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=LAPTOP NEWS=
=LAPTOP NEWS=
1. Stable build: After a final few bugs that had hidden in corners
1. Cambridge: A three-day (36 hour) working session took place at OLPC
were driven into the light, we issued Stable Build 303 along with
headquarters with a subset of launch countries (Argentina, Uruguay,
Q2B76 firmware this week. Highlights of this stable build include:
Brazil, Nigeria and Rwanda), asking the countries to be partners and
* a working mesh network;
critics. An extremely interactive meeting ensued, at times boisterous
* an updated web browser that scales on our high-resolution screen, making for improved web experience;
and combative, from early morning to late evening with only a few
* Gnash—the FOSS Flash player (still somewhat unstable)—pre-installed; Adobe's Flash 9 is also known to work, but not packaged or installed as part of the build;
breaks and minimal sleep. Every topic was touched from firmware to
* a touch-pad driver fix for jumping cursor: the touch pad should be more usable, and the tablet is enabled on B2 systems; and
firm agreements.
* boot time has improved due to a scheduler fix.


Please read the [[OLPC_Software_Release_Notes|release notes]].
2. Cambridge: At a two-day design review with Quanta and Fuse Project
we finalized all ID and mechanical changes and most electrical
changes.


2. Activities: There are some new activities in the new build:
3. A team from the MIT Media Lab spent the day at OLPC presenting
* Blockparty (aka Tetris) was written by Vadim Gerasimov and John Palmieri;
current and potential plans for the XO. A highlight was a presentation
* Slideshow was written by Erik Blankinship and Marco Gritti; and
of projects from a class being taught by Henry Holtzman and Ted
* Journal "Preview" (a first pass at the journal activity) was written by Marco and Tomeu Vizoso.
Selker.


3. Community: Mauro Torres and the team from the Tuquito Project in
4. A method for creating 400 different colors of XOs on the back cover
Argentina have put together a calculator activity that will appear in
of the laptop was decided: multi-color XO pieces of plastic will be
soon in our builds. They are working on a extensions that will let the
attached via heat stake to the back cover of the laptop. 20 colors
children explore their calculations in notational form as well as get
will be used for the X and the O, creating 400 unique combinations,
the "answer."
enough for each child in a small school to have their own colors.


4. Kernel: While Andres Salomon was working on the new stable release,
5. The Red Hat team has generated 60 builds in the last month and a
he found (and fixed) a build-system bug/interaction that was keeping
half—a strenuous pace. Build 299 was released this week. A new stable
fixes from hitting the stable kernel builds.
build, the first one that will be used by children, will have many
improvements and some new activities: a Tetris-like game, a slide-show
activity, and a preview of the journal. The firmware team at OLPC was
also been busy preparing release B76, which fixes many of the battery
problems experienced in earlier releases.


5. Richard Smith and John Watlington modified some B2 machines to ship
The new build contains some new activities and also improvements in
out to suspend/resume developers; these mods fix some known hardware
many of the existing activities. The Abiword word processor activity
problems that only affect suspend/resume.
has had a number of bug fixes and is the first activity that saves to
the journal when you close it. TamTam has been vastly improved and now
includes a track editor. The web browser is vastly improved: it
properly scales pages, text, and images to our 200dpi display and
includes the Gnash free-software flash viewer. The news reader
included is also more obviously named.


6. Q2B76: This firmware release should have a temporary work-around
There are also changes to the Sugar API to support new functionality;
for the problem that has been costing us about 1/3 of our system's
lots of bug fixes and changes have been made to the new mesh view,
which is where network activation now takes place. Also, a splash
performance whenever a network interface was alive on USB (either our
wireless or ethernet).
screen that takes a child's picture and asks their name is included
with this build.


7. Mitch Bradley continued improvements to the suspend/resume code:
This build also includes a new Marvell firmware that fixes a few
* time-to-resume is now down to 12 mS, except for the CAFE;
mesh-related problems; a big step forward. This is in conjunction with
* reinit is working well; he can suspend/resume reliably without a serial port;
a new kernel that fixes some problems that were showing up under heavy
* suspend/resume is now working on B1 in addition to B2;
network traffic will make a big difference in our networking
* the suspend routine is now independent of the virtual address from which it is called.
experience.
Mitch also integrated Lilian Walter's first cut at self-test
diagnostics into the experimental firmware.


8. Community II: William Cohen reported a major coup: he got the
We are about to release a new auto update image that will let people
system-level performance tool "oprofile" running on the Geode, and
upgrade from version B43 (the last stable release) or B61 (included on
immediately started posting very helpful performance data. We have
the B2 machines) to B76 which includes important battery charging
wanted this tool for quite a while, and have not had the time to do it
fixes that many people have run into. It also fixes the problem where
ourselves. Our great thanks to Bill.
the wireless does not show up after a reboot. Please upgrade your
systems
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Btest_Boards).


9. Trac: The bug-tracking system has passed several milestones: more
The kernel in this build also contains a software work around for the
than 1000 bugs reported and more than 250 people registered. Our
problem we were seeing where the touch pad jumped around when you
community is growing quickly (See http://dev.laptop.org).
released your finger.


10. Mesh status: Michail Bletsas and teams from Cozybit and Marvell
Many thanks to Dan Williams, Marco Gritti, Richard Smith, Marcelo
spent the past week doing intense debugging on the mesh firmware.
Tosatti, John Palmieri, Chris Ball, Tomeu Vizoso, the Abiword team,
There were two serious bugs uncovered: mesh routing was erratic in
the TamTam team, Andres Salomon, and Owen Williams, who worked very
noisy environments (e.g., OLPC's Cambridge office) and there was data
hard on this release.
corruption observed during large file transfers. The first problem was
solved by allowing route request and reply frames to be sent at rates
as low as 1Mbps. The data corruption issue was tracked to MTUs (frame
sizes) larger than 1494 bytes. Firmware addressing the first issue was
released early this week and a fix for the second will be incorporated
in next week's firmware build. (In the meantime, people should set the
MTU of msh0 to 1494 if they want to utilize the mesh interface). In
parallel a variety of driver issues were addressed and should be
pulled into the XO build next week, at which point the mesh substrate
will be fully functional.


11. Fun and games: Chris "sugarized" a game called Kye
6. From the community: Build 299 includes the beta release of the
(http://games.moria.org.uk/kye/pygtk) and posted the bundle to the
TamTam music editor. TamTam Edit is a page-driven event sequencer
Sugar mailing list.
featuring a powerful music generator, a colorful and intuitive
graphical interface to create, modify, and organize notes on five
virtual "tracks," a palette of almost one-hundred sounds, and a
music-construction model that allows virtually limitless variations in
all musical styles.

TamTam Edit joins miniTamTam and TamTam synthLab as the third
component of a complete music and sound creation and collaboration
environment on the XO. A fourth component, consisting of a
collaborative playing and composing tool,
will be forthcoming as soon as the mesh-network APIs stabilize.

TamTam Edit uses about 55–65% of the CPU when running full tilt and
presently occupies about 20MB of RAM. Kudos to Jean Piché, James
Bergstra of the Université de Montréal and Adrian Martin of the
University of Toronto for making this a reality—given the constraints,
this is an engineering feat of no small proportion. Olivier Bélanger
and Nathanael Lécaudé, both of the Université de Montréal have also
contributed an enormous amount of time to create what is turning out
to be a suite of expressive tools we are extremely proud of.

7. Video: Erik Blankinship and Bakhtiar Mikhak from Media Mods have
video capture and playback working within in the Camera Activity. It
will be folded into a build coming soon.

8. Richard prepared a CD that contained a Build 282 set up for QEmu
and the latest Develop Activity from Andrew Clunis (orospaker). SJ
Klein distributed the CDs at the Serious Games conference. Special
thanks to Andrew, who pulled together an easy QEmu install built and
integrated the Develop Activity in to
Build 282.

9. Kernel: In the quest to get a stable kernel ready for our new
stable build, Andres worked with Tom Gleixner to fix the kernel crash
we were seeing; that has since made it upstream (along with a few
other problems that were noticed in hrtimers). There were some
libertas wireless driver changes that went into the kernel, and Andres
enabled some netfilter modules to allow NAT to work. Chris notes that
the dyntick bug that we had been seeing (#954) isn't really fixed, it
is just harder to reproduce. Ah, races are fun.

10. Performance: We've recently focused effort on solving a problem
that costs 30% of the performance of the system when a network
interface is enabled. This is due to a cache snooping issue with USB
that the GX processor has. Mitch Bradley verified that the "uncached
descriptor" workaround for the USB/BTB performance problem nearly
eliminates the CPU performance hit. Andres worked on adding a new
memory zone to the kernel for uncached memory allocations; that work
lives in a separate kernel branch [0]. Marcelo is in the process of
testing it to see whether it actually makes a difference for GX
performance with DMA.

11. Firmware: Mitch Bradley made good progress on suspend/resume on B2
using firmware tests. With the board modified to pull DCONLOAD down
instead of up, Mitch can suspend and resume without losing display
integrity and display interaction continues to work after resume. The
core resume is pretty fast: less than 15mS (not counting the time to
resync the DCON to the video, which add an extra 30mS or so). Mitch
can also access the NAND FLASH and SD after resume but does not have
USB resume working yet.

Mitch started to look into use cases for firmware wireless support,
now that Lilian Walter has released a working firmware wireless driver
and Wifi supplicant. Earlier in the week, Lilian released the first
version of the supplicant and wireless ethernet driver to Mitch.
Lilian also worked on country the country code, channel, and transmit
power information so that the driver will comply with local regulatory
constraints (called IE support.) Lilian currently debugging the ad-hoc
join operation.

12. Touch-pad driver: Zephaniah Hull reports the lack of debounce on
the PT to GS switch has been corrected, and the touch pad continues to
work properly.




Revision as of 20:34, 17 March 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.


LAPTOP NEWS

1. Stable build: After a final few bugs that had hidden in corners were driven into the light, we issued Stable Build 303 along with Q2B76 firmware this week. Highlights of this stable build include:

  • a working mesh network;
  • an updated web browser that scales on our high-resolution screen, making for improved web experience;
  • Gnash—the FOSS Flash player (still somewhat unstable)—pre-installed; Adobe's Flash 9 is also known to work, but not packaged or installed as part of the build;
  • a touch-pad driver fix for jumping cursor: the touch pad should be more usable, and the tablet is enabled on B2 systems; and
  • boot time has improved due to a scheduler fix.

Please read the release notes.

2. Activities: There are some new activities in the new build:

  • Blockparty (aka Tetris) was written by Vadim Gerasimov and John Palmieri;
  • Slideshow was written by Erik Blankinship and Marco Gritti; and
  • Journal "Preview" (a first pass at the journal activity) was written by Marco and Tomeu Vizoso.

3. Community: Mauro Torres and the team from the Tuquito Project in Argentina have put together a calculator activity that will appear in soon in our builds. They are working on a extensions that will let the children explore their calculations in notational form as well as get the "answer."

4. Kernel: While Andres Salomon was working on the new stable release, he found (and fixed) a build-system bug/interaction that was keeping fixes from hitting the stable kernel builds.

5. Richard Smith and John Watlington modified some B2 machines to ship out to suspend/resume developers; these mods fix some known hardware problems that only affect suspend/resume.

6. Q2B76: This firmware release should have a temporary work-around for the problem that has been costing us about 1/3 of our system's performance whenever a network interface was alive on USB (either our wireless or ethernet).

7. Mitch Bradley continued improvements to the suspend/resume code:

  • time-to-resume is now down to 12 mS, except for the CAFE;
  • reinit is working well; he can suspend/resume reliably without a serial port;
  • suspend/resume is now working on B1 in addition to B2;
  • the suspend routine is now independent of the virtual address from which it is called.

Mitch also integrated Lilian Walter's first cut at self-test diagnostics into the experimental firmware.

8. Community II: William Cohen reported a major coup: he got the system-level performance tool "oprofile" running on the Geode, and immediately started posting very helpful performance data. We have wanted this tool for quite a while, and have not had the time to do it ourselves. Our great thanks to Bill.

9. Trac: The bug-tracking system has passed several milestones: more than 1000 bugs reported and more than 250 people registered. Our community is growing quickly (See http://dev.laptop.org).

10. Mesh status: Michail Bletsas and teams from Cozybit and Marvell spent the past week doing intense debugging on the mesh firmware. There were two serious bugs uncovered: mesh routing was erratic in noisy environments (e.g., OLPC's Cambridge office) and there was data corruption observed during large file transfers. The first problem was solved by allowing route request and reply frames to be sent at rates as low as 1Mbps. The data corruption issue was tracked to MTUs (frame sizes) larger than 1494 bytes. Firmware addressing the first issue was released early this week and a fix for the second will be incorporated in next week's firmware build. (In the meantime, people should set the MTU of msh0 to 1494 if they want to utilize the mesh interface). In parallel a variety of driver issues were addressed and should be pulled into the XO build next week, at which point the mesh substrate will be fully functional.

11. Fun and games: Chris "sugarized" a game called Kye (http://games.moria.org.uk/kye/pygtk) and posted the bundle to the Sugar mailing list.


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

Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
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)
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).

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

3 Jan. 2007 networkworld.com| OLPC Aims for Mass Production in Third Quarter
3 Jan. 2007 IDG.net| One Laptop per Child Sweetens Hardware with 'Sugar' UI
3 Jan. 2007 YAHOO! Finance| OLPC Announces First-of-Its Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer
2 Jan. 2007 Bicyclemark's Communique (podcast)| One Laptop Per Child (@23C3)
22 Dec. 2006 Financial Times| Clever Kit to Benefit Developing Countries (registration required)
27 Nov. 2006 Pagina/12| La manera más económica para mejorar la educación
21 Nov. 2006 Official Release|First 1,000 XO-Laptops Roll off the Assembly Line in Shanghai
19 Nov. 2006 Jamaica Gleaner| Technology - a tool for transformation
19 Nov. 2006 International Herald Tribune| One Laptop per Child: Computer designed for those who can least afford them
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review| Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part III
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review| Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part II
Nov./Dec. 2006 Technology Review| Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop Part I
8 Nov. 2006 Popular Science| Best of What's New 2006: One Laptop per Child XO- Better Screen, Better World
6 Nov. 2006 ZDNet.co.uk | Why Every Child Deserves a Laptop- Matthew Szulik, CEO, Red Hat
27 Oct. 2006 LinuxWorld | Children's Laptop Inspires Open Source Projects
24 Oct. 2006 LA Times | Upward Mobility in a Laptop
24 Oct. 2006 Fortune | This PC wants to save the world
12 Oct. 2006 Bostonist | One Laptop per Child for Libya
11 Oct. 2006 New York Times | U.S. Group Reaches Deal to Provide Laptops to All Libyan Schoolchildren
3 Oct. 2006 GulfNews.com | College gets look at $100 Children's Laptop Computer
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
28 Aug. 2006 PCINpact.com | L'OLPC a 100 $ est finalise: un engin hors du commun
21 Aug. 2006 EWeek.com | Knocking Down Barriers to the $100 Laptop
31 Jul. 2006 NPR | Affordable Laptop Computer Project Moves Forward
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

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

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