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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 2007-10-27=
=Laptop News 2007-11-03=
1. Reggio Emilia: Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi reconfirmed his commitment of 50,000 laptops for Ethiopia while at a town meeting of over 600 people where Nicholas presented OLPC. The importance of the funding is its exemplary nature—it is model for other European countries and the EU itself to follow. The clarity with which both the press and the audience understood children as our mission, versus a market, was refreshing.
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. Rome: Nicholas joined Antonio Battro and Matt Keller for a whirlwind one-day tour of the Eternal City. The day started with an interview on Radio Vatican, followed by an address to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, a speech received by over 200 UN staffers. After meeting with members of the City of Florence Council, Nicholas addressed over 300 members of Catholic Orders at the Vatican. (The Catholic Orders educate 50-million children in schools worldwide, many in the poorest countries.) The event, organized by Matt and Tom Rocheford of the Jesuit order included a presentation by Cardinal Poupard on the Encyclica “Populorum Progressio” as a mission towards education in developing countries and Antonio introduced the fundamental principles of OLPC. Throughout the day, they were shadowed by a Time Magazine reporter (See [http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1678273,00.html]).
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. New York City: Nicholas gave the keynote address at the 10th anniversary of Mouse.org, accompanied by Chancellor Joel Klein of the NYC public school system. Mouse is working with OLPC and, among other things, will help document the XO. Mouse is an organization that has students who helps other students (and teachers and schools) run their computer systems.
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. Cambridge: The first of what will become monthly learning workshops will be held this coming week; attendees are coming from the countries expecting to launch in the coming weeks and months. Lindsay Petrillose has done a fantastic job organizing all aspects of the meeting.
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.)


5. Mass production (MP): John Watlington continued to chase down our remaining suspend/resume problems. Many tests were tried, with most of them failing to cause any laptop crashes. (We now only see very rare crashes upon resume.) A production-line test for suspend/resume was developed and tested. The kernel and firmware teams have been invaluable in supporting this testing process.
* 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


Richard Smith has arrived in Changshu to continue testing the C2 motherboard and provide support the first days of production while John returns to Cambridge with a batch of motherboards for more intensive hardware analysis. Another batch is going to Terry Su (Quanta) in Taiwan for parallel debugging. Mary Lou Jepsen, Richard, Arnold Kao, Gary Chiang, and Matt Huang are in Changshu right now. Chris Ball is already back.
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.


This unusual level of testing is due to our quest for an extraordinarily robust laptop with extraordinary low power consumption.
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.


Regarding mechanical, this weekend, among other things, we are fixing a cosmetic blemish on the left and right hand side keyboard-base green “bumpers.” The tooling is being modified presently. Other work includes online manufacturer-server setup and testing plans, fulfillment reporting, logistics, etc.
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).


6. Embedded controller (EC): Richard finally figured out what was going on with the NiMH batteries in secure-boot mode. API differences between the EC commands and Open Firmware. This was fixed in Q2D03.
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.


7. Schedule: Friday was Feature Freeze Day for “Update.1.” At this point it is recommended that activity developers branch their builds—only high-priority fixes should be made to this branch—they can continue in development for future features on their mainline branch. In order to stabilize the Update.1 branch, we are asking that developers make recommendations about blocking or very-high-priority bugs; but no more code check-ins until they are confirmed with Jim Gettys or Kim Quirk.
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.


8. Testing: Ricardo Carrano and Yani Galanis have been tracking down some issues associated with Access Point association, network manager, wireless drivers, and presence service. They continue to add to the knowledge base of how to debug and test in these areas (Please see [[Test_Network_Configuration]] and [[Test_Config_Notes]]).
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.


Alex Latham has developed a one-hour smoke/regression test that anyone can run as we begin testing of Update.1, which is scheduled to be out at the end of the month (See [[1_Hour_Smoke_Test]]). Please review and make comments (and start using it next week).
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. Sugar: Marco Pesenti Gritti spent most of the week on Update1 bug fixes. He fixed several regressions from Ship.1 (Trial-3); as a result, the Sugar core is getting back to a state of stability: the Totem video player is working again and mime-type handling is much improved. Journal previews are now generated reliably, but they are still too slow. Bernardo Innocenti is working on improved performance. Marco started looking into rainbow with Michael Stone to plan proper integration with Sugar for Update.1. Marco and Chris Ball started looking into the sound issues that crept into the Joyride builds—there was a race in the gstreamer code that prevents the device from being freed; a fix is in the build.
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.)


Reinier Heeres has joined the Sugar team as a three-month intern. He is the author of the Calculate activity in current builds. Marco helped Reinier to integrate with the team.
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!


Tomeu Vizoso fixed some issues with special characters when copying entries to USB sticks (tickets #3498 and #4558: Mount removable devices as UTF8). He also implemented “expanding” of bundled journal entries. This will allow restoring individual entries from the backup in the school server and, in a future milestone, sharing entries between XOs (See [[Journal_entry_bundles]] for more details).
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.


Tomeau also removed an active loop in the DataStore that had caused it to wake up every 2.5ms; eliminating this wake-up will help keep power consumption low. Tomeu improved the flushing strategy in the DataStore. We now flush either every 20 changes or one minute after the last unflushed change. This should prevent data loss in most cases, such as when the power goes off completely.
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.


Simon Schampijer continued to work on the Sugar control panel, which is now included in the latest builds (See [[Sugar_Control_Panel]] for details.)
Scott found a battery-charging bug with NiMH batteries, which Richard is working on.


Some improvements have been made to the browser as well. The browser can now scale its contents. Simon introduced a view toolbar with buttons for zoom in and zoom out, full-screen, and and to hide or show the tray. Key bindings for zoom in (CTRL+) and zoom out (CTRL–) have been added as well. Walter Bender and Eben Eliason made a new activity as a derivative of the browser that launches Gmail directly from the taskbar. Other Google Apps may follow.
13. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released [[OLPC_Firmware_q2d02|Firmware Q2D02]]:
* 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.


Chris Ball released a new version of Pippy, which has new examples, including Guess (from Pilar Saenz).
14. Schedule: The upcoming releases have been renamed and re-purposed:


Muriel de Souza Godoi released a new version of the Memorize activity. This version allows children to create their own games, using text, pictures and audio from the Record activity, which are then saved in the Journal. When someone joins the activity, these data are copied into the Journal of the other XO using the author’s colors.
Oct. 26: “Trial-3” ([http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/build622/ Build 622]) are the bits being loaded for mass production. This was completed this week.


Arjun Sarwal worked on the Measure activity with Cody Lodridge; they optimized the rendering code: the frame-rate and response time has improved significantly. This has largely been possible due to reduced calls to X for re-drawing the background in each frame update. Arjun also reintroduced the show values option, which displays the RMS and average values of the signal; and he fixed a bug that prevented Measure and Record from working together.
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.


Scott Ananian added AcousticMeasure, Wikibrowse, and Gmail activities to Joyride.
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.


10. Presence service: Sjoerd Simons has been working on stabilizing (and freezing) the telepathy-salut chatroom/activity protocol, now officially named “Clique” (previously it didn't really have a name), for Update.1.
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.


Simon McVittie made some related changes that will deliberately break compatibility with the multicast DNS announcements used in Ship.1 (Trial-3), so that Update.1 XOs will not be able to see Ship.1 activities, and Ship.1 XOs will not be able to see Update.1 activities. This is actually a a good thing: if you put an Update.1 XO and a Ship.1 XO in the same activity, the Ship.1 telepathy-salut would abort with an assertion failure whenever the Update.1 version sent messages, and the Update.1 telepathy-salut would be unable to understand messages sent by the Ship.1 version.
(See https://dev.laptop.org/roadmap for more info.)


Simon synchronized with Sjoerd's latest changes and it seems to work, so he has pushed it into Koji for Joyride inclusion. There are likely to be some issues to sort out early next week, but he thinks we're done with major changes—we do not plan to change the wire protocol again for the foreseeable future.
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.


Morgan Collett has been working on Presence Service reliability improvements, which track activities and Telepathy connection managers and recover from them crashing. Morgan also updated HelloMesh, the Tubes demo activity, incorporating Simon’s Sugar API improvements, which reduce the code necessary to set up Tubes. Activity authors should look at the changes in Connect and HelloMesh to see how they can reduce the existing code. (The old method will still work, so there is no urgency to update.)
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.


Simon and Guillaume Desmottes worked on Stream Tubes, which implement TCP/IP over XMPP; Simon implemented this for the Read activity. Stream Tubes provide one-to-one connections that are much better for data transfer or streaming as opposed to the signal and method calls provided by D-Bus Tubes; Stream Tubes can be used in conjunction with D-Bus Tubes in an activity which needs both.
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.


11. X Window System: Bernie Innocenti has been restructuring our i18n (internationalization) and keyboard configuration scripts, along with the OLPC Display Manager (olpc-dm). There's still some work to do, but the resulting scheme is simpler, writes less to system files and, hopefully, also speeds up boot a little. Bernie has also been chasing a performance regression in taking screen shots for the Journal that slows us down when switching between activities. Walter Bender sent the [[OLPC_Nepal_Keyboard|Nepali keyboard]] out for review from the manufacturer; a [[Pashto_Keyboard|Pashto keyboard]] is being reviewed by the community; the [[Talk:OLPC_Nigeria_Keyboard|West African keyboard]] is also getting extensive review by Don Osborn, Paa Kwesi Imbeah, Dwayne Bailey, Adel El Zaim, and Albert Cahalan.
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.


12. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent Sunday through Tuesday hunting down a bizarre bug that turned out to be something in the kernel scheduler. He ran out of time for debugging, but signs were pointing to it being a vserver bug. The instability of the VServer kernel patches has made us remove this from our builds for Update.1. We will likely revisit use of light-weight containerization for security in future releases. We are pursuing alternate approaches to activity isolation for our first releases.
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.


Andres also did some debugging of USB and DCON (display controller) code and attempted to reliably reproduce a Libertas transmit timeout bug. Chris Ball worked on OHM (Open Hardware Manager) to implement power management: results to follow.
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.


13. New build system: We have established an independent build system for OLPC, that allows greater flexibility for testing builds. Scott Ananian spent time on Koji/mock integration work and discussions with the Fedora koji team. Scott created new Kernel/Xtest/Sugar/Rainbow branches for stabilization and testing of Joyride. Scott and John Palmieri released stable builds 623, and 624 to Quanta. for mass production. They pplied pilgrim patches to close or address numerous trac tickets: #4600, 4259, 4473, 3937, 4063, 2661, 4032, 3643, 3977, 2840, 4457, and 4400, among others. Scott also patched olpcrd with initial partition support.
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]]).


Scott also helped Red Sox win the World Series by wearing clothing with appropriate logos and dressing his dog in same as well.
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.


14. Wireless: We spent most of the week trying to consistently reproduce the wireless loss of functionality issue described in ticket #4470. The only consistent pattern that emerged is that newer builds expose the behavior more quickly and that there is a strong correlation with traffic volume (Michail Bletsas hasn't been able to reproduce the bug at home for the entire week). Given that the wireless firmware keeps running, the most probable cause is data-flow management in the Libertas driver. There was one patch submitted this week that fixes silent discard of frames by the driver that could also have an effect on the behavior seen in #4470. The other major blocking bug (#3341) is addressed by that fix and some firmware changes implemented in a private release to Scott, so that he can move on with his wireless update development.
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.


QMI produced the first Active Antenna board samples and send them to OLPC for testing this week. Marvell is working on the firmware update tool on them that will be released the last week of November.
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/).


15. Suspend on idle CPU: John Gilmore has been exploring automatic suspend-on-idle; these issues have become a lot clearer in his mind, but it is still easy to get confused. You can join the discussion in the wiki (See [[Suspend_and_resume]]).
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.


16. Localization: Xavier Alverez and Alfonso de la Guarda have established a Pootle server for localization of Sugar, activities, and other OLPC-related localization needs. Sayamindu Dasgupta is working with them. They are making good progress, but could use as much help as they can get (See [http://solar.laptop.org:5080/projects/xo_core/]). Support your favorite language now!
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.


17. Security: Ivan Krstić and Michael Stone gave a heads up to activity developers that we will be landing portions of our security system for Update.1. We will be requiring: (1) file-path compliance; (2) a cryptographic signature; and (3) a permissions declaration.
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.


File-path compliance means that you must ensure your activity does not write to any path outside of that contained in the environment variable SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT; specifically subdirectories called “data,” “conf,” and “tmp” within the SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT directory. (We are working with the Sugar team to provide helper functions for easily getting those three directory paths for those of you using Python. Until then, please depend on the environment variable directly.)
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.


Please note that if you are using the DataStore for your file I/O, you still must write the file somewhere before asking the DataStore to check it in; if you choose a temporary filename that's outside of SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT, you will be non-compliant.
Marilyn Mosley, coordinator of the Laurel Springs school, is offering her online ecology courses to OLPC students, and working on new health
courses


File path compliance is a requirement for inclusion in Update.1. Please do your best to make sure you are not writing to paths outside of SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT; we'll try to help you catch any such writes that you miss.
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.


We will be posting more details regarding cryptographic signatures and permissions declarations—these will be required in near future. As a summary, when we say signatures, we mean that you as the activity authors will use a set of tools we provide to make your own keys and sign your activities; the purpose of this is simply to allow secure activity upgrades once they are on the machines. Permission declarations will enumerate which special permissions (camera access? microphone access? non-Tubes network access? etc.) your activity may need for its normal operation.
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.

22. Rowen and Tim of OLPCPH talked with Graham Prosser for their plans on testing laptops in Toronto, USA and in Makati/Manila/Bulacan, Philippines.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 16:42, 3 November 2007

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Laptop News 2007-11-03

1. Reggio Emilia: Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi reconfirmed his commitment of 50,000 laptops for Ethiopia while at a town meeting of over 600 people where Nicholas presented OLPC. The importance of the funding is its exemplary nature—it is model for other European countries and the EU itself to follow. The clarity with which both the press and the audience understood children as our mission, versus a market, was refreshing.

2. Rome: Nicholas joined Antonio Battro and Matt Keller for a whirlwind one-day tour of the Eternal City. The day started with an interview on Radio Vatican, followed by an address to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, a speech received by over 200 UN staffers. After meeting with members of the City of Florence Council, Nicholas addressed over 300 members of Catholic Orders at the Vatican. (The Catholic Orders educate 50-million children in schools worldwide, many in the poorest countries.) The event, organized by Matt and Tom Rocheford of the Jesuit order included a presentation by Cardinal Poupard on the Encyclica “Populorum Progressio” as a mission towards education in developing countries and Antonio introduced the fundamental principles of OLPC. Throughout the day, they were shadowed by a Time Magazine reporter (See [1]).

3. New York City: Nicholas gave the keynote address at the 10th anniversary of Mouse.org, accompanied by Chancellor Joel Klein of the NYC public school system. Mouse is working with OLPC and, among other things, will help document the XO. Mouse is an organization that has students who helps other students (and teachers and schools) run their computer systems.

4. Cambridge: The first of what will become monthly learning workshops will be held this coming week; attendees are coming from the countries expecting to launch in the coming weeks and months. Lindsay Petrillose has done a fantastic job organizing all aspects of the meeting.

5. Mass production (MP): John Watlington continued to chase down our remaining suspend/resume problems. Many tests were tried, with most of them failing to cause any laptop crashes. (We now only see very rare crashes upon resume.) A production-line test for suspend/resume was developed and tested. The kernel and firmware teams have been invaluable in supporting this testing process.

Richard Smith has arrived in Changshu to continue testing the C2 motherboard and provide support the first days of production while John returns to Cambridge with a batch of motherboards for more intensive hardware analysis. Another batch is going to Terry Su (Quanta) in Taiwan for parallel debugging. Mary Lou Jepsen, Richard, Arnold Kao, Gary Chiang, and Matt Huang are in Changshu right now. Chris Ball is already back.

This unusual level of testing is due to our quest for an extraordinarily robust laptop with extraordinary low power consumption.

Regarding mechanical, this weekend, among other things, we are fixing a cosmetic blemish on the left and right hand side keyboard-base green “bumpers.” The tooling is being modified presently. Other work includes online manufacturer-server setup and testing plans, fulfillment reporting, logistics, etc.

6. Embedded controller (EC): Richard finally figured out what was going on with the NiMH batteries in secure-boot mode. API differences between the EC commands and Open Firmware. This was fixed in Q2D03.

7. Schedule: Friday was Feature Freeze Day for “Update.1.” At this point it is recommended that activity developers branch their builds—only high-priority fixes should be made to this branch—they can continue in development for future features on their mainline branch. In order to stabilize the Update.1 branch, we are asking that developers make recommendations about blocking or very-high-priority bugs; but no more code check-ins until they are confirmed with Jim Gettys or Kim Quirk.

8. Testing: Ricardo Carrano and Yani Galanis have been tracking down some issues associated with Access Point association, network manager, wireless drivers, and presence service. They continue to add to the knowledge base of how to debug and test in these areas (Please see Test_Network_Configuration and Test_Config_Notes).

Alex Latham has developed a one-hour smoke/regression test that anyone can run as we begin testing of Update.1, which is scheduled to be out at the end of the month (See 1_Hour_Smoke_Test). Please review and make comments (and start using it next week).

9. Sugar: Marco Pesenti Gritti spent most of the week on Update1 bug fixes. He fixed several regressions from Ship.1 (Trial-3); as a result, the Sugar core is getting back to a state of stability: the Totem video player is working again and mime-type handling is much improved. Journal previews are now generated reliably, but they are still too slow. Bernardo Innocenti is working on improved performance. Marco started looking into rainbow with Michael Stone to plan proper integration with Sugar for Update.1. Marco and Chris Ball started looking into the sound issues that crept into the Joyride builds—there was a race in the gstreamer code that prevents the device from being freed; a fix is in the build.

Reinier Heeres has joined the Sugar team as a three-month intern. He is the author of the Calculate activity in current builds. Marco helped Reinier to integrate with the team.

Tomeu Vizoso fixed some issues with special characters when copying entries to USB sticks (tickets #3498 and #4558: Mount removable devices as UTF8). He also implemented “expanding” of bundled journal entries. This will allow restoring individual entries from the backup in the school server and, in a future milestone, sharing entries between XOs (See Journal_entry_bundles for more details).

Tomeau also removed an active loop in the DataStore that had caused it to wake up every 2.5ms; eliminating this wake-up will help keep power consumption low. Tomeu improved the flushing strategy in the DataStore. We now flush either every 20 changes or one minute after the last unflushed change. This should prevent data loss in most cases, such as when the power goes off completely.

Simon Schampijer continued to work on the Sugar control panel, which is now included in the latest builds (See Sugar_Control_Panel for details.)

Some improvements have been made to the browser as well. The browser can now scale its contents. Simon introduced a view toolbar with buttons for zoom in and zoom out, full-screen, and and to hide or show the tray. Key bindings for zoom in (CTRL+) and zoom out (CTRL–) have been added as well. Walter Bender and Eben Eliason made a new activity as a derivative of the browser that launches Gmail directly from the taskbar. Other Google Apps may follow.

Chris Ball released a new version of Pippy, which has new examples, including Guess (from Pilar Saenz).

Muriel de Souza Godoi released a new version of the Memorize activity. This version allows children to create their own games, using text, pictures and audio from the Record activity, which are then saved in the Journal. When someone joins the activity, these data are copied into the Journal of the other XO using the author’s colors.

Arjun Sarwal worked on the Measure activity with Cody Lodridge; they optimized the rendering code: the frame-rate and response time has improved significantly. This has largely been possible due to reduced calls to X for re-drawing the background in each frame update. Arjun also reintroduced the show values option, which displays the RMS and average values of the signal; and he fixed a bug that prevented Measure and Record from working together.

Scott Ananian added AcousticMeasure, Wikibrowse, and Gmail activities to Joyride.

10. Presence service: Sjoerd Simons has been working on stabilizing (and freezing) the telepathy-salut chatroom/activity protocol, now officially named “Clique” (previously it didn't really have a name), for Update.1.

Simon McVittie made some related changes that will deliberately break compatibility with the multicast DNS announcements used in Ship.1 (Trial-3), so that Update.1 XOs will not be able to see Ship.1 activities, and Ship.1 XOs will not be able to see Update.1 activities. This is actually a a good thing: if you put an Update.1 XO and a Ship.1 XO in the same activity, the Ship.1 telepathy-salut would abort with an assertion failure whenever the Update.1 version sent messages, and the Update.1 telepathy-salut would be unable to understand messages sent by the Ship.1 version.

Simon synchronized with Sjoerd's latest changes and it seems to work, so he has pushed it into Koji for Joyride inclusion. There are likely to be some issues to sort out early next week, but he thinks we're done with major changes—we do not plan to change the wire protocol again for the foreseeable future.

Morgan Collett has been working on Presence Service reliability improvements, which track activities and Telepathy connection managers and recover from them crashing. Morgan also updated HelloMesh, the Tubes demo activity, incorporating Simon’s Sugar API improvements, which reduce the code necessary to set up Tubes. Activity authors should look at the changes in Connect and HelloMesh to see how they can reduce the existing code. (The old method will still work, so there is no urgency to update.)

Simon and Guillaume Desmottes worked on Stream Tubes, which implement TCP/IP over XMPP; Simon implemented this for the Read activity. Stream Tubes provide one-to-one connections that are much better for data transfer or streaming as opposed to the signal and method calls provided by D-Bus Tubes; Stream Tubes can be used in conjunction with D-Bus Tubes in an activity which needs both.

11. X Window System: Bernie Innocenti has been restructuring our i18n (internationalization) and keyboard configuration scripts, along with the OLPC Display Manager (olpc-dm). There's still some work to do, but the resulting scheme is simpler, writes less to system files and, hopefully, also speeds up boot a little. Bernie has also been chasing a performance regression in taking screen shots for the Journal that slows us down when switching between activities. Walter Bender sent the Nepali keyboard out for review from the manufacturer; a Pashto keyboard is being reviewed by the community; the West African keyboard is also getting extensive review by Don Osborn, Paa Kwesi Imbeah, Dwayne Bailey, Adel El Zaim, and Albert Cahalan.

12. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent Sunday through Tuesday hunting down a bizarre bug that turned out to be something in the kernel scheduler. He ran out of time for debugging, but signs were pointing to it being a vserver bug. The instability of the VServer kernel patches has made us remove this from our builds for Update.1. We will likely revisit use of light-weight containerization for security in future releases. We are pursuing alternate approaches to activity isolation for our first releases.

Andres also did some debugging of USB and DCON (display controller) code and attempted to reliably reproduce a Libertas transmit timeout bug. Chris Ball worked on OHM (Open Hardware Manager) to implement power management: results to follow.

13. New build system: We have established an independent build system for OLPC, that allows greater flexibility for testing builds. Scott Ananian spent time on Koji/mock integration work and discussions with the Fedora koji team. Scott created new Kernel/Xtest/Sugar/Rainbow branches for stabilization and testing of Joyride. Scott and John Palmieri released stable builds 623, and 624 to Quanta. for mass production. They pplied pilgrim patches to close or address numerous trac tickets: #4600, 4259, 4473, 3937, 4063, 2661, 4032, 3643, 3977, 2840, 4457, and 4400, among others. Scott also patched olpcrd with initial partition support.

Scott also helped Red Sox win the World Series by wearing clothing with appropriate logos and dressing his dog in same as well.

14. Wireless: We spent most of the week trying to consistently reproduce the wireless loss of functionality issue described in ticket #4470. The only consistent pattern that emerged is that newer builds expose the behavior more quickly and that there is a strong correlation with traffic volume (Michail Bletsas hasn't been able to reproduce the bug at home for the entire week). Given that the wireless firmware keeps running, the most probable cause is data-flow management in the Libertas driver. There was one patch submitted this week that fixes silent discard of frames by the driver that could also have an effect on the behavior seen in #4470. The other major blocking bug (#3341) is addressed by that fix and some firmware changes implemented in a private release to Scott, so that he can move on with his wireless update development.

QMI produced the first Active Antenna board samples and send them to OLPC for testing this week. Marvell is working on the firmware update tool on them that will be released the last week of November.

15. Suspend on idle CPU: John Gilmore has been exploring automatic suspend-on-idle; these issues have become a lot clearer in his mind, but it is still easy to get confused. You can join the discussion in the wiki (See Suspend_and_resume).

16. Localization: Xavier Alverez and Alfonso de la Guarda have established a Pootle server for localization of Sugar, activities, and other OLPC-related localization needs. Sayamindu Dasgupta is working with them. They are making good progress, but could use as much help as they can get (See [2]). Support your favorite language now!

17. Security: Ivan Krstić and Michael Stone gave a heads up to activity developers that we will be landing portions of our security system for Update.1. We will be requiring: (1) file-path compliance; (2) a cryptographic signature; and (3) a permissions declaration.

File-path compliance means that you must ensure your activity does not write to any path outside of that contained in the environment variable SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT; specifically subdirectories called “data,” “conf,” and “tmp” within the SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT directory. (We are working with the Sugar team to provide helper functions for easily getting those three directory paths for those of you using Python. Until then, please depend on the environment variable directly.)

Please note that if you are using the DataStore for your file I/O, you still must write the file somewhere before asking the DataStore to check it in; if you choose a temporary filename that's outside of SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT, you will be non-compliant.

File path compliance is a requirement for inclusion in Update.1. Please do your best to make sure you are not writing to paths outside of SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT; we'll try to help you catch any such writes that you miss.

We will be posting more details regarding cryptographic signatures and permissions declarations—these will be required in near future. As a summary, when we say signatures, we mean that you as the activity authors will use a set of tools we provide to make your own keys and sign your activities; the purpose of this is simply to allow secure activity upgrades once they are on the machines. Permission declarations will enumerate which special permissions (camera access? microphone access? non-Tubes network access? etc.) your activity may need for its normal operation.

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.

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

Laptop News 2007-11-03

1. Reggio Emilia: Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi reconfirmed his commitment of 50,000 laptops for Ethiopia while at a town meeting of over 600 people where Nicholas presented OLPC. The importance of the funding is its exemplary nature—it is model for other European countries and the EU itself to follow. The clarity with which both the press and the audience understood children as our mission, versus a market, was refreshing.

2. Rome: Nicholas joined Antonio Battro and Matt Keller for a whirlwind one-day tour of the Eternal City. The day started with an interview on Radio Vatican, followed by an address to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, a speech received by over 200 UN staffers. After meeting with members of the City of Florence Council, Nicholas addressed over 300 members of Catholic Orders at the Vatican. (The Catholic Orders educate 50-million children in schools worldwide, many in the poorest countries.) The event, organized by Matt and Tom Rocheford of the Jesuit order included a presentation by Cardinal Poupard on the Encyclica “Populorum Progressio” as a mission towards education in developing countries and Antonio introduced the fundamental principles of OLPC. Throughout the day, they were shadowed by a Time Magazine reporter (See [3]).

3. New York City: Nicholas gave the keynote address at the 10th anniversary of Mouse.org, accompanied by Chancellor Joel Klein of the NYC public school system. Mouse is working with OLPC and, among other things, will help document the XO. Mouse is an organization that has students who helps other students (and teachers and schools) run their computer systems.

4. Cambridge: The first of what will become monthly learning workshops will be held this coming week; attendees are coming from the countries expecting to launch in the coming weeks and months. Lindsay Petrillose has done a fantastic job organizing all aspects of the meeting.

5. Mass production (MP): John Watlington continued to chase down our remaining suspend/resume problems. Many tests were tried, with most of them failing to cause any laptop crashes. (We now only see very rare crashes upon resume.) A production-line test for suspend/resume was developed and tested. The kernel and firmware teams have been invaluable in supporting this testing process.

Richard Smith has arrived in Changshu to continue testing the C2 motherboard and provide support the first days of production while John returns to Cambridge with a batch of motherboards for more intensive hardware analysis. Another batch is going to Terry Su (Quanta) in Taiwan for parallel debugging. Mary Lou Jepsen, Richard, Arnold Kao, Gary Chiang, and Matt Huang are in Changshu right now. Chris Ball is already back.

This unusual level of testing is due to our quest for an extraordinarily robust laptop with extraordinary low power consumption.

Regarding mechanical, this weekend, among other things, we are fixing a cosmetic blemish on the left and right hand side keyboard-base green “bumpers.” The tooling is being modified presently. Other work includes online manufacturer-server setup and testing plans, fulfillment reporting, logistics, etc.

6. Embedded controller (EC): Richard finally figured out what was going on with the NiMH batteries in secure-boot mode. API differences between the EC commands and Open Firmware. This was fixed in Q2D03.

7. Schedule: Friday was Feature Freeze Day for “Update.1.” At this point it is recommended that activity developers branch their builds—only high-priority fixes should be made to this branch—they can continue in development for future features on their mainline branch. In order to stabilize the Update.1 branch, we are asking that developers make recommendations about blocking or very-high-priority bugs; but no more code check-ins until they are confirmed with Jim Gettys or Kim Quirk.

8. Testing: Ricardo Carrano and Yani Galanis have been tracking down some issues associated with Access Point association, network manager, wireless drivers, and presence service. They continue to add to the knowledge base of how to debug and test in these areas (Please see Test_Network_Configuration and Test_Config_Notes).

Alex Latham has developed a one-hour smoke/regression test that anyone can run as we begin testing of Update.1, which is scheduled to be out at the end of the month (See 1_Hour_Smoke_Test). Please review and make comments (and start using it next week).

9. Sugar: Marco Pesenti Gritti spent most of the week on Update1 bug fixes. He fixed several regressions from Ship.1 (Trial-3); as a result, the Sugar core is getting back to a state of stability: the Totem video player is working again and mime-type handling is much improved. Journal previews are now generated reliably, but they are still too slow. Bernardo Innocenti is working on improved performance. Marco started looking into rainbow with Michael Stone to plan proper integration with Sugar for Update.1. Marco and Chris Ball started looking into the sound issues that crept into the Joyride builds—there was a race in the gstreamer code that prevents the device from being freed; a fix is in the build.

Reinier Heeres has joined the Sugar team as a three-month intern. He is the author of the Calculate activity in current builds. Marco helped Reinier to integrate with the team.

Tomeu Vizoso fixed some issues with special characters when copying entries to USB sticks (tickets #3498 and #4558: Mount removable devices as UTF8). He also implemented “expanding” of bundled journal entries. This will allow restoring individual entries from the backup in the school server and, in a future milestone, sharing entries between XOs (See Journal_entry_bundles for more details).

Tomeau also removed an active loop in the DataStore that had caused it to wake up every 2.5ms; eliminating this wake-up will help keep power consumption low. Tomeu improved the flushing strategy in the DataStore. We now flush either every 20 changes or one minute after the last unflushed change. This should prevent data loss in most cases, such as when the power goes off completely.

Simon Schampijer continued to work on the Sugar control panel, which is now included in the latest builds (See Sugar_Control_Panel for details.)

Some improvements have been made to the browser as well. The browser can now scale its contents. Simon introduced a view toolbar with buttons for zoom in and zoom out, full-screen, and and to hide or show the tray. Key bindings for zoom in (CTRL+) and zoom out (CTRL–) have been added as well. Walter Bender and Eben Eliason made a new activity as a derivative of the browser that launches Gmail directly from the taskbar. Other Google Apps may follow.

Chris Ball released a new version of Pippy, which has new examples, including Guess (from Pilar Saenz).

Muriel de Souza Godoi released a new version of the Memorize activity. This version allows children to create their own games, using text, pictures and audio from the Record activity, which are then saved in the Journal. When someone joins the activity, these data are copied into the Journal of the other XO using the author’s colors.

Arjun Sarwal worked on the Measure activity with Cody Lodridge; they optimized the rendering code: the frame-rate and response time has improved significantly. This has largely been possible due to reduced calls to X for re-drawing the background in each frame update. Arjun also reintroduced the show values option, which displays the RMS and average values of the signal; and he fixed a bug that prevented Measure and Record from working together.

Scott Ananian added AcousticMeasure, Wikibrowse, and Gmail activities to Joyride.

10. Presence service: Sjoerd Simons has been working on stabilizing (and freezing) the telepathy-salut chatroom/activity protocol, now officially named “Clique” (previously it didn't really have a name), for Update.1.

Simon McVittie made some related changes that will deliberately break compatibility with the multicast DNS announcements used in Ship.1 (Trial-3), so that Update.1 XOs will not be able to see Ship.1 activities, and Ship.1 XOs will not be able to see Update.1 activities. This is actually a a good thing: if you put an Update.1 XO and a Ship.1 XO in the same activity, the Ship.1 telepathy-salut would abort with an assertion failure whenever the Update.1 version sent messages, and the Update.1 telepathy-salut would be unable to understand messages sent by the Ship.1 version.

Simon synchronized with Sjoerd's latest changes and it seems to work, so he has pushed it into Koji for Joyride inclusion. There are likely to be some issues to sort out early next week, but he thinks we're done with major changes—we do not plan to change the wire protocol again for the foreseeable future.

Morgan Collett has been working on Presence Service reliability improvements, which track activities and Telepathy connection managers and recover from them crashing. Morgan also updated HelloMesh, the Tubes demo activity, incorporating Simon’s Sugar API improvements, which reduce the code necessary to set up Tubes. Activity authors should look at the changes in Connect and HelloMesh to see how they can reduce the existing code. (The old method will still work, so there is no urgency to update.)

Simon and Guillaume Desmottes worked on Stream Tubes, which implement TCP/IP over XMPP; Simon implemented this for the Read activity. Stream Tubes provide one-to-one connections that are much better for data transfer or streaming as opposed to the signal and method calls provided by D-Bus Tubes; Stream Tubes can be used in conjunction with D-Bus Tubes in an activity which needs both.

11. X Window System: Bernie Innocenti has been restructuring our i18n (internationalization) and keyboard configuration scripts, along with the OLPC Display Manager (olpc-dm). There's still some work to do, but the resulting scheme is simpler, writes less to system files and, hopefully, also speeds up boot a little. Bernie has also been chasing a performance regression in taking screen shots for the Journal that slows us down when switching between activities. Walter Bender sent the Nepali keyboard out for review from the manufacturer; a Pashto keyboard is being reviewed by the community; the West African keyboard is also getting extensive review by Don Osborn, Paa Kwesi Imbeah, Dwayne Bailey, Adel El Zaim, and Albert Cahalan.

12. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent Sunday through Tuesday hunting down a bizarre bug that turned out to be something in the kernel scheduler. He ran out of time for debugging, but signs were pointing to it being a vserver bug. The instability of the VServer kernel patches has made us remove this from our builds for Update.1. We will likely revisit use of light-weight containerization for security in future releases. We are pursuing alternate approaches to activity isolation for our first releases.

Andres also did some debugging of USB and DCON (display controller) code and attempted to reliably reproduce a Libertas transmit timeout bug. Chris Ball worked on OHM (Open Hardware Manager) to implement power management: results to follow.

13. New build system: We have established an independent build system for OLPC, that allows greater flexibility for testing builds. Scott Ananian spent time on Koji/mock integration work and discussions with the Fedora koji team. Scott created new Kernel/Xtest/Sugar/Rainbow branches for stabilization and testing of Joyride. Scott and John Palmieri released stable builds 623, and 624 to Quanta. for mass production. They pplied pilgrim patches to close or address numerous trac tickets: #4600, 4259, 4473, 3937, 4063, 2661, 4032, 3643, 3977, 2840, 4457, and 4400, among others. Scott also patched olpcrd with initial partition support.

Scott also helped Red Sox win the World Series by wearing clothing with appropriate logos and dressing his dog in same as well.

14. Wireless: We spent most of the week trying to consistently reproduce the wireless loss of functionality issue described in ticket #4470. The only consistent pattern that emerged is that newer builds expose the behavior more quickly and that there is a strong correlation with traffic volume (Michail Bletsas hasn't been able to reproduce the bug at home for the entire week). Given that the wireless firmware keeps running, the most probable cause is data-flow management in the Libertas driver. There was one patch submitted this week that fixes silent discard of frames by the driver that could also have an effect on the behavior seen in #4470. The other major blocking bug (#3341) is addressed by that fix and some firmware changes implemented in a private release to Scott, so that he can move on with his wireless update development.

QMI produced the first Active Antenna board samples and send them to OLPC for testing this week. Marvell is working on the firmware update tool on them that will be released the last week of November.

15. Suspend on idle CPU: John Gilmore has been exploring automatic suspend-on-idle; these issues have become a lot clearer in his mind, but it is still easy to get confused. You can join the discussion in the wiki (See Suspend_and_resume).

16. Localization: Xavier Alverez and Alfonso de la Guarda have established a Pootle server for localization of Sugar, activities, and other OLPC-related localization needs. Sayamindu Dasgupta is working with them. They are making good progress, but could use as much help as they can get (See [4]). Support your favorite language now!

17. Security: Ivan Krstić and Michael Stone gave a heads up to activity developers that we will be landing portions of our security system for Update.1. We will be requiring: (1) file-path compliance; (2) a cryptographic signature; and (3) a permissions declaration.

File-path compliance means that you must ensure your activity does not write to any path outside of that contained in the environment variable SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT; specifically subdirectories called “data,” “conf,” and “tmp” within the SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT directory. (We are working with the Sugar team to provide helper functions for easily getting those three directory paths for those of you using Python. Until then, please depend on the environment variable directly.)

Please note that if you are using the DataStore for your file I/O, you still must write the file somewhere before asking the DataStore to check it in; if you choose a temporary filename that's outside of SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT, you will be non-compliant.

File path compliance is a requirement for inclusion in Update.1. Please do your best to make sure you are not writing to paths outside of SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT; we'll try to help you catch any such writes that you miss.

We will be posting more details regarding cryptographic signatures and permissions declarations—these will be required in near future. As a summary, when we say signatures, we mean that you as the activity authors will use a set of tools we provide to make your own keys and sign your activities; the purpose of this is simply to allow secure activity upgrades once they are on the machines. Permission declarations will enumerate which special permissions (camera access? microphone access? non-Tubes network access? etc.) your activity may need for its normal operation.

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. 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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