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.

In the switch to systemd, the way that the system time/date is handled has changed significantly. Setting the time/date will no longer affect the hardware clock, so it may seem that your change gets lost on reboot. If you decide to set the time/date with a utility such as date or ntpdate, remember to synchronize the new date/time to the hardware clock afterwards (with hwclock --systohc).

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.

Miscellaneous improvements

Network connection details (e.g. preferred wireless networks, wireless keyphrases) are now shared between GNOME and Sugar, and you will notice the connection being established earlier during boot. Most of the time, by the time the desktop has loaded, you are already connected.

The display is now dimmed while inactive for power saving reasons, even when "automatic power management" (idle suspend) is disabled. While this won't change anything for XO-1.5 or XO-1.75 (where automatic dimming was already enabled, alongside idle suspend), XO-1 users will now see the auto-dim behaviour possibly for the first time.

The boot animation has changed. It is now harder to reliably calculate the progress of the boot sequence, so we just show a "stateless" animation. Internally, we have moved from our own boot animation code (which was a pain to maintain) to plymouth, a standard boot animation engine used by Fedora and other distributions. For deployments wishing to customise this, it is simple to add your own logo to the boot screen (via the bootanim module of OS Builder). Alternatively, you can take advantage of plymouth's advanced theming engine to do something different.

The OS Builder configuration format has been simplified a little. In the past, modules had be loaded by adding an entry to a list. Now simply providing the module configuration section will load it, and the modules list is ignored. For more details, see this mail.

Installation

Only pre-release builds are available at this time. Instructions for experienced users are in 12.1.0.

Notable fixed bugs

• The system will now gracefully handle the case when the network card is not available during first boot (<trac>11534</trac>). It would previously disable networking until the OS was reinstalled.
• The XO-1 will no longer perform atrociously slow when the internal disk is nearly full (<trac>5317</trac>).
• sisusbvga USB-VGA adapter support now works again on XO-1 (<trac>10568</trac>)
• If a software installation process is aborted late in the process on XO-1.5 and XO-1.75, the system will no longer be bootable (<trac>11776</trac>), allowing this failure condition to be easily detected.
• The first network scan on boot or system resume will no longer return unreliable/incomplete results.
• In the Browse homepage, the "Search OLPC" form no longer leads to a Google error page (<trac>11375</trac>).
• The Wikimedia OggPlayer media player now works correctly (<trac>11771</trac>).
• When loading websites, Browse once again reports that it is running under Sugar (<trac>10921</trac>), so that such sites can offer Sugar-specific functionality.
• Browse no longer displays pages with bad scaling settings if started when the screen is in a rotated mode (<trac>10566</trac>).

Known problems

This section lists significant known issues that we hope to solve in future releases.

If deployments have solid plans and schedules to deploy 11.3.1 but feel blocked by some of these issues in particular, they are encouraged to get in contact with OLPC far in advance of the installation date. OLPC may be able to produce a limited scope point-release fixing highlighted issues.

Sugar

• When pressing the volume hotkeys (F11/F12), the volume levels are changed accordingly, but the icon in the Sugar frame does not show the change - <trac>9913</trac>.
• The option to disable wireless networking in the Sugar Settings dialog no longer results in removal of power from the wifi hardware (<trac>10913</trac>) and does not disable XO-1 mesh functionality.
• Copying an item from an external device to the journal may result in the copied item incorrectly appearing at the bottom of the list of Journal items (instead of at the top), the item appear at the correct position after 5 seconds (<trac>10905</trac>).
• Etoys sound recording may freeze or record low-quality audio (<trac>9724</trac>, <trac>9527</trac>). When collaborating, items may fail to be transferred (<trac>10744</trac>), and chat messages may fail to display the sender icon (<trac>10745</trac>).
• Record does not correctly pause itself when it is left running but is no longer the active activity. Multiple instances of Record will not always work correctly when run simultaneously (SL#2570, SL#3027). Other A/V-capable activities are likely to be affected too.
• The Moon activity fails to launch if the system date is wildly incorrect (SL#3223).
• When upgrading activities using the Software Update functionality, activity icons may be duplicated in the home screen until reboot (<trac>11373</trac>).
• Switching between Sugar and GNOME desktops quickly may fail after a few switches. Seeing the graphical desktop environment exit every few seconds, the system assumes there is a problem and blocks it. As a workaround, wait a minute between switches from one desktop to the other (<trac>11838</trac>.
• After running for extended periods of time (measured in days) in an environment with many Wireless Access Points, a memory leak in Sugar Shell may prevent opening activities and lead the system to an out-of-memory (OOM) condition (<trac>11708</trac>).

Sugar collaboration

The following issues are all believed to be regressions over OLPC OS 10.1.3.

• When the initiator of a shared activity leaves the activity, the icon of the shared activity will disappear from the neighborhood view of other participants (<trac>10674</trac>).
• When collaborating over a jabber server, names of other users may be displayed as their account hashes (e.g. c72019147aed6de8731769a126c2931a8a9ecfeb) rather than their name (<trac>10750</trac>).
• If a user changes his name, the new name is not reliably communicated to his peers (<trac>10749</trac>).
• The friends tray in the Sugar frame is incorrect for the initiator of a shared activity; it will not show other users who have joined (<trac>10801</trac>)
• When collaborating over a jabber server, information regarding who has joined and left an activity is not displayed reliably (<trac>11075</trac>)
• If a user is invited to an activity but does not have that activity installed, a confusing grey circle is displayed where the invitation would normally be (<trac>10821</trac>).
• Upon accepting a private invitation via the frame, if the frame is left open during activity launch then the invitation will not disappear as it should (<trac>11073</trac>).
• The olpc-xos diagnostic tool for developers no longer shows the users connected to the jabber server (<trac>10677</trac>).
• When inviting another learner to an activity the frame does only show ourself, this is true for both members of the session <trac>11074</trac>

GNOME

• Some GNOME applications now use Clutter, which we do not (yet) support because it requires 3D graphics. Such applications will crash on launch (<trac>11810</trac>).
  • Applications include totem (shipped), cheese (not shipped), and the GNOME control center (not shipped)

Input

• F5 and F6 are bound to Search and Frame on all laptops, when these mappings should ideally only apply to XO High-School laptops where these icons are printed on the keys (<trac>10534</trac>)
• Some keyboard layouts (ie: Pt_BR) are missing the Linux console keyboard map -- can still be used correctly in Sugar's Terminal activity and in GNOME's Terminal (<trac>11557</trac>).

Power management

Automatic power management is enabled on XO-1.5 and XO-1.75 by default, and can be optionally enabled on XO-1 via the Sugar Settings dialog.

When enabled, the following bugs are present:

• On XO-1, wireless network connectivity may disappear while the system is sleeping (<trac>10232</trac>)
• On XO-1, touchpad may seem slow to respond as the system wakes (<trac>10233</trac>)
• XO-1.5 and XO-1.75 may fail to be woken up by network traffic directed at it (<trac>9960</trac>)
• XO-1.5 and XO-1.75 wireless may fail and be automatically reset during system resume. This will cause a momentary interruption of connectivity, and could result in the XO-1.5 connecting to a different network after the reset.
• The laptop may only sleep for short periods of time due to being woken up by unrelated/uninteresting multicast network traffic.
• The mouse will occasionally be excessively jumpy for a few seconds after system wakeup, before it gets automatically recalibrated (<trac>10967</trac>).
• If put into a state where the system is suspended and cannot be woken up with the power button, typing on the keyboard while in suspended state may result in a misbehaving keyboard when the system resumes (<trac>11223</trac>).

OS update

• After updating the system using olpc-update, the following boot takes a bit longer than usual while some disk space is recovered. If Ctrl+Alt+F1 is pressed during this operation, the system will halt with an error message (<trac>11371</trac>). Power cycling the system will cause the process to continue from where it left off and boot successfully.

XO-1.75

• Browse under Sugar and Firefox under GNOME may crash when displaying very large images. This can be triggered with pages where many large images are displayed in smaller dimensions.The rendering enginer must allocate memory for the full size of the original emails, and may hit memory limits (<trac>11569</trac>).
• Sound quality may suffer when the system is busy(<trac>11187</trac>). Some clicks or scratches can be heard sometiems every 80ms (<trac>11334</trac>).
• USBVGA support does not work yet on the XO-1.75 platform (<trac>11621</trac>).
• Screen rotation works, but video performance is noticably degraded in the rotated modes, and some activities misbehave after the screen has been rotated (<trac>11344</trac>).
• "Customization stick" and "collection stick" do not work on XO-1.75 units (<trac>11432</trac>)

XO-1.5

• The microphone recording level is believed to be too low in comparison to XO-1 (<trac>10903</trac>).

XO-1

• Unfortunately, the base filesystem has grown in this release to the point where it is not possible to upgrade from a freshly-installed 10.1.3 OS to 11.2.0. This is due to temporary disk space requirements during the upgrade process. The update preparation steps are therefore essential, so that enough disk space is available.