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=Laptop News 2007-06-24=
=Laptop News 2007-06-30=
1. Washington: Walter Bender had to dust off his tuxedo in order to receive the Bridging Nations “Bridge Builder Award: Technological Innovation for Bridging Digital Divide” on behalf of OLPC.


2. Porto Alegre: Juliano Bittencourt reports that UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) held a small conference, INOVA, to share the best research from the university with the local community. As they did at the International Free Software Conference (FISL), researchers from the university brought a group of children to conference to share their experiences with the use of the XO. The children stole the spotlight: “it was very satisfying to see how they talked with people, how they became autonomous, and were very proud of their projects. They behave like small scientists, making interviews with their laptop using the camera, taking notes in the Write Activity, and posting reports to their blogs on AMADIS.”
1. Shanghai: Mary Lou Jepsen, John Watlington, Richard Smith, and David Woodhouse joined the extensive team from Quanta in Shanghai for the B4 build. 2000 laptops are scheduled to be built by the end of Monday, more than half are already built. Things went so well that the build was started early, leaving the OLPC team ample time to work other components of the OLPC ecosystem: school server, multi-battery charger, active antennae, and WiFi repeaters. The B4 yield (so far) is approximately 99%—up substantially from previous builds. Improvements in B4 include: texture on the upper handle bar; increased hinge tilt; elimination of the hinge “squeak”; rabbit ears that click into place when put into the down position; elimination of a slight camera vignetting by the bezel; minor modifications to the motherboard; etc.


3. Green: Mary Lou Jepsen has completed all paper work for environmental compliance with EPEAT, the organization that implements the IEEE 1680-2006 computer environmental standard. OLPC’s EPEAT “Gold” status is now pending. Mary Lou has a draft version available of our ISO14001-compliant OLPC environmental policy, which is required for EPEAT compliance. In addition, OLPC has joined and filed for Energy Star 4.0 recognition; the XO exceeds the Energy Star compliance requirements by 14-fold.
2. EC: Richard Smith and David Woodhouse have moved the kernel battery driver over to new embedded controller (EC) protocol. In the process, David had some some suggestions that Richard will be folding back into the EC code. Meanwhile, Richard has flushed out a few minor EC bugs and submitted fixes back to Quanta.


4. Safety: OLPC, Quanta, and UL met this week to discuss progress on safety testing. Preliminary findings are excellent; further details of testing were discussed, including specific in-country requirements. The XO appears to be on track for UL certification; further testing of batteries and AC adaptors is planned. UL will help us apply for CE markings to allow us to ship in Europe.
3. School server: Scott Ananian, John Watlington, and Dan Margo worked on school-server configuration management. The process—a combination of RedHat's RPM system and a version-control system—will allow system updates of OLPC specific configuration files while preserving local configuration modifications.


5. Trial-2: Tuesday marked the feature-freeze date for the Trial-2 software release. We have begun testing of the software release (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_issues); there are test plans for activities, connectivity, performance, mesh view, suspend/resume, and updates. Thanks to Zack Cerza, John Fuhrer, Cameron Meadors, and Ronak Chockshi, who have contributed to these plans.
4. Firmware: Mitch Bradley started work on school-server firmware and integrated the cryptographic code into Open Firmware needed for our Bitfrost security system. Lilian Walter modified the TCP layer to support IPv6. She can successfully “finger” and “telnet” to her Fedora Core 7 PC.


6. Network: The Collabora team continued work on the peer-to-peer networking pieces that will allow Sugar Activity authors to readily share data between their activities; the focus has been on “tubes” and multicast support for the mesh. Dan Williams helped debug direct XO-to-XO communications and plowed through more network manager (NM) issues. Dan, along with Kim Quirk, John Watlington, Scott Ananian, and Michail Bletsas continue to refine NM as we realize more functionality and stability in our network drivers and get more feedback from internal testing and the field.
5. System: Chris Ball wrote a script to backup and restore user data from a USB disk during OS build upgrades, so that laptops can be upgraded to newer builds without losing data. The script is still being tested, since there are some “corner cases” to deal with—for example, some old Sugar configuration files causes newer versions of Sugar to crash at startup.


Michail tested the latest wireless firmware from Marvell (5.110.16.p0). It solves the issues with lazy-WDS access points (like the extremely popular Linksys WRT54G). This is the issue where XOs associated with a WiFi access point will stop passing traffic intermittently for which we had a temporary (ugly) workaround in place. The current firmware, besides having the latest suspend/resume code bits, uses a new mesh frame format that is closer to the latest proposals circulating in the 802.11s standard committee. Unfortunately, the new format is incompatible with the older format; we will incorporate the new firmware in the XO builds and server software ASAP to minimize confusion.
Andres Salomon did some merging (we are up to 2.6.22-rc5 on master) and created a vserver branch and added the vserver patch (See http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/vserver). He also did some bug triaging and worked on merging in the persistence-USB code from Andrew Morton's -mm tree.


7. User interface: Marco Gritti hooked up Sugar and the core Activities into the Fedora translations system and has already integrated a community-contributed Arabic translation.
Scott Ananian spend the week writing kernel patches for DNS autoconfiguration over Ipv6. The kernel functionality is now working; Scott still has to patch this into “userland” properly (glibc and/or network manager), and get the patches shipped and accepted upstream. In the process, Scott fixed another bug in the router advertisement daemon (radvd) this week, added some kernel documentation, and found a few minor bugs in the kernel to fix.


Marco and Benjamin Berg continue to refine the GTK (GIMP Toolkit) themes in conjunction with the design work being done by Eben Eliason and the Pentagram team. They also revisited the Journal core feature set that will be part of the first release software. Tomeu Vizoso continued his work on the web browser. He implemented an “object-chooser dialog” that is used in place of the standard file picker for the browser; items can now be uploaded from the Journal to the web. Tomeu also add the ability to shut down the XO from the home view (the power button will be used for suspend). In the Journal, he also implemented the latest toolbar design, added the ability to erase items, copy items onto the clipboard, and support for removable storage devices (e.g., USB sticks).
Bernardo Innocenti has been looking into Geode optimizations of glibc—Rob Savoye had developed some optimizations working from code originally written by John Zulauf.


Dan, Marco, and John Palmieri also did packaging work in support of the Fedore Core 7 update. Dan also worked on some unresolved X video (Xv) bugs.
John Palmieri has been working on the Fedora 7 move. Most of the packages we need to worry about now in place. We will be pulling our builds together from three different repository: the F7/OLPC repository, dilinger's (Andres’s) kernel repository, and a temporary repository that exists until we have emergency builds and until Etoys can be put into the Fedora repositories.


8. Power management: Richard Hughes worked on the XO’s power management interfaces. He reports that our hardware abstraction layer detects and exports proper power supply interfaces, which means Activities have an easy way of querying the battery and the AC adapter. His patches should land soon. Richard also worked on D-Bus system activation; important in order to start system services through a standardized interface. He has a policy manager (OHM) running on the laptop that will do things such as dim the backlight when the machine is idle and turn off the panel when the lid on the XO is shut.
Alex Larsson, who is on loan from the Red Hat desktop team, has been working on a new live-update system for the XO. He posted comments for review to the devel mailing list earlier this week and has since then been working on an implementation. He now has code that can update between image versions, including reverting back to older versions of an image. He also has working code that can detect an update that is available from another laptop on the mesh, and can download it locally instead of going to a central server over a potentially slow, high-latency, high-cost network. Finally, he has code that will host an update on a laptop and publish it on the mesh.


9. Software updates: Scott Ananian, Ivan Krstić, Chris Blizzard, David Woodhouse, and Alex Larsson engaged in a (somewhat heated) discussion of the XO upgrade model; a concrete specification will be the outcome.
6. X11: The X11 update is only missing a few package rebuilds and a few new RPMs. The new keyboard descriptions are ready to go. Bernardo, Miles Grimshaw, and Walter Bender have been collecting more localized keyboards (Turkish, Ethiopic) and modularizing our changes to make them acceptable for upstream. Bernardo has gotten a positive response from Sergey Udaltsov regarding our changes and is waiting for final approval.


Meanwhile Alex spent the week working on the “Updatinator” code. His utilities that can generate manifests, generating differences between manifests, verify a directory tree against a manifest, and upgrade a directory tree from one manifest to another. He also has a tool that can generate a manifest from a set of images. His code, written in Python, knows how to download blobs and manifests from a http server, using a well-defined format and uses Avahi to automatically find local machines that have newer versions of a manifest. He also put together a small web server that an XO can run in order to export an image such that other laptops can upgrade from it.
7. USB: Marcelo Tosatti, working with Cozybit and Marvell in California, made great progress in debugging our USB suspend/resume issues. Javier Cardona and Marcelo were able to acquire accurate traces of the activity on the USB bus. Those traces showed that the USB host controller is entering an invalid state during resume if the wireless device detaches after getting the host_sleep_active notification from the host. Their workaround is to have the wireless device idle for 3mS on the USB bus before detaching; they implemented that in wireless firmware version 5.110.16.p0. This is great progress towards fully working suspend/resume.


Chris Ball has written a script that performs a backup of user data during upgrades; we can start using it next week. Scott benchmarked XO upgrades between Builds 464, 465, and 466 using rsync, “improved” rsync, and “improved” bittorrent. (He wrote code to use per-directory manifests to improve rsync and added the ability to bittorrent filesystem images, complete with user/group/mode and special file information.) He also started implementing a skeleton XO upgrade system that we can use to automate our 100+ laptop mesh-network tests in the coming weeks.
8. Wireless: Marvell's team in India released wireless firmware that incorporates the new mesh frame format as well as mesh beacon frames (5.110.15.p1). Their release was followed by the release of 5.110.16.p0, which incorporates the support for host sleep and the aforementioned workaround for the USB suspend/resume. Cozybit has also released patches for ethereal/wireshark that decode the new frame format. With this release, we are moving closer to the emerging 802.11s standard and we are also averting problems with existing access points that support lazy-WDS. Note that this firmware version is not interoperable with any previous released versions. Nodes running the new firmware will disrupt and be disrupted by nodes running older versions of the firmware. Q&A testing will be proceeding this week with the goal of incorporating the new frame format in the upcoming stable build. From a network-manager perspective this release greatly simplifies sensing for the presence of mesh nodes. Dan Williams continued work on the Libertas wireless driver. He also spent time getting Avahi ready for the network-manager auto-mesh code.


10. Microphone: Chris Ball reports that the audio driver now keeps the microphone-in-use LED off while the audio hardware is not being used. There is still a bug remaining: the LED turns on during both recording and playback (because the default state of the driver is to have the V_Ref microphon bias turned on).
9. Sugar: Ben Saller continues work on the data store for the Journal. He has been working on support so that one can store Journal entries on pluggable media (such as USB keys) and access entries over the network. He also fixed several bugs that Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti needed.


11. Fun and games: Lincoln Quirk has been working on infrastructure stuff and the pygame wrapper. He has been experimenting with various techniques for integration of GTK and pygame; he also did some preliminary work with Eric Nelson to use the camera as a game input device. It still in process, but the wrapper supports the game keys properly. Lincoln also done a lot of documentation work in the OLPC wiki.
Guillaume Desmottes spent the week working on peer-to-peer tubes support so that more than two people can join an activity (instead of
activities being strictly peer to peer). Large parts of this code are working today. There will be more progress next week.


Roberto Faga has been working on an adventure game toolkit; he has been tackling the challenging problem of creating a simple generic parser that can cope with different noun/verb/object word orders in different languages. At the same time, he's trying to construct a user interface (UI) that would allow the creation of these games in a purely graphical model.
Marco spent much of the week working on the Fedora 7 port. He also made a number of fixes in the Journal, the theme, and Sugar in general.
He is largely concentrating on Trial-2 bug fixes. He wrote a simple
activity to demonstrate how to integrate with the Journal (See http://dev.laptop.org/~marco/edit-activity).


Patrick DeJarnette's side-scrolling game engine got a lot faster this week, and now has semi-intelligent moving “enemies.” It should be a lot of fun for the children to design their own game levels.
Marco and Chris Blizzard worked with the Fedora Translation team to set up an easy-to-use interface for translators to be able to help translate Fedora. A Google Summer of Code student has been working on a web
interface that makes it easy for the several hundred Fedora translators
to interact with upstream projects like OLPC (As and example, see http://translate.fedoraproject.org/module/olpc-journal-activity). We do not have all of the work flow completed, but this is an important first step to closing the loop with translators.


12. Analog input: Arjun Sarwal has created a basic UI for turning the XO into an oscilloscope. He has built controls for AC/DC, bias, RMS AVG, and Pk-Pk values. He is working with John Watlington to characterize the frequency characteristics of the AD1888 and they are working towards enabling the double sample rate that this chip supports. They are also studying the filter in the power supply, with the goal to reduce the noise floor. Another target is to bring down to 0V the minimum voltage that the analog input port can sample (the current minimum is 0.4V).
Tomeu spent the week doing a lot of bug fixing in the web activity, the
Journal and the Sugar shell. He also did a lot of testing of the data
store and worked with Ben to fix bugs that he found. In addition he
added a lot of new stuff for Trial 2, including:
* implement of modal dialogs for the web browser;
* in the Journal:
** you can now change an entry title;
** install and execute activities you have downloaded (but are not on the main toolbar);
** take a screenshot of the activity's canvas and use it as a preview for an entry;
** add a save-in-journal button to the default activity toolbar to
** explicitly save something to the journal;
** drag entries from the journal into the clipboard; and
** use the object-type registry;
* in the sugar shell:
** add an option to save objects in the clipboard to the Journal;
** make the clipboard also use the object-type registry.

10. Sugar Activities in the community: Marc Maurer has been working on collision detection for multiple-document editing. He and the rest of the Abiword team have an algorithm they are happy with. The really adventurous can look at the document (See http://uwog.net/~uwog/abiword/abicollab.pdf).

Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger implemented the IPv6 support for
Squeak and ready for the testing. This will enable various collaborative tools in Etoys work over the IPv6 mesh network. Scott Wallace published the FunctionTile feature to the public image; this enables the Etoys user to write scripts with mathematical functions. Bert Freudenberg's recent work encompasses: patching Sugar; X Windows System display support code for the Squeak virtual machine; and an Etoys hook to enables smoother integration of Etoys to the Sugar environment. Ted Kaehler and Alan Kay are working on the kids version of text editor written in Etoys, as well as the simulation of colliding billiard balls. Takashi Yamamiya is now looking at the final integration of
a drag-and-drop mechanism. Yoshiki Ohshima helped the code generation part of FunctionTile, as well as the documentation of
projects.

Jean Piché and the core TamTam team spent the first half of the week at the OLPC office in Cambridge working closely with Eben Eliason on reworking the TamTam interface in light of Sugar “tabs” and some new functional and structural ideas that the team has been exploring. The result will be a recasting of MiniTamTam into TamTamJam, which will enable the explorations and improvisations we enjoy in TamTam to extend across multiple machines on the mesh; and a cleaner integration of the rich and varied functionality of TamTamEdit, making this powerful composition tool more accessible. They also did some preliminary exploration of Barry Vercoe’s fixed-point C-Sound implementation; evaluated TamTam on the B3 hardware; and discussed details of Journal integration with Tomeu.

Kent Quirk reports from the XO game-development front that Patrick DeJarnette has created the beginnings of a generic side-scroller
game toolkit and has a demonstration game that is beginning to feel a
lot “a-like a-Mario.” It hasn't yet been turned into an activity or tested
on the XO, but the approach is sound and we should see it running
next week. This toolkit is intended to allow children to easily create
arcade-like games on the XO.

Lincoln Quirk has been working on integrating PyGame with Sugar. He has taken Noah Kantrowitz's wrapper code and extended it, but there are problems integrating properly with GTK. For the last few days, he has been working on a Cairo-based implementation of PyGame, which is starting to work, but is so far quite a bit slower than the existing PyGame code. It may be fast enough to use for some games, it looks beautiful, and we hope it will get faster over time.

Roberto Fagá has been building an adventure game toolkit called ISIS intended to build text-based adventures with graphical illustrations. The longterm goal is to build a drag-and-drop storytelling game toolkit that kids can use. He just got his hands on an XO and is working on getting the graphics portion of the toolkit functional.

As a team, the gamers now have a git repository and have checked in all of their work, as well as other games from the OLPC game jam. There are several games that they hope to build on over the next few weeks, including a Mancala/Owari stone game that will support play either on a single machine or across the mesh.

Kuku Anakula, a flashcard-style game, has been polished for Trial 2; it can share configuration files and tile sets with the Memonumber game.

MaMaMedia has finished three activities: a slider puzzle, an e-poll generator, and a teacher center, the latter being a place for teachers to learn and contribute to how they can use activities to integrate XO programs (Paint, Camera, Write) into their teaching. In the teacher center, there are lesson ideas for exploring the XO and the activities, a glossary, some background on Constructionism, etc.

11. Content: SJ Klein and Mel Chua, who organized the Game jam, are working on a generalized notion of “jam,” for a broader community audience. The FHSST group in South Africa is running a jam out of Berkeley to make high school curricula and polish their texts. The Polish Free Texts project has their own variant on the theme for teachers. In progress: defining a space for collating links to such initiatives; developing a framework that allows for broad intake of all kinds of material, and for a refinement step that converts scans or documents into final formats for printing, storing in specialized repositories, storing on wikis and other collaboration sites. Meanwhile, SJ has been working on style guidelines for content contributions.

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is planning some content jams for educators and authors towards the end of the summer and early fall. They are expanding their collaboration on free textbooks starting with wikieducator, where public domain texts are being added to the “XXI texts” project, a project to find textbooks that have entered the public domain. They are working with educators to get primary texts online and developing an OLPC project on the site. A new mailing list for free texts has been set up, with COL, an Arabic texts project, the Polish Free Textbook project, Free Culture's college texts project, and OLPC. The Open Society Institute is looking into ways to fund a specific short-term effort to bootstrap these groups and bring their efforts together.

There was an entire track at the third annual iCommons summit dedicated to open education. OLPC and growing rural networks were highlighted as an example of the most revolutionary target audience. Over the course of a year or so, there are many projects aiming to develop free materials and interested n focusing on developing-world primary school; beginning with the Shuttleworth Foundation and FHSST and Schoolnet projects in southern Africa.

Google’s OurStories continues apace and is looking for active contacts in each country to help coordinate story gathering via activities.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 17:54, 30 June 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 46687]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-06-30

1. Washington: Walter Bender had to dust off his tuxedo in order to receive the Bridging Nations “Bridge Builder Award: Technological Innovation for Bridging Digital Divide” on behalf of OLPC.

2. Porto Alegre: Juliano Bittencourt reports that UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) held a small conference, INOVA, to share the best research from the university with the local community. As they did at the International Free Software Conference (FISL), researchers from the university brought a group of children to conference to share their experiences with the use of the XO. The children stole the spotlight: “it was very satisfying to see how they talked with people, how they became autonomous, and were very proud of their projects. They behave like small scientists, making interviews with their laptop using the camera, taking notes in the Write Activity, and posting reports to their blogs on AMADIS.”

3. Green: Mary Lou Jepsen has completed all paper work for environmental compliance with EPEAT, the organization that implements the IEEE 1680-2006 computer environmental standard. OLPC’s EPEAT “Gold” status is now pending. Mary Lou has a draft version available of our ISO14001-compliant OLPC environmental policy, which is required for EPEAT compliance. In addition, OLPC has joined and filed for Energy Star 4.0 recognition; the XO exceeds the Energy Star compliance requirements by 14-fold.

4. Safety: OLPC, Quanta, and UL met this week to discuss progress on safety testing. Preliminary findings are excellent; further details of testing were discussed, including specific in-country requirements. The XO appears to be on track for UL certification; further testing of batteries and AC adaptors is planned. UL will help us apply for CE markings to allow us to ship in Europe.

5. Trial-2: Tuesday marked the feature-freeze date for the Trial-2 software release. We have begun testing of the software release (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_issues); there are test plans for activities, connectivity, performance, mesh view, suspend/resume, and updates. Thanks to Zack Cerza, John Fuhrer, Cameron Meadors, and Ronak Chockshi, who have contributed to these plans.

6. Network: The Collabora team continued work on the peer-to-peer networking pieces that will allow Sugar Activity authors to readily share data between their activities; the focus has been on “tubes” and multicast support for the mesh. Dan Williams helped debug direct XO-to-XO communications and plowed through more network manager (NM) issues. Dan, along with Kim Quirk, John Watlington, Scott Ananian, and Michail Bletsas continue to refine NM as we realize more functionality and stability in our network drivers and get more feedback from internal testing and the field.

Michail tested the latest wireless firmware from Marvell (5.110.16.p0). It solves the issues with lazy-WDS access points (like the extremely popular Linksys WRT54G). This is the issue where XOs associated with a WiFi access point will stop passing traffic intermittently for which we had a temporary (ugly) workaround in place. The current firmware, besides having the latest suspend/resume code bits, uses a new mesh frame format that is closer to the latest proposals circulating in the 802.11s standard committee. Unfortunately, the new format is incompatible with the older format; we will incorporate the new firmware in the XO builds and server software ASAP to minimize confusion.

7. User interface: Marco Gritti hooked up Sugar and the core Activities into the Fedora translations system and has already integrated a community-contributed Arabic translation.

Marco and Benjamin Berg continue to refine the GTK (GIMP Toolkit) themes in conjunction with the design work being done by Eben Eliason and the Pentagram team. They also revisited the Journal core feature set that will be part of the first release software. Tomeu Vizoso continued his work on the web browser. He implemented an “object-chooser dialog” that is used in place of the standard file picker for the browser; items can now be uploaded from the Journal to the web. Tomeu also add the ability to shut down the XO from the home view (the power button will be used for suspend). In the Journal, he also implemented the latest toolbar design, added the ability to erase items, copy items onto the clipboard, and support for removable storage devices (e.g., USB sticks).

Dan, Marco, and John Palmieri also did packaging work in support of the Fedore Core 7 update. Dan also worked on some unresolved X video (Xv) bugs.

8. Power management: Richard Hughes worked on the XO’s power management interfaces. He reports that our hardware abstraction layer detects and exports proper power supply interfaces, which means Activities have an easy way of querying the battery and the AC adapter. His patches should land soon. Richard also worked on D-Bus system activation; important in order to start system services through a standardized interface. He has a policy manager (OHM) running on the laptop that will do things such as dim the backlight when the machine is idle and turn off the panel when the lid on the XO is shut.

9. Software updates: Scott Ananian, Ivan Krstić, Chris Blizzard, David Woodhouse, and Alex Larsson engaged in a (somewhat heated) discussion of the XO upgrade model; a concrete specification will be the outcome.

Meanwhile Alex spent the week working on the “Updatinator” code. His utilities that can generate manifests, generating differences between manifests, verify a directory tree against a manifest, and upgrade a directory tree from one manifest to another. He also has a tool that can generate a manifest from a set of images. His code, written in Python, knows how to download blobs and manifests from a http server, using a well-defined format and uses Avahi to automatically find local machines that have newer versions of a manifest. He also put together a small web server that an XO can run in order to export an image such that other laptops can upgrade from it.

Chris Ball has written a script that performs a backup of user data during upgrades; we can start using it next week. Scott benchmarked XO upgrades between Builds 464, 465, and 466 using rsync, “improved” rsync, and “improved” bittorrent. (He wrote code to use per-directory manifests to improve rsync and added the ability to bittorrent filesystem images, complete with user/group/mode and special file information.) He also started implementing a skeleton XO upgrade system that we can use to automate our 100+ laptop mesh-network tests in the coming weeks.

10. Microphone: Chris Ball reports that the audio driver now keeps the microphone-in-use LED off while the audio hardware is not being used. There is still a bug remaining: the LED turns on during both recording and playback (because the default state of the driver is to have the V_Ref microphon bias turned on).

11. Fun and games: Lincoln Quirk has been working on infrastructure stuff and the pygame wrapper. He has been experimenting with various techniques for integration of GTK and pygame; he also did some preliminary work with Eric Nelson to use the camera as a game input device. It still in process, but the wrapper supports the game keys properly. Lincoln also done a lot of documentation work in the OLPC wiki.

Roberto Faga has been working on an adventure game toolkit; he has been tackling the challenging problem of creating a simple generic parser that can cope with different noun/verb/object word orders in different languages. At the same time, he's trying to construct a user interface (UI) that would allow the creation of these games in a purely graphical model.

Patrick DeJarnette's side-scrolling game engine got a lot faster this week, and now has semi-intelligent moving “enemies.” It should be a lot of fun for the children to design their own game levels.

12. Analog input: Arjun Sarwal has created a basic UI for turning the XO into an oscilloscope. He has built controls for AC/DC, bias, RMS AVG, and Pk-Pk values. He is working with John Watlington to characterize the frequency characteristics of the AD1888 and they are working towards enabling the double sample rate that this chip supports. They are also studying the filter in the power supply, with the goal to reduce the noise floor. Another target is to bring down to 0V the minimum voltage that the analog input port can sample (the current minimum is 0.4V).

More News

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News. Also on community-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@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
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.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 46687]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-06-30

1. Washington: Walter Bender had to dust off his tuxedo in order to receive the Bridging Nations “Bridge Builder Award: Technological Innovation for Bridging Digital Divide” on behalf of OLPC.

2. Porto Alegre: Juliano Bittencourt reports that UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) held a small conference, INOVA, to share the best research from the university with the local community. As they did at the International Free Software Conference (FISL), researchers from the university brought a group of children to conference to share their experiences with the use of the XO. The children stole the spotlight: “it was very satisfying to see how they talked with people, how they became autonomous, and were very proud of their projects. They behave like small scientists, making interviews with their laptop using the camera, taking notes in the Write Activity, and posting reports to their blogs on AMADIS.”

3. Green: Mary Lou Jepsen has completed all paper work for environmental compliance with EPEAT, the organization that implements the IEEE 1680-2006 computer environmental standard. OLPC’s EPEAT “Gold” status is now pending. Mary Lou has a draft version available of our ISO14001-compliant OLPC environmental policy, which is required for EPEAT compliance. In addition, OLPC has joined and filed for Energy Star 4.0 recognition; the XO exceeds the Energy Star compliance requirements by 14-fold.

4. Safety: OLPC, Quanta, and UL met this week to discuss progress on safety testing. Preliminary findings are excellent; further details of testing were discussed, including specific in-country requirements. The XO appears to be on track for UL certification; further testing of batteries and AC adaptors is planned. UL will help us apply for CE markings to allow us to ship in Europe.

5. Trial-2: Tuesday marked the feature-freeze date for the Trial-2 software release. We have begun testing of the software release (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_issues); there are test plans for activities, connectivity, performance, mesh view, suspend/resume, and updates. Thanks to Zack Cerza, John Fuhrer, Cameron Meadors, and Ronak Chockshi, who have contributed to these plans.

6. Network: The Collabora team continued work on the peer-to-peer networking pieces that will allow Sugar Activity authors to readily share data between their activities; the focus has been on “tubes” and multicast support for the mesh. Dan Williams helped debug direct XO-to-XO communications and plowed through more network manager (NM) issues. Dan, along with Kim Quirk, John Watlington, Scott Ananian, and Michail Bletsas continue to refine NM as we realize more functionality and stability in our network drivers and get more feedback from internal testing and the field.

Michail tested the latest wireless firmware from Marvell (5.110.16.p0). It solves the issues with lazy-WDS access points (like the extremely popular Linksys WRT54G). This is the issue where XOs associated with a WiFi access point will stop passing traffic intermittently for which we had a temporary (ugly) workaround in place. The current firmware, besides having the latest suspend/resume code bits, uses a new mesh frame format that is closer to the latest proposals circulating in the 802.11s standard committee. Unfortunately, the new format is incompatible with the older format; we will incorporate the new firmware in the XO builds and server software ASAP to minimize confusion.

7. User interface: Marco Gritti hooked up Sugar and the core Activities into the Fedora translations system and has already integrated a community-contributed Arabic translation.

Marco and Benjamin Berg continue to refine the GTK (GIMP Toolkit) themes in conjunction with the design work being done by Eben Eliason and the Pentagram team. They also revisited the Journal core feature set that will be part of the first release software. Tomeu Vizoso continued his work on the web browser. He implemented an “object-chooser dialog” that is used in place of the standard file picker for the browser; items can now be uploaded from the Journal to the web. Tomeu also add the ability to shut down the XO from the home view (the power button will be used for suspend). In the Journal, he also implemented the latest toolbar design, added the ability to erase items, copy items onto the clipboard, and support for removable storage devices (e.g., USB sticks).

Dan, Marco, and John Palmieri also did packaging work in support of the Fedore Core 7 update. Dan also worked on some unresolved X video (Xv) bugs.

8. Power management: Richard Hughes worked on the XO’s power management interfaces. He reports that our hardware abstraction layer detects and exports proper power supply interfaces, which means Activities have an easy way of querying the battery and the AC adapter. His patches should land soon. Richard also worked on D-Bus system activation; important in order to start system services through a standardized interface. He has a policy manager (OHM) running on the laptop that will do things such as dim the backlight when the machine is idle and turn off the panel when the lid on the XO is shut.

9. Software updates: Scott Ananian, Ivan Krstić, Chris Blizzard, David Woodhouse, and Alex Larsson engaged in a (somewhat heated) discussion of the XO upgrade model; a concrete specification will be the outcome.

Meanwhile Alex spent the week working on the “Updatinator” code. His utilities that can generate manifests, generating differences between manifests, verify a directory tree against a manifest, and upgrade a directory tree from one manifest to another. He also has a tool that can generate a manifest from a set of images. His code, written in Python, knows how to download blobs and manifests from a http server, using a well-defined format and uses Avahi to automatically find local machines that have newer versions of a manifest. He also put together a small web server that an XO can run in order to export an image such that other laptops can upgrade from it.

Chris Ball has written a script that performs a backup of user data during upgrades; we can start using it next week. Scott benchmarked XO upgrades between Builds 464, 465, and 466 using rsync, “improved” rsync, and “improved” bittorrent. (He wrote code to use per-directory manifests to improve rsync and added the ability to bittorrent filesystem images, complete with user/group/mode and special file information.) He also started implementing a skeleton XO upgrade system that we can use to automate our 100+ laptop mesh-network tests in the coming weeks.

10. Microphone: Chris Ball reports that the audio driver now keeps the microphone-in-use LED off while the audio hardware is not being used. There is still a bug remaining: the LED turns on during both recording and playback (because the default state of the driver is to have the V_Ref microphon bias turned on).

11. Fun and games: Lincoln Quirk has been working on infrastructure stuff and the pygame wrapper. He has been experimenting with various techniques for integration of GTK and pygame; he also did some preliminary work with Eric Nelson to use the camera as a game input device. It still in process, but the wrapper supports the game keys properly. Lincoln also done a lot of documentation work in the OLPC wiki.

Roberto Faga has been working on an adventure game toolkit; he has been tackling the challenging problem of creating a simple generic parser that can cope with different noun/verb/object word orders in different languages. At the same time, he's trying to construct a user interface (UI) that would allow the creation of these games in a purely graphical model.

Patrick DeJarnette's side-scrolling game engine got a lot faster this week, and now has semi-intelligent moving “enemies.” It should be a lot of fun for the children to design their own game levels.

12. Analog input: Arjun Sarwal has created a basic UI for turning the XO into an oscilloscope. He has built controls for AC/DC, bias, RMS AVG, and Pk-Pk values. He is working with John Watlington to characterize the frequency characteristics of the AD1888 and they are working towards enabling the double sample rate that this chip supports. They are also studying the filter in the power supply, with the goal to reduce the noise floor. Another target is to bring down to 0V the minimum voltage that the analog input port can sample (the current minimum is 0.4V).

More News

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Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
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.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

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