Release notes/12.1.0

NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... Please leave suggestions on the talk page.

VERY EARLY DRAFT!

Purpose

OLPC OS 12.1.0 is a new software release focusing on improving the XO-1.75 user experience, and undertaking a much-needed technological shift for Sugar's internals to GTK+ 3.x. Additionally, XO-1.5 and XO-1 continue to be supported in this release, and we include a variety of new features and fixes.

Features

Sugar-0.96

More information is available in the Sugar-0.96 release notes.

GTK3

In recent years, the GNOME platform (which provides the basis on top of which Sugar is built) has been in transition from GTK+ 2.x to GTK+ 3.x. This has had some impacts on Sugar, which uses GTK+ 2.x only. During this development cycle, we have spearheaded efforts within the Sugar Labs community to make Sugar GTK3-ready and to move the recently-broken components over to GTK3.

Despite being a large chunk of work and very important for the future of Sugar, the changes you will see as a user are few. This work was limited to the back-end platform only. As we continue the transition in future, you'll receive efficiency improvements, and activities will improve in quality from having more direct access to a wider range of system libraries.

Write to the journal anytime

Recent Sugar versions have shown a "naming screen" upon stopping a new instance of a Sugar activity. The idea was to encourage the learner to provide a good name for their work, and perform some self-reflection in the details field. However, some found this confusing (stopping an activity should be as simple as possible).

Sugar-0.96 changes this - the naming screen is no longer displayed. However, all activities now have a button in the toolbar that allows a description to be set. We hope that this will continue to encourage self-reflection while not being as intrusive as before.

Text to speech

A new icon in the Sugar frame allows for any currently-selected text to be dictated by the internal speech engine.

Notable activity changes

Browse, Wikipedia and Help have been moved from Mozilla to WebKit internally, as the Mozilla engine can no longer be embedded into other applications (like Browse) and have stated officially that it is unsupported. WebKit has proven to be a far superior alternative and this represents a valuable step forward for Sugar's future. As a user, you will notice faster activity startup time and a smoother browsing experience. Also, form elements on webpages are now themed according to the system theme, so you'll see Sugar's UI design blending more into the web forms that you access.

Wikipedia has been updated with new content, both in English and Spanish (this is the first content update since the creation of the activity, the old content was now a few years old). The activity starts up quicker and takes less time to navigate between pages.

Memorize and Jukebox have been moved to the new Sugar toolbar design, completing the transition: all standard shipped activities use the new design.

GNOME 3.4

We have updated to GNOME v3.4, upgrading from v2.32 shipped in earlier releases. For details on the changes, see the release notes for GNOME 3.0, GNOME 3.2 and GNOME 3.4.

Note that OLPC ships a stripped down version of GNOME, therefore not everything noted in the GNOME release notes applies to our releases. We do not currently have support for accelerated 3D graphics, so the new "GNOME Shell" UI is not (yet) available on OLPC laptops. We continue to use the previous UI mode, which is now known as "fallback."

Base system

The base system has been updated to Fedora 17, keeping us current with our underpinning open source technologies. This has enabled many of the enhancements listed on this page. Thanks to the introduction of systemd, startup and shutdown is much quicker than before.

The XO-1.75 release has moved to a different packaging architecture. In previous releases, we did not make use of the processor's floating point unit; instead, we performed all floating-point (i.e. decimal number) calculations in software. Now we move to a "hardware floating point" architecture using instructions for processor generations up to ARMv7 which results in a performance improvement in various parts of the interface.

The XO-1 and XO-1.5 platforms have been upgraded to the v3.3 Linux kernel. This brings in assorted minor back-end improvements and will be appreciated by those who wish to connect present-day external periphals (e.g. GSM modems).

More disk space

Those who are familiar with our previous releases for XO-1.5 and XO-1.75 will recall that when downloading the release, they had to choose whether they were going to install it on a system with 2GB, 4GB or 8GB of internal SD card capacity and download the appropriate file. This was not ideal.

This system had further flaws. Manufacturers do not agree on (e.g.) exactly how big a 4GB SD card should be - some provide more disk space than others. Similar cards from the same manufacturer can even show such discrepency. Previously, we had to guess at a safe number for our OS images - e.g. what is the smallest 4GB SD card we can expect to see on the market? We went conservative and guessed low, because guessing too high would mean the system would be unusable on some SD cards. This was at the expense of leaving a part of the SD card unused, effectively not making use of all of the free space offered by the card.

In 12.1.0, we have improved this system. Now there is just one file to download, for any capacity of SD card. The first time the system is booted, the filesystem is resized to fill the disk, using all available capacity. In practice, this means that most users will gain 100mb to 200mb of free disk space that was previously unavailable.

DisplayLink USB-VGA

In 2010 we added support for SiS-based USB-to-VGA adapters, allowing you to hook the XO up to an external monitor or projector (very useful for training sessions). More recently, adapters based on a DisplayLink chip (instead of SiS) have been growing in popularity. 12.1.0 adds support for these DisplayLink adapters. To use them, the process is the same as it is for SiS-based devices: connect the device before turning the XO on, then the user interface will be loaded on the external display.

Network improvements

• networks shared between GNOME and Sugar
• networks come up earlier during boot

Miscellaneous improvements

• screen now dimmed when system is inactive, even when automatic PM is disabled
• new boot screen, new customisation methods
• refined olpc-os-builder config format for module selection

Notable fixed bugs

• JFFS2 "the slows" avoided by reserving disk space for root (Trac #5317)
• Fix sisusbvga on XO-1 (Trac #10746) , (Trac #10568)
• Incomplete fs-update may leave laptop bootable (Trac #11776)
• network scan after resume is no longer unreliable/incomplete

Known problems

• no cheese (a Gnome webcam application) (Trac #11803)
• anything that might use Clutter (a graphical UI library) segfaults (Trac #11810) , for example gnome-control-center