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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].


=Laptop News 2007-10-20=
=Laptop News 2007-10-27=
1. New York City: United Nations Under-Secretary-General/High Representative for Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Countries and Island States, Mr. Cheick Sidi Diarra of Mali, hosted a two-hour meeting exclusively devoted to OLPC. Miguel Brechner and Oscar Becerra presented, respectively, the experiences and decision-making process in Uruguay and Peru. Questions and demos lasted for an additional forty five minutes. About 50 countries were represented.
1. Lima: Carla Gomez Monroy's hard work at Arahuay—the town which hosted the first OLPC pilot in Perú—came to fruition with news that the Budget Commission of the Peruvian Congress has unanimously approved of the first allocation of laptops for children. The announcement was made just as Jim Gettys, Hernán Pachas, and Carla Palomino Guerrero arrived in Arahuay for a visit. Hernán and Carla are working with Oscar Becerra, General Director of Educational Technology, Ministry of Education of Peru, who is in charge of the OLPC program in Peru. (Jim gave the keynote address at the Vision 2007 Conference in Lima, Peru, having worked with Hernán and Carla earlier in the week.)


2. Netherlands: Ivan Krstić keynoted GOVCERT.NL, the invitation-only security conference organized by the Dutch computer emergency response team (CERT). He made a number of contacts with international CERTs, whose assistance might be critical after we deploy.
2. Miami: Nicholas Negroponte spoke at the Latin American Society for Information and Publishers, which drew all the major news media from Latin America. The audience carried stories throughout Latin America the rest of the week, widely naming Uruguay the first country to boldly proceed.


3. Adapter prong orientation: Demands from the field for one or the other orientation of adapter prongs have led us to request more adapter orientation options. Quanta has been responsive and UL will assist with safety testing. It will be several months before these AC adapters will be available, but work has begun.
3. Accra: Matt Keller, Juliano Bittencourt (who is one of the leads at the Porto Alegre OLPC trial school), and David Cavallo ran a Laptops and Learning workshop as part of the build up towards Ghana's deployment of One Laptop per Child. The workshop was held at the Kofi Annan Center and was organized by the Ministry of Finance, who is championing the initiative. Participants came from a broad array of Ghanaian society, including various ministries, universities, NGOs, and the private sector. The goals of the workshop were to familiarize the participants with the ideas behind OLPC; to learn about learning and laptops; to learn about experiences in other countries to date; and to plan next steps towards a broad deployment.


4. Resistance tests: Summarized below is the current status of resistance testing of the XO laptop. Mary Lou Jepsen will write a complete report in early November, after all testing data is available. (This report will be available on http://wiki.laptop.org.)
4. Springfield, Illinois: Cavallo gave a keynote address to the Rural Telecom Conference in Springfield. There were participants from many states as well as tribal reservations; there was tremendous enthusiasm for deployment of OLPC in US rural areas and twinning them with deployments in other countries.


* Drop: XO passes 10-point drop test from a height of 150cm onto carpet- covered steel (other drop-test details available)
5. Cambridge: SES-Americom has given us a two-way satellite terminal. The installation was completed this week at the roof of the Media Lab and the terminal is now connected to the OLPC offices via a Motorola canopy base station that sits on the top of MIT’s Eastgate building. In this manner we are now able to setup a simulation of a complete rural school network at the OLPC Cambridge office and test network connectivity via satellite. The system that SES has given us is an iDirect series 5000, which is towards the high-end of the spectrum as far as VSAT routers go and is able to sustain 500Kbps symmetric with download bursts up to 6Mbps.
* Operating temperature: 0C to 45C (50C pending certification)
* Storage temperature : –25C to 60C
* Operational altitude: 0 to 5000m
* Dust/water: Testing to Ingress Protocol 54 and 42 (in process)
* Toxicity: RoHS certified (UL report due in early November)
* Safety:
** IEC 60950-1(write up in process)
** EN 60950-1 (write up in process)
** CSA/UL 60950-1 (write up in process)
** ASTM F 963 – Electronic Toy Safety (write up in process)
* AC adapter
** Wide input range: 90v(–10%) ~ 240v(+25%), 35Hz to 70Hz
** IEC 60950-1 (write up in process)
** EN 60950-1 (write up in process)
** CSA/UL 60950-1 (write up in process)
** Extra transient and burst immunity: IEC 61000-4-4 (passed)
** Extra surge immunity: IEC 61000-4-5 (passed)
* Keyboard
** Tested to 500,000 cycles
** Rubber: water and dust resistant
* Buttons (power, display rotate, gamepads): Tested to 500,000 cycles


5. Mass-production build (Trial 3): The stable build for mass production start is [http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/build622/ '''Build 622'''] ([[OLPC_Firmware_q2d02|Firmware Q2D02]]). Please test these builds extensively. John Palmieri and Scott Ananian produced a number of builds in support of mass production, incorporating final changes for C2 systems and fixes from Javier Cardona and Andres Salomon for USB and wireless related suspend/resume problems. James Cameron helped Chris Ball, Bernie Innocenti, and Jim Gettys diagnose why X would not start while testing the C2 boards.
6. Laptop on your lap: XO is the first “laptop” that can safely be used on one's lap. Most laptops are officially called notebook computers, because use on a lap is unsafe—you risk burning your skin. Not so with the XO; it is so low power that the electronics don't get hot; and further, the electronics are next to the screen, not the lap. The plastic in the keyboard area stays cool all the time.


Scott has been supporting the Joyride build system. He, Michael Stone, and Bernardo Innocenti had a fruitful discussion with the Fedora build maintainer community about how to integrate our build system with koji going forward. Greg DeKoenigsberg at RedHat has offered his significant help in coordinating our needs with members of the Fedora community who would like to get involved.
7. Mesh: Ronak Chokshi from Marvell and Javier Cardona from Cozybit made an “emergency” visit to OLPC. The visit resulted in some useful discussions that brought everybody up to speed with the status and the development of XO’s wireless stack. Marvell released firmware 5.110.19.p0 on Thursday; we reached consensus that we need to incorporated into our builds as soon as possible for testing.


6. Localization: We have issued a call for translators, coordinators, and volunteers (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/localization/2007-October/000052.html). If you have good language skills (even if you have minimal computer skills), you can make an important contribution to the project. Please help us localize to as many languages as possible (See the localization mailing-list subscription page at
8. Wireless driver: The effort to push the wireless driver upstream has left the driver on our builds with a limited “control knobs.” Of the 79 documented iwpriv controls, only 28 are exposed in the current builds. Of the 51 that don't work, some are rarely used but some are essential, e.g., radioff. Given that many of the enhancements that we have requested Marvell to implement depend on driver support, in the interim, Michail Bletsas recommends that we use the original libertas-2.6 tree for our builds—where Marvell and Cozybit are contributing—not the tree that we are using for pushing patches upstream.
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/localization).


Xavier Alvarez, Alfonso de la Guarda, and Danny Clark have built a Pootle installation—a web based tool to help in language localization (See the OLPC Pootle at its temporary site by visiting http://solar.laptop.org:5080/). Sayamindu Dasgupta, a student from India working part-time on the project is helping them.
9. New intern: Ricardo Carrano from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Niterói, Brazil has joined OLPC as an intern for the next two months. He will be working on various wireless issues with Michail. Ricardo has been instrumental in performing a variety of tests since the beginning of the year in Brazil.


Sumit Chowdhury reports that Nandu Pradhan, president of RedHat India, is working with a team next week to help provide localization support in eleven Indian languages. Sarmad Hussein of the PAN Localization project and the CRULP research center has offered help with Pashto, Urdu, and Nepali keyboards and localization.
10. Bulk charger: The industrial design for the multi-battery charger has been approved. A full mechanicals package has been created and is off to tooling vendors to get some quotes. Gecko had a stereolithographic (SLA) model of the front panel build with five battery slots in order to test the battery retention system, which is designed to allow battery removal with one hand. We should have a mechanical model in Cambridge soon for evaluation. Flextronics finished up the thermal simulation of the inside of the charger. We are looking at a 15-degree C rise over ambient temperature. Simulations are showing that we are well within the operating range of the components while operating at our target of 50-degree C ambient temperature.


7. Network upgrades/activation: Scott Ananian has completed a bring up of our “meshtest” testbed; he has verified automated network upgrades with security enabled, and activation from school server. (Some tweaks required to make this more robust went into Build 619.) He also discovered that about half of the meshtest machines were using compact Linksys external USB ethernet dongles that would overheat and crash if left on overnight. He also made some database-model changes to activation.laptop.org which will help us better manage groups of laptops. And he imported manufacturing data for all of our existing B2-C1 machines and generated activation and developer leases for them to ease testing.
Bitworks and Richard Smith brought up the CPU board for the bulk charger: Forth is running and all the I/O paths have been exercised. Both Richard and Lilian Walter have prototype CPU boards for software development. The first draft of the software specification along with the relevant EC code that currently runs as part of the laptop charging system were delivered to Lilian last week. She has ported the USB code and has written a software pulse-width modulator (PWM), which will be used to drive the charge voltage for each battery. She is now working on increasing the PWM interrupt priority. Next week Richard hopes to charge some batteries.


8. Backups: Tomeu Vizoso, Ivan Krstić, and Marco Gritti discussed and implemented Journal backups to the server and individual file restore. Datastore performance will also be good enough to do full restores. Along the way, a number of bugs were fixed. Ivan wrote the corresponding school-server backup system (#4100) with Tomeu assisting on the datastore side and Marco on the Journal-activity side. It should be ready to land in builds early this week.
11. Cow power: In a related effort, Richard has been working with Arjun Sarwal, helping him refine his plan for charging the XOs using cow power. [http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/india/2007-October/000069.html link]


9. Screenshots: Tomeu and Marco are working on an improved way of taking screenshots of running activities for the Journal preview. (Typing Alt+1 will still cause a screenshot to be placed in the Journal.)
12. Firmware: Mitch Bradley has been putting together a firmware build for mass production. Q2D01 was officially released, but we may decide to bump to Q2D02 to address some issue with security migration. Q2D01 has several important bug fixes: wireless association, JFFS2, and support for non-US keyboard layouts, as well as a secure OS image update.


10. Read activity and Sugar documentation: Tomeu gave some support to Pascal Scheffers for his work in Read (which now saves its state in the Journal and has numerous improvements to the UI) and documentation of the Sugar API. He is doing an awesome job!
13. Embedded controller: An agreement between EnE and OLPC on use of the EC source code has been finalized—now it just needs signatures. Richard, Mitch, and Scott Ananian worked up a method for automatic firmware updates in the face of our full security mode. It needs an EC patch that might not make it into MP. In other news, a small “buglet” with the Read Power Rail command (0x2B)—it always reported the DCON as powered up—has been fixed.


11. UI polish: Simon Schampier added (Ctrl+Q, Ctrl+Escape) for closing the activities and the keybinding (Alt+Space) to the activity window to hide/show the tray. The browse activity was adopted accordingly to these API changes. He is now finishing up work on a control panel.
14. Laptop hardware: John Watlington spent the week working on improving our test setup and chasing the occasional “reboot on resume on ping” bug. This is our most significant remaining hardware problem—it occurs rarely enough that, while we will hunt it down and fix it, we will not stop initial production. An update will be provided next week, after John and Chris Ball have tested a statistically more significant number of C2 pre-build machines at the factory in China. We are releasing the modified B4 and C1 laptops from the Cambridge test bed to software developers (four had already been sent out). Kim Quirk is distributing these. Two will be kept running in the testbed in a continually ongoing attempt to break the one-million suspend/resume-cycle mark.


12. Battery-life testing: Richard Smith repeated a number of tests on power consumption and battery life. These tests were gratifyingly consistent with other direct power measurements Joel Stanley had performed in late summer. There are remaining power savings to be had by better use of the DCON hardware and optimization of the wireless firmware when running in mesh mode, which have just begun.
We have gotten to the point in fixing the suspend/resume problems where we are once again finding subtle problems with our test setup. Javier and Ronak helped us debug some remaining wireless-mesh problems: we started testing with a new build of the WLAN firmware and consequently started seeing more instances of the problem loosely identified by Trac ticket #1752 (USB wireless suspend/resume failure at setup phase). This is the ticket that gets blamed for problems with networking after a large number of suspend/resume cycles (over time, a collection of bugs have been corrected by multiple changes in WLAN firmware, EC firmware, and the motherboard itself). We hadn't seen the bug in modified machines; we will be testing an even newer WLAN firmware, which might correct the problem.


Scott found a battery-charging bug with NiMH batteries, which Richard is working on.
15. Javier and Ronak also looked at some problems we have been having with the active antenna (it occasionally stops working, even though to system software it appears to be OK). As this problem only happens after weeks of operation, they weren't lucky enough to see the behavior. What they did realize was that the test setup Marvell had been using in India was completely different from the one in which we were seeing the problem. They will now run the school-server software in their testbed. Again, Marvell's latest firmware might fix this problem.


13. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2D02 firmware:
16. Peripherals ideas: Joshua Seal has created a new discussion space for peripheral ideas. It combines all previous ideas posted on the OLPC wiki regarding power, connectivity, sensors, and input and output devices. By going to [[Peripherals]] you will see all of the peripheral ideas and are welcome to post any new ideas you may have. Alternatively please email your ideas to josh<at>laptop<dot>org with your suggestions.
* turned off indexed I/O before early interaction to close a security hole;
* added rtc-wackup command for suspend-resume testing;
* enabled reboot using the new EC command that resets the EC too, thus re-enabling indexed I/O, thus making auto-firmware-update possible;
* fixed bug in signature parsing for developer keys;
* increased countdown to five seconds because its harder to catch it with security activated;
* when searching for a signature string, look for one whose key signature matches the trailing portion of our pubkey, instead of just taking the first line with a "sig01:" format;
* disabled “X” button toggle between secure and non-secure modes (The “X” button now forces secure mode when in non-secure mode, instead of going in either direction.);
* disabled indexed I/O when entering the kernel in secure mode;
* disabled PSCLK in low state to fix the PS2 flow control bug from a cold boot;
* added feature to send battery-status SCIs on low_bat change;
* fixed the bug that caused a failure to recognize the C2 board revision number;
* implemented command 0xDB to auto restart with indexed IO enabled.


14. Schedule: The upcoming releases have been renamed and re-purposed:
17. Sugar: Simon Schampijer worked on Sugar refinements to the standard alerts and added a timeout alert. He also added full-screen support to Sugar—hides the toolbar and tray—and add tray support in activity windows. This is implemented and works for all the Python activities, since we handle this in the base activity window. (He has also added support of trays to the base activity, which is why both the toolbar and the tray are affected by full-screen mode.) The Browse activity is a good place to see and test this new feature. Alt+enter is bound to this feature. (Note that currently you have to use Alt+shift+enter due to a misbehavior in the Matchbox window manager. This has been filed and will hopefully be fixed upstream early next week.) Simon also added alerts for “Download started” and “Download completed” and feedback for downloads in progress when closing a session.


Oct. 26: “Trial-3” (Build 622) are the bits being loaded for mass production. This was completed this week.
Internationalization support has been integrated into Measure Activity and with help from volunteers Spanish and Portuguese translations have already been done. Arjun Sarwal has been working on displaying multiple logs at the same time to enable comparison amongst logs.


Nov. 16: “Reload” are bits that could possibly be loaded before shipping laptops to individuals. We will hand pick blocking bug fixes only if we need to.
Bert Freudenberg spear-headed the effort to adapt Squeak to the API changes and security container change after Trial-3. Takashi Yamamiya also take the charge of DnD fixes. Yoshiki Ohshima worked on the fixes on accented character input and support for the DC-mode input. Scott Wallace gathers numerous fixes from community and merge them to the Etoys.


Dec. 07: “Killjoy” (V1.0, previously referred to as FRS or First Deployment) is a release based on the “Joyride” builds. This will include bug fixes/minor features that are in Joyride today; and we are actively moving some trac items to this release based on what we know about in the next week. Feature freeze for this is next week; code freeze the week after.
Hilaire Fernandes has led an effort to port Dr. Geo, a GTK interactive geometry software to the laptop. It allows one to create geometric figure plus the interactive manipulation of such figure in respect with their geometric constraints. It runs inside of Etoys; a great example of “hard fun.” (See [[DrGeo]] for details.)


Q1 2008: “Future Release” (V1.1) is the release after Killjoy. Not well defined. Right now it is where we moved all the features that didn't make it into Killjoy.
Muriel Godoi continues to make improvements to the Memorize Game activity. He has reduced the memory footprint; added new icons to the
“create” mode (which lets children create their own games); integrated the datastore; enabled importing of pictures and audio from the Journal (for building cards for new games); added an icon and tool tip for a “reset game” button; and incorporated the new protocol for sending files over tubes in order to share a child-created game. A new release will be available soon.


(See https://dev.laptop.org/roadmap for more info.)
Manusheel Gupta has been working with the team from LSI at the University of São Paulo (including Alexandre Martinazzo, Irene Karaguilla Ficheman, Nathalia Sautchuk Patrício, Roseli de Deus Lopes, André Mossinato, Rafael Barbolo Lopes, and Pedro Kayatt) on the Paint activity. They have some new ideas for implementing sharing and fixing bugs. One important enhancement is Journal integration for image imports. (Try downloading www.lsi.usp.br/nate/documentation/Paint-12.xo).


As we do the triage for these builds, we’d very much appreciate community feedback as to what you think is important. Feel free to send email to Walter Bender, Kim Quirk, or Jim Gettys in regard to priorities.
18. Keyboards: Manusheel, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Roshan Kamat, Tushar Sayankar, Jens Peterson, and Walter Bender have finished the layout for a Deva keyboard (See [[Devanagari_Keyboard]]). We hope to finish the Nepali and Pashto keyboards in the coming weeks. Manu is leading a discussion on an OLPC keyboard for the blind. Please send your ideas/feedback to manu<at>laptop<dot>org).


15. Testing: Alex Latham kept the suspend/resume testbed running with the same OS, OFW, kernel, and wireless firmware release as the test team in China, who are bringing up 42 boards with new PCB. He also worked on connectivity testing and upgrade testing. Next week he will be working creating a more comprehensive smoke/regression test to provide the basis for our final release testing. Yani Galanis has put together a detailed wiki page on testing network connectivity (See [[Test_Network_Configuration]]). There is information on how things work today and where to find information about your connectivity; he has also created a connectivity-status script that will send all this info to standard output. Ricardo Carrano has been working our RF sniffer to provide debug and analysis help on some of the difficult wireless hangs and access-point association problems we have been seeing.
19. Schedules/testing: We have done what we hope is the final OFW and Trial-3 builds for the mass production start at Quanta. The focus of the development and test teams starting this week has been mostly on first deployment (FRS) bug fixing and testing. Yani Galanis, Ricardo Carrno joined Ronak and Javier to help sort out issues with wireless connectivity. Alex Latham continued to help out on suspend/resume testing as well as updating and executing test plans from the wiki test area ([[User_Stories_Testing]]).


16. EC code: Three new EC bugs seemed to have surfaced this week:
20. Test sprint: Michael Stone ran a “Test” sprint at OLPC to brainstorm ideas for improving our QA and test process. Thanks to community members who contributed (on IRC) including Titus Brown and Grig Gheorghiu (two testing/QA experts from the Python community), Mitchell Charity, Ricardo Carrno, Chris Ball, Danny Clark, Reynaldo Verdejo, Marco Gritti, Alex Latham, Yani Galanis, and others. Accomplishments include: specific work towards an improved tinderbox; the creation of a vision for the test activity; an attack of the problem of uploading a log set from the laptop to a central server; some updating of our current set of test plans; and discussions on the Trac extension for test-case management. We will follow up over the next few weeks (See wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_process_sprint). Weekly test meetings are held on Mondays at 1pm EDT. Please send email to kim<at>laptop<dot>org if you want to be on the testing mail list.
* The EC code and kernel have a mismatch in meaning of data sent between them for power-status events. Therefore its true external- power status events are not detected by the kernel. David Woodhouse and Richard have a workaround.
* EC commands too close to suspend leave the EC in a state where
it won't respond to commands anymore. Andres Salomon and Richard have a kernel workaround.
* Something in the “Secure Boot” sequence seems to make the EC reset the capacity percentage of a full NiMH battery to 7% and sometimes this gets written back into the battery. This results in what was a fully charged battery now marked as empty. Bad things then happen. It only happens in secure boot and only with a fully charged NiMH. Testing in secure boot mode has made for slow goings. The current suspect is when we disable Indexed IO to the EC to prevent flashing.


17. Squeak/Etoys: Marta Voelcker reports that the children at the Luciana de Abreu school in Porto Alegre, Brazil are making great progress with Etoys. “The 11-year olds are using it very frequently, 12-to-14-year olds also increasing it, and first graders (age 7) are starting to use it. They use squeak in the classroom and after school they meet in the garden to talk about and share things made with squeak, it is becoming a culture!” Squeak has been very popular in Ethiopia as well.
21. System updates: Chris Ball modified the tinderbox to run on Joyride builds and to launch every installed activity; recording how long each launch took. Chris is also working on having open hardware manager (OHM) interpret the wakeup reason newly reported by the kernel: if the wakeup reason suggests it, we will go immediately to sleep after waking up. We can also start treating “suspend” differently from “sleep”—if the power button is pressed, the assumption is that user wants us to stay asleep until we get another power-button press to wake us up.


18. Measure activity: Arjun Sarwal explored color schemes for displaying multiple logs from multiple people. He also spent this past week reviewing UI of the Activity with Eben Eliason, reviewing Journal integration with Tomeu and Marco, refining DSP aspects with Mitch, V. Michael Bove, Albert Cahalan, and Benjamin Schwartz, and optimizing drawing code with Bernie Innocenti and Cody Lodrige.
This week Andres Salomon worked on bugs, including the infamous JFFS2 corruption bug that appears to be a race in some VServer or VFS code and has proven difficult to grasp. Another bug was the inclusion of the DCON smbus init recipe, which (we believe) makes the DCON finally behave as we intended. Andres also updated the kernel's geode GPIO API and wrote a patch that allows you to see what event has woken the machine up via /sys/power/wakeup-source. He sent more patches upstream and helped massage outstanding patches into 2.6.24-rc1. Andres merged a few of Mitch Bradley's patches, as well: power off via cs5536 rather than the EC (which allows us to drop indexed I/O from the EC, unfreeze the DCON when (not if) the kernel panics, etc. SELinux was disabled in the kernel; it was originally enabled so that people could use it as the starting point to come up with something comparable to Vserver. No one ever did and one of the bugs Andres worked on (that appears to be caused by hardware memory corruption) has SELinux stuff in the backtrace, so it was time to remove it.


19. Documentation: Todd Kelsey has build “PHPMyFaq” in order to take some of the support heat off of developers. PHPMyFaq is scalable, multilingual, RSS, XML; it allows people to post questions, other people to answer, print out, save to PDF, XML, etc. Its coolest feature is ranking—most relevant/popular items float to top (See http://aaa.opensourcehost.com/~thoughts/faq/). Todd could use one or more people’s help on:
22. Security: Ivan Krstić worked on the system of capturing manufacturing information from the production line for the security/theft system—a server will be set up at the factory. As a fall-back option, we will utilize a parallel posting of manufacturing data directly upstream to Cambridge. We have requested the source code to Quanta's manufacturing data submitter program to verify it can handle error conditions correctly. Ivan also spent several hours with Mitch Bradley debugging a kernel filename corruption bug triggered by VServer's copy-on-write functionality; we didn't succeed in specifically tracking down the bug, but we identified locking problems in a VServer routine that are being fixed.
* defining categories of questions that developers get asked;
* some pre-made questions and answers to seed page;
* someone to moderate instances.


Meanwhile, Felice Gardner has been doing some cleaning up of the FAQ on the wiki, putting “new” questions into categories and consolidating multiple pages of questions on the same topic (See [[Ask_OLPC_a_Question]]).
23. Backups: Ivan is working with Marco Gritti and Tomeu Vizoso on the school server components needed to provide a human-readable index of Journal. Ivan wrote a detailed specification and has iterated with Marco and Tomeu, who will be working on the “XO side” of backup, to meet all the requirements (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_backup_restore).


Todd and Ann Gentle are spending part of today writing up how they have worked on documentation so far, and what tools could help improve the process. Christoph Derndofer and Eduardo Silva have shared their drafts of an activity handbook as well. The results will be posted to the OLPC wiki's [[Documentation]] page.
24. Activation/updates: Michael Stone spend time this week making some architectural changes to the mechanism we use for selecting packages to be built by pilgrim; Scott Ananian implemented part of one of the requests, namely, to require that detailed change-entries be supplied describing what each package in a fragment of a build-branch is intended to accomplish.


20. Library: Jamendo now has an OLPC music portal up, with help from Free Culture and the Antenna Alliance (See http://www.jamendo.com/en/olpc for the first posted bands and albums of freely licensed music). They are also gathering signed copyright statements from all authors for the collections.
Mitch Bradley, Kim Quirk, and ScottI tried to nail down the bits that are going into the MP machines. We will shortly have a Q2D02 firmware and Build 618, which we hope is ready for MP. Many of Scott’s fixes for early-boot code landed in Build 617, including better activation-failure messages—more translations needed—and activation from a school server.


The Internet Archive is working to turn their feeds of new book-metapages into a feed of PDFs. Alexis Rossi is helping produce improved collections of their children's library (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arael/preview/childrens-library/).
Scott set up updates.laptop.org on its own (virtual) machine; he built and installed activation.laptop.org, which allows deployment teams to generate activation leases and developer keys. He also installed a “recent” build on all 25 meshtest machines hanging from the ceiling of the OLPC office, reclaiming some machines that had left the mesh for other testing. There is now an infrastructure in place for doing automatic upgrades of the entire meshtest, which will let us easily put tests in place and execute them, as well as load testing our upgrade mechanism.


Anil Hemrajani at Big Universe has 14 children's picturebooks whose authors have agreed for them to be distributed as demo books. These are the first children’s books in our collections that were not scanned, but were created in digital format. This is a temporary collection while working to get authors and publishers to agree to a suitable CC license.
25. Text to speech: Hemant Goyal and Asiem Deodia are working on getting a text-to-speech synthesizer integrated into xbook (and perhaps into Sugar). Arjun Sarwal is mentoring them as part of Summer of Content. They have an initial design working, involving a dbus service that will capture highlighted text and play it with espeak. A global “play” button is planned for the Sugar activity toolbar so that this is accessible from all activities. Paulo Condado, a programmer from Portugal introduced by Antonio Battro, works on accessibility software for the disabled. He is working to make a version of his “easyvoice” tool work on the XO; he is also beginning with text-to-speech services (See [http://w3.ualg.pt/~pcondado/easyvoice/]).


Andrew Whitworth at Wikijunior is working on making stable versions of
26. How-tos/documentation: A few groups have independently developed their own “how-tos” about using Sugar and the XOs. Christoph Derndofer and Eduardo Silva each took a stab at how-tos for using activities and Todd Kelsey and Val Scarlatta worked on updating the 542 Demo Notes with more detailed information from the wiki and updates for recent builds. John Gilmore wrote in with his own ideas for help files. There is a group discussion planned for next Saturday to bring these similar works together.
their newer books, with a focus on an offline interface that is simple and allows people to read static books while linking to places for them to comment and edit them.


Curriki is working on their tool to package collections as XO bundles. Some of our curators have gone to them to store their collections.
27. Localization: Our pootle instance is running, thanks to Xavi Alvarez and Rafael Ortiz, and will be used this weekend, though integration between pootle and git has been harder than expected; much is not yet automated.
The EGAP alumni from Monterrey's Tech working on a summer of content mapping project have started a blog. They are posting their works to Curriki, and learning how to integrate with our feature server (See http://olpclatam.blogspot.com/). Curriki is working with Nortel to convert their LearnIT video and text materials to Curriki collections; and to make sure they are bundled for the XO.


Kevin Driscoll is working with a few students in India on a Hackety-Hack series. They have eight problems and solutions written so far; the whole needs to be Sugarized.
28. Design: Aza Raskin of the Humanized design team and David Huynh of CSAIL's Simile project are coming to OLPC late next week to discuss some of their design ideas and to see how their teams can help with interfaces to display content and personal history.


Marilyn Mosley, coordinator of the Laurel Springs school, is offering her online ecology courses to OLPC students, and working on new health
29. Community: Manusheel Gupta and Arjun Sarwal finished work on a community and partners database for India, to be integrated with the OLPC wikis and made available to others.
courses


Peter Kaufman, our open video coordinator, and Ahrash Bissell of ccLearn are helping plan a video creation and remix challenge for the science video and documentary community. The challenge will have two stages, one to provide free material suitable for teaching science, and the second to make the best short educational video for children from available sources.
30. Copyright: Pam Samuelson from Berkeley Law School has offered to help evaluate copyright concerns for media and content we distribute. A meeting is being scheduled for the end of the month at Harvard Law School.


21. Community/Games: Mike Fletcher is being flown to Taipei for a few days this week for a free-software and open-source conference there. He is talking in a session along with the lead Asus Eee developers, who are eager to involve the open source community. Mike Fletcher is also helping organize a small sibling game sprint in Toronto, November 16–18, at the same time as the CMU Game Jam (See [[Games/Productive]]).
31. SimCity: Don Hopkins is done with most of the SimCity port, but is still working on sound and font issues. He is working on the project again this coming week, with help from Julius Lucks.


Nov. 10–11 : Game Jam Brasil (in São Carlos)
32. Creators/curators: Roberto Faga has started working with Marcelo Bursztein and the ePals team to finish their simple activity for school-to-school collaboration. Elizabeth Stark and the Free Culture Foundation have found a PR group in New York interested in promoting “music for OLPC.” (This needs to be coordinated with W2.) They are adding one or two new collections a week to the “olpc” category at Jamendo. ([http://www.jamendo.com/olpc] should be up sometime this week with the OLPC music lists.) Colingo has new Spanish- and Portuguese-language videos out (See [[ColingoXO]]). Wikihow and howtopedia are working together to coordinate their efforts in English, Spanish, and French. The OLiVER project, working on publishing curricula across Africa, is working with wikieducator to share their materials.


Nov. 16–18 : Game Jam Pittsburgh (at the CMU ETC center)
33. Java: Adam Bouhenguel has started working on a CDC port to the XO. Stefano Mazzochi has a plan for how to cut down the Harmony implementation for comparison, and is trying this out in emulation.

Nov. 16–18 : Toronto Game Sprint

Don Hopkins' version of SimCity is almost complete; it needs to go through final testing by the EA developers before it can be released under the GPL, but should be ready for child testing.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 17:56, 27 October 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 73628]  +/-  

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2007-10-27

1. New York City: United Nations Under-Secretary-General/High Representative for Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Countries and Island States, Mr. Cheick Sidi Diarra of Mali, hosted a two-hour meeting exclusively devoted to OLPC. Miguel Brechner and Oscar Becerra presented, respectively, the experiences and decision-making process in Uruguay and Peru. Questions and demos lasted for an additional forty five minutes. About 50 countries were represented.

2. Netherlands: Ivan Krstić keynoted GOVCERT.NL, the invitation-only security conference organized by the Dutch computer emergency response team (CERT). He made a number of contacts with international CERTs, whose assistance might be critical after we deploy.

3. Adapter prong orientation: Demands from the field for one or the other orientation of adapter prongs have led us to request more adapter orientation options. Quanta has been responsive and UL will assist with safety testing. It will be several months before these AC adapters will be available, but work has begun.

4. Resistance tests: Summarized below is the current status of resistance testing of the XO laptop. Mary Lou Jepsen will write a complete report in early November, after all testing data is available. (This report will be available on http://wiki.laptop.org.)

  • Drop: XO passes 10-point drop test from a height of 150cm onto carpet- covered steel (other drop-test details available)
  • Operating temperature: 0C to 45C (50C pending certification)
  • Storage temperature : –25C to 60C
  • Operational altitude: 0 to 5000m
  • Dust/water: Testing to Ingress Protocol 54 and 42 (in process)
  • Toxicity: RoHS certified (UL report due in early November)
  • Safety:
    • IEC 60950-1(write up in process)
    • EN 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • CSA/UL 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • ASTM F 963 – Electronic Toy Safety (write up in process)
  • AC adapter
    • Wide input range: 90v(–10%) ~ 240v(+25%), 35Hz to 70Hz
    • IEC 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • EN 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • CSA/UL 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • Extra transient and burst immunity: IEC 61000-4-4 (passed)
    • Extra surge immunity: IEC 61000-4-5 (passed)
  • Keyboard
    • Tested to 500,000 cycles
    • Rubber: water and dust resistant
  • Buttons (power, display rotate, gamepads): Tested to 500,000 cycles

5. Mass-production build (Trial 3): The stable build for mass production start is Build 622 (Firmware Q2D02). Please test these builds extensively. John Palmieri and Scott Ananian produced a number of builds in support of mass production, incorporating final changes for C2 systems and fixes from Javier Cardona and Andres Salomon for USB and wireless related suspend/resume problems. James Cameron helped Chris Ball, Bernie Innocenti, and Jim Gettys diagnose why X would not start while testing the C2 boards.

Scott has been supporting the Joyride build system. He, Michael Stone, and Bernardo Innocenti had a fruitful discussion with the Fedora build maintainer community about how to integrate our build system with koji going forward. Greg DeKoenigsberg at RedHat has offered his significant help in coordinating our needs with members of the Fedora community who would like to get involved.

6. Localization: We have issued a call for translators, coordinators, and volunteers (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/localization/2007-October/000052.html). If you have good language skills (even if you have minimal computer skills), you can make an important contribution to the project. Please help us localize to as many languages as possible (See the localization mailing-list subscription page at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/localization).

Xavier Alvarez, Alfonso de la Guarda, and Danny Clark have built a Pootle installation—a web based tool to help in language localization (See the OLPC Pootle at its temporary site by visiting http://solar.laptop.org:5080/). Sayamindu Dasgupta, a student from India working part-time on the project is helping them.

Sumit Chowdhury reports that Nandu Pradhan, president of RedHat India, is working with a team next week to help provide localization support in eleven Indian languages. Sarmad Hussein of the PAN Localization project and the CRULP research center has offered help with Pashto, Urdu, and Nepali keyboards and localization.

7. Network upgrades/activation: Scott Ananian has completed a bring up of our “meshtest” testbed; he has verified automated network upgrades with security enabled, and activation from school server. (Some tweaks required to make this more robust went into Build 619.) He also discovered that about half of the meshtest machines were using compact Linksys external USB ethernet dongles that would overheat and crash if left on overnight. He also made some database-model changes to activation.laptop.org which will help us better manage groups of laptops. And he imported manufacturing data for all of our existing B2-C1 machines and generated activation and developer leases for them to ease testing.

8. Backups: Tomeu Vizoso, Ivan Krstić, and Marco Gritti discussed and implemented Journal backups to the server and individual file restore. Datastore performance will also be good enough to do full restores. Along the way, a number of bugs were fixed. Ivan wrote the corresponding school-server backup system (#4100) with Tomeu assisting on the datastore side and Marco on the Journal-activity side. It should be ready to land in builds early this week.

9. Screenshots: Tomeu and Marco are working on an improved way of taking screenshots of running activities for the Journal preview. (Typing Alt+1 will still cause a screenshot to be placed in the Journal.)

10. Read activity and Sugar documentation: Tomeu gave some support to Pascal Scheffers for his work in Read (which now saves its state in the Journal and has numerous improvements to the UI) and documentation of the Sugar API. He is doing an awesome job!

11. UI polish: Simon Schampier added (Ctrl+Q, Ctrl+Escape) for closing the activities and the keybinding (Alt+Space) to the activity window to hide/show the tray. The browse activity was adopted accordingly to these API changes. He is now finishing up work on a control panel.

12. Battery-life testing: Richard Smith repeated a number of tests on power consumption and battery life. These tests were gratifyingly consistent with other direct power measurements Joel Stanley had performed in late summer. There are remaining power savings to be had by better use of the DCON hardware and optimization of the wireless firmware when running in mesh mode, which have just begun.

Scott found a battery-charging bug with NiMH batteries, which Richard is working on.

13. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2D02 firmware:

  • turned off indexed I/O before early interaction to close a security hole;
  • added rtc-wackup command for suspend-resume testing;
  • enabled reboot using the new EC command that resets the EC too, thus re-enabling indexed I/O, thus making auto-firmware-update possible;
  • fixed bug in signature parsing for developer keys;
  • increased countdown to five seconds because its harder to catch it with security activated;
  • when searching for a signature string, look for one whose key signature matches the trailing portion of our pubkey, instead of just taking the first line with a "sig01:" format;
  • disabled “X” button toggle between secure and non-secure modes (The “X” button now forces secure mode when in non-secure mode, instead of going in either direction.);
  • disabled indexed I/O when entering the kernel in secure mode;
  • disabled PSCLK in low state to fix the PS2 flow control bug from a cold boot;
  • added feature to send battery-status SCIs on low_bat change;
  • fixed the bug that caused a failure to recognize the C2 board revision number;
  • implemented command 0xDB to auto restart with indexed IO enabled.

14. Schedule: The upcoming releases have been renamed and re-purposed:

Oct. 26: “Trial-3” (Build 622) are the bits being loaded for mass production. This was completed this week.

Nov. 16: “Reload” are bits that could possibly be loaded before shipping laptops to individuals. We will hand pick blocking bug fixes only if we need to.

Dec. 07: “Killjoy” (V1.0, previously referred to as FRS or First Deployment) is a release based on the “Joyride” builds. This will include bug fixes/minor features that are in Joyride today; and we are actively moving some trac items to this release based on what we know about in the next week. Feature freeze for this is next week; code freeze the week after.

Q1 2008: “Future Release” (V1.1) is the release after Killjoy. Not well defined. Right now it is where we moved all the features that didn't make it into Killjoy.

(See https://dev.laptop.org/roadmap for more info.)

As we do the triage for these builds, we’d very much appreciate community feedback as to what you think is important. Feel free to send email to Walter Bender, Kim Quirk, or Jim Gettys in regard to priorities.

15. Testing: Alex Latham kept the suspend/resume testbed running with the same OS, OFW, kernel, and wireless firmware release as the test team in China, who are bringing up 42 boards with new PCB. He also worked on connectivity testing and upgrade testing. Next week he will be working creating a more comprehensive smoke/regression test to provide the basis for our final release testing. Yani Galanis has put together a detailed wiki page on testing network connectivity (See Test_Network_Configuration). There is information on how things work today and where to find information about your connectivity; he has also created a connectivity-status script that will send all this info to standard output. Ricardo Carrano has been working our RF sniffer to provide debug and analysis help on some of the difficult wireless hangs and access-point association problems we have been seeing.

16. EC code: Three new EC bugs seemed to have surfaced this week:

  • The EC code and kernel have a mismatch in meaning of data sent between them for power-status events. Therefore its true external- power status events are not detected by the kernel. David Woodhouse and Richard have a workaround.
  • EC commands too close to suspend leave the EC in a state where

it won't respond to commands anymore. Andres Salomon and Richard have a kernel workaround.

  • Something in the “Secure Boot” sequence seems to make the EC reset the capacity percentage of a full NiMH battery to 7% and sometimes this gets written back into the battery. This results in what was a fully charged battery now marked as empty. Bad things then happen. It only happens in secure boot and only with a fully charged NiMH. Testing in secure boot mode has made for slow goings. The current suspect is when we disable Indexed IO to the EC to prevent flashing.

17. Squeak/Etoys: Marta Voelcker reports that the children at the Luciana de Abreu school in Porto Alegre, Brazil are making great progress with Etoys. “The 11-year olds are using it very frequently, 12-to-14-year olds also increasing it, and first graders (age 7) are starting to use it. They use squeak in the classroom and after school they meet in the garden to talk about and share things made with squeak, it is becoming a culture!” Squeak has been very popular in Ethiopia as well.

18. Measure activity: Arjun Sarwal explored color schemes for displaying multiple logs from multiple people. He also spent this past week reviewing UI of the Activity with Eben Eliason, reviewing Journal integration with Tomeu and Marco, refining DSP aspects with Mitch, V. Michael Bove, Albert Cahalan, and Benjamin Schwartz, and optimizing drawing code with Bernie Innocenti and Cody Lodrige.

19. Documentation: Todd Kelsey has build “PHPMyFaq” in order to take some of the support heat off of developers. PHPMyFaq is scalable, multilingual, RSS, XML; it allows people to post questions, other people to answer, print out, save to PDF, XML, etc. Its coolest feature is ranking—most relevant/popular items float to top (See http://aaa.opensourcehost.com/~thoughts/faq/). Todd could use one or more people’s help on:

  • defining categories of questions that developers get asked;
  • some pre-made questions and answers to seed page;
  • someone to moderate instances.

Meanwhile, Felice Gardner has been doing some cleaning up of the FAQ on the wiki, putting “new” questions into categories and consolidating multiple pages of questions on the same topic (See Ask_OLPC_a_Question).

Todd and Ann Gentle are spending part of today writing up how they have worked on documentation so far, and what tools could help improve the process. Christoph Derndofer and Eduardo Silva have shared their drafts of an activity handbook as well. The results will be posted to the OLPC wiki's Documentation page.

20. Library: Jamendo now has an OLPC music portal up, with help from Free Culture and the Antenna Alliance (See http://www.jamendo.com/en/olpc for the first posted bands and albums of freely licensed music). They are also gathering signed copyright statements from all authors for the collections.

The Internet Archive is working to turn their feeds of new book-metapages into a feed of PDFs. Alexis Rossi is helping produce improved collections of their children's library (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arael/preview/childrens-library/).

Anil Hemrajani at Big Universe has 14 children's picturebooks whose authors have agreed for them to be distributed as demo books. These are the first children’s books in our collections that were not scanned, but were created in digital format. This is a temporary collection while working to get authors and publishers to agree to a suitable CC license.

Andrew Whitworth at Wikijunior is working on making stable versions of their newer books, with a focus on an offline interface that is simple and allows people to read static books while linking to places for them to comment and edit them.

Curriki is working on their tool to package collections as XO bundles. Some of our curators have gone to them to store their collections. The EGAP alumni from Monterrey's Tech working on a summer of content mapping project have started a blog. They are posting their works to Curriki, and learning how to integrate with our feature server (See http://olpclatam.blogspot.com/). Curriki is working with Nortel to convert their LearnIT video and text materials to Curriki collections; and to make sure they are bundled for the XO.

Kevin Driscoll is working with a few students in India on a Hackety-Hack series. They have eight problems and solutions written so far; the whole needs to be Sugarized.

Marilyn Mosley, coordinator of the Laurel Springs school, is offering her online ecology courses to OLPC students, and working on new health courses

Peter Kaufman, our open video coordinator, and Ahrash Bissell of ccLearn are helping plan a video creation and remix challenge for the science video and documentary community. The challenge will have two stages, one to provide free material suitable for teaching science, and the second to make the best short educational video for children from available sources.

21. Community/Games: Mike Fletcher is being flown to Taipei for a few days this week for a free-software and open-source conference there. He is talking in a session along with the lead Asus Eee developers, who are eager to involve the open source community. Mike Fletcher is also helping organize a small sibling game sprint in Toronto, November 16–18, at the same time as the CMU Game Jam (See Games/Productive).

Nov. 10–11 : Game Jam Brasil (in São Carlos)

Nov. 16–18 : Game Jam Pittsburgh (at the CMU ETC center)

Nov. 16–18 : Toronto Game Sprint

Don Hopkins' version of SimCity is almost complete; it needs to go through final testing by the EA developers before it can be released under the GPL, but should be ready for child testing.

More News

Laptop News is archived here and here.

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

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 73628]  +/-  

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2007-10-27

1. New York City: United Nations Under-Secretary-General/High Representative for Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Countries and Island States, Mr. Cheick Sidi Diarra of Mali, hosted a two-hour meeting exclusively devoted to OLPC. Miguel Brechner and Oscar Becerra presented, respectively, the experiences and decision-making process in Uruguay and Peru. Questions and demos lasted for an additional forty five minutes. About 50 countries were represented.

2. Netherlands: Ivan Krstić keynoted GOVCERT.NL, the invitation-only security conference organized by the Dutch computer emergency response team (CERT). He made a number of contacts with international CERTs, whose assistance might be critical after we deploy.

3. Adapter prong orientation: Demands from the field for one or the other orientation of adapter prongs have led us to request more adapter orientation options. Quanta has been responsive and UL will assist with safety testing. It will be several months before these AC adapters will be available, but work has begun.

4. Resistance tests: Summarized below is the current status of resistance testing of the XO laptop. Mary Lou Jepsen will write a complete report in early November, after all testing data is available. (This report will be available on http://wiki.laptop.org.)

  • Drop: XO passes 10-point drop test from a height of 150cm onto carpet- covered steel (other drop-test details available)
  • Operating temperature: 0C to 45C (50C pending certification)
  • Storage temperature : –25C to 60C
  • Operational altitude: 0 to 5000m
  • Dust/water: Testing to Ingress Protocol 54 and 42 (in process)
  • Toxicity: RoHS certified (UL report due in early November)
  • Safety:
    • IEC 60950-1(write up in process)
    • EN 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • CSA/UL 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • ASTM F 963 – Electronic Toy Safety (write up in process)
  • AC adapter
    • Wide input range: 90v(–10%) ~ 240v(+25%), 35Hz to 70Hz
    • IEC 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • EN 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • CSA/UL 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • Extra transient and burst immunity: IEC 61000-4-4 (passed)
    • Extra surge immunity: IEC 61000-4-5 (passed)
  • Keyboard
    • Tested to 500,000 cycles
    • Rubber: water and dust resistant
  • Buttons (power, display rotate, gamepads): Tested to 500,000 cycles

5. Mass-production build (Trial 3): The stable build for mass production start is Build 622 (Firmware Q2D02). Please test these builds extensively. John Palmieri and Scott Ananian produced a number of builds in support of mass production, incorporating final changes for C2 systems and fixes from Javier Cardona and Andres Salomon for USB and wireless related suspend/resume problems. James Cameron helped Chris Ball, Bernie Innocenti, and Jim Gettys diagnose why X would not start while testing the C2 boards.

Scott has been supporting the Joyride build system. He, Michael Stone, and Bernardo Innocenti had a fruitful discussion with the Fedora build maintainer community about how to integrate our build system with koji going forward. Greg DeKoenigsberg at RedHat has offered his significant help in coordinating our needs with members of the Fedora community who would like to get involved.

6. Localization: We have issued a call for translators, coordinators, and volunteers (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/localization/2007-October/000052.html). If you have good language skills (even if you have minimal computer skills), you can make an important contribution to the project. Please help us localize to as many languages as possible (See the localization mailing-list subscription page at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/localization).

Xavier Alvarez, Alfonso de la Guarda, and Danny Clark have built a Pootle installation—a web based tool to help in language localization (See the OLPC Pootle at its temporary site by visiting http://solar.laptop.org:5080/). Sayamindu Dasgupta, a student from India working part-time on the project is helping them.

Sumit Chowdhury reports that Nandu Pradhan, president of RedHat India, is working with a team next week to help provide localization support in eleven Indian languages. Sarmad Hussein of the PAN Localization project and the CRULP research center has offered help with Pashto, Urdu, and Nepali keyboards and localization.

7. Network upgrades/activation: Scott Ananian has completed a bring up of our “meshtest” testbed; he has verified automated network upgrades with security enabled, and activation from school server. (Some tweaks required to make this more robust went into Build 619.) He also discovered that about half of the meshtest machines were using compact Linksys external USB ethernet dongles that would overheat and crash if left on overnight. He also made some database-model changes to activation.laptop.org which will help us better manage groups of laptops. And he imported manufacturing data for all of our existing B2-C1 machines and generated activation and developer leases for them to ease testing.

8. Backups: Tomeu Vizoso, Ivan Krstić, and Marco Gritti discussed and implemented Journal backups to the server and individual file restore. Datastore performance will also be good enough to do full restores. Along the way, a number of bugs were fixed. Ivan wrote the corresponding school-server backup system (#4100) with Tomeu assisting on the datastore side and Marco on the Journal-activity side. It should be ready to land in builds early this week.

9. Screenshots: Tomeu and Marco are working on an improved way of taking screenshots of running activities for the Journal preview. (Typing Alt+1 will still cause a screenshot to be placed in the Journal.)

10. Read activity and Sugar documentation: Tomeu gave some support to Pascal Scheffers for his work in Read (which now saves its state in the Journal and has numerous improvements to the UI) and documentation of the Sugar API. He is doing an awesome job!

11. UI polish: Simon Schampier added (Ctrl+Q, Ctrl+Escape) for closing the activities and the keybinding (Alt+Space) to the activity window to hide/show the tray. The browse activity was adopted accordingly to these API changes. He is now finishing up work on a control panel.

12. Battery-life testing: Richard Smith repeated a number of tests on power consumption and battery life. These tests were gratifyingly consistent with other direct power measurements Joel Stanley had performed in late summer. There are remaining power savings to be had by better use of the DCON hardware and optimization of the wireless firmware when running in mesh mode, which have just begun.

Scott found a battery-charging bug with NiMH batteries, which Richard is working on.

13. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2D02 firmware:

  • turned off indexed I/O before early interaction to close a security hole;
  • added rtc-wackup command for suspend-resume testing;
  • enabled reboot using the new EC command that resets the EC too, thus re-enabling indexed I/O, thus making auto-firmware-update possible;
  • fixed bug in signature parsing for developer keys;
  • increased countdown to five seconds because its harder to catch it with security activated;
  • when searching for a signature string, look for one whose key signature matches the trailing portion of our pubkey, instead of just taking the first line with a "sig01:" format;
  • disabled “X” button toggle between secure and non-secure modes (The “X” button now forces secure mode when in non-secure mode, instead of going in either direction.);
  • disabled indexed I/O when entering the kernel in secure mode;
  • disabled PSCLK in low state to fix the PS2 flow control bug from a cold boot;
  • added feature to send battery-status SCIs on low_bat change;
  • fixed the bug that caused a failure to recognize the C2 board revision number;
  • implemented command 0xDB to auto restart with indexed IO enabled.

14. Schedule: The upcoming releases have been renamed and re-purposed:

Oct. 26: “Trial-3” (Build 622) are the bits being loaded for mass production. This was completed this week.

Nov. 16: “Reload” are bits that could possibly be loaded before shipping laptops to individuals. We will hand pick blocking bug fixes only if we need to.

Dec. 07: “Killjoy” (V1.0, previously referred to as FRS or First Deployment) is a release based on the “Joyride” builds. This will include bug fixes/minor features that are in Joyride today; and we are actively moving some trac items to this release based on what we know about in the next week. Feature freeze for this is next week; code freeze the week after.

Q1 2008: “Future Release” (V1.1) is the release after Killjoy. Not well defined. Right now it is where we moved all the features that didn't make it into Killjoy.

(See https://dev.laptop.org/roadmap for more info.)

As we do the triage for these builds, we’d very much appreciate community feedback as to what you think is important. Feel free to send email to Walter Bender, Kim Quirk, or Jim Gettys in regard to priorities.

15. Testing: Alex Latham kept the suspend/resume testbed running with the same OS, OFW, kernel, and wireless firmware release as the test team in China, who are bringing up 42 boards with new PCB. He also worked on connectivity testing and upgrade testing. Next week he will be working creating a more comprehensive smoke/regression test to provide the basis for our final release testing. Yani Galanis has put together a detailed wiki page on testing network connectivity (See Test_Network_Configuration). There is information on how things work today and where to find information about your connectivity; he has also created a connectivity-status script that will send all this info to standard output. Ricardo Carrano has been working our RF sniffer to provide debug and analysis help on some of the difficult wireless hangs and access-point association problems we have been seeing.

16. EC code: Three new EC bugs seemed to have surfaced this week:

  • The EC code and kernel have a mismatch in meaning of data sent between them for power-status events. Therefore its true external- power status events are not detected by the kernel. David Woodhouse and Richard have a workaround.
  • EC commands too close to suspend leave the EC in a state where

it won't respond to commands anymore. Andres Salomon and Richard have a kernel workaround.

  • Something in the “Secure Boot” sequence seems to make the EC reset the capacity percentage of a full NiMH battery to 7% and sometimes this gets written back into the battery. This results in what was a fully charged battery now marked as empty. Bad things then happen. It only happens in secure boot and only with a fully charged NiMH. Testing in secure boot mode has made for slow goings. The current suspect is when we disable Indexed IO to the EC to prevent flashing.

17. Squeak/Etoys: Marta Voelcker reports that the children at the Luciana de Abreu school in Porto Alegre, Brazil are making great progress with Etoys. “The 11-year olds are using it very frequently, 12-to-14-year olds also increasing it, and first graders (age 7) are starting to use it. They use squeak in the classroom and after school they meet in the garden to talk about and share things made with squeak, it is becoming a culture!” Squeak has been very popular in Ethiopia as well.

18. Measure activity: Arjun Sarwal explored color schemes for displaying multiple logs from multiple people. He also spent this past week reviewing UI of the Activity with Eben Eliason, reviewing Journal integration with Tomeu and Marco, refining DSP aspects with Mitch, V. Michael Bove, Albert Cahalan, and Benjamin Schwartz, and optimizing drawing code with Bernie Innocenti and Cody Lodrige.

19. Documentation: Todd Kelsey has build “PHPMyFaq” in order to take some of the support heat off of developers. PHPMyFaq is scalable, multilingual, RSS, XML; it allows people to post questions, other people to answer, print out, save to PDF, XML, etc. Its coolest feature is ranking—most relevant/popular items float to top (See http://aaa.opensourcehost.com/~thoughts/faq/). Todd could use one or more people’s help on:

  • defining categories of questions that developers get asked;
  • some pre-made questions and answers to seed page;
  • someone to moderate instances.

Meanwhile, Felice Gardner has been doing some cleaning up of the FAQ on the wiki, putting “new” questions into categories and consolidating multiple pages of questions on the same topic (See Ask_OLPC_a_Question).

Todd and Ann Gentle are spending part of today writing up how they have worked on documentation so far, and what tools could help improve the process. Christoph Derndofer and Eduardo Silva have shared their drafts of an activity handbook as well. The results will be posted to the OLPC wiki's Documentation page.

20. Library: Jamendo now has an OLPC music portal up, with help from Free Culture and the Antenna Alliance (See http://www.jamendo.com/en/olpc for the first posted bands and albums of freely licensed music). They are also gathering signed copyright statements from all authors for the collections.

The Internet Archive is working to turn their feeds of new book-metapages into a feed of PDFs. Alexis Rossi is helping produce improved collections of their children's library (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arael/preview/childrens-library/).

Anil Hemrajani at Big Universe has 14 children's picturebooks whose authors have agreed for them to be distributed as demo books. These are the first children’s books in our collections that were not scanned, but were created in digital format. This is a temporary collection while working to get authors and publishers to agree to a suitable CC license.

Andrew Whitworth at Wikijunior is working on making stable versions of their newer books, with a focus on an offline interface that is simple and allows people to read static books while linking to places for them to comment and edit them.

Curriki is working on their tool to package collections as XO bundles. Some of our curators have gone to them to store their collections. The EGAP alumni from Monterrey's Tech working on a summer of content mapping project have started a blog. They are posting their works to Curriki, and learning how to integrate with our feature server (See http://olpclatam.blogspot.com/). Curriki is working with Nortel to convert their LearnIT video and text materials to Curriki collections; and to make sure they are bundled for the XO.

Kevin Driscoll is working with a few students in India on a Hackety-Hack series. They have eight problems and solutions written so far; the whole needs to be Sugarized.

Marilyn Mosley, coordinator of the Laurel Springs school, is offering her online ecology courses to OLPC students, and working on new health courses

Peter Kaufman, our open video coordinator, and Ahrash Bissell of ccLearn are helping plan a video creation and remix challenge for the science video and documentary community. The challenge will have two stages, one to provide free material suitable for teaching science, and the second to make the best short educational video for children from available sources.

21. Community/Games: Mike Fletcher is being flown to Taipei for a few days this week for a free-software and open-source conference there. He is talking in a session along with the lead Asus Eee developers, who are eager to involve the open source community. Mike Fletcher is also helping organize a small sibling game sprint in Toronto, November 16–18, at the same time as the CMU Game Jam (See Games/Productive).

Nov. 10–11 : Game Jam Brasil (in São Carlos)

Nov. 16–18 : Game Jam Pittsburgh (at the CMU ETC center)

Nov. 16–18 : Toronto Game Sprint

Don Hopkins' version of SimCity is almost complete; it needs to go through final testing by the EA developers before it can be released under the GPL, but should be ready for child testing.

More News

Laptop News is archived here and here.

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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

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site. Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

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