up" work of the OLPC mission: raising investments from corporations, foundations, and individuals that will be used to stimulate local grassroots initiatives designed to enhance and sustain over time the effectiveness of XO Laptops as learning tools for children. OLPC's new website contains information about the Foundation under the "Participate" arrow. |
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2. The new laptop.org website designed by Pentagram and powered by Nurun was turned live this week. The new website is a welcome upgrade from the one that was originally hobbled together last spring. Many thanks to the teams at Pentagram and Nurun, as well as to Stephen Michaud and Richard Rowe, who wrote much of the copy under a tight deadline. Special thanks to Serge Rosilio of Nurun, who led the effort from soup to nuts. |
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2. Davos: The OLPC Foundation was officially launched last week at the World Economic Forum, where guests at a formal dinner hosted by Rupert Murdoch were able see a demonstration of the XO's talents at making music and taking pictures. |
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3. São Paulo and Porto Alegre: David Cavallo and Roseli de Deus Lopes ran a workshop for teachers in São Paulo at the University of São Paulo (USP) on Tuesday and Wednesday. David and Lea Fagundes ran second workshop in Porto Alegre at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) on Thursday and Friday. José Luiz Aquino, special advisor to President Lula, and OLPC advisor Rodrigo Mesquita attended throughout. Antonio Battro spoke about the OLPC educational concept; Sylvia Gonzales and Miguel Brechner, OLPC coordinators from Uruguay, and Laura Serra and Alejandro Piscitelli, OLPC coordinators from Argentina also presented. |
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3. Addis Ababa: Calestous Juma gave the keynote address at the Summit of the African Union, a meeting of the African heads of state. In his address, he introduced them to the XO Laptop. |
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4. Porto Alegre: Walter Bender met with the organizers of fisl8.0, the 8th annual international forum on free and open-source software. OLPC has had a presence at the forum the last two years. We discussed the possibility running sessions for both developers and educators. Since one of the test schools for OLPC in Brazil will be in Porto Alegre, the organizers are considering to showcase the kids using the OLPC machines. |
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4. New York: Walter and SJ Klein presented at the UN Committee on Teaching About the UN. The audience included roughly 500 educators, many of whom have connections with schools in the least-developed countries (LDCs). |
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5. Last-minute B2 mods: This week was dominated by final issues running up to the Beta-2 build of machines. There were a few last-minute surprises, but the team worked through them. These included: |
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5. Rio de Janeiro: Michail Bletsas ran a two-day technical workshop on mesh networking at the Federal University of Fluminese. National coordinators from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, technical teams, and students working on the mesh attended. |
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:Microphone problems. A new firmware update fixed problems with the microphone that were discovered with the Beta-2 build. The firmware was not properly detecting the B-2 board and hence was not setting a mode correctly on the cs5536. |
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6. B2 build: 650 units have been built at Quanta Shanghai. The rest of the B2 units will likely be built by the end of this week. |
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:Power and charging problems. There are still a number of battery-charging problems related to code in the embedded controller (EC). A new release of the EC code fixed a number of the issues. |
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7. Touch pad: Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, Mitch Bradley and Chris Ball spent much of the week diagnosing (and fixing) problems with the touch pad. |
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6. Wireless: Dan Williams attended a wireless summit in London. Lots of people from the wireless world and Linux were in attendance. Intel, Broadcom and CSR were represented, as well as Cozybit, who was represented by Javier Cardona. (Javier and his colleagues have done a lot of work for Marvell and OLPC.) Red Hat sent Dan and John Linville, who is the upstream wireless maintained for the kernel. They discussed specific issues about the code in the kernel, including how to share more code and interfaces in the drivers. In the past, the drivers have all had their own interfaces and work has been underway for quite a while to unify them so that user space utilities will work better. |
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8. Chris Ball, Adam Jackson, Dan Williams and Jordan Crouse all spent time this week investigating why many graphic operations on the machine appear too slow. They came up with some strategies for improving performance. More work needs to be done in this area; a final resolution on these issues has not been made. |
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7. Sugar UI: Marco Gritti has been working hard to update Sugar to support newer versions of some of our libraries. He has moved most of the Sugar interface to support Python 2.5 (including support for building Python 2.5 as part of our build process) and Gecko 1.9. Python 2.5 is important for performance and startup issues and gives more longevity to our platform. Gecko 1.9 is the underlying engine that will be used in Firefox 3 and will be important because it will give us more control over font sizes and image zooming. Our 200DPI display needs a more flexible rendering system from the browser, something they are building into Gecko 1.9. |
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9. John Palmieri has been working on fixing issues in our front-end infrastructure. This includes more fixes for the canvas, some memory-leak fixes for the underlying message bus and more work on the Python bindings for the bus. He also spent some time looking at a Python launcher process that Johan Dahlin, an active external community member and owner of some of our more important components has created for us. This process is very likely to decrease the startup time for activities built with Python as well as save us a good bit of memory for each process by taking advantage of Unix copy-on-write capabilities. |
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8. Ricardo Medina and Walter Bender got Sugar opening its windows on a remote display—mostly. While still buggy, this feature will be especially useful for debugging—e.g., opening the Memphis window on another laptop—and projecting from a laptop by mapping to the display to a conventional machine. More work is needed to smoothly integrate this into Sugar, but it is a proof of principle nonetheless. |
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10. Marco Gritti updated Sugar to use xulrunner 1.9 (the basis for the upcoming Firefox 3); he also pushed out a bunch of new Sugar snapshots and did more work on the activity-bundle specification. |
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11. On Friday, John, Dan, Chris Ball, and Chris Blizzard went to Boston University to take place in FUDCon Boston 2007, a gathering of several hundred Fedora users and developers from all over the world. Fedora-specific topics were discussed including a large number of topics related to OLPC. Saturday and Sunday of this weekend are the Fedora Hackfest days; the laptop will be one of the "hackfests" taking place. They intend to work on the Python launcher and some bundle and activity topics. |
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Revision as of 15:56, 3 February 2007
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Dick Rowe has joined us as President of the OLPC Foundation. Former associate dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, and Chair of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, Dick spend several years working in Nigeria with the West African Examinations Council and more recently directed the Internet and Information Services team of the Howard Dean Campaign.
With Dick's leadership, the Foundation will be responsible for the "bottoms up" work of the OLPC mission: raising investments from corporations, foundations, and individuals that will be used to stimulate local grassroots initiatives designed to enhance and sustain over time the effectiveness of XO Laptops as learning tools for children. OLPC's new website contains information about the Foundation under the "Participate" arrow.
2. Davos: The OLPC Foundation was officially launched last week at the World Economic Forum, where guests at a formal dinner hosted by Rupert Murdoch were able see a demonstration of the XO's talents at making music and taking pictures.
3. Addis Ababa: Calestous Juma gave the keynote address at the Summit of the African Union, a meeting of the African heads of state. In his address, he introduced them to the XO Laptop.
4. New York: Walter and SJ Klein presented at the UN Committee on Teaching About the UN. The audience included roughly 500 educators, many of whom have connections with schools in the least-developed countries (LDCs).
5. Rio de Janeiro: Michail Bletsas ran a two-day technical workshop on mesh networking at the Federal University of Fluminese. National coordinators from Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, technical teams, and students working on the mesh attended.
6. B2 build: 650 units have been built at Quanta Shanghai. The rest of the B2 units will likely be built by the end of this week.
7. Touch pad: Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, Mitch Bradley and Chris Ball spent much of the week diagnosing (and fixing) problems with the touch pad.
8. Chris Ball, Adam Jackson, Dan Williams and Jordan Crouse all spent time this week investigating why many graphic operations on the machine appear too slow. They came up with some strategies for improving performance. More work needs to be done in this area; a final resolution on these issues has not been made.
9. John Palmieri has been working on fixing issues in our front-end infrastructure. This includes more fixes for the canvas, some memory-leak fixes for the underlying message bus and more work on the Python bindings for the bus. He also spent some time looking at a Python launcher process that Johan Dahlin, an active external community member and owner of some of our more important components has created for us. This process is very likely to decrease the startup time for activities built with Python as well as save us a good bit of memory for each process by taking advantage of Unix copy-on-write capabilities.
10. Marco Gritti updated Sugar to use xulrunner 1.9 (the basis for the upcoming Firefox 3); he also pushed out a bunch of new Sugar snapshots and did more work on the activity-bundle specification.
11. On Friday, John, Dan, Chris Ball, and Chris Blizzard went to Boston University to take place in FUDCon Boston 2007, a gathering of several hundred Fedora users and developers from all over the world. Fedora-specific topics were discussed including a large number of topics related to OLPC. Saturday and Sunday of this weekend are the Fedora Hackfest days; the laptop will be one of the "hackfests" taking place. They intend to work on the Python launcher and some bundle and activity topics.
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@laptop.org
MILESTONES
| Jan. 2007 | Rwanda announced its participation in the project. |
| Dec. 2006 | Uruguay announced its participation in the project. |
| Nov. 2006 | First B1 machines are built; IDB and OLPC formalize an agreement regarding Latin American and Caribbean education. |
| Oct. 2006 | B-test boards become available; Libya announces plans for one laptop for every child |
| Sep. 2006 | UI designs presented; integrated software build released; SES-Astra joins OLPC |
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| Jun. 2006 | 500 developer boards are shipped worldwide; WiFi operational; Csound demonstrated over the mesh network First video with working prototype [1] |
| May 2006 | eBay joins OLPC; display specs set; A-test boards become available; $100 Server is announced |
| Apr. 2006 | Pre-A test board boots; Squid and FreePlay present first human-power systems |
| Mar. 2006 | Yves Behar and FuseProject are selected as industry designers |
| Feb. 2006 | Marvell joins OLPC and continues to partner on network hardware |
| Jan. 2006 | World Economic Forum, Switzerland UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement news release |
| Dec. 2005 | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop (html)(pdf) |
| Nov. 2005 | WSIS, Tunisia Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; Nortel joins OLPC Photos: (Image 1)
(Image 2) (Image 3) |
| Aug. 2005 | Design Continuum starts design of first laptop |
| Jul. 2005 | Formal signing of original members of OLPC |
| Mar. 2005 | Brightstar and Red Hat come on board |
| Jan. 2005 | Laptop initiative officially announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland; AMD, News Corp. and Google agree to join OLPC |
PRESS
PRESS RELEASES
| Jan. 2007 | OLPC has No Plans to Commercialize XO Computer. |
| Jan. 2007 | OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer. |
| Jan. 2007 | Rwanda Commits to One Laptop per Child Initiative. |
| Dec. 2006 | Low Cost Laptop Could Tranform Learning. |
Video
(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found.)
http://video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM607884-7823-CRIANCAS+TESTAM+COMPUTADOR+PORTATIL,00.html | Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop, GLOBO- BRASIL
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx | Mark Foster delivers presentation to Standford University
http://www.technologyreview.com/ | Technology Review Mini-Documentary
http://www.radiofarda.com/Article/2007/01/04/f2_Interview-laptop.html | A Brief Demo