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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 2007-12-01=
=Laptop News 2007-12-08=
1. Santiago: David Cavallo keynoted TISE 2007, the workshop on Educational Software.
1. Montevideo: We’ve only just begun!! The first deployment machines were handed out in Escuela No. 109 in Florida, a rural department of Uruguay. The second batch was handed out in Escuela No. 24 in Villa Cardal, which has been a pilot site since May of this year. In Cardal, we gave children production XOs and collecting their old Beta-2 units. The OLPC deployment in Uruguay is being run by Miguel Brechner as part of Proyecto Ceibal (Ceibo is the national flower of Uruguay), a presidential initiative to equip each child with a laptop. The Ceibal offices are housed in a Montevideo complex called LATU, or Laboratorio Tecnológico del Uruguay, which is a public/private sector cooperative technical lab now responsible for much of Uruguay’s technical certification and quality control programs, as well as serving an incubator role for various engineering and technical projects. The OLPC team has put all of their blood, sweat and code into the project over the past three years because of the unshaken belief that it is the right thing to do. Now it is real. You can read more about our first deployment on Ivan Krstić’s blog (See http://radian.org/notebook/first-deployment).
At the day the most of the schools in Florida are visited by the volunteers from DESEM and other ONG's thtat deliver the XO to all the children in the region.


2. Schedule: The release of our Ship.2 Build (650) and firmware (Q2D07) occurred in time to be installed on the G1G1 laptops that will begin shipping on Monday.
2. Changshu: Mass Production is now very stable. We are using our line at 100% capacity. Congratulations to Quanta for stabilizing production just three weeks after MP start.


The roadmap for Update.1 has been enhanced with more detailed dates and important bug fixes that are being worked on (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap). We have already passed feature freeze and string freeze (for translations). The next milestone is code freeze on December 15. Developers not fixing critical bugs for Update.1 should provide their recommended feature set for Update.2 (and beyond).
3. G1G1: Every “Day 1” Give One Get One participant (those that donated on November 12, the first day of our campaign) received email on Wednesday informing them to expect their “Get” laptops between December 14 and 24. Delivery windows for other G1G1 participants were calculated and posted: “Get” laptops ordered thus far will be arriving, at the latest, by mid-January 2008. Brightstar and OLPC have been working closely to determine when the complicated logistics of laptop delivery can be promised.


3. Testing: Ricardo Carrano, Yani Galanis, and Michail Bletsas spent a number of hours with a forty (40) laptop test bed in a quiet RF environment to ensure that we have fixed our most egregious wireless bug—the lazyWDS problem—and to dig deeper into an occasional wireless crash problems in mesh networks of more than 30 laptops. They have also been working with Robert McQueen and the Collabra team to document and simplify the process of creating a Jabber server –so individuals and groups can create their own Jabber servers to make their own mesh neighborhood clusters. Yani is working on a test plan to scale the number laptops virtually connected to a Jabber server so we can simulate having 100s of users while using only a few laptops.
4. AC adapters: There has been a request for AC adapters that are rotated ninety degrees from the current configuration. In order to rotate the orientation of the prongs, the width of the adapter must be extended (to satisfy the safety requirement). As a result, six reoriented AC adapters will not fit abreast in the standard spacing of a six-plug power strip. Mary Lou Jepsen and Fuse are investigating further; if we can not resolve the issue, we will not make AC adapters with a rotated prong orientation.


Alex Latham has moved on to testing Joyride builds after adding some notes to the Ship.2 release notes—not complete, but there is a link from the Software Release Notes page (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Ship.2_Software_Release_Notes). Alex also spent time reviewing and documenting the activation and developer key processes (Please see [[Activation_and_Developer_Keys]]).
5. Schedules: This was the week to release “Ship.2”, a build to improve upon network upgrades, wireless problems, and our ability to connect to T-mobile services. Although the week had its ups and downs, it ended with successes on all of these fronts and we have Release 649 as the candidate, barring any last-minute problems in testing this weekend. The Ship.2 Build connects successfully to many different access points; we believe we have fixed the “lazyWDS” issue (which could have potentially caused problems in multi-access-point environments with other 802.11b/g laptops and XOs); and we are successfully connecting to T-mobile services after setting an appropriate configuration for the browser. The Roadmap has been updated (http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap); please send Kim Quirk any new feature/product ideas so they can be scheduled into upcoming releases.


4. Support: We had meetings between OLPC, Brightstar, RMS (Brightstar's tech-support call center), and Patriot to map out the phone, email, webpages, and processes that will help our new laptop users to get up to speed quickly and diagnose some problems they might encounter (Please send comments regarding http://laptop.org/gettingstarted). Adam has been helping to coordinate and document the internal and externally facing support mechanisms.
The release candidate for the G1G1 program is Build 649 and will be called Ship.2. Final testing is underway, specifically for network
issues that have been reported. The wireless team of Ricardo Carrano, Michail Bletsas, Javiar Cardona, Ashish Shukla, David Woodhouse, Marcelo Tosatti, Ronak Chokshi of OLPC, Marvell, RedHat, and Cozybit worked hard on these issues of both the Linux driver and the Marvell wireless
firmware and worked out a solution, which is now in final test, under great pressure. Ship.2 has most of the user visible features of the
planned Update.1 release, but has Bitfrost security turned off and lacking the advanced OHM-based power management with aggressive suspend and resume and ebook mode. Both of these major features are now operating in our Joyride test builds, but there were too many open
issues to enable Bitfrost or to ship OHM power management.


5. Wireless: Michail Bletsas reports that the past week was spent testing reliability, functionality, and scalability.
6. Testing: This weekend Michail Bletsas and Ricardo Carrano are testing 40+ XOs with a number of access points and traditional 802.11b/g laptops to “prove” the fix for the WDS problems that have been plaguing us for a while. Thanks to Marvell for their debugging and test builds to find a good work around; and special thanks to the volunteers in the office who activated and upgraded all the laptops in preparation for this testing: Andriani Ferti, Danny Clark, Adam Holt, Alex Latham, and Eben Eliason.


On the reliability front, David Woodhouse is in the process of sanitizing the command queueing used in the wireless driver; this should eliminate the occasional fall into catatonia by the firmware.
7. Support: Adam Holt joined OLPC this week as our Support Engineer focused on tracking, debugging and follow up of customer problems from the field. He is an MIT graduate who has worked in software development, support, and systems integration. Most recently he comes from Jenzabar in Boston. He was a great help in his first week as we were testing and configuring laptops for Ship.2 Release.


Testing this week confirmed that these problems only manifest in very busy wireless environments. Even in such environments, they tend to only affect idle machines. When XOs are idle, the are exchanging Salut traffic (useful) and generating probes and probe responses for WLAN discovery (useless and a big nuisance with large numbers of XOs). Michail is currently testing a version of the firmware that disables probe responses from XOs with the intent to deploy it in the upcoming learning workshops so that we can comfortably run all the machines in the room concurrently.
8. Wireless: Michail Bletsas reports great progress was made this week in circumventing a problem that we had with access points that were misinterpreting our mesh frames as wireless backbone frames, resulting in the creation of erratic ad-hoc wireless network topologies. These were access points (APs) utilizing wireless adapters from Broadcom as the ubiquitous Linksys WRT54. We have alerted Broadcom to the issue (if the standard doesn't change, 802.11s devices will be rendering these APs useless unless they address that behavior) and we have worked around it by changing our broadcast and multicast mesh frames to use 3-address frames instead of the 4-address WDS frames that the Broadcom APs are already using. Thanks to Javier Cardona, a dedicated team at Marvell, and Ricardo Carrano for implementing and testing this in time for our Ship.2 Release. Javier will be submitting this change for consideration in the next standards committee meeting. This change requires no driver/software changes on the XOs and is implemented completely in firmware. The important point to note is that all XOs in a mesh have to be running the new firmware (5.110.20.p42) for them to be able to collaborate via the mesh.


Collabora also found a number of bugs in the local-link presence code which will improve scaling in the next release. Ricardo tested various workarounds for the UI's wireless encryption configuration bugs.
Michail et al. had great fun at OLPC in the later half of this week. Somebody was using a wireless device that was acting as a jammer for the center part of the 2.4Ghz band. Despite all the troubles that it caused us by preventing us from doing any serious testing of the laptops, we should be thanking him/her since the extremely difficult environment helped expose a serious issue with wireless operation in congested environments which has probably bitten us in the past and which we had never had the opportunity to properly diagnose and debug. The problem has been pinpointed to the scan routines in the firmware and is being currently addressed. Testing with a jammer present is now a requirement (not your usual WiFi test ;-).


6. Active antennae: Marvell is going to release the firmware update tool for the active antennae next week. This became more urgent after the recent frame-format change and John Watlington's observation that the school server’s boot time is longer than the time period during which the active antennas wait for the host to talk them after power-up (See further discussion below). The current modules switch into autonomous mode before the server has finished with its boot-up sequence and thus they fail to be properly configured by the server. We will have to increase the host-wait timeout on the antennae to avoid this in the future and flash server modules with the standard radio boot code (to prevent them from going into autonomous mode).
9. Sugar: Simon Schampijer fixed memorize again to release the sound device and put the drumgit game back in the distribution which is the only demo game we have which includes sound (in current joyride). He added an “About this XO” entry to the menu you get when hovering over the XO icon in the home view: this brings up a window with information about the current build, firmware and serial number of this XO. With Mako Hill, SJ Klein and Marco Pesenti Gritti, Simon worked on the library fixes for Ship.2 which included a fix for Sugar (Ticket #2856). Marco and Simon added as well support for the OLPC Root CA into the browser. You can test this by pointing your browser to https://activation.laptop.org in the current Ship.2 build.


7. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso moved the object chooser from the Sugar library to the Journal. Activities now ask the Journal to display the object chooser so the user may choose which Journal entry the activity should have access to. This will help to protect the privacy of the user while allowing activities to consume data from other activities. Also, this removes duplicate code and facilitates sharing of features between the Journal and the object chooser.
Marco reviewed several patches with small UI improvements (to the interaction with palettes in particular) and bug fixes for Update.1 and packaged them in joyride for testing. Marco also tracked down two different issues with the datastore which was causing activities to not start. Fixes for both of them landed into Joyride. Finally, he changed the default Jabber server for Ship.2.


Tomeu also is investigating why activities startup has gotten to be so slow of late. He has already identified some areas that can be easily improved for Update.1. Other improvements will come later.
Reinier Herres worked working with Marco to build a new evince version for the Read activity, which will probably be available early next week. He also released a new Calculate with some bug-fixes.


Simon Shampijer worked this week on tracking down and fixing issues in the browser regarding Rainbow security: the data generated by the “view source” command are saved in $SAR/instance and the browser profile is saved in $SAR/data. There is still a remaining issue with the permissions for the profile, since these are files sometimes generated and accessed by the library. Will have to discuss this again with Michael Stone and Marco Pesenti Gritti. Working along with Morgan Collett, we finally have all the parts for a fix to the Rainbow-related problem with opening links from Chat in the browser. But not everything is in Joyride yet for testing.
Morgan Collett worked on Chat to fix scrolling issues—he made it not automatically scroll on new messages if you scrolled up to read the log and worked on copying URLs to the clipboard (#5080); he found some issues with clipboard handling in Sugar. We will land the Chat and Sugar changes when the Ship.2 dust settles. He also worked on the Presence Service: preforming lots of testing on Ship.2 and Joyride builds, testing recent fixes.


Reinier Heeres spent last week getting a new evince version working (evince is the PDF back-end for Read). It was already working in jhbuild, but some library dependencies had to be removed and new rpm packages built. This is now complete, so everything is in place to get packages in Joyride soon. Reinier is also working on supporting bundle upgrades from the Journal. Beside that, he fixed some Sugar bugs, like leaking of icons in /tmp, and has written code to improve unmount-failure feedback in the Journal.
Memorize: Muriel Godoi reports that Memorize was launching under Rainbow, but wasn’t saving games in datastore; after some chats with Michael Stone, they realize that Memorize is creating new sub-folders inside their instance folder using tempfile library under permission 700 denying the access when trying to write into it. Changing the folder permission fixed that problem. Muriel also fixed the mime-type icon file location and added ogg support.


8. Open hardware manager: Chris Ball worked on power manager bugs and features. The version of OHM in the Joyride build is complete except for two new features being added for Update.1—better handling of user-set brightness (currently OHM will override it) and inhibiting suspend when the CPU is not idle. These should land in Joyride next week.
Muriel also reports that Food Force had some UI improvements, such as a message bar where contextualized educational messages to the player will be displayed. The code will be posted to his public_git next week.


Chris hasn't had much time to work on Pippy—if anyone can think of Pippy “examples” they'd like to see in Update.1, please let him know.
10. Etoys: For Ship.2 release, Etoys team packaged a new version that has the progress made since Ship.1. Bert Freudenberg has been carefully working to adapt changes in Sugar while keeping the compatibility with old Sugar so that the latest work can be back ported. In this week, Yoshiki Ohshima and Bert improved the sharing experience and Takashi Yamamiya fixed a bug in script editing interface to make the version for Ship.2 be very comfortable. In the meantime, Scott Wallace took a pass on making an IDE for a traditional text file based programming system on Squeak, which may be useful for making an IDE for XO.


9. Emulation: Bernie Innocenti and Mitchell Charity improved the experience for users of QEMU, Vmware, and other emulated environments. We now support the video driver vmware_drv, which also works with the latest CVS snapshots of QEMU and provides a 1200x900 mode.
11. Localization: Xavi Alvarez and Sayamindu Dasgupta have finally put the GIT integration of the Translation Infrastructure (Pootle) in place in a fully working form. Translators can directly commit to GIT now via the Pootle web interface. We also have a new project in Pootle, called Update 1 (Core), which tracks the update-1 branch for a few core modules of the Sugar environment. From an average translation coverage of 23% at the beginning of the week, we have 33% average coverage now. Languages with more than 80% of Update 1 (Core) translated are:


10. Utilities: Bernie also made changes to the boot process and olpc-utils for better UTF-8 support. olpc-configure now regenerates the library index after updates. The experimental Xserver 1.5 is still in the works, and lives in a separate xtest build for now.
French
(100%)


11. Rainbow: Michael Stone experimented with an architecture for our automated testing; he also spent time answering Sugar-related questions about Rainbow, he a little bit on Rainbow bug-fixing, and helped get us unstuck on encryption export controls and P_DOCUMENT/P_DOCUMENT_RO.
Chinese (Taiwan)
(100%)


12. Builds: Last week, C Scott Ananian managed stable builds through 649, making our builds substantially less sexy, and finished and tuned
German
olpc-update-query, which allows you to subscribe to any one of a number of “update streams” to keep your machine up to date.
(96%)


This week Scott shepherded build 650 with Q2D06 and fixed the “fail to boot on upgrade” bug. He has automated generation of activation/developer keys—there are no more “sneakernet” delays! He also added statistics collection code to the activation server in order to let us track which builds are “in the wild”; he promises pretty graphs next week.
Arabic
(90%)


Scott also cleaned up the server-side component of the XO dev key request page; he worked with Michael on integrating automated testing into our build system, using the pybots/buildbots framework; he edited http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activation_and_Developer_Keys; and he did a “sticker drive” at OLPC HQ, trying to remove machines running ancient versions of libertas firmware from our network.
Polish
(85%)


13. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes wrote a wiki page explaining how to deploy an Openfire server (Please see [[Openfire_Configuration]]). He also investigated an alias problem with Openfire (Please see [[Openfire_Configuration#Alias_droped]]). He worked on the server component XMPP protocol; wrote a fix for http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13156, and started to implement new XMPP protocol in Gabble.
Spanish
(84%)


Sjoerd Simons analyzed some network traces of tests with 10 or more XOs, which lead to the discovery that idle session of Salut’s Clique protocol didn’t scale as they are supposed to. He released telepathy-salut-0.2.0, which is the start of a bug-fix-only branch for salut. This
Quite a few of the other languages are catching up quickly. A number of Indic language translation teams started work this week: Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, and Tamil. A Japanese project was also started this week. Waqas Toor and Salman Minhasreport that more than 85% of Urdu localization is completed.
release fixes stream tubes on machines without nss-mdns (such as the XO) and the aforementioned scaling issue of idle Clique sessions.


Rob McQueen has been working with Dafydd Harries, Guillaume Desmottes, and Simon McVittie to write up proposed XMPP component protocol. Rob has also been liaising (or nagging :D) with ejabberd upstream to try and address stability issues on jabber.laptop.org and hence school server deployments. He has packaged the ejabberd trunk and is trying it on jabber.laptop.org and he has tracked outstanding ejabberd issues that affect jabber.laptop.org and school server (automatic configuration of shared roster). He has been applying hacks to keep jabber.laptop.org running (such as watch ejabberd with monit, reduce the shared roster to recently-active users rather than all registered users, etc.) and the odd bit of packaging/trac herding for telepathy components.
Xavi and Sayamindu also managed to fix a few build breakages introduced by some issues in Pootle's PO generation code. Things should be running smoothly now (Sayamindu has also put in a logging framework in place that monitors the interaction between Pootle and GIT so that we can investigate potential problems easily later).


Dafydd Harries began work on the Jabber-server extension planned for Update 2 that we hope will greatly improve collaboration scalability.
12. OLPC Pakistan: Waqas and Salman have initiated developing two e-Books and are busy working on an English to Urdu Glossary Project for OLPC.
A community list for support in Pakistan is up and running (Please see http://groups.google.com/group/olpc-pakistan and visit the #olpc-pakistan IRC channel on irc.freenode.net).


Morgan Collett engaged in various discussions on mailing lists and IRC about jabber servers and appropriate expectations for Ship.2 users. Please note that there is not be a working server configured in the Ship.2 software, since we cannot support that kind of volume on our current server infrastructure. Anyone interested in running a server for themselves or a specific community should see the latest information in the wiki (See [[Run_your_own_jabber_server]]). Morgan also tested Ship.2 collaboration and herded patches and bugs through the Update.1 approval process, including Presence Service patches that have been pending for a while.
13. System programming: Chris Ball worked on OHM early in the week, Ship.2 testing towards the end. Bernie Innocenti has been squashing the last few input, localization and configuration bugs. Mostly in olpc-utils and xkeyboard-config and finished moving the rest of the Xorg packages to Fedora's repository and now has no packages built locally. He also helped SJ Klein apply blanket changes all over the dictionary to fixlinks and encoding errors. And he did some transformations for the start pages. Bernie also finished building a geode-optimized package of glibc 2.7 that looks very promising, but still needs testing and started packaging X 1.4.99 from Fedora development, which seems interesting for the various EXA improvements. There is some PCI rework needed in amd_drv before we can start doing some benchmarking. He is hoping to offload the rest of this work to Stefano “aleph” Fedrigo, who in the past has been doing some neat X performance analysis for us.


14. Laptop firmware: Mitch Bradley released two new firmware for the laptop this week. Q2D06 was release on Tuesday night to fix a problem found which might cause problems when upgrading the laptops. It was quickly superseded by Q2D07 on Thursday night, when a bug was found by Quanta which will brick the laptop if the RTC battery (on the motherboard) fails. If you are running Q2D05 or Q2D06, please update immediately to Q2D07.
Dennis Gilmore spent some time helping John Watlington and Michael Stone with some issues with the school server live image. He submitted a patch to upstream yum adding geode support and worked on a patch for rpm adding geode support should be done today or tomorrow. Dennis worked on some code to enable subscriptions to koji. This will let us import new builds into our own koji when we get it.


15. School server: A new build of school server software (137) was released this week. This includes newer libertas (wireless mesh) drivers and firmware, as well as supporting the hot-plugging of Active Antennas. It was decided on Tuesday to proceed with the laptop backup/restore protocol developed by Ivan Krstić and the Journal team for Update.1; it will be included in an upcoming release to allow testing over the next few weeks. Upcoming features are the addition of the Jabber server and web caching.
Andres Salomon worked on the xorg evdev driver (*cry*), setting up general geode testing infrastructure, some participation in the libertas nonsense (*cry*^2), and some dcon debugging.


We discovered a serious problem with the new Active Antenna prototypes this week. These are the ones assembled around the beginning of November, and handed out to a number of countries and developers. The Boot2 firmware placed on them in manufacturing (3109) enters standalone repeater mode too quickly, and once in that mode they stop talking over USB. By the time a server has booted it can no longer talk to its Active Antennas! Attempts to downgrade the Boot2 firmware to the latest—which doesn't support standalone repeater mode (3107)—using the libertas-flash tool developed last year by Dan Williams are failing due to changes in the Boot2 API. As the most recent software builds now support hot-plugging of the antenna, the temporary work-around is to plug the antennas into the server after it has booted up.
14. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes tested, modified and improve Dafydd Harries' patches for #4965; he did more ejbbard/Erlang investigations; reviewed Sjoerd Simons's Salut fixes; started to evaluate Openfire as alternative Jabber server; debugged and fixed a PEP problem in Gabble breaking sharing with Openfire (#5223); improved friends roster synchronization (#4965); fixed a Gabble bug when requestion lists channels (#5164); debugged and fixed a muc properties bug in Gabble breaking sharing with Openfire (#5224); and modified telepathy-python tubes examples to work with latest Salut.


16. From the community: Bruno Coudoin uploaded a new release of the GCompris activities. Bruno followed Bert Freudenberg 's EToys scripts to stay retro-compatible with previous startup sequence. Changes include a new sugar compliant icon; a Spanish translation; a fix to some some broken activities (e.g., algebra_plus-activity); and better Rainbow compatibility (e.g., no more writing in the home directory).
Dafydd Harries worked on a more scalable XMPP protocol for activity management. Sjoerd Simons tested Salut for Ship.2 and fixed all outstanding Ship.2 issues it had.


Eduardo Silva has been working on a new application called “XO-Monitor.” The goal is to watch the XO resources from a normal PC or laptop through the network with a simple graphical user interface written in PyGTK. It is very similar to the old developer console and it can aquire basic information such as build, kernel, firmware, model, serial number, etc.; trace system CPU usage; view logs; report simple network statistics; and list all of the XOs in the local network. More information about the project can be found in the wiki (Please see [[XO_Monitor]]).
15. Multiple-battery charger: Tooling has been ordered; first prototypes will be available at the end of December or early January. The PCB for the production system is done. The question is how many to build for our first run. The current plan is to build twenty-five, but this may be increased if there is more interest from trials.


Wolfgang Rohrmoser and Kurt Gramlich are proud to announce the initial version of their OLPC XO-LiveCD. This new project targets these goals:
Lilian Walter is progressing nicely on the battery charger firmware. She has been working on implementing a LiFePO battery charging algorithm this week. She has charged a battery, and so far only damaged a single battery.
• give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the Sugar educational software on a common PC;
• support demonstration of OLPC software to non-developers;
• provide an easy maintainable Live-System for developers to test activities on the sugar desktop, this could be regarded as an alternative to existing OLPC virtualbox and qemu images.


The technology they choose embeds an unmodified official Redhat build into a framework (LiveBackup), which provides everything needed to run a live system. Going this way we are able to minimize the work for updates as new OLPC builds get released.
16. Firmware: Mitch Bradley and Richard Smith have released Q2D05 with miscellaneous bug fixes for Ship.2. This contains EC firmware with the software workaround for most of the suspend/resume problems and the now controversial (?) blink-power-LED-on-suspend. Since suspend/resume is disabled for Ship.2, these changes will not be apparent to the user.


The ISO image are available at:
Wireless support from within OFW is still not totally robust. Mitch is unsure whether it is the WLAN firmware, the 1CC RF jamming, or an OFW driver problem. (Over the past week we have been unable to use WiFi channel 6 at 1CC due to constant, high level non-WiFi signal from an unknown source, the aforementioned jammer.)


ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/
17. Touchpad: Richard Smith is now pretty convinced that our touchpad problems are caused by the auto-calibration feature of the touchpad. The two problems—undersensitivity and jitteriness—are opposite results of a bad recalibrate. By forcing a calibrate to happen with the touchpad in various conditions he can recreate our touchpad problems.


as: XO-LiveCD_<date>.iso
“Go to a corner” and stay is caused by under-sensitivity. Duplicating this is fairly easy. Do the recalibrate (the “four-finger salute”)
with as much of your thumb on the touchpad as you can, pressing quite hard.


Images will be mirrored to:
“Jumpiness” is caused by over sensitivity. Duplicating this is bit harder. The best Richard has found is placing a large chunk of thick
rubber on the touchpad while the unit is on battery power and then recalibrate.


http://skolelinux.de:/XO-LiveCD/
A recalibration while the touchpad is in use causes under-sensitivity but we’re not sure how over-sensitivity happens the field. Nor do we yet
understand why some laptops are so much worse than others. We are arranging a conference call with ALPS to discuss the issue. The only “fix” Richard proposes is to disable auto-calibration. It seems that auto-calibration can't ever be made safe without some method of insuring that the touchpad is free and clear for the recalibration. It is unclear whether we still need to auto-calibrate, or if this was only needed for the problems seen with the B2 build.


Wolfgang and Kurt encourage everybody to try it out and give them feedback for improvements; please send mail to:
18. School Server: School server development has restarted. It was discovered that previously distributed installers will no longer work due to a reliance on a now missing Fedora server. The build system also needed repair but seems to be behaving again. A new build is being tested and will be released over the weekend. This build will have no new features but will contain the latest wireless mesh firmware and drivers.

XO-LiveCD@skolelinux.de.
Further information is available in the XO-LiveCD.pdf document at:

http://skolelinux.de:/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD.pdf

17. Urdu localization: Waqas Toor and Salman Minhasreport have almost completed their Urdu Glossary Project; Waqas be will be testing it over this weekend and will be ready/tested/debugged on Monday. An ebook of science is 100% complete and ready to be included. An ebook of Urdu (Meri Kitab) is 60% complete. Salman will attempt to complete it over the weekend. The Urdu localization of EToys is 75% complete; Waqas and Salman are confident to complete it sometimes next week.

18. Documentation: Anne Gentle and Seth Woodhouse are finishing laying out a simple introductory guide to ownership and care of the XO, working with material from Todd Kelsey and older demo notes and a number of community artists. Translation will begin this week (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/~sj/quickstart/).

Anne is working on fixing the banner and adding an actual index; generated by Author-IT, a commercial tool that we are currently using. Adam Hyde of FLOSSManuals has offered to port the documents to his site and set up a system to auto-update manuals there with text from the olpc wiki; we may switch to this next month.

19. Science fare: Sunee Piromprames has been working with Lauren Klein and teacher Srinuan to organize a bug-identification project at Ban Samhka, Thailand. David Stang of the BayScience Foundation is setting up forums for them to use to classify their findings, with photos and local text and pronunciation of bug names. They will have a worked example this week for the children to follow, and are working with Thai strings.

20. Library: Mako Hill, Lauren, and SJ Klein have worked out what bundling scripts need to be written to provide for simple bundle creation. It will be possible to make (and verify) bundles through a web upload form soon.

21. Our Stories: Google, UNICEF, and OLPC issued a joint press release regarding a global storytelling project being orchestrated by Google’s Stephen Cho. The goal of the initiative is to preserve and share stories, histories, and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages. Using XO laptops, mobile phones, and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends. These stories will be shared globally through the Our Stories website (See http://www.ourstories.org/), where they can be found on a Google Map.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 19:02, 8 December 2007

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Laptop News 2007-12-08

1. Santiago: David Cavallo keynoted TISE 2007, the workshop on Educational Software.

2. Schedule: The release of our Ship.2 Build (650) and firmware (Q2D07) occurred in time to be installed on the G1G1 laptops that will begin shipping on Monday.

The roadmap for Update.1 has been enhanced with more detailed dates and important bug fixes that are being worked on (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap). We have already passed feature freeze and string freeze (for translations). The next milestone is code freeze on December 15. Developers not fixing critical bugs for Update.1 should provide their recommended feature set for Update.2 (and beyond).

3. Testing: Ricardo Carrano, Yani Galanis, and Michail Bletsas spent a number of hours with a forty (40) laptop test bed in a quiet RF environment to ensure that we have fixed our most egregious wireless bug—the lazyWDS problem—and to dig deeper into an occasional wireless crash problems in mesh networks of more than 30 laptops. They have also been working with Robert McQueen and the Collabra team to document and simplify the process of creating a Jabber server –so individuals and groups can create their own Jabber servers to make their own mesh neighborhood clusters. Yani is working on a test plan to scale the number laptops virtually connected to a Jabber server so we can simulate having 100s of users while using only a few laptops.

Alex Latham has moved on to testing Joyride builds after adding some notes to the Ship.2 release notes—not complete, but there is a link from the Software Release Notes page (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Ship.2_Software_Release_Notes). Alex also spent time reviewing and documenting the activation and developer key processes (Please see Activation_and_Developer_Keys).

4. Support: We had meetings between OLPC, Brightstar, RMS (Brightstar's tech-support call center), and Patriot to map out the phone, email, webpages, and processes that will help our new laptop users to get up to speed quickly and diagnose some problems they might encounter (Please send comments regarding http://laptop.org/gettingstarted). Adam has been helping to coordinate and document the internal and externally facing support mechanisms.

5. Wireless: Michail Bletsas reports that the past week was spent testing reliability, functionality, and scalability.

On the reliability front, David Woodhouse is in the process of sanitizing the command queueing used in the wireless driver; this should eliminate the occasional fall into catatonia by the firmware.

Testing this week confirmed that these problems only manifest in very busy wireless environments. Even in such environments, they tend to only affect idle machines. When XOs are idle, the are exchanging Salut traffic (useful) and generating probes and probe responses for WLAN discovery (useless and a big nuisance with large numbers of XOs). Michail is currently testing a version of the firmware that disables probe responses from XOs with the intent to deploy it in the upcoming learning workshops so that we can comfortably run all the machines in the room concurrently.

Collabora also found a number of bugs in the local-link presence code which will improve scaling in the next release. Ricardo tested various workarounds for the UI's wireless encryption configuration bugs.

6. Active antennae: Marvell is going to release the firmware update tool for the active antennae next week. This became more urgent after the recent frame-format change and John Watlington's observation that the school server’s boot time is longer than the time period during which the active antennas wait for the host to talk them after power-up (See further discussion below). The current modules switch into autonomous mode before the server has finished with its boot-up sequence and thus they fail to be properly configured by the server. We will have to increase the host-wait timeout on the antennae to avoid this in the future and flash server modules with the standard radio boot code (to prevent them from going into autonomous mode).

7. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso moved the object chooser from the Sugar library to the Journal. Activities now ask the Journal to display the object chooser so the user may choose which Journal entry the activity should have access to. This will help to protect the privacy of the user while allowing activities to consume data from other activities. Also, this removes duplicate code and facilitates sharing of features between the Journal and the object chooser.

Tomeu also is investigating why activities startup has gotten to be so slow of late. He has already identified some areas that can be easily improved for Update.1. Other improvements will come later.

Simon Shampijer worked this week on tracking down and fixing issues in the browser regarding Rainbow security: the data generated by the “view source” command are saved in $SAR/instance and the browser profile is saved in $SAR/data. There is still a remaining issue with the permissions for the profile, since these are files sometimes generated and accessed by the library. Will have to discuss this again with Michael Stone and Marco Pesenti Gritti. Working along with Morgan Collett, we finally have all the parts for a fix to the Rainbow-related problem with opening links from Chat in the browser. But not everything is in Joyride yet for testing.

Reinier Heeres spent last week getting a new evince version working (evince is the PDF back-end for Read). It was already working in jhbuild, but some library dependencies had to be removed and new rpm packages built. This is now complete, so everything is in place to get packages in Joyride soon. Reinier is also working on supporting bundle upgrades from the Journal. Beside that, he fixed some Sugar bugs, like leaking of icons in /tmp, and has written code to improve unmount-failure feedback in the Journal.

8. Open hardware manager: Chris Ball worked on power manager bugs and features. The version of OHM in the Joyride build is complete except for two new features being added for Update.1—better handling of user-set brightness (currently OHM will override it) and inhibiting suspend when the CPU is not idle. These should land in Joyride next week.

Chris hasn't had much time to work on Pippy—if anyone can think of Pippy “examples” they'd like to see in Update.1, please let him know.

9. Emulation: Bernie Innocenti and Mitchell Charity improved the experience for users of QEMU, Vmware, and other emulated environments. We now support the video driver vmware_drv, which also works with the latest CVS snapshots of QEMU and provides a 1200x900 mode.

10. Utilities: Bernie also made changes to the boot process and olpc-utils for better UTF-8 support. olpc-configure now regenerates the library index after updates. The experimental Xserver 1.5 is still in the works, and lives in a separate xtest build for now.

11. Rainbow: Michael Stone experimented with an architecture for our automated testing; he also spent time answering Sugar-related questions about Rainbow, he a little bit on Rainbow bug-fixing, and helped get us unstuck on encryption export controls and P_DOCUMENT/P_DOCUMENT_RO.

12. Builds: Last week, C Scott Ananian managed stable builds through 649, making our builds substantially less sexy, and finished and tuned olpc-update-query, which allows you to subscribe to any one of a number of “update streams” to keep your machine up to date.

This week Scott shepherded build 650 with Q2D06 and fixed the “fail to boot on upgrade” bug. He has automated generation of activation/developer keys—there are no more “sneakernet” delays! He also added statistics collection code to the activation server in order to let us track which builds are “in the wild”; he promises pretty graphs next week.

Scott also cleaned up the server-side component of the XO dev key request page; he worked with Michael on integrating automated testing into our build system, using the pybots/buildbots framework; he edited http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activation_and_Developer_Keys; and he did a “sticker drive” at OLPC HQ, trying to remove machines running ancient versions of libertas firmware from our network.

13. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes wrote a wiki page explaining how to deploy an Openfire server (Please see Openfire_Configuration). He also investigated an alias problem with Openfire (Please see Openfire_Configuration#Alias_droped). He worked on the server component XMPP protocol; wrote a fix for http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13156, and started to implement new XMPP protocol in Gabble.

Sjoerd Simons analyzed some network traces of tests with 10 or more XOs, which lead to the discovery that idle session of Salut’s Clique protocol didn’t scale as they are supposed to. He released telepathy-salut-0.2.0, which is the start of a bug-fix-only branch for salut. This release fixes stream tubes on machines without nss-mdns (such as the XO) and the aforementioned scaling issue of idle Clique sessions.

Rob McQueen has been working with Dafydd Harries, Guillaume Desmottes, and Simon McVittie to write up proposed XMPP component protocol. Rob has also been liaising (or nagging :D) with ejabberd upstream to try and address stability issues on jabber.laptop.org and hence school server deployments. He has packaged the ejabberd trunk and is trying it on jabber.laptop.org and he has tracked outstanding ejabberd issues that affect jabber.laptop.org and school server (automatic configuration of shared roster). He has been applying hacks to keep jabber.laptop.org running (such as watch ejabberd with monit, reduce the shared roster to recently-active users rather than all registered users, etc.) and the odd bit of packaging/trac herding for telepathy components.

Dafydd Harries began work on the Jabber-server extension planned for Update 2 that we hope will greatly improve collaboration scalability.

Morgan Collett engaged in various discussions on mailing lists and IRC about jabber servers and appropriate expectations for Ship.2 users. Please note that there is not be a working server configured in the Ship.2 software, since we cannot support that kind of volume on our current server infrastructure. Anyone interested in running a server for themselves or a specific community should see the latest information in the wiki (See Run_your_own_jabber_server). Morgan also tested Ship.2 collaboration and herded patches and bugs through the Update.1 approval process, including Presence Service patches that have been pending for a while.

14. Laptop firmware: Mitch Bradley released two new firmware for the laptop this week. Q2D06 was release on Tuesday night to fix a problem found which might cause problems when upgrading the laptops. It was quickly superseded by Q2D07 on Thursday night, when a bug was found by Quanta which will brick the laptop if the RTC battery (on the motherboard) fails. If you are running Q2D05 or Q2D06, please update immediately to Q2D07.

15. School server: A new build of school server software (137) was released this week. This includes newer libertas (wireless mesh) drivers and firmware, as well as supporting the hot-plugging of Active Antennas. It was decided on Tuesday to proceed with the laptop backup/restore protocol developed by Ivan Krstić and the Journal team for Update.1; it will be included in an upcoming release to allow testing over the next few weeks. Upcoming features are the addition of the Jabber server and web caching.

We discovered a serious problem with the new Active Antenna prototypes this week. These are the ones assembled around the beginning of November, and handed out to a number of countries and developers. The Boot2 firmware placed on them in manufacturing (3109) enters standalone repeater mode too quickly, and once in that mode they stop talking over USB. By the time a server has booted it can no longer talk to its Active Antennas! Attempts to downgrade the Boot2 firmware to the latest—which doesn't support standalone repeater mode (3107)—using the libertas-flash tool developed last year by Dan Williams are failing due to changes in the Boot2 API. As the most recent software builds now support hot-plugging of the antenna, the temporary work-around is to plug the antennas into the server after it has booted up.

16. From the community: Bruno Coudoin uploaded a new release of the GCompris activities. Bruno followed Bert Freudenberg 's EToys scripts to stay retro-compatible with previous startup sequence. Changes include a new sugar compliant icon; a Spanish translation; a fix to some some broken activities (e.g., algebra_plus-activity); and better Rainbow compatibility (e.g., no more writing in the home directory).

Eduardo Silva has been working on a new application called “XO-Monitor.” The goal is to watch the XO resources from a normal PC or laptop through the network with a simple graphical user interface written in PyGTK. It is very similar to the old developer console and it can aquire basic information such as build, kernel, firmware, model, serial number, etc.; trace system CPU usage; view logs; report simple network statistics; and list all of the XOs in the local network. More information about the project can be found in the wiki (Please see XO_Monitor).

Wolfgang Rohrmoser and Kurt Gramlich are proud to announce the initial version of their OLPC XO-LiveCD. This new project targets these goals: 

• give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the Sugar educational software on a common PC;
• support demonstration of OLPC software to non-developers;
• provide an easy maintainable Live-System for developers to test activities on the sugar desktop, this could be regarded as an alternative to existing OLPC virtualbox and qemu images.

The technology they choose embeds an unmodified official Redhat build into a framework (LiveBackup), which provides everything needed to run a live system. Going this way we are able to minimize the work for updates as new OLPC builds get released.

The ISO image are available at:

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/

as: XO-LiveCD_<date>.iso

Images will be mirrored to:

http://skolelinux.de:/XO-LiveCD/

Wolfgang and Kurt encourage everybody to try it out and give them feedback for improvements; please send mail to:

XO-LiveCD@skolelinux.de. Further information is available in the XO-LiveCD.pdf document at:

http://skolelinux.de:/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD.pdf

17. Urdu localization: Waqas Toor and Salman Minhasreport have almost completed their Urdu Glossary Project; Waqas be will be testing it over this weekend and will be ready/tested/debugged on Monday. An ebook of science is 100% complete and ready to be included. An ebook of Urdu (Meri Kitab) is 60% complete. Salman will attempt to complete it over the weekend. The Urdu localization of EToys is 75% complete; Waqas and Salman are confident to complete it sometimes next week.

18. Documentation: Anne Gentle and Seth Woodhouse are finishing laying out a simple introductory guide to ownership and care of the XO, working with material from Todd Kelsey and older demo notes and a number of community artists. Translation will begin this week (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/~sj/quickstart/).

Anne is working on fixing the banner and adding an actual index; generated by Author-IT, a commercial tool that we are currently using. Adam Hyde of FLOSSManuals has offered to port the documents to his site and set up a system to auto-update manuals there with text from the olpc wiki; we may switch to this next month.

19. Science fare: Sunee Piromprames has been working with Lauren Klein and teacher Srinuan to organize a bug-identification project at Ban Samhka, Thailand. David Stang of the BayScience Foundation is setting up forums for them to use to classify their findings, with photos and local text and pronunciation of bug names. They will have a worked example this week for the children to follow, and are working with Thai strings.

20. Library: Mako Hill, Lauren, and SJ Klein have worked out what bundling scripts need to be written to provide for simple bundle creation. It will be possible to make (and verify) bundles through a web upload form soon.

21. Our Stories: Google, UNICEF, and OLPC issued a joint press release regarding a global storytelling project being orchestrated by Google’s Stephen Cho. The goal of the initiative is to preserve and share stories, histories, and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages. Using XO laptops, mobile phones, and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends. These stories will be shared globally through the Our Stories website (See http://www.ourstories.org/), where they can be found on a Google Map.

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# 83162]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2007-12-08

1. Santiago: David Cavallo keynoted TISE 2007, the workshop on Educational Software.

2. Schedule: The release of our Ship.2 Build (650) and firmware (Q2D07) occurred in time to be installed on the G1G1 laptops that will begin shipping on Monday.

The roadmap for Update.1 has been enhanced with more detailed dates and important bug fixes that are being worked on (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap). We have already passed feature freeze and string freeze (for translations). The next milestone is code freeze on December 15. Developers not fixing critical bugs for Update.1 should provide their recommended feature set for Update.2 (and beyond).

3. Testing: Ricardo Carrano, Yani Galanis, and Michail Bletsas spent a number of hours with a forty (40) laptop test bed in a quiet RF environment to ensure that we have fixed our most egregious wireless bug—the lazyWDS problem—and to dig deeper into an occasional wireless crash problems in mesh networks of more than 30 laptops. They have also been working with Robert McQueen and the Collabra team to document and simplify the process of creating a Jabber server –so individuals and groups can create their own Jabber servers to make their own mesh neighborhood clusters. Yani is working on a test plan to scale the number laptops virtually connected to a Jabber server so we can simulate having 100s of users while using only a few laptops.

Alex Latham has moved on to testing Joyride builds after adding some notes to the Ship.2 release notes—not complete, but there is a link from the Software Release Notes page (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Ship.2_Software_Release_Notes). Alex also spent time reviewing and documenting the activation and developer key processes (Please see Activation_and_Developer_Keys).

4. Support: We had meetings between OLPC, Brightstar, RMS (Brightstar's tech-support call center), and Patriot to map out the phone, email, webpages, and processes that will help our new laptop users to get up to speed quickly and diagnose some problems they might encounter (Please send comments regarding http://laptop.org/gettingstarted). Adam has been helping to coordinate and document the internal and externally facing support mechanisms.

5. Wireless: Michail Bletsas reports that the past week was spent testing reliability, functionality, and scalability.

On the reliability front, David Woodhouse is in the process of sanitizing the command queueing used in the wireless driver; this should eliminate the occasional fall into catatonia by the firmware.

Testing this week confirmed that these problems only manifest in very busy wireless environments. Even in such environments, they tend to only affect idle machines. When XOs are idle, the are exchanging Salut traffic (useful) and generating probes and probe responses for WLAN discovery (useless and a big nuisance with large numbers of XOs). Michail is currently testing a version of the firmware that disables probe responses from XOs with the intent to deploy it in the upcoming learning workshops so that we can comfortably run all the machines in the room concurrently.

Collabora also found a number of bugs in the local-link presence code which will improve scaling in the next release. Ricardo tested various workarounds for the UI's wireless encryption configuration bugs.

6. Active antennae: Marvell is going to release the firmware update tool for the active antennae next week. This became more urgent after the recent frame-format change and John Watlington's observation that the school server’s boot time is longer than the time period during which the active antennas wait for the host to talk them after power-up (See further discussion below). The current modules switch into autonomous mode before the server has finished with its boot-up sequence and thus they fail to be properly configured by the server. We will have to increase the host-wait timeout on the antennae to avoid this in the future and flash server modules with the standard radio boot code (to prevent them from going into autonomous mode).

7. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso moved the object chooser from the Sugar library to the Journal. Activities now ask the Journal to display the object chooser so the user may choose which Journal entry the activity should have access to. This will help to protect the privacy of the user while allowing activities to consume data from other activities. Also, this removes duplicate code and facilitates sharing of features between the Journal and the object chooser.

Tomeu also is investigating why activities startup has gotten to be so slow of late. He has already identified some areas that can be easily improved for Update.1. Other improvements will come later.

Simon Shampijer worked this week on tracking down and fixing issues in the browser regarding Rainbow security: the data generated by the “view source” command are saved in $SAR/instance and the browser profile is saved in $SAR/data. There is still a remaining issue with the permissions for the profile, since these are files sometimes generated and accessed by the library. Will have to discuss this again with Michael Stone and Marco Pesenti Gritti. Working along with Morgan Collett, we finally have all the parts for a fix to the Rainbow-related problem with opening links from Chat in the browser. But not everything is in Joyride yet for testing.

Reinier Heeres spent last week getting a new evince version working (evince is the PDF back-end for Read). It was already working in jhbuild, but some library dependencies had to be removed and new rpm packages built. This is now complete, so everything is in place to get packages in Joyride soon. Reinier is also working on supporting bundle upgrades from the Journal. Beside that, he fixed some Sugar bugs, like leaking of icons in /tmp, and has written code to improve unmount-failure feedback in the Journal.

8. Open hardware manager: Chris Ball worked on power manager bugs and features. The version of OHM in the Joyride build is complete except for two new features being added for Update.1—better handling of user-set brightness (currently OHM will override it) and inhibiting suspend when the CPU is not idle. These should land in Joyride next week.

Chris hasn't had much time to work on Pippy—if anyone can think of Pippy “examples” they'd like to see in Update.1, please let him know.

9. Emulation: Bernie Innocenti and Mitchell Charity improved the experience for users of QEMU, Vmware, and other emulated environments. We now support the video driver vmware_drv, which also works with the latest CVS snapshots of QEMU and provides a 1200x900 mode.

10. Utilities: Bernie also made changes to the boot process and olpc-utils for better UTF-8 support. olpc-configure now regenerates the library index after updates. The experimental Xserver 1.5 is still in the works, and lives in a separate xtest build for now.

11. Rainbow: Michael Stone experimented with an architecture for our automated testing; he also spent time answering Sugar-related questions about Rainbow, he a little bit on Rainbow bug-fixing, and helped get us unstuck on encryption export controls and P_DOCUMENT/P_DOCUMENT_RO.

12. Builds: Last week, C Scott Ananian managed stable builds through 649, making our builds substantially less sexy, and finished and tuned olpc-update-query, which allows you to subscribe to any one of a number of “update streams” to keep your machine up to date.

This week Scott shepherded build 650 with Q2D06 and fixed the “fail to boot on upgrade” bug. He has automated generation of activation/developer keys—there are no more “sneakernet” delays! He also added statistics collection code to the activation server in order to let us track which builds are “in the wild”; he promises pretty graphs next week.

Scott also cleaned up the server-side component of the XO dev key request page; he worked with Michael on integrating automated testing into our build system, using the pybots/buildbots framework; he edited http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activation_and_Developer_Keys; and he did a “sticker drive” at OLPC HQ, trying to remove machines running ancient versions of libertas firmware from our network.

13. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes wrote a wiki page explaining how to deploy an Openfire server (Please see Openfire_Configuration). He also investigated an alias problem with Openfire (Please see Openfire_Configuration#Alias_droped). He worked on the server component XMPP protocol; wrote a fix for http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13156, and started to implement new XMPP protocol in Gabble.

Sjoerd Simons analyzed some network traces of tests with 10 or more XOs, which lead to the discovery that idle session of Salut’s Clique protocol didn’t scale as they are supposed to. He released telepathy-salut-0.2.0, which is the start of a bug-fix-only branch for salut. This release fixes stream tubes on machines without nss-mdns (such as the XO) and the aforementioned scaling issue of idle Clique sessions.

Rob McQueen has been working with Dafydd Harries, Guillaume Desmottes, and Simon McVittie to write up proposed XMPP component protocol. Rob has also been liaising (or nagging :D) with ejabberd upstream to try and address stability issues on jabber.laptop.org and hence school server deployments. He has packaged the ejabberd trunk and is trying it on jabber.laptop.org and he has tracked outstanding ejabberd issues that affect jabber.laptop.org and school server (automatic configuration of shared roster). He has been applying hacks to keep jabber.laptop.org running (such as watch ejabberd with monit, reduce the shared roster to recently-active users rather than all registered users, etc.) and the odd bit of packaging/trac herding for telepathy components.

Dafydd Harries began work on the Jabber-server extension planned for Update 2 that we hope will greatly improve collaboration scalability.

Morgan Collett engaged in various discussions on mailing lists and IRC about jabber servers and appropriate expectations for Ship.2 users. Please note that there is not be a working server configured in the Ship.2 software, since we cannot support that kind of volume on our current server infrastructure. Anyone interested in running a server for themselves or a specific community should see the latest information in the wiki (See Run_your_own_jabber_server). Morgan also tested Ship.2 collaboration and herded patches and bugs through the Update.1 approval process, including Presence Service patches that have been pending for a while.

14. Laptop firmware: Mitch Bradley released two new firmware for the laptop this week. Q2D06 was release on Tuesday night to fix a problem found which might cause problems when upgrading the laptops. It was quickly superseded by Q2D07 on Thursday night, when a bug was found by Quanta which will brick the laptop if the RTC battery (on the motherboard) fails. If you are running Q2D05 or Q2D06, please update immediately to Q2D07.

15. School server: A new build of school server software (137) was released this week. This includes newer libertas (wireless mesh) drivers and firmware, as well as supporting the hot-plugging of Active Antennas. It was decided on Tuesday to proceed with the laptop backup/restore protocol developed by Ivan Krstić and the Journal team for Update.1; it will be included in an upcoming release to allow testing over the next few weeks. Upcoming features are the addition of the Jabber server and web caching.

We discovered a serious problem with the new Active Antenna prototypes this week. These are the ones assembled around the beginning of November, and handed out to a number of countries and developers. The Boot2 firmware placed on them in manufacturing (3109) enters standalone repeater mode too quickly, and once in that mode they stop talking over USB. By the time a server has booted it can no longer talk to its Active Antennas! Attempts to downgrade the Boot2 firmware to the latest—which doesn't support standalone repeater mode (3107)—using the libertas-flash tool developed last year by Dan Williams are failing due to changes in the Boot2 API. As the most recent software builds now support hot-plugging of the antenna, the temporary work-around is to plug the antennas into the server after it has booted up.

16. From the community: Bruno Coudoin uploaded a new release of the GCompris activities. Bruno followed Bert Freudenberg 's EToys scripts to stay retro-compatible with previous startup sequence. Changes include a new sugar compliant icon; a Spanish translation; a fix to some some broken activities (e.g., algebra_plus-activity); and better Rainbow compatibility (e.g., no more writing in the home directory).

Eduardo Silva has been working on a new application called “XO-Monitor.” The goal is to watch the XO resources from a normal PC or laptop through the network with a simple graphical user interface written in PyGTK. It is very similar to the old developer console and it can aquire basic information such as build, kernel, firmware, model, serial number, etc.; trace system CPU usage; view logs; report simple network statistics; and list all of the XOs in the local network. More information about the project can be found in the wiki (Please see XO_Monitor).

Wolfgang Rohrmoser and Kurt Gramlich are proud to announce the initial version of their OLPC XO-LiveCD. This new project targets these goals: 

• give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the Sugar educational software on a common PC;
• support demonstration of OLPC software to non-developers;
• provide an easy maintainable Live-System for developers to test activities on the sugar desktop, this could be regarded as an alternative to existing OLPC virtualbox and qemu images.

The technology they choose embeds an unmodified official Redhat build into a framework (LiveBackup), which provides everything needed to run a live system. Going this way we are able to minimize the work for updates as new OLPC builds get released.

The ISO image are available at:

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/

as: XO-LiveCD_<date>.iso

Images will be mirrored to:

http://skolelinux.de:/XO-LiveCD/

Wolfgang and Kurt encourage everybody to try it out and give them feedback for improvements; please send mail to:

XO-LiveCD@skolelinux.de. Further information is available in the XO-LiveCD.pdf document at:

http://skolelinux.de:/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD.pdf

17. Urdu localization: Waqas Toor and Salman Minhasreport have almost completed their Urdu Glossary Project; Waqas be will be testing it over this weekend and will be ready/tested/debugged on Monday. An ebook of science is 100% complete and ready to be included. An ebook of Urdu (Meri Kitab) is 60% complete. Salman will attempt to complete it over the weekend. The Urdu localization of EToys is 75% complete; Waqas and Salman are confident to complete it sometimes next week.

18. Documentation: Anne Gentle and Seth Woodhouse are finishing laying out a simple introductory guide to ownership and care of the XO, working with material from Todd Kelsey and older demo notes and a number of community artists. Translation will begin this week (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/~sj/quickstart/).

Anne is working on fixing the banner and adding an actual index; generated by Author-IT, a commercial tool that we are currently using. Adam Hyde of FLOSSManuals has offered to port the documents to his site and set up a system to auto-update manuals there with text from the olpc wiki; we may switch to this next month.

19. Science fare: Sunee Piromprames has been working with Lauren Klein and teacher Srinuan to organize a bug-identification project at Ban Samhka, Thailand. David Stang of the BayScience Foundation is setting up forums for them to use to classify their findings, with photos and local text and pronunciation of bug names. They will have a worked example this week for the children to follow, and are working with Thai strings.

20. Library: Mako Hill, Lauren, and SJ Klein have worked out what bundling scripts need to be written to provide for simple bundle creation. It will be possible to make (and verify) bundles through a web upload form soon.

21. Our Stories: Google, UNICEF, and OLPC issued a joint press release regarding a global storytelling project being orchestrated by Google’s Stephen Cho. The goal of the initiative is to preserve and share stories, histories, and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages. Using XO laptops, mobile phones, and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends. These stories will be shared globally through the Our Stories website (See http://www.ourstories.org/), where they can be found on a Google Map.

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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