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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].


=Laptop News 2007-12-22=
=Laptop News 2007-12-30=


1. Give One Get One: The G1G1 program ends on December 31. G1G1 has
1. Arahuay, Peru: If you haven't yet seen it, please take the time to
not only made it possible to seed the launch of programs in Haiti,
read this AP article about the XO in remote Peruvian village
Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Afghanistan, but we have
([http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h39xDUaVB_AAIyMNnlTSCaldwrTwD8TO0NTO0]).
also greatly broaden the community of participation in the project.
The lead paragraph says it all: "Doubts about whether poor, rural
The community has already jumped in to help: the level of activity in
children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as
our forums, IRC, email lists, wiki, etc. has risen dramatically over
quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50
the past few weeks. G1G1 participants have asked lots of questions—and have
primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child
uncovered some new bugs—but they also have lots of answers—and have
project six months ago."
submitted some new patches. The community model seems to be scaling.


Many thanks to Hilary Meserole and the tireless efforts from the teams
2. Hinge: Jacques Gagne has been investigating the laptop hinge—the
at Pentagram, Nurun, Eleven, Patriot, and Brightstar.
"clearance" between the two rotating parts should be tighter and this
would reduce wobble. Mary Lou Jepsen and Quanta are investigating a
possible run-in change at the earliest possible date.


2. Mary Lou Jepsen: Mary Lou's last day at OLPC is December 31. She
3. Hardware certifications and testing data: Mary Lou has created a
will be continuing to consult with us on a number of different fronts
compilation of certification and testing data that is available on the
as she chases after her next miracle in display technology. Mary Lou
wiki (Please see [[Hardware Testing]]); it will
was OLPC employee Number One, both in terms of when she joined the
be expanded over time.
organization and in terms of the breadth and depth of her
contributions. Thank you and best of luck with your adventures in a
new role and new year.


3. Embedded controller (EC): Richard Smith has tested a battery EEPROM
4. Green: EMPA at the Swiss National Labs is continuing its work on
dumping feature recently added by Andres Salomon: it seems to work
life cycle analysis of the XO laptops by comparing the cost, lifetime,
great. Richard has written crontab scripts and "phone home" scripts
power consumption, and overall environmental impact with the
for inclusion in joyride builds, with the intent to include them in an
refurbished desktops in Columbia. Mary Lou teleconferenced with the
upcoming release to build an anonymous database of battery
team this week and will assure that they get all the data they need to
performance. These scripts will sample the power used every five
complete their analysis. The final report is due in mid-February.
minutes and log it. They only sample when the battery is charging or
Columbia is widely acknowledged to have one of the most successful
discharging. The hope is to gather a composite view of battery
re-furbished desktop programs in Latin America.
performance under realistic conditions of use.


Richard noticed that on the community-development list there are at
5. Water: Anna Bershteyn, an MIT Ph.D. candidate, has been helping
least two reports of the EC going "terminal", meaning that on boot
OLPC follow up on some questions from Ban Samhka, Thailand about the
they get the error message: "EC problem. Remove all power and
best way to test and improve water quality; water quality is an area
restart." We need to get those machines to Cambridge to investigate
of interest that is expanding in the OLPC community. Anna and Mary Lou
further.
met with Susan Murcott to discuss possible simple hands-on games on
the XOs that will encourage children to test and/or filter their
water. SJ Klein has put Anna in touch with groups from UNICEF and the
Hesperian Foundation who are also working on water safety. To learn
more about Anna, please visit the wiki [[User:Anna B]]).


Another issue found on the community-list are reports from a few
6. Power measurements: John Watlington instrumented a production
people about their batteries not charging. Richard says this would not
machine for power measurements this week to allow continued
surprise him if they were NiMH batteries, but G1G1 machines have the
verification of the laptop power-saving measures. This allows Chris
LiFePo batteries. He did had one person run "logbat" and send him the
Ball (and the rest of the software team) to continuously measure the
results: the EC reads the battery fine and is attempting to charge the
power consumption at ten different places around the laptop, and also
battery but no current ever goes into the battery. Again, we need to
automatically simulate user input to wake up the laptop (power button,
get these machines to Cambridge as we haven't seen this behavior
lid switch, etc.). We have already have a B3 unit with over twenty
before.
power measurement points, but it cannot aggressively suspend/resume,
and doesn't have any of the more recent power-savings-related
engineering changes.


4. Open Firmware: Mitch Bradley continued to provide G1G1 customer
7. Embedded controller: Richard Smith spent time studying oscilloscope
support, for example, chasing down some problems with SD cards. He
traces looking for a possible cause of the reopening of Ticket 1835
also added the ability to delete JFFS2 files from Open Firmware and
(unable to resume); recent software builds were failing on the
fixed Tickets #5717, #5585, and #5727, all improvements to the overall
suspend/resume testbed. He has been unable to reproduce the problem
OFW performance and reliability. Preparations continue on OFW for the
with bare-board tests and he now feels that he fully understand the
Intel prototype XO board.
software causes of 1835 (three distinct causes). Running the latest EC
code with Joyride kernels doesn't seem to have the problem. Richard
and John will continue to run tests on the suspend/resume testbed to
insure that we won't have the problem with Update.1


5. Wireless firmware: Marvell released firmware version 5.110.20.p49
A second bonus was discovery and verification of EC issues that Chris
which addresses Ticket #5194. With this firmware release, all known
Ball and Jim Gettys have run into. Andres helped Richard find an EC
major low-level bugs have been addressed. With the wireless driver
bug where the SCI mask was getting corrupted. The most frequent
that's in the current ship builds, we see locking errors under heavy
manifestation of that was the loss of AC events or battery-charge
load from which the driver recovers automatically. David Woodhouse is
level. Richard still don't know the root cause of the corruption, but
doing a major rewrite of the driver which should eventually address
has a good test case and kernel debug logs. There appears to be a case
that issue.
where EC communication fails and error recover is not working. Fixing
it is going to involve more oscilloscope time, because turning on
serial- port debugging appears to make the problem go away. There is
already a workaround in the kernel to fix the mask when it becomes
corrupted, so it's not a show-stopper.


6. Software ECOs: From time to time there may be critical bug fixes
Richard is also writing some cron scripts that will take a snapshot of
that must be released between our regularly scheduled releases. These
the battery ACR while the laptop is running on battery power and then
may occur due to security issues, from unexpected hardware problems,
then send us the data. Richard wants to use these data to build power
or the discovery of latent bugs that affect large numbers of users.
usage profiles. The ACR gives us a very accurate reading on the amount
We've started a page in wiki discuss the software engineering change
of mA/h drawn from the battery. Plotting it over time will begin to
order (ECO) process (See [[Operating_system_release_procedures]]).
give us insight on our dynamic power draw.


7. Support: The past week has been a busy one for Adam Holt and the
8. School server We found a serious problem with the mesh networking
OLPC support team. Adam has organized a team of 30 support volunteers
in the build of School-server software released last week (Build 137),
to comprehensively answer help@laptop.org tickets. (Each ticket is an
which brings down an active antenna if a large file transfer is
ongoing email conversation with a donor/client.) The volunteer team is
attempted. A new build of the software with the new libertas driver
working hard, but keeping up with the support load. Part of the
(thanks David Woodhouse) greatly improves the situation. A new build
process includes the compilation of a Support FAQ (See [[Support_FAQ]]). Adam is also organizing a
is being tested and tuned and will be released in the next few days.
"virtual call center" based on asterisk.org VoIP. Matthew O'Gorman is
The school-server-software build problems have returned, but this time
helping finalize the server. Callers will access a local US number in
we identified one of the problems: it turns out that the livecd build
the 617 area code. It will be informal, but we hope it will provide a
process fails if you have upgraded the kernel. Providing a single
critical outreach to those users who need it most. We hope to complete
choice for the kernel is the workaround for this problem.
testing and possibly an initial rollout within the coming week.


Please everyone recruit your XO-aware friends as:
We have encountered scaling problem with the XMPP service on the
(1) "charming" volunteers to answer phones; and
server. The eJabber software runs out of memory over time as the
(2) "perfectionist" volunteers to help organize our wiki pages.
number of active users exceeds a hundred. Collabra is looking into
alternative server implementations. We had thought eJabber has used by
large instant-messaging services, but probably not with all the bells
and whistles we use. The XMPP service is crucial to the efficient
provision of presence information to laptops in a school through a
centralized method. The alternative, used when no server is found, is
for each laptop to send multicast announcements, which spread through
our mesh network at a low rate and using an algorithm best described
as a "flood fill".


You can email Adam regarding your talents, motivations, and a phone
In order to support a trial in Mongolia, the server software will
number at "holt AT laptop DOT org". Thanks!
start supporting multiple servers per school in January. Each server
in a school acts as an additional internet portal in a school's
wireless mesh; together they redundantly provide services to all of
the laptops in a school.


There will be an "Organizing Sunday" meeting among our volunteers on
9. Active antenna update: We are awaiting a utility from Marvell for
30 December, 4PM EST. All interested parties can join if they email
reflashing the firmware on the active antennas we now have, to allow
Adam first.
their use with school servers; presently, they have to be plugged in
after a server has booted. When this arrives, it will be included in a
school server software release. Users in the field should be able to
automatically upgrade any antenna simply by plugging it into a server.


Noah Kantrowitz has helped to organize the RT system so that
10. Testing: We released a patch to Ship.2, Build 653 to fix a problem
volunteers' workflow is more efficient. Instant-response RTFM entries
with Spanish laptops coming up in English, as well as a problem
(canned answers auto-pasted into emails) are growing too.
(discovered in Uruguay) with the Journal items going away.


Chih-yu Chao is helping Adam to answer questions from G1G1 recipients;
There was a discussion this week that focused on how volunteers could
she has noticed that many parents are asking whether our browser
get started on testing activities by editing the current wiki pages
support Flash/Java websites, an area we need to improve upon.
that describe activities: many of these wiki pages are old and thus
they do not accurately reflect how the activity works. Please watch
the [[Test issues]] page in the coming weeks to see how
you can help!


Michael Burns of the Oregon State Open Source Lab has been working
11. Schedule: We are at code freeze for the Update1 release. We will
each night improving and growing the Community Support forum (See
spend the next couple of weeks testing and documenting. Thanks for
http://olpc.osuosl.org/), which is now exceeding 1,000 posts; 200
everyone's patience for bearing with us during the usual chaos
registered users have answered hundreds of first-time computer
associated with of the start of shipping that has gotten in the way of
questions from G1G1 donors. There is already a growing community of
a smooth release cycle. We expect to spend some time on improving
users helping other users on the site. The site includes a live (IRC)
process issues before we move on to serious work in Update2.
chat (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/chat), a feature that works from any
computer, including directly from the XO, and a volunteers map (See
http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/phoogle_map.php) that lets developers,
enthusiasts and users put a push-pin next to their home town.


8. Etoys: 2007 was a busy year for the Etoys team: they made over 700
12. Support: Adam Holt has done a heroic job this week in answering
patches this calendar year. In addition to these code changes, there
emails sent to help@laptop.org, creating and updating the Support
is new content: examples, help contents, and documentation. Etoys was
pages (See [[Support]]), the Support FAQ,
more or less stable and mature before 2007, but the effort in the year
helping with the Getting Started Guild (See [http://laptop.org/start])
made it even more stable, useful and be fit to the XO platform.
and coordinating volunteers to help answer emails, IRC, and forum.
Notable improvements and contributions include: sane mathematical
This weekend he is holding a volunteer training session in preparation
operator precedence by Yoshiki Ohshima; better natural language
for a phone bank that could go live as early as next week; look on the
translation by Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider; display scaling by
olpc-support IRC channel for info.
Andreas Raab; an event recording system (called Event Theatre) by
Scott Wallace; a camera interface by Diego Gomez Deck; the World
Stethoscope by Kazuhiro Abe; the Quick Guide help system by Kathleen
Harness, Ted Kaehler and Yoshiki; drag and drop by Takashi; IPv6
support by Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger; documentation by Alan Kay,
Kim Rose and Rebecca Cannara; and numerous fixes and usability
improvements from the Etoys team and community, including
contributions by Karl Ramberg and Marcus Denker.


In 2007, there were many deadlines in short successions, putting
We'd like to be able to provide RMA numbers for returns to help
pressure on the team to deliver stable versions—pushing the team
offload the Patriot Donor Services and we would like to put a process
towards a conservative approach to development. Many big changes were
in place where we can get some of the returns sent to OLPC for
punted. In hindsight, perhaps delivering some unstable versions with
analysis.
bigger changes would have been better strategy. On the other hand, it
is worth to mention that Etoys is one of the most reliable packages
over the course of XO development and has seen extensive use in most
of the school trials. Kudos to Bert Freudenberg, who maintains the
Etoys integration with Sugar (Bert not only led the effort to
integrate Etoys with Sugar; he also contributed Sugar's overall
development).


There were various Etoys-based activities proposed: a programming
13. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta helped some language teams
tutorial called Bots Inc by Stéphane Ducasse; an interactive geometry
troubleshoot their problems with Pootle. All throughout the week, he
program called Dr Geo II by Hilaire Hernandez; and education contents
was also testing the system to keep the POT files up to date. The
suite by Luke Gorrie, Bryan Berry, and the OLPC Nepal developers.
system seems to be working fine and will be rolling it out (along with
"Conservativeness" was a major issue when discussing the possible
the documentation) during this weekend.
inclusion of Dr Geo II into the base Etoys image; accommodating such
code in a graceful way is a challenge for 2008.


9. Translation: One of the last pieces in our Pootle deployment is now
Sayamindu also gained access to build fontconfig for the OLPC in Koji
in place: a mechanism to update PO template files for each module
(thanks Dennis Gilmore), and created a build which should hopefully
automatically. Sayamindu Dasgupta has fine tuned the script that does
fix Ticket #1525 (a long-standing bug due to the interaction between
this updating to change POT files only if the strings have changed.
the font cache and the system time).
(This work is based on Damned Lies, the GNOME translation management
system). This helps avoid the redundant updating of PO files. The
string-change detection feature will also be useful in the future to
detect string-freeze breakages and also to notify translators when new
strings are added to a module.


This week also saw the first package release of the Update 1 branch to
Waqas Toor and Salman Minhas have lead a team in Pakistan to the
pick up new translators. Thanks to the excellent effort put in by the
successful completion of an Urdu translation in Pootle
translators, the Update.1 project (which consisted of the Update 1
([https://dev.laptop.org/translate/ur/update1/]); all the strings are
branches of the Sugar, Journal activity, Record activity and Browse
successfully committed and are ready to be included in Update.1. They
activity) is, on an average, 50% translated for each language.
have also commenced working on making Zekr a Sugar activity (initially
Languages that have more than 90% of their strings translated are:
in two languages: Urdu and Persian (Dari)).


• Urdu (100%)
They are also making poems for children by Pakistani national poets
• Nepali (100%)
Illama Iqbal and Faraz Ahmad Faraz available in the form of e-books;
• Dutch (100%)
and they are writing a teacher "training manual" for Afghanistan,
• Chinese (Taiwan) (100%)
which includes activity tutorials; they are working on materials for
• Bengali (100%)
teachers that address their needs in the Constructionist methodology
• Arabic (100%)
of education and learning.
• Portuguese (Brazil) (99%)
• Portuguese (99%)
• Macedonian (99%)
• Russian (98%)
• Greek (98%)
• French (98%)
• Chinese (China) (98%)
• German (96%)
• Mongolian (94%)


The focus has shifted to the master branches once again, although
14. Kernel: Andres Salomon and Bernie Innocenti finally were able to
language teams are encouraged to update their translations in Update.1
reproduce Ticket #2804 (the jumpy touchpad problem) and get enough
project (there will be another package release for Update.1 that would
useful debug information out of it to deduce a working theory of
pick up any new translations).
what's causing it and how we can workaround it in the kernel. Bernie
has built an experimental kernel with a candidate fix and is eager to
receive feedback from some of the jumpy mouse victims to see if our
helps.


In the middle of the week, Sayamindu also managed to track down a
15. Updates and builds: Scott Ananian gave olpc-update the ability to
problem in Pootle that was holding up the work being done by the Urdu
upgrade from a USB key (Ticket #3881) (See
team. The issue was being caused by a corrupt stats file in the
[[Olpc-update]]); olpc-update also now warns you
Pootle-Urdu directory.
if you try to upgrade to a joyride build without a developer key
(Ticket #5309) and is more efficient if it is interrupted in the
middle of an update. OFW will now upgrade you to the latest firmware
even if you have a developer key (Ticket #5371); ntpdate is run on the
XOs when we get network connectivity (Ticket #3359); rtcwake is in the
build to enable timed wakeups from suspend (Tickets #5434 and #5435);
our builds now use sudo to get root—there has been some discussion of
configuring su instead (Ticekt #5537).


10. Touchpad: Bernardo Innocenti spent much of the week testing a
Dennis Gilmore has been working on builds and some tools to help make
solution to the "jumpy mouse" touchpad bug. We'll soon be pushing out
them faster to turn around; he has also been tagging packages for
a patch that should cover the majority of touchpad problems.
Update.1.


11. Journal: Reinier Heeres wrote a script to copy files from the
16. View source: The view-source key now works in Chat, Web, Pippy,
Journal to the Linux file system (Ticket #5571). This got extended by
and any activities generated by Pippy (Tickets #4909, #5541, #5542).
Phil Bordelon, just like the copy-to-journal script. Reinier also
Next up for Scott: Terminal (Ticket #5543), Gmail (Ticket #5544), and
fixed some equation parser issues in the Calculator (Ticket #5734) and
Clock (Ticket #5545). Any application that can reasonable be written
an issue with Browse not exiting when a keep error occurred (Ticket
as a single python source file is a good candidate for Pippy-ization,
#5493).
which lets children view and customize the activity. This will
undoubtedly stress our handling of activity bundles in the Journal,
which arguably is a good spur in the side!


12. Debian: Ivan Krstić is overhauling the OLPC server infrastructure,
17. Wireless driver: Dave Woodhouse worked again on the libertas
but also found the time to put together an "unofficial" etch/xfce4
wireless driver, a certain amount of sleeping and some frustration
build. It includes Firefox, Thunderbird, a suite of development tools
that although he's fixed most of the known bugs in the driver, people
(python, git, gcc, gdb, flex, bison, automake, autoconf, libtool), a
are still using some ancient kernel in their OS builds which is
music player (XMMS), IRC client (irssi) and a graphical wireless AP
entirely useless for testing purposes.
selector. The entire build takes up 250MB of flash. Ivan optimized the
Firefox window layout to maximum screen estate and configured a number
of keyboard shortcuts.


13. Cow power: Arjun Sarwal along with the Mumbai team made some good
18. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg spent the first half of week in Kathmandu.
progress on the cow-power system for charging the XO. They made some
He observed and helped the very active OLPC and Etoys communities in
changes in the electrical design (e.g., using an alternator now
Nepal (See [http://nepal.ole.org/home/?q=node/107]). Yoshiki Ohshima continued on fixing bugs on trac. These patches
instead of a dynamo) and they have a plan regarding the mechanical
will show up in the Update.1 stream at some point. Yoshiki also is
design based upon a better understanding of what are readily available
working on the packaging for non-OLPC environment. Takashi Yamamiya
parts. The current setup easily charges two laptops, however with the
started prototyping a simple presentation tool. Ted Kaehler and
planned mechanical design changes, they hope to charge at least ten
Korakurider are looking at the translation of QuickGuide contents.
laptops simultaneously.
Scott Wallace and Yoshiki worked together to provide a better way to
report runtime errors.


14. Games: Don Hopkins has been working on the new Micropolis codebase
19. Scratch: Brian Silverman (by phone), John Maloney,and Mitchel
(See http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/micropolis). He has made a web
Resnick came by the OLPC office this week to demonstrate Scratch
server out of the Micropolis python module for testing and has
running on an XO (See [http://scratch.mit.edu/]). While it hasn't been
modularized python code for tile and cellular automation rendering.
wholy "Sugarized" yet, it is already quite usable. John will be
posting a bundle on the wiki for those who'd like to explore it (and
provide feedback) at this stage.


15. OurStories: Pablo Flores reports that Uruguay will start
20. Open hardware management: Chris Ball is working on a particularly
collecting stories in late January in different localities, like their
entrenched yet subtle bug in OHM's timing code at the moment.
recent work in Sarand Grande (See
(Richard Hughes confirms that he's been seeing it on non-OLPC
http://olpc-ceibal.blogspot.com/2007/12/day-of-activities-in-sarand-grande.html).
platforms too, all the way back to the beginning of OHM.)
Announcements of the site in Spanish and Nigerian languages are being
prepared for late January.


16. Library: Lauren Klein has been working on interfaces to make
21. Presence/sharing: Morgan Collett helped with testing the
generating content bundles easier, starting with forms to generate
sugar-shell-consumes-all-memory issue (Ticket #5532). (Thanks to
bundle metadata. Next up are automatic bundlers that check and
Sjoerd Simons for providing the avahi invocations to fake buddies on
generate manifests and metadata from uploaded tars and zips (See
the mesh.) Morgan helped some community people with Jabber questions
http://crank.laptop.org/~lauren/libraryInfo/).
on the forums. There has been confusion about why the
ship2.jabber.laptop.org server doesn't work: Robert McQueen spoke with
people on IRC who were interested in trying ejabberd and helping us
work out why it was failing so badly. (There is now a server at
xochat.org that can be used instead of the default at
ship2.jabber.laptop.org. See the Sugar control panel page in the wiki
for instructions on how to configure your Jabber server.) Robert has
updated the Ejabberd configuration pages on the wiki with some updated
patches and clearer instructions.


17. Installing activities: OLPC Austria is improving their "xo-get"
Dafydd Harries spent most of the week trying to set up OpenFire on
command-line script for downloading and installing activities. (The
jabber.laptop.org. He managed to export the user database from
script is a complement to the current process of clicking on .xo files
Ejabberd and import it to OpenFire, but laptops don't seem to be able
from the Browse activity.) They are making it work with the activities
to connect to the server successfully. He'll be investigating why this
found on the [[Activities]] page, having added a
is the case and suspect some sort of problem with our client code.
field there to include tags (See
OpenFire developers have been keen to help, however.
http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get and
http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get/Repository).


18. OLPC Communities: Holger Levsen, Aaron Kaplan, and others from
Morgan looked into the HippoCanvas bug (Ticket #2351) that is
Austrian and German OLPC groups spent the last days of the week at the
affecting scrolling of multiline Chat messages; he hasn't found a fix
24C3 conference in Berlin, Germany. John Crispin and the OpenWRT
for it yet. XO users who are annoyed with this bug have resorted to
contingent showed off OpenWRT booting on an XO and let a growing
sharing Write as a primitive chat tool instead.
number of XOs share their space. At one point there were over 20 XOs
in use in the area, most in the hands of developers and early G1G1
arrivals.


OLPC Switzerland is having its first meeting January 15 in Bern,
Morgan also cleaned up some wiki documentation referring to Tubes and
organized by Michele Notari (See [[OLPC_Switzerland]]).
Presence Service; while more documentation is needed, most of the
existing documentation was out of date (predating Salut for instance).


Greg DeKoenigsberg and Jack Aboutbol are starting to organize a social
All the bits for Chat copying URLs to the clipboard (Ticket #5080) to
and musical OLPC event in New York City for next August. They are
launch in Browse finally landed and work fine, although now it seems
presenting a proposal to the NYC parks and recreation committee next
we may be able to do it more directly after all with the Rainbow work
Friday.
done to address Ticket #4909.


19. Developer community: Almost 1000 developers are active in our Trac
And Morgan has been working on the unreliability of buddy icons
system (http://dev.laptop.org). There are thousands more contributors
clustering around their shared activity (Ticket #5368); it is still
to wiki.laptop.org and to various fori, mailing lists, IRCs, etc. This
unclear whether the best place to make a fix is in Sugar or Presence
participation is invaluable to the success of OLPC mission. We'd like
Service. The problem arises when CurrentActivityChanged occurs before
to thank, among others:
ActivitiesChanged, so the buddy icon moves before the activity is
known about.


a-12, aalam, abelay, abrar.momin, aconbere, adeighton, adetola,
Sjoerd Simons investigated why avahi under some circumstances marks
admford, adricnet, aegis, aenertia, aferti, afranke, agdelma, ahmad,
records as failed a bit too easily, causing the "contacts flashing"
ajax, akauppi, akeemolabiyi, alagu, albertcahalan, aleph, alexandre,
bug. He discovered that the passive-observation-of-failures
alexl, alfonsodg, als, altemusm, alxx, ambros, amitgogna, andic,
implementation was a bit too sensitive and created a patch to make it
andreasraab, andre.mossinato, andrey, angel, angieklein123, angus,
less sensitive. The patch needs further testing in a crowded RF
anna chang, annegentle, ant, antoninoiacono, antonio correia,
environment like the OLPC headquarters to see if it solves the issue.
antoniojf, approvalforupdate, aprodan, arangelangov, arauto,
argento78, ariana, arjs, arnd, arnold, aroscha, artpro, arvinliu,
ashish, ashsong, assim, astein, atodorov, aturist, aumana, avocade,
avoine, awjrichards, awong9702, axboe, bamdad, bananascanner, barbolo,
barry, bart massey, basil, bbaston, bbbush, bcavagnolo, bcsaller,
bdoin, beaubrewer, beauty, beckerde, behdad, behnam, bemasc, benzea,
bernie, bert, bertl, bfcatfriends, biarm, bigbaaadbob, bigwally,
bilboed, billaspell, billjank, bill_mcgonigle, billy, bjfreeman,
bkublik, blahedo, blanchet, blankverse, blix, blizzard, bluefoxicy,
blueyed, bmcarnes, bnardone, bob, bobbysmith007, bobkeyes,
boujelbenhichem, brainrecall, briandorsey, briandorsey, bronson,
bryan.ma, bss, bsugarse, btate, budbird, buendia, byodo, c9damico,
cafl, cak, calyth, campbell, candy, candy lu, candy_man, cannonjt,
carl2, carla, carlfk, carlofalciola, carrano, cavallo, cbramsey,
cdoty, cdurrett, cgalpin, chaos, chatworthy, cheetahman, chenz,
chiaying.lin, chihyu, chitraspai, chrisb143, christianmarc,
christophd, christoph_hagemeyer, chuck, cialis, cihan, ciscos151, cjb,
c.kutzleb, clifft135, cmeadors, cmusodza, coderanger, codyl, colonwq,
company, corbet, crazy-chris, crazymonk, crichardson, crouchjay,
crschmidt, cscott, cshields, csounder, csutton, curlydude007, cwhii,
cworth, cycho, czhower, dabender, daf, damonkohler, danarnold,
dandelion, danerogers, danielfuhry, daniher, daniher, danjared,
dan_margo, danw, dao, dark314, davidgr, david_leeh, david.lin,
davidpfarrell, davidz, dbpatterson, dcbw, dcolivares, ddhoppe, ddo,
dds, deanbrettle, deborah hanley, dedekind, dennisdanso,
dennisfrancis, desertgojo, devinliu, devlware, devwillie, dgd,
dgilmore, dhabersa, dhopkins, dhuff, dialectric, diegozacarao,
dilinger, diyoung, djbclark, djihed, djneu, dking, dlang, dmd, docdtv,
dolphinling, doom, douglas_goodall, drewish, dulouz, duncanb,
dushyantgautam, dvsullivan, dwmw2, dyd, dydimustk, dysumner, ea,
ealtin, eamaya, ebelechukwu2005, eben, ebf, ebodfish, ebotee,
echeonwugbenu, edbatalha, ediaz, edsiper, edstoner, edwardbaafi,
eenii, ejkrohne, eli amesefe, elife, elijah, elite231,
elizabeth251964, elranchero, elvis, elyip, emilmont, enalax, enjahova,
eric, eric, erick, ericsilva2, erikb, erikhatcher, erikos, eteo,
ethrop, etoys, evenremy, fab, fabiand, fabiomarcio, factor, fade,
faga, fahmi, fayoeu, fc, fciron, fdraeger, felix01, feranick,
fernandodotnet, ffm, fgrose, fhill, finalzone, fiorella, fireball,
firewing1, florentin_raud, foddex, follower, fongoses, foot,
franka001, frazermarge, frief, fuseproject, gabaug, garlick, garrison,
gary, garysu, gauravchem, gauthierancelin, gblaufuss, gbulfon,
gcarrier, gcase, gcerchio, gdesmott, george rey, george yeager,
gesmit, gfw123, ghopper, gi693362, giangy, giles, glezos, glochan,
gnrfan, gnu, godiard, gonzalo, grantbow, greg, gregdek, gregm, gregt,
gregthompson, grendelt, grenoble, griffithbuilt, grig, gustavo,
gustavoo, gwlc, gwright, h7bse1c, hai, hal, hal, hallie, hal.murray,
hamed, happyolpc, hartwellfong, hartwellfong, hazardouswaster,
hchennings, hello1024, hemantg, henninger, hiper, hitoro, hmes,
hoboprimate, holger, holt, holtzman, homunq, hopsman, hsin wu,
hsin.wu, huangcza, hughsient, hummingbird, humptybump, hyppy, ianb,
ianissitt, iceberg, iknowjoseph, indradg, indutiomarus, info_anarchy,
intrader, irish_moss, isforinsects, ismaell, ivazquez, ivo, j5,
jaberg, jack, jackeyzhao, jafo, jaimebalb, jaing, jake h, jamesm,
jamespaige, jamil, jani, jaq, jason liu, jayakumar, jbarahona,
jcallas, jcardona, jcfrench, jdub, jecel, jeckson, jennjacobsen,
jenny2, jensjorgensen, jeremyvisser, jeroentb, jerub, jerub,
jfallgatter, jfc, jfuhrer, jg, jherzog, jhuangtw, jhulten, jiffy,
jimfare, jim.morey, jirwin, jlstomp66, jm3, joaoboscoapf, jochang,
joebergin, joeclark, joeywang, john, johnkemeny, johnlin, johnson,
jondo, jonknee, jonsd, jordancrouse, jorgecortes, josepht, joshseal,
jpff, jpritikin, jrus, juanayup, juliano, julibio, junia, junwiseman,
jwildebo, k2nt23, karl, karmaflux, kayseon, kazuhiro abe, kenh, ken
lin, kentquirk, kenwatford, kevinprt, kfieldho, khaled, khassounah,
kiddo, kimquirk, kim rose, kiran, kityoko, kkv, konrad1134,
konrad_kleine, korakurider, kraetzichriz, kreneskyp, krstic, kruemel,
ksankar, kylesteinfatt, kylin, larryapple, lathiat, laural, lauren,
lbenavente, lcatania, lcbiazon, leejc, leemingd, leetcharmer,
legolas558, legutierr, lenkawell, lferre, liam henry, lileeanna,
linagee, lincolnquirk, lionstone, lmaltin, lmanul, lorenzen, lrhowa5,
lucia, lucks, luisca, lukego, luna, lwalter42, ma895907, mac, madcat,
madd, magnum34, mako, maku, mallum, mantaraya36, mantas, manu,
manusheel, marcelo, marco, marcos ficarelli, marcus, markharrison,
martine, martin.langhoff, martoro, martyvis, marv, massimo, mathew,
maurotorres, maxim_o, mbletsas, mbrubeck, mburns, mcalef, mcfletch,
mchehab, mchenetz, mchua, mduvigneaud, melekim, methril, meyers,
mfoster, mi370560, michael, michael.tiemann, midiwall, miguelon,
mihai, mihi, mikelee_aarp, mikes, mikus, mime, mitchellncharity, mitu,
mjr, mk8, mkgobaco, mleech, mlj, mohsen, mokurai, monkeyfork, monyu,
morgs, morningstar, moshez, motherhoose, mpal, mpdevine, mrdomino,
m.scott, msevior, mstone, mtklein, mucca, muccini, murielgodoi,
murray, murrays, musallam, mvirkkil, myles, mylesb, nacholudo,
nalrawahi, nandoa, nasa, nat, nathalia.sautchuk, naustin, ncorrare,
nelhage, nelson, neptune, newsham, ni762428, nibhatish, nicomy,
ninjakitten, nirmal, nitin, nnorwitz, nolambar, nornagon, nrp, nuke,
nuwdle, obc_spike, oeka, ohm, ohshima, okada, olafura, ollybetts,
ondal, openspark, orospakr, osbornisle, osmosys, otakuj462, ozwald,
pacease, pamela.dallas, pascal, path, paul, paulproteus, pavel, pavel,
pd, peiwei, pekayatt, pengo, pepboy, pepboy, perlhacker, peter,
peter.lorenzen, petria, pezhman, phil, philipmac, phollings, php5,
pierre, pierreossman, ping, pmj, pnasrat, polvi, ponafarioli, power
guo, pr3d4t0r, prasanna, prashant.thakkar, probono, pvanhoof,
pwiltsey, pwr, py_geek, pzelenka, qq, quantumcat, quantumg, quozl,
rabeeh, rafaelortiz, ramaseshanr, raven, ravikondamuru, ravualhemio,
ray.tseng, rbh00, rbhagwat, rblengio, rbwjrw, rcauk, rchokshi,
rdebath, rdike, rdobson, rebecca, rebecca, rebecca allen, rebeccag,
rebeccagettys, redpawn, reg, regan20, reillysl, rejon, reservedoc,
retired_techie, retroplumido, reynaldo, rgs, rharrison, rhindak,
rhindak, richard, richie.wang, riv, rj_dean, rkevans, rminnich,
robertfadel, robot101, robsta, rock, rodarvus, roel, roozbeh, rorrim,
roscherfr, roubert, roy, rsavoye, rsmith, rsriniva, rtlm, ruby,
russnelson, rwh, ry313323, ryankelln, ryant5000, ryebo1, sabu, sam,
samuel bizien, sandeepdutta, sankarshan, santanu, sarahmoodoo,
saramah, satch89450, satyajeet, sayamindu, sbelter, scomst,
scott_kirkwood, scottwallace, sdalvi, seberg, segher, seph,
seralewise, sero189, shailen, shang, shankar, sharon, shekay, shenki,
shiu, sholton, sierrahombre, simon, simon, simosx, sirjuanlu, sj, sjg,
sjoerd, skeezix, skiboo, skierpage, slasc, sleet01, smcv, smetz52,
smohan, spacey, spditner, splinux, sprezzatura, ssb22, ssc, sssss,
steck, steeg, stepheneb, steveb, steve fullerton, stevew, stevo,
stoecker, stoutbigred, stressyndrome, sturnfie, subbu, sulmanminhas,
sunny, sverma, svu, swagle, sxpert, syd, sylvinus, s.zytkiewicz, t3,
tags07, takashi, talmage, tamichan, tannewt, tbpringle, te294177,
tedch, ted.juan, tedkaehler, teefal, term, terry su, tess, testing,
teus, tf, theperturbator, thiago_s, timbutler, tim.millerdyck, titus,
tomeu, tomhannen, tonsofpcs, toygmail, trapdoor, trevor, tribleyl,
trobertson, tsylla, tudd, turadg, tushards, twinkle, uden, ufg,
uflchamp, ujwal2, usman ansari, usman.ansari, uwog, vadim, vance.ke,
vandien, vasukrishnan, vbhunt, vegpuff, vgiasolli, victorchao,
victor-y, vjohn, vmb, voden, vorburger, vradok, wad, wadeb, walter,
wangwebbxydd, waqastoor, warp, watchhillfarm, wcohen, weixiang,
wenmi01, we.three.tees, wildem, williamb68, wiswaud, wkraimer, wmb,
wmfwlr, wolf, wolfgang, wvbailey, wwworkshop shannon, wwworkshop
terrence, wybiral, xardox, xatzipe, xavi, xiang.wei, xorAxAx, yani,
ychao, yhosoai, yosch, youssef, ypod, ywwg, zack, zakarpatska,
zapador, zarcher, znmeb, zogger50, zoltanthegypsy, zwl821022, and
zztopd.


Best wishes for the new year.
Guillaume Desmottes continue to investigate the stream-tubes problem
with Rainbow. The Telepathy side should be fixed in Update.1. He start
to implement/design peer-to-peer connections for stream tubes in
Gabble (Ticket #4047) and improved Gabble-tubes test coverage.


20. Special thanks: As mentioned, the contributions to the project
22. Sugar: Reinier Heeres worked on fixing a Read sharing issue
have been numerous and diverse. However, I'd like to acknowledge one
(Ticket #5365), a Calculate internationalization issue (Ticket #5319)
contributor who has quietly been playing a central role in perhaps the
and adding ellipsis to long texts in palettes (Ticket #4562). He also
most critical user-facing aspect of the OLPC effort, Sugar. Red Hat's
wrote a simple script to copy a regular file to the datastore/journal
Marco Pesenti Gritti seems to never rest; he never tires of answering
that got extended with quite a bit more functionality by Phil
questions, writing patches, and engaging in design discussions. His
Bordelon. He tested previous fixes in Joyride and Update-1 and tried
productivity is monumental; his insights are invaluable.
to understand the memory leaks the sugar shell was showing.

Simon Schampijer focused on the browser, testing and implemented a
"solution" for the browser permission issue described here (See
[[Concurrent activity instances]]). Actually we
don't think anymore that copying the profile around is a good thing to
do; we think we should run the browser outside the container for
Update.1 (Ticket #5489). Michael Stone send an email to the mozilla
devs to start discussion with them about a long term solution.

23. Trac: Noah Kantrowitz visited Friday and helped improve our trac
system, adding bug dependencies and sketching out better workflow
features that can now be implemented in it. He also made some great
suggestions for the Support/Help pages.

24. Documentation: Mako Hill and SJ Klein packaged together a new
version of the Getting Started Guide for inclusion in the library on
the laptop itself. (Walter Bender wrote a new stylesheet to fit the
pages in the XO.)


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 14:20, 30 December 2007

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Laptop News 2007-12-30

1. Give One Get One: The G1G1 program ends on December 31. G1G1 has not only made it possible to seed the launch of programs in Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Afghanistan, but we have also greatly broaden the community of participation in the project. The community has already jumped in to help: the level of activity in our forums, IRC, email lists, wiki, etc. has risen dramatically over the past few weeks. G1G1 participants have asked lots of questions—and have uncovered some new bugs—but they also have lots of answers—and have submitted some new patches. The community model seems to be scaling.

Many thanks to Hilary Meserole and the tireless efforts from the teams at Pentagram, Nurun, Eleven, Patriot, and Brightstar.

2. Mary Lou Jepsen: Mary Lou's last day at OLPC is December 31. She will be continuing to consult with us on a number of different fronts as she chases after her next miracle in display technology. Mary Lou was OLPC employee Number One, both in terms of when she joined the organization and in terms of the breadth and depth of her contributions. Thank you and best of luck with your adventures in a new role and new year.

3. Embedded controller (EC): Richard Smith has tested a battery EEPROM dumping feature recently added by Andres Salomon: it seems to work great. Richard has written crontab scripts and "phone home" scripts for inclusion in joyride builds, with the intent to include them in an upcoming release to build an anonymous database of battery performance. These scripts will sample the power used every five minutes and log it. They only sample when the battery is charging or discharging. The hope is to gather a composite view of battery performance under realistic conditions of use.

Richard noticed that on the community-development list there are at least two reports of the EC going "terminal", meaning that on boot they get the error message: "EC problem. Remove all power and restart." We need to get those machines to Cambridge to investigate further.

Another issue found on the community-list are reports from a few people about their batteries not charging. Richard says this would not surprise him if they were NiMH batteries, but G1G1 machines have the LiFePo batteries. He did had one person run "logbat" and send him the results: the EC reads the battery fine and is attempting to charge the battery but no current ever goes into the battery. Again, we need to get these machines to Cambridge as we haven't seen this behavior before.

4. Open Firmware: Mitch Bradley continued to provide G1G1 customer support, for example, chasing down some problems with SD cards. He also added the ability to delete JFFS2 files from Open Firmware and fixed Tickets #5717, #5585, and #5727, all improvements to the overall OFW performance and reliability. Preparations continue on OFW for the Intel prototype XO board.

5. Wireless firmware: Marvell released firmware version 5.110.20.p49 which addresses Ticket #5194. With this firmware release, all known major low-level bugs have been addressed. With the wireless driver that's in the current ship builds, we see locking errors under heavy load from which the driver recovers automatically. David Woodhouse is doing a major rewrite of the driver which should eventually address that issue.

6. Software ECOs: From time to time there may be critical bug fixes that must be released between our regularly scheduled releases. These may occur due to security issues, from unexpected hardware problems, or the discovery of latent bugs that affect large numbers of users. We've started a page in wiki discuss the software engineering change order (ECO) process (See Operating_system_release_procedures).

7. Support: The past week has been a busy one for Adam Holt and the OLPC support team. Adam has organized a team of 30 support volunteers to comprehensively answer help@laptop.org tickets. (Each ticket is an ongoing email conversation with a donor/client.) The volunteer team is working hard, but keeping up with the support load. Part of the process includes the compilation of a Support FAQ (See Support_FAQ). Adam is also organizing a "virtual call center" based on asterisk.org VoIP. Matthew O'Gorman is helping finalize the server. Callers will access a local US number in the 617 area code. It will be informal, but we hope it will provide a critical outreach to those users who need it most. We hope to complete testing and possibly an initial rollout within the coming week.

Please everyone recruit your XO-aware friends as: (1) "charming" volunteers to answer phones; and (2) "perfectionist" volunteers to help organize our wiki pages.

You can email Adam regarding your talents, motivations, and a phone number at "holt AT laptop DOT org". Thanks!

There will be an "Organizing Sunday" meeting among our volunteers on 30 December, 4PM EST. All interested parties can join if they email Adam first.

Noah Kantrowitz has helped to organize the RT system so that volunteers' workflow is more efficient. Instant-response RTFM entries (canned answers auto-pasted into emails) are growing too.

Chih-yu Chao is helping Adam to answer questions from G1G1 recipients; she has noticed that many parents are asking whether our browser support Flash/Java websites, an area we need to improve upon.

Michael Burns of the Oregon State Open Source Lab has been working each night improving and growing the Community Support forum (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/), which is now exceeding 1,000 posts; 200 registered users have answered hundreds of first-time computer questions from G1G1 donors. There is already a growing community of users helping other users on the site. The site includes a live (IRC) chat (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/chat), a feature that works from any computer, including directly from the XO, and a volunteers map (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/phoogle_map.php) that lets developers, enthusiasts and users put a push-pin next to their home town.

8. Etoys: 2007 was a busy year for the Etoys team: they made over 700 patches this calendar year. In addition to these code changes, there is new content: examples, help contents, and documentation. Etoys was more or less stable and mature before 2007, but the effort in the year made it even more stable, useful and be fit to the XO platform. Notable improvements and contributions include: sane mathematical operator precedence by Yoshiki Ohshima; better natural language translation by Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider; display scaling by Andreas Raab; an event recording system (called Event Theatre) by Scott Wallace; a camera interface by Diego Gomez Deck; the World Stethoscope by Kazuhiro Abe; the Quick Guide help system by Kathleen Harness, Ted Kaehler and Yoshiki; drag and drop by Takashi; IPv6 support by Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger; documentation by Alan Kay, Kim Rose and Rebecca Cannara; and numerous fixes and usability improvements from the Etoys team and community, including contributions by Karl Ramberg and Marcus Denker.

In 2007, there were many deadlines in short successions, putting pressure on the team to deliver stable versions—pushing the team towards a conservative approach to development. Many big changes were punted. In hindsight, perhaps delivering some unstable versions with bigger changes would have been better strategy. On the other hand, it is worth to mention that Etoys is one of the most reliable packages over the course of XO development and has seen extensive use in most of the school trials. Kudos to Bert Freudenberg, who maintains the Etoys integration with Sugar (Bert not only led the effort to integrate Etoys with Sugar; he also contributed Sugar's overall development).

There were various Etoys-based activities proposed: a programming tutorial called Bots Inc by Stéphane Ducasse; an interactive geometry program called Dr Geo II by Hilaire Hernandez; and education contents suite by Luke Gorrie, Bryan Berry, and the OLPC Nepal developers. "Conservativeness" was a major issue when discussing the possible inclusion of Dr Geo II into the base Etoys image; accommodating such code in a graceful way is a challenge for 2008.

9. Translation: One of the last pieces in our Pootle deployment is now in place: a mechanism to update PO template files for each module automatically. Sayamindu Dasgupta has fine tuned the script that does this updating to change POT files only if the strings have changed. (This work is based on Damned Lies, the GNOME translation management system). This helps avoid the redundant updating of PO files. The string-change detection feature will also be useful in the future to detect string-freeze breakages and also to notify translators when new strings are added to a module.

This week also saw the first package release of the Update 1 branch to pick up new translators. Thanks to the excellent effort put in by the translators, the Update.1 project (which consisted of the Update 1 branches of the Sugar, Journal activity, Record activity and Browse activity) is, on an average, 50% translated for each language. Languages that have more than 90% of their strings translated are:

• Urdu (100%) • Nepali (100%) • Dutch (100%) • Chinese (Taiwan) (100%) • Bengali (100%) • Arabic (100%) • Portuguese (Brazil) (99%) • Portuguese (99%) • Macedonian (99%) • Russian (98%) • Greek (98%) • French (98%) • Chinese (China) (98%) • German (96%) • Mongolian (94%)

The focus has shifted to the master branches once again, although language teams are encouraged to update their translations in Update.1 project (there will be another package release for Update.1 that would pick up any new translations).

In the middle of the week, Sayamindu also managed to track down a problem in Pootle that was holding up the work being done by the Urdu team. The issue was being caused by a corrupt stats file in the Pootle-Urdu directory.

10. Touchpad: Bernardo Innocenti spent much of the week testing a solution to the "jumpy mouse" touchpad bug. We'll soon be pushing out a patch that should cover the majority of touchpad problems.

11. Journal: Reinier Heeres wrote a script to copy files from the Journal to the Linux file system (Ticket #5571). This got extended by Phil Bordelon, just like the copy-to-journal script. Reinier also fixed some equation parser issues in the Calculator (Ticket #5734) and an issue with Browse not exiting when a keep error occurred (Ticket

  1. 5493).

12. Debian: Ivan Krstić is overhauling the OLPC server infrastructure, but also found the time to put together an "unofficial" etch/xfce4 build. It includes Firefox, Thunderbird, a suite of development tools (python, git, gcc, gdb, flex, bison, automake, autoconf, libtool), a music player (XMMS), IRC client (irssi) and a graphical wireless AP selector. The entire build takes up 250MB of flash. Ivan optimized the Firefox window layout to maximum screen estate and configured a number of keyboard shortcuts.

13. Cow power: Arjun Sarwal along with the Mumbai team made some good progress on the cow-power system for charging the XO. They made some changes in the electrical design (e.g., using an alternator now instead of a dynamo) and they have a plan regarding the mechanical design based upon a better understanding of what are readily available parts. The current setup easily charges two laptops, however with the planned mechanical design changes, they hope to charge at least ten laptops simultaneously.

14. Games: Don Hopkins has been working on the new Micropolis codebase (See http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/micropolis). He has made a web server out of the Micropolis python module for testing and has modularized python code for tile and cellular automation rendering.

15. OurStories: Pablo Flores reports that Uruguay will start collecting stories in late January in different localities, like their recent work in Sarand Grande (See http://olpc-ceibal.blogspot.com/2007/12/day-of-activities-in-sarand-grande.html). Announcements of the site in Spanish and Nigerian languages are being prepared for late January.

16. Library: Lauren Klein has been working on interfaces to make generating content bundles easier, starting with forms to generate bundle metadata. Next up are automatic bundlers that check and generate manifests and metadata from uploaded tars and zips (See http://crank.laptop.org/~lauren/libraryInfo/).

17. Installing activities: OLPC Austria is improving their "xo-get" command-line script for downloading and installing activities. (The script is a complement to the current process of clicking on .xo files from the Browse activity.) They are making it work with the activities found on the Activities page, having added a field there to include tags (See http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get and http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get/Repository).

18. OLPC Communities: Holger Levsen, Aaron Kaplan, and others from Austrian and German OLPC groups spent the last days of the week at the 24C3 conference in Berlin, Germany. John Crispin and the OpenWRT contingent showed off OpenWRT booting on an XO and let a growing number of XOs share their space. At one point there were over 20 XOs in use in the area, most in the hands of developers and early G1G1 arrivals.

OLPC Switzerland is having its first meeting January 15 in Bern, organized by Michele Notari (See OLPC_Switzerland).

Greg DeKoenigsberg and Jack Aboutbol are starting to organize a social and musical OLPC event in New York City for next August. They are presenting a proposal to the NYC parks and recreation committee next Friday.

19. Developer community: Almost 1000 developers are active in our Trac system (http://dev.laptop.org). There are thousands more contributors to wiki.laptop.org and to various fori, mailing lists, IRCs, etc. This participation is invaluable to the success of OLPC mission. We'd like to thank, among others:

a-12, aalam, abelay, abrar.momin, aconbere, adeighton, adetola, admford, adricnet, aegis, aenertia, aferti, afranke, agdelma, ahmad, ajax, akauppi, akeemolabiyi, alagu, albertcahalan, aleph, alexandre, alexl, alfonsodg, als, altemusm, alxx, ambros, amitgogna, andic, andreasraab, andre.mossinato, andrey, angel, angieklein123, angus, anna chang, annegentle, ant, antoninoiacono, antonio correia, antoniojf, approvalforupdate, aprodan, arangelangov, arauto, argento78, ariana, arjs, arnd, arnold, aroscha, artpro, arvinliu, ashish, ashsong, assim, astein, atodorov, aturist, aumana, avocade, avoine, awjrichards, awong9702, axboe, bamdad, bananascanner, barbolo, barry, bart massey, basil, bbaston, bbbush, bcavagnolo, bcsaller, bdoin, beaubrewer, beauty, beckerde, behdad, behnam, bemasc, benzea, bernie, bert, bertl, bfcatfriends, biarm, bigbaaadbob, bigwally, bilboed, billaspell, billjank, bill_mcgonigle, billy, bjfreeman, bkublik, blahedo, blanchet, blankverse, blix, blizzard, bluefoxicy, blueyed, bmcarnes, bnardone, bob, bobbysmith007, bobkeyes, boujelbenhichem, brainrecall, briandorsey, briandorsey, bronson, bryan.ma, bss, bsugarse, btate, budbird, buendia, byodo, c9damico, cafl, cak, calyth, campbell, candy, candy lu, candy_man, cannonjt, carl2, carla, carlfk, carlofalciola, carrano, cavallo, cbramsey, cdoty, cdurrett, cgalpin, chaos, chatworthy, cheetahman, chenz, chiaying.lin, chihyu, chitraspai, chrisb143, christianmarc, christophd, christoph_hagemeyer, chuck, cialis, cihan, ciscos151, cjb, c.kutzleb, clifft135, cmeadors, cmusodza, coderanger, codyl, colonwq, company, corbet, crazy-chris, crazymonk, crichardson, crouchjay, crschmidt, cscott, cshields, csounder, csutton, curlydude007, cwhii, cworth, cycho, czhower, dabender, daf, damonkohler, danarnold, dandelion, danerogers, danielfuhry, daniher, daniher, danjared, dan_margo, danw, dao, dark314, davidgr, david_leeh, david.lin, davidpfarrell, davidz, dbpatterson, dcbw, dcolivares, ddhoppe, ddo, dds, deanbrettle, deborah hanley, dedekind, dennisdanso, dennisfrancis, desertgojo, devinliu, devlware, devwillie, dgd, dgilmore, dhabersa, dhopkins, dhuff, dialectric, diegozacarao, dilinger, diyoung, djbclark, djihed, djneu, dking, dlang, dmd, docdtv, dolphinling, doom, douglas_goodall, drewish, dulouz, duncanb, dushyantgautam, dvsullivan, dwmw2, dyd, dydimustk, dysumner, ea, ealtin, eamaya, ebelechukwu2005, eben, ebf, ebodfish, ebotee, echeonwugbenu, edbatalha, ediaz, edsiper, edstoner, edwardbaafi, eenii, ejkrohne, eli amesefe, elife, elijah, elite231, elizabeth251964, elranchero, elvis, elyip, emilmont, enalax, enjahova, eric, eric, erick, ericsilva2, erikb, erikhatcher, erikos, eteo, ethrop, etoys, evenremy, fab, fabiand, fabiomarcio, factor, fade, faga, fahmi, fayoeu, fc, fciron, fdraeger, felix01, feranick, fernandodotnet, ffm, fgrose, fhill, finalzone, fiorella, fireball, firewing1, florentin_raud, foddex, follower, fongoses, foot, franka001, frazermarge, frief, fuseproject, gabaug, garlick, garrison, gary, garysu, gauravchem, gauthierancelin, gblaufuss, gbulfon, gcarrier, gcase, gcerchio, gdesmott, george rey, george yeager, gesmit, gfw123, ghopper, gi693362, giangy, giles, glezos, glochan, gnrfan, gnu, godiard, gonzalo, grantbow, greg, gregdek, gregm, gregt, gregthompson, grendelt, grenoble, griffithbuilt, grig, gustavo, gustavoo, gwlc, gwright, h7bse1c, hai, hal, hal, hallie, hal.murray, hamed, happyolpc, hartwellfong, hartwellfong, hazardouswaster, hchennings, hello1024, hemantg, henninger, hiper, hitoro, hmes, hoboprimate, holger, holt, holtzman, homunq, hopsman, hsin wu, hsin.wu, huangcza, hughsient, hummingbird, humptybump, hyppy, ianb, ianissitt, iceberg, iknowjoseph, indradg, indutiomarus, info_anarchy, intrader, irish_moss, isforinsects, ismaell, ivazquez, ivo, j5, jaberg, jack, jackeyzhao, jafo, jaimebalb, jaing, jake h, jamesm, jamespaige, jamil, jani, jaq, jason liu, jayakumar, jbarahona, jcallas, jcardona, jcfrench, jdub, jecel, jeckson, jennjacobsen, jenny2, jensjorgensen, jeremyvisser, jeroentb, jerub, jerub, jfallgatter, jfc, jfuhrer, jg, jherzog, jhuangtw, jhulten, jiffy, jimfare, jim.morey, jirwin, jlstomp66, jm3, joaoboscoapf, jochang, joebergin, joeclark, joeywang, john, johnkemeny, johnlin, johnson, jondo, jonknee, jonsd, jordancrouse, jorgecortes, josepht, joshseal, jpff, jpritikin, jrus, juanayup, juliano, julibio, junia, junwiseman, jwildebo, k2nt23, karl, karmaflux, kayseon, kazuhiro abe, kenh, ken lin, kentquirk, kenwatford, kevinprt, kfieldho, khaled, khassounah, kiddo, kimquirk, kim rose, kiran, kityoko, kkv, konrad1134, konrad_kleine, korakurider, kraetzichriz, kreneskyp, krstic, kruemel, ksankar, kylesteinfatt, kylin, larryapple, lathiat, laural, lauren, lbenavente, lcatania, lcbiazon, leejc, leemingd, leetcharmer, legolas558, legutierr, lenkawell, lferre, liam henry, lileeanna, linagee, lincolnquirk, lionstone, lmaltin, lmanul, lorenzen, lrhowa5, lucia, lucks, luisca, lukego, luna, lwalter42, ma895907, mac, madcat, madd, magnum34, mako, maku, mallum, mantaraya36, mantas, manu, manusheel, marcelo, marco, marcos ficarelli, marcus, markharrison, martine, martin.langhoff, martoro, martyvis, marv, massimo, mathew, maurotorres, maxim_o, mbletsas, mbrubeck, mburns, mcalef, mcfletch, mchehab, mchenetz, mchua, mduvigneaud, melekim, methril, meyers, mfoster, mi370560, michael, michael.tiemann, midiwall, miguelon, mihai, mihi, mikelee_aarp, mikes, mikus, mime, mitchellncharity, mitu, mjr, mk8, mkgobaco, mleech, mlj, mohsen, mokurai, monkeyfork, monyu, morgs, morningstar, moshez, motherhoose, mpal, mpdevine, mrdomino, m.scott, msevior, mstone, mtklein, mucca, muccini, murielgodoi, murray, murrays, musallam, mvirkkil, myles, mylesb, nacholudo, nalrawahi, nandoa, nasa, nat, nathalia.sautchuk, naustin, ncorrare, nelhage, nelson, neptune, newsham, ni762428, nibhatish, nicomy, ninjakitten, nirmal, nitin, nnorwitz, nolambar, nornagon, nrp, nuke, nuwdle, obc_spike, oeka, ohm, ohshima, okada, olafura, ollybetts, ondal, openspark, orospakr, osbornisle, osmosys, otakuj462, ozwald, pacease, pamela.dallas, pascal, path, paul, paulproteus, pavel, pavel, pd, peiwei, pekayatt, pengo, pepboy, pepboy, perlhacker, peter, peter.lorenzen, petria, pezhman, phil, philipmac, phollings, php5, pierre, pierreossman, ping, pmj, pnasrat, polvi, ponafarioli, power guo, pr3d4t0r, prasanna, prashant.thakkar, probono, pvanhoof, pwiltsey, pwr, py_geek, pzelenka, qq, quantumcat, quantumg, quozl, rabeeh, rafaelortiz, ramaseshanr, raven, ravikondamuru, ravualhemio, ray.tseng, rbh00, rbhagwat, rblengio, rbwjrw, rcauk, rchokshi, rdebath, rdike, rdobson, rebecca, rebecca, rebecca allen, rebeccag, rebeccagettys, redpawn, reg, regan20, reillysl, rejon, reservedoc, retired_techie, retroplumido, reynaldo, rgs, rharrison, rhindak, rhindak, richard, richie.wang, riv, rj_dean, rkevans, rminnich, robertfadel, robot101, robsta, rock, rodarvus, roel, roozbeh, rorrim, roscherfr, roubert, roy, rsavoye, rsmith, rsriniva, rtlm, ruby, russnelson, rwh, ry313323, ryankelln, ryant5000, ryebo1, sabu, sam, samuel bizien, sandeepdutta, sankarshan, santanu, sarahmoodoo, saramah, satch89450, satyajeet, sayamindu, sbelter, scomst, scott_kirkwood, scottwallace, sdalvi, seberg, segher, seph, seralewise, sero189, shailen, shang, shankar, sharon, shekay, shenki, shiu, sholton, sierrahombre, simon, simon, simosx, sirjuanlu, sj, sjg, sjoerd, skeezix, skiboo, skierpage, slasc, sleet01, smcv, smetz52, smohan, spacey, spditner, splinux, sprezzatura, ssb22, ssc, sssss, steck, steeg, stepheneb, steveb, steve fullerton, stevew, stevo, stoecker, stoutbigred, stressyndrome, sturnfie, subbu, sulmanminhas, sunny, sverma, svu, swagle, sxpert, syd, sylvinus, s.zytkiewicz, t3, tags07, takashi, talmage, tamichan, tannewt, tbpringle, te294177, tedch, ted.juan, tedkaehler, teefal, term, terry su, tess, testing, teus, tf, theperturbator, thiago_s, timbutler, tim.millerdyck, titus, tomeu, tomhannen, tonsofpcs, toygmail, trapdoor, trevor, tribleyl, trobertson, tsylla, tudd, turadg, tushards, twinkle, uden, ufg, uflchamp, ujwal2, usman ansari, usman.ansari, uwog, vadim, vance.ke, vandien, vasukrishnan, vbhunt, vegpuff, vgiasolli, victorchao, victor-y, vjohn, vmb, voden, vorburger, vradok, wad, wadeb, walter, wangwebbxydd, waqastoor, warp, watchhillfarm, wcohen, weixiang, wenmi01, we.three.tees, wildem, williamb68, wiswaud, wkraimer, wmb, wmfwlr, wolf, wolfgang, wvbailey, wwworkshop shannon, wwworkshop terrence, wybiral, xardox, xatzipe, xavi, xiang.wei, xorAxAx, yani, ychao, yhosoai, yosch, youssef, ypod, ywwg, zack, zakarpatska, zapador, zarcher, znmeb, zogger50, zoltanthegypsy, zwl821022, and zztopd.

Best wishes for the new year.

20. Special thanks: As mentioned, the contributions to the project have been numerous and diverse. However, I'd like to acknowledge one contributor who has quietly been playing a central role in perhaps the most critical user-facing aspect of the OLPC effort, Sugar. Red Hat's Marco Pesenti Gritti seems to never rest; he never tires of answering questions, writing patches, and engaging in design discussions. His productivity is monumental; his insights are invaluable.

More News

Laptop News is archived 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

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

Laptop News 2007-12-30

1. Give One Get One: The G1G1 program ends on December 31. G1G1 has not only made it possible to seed the launch of programs in Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Afghanistan, but we have also greatly broaden the community of participation in the project. The community has already jumped in to help: the level of activity in our forums, IRC, email lists, wiki, etc. has risen dramatically over the past few weeks. G1G1 participants have asked lots of questions—and have uncovered some new bugs—but they also have lots of answers—and have submitted some new patches. The community model seems to be scaling.

Many thanks to Hilary Meserole and the tireless efforts from the teams at Pentagram, Nurun, Eleven, Patriot, and Brightstar.

2. Mary Lou Jepsen: Mary Lou's last day at OLPC is December 31. She will be continuing to consult with us on a number of different fronts as she chases after her next miracle in display technology. Mary Lou was OLPC employee Number One, both in terms of when she joined the organization and in terms of the breadth and depth of her contributions. Thank you and best of luck with your adventures in a new role and new year.

3. Embedded controller (EC): Richard Smith has tested a battery EEPROM dumping feature recently added by Andres Salomon: it seems to work great. Richard has written crontab scripts and "phone home" scripts for inclusion in joyride builds, with the intent to include them in an upcoming release to build an anonymous database of battery performance. These scripts will sample the power used every five minutes and log it. They only sample when the battery is charging or discharging. The hope is to gather a composite view of battery performance under realistic conditions of use.

Richard noticed that on the community-development list there are at least two reports of the EC going "terminal", meaning that on boot they get the error message: "EC problem. Remove all power and restart." We need to get those machines to Cambridge to investigate further.

Another issue found on the community-list are reports from a few people about their batteries not charging. Richard says this would not surprise him if they were NiMH batteries, but G1G1 machines have the LiFePo batteries. He did had one person run "logbat" and send him the results: the EC reads the battery fine and is attempting to charge the battery but no current ever goes into the battery. Again, we need to get these machines to Cambridge as we haven't seen this behavior before.

4. Open Firmware: Mitch Bradley continued to provide G1G1 customer support, for example, chasing down some problems with SD cards. He also added the ability to delete JFFS2 files from Open Firmware and fixed Tickets #5717, #5585, and #5727, all improvements to the overall OFW performance and reliability. Preparations continue on OFW for the Intel prototype XO board.

5. Wireless firmware: Marvell released firmware version 5.110.20.p49 which addresses Ticket #5194. With this firmware release, all known major low-level bugs have been addressed. With the wireless driver that's in the current ship builds, we see locking errors under heavy load from which the driver recovers automatically. David Woodhouse is doing a major rewrite of the driver which should eventually address that issue.

6. Software ECOs: From time to time there may be critical bug fixes that must be released between our regularly scheduled releases. These may occur due to security issues, from unexpected hardware problems, or the discovery of latent bugs that affect large numbers of users. We've started a page in wiki discuss the software engineering change order (ECO) process (See Operating_system_release_procedures).

7. Support: The past week has been a busy one for Adam Holt and the OLPC support team. Adam has organized a team of 30 support volunteers to comprehensively answer help@laptop.org tickets. (Each ticket is an ongoing email conversation with a donor/client.) The volunteer team is working hard, but keeping up with the support load. Part of the process includes the compilation of a Support FAQ (See Support_FAQ). Adam is also organizing a "virtual call center" based on asterisk.org VoIP. Matthew O'Gorman is helping finalize the server. Callers will access a local US number in the 617 area code. It will be informal, but we hope it will provide a critical outreach to those users who need it most. We hope to complete testing and possibly an initial rollout within the coming week.

Please everyone recruit your XO-aware friends as: (1) "charming" volunteers to answer phones; and (2) "perfectionist" volunteers to help organize our wiki pages.

You can email Adam regarding your talents, motivations, and a phone number at "holt AT laptop DOT org". Thanks!

There will be an "Organizing Sunday" meeting among our volunteers on 30 December, 4PM EST. All interested parties can join if they email Adam first.

Noah Kantrowitz has helped to organize the RT system so that volunteers' workflow is more efficient. Instant-response RTFM entries (canned answers auto-pasted into emails) are growing too.

Chih-yu Chao is helping Adam to answer questions from G1G1 recipients; she has noticed that many parents are asking whether our browser support Flash/Java websites, an area we need to improve upon.

Michael Burns of the Oregon State Open Source Lab has been working each night improving and growing the Community Support forum (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/), which is now exceeding 1,000 posts; 200 registered users have answered hundreds of first-time computer questions from G1G1 donors. There is already a growing community of users helping other users on the site. The site includes a live (IRC) chat (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/chat), a feature that works from any computer, including directly from the XO, and a volunteers map (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/phoogle_map.php) that lets developers, enthusiasts and users put a push-pin next to their home town.

8. Etoys: 2007 was a busy year for the Etoys team: they made over 700 patches this calendar year. In addition to these code changes, there is new content: examples, help contents, and documentation. Etoys was more or less stable and mature before 2007, but the effort in the year made it even more stable, useful and be fit to the XO platform. Notable improvements and contributions include: sane mathematical operator precedence by Yoshiki Ohshima; better natural language translation by Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider; display scaling by Andreas Raab; an event recording system (called Event Theatre) by Scott Wallace; a camera interface by Diego Gomez Deck; the World Stethoscope by Kazuhiro Abe; the Quick Guide help system by Kathleen Harness, Ted Kaehler and Yoshiki; drag and drop by Takashi; IPv6 support by Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger; documentation by Alan Kay, Kim Rose and Rebecca Cannara; and numerous fixes and usability improvements from the Etoys team and community, including contributions by Karl Ramberg and Marcus Denker.

In 2007, there were many deadlines in short successions, putting pressure on the team to deliver stable versions—pushing the team towards a conservative approach to development. Many big changes were punted. In hindsight, perhaps delivering some unstable versions with bigger changes would have been better strategy. On the other hand, it is worth to mention that Etoys is one of the most reliable packages over the course of XO development and has seen extensive use in most of the school trials. Kudos to Bert Freudenberg, who maintains the Etoys integration with Sugar (Bert not only led the effort to integrate Etoys with Sugar; he also contributed Sugar's overall development).

There were various Etoys-based activities proposed: a programming tutorial called Bots Inc by Stéphane Ducasse; an interactive geometry program called Dr Geo II by Hilaire Hernandez; and education contents suite by Luke Gorrie, Bryan Berry, and the OLPC Nepal developers. "Conservativeness" was a major issue when discussing the possible inclusion of Dr Geo II into the base Etoys image; accommodating such code in a graceful way is a challenge for 2008.

9. Translation: One of the last pieces in our Pootle deployment is now in place: a mechanism to update PO template files for each module automatically. Sayamindu Dasgupta has fine tuned the script that does this updating to change POT files only if the strings have changed. (This work is based on Damned Lies, the GNOME translation management system). This helps avoid the redundant updating of PO files. The string-change detection feature will also be useful in the future to detect string-freeze breakages and also to notify translators when new strings are added to a module.

This week also saw the first package release of the Update 1 branch to pick up new translators. Thanks to the excellent effort put in by the translators, the Update.1 project (which consisted of the Update 1 branches of the Sugar, Journal activity, Record activity and Browse activity) is, on an average, 50% translated for each language. Languages that have more than 90% of their strings translated are:

• Urdu (100%) • Nepali (100%) • Dutch (100%) • Chinese (Taiwan) (100%) • Bengali (100%) • Arabic (100%) • Portuguese (Brazil) (99%) • Portuguese (99%) • Macedonian (99%) • Russian (98%) • Greek (98%) • French (98%) • Chinese (China) (98%) • German (96%) • Mongolian (94%)

The focus has shifted to the master branches once again, although language teams are encouraged to update their translations in Update.1 project (there will be another package release for Update.1 that would pick up any new translations).

In the middle of the week, Sayamindu also managed to track down a problem in Pootle that was holding up the work being done by the Urdu team. The issue was being caused by a corrupt stats file in the Pootle-Urdu directory.

10. Touchpad: Bernardo Innocenti spent much of the week testing a solution to the "jumpy mouse" touchpad bug. We'll soon be pushing out a patch that should cover the majority of touchpad problems.

11. Journal: Reinier Heeres wrote a script to copy files from the Journal to the Linux file system (Ticket #5571). This got extended by Phil Bordelon, just like the copy-to-journal script. Reinier also fixed some equation parser issues in the Calculator (Ticket #5734) and an issue with Browse not exiting when a keep error occurred (Ticket

  1. 5493).

12. Debian: Ivan Krstić is overhauling the OLPC server infrastructure, but also found the time to put together an "unofficial" etch/xfce4 build. It includes Firefox, Thunderbird, a suite of development tools (python, git, gcc, gdb, flex, bison, automake, autoconf, libtool), a music player (XMMS), IRC client (irssi) and a graphical wireless AP selector. The entire build takes up 250MB of flash. Ivan optimized the Firefox window layout to maximum screen estate and configured a number of keyboard shortcuts.

13. Cow power: Arjun Sarwal along with the Mumbai team made some good progress on the cow-power system for charging the XO. They made some changes in the electrical design (e.g., using an alternator now instead of a dynamo) and they have a plan regarding the mechanical design based upon a better understanding of what are readily available parts. The current setup easily charges two laptops, however with the planned mechanical design changes, they hope to charge at least ten laptops simultaneously.

14. Games: Don Hopkins has been working on the new Micropolis codebase (See http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/micropolis). He has made a web server out of the Micropolis python module for testing and has modularized python code for tile and cellular automation rendering.

15. OurStories: Pablo Flores reports that Uruguay will start collecting stories in late January in different localities, like their recent work in Sarand Grande (See http://olpc-ceibal.blogspot.com/2007/12/day-of-activities-in-sarand-grande.html). Announcements of the site in Spanish and Nigerian languages are being prepared for late January.

16. Library: Lauren Klein has been working on interfaces to make generating content bundles easier, starting with forms to generate bundle metadata. Next up are automatic bundlers that check and generate manifests and metadata from uploaded tars and zips (See http://crank.laptop.org/~lauren/libraryInfo/).

17. Installing activities: OLPC Austria is improving their "xo-get" command-line script for downloading and installing activities. (The script is a complement to the current process of clicking on .xo files from the Browse activity.) They are making it work with the activities found on the Activities page, having added a field there to include tags (See http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get and http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get/Repository).

18. OLPC Communities: Holger Levsen, Aaron Kaplan, and others from Austrian and German OLPC groups spent the last days of the week at the 24C3 conference in Berlin, Germany. John Crispin and the OpenWRT contingent showed off OpenWRT booting on an XO and let a growing number of XOs share their space. At one point there were over 20 XOs in use in the area, most in the hands of developers and early G1G1 arrivals.

OLPC Switzerland is having its first meeting January 15 in Bern, organized by Michele Notari (See OLPC_Switzerland).

Greg DeKoenigsberg and Jack Aboutbol are starting to organize a social and musical OLPC event in New York City for next August. They are presenting a proposal to the NYC parks and recreation committee next Friday.

19. Developer community: Almost 1000 developers are active in our Trac system (http://dev.laptop.org). There are thousands more contributors to wiki.laptop.org and to various fori, mailing lists, IRCs, etc. This participation is invaluable to the success of OLPC mission. We'd like to thank, among others:

a-12, aalam, abelay, abrar.momin, aconbere, adeighton, adetola, admford, adricnet, aegis, aenertia, aferti, afranke, agdelma, ahmad, ajax, akauppi, akeemolabiyi, alagu, albertcahalan, aleph, alexandre, alexl, alfonsodg, als, altemusm, alxx, ambros, amitgogna, andic, andreasraab, andre.mossinato, andrey, angel, angieklein123, angus, anna chang, annegentle, ant, antoninoiacono, antonio correia, antoniojf, approvalforupdate, aprodan, arangelangov, arauto, argento78, ariana, arjs, arnd, arnold, aroscha, artpro, arvinliu, ashish, ashsong, assim, astein, atodorov, aturist, aumana, avocade, avoine, awjrichards, awong9702, axboe, bamdad, bananascanner, barbolo, barry, bart massey, basil, bbaston, bbbush, bcavagnolo, bcsaller, bdoin, beaubrewer, beauty, beckerde, behdad, behnam, bemasc, benzea, bernie, bert, bertl, bfcatfriends, biarm, bigbaaadbob, bigwally, bilboed, billaspell, billjank, bill_mcgonigle, billy, bjfreeman, bkublik, blahedo, blanchet, blankverse, blix, blizzard, bluefoxicy, blueyed, bmcarnes, bnardone, bob, bobbysmith007, bobkeyes, boujelbenhichem, brainrecall, briandorsey, briandorsey, bronson, bryan.ma, bss, bsugarse, btate, budbird, buendia, byodo, c9damico, cafl, cak, calyth, campbell, candy, candy lu, candy_man, cannonjt, carl2, carla, carlfk, carlofalciola, carrano, cavallo, cbramsey, cdoty, cdurrett, cgalpin, chaos, chatworthy, cheetahman, chenz, chiaying.lin, chihyu, chitraspai, chrisb143, christianmarc, christophd, christoph_hagemeyer, chuck, cialis, cihan, ciscos151, cjb, c.kutzleb, clifft135, cmeadors, cmusodza, coderanger, codyl, colonwq, company, corbet, crazy-chris, crazymonk, crichardson, crouchjay, crschmidt, cscott, cshields, csounder, csutton, curlydude007, cwhii, cworth, cycho, czhower, dabender, daf, damonkohler, danarnold, dandelion, danerogers, danielfuhry, daniher, daniher, danjared, dan_margo, danw, dao, dark314, davidgr, david_leeh, david.lin, davidpfarrell, davidz, dbpatterson, dcbw, dcolivares, ddhoppe, ddo, dds, deanbrettle, deborah hanley, dedekind, dennisdanso, dennisfrancis, desertgojo, devinliu, devlware, devwillie, dgd, dgilmore, dhabersa, dhopkins, dhuff, dialectric, diegozacarao, dilinger, diyoung, djbclark, djihed, djneu, dking, dlang, dmd, docdtv, dolphinling, doom, douglas_goodall, drewish, dulouz, duncanb, dushyantgautam, dvsullivan, dwmw2, dyd, dydimustk, dysumner, ea, ealtin, eamaya, ebelechukwu2005, eben, ebf, ebodfish, ebotee, echeonwugbenu, edbatalha, ediaz, edsiper, edstoner, edwardbaafi, eenii, ejkrohne, eli amesefe, elife, elijah, elite231, elizabeth251964, elranchero, elvis, elyip, emilmont, enalax, enjahova, eric, eric, erick, ericsilva2, erikb, erikhatcher, erikos, eteo, ethrop, etoys, evenremy, fab, fabiand, fabiomarcio, factor, fade, faga, fahmi, fayoeu, fc, fciron, fdraeger, felix01, feranick, fernandodotnet, ffm, fgrose, fhill, finalzone, fiorella, fireball, firewing1, florentin_raud, foddex, follower, fongoses, foot, franka001, frazermarge, frief, fuseproject, gabaug, garlick, garrison, gary, garysu, gauravchem, gauthierancelin, gblaufuss, gbulfon, gcarrier, gcase, gcerchio, gdesmott, george rey, george yeager, gesmit, gfw123, ghopper, gi693362, giangy, giles, glezos, glochan, gnrfan, gnu, godiard, gonzalo, grantbow, greg, gregdek, gregm, gregt, gregthompson, grendelt, grenoble, griffithbuilt, grig, gustavo, gustavoo, gwlc, gwright, h7bse1c, hai, hal, hal, hallie, hal.murray, hamed, happyolpc, hartwellfong, hartwellfong, hazardouswaster, hchennings, hello1024, hemantg, henninger, hiper, hitoro, hmes, hoboprimate, holger, holt, holtzman, homunq, hopsman, hsin wu, hsin.wu, huangcza, hughsient, hummingbird, humptybump, hyppy, ianb, ianissitt, iceberg, iknowjoseph, indradg, indutiomarus, info_anarchy, intrader, irish_moss, isforinsects, ismaell, ivazquez, ivo, j5, jaberg, jack, jackeyzhao, jafo, jaimebalb, jaing, jake h, jamesm, jamespaige, jamil, jani, jaq, jason liu, jayakumar, jbarahona, jcallas, jcardona, jcfrench, jdub, jecel, jeckson, jennjacobsen, jenny2, jensjorgensen, jeremyvisser, jeroentb, jerub, jerub, jfallgatter, jfc, jfuhrer, jg, jherzog, jhuangtw, jhulten, jiffy, jimfare, jim.morey, jirwin, jlstomp66, jm3, joaoboscoapf, jochang, joebergin, joeclark, joeywang, john, johnkemeny, johnlin, johnson, jondo, jonknee, jonsd, jordancrouse, jorgecortes, josepht, joshseal, jpff, jpritikin, jrus, juanayup, juliano, julibio, junia, junwiseman, jwildebo, k2nt23, karl, karmaflux, kayseon, kazuhiro abe, kenh, ken lin, kentquirk, kenwatford, kevinprt, kfieldho, khaled, khassounah, kiddo, kimquirk, kim rose, kiran, kityoko, kkv, konrad1134, konrad_kleine, korakurider, kraetzichriz, kreneskyp, krstic, kruemel, ksankar, kylesteinfatt, kylin, larryapple, lathiat, laural, lauren, lbenavente, lcatania, lcbiazon, leejc, leemingd, leetcharmer, legolas558, legutierr, lenkawell, lferre, liam henry, lileeanna, linagee, lincolnquirk, lionstone, lmaltin, lmanul, lorenzen, lrhowa5, lucia, lucks, luisca, lukego, luna, lwalter42, ma895907, mac, madcat, madd, magnum34, mako, maku, mallum, mantaraya36, mantas, manu, manusheel, marcelo, marco, marcos ficarelli, marcus, markharrison, martine, martin.langhoff, martoro, martyvis, marv, massimo, mathew, maurotorres, maxim_o, mbletsas, mbrubeck, mburns, mcalef, mcfletch, mchehab, mchenetz, mchua, mduvigneaud, melekim, methril, meyers, mfoster, mi370560, michael, michael.tiemann, midiwall, miguelon, mihai, mihi, mikelee_aarp, mikes, mikus, mime, mitchellncharity, mitu, mjr, mk8, mkgobaco, mleech, mlj, mohsen, mokurai, monkeyfork, monyu, morgs, morningstar, moshez, motherhoose, mpal, mpdevine, mrdomino, m.scott, msevior, mstone, mtklein, mucca, muccini, murielgodoi, murray, murrays, musallam, mvirkkil, myles, mylesb, nacholudo, nalrawahi, nandoa, nasa, nat, nathalia.sautchuk, naustin, ncorrare, nelhage, nelson, neptune, newsham, ni762428, nibhatish, nicomy, ninjakitten, nirmal, nitin, nnorwitz, nolambar, nornagon, nrp, nuke, nuwdle, obc_spike, oeka, ohm, ohshima, okada, olafura, ollybetts, ondal, openspark, orospakr, osbornisle, osmosys, otakuj462, ozwald, pacease, pamela.dallas, pascal, path, paul, paulproteus, pavel, pavel, pd, peiwei, pekayatt, pengo, pepboy, pepboy, perlhacker, peter, peter.lorenzen, petria, pezhman, phil, philipmac, phollings, php5, pierre, pierreossman, ping, pmj, pnasrat, polvi, ponafarioli, power guo, pr3d4t0r, prasanna, prashant.thakkar, probono, pvanhoof, pwiltsey, pwr, py_geek, pzelenka, qq, quantumcat, quantumg, quozl, rabeeh, rafaelortiz, ramaseshanr, raven, ravikondamuru, ravualhemio, ray.tseng, rbh00, rbhagwat, rblengio, rbwjrw, rcauk, rchokshi, rdebath, rdike, rdobson, rebecca, rebecca, rebecca allen, rebeccag, rebeccagettys, redpawn, reg, regan20, reillysl, rejon, reservedoc, retired_techie, retroplumido, reynaldo, rgs, rharrison, rhindak, rhindak, richard, richie.wang, riv, rj_dean, rkevans, rminnich, robertfadel, robot101, robsta, rock, rodarvus, roel, roozbeh, rorrim, roscherfr, roubert, roy, rsavoye, rsmith, rsriniva, rtlm, ruby, russnelson, rwh, ry313323, ryankelln, ryant5000, ryebo1, sabu, sam, samuel bizien, sandeepdutta, sankarshan, santanu, sarahmoodoo, saramah, satch89450, satyajeet, sayamindu, sbelter, scomst, scott_kirkwood, scottwallace, sdalvi, seberg, segher, seph, seralewise, sero189, shailen, shang, shankar, sharon, shekay, shenki, shiu, sholton, sierrahombre, simon, simon, simosx, sirjuanlu, sj, sjg, sjoerd, skeezix, skiboo, skierpage, slasc, sleet01, smcv, smetz52, smohan, spacey, spditner, splinux, sprezzatura, ssb22, ssc, sssss, steck, steeg, stepheneb, steveb, steve fullerton, stevew, stevo, stoecker, stoutbigred, stressyndrome, sturnfie, subbu, sulmanminhas, sunny, sverma, svu, swagle, sxpert, syd, sylvinus, s.zytkiewicz, t3, tags07, takashi, talmage, tamichan, tannewt, tbpringle, te294177, tedch, ted.juan, tedkaehler, teefal, term, terry su, tess, testing, teus, tf, theperturbator, thiago_s, timbutler, tim.millerdyck, titus, tomeu, tomhannen, tonsofpcs, toygmail, trapdoor, trevor, tribleyl, trobertson, tsylla, tudd, turadg, tushards, twinkle, uden, ufg, uflchamp, ujwal2, usman ansari, usman.ansari, uwog, vadim, vance.ke, vandien, vasukrishnan, vbhunt, vegpuff, vgiasolli, victorchao, victor-y, vjohn, vmb, voden, vorburger, vradok, wad, wadeb, walter, wangwebbxydd, waqastoor, warp, watchhillfarm, wcohen, weixiang, wenmi01, we.three.tees, wildem, williamb68, wiswaud, wkraimer, wmb, wmfwlr, wolf, wolfgang, wvbailey, wwworkshop shannon, wwworkshop terrence, wybiral, xardox, xatzipe, xavi, xiang.wei, xorAxAx, yani, ychao, yhosoai, yosch, youssef, ypod, ywwg, zack, zakarpatska, zapador, zarcher, znmeb, zogger50, zoltanthegypsy, zwl821022, and zztopd.

Best wishes for the new year.

20. Special thanks: As mentioned, the contributions to the project have been numerous and diverse. However, I'd like to acknowledge one contributor who has quietly been playing a central role in perhaps the most critical user-facing aspect of the OLPC effort, Sugar. Red Hat's Marco Pesenti Gritti seems to never rest; he never tires of answering questions, writing patches, and engaging in design discussions. His productivity is monumental; his insights are invaluable.

More News

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Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


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