OLPC:News: Difference between revisions

From OLPC
Jump to navigation Jump to search
m (.)
Line 5: Line 5:
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 2007-12-30=
=Laptop News 2008-01-05=


1. Intel: John Markoff’s article in today’s New York Times provides an accurate description of the events of the past 48 hours regarding Intel (See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/technology/05laptop.html). We made a sincere effort of rapprochement, but it was clear from even the way that Intel terminated the relationship—with an “inadvertent leak”—that their was no reciprocal sincerity. We made great strides before Intel joined us and we will continue to make great strides now that they have left the OLPC association.
1. Give One Get One: The G1G1 program ended December 31, 2007. 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 broadened 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.


2. Lagos: Ayo Kusamotu filed a preliminary objection to the Nigerian keyboard lawsuit (See [[Lancor]]). The details of the case have been discussed extensively on Groklaw (See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071226210020415).
Many thanks to Hilary Meserole and the tireless efforts from the teams
at Pentagram, Nurun, Eleven, Patriot, and Brightstar.


3. School Server: A long delayed update to the School Server software to fix problems with large file transfers due to a now antiquated libertas driver has finally happened. Pick up Build 141 (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Installing_Software#OLPC_XS_141), request an Active Antenna build through our developer program, and turn some old junker PC near you into a school server! This was delayed by the holidays and a QA process which turned out to be as necessary as it was difficult. Several problems and unwanted interactions had crept into the build, but these were mostly fixed in this release. (John Watlington finally gave up getting an early version of the school server software to work properly with the Active Antenna he had for testing the upgrade process. After upgrading to Build 141 (stable) it worked fine.)
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.


We now have a jabber server running on the schoolserver in Cambridge (See [[Ejabberd Configuration]]), and are starting to test against it. We have seen the “register” button work! This should reach a school server build by the beginning of next week.
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.


4. Open firmware (OFW): Mitch Bradley made a number of improvements this week. It now reports the OFW version when in a failure condition to simplify field support; the “remove all power” error message has been made clearer; and the status of the game buttons is indicated when pressed.
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.


5. Embedded controller (EC): Richard Smith reports that several EC issues are pending. The one that has received attention the SCI Mask Corruption bug (Ticket #5467). While chasing this bug, Richard found several small but critical typos in the handling of some of the commands he had added since November. The net result of these typos is that under some conditions, a value passed in as data would be run as a command and some commands would not get run at all. Unfortunately, fixing those typos does not fix #5467. Its cause goes much deeper into the EC protocol handling. The next couple of days should shake out what the problem is and get it fixed for good.
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 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.


Battery problems: A growing number of reports of short battery life are coming in. People are starting to run olpc-logbat bat and Richard has
4. Open Firmware: Mitch Bradley continued to provide G1G1 customer
been looking at the resulting data. Based on the data he's seen so far, he conjects that either (1) there are some “funky” batteries in the field; or (2) the EC is failing to charge the battery up to full capacity, yet it is marking it as full. Most of the data gathered so far has been discharge info. Richard will be responding to many of the trouble tickets requesting several cycles of charge/discharge while running olpc-logbat to flush out whats going on.
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.


The report of “shutdown yet no red LED” is the result of the capacity never going below 15% but the battery voltage dropped to the critical cutoff point, followed by the EC dropping system power. An enhancement Richard will make to the EC code is to also do something with the status LED to indicted that a critical voltage shutdown is looming so there's some warning your laptop is about to shutdown.
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. Schedules: For the next few weeks we will be focused on stabilizing Update.1 (based on Joyride) through testing, documentation, and limited number of bug fixes. We recently found two more critical bugs that will need an unscheduled software release (USR): touchpad/mouse jumpiness and data loss if you fill up the memory. We have created a procedure for these USRs; we are using this process to get these fixes out sooner than the next scheduled release (See [[Operating system release procedures]]).
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. Test: Chih-Yu Choa is helping out with both test and support this week. She has gotten through the 1-Hour Smoke Test on a recent Joyride build, which revealed a few regression bugs from the Ship.2 (650) release. Next we need to create and document some test cases for the new features in Update.1, and some testing with the school server.
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.


8. Support: Adam Holt has been working days, nights, and weekends to grow the volunteer support group (now up to 40 people), who are answering emails, hanging out on forums and IRC to help people. A core crew of about 15 volunteers drives the process forward with increasingly sophisticated answers. Others contribute part-time working from the Support FAQ ([[Support FAQ]]) and “RTFM” template answers as they get up to speed. We have almost hit 1000 email help requests in the database! Katie Belisle and Casey Ratliff are working on a next-generation documentation ideas for our Support FAQ.
Please everyone recruit your XO-aware friends as:
(1) "charming" volunteers to answer phones; and
(2) "perfectionist" volunteers to help organize our wiki pages.


Adam is also coordinating “4PM Sunday” (Eastern Standard Time) conference calls for the entire support-volunteers team. Last week’s call was extremely successful due to the contributions of the OLPC developer community (special thanks to Bernie Innocenti and Arjun Sarwal) (See [[Support meetings]]). Anyone you wants to join, email me well in advance at “holt AT laptop DOT org” and be sure to include your phone number! All volunteers worldwide will be considered, after a very brief phone call. (See http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang if you are interested in volunteering.)
You can email Adam regarding your talents, motivations, and a phone
number at "holt AT laptop DOT org". Thanks!


Adam, Kim Quirk, and Greg Babbin are now able to provide RMAs, which will help off-load the donor support 800-number and email. Kudos to Greg’s genuine heroics. Our Asterisk-based VoIP virtual call center has been briefly delayed. Matthew O’Gorman and Joe Phigan continue to work hard on this, scripting prompts for rudimentary integration with http://rt.laptop.org, and we should have our volunteer-training shortly.
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.


9. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta helped start Pashto and Bulgarian translation teams and resolve an issue with Pootle that caused it to reject new user registrations; it was being caused by a invalid username in the Pootle database.
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.


A long-standing blocker bug (Ticket #1525) regarding the invalidation of the fontconfig cache was finally fixed. Font cache generation in the XO should be more robust now, even in the face of clock failures.
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.


10. Software potpourri: Tomeu Vizoso proposed fixes for a number of bugs that have highest priority: previews are not deleted when their matching datastore objects are removed (Ticket #5707); deleting a large file from a USB stick copies it into NAND (often filling NAND) (Ticket #5719); Sugar shell consuming vast amounts of memory (Ticket #5532); “resuming” a large file from USB copies it into NAND (filling NAND) (Ticket #5744); and objects accumulate on the clipboard, impacting system performance (Ticket #5760).
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.


Chris Ball fixed many power manager bugs. We now perform power management regardless of whether you're on an external power source, we remember the user's previous brightness setting when we dim the screen during suspend, and open hardware manager (OHM) no longer exits when X does.
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.


Chris Ball wrote “slideshow” over Christmas, which is a Pippy example that queries the datastore for camera images and then shows them full-screen in a slideshow. He can't decide whether it should be a Pippy example (since it demonstrates performing datastore searches in Python) or a separate activity.
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).


Dennis Gilmore spent most of the week troubleshooting issues, working around an issue today causing build failures and mostly trying to put the pieces together to make things better.
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.


Michael Stone and Dennis spent some time working out why iputils fell out of our builds. Michael also worked with Bernie and Tomeu on address a problem with olpc-update in regards to persistent activity directories (Ticket #5033), with Ben Schwartz on problem with stream sockets (Ticket #5818), and with Eben Eliason on the beginnings of a security user interface.
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.


Ivan Krstić is exploring a more secure way of isolating Browse for Update.1; it might be trivial.
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:


11. Presence: Robert McQueen finished an out-of-band data (OOB) implementation (he added IP detection code) and wrote tests for it. That means OOB bytestream is now working with Gabble. The next step will be to define and implement bytestream renegotiation and fallback.
• 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%)


Dafydd Harries made updated packages for Presence Service and Avahi, although Koji cannot build the former for some reason. He also debugged problems registering laptops with school servers (Ticket #5834); it turns out that the ejabberd RPM doesn't generate an X.509 certificate. Dafydd also spent time trying to coax OpenFire into working. It works ok as long as your account is not in the shared roster group, but authenticating becomes unreliable as soon as you are a member. The web interface becomes unreliable from time to time too, necessitating restarting the server. It seems that, like with ejabberd, we are using it in a way it is not designed to handle. Our scalability improvements should solve this for Update.2, but it is not clear yet what the best approach is for the Update.1 time frame.
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).


Morgan Collett fixed the scrolling bug (Ticket #2351) in Chat for Update.1 thanks to a patch from Marco Pesenti Gritti. (C. Scott Ananian’s view source changes for Chat are in Update.1, but will require a newer Pippy.) Morgan is testing a fix for Presence Service #5368 where the buddies in an activity weren't reliably clustering around the shared activity icon.
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.


12. Activities: Muriel Godoi progressing on his port of Food Force for the XO (See [[Food Force 2]]). Progress includes artwork (builds and villagers); next, the game model need more work to get a playable game. The code is in his public_git folder (https://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/murielgodoi/foodforce2;a=summary). Please contact Muriel if you’d like to help.
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.


Arjun Sarwal reports progress on the Measure activity: he is rethinking certain aspects of the code design of the activity that would make it more easily expandable and scalable.
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 #5493).


13. OLPC Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports progress amidst chaos. Urdu localization is 100% complete. They have had a useful discussion with an Afghan graduate student of International Islamic University (IIU) who is keenly interested in translating OLPC bundles into Dari and Pashto. They are also mobilizing volunteers from the Pakistan Institute of Engineering & Applied Sciences, (PIEAS). A training package for Afghan teachers is nearing completion, including software, hardware, and activities tutorials. They’ve also launched an effort to convert into e-books all the text books written on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad. Beta versions for Grades one through four are ready. The subjects are English, Social Studies, Science, and Urdu.
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.


14. Cow power: Arjun have completed documentation of the project (See [[Cow Power]]). The page details the current design and the proposed mechanical design. He is hoping to get feedback from the community on the proposed mechanical design before moving forward in the implementation of the changes.
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.


15. Community: The OLPC Austria team reports progress on OpenWRT. It boots an XO (currently with minimal driver support) in 15–20 seconds. John Crispin and others want to look into porting Sugar to OpenWRT if there is community interest.
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.


Pascal Martin of Linterweb, an open source software company based in France that has worked on desktop and wiki search tools, has offered
15. OurStories: Pablo Flores reports that Uruguay will start
their support and development time to help with the search component for the Journal. Tomeu Vizoso spent some time explaining to Fabien
collecting stories in late January in different localities, like their
Coulon from their team what has been done to date in the datastore.
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.


Jesper Taxbøl is helping organize this year's Nordic Game Jam; he is angling to run it on XOs and lead off with an introduction to PyGame.
16. Library: Lauren Klein has been working on interfaces to make
They are looking for 10 laptops for their 100 participants to use February 1–3. This is quite a popular jam and produces some pretty polished games each year.
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/).


Many people are asking for ways to contact the creators of bundles and activities. Please add your name and some sort of contact info to
17. Installing activities: OLPC Austria is improving their "xo-get"
projects you have worked on, on their own wiki pages, and on the [[Activities]] page.
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=
=More News=

Revision as of 18:58, 5 January 2008

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 92607]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-01-05

1. Intel: John Markoff’s article in today’s New York Times provides an accurate description of the events of the past 48 hours regarding Intel (See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/technology/05laptop.html). We made a sincere effort of rapprochement, but it was clear from even the way that Intel terminated the relationship—with an “inadvertent leak”—that their was no reciprocal sincerity. We made great strides before Intel joined us and we will continue to make great strides now that they have left the OLPC association.

2. Lagos: Ayo Kusamotu filed a preliminary objection to the Nigerian keyboard lawsuit (See Lancor). The details of the case have been discussed extensively on Groklaw (See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071226210020415).

3. School Server: A long delayed update to the School Server software to fix problems with large file transfers due to a now antiquated libertas driver has finally happened. Pick up Build 141 (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Installing_Software#OLPC_XS_141), request an Active Antenna build through our developer program, and turn some old junker PC near you into a school server! This was delayed by the holidays and a QA process which turned out to be as necessary as it was difficult. Several problems and unwanted interactions had crept into the build, but these were mostly fixed in this release. (John Watlington finally gave up getting an early version of the school server software to work properly with the Active Antenna he had for testing the upgrade process. After upgrading to Build 141 (stable) it worked fine.)

We now have a jabber server running on the schoolserver in Cambridge (See Ejabberd Configuration), and are starting to test against it. We have seen the “register” button work! This should reach a school server build by the beginning of next week.

4. Open firmware (OFW): Mitch Bradley made a number of improvements this week. It now reports the OFW version when in a failure condition to simplify field support; the “remove all power” error message has been made clearer; and the status of the game buttons is indicated when pressed.

5. Embedded controller (EC): Richard Smith reports that several EC issues are pending. The one that has received attention the SCI Mask Corruption bug (Ticket #5467). While chasing this bug, Richard found several small but critical typos in the handling of some of the commands he had added since November. The net result of these typos is that under some conditions, a value passed in as data would be run as a command and some commands would not get run at all. Unfortunately, fixing those typos does not fix #5467. Its cause goes much deeper into the EC protocol handling. The next couple of days should shake out what the problem is and get it fixed for good.

Battery problems: A growing number of reports of short battery life are coming in. People are starting to run olpc-logbat bat and Richard has been looking at the resulting data. Based on the data he's seen so far, he conjects that either (1) there are some “funky” batteries in the field; or (2) the EC is failing to charge the battery up to full capacity, yet it is marking it as full. Most of the data gathered so far has been discharge info. Richard will be responding to many of the trouble tickets requesting several cycles of charge/discharge while running olpc-logbat to flush out whats going on.

The report of “shutdown yet no red LED” is the result of the capacity never going below 15% but the battery voltage dropped to the critical cutoff point, followed by the EC dropping system power. An enhancement Richard will make to the EC code is to also do something with the status LED to indicted that a critical voltage shutdown is looming so there's some warning your laptop is about to shutdown.

6. Schedules: For the next few weeks we will be focused on stabilizing Update.1 (based on Joyride) through testing, documentation, and limited number of bug fixes. We recently found two more critical bugs that will need an unscheduled software release (USR): touchpad/mouse jumpiness and data loss if you fill up the memory. We have created a procedure for these USRs; we are using this process to get these fixes out sooner than the next scheduled release (See Operating system release procedures).

7. Test: Chih-Yu Choa is helping out with both test and support this week. She has gotten through the 1-Hour Smoke Test on a recent Joyride build, which revealed a few regression bugs from the Ship.2 (650) release. Next we need to create and document some test cases for the new features in Update.1, and some testing with the school server.

8. Support: Adam Holt has been working days, nights, and weekends to grow the volunteer support group (now up to 40 people), who are answering emails, hanging out on forums and IRC to help people. A core crew of about 15 volunteers drives the process forward with increasingly sophisticated answers. Others contribute part-time working from the Support FAQ (Support FAQ) and “RTFM” template answers as they get up to speed. We have almost hit 1000 email help requests in the database! Katie Belisle and Casey Ratliff are working on a next-generation documentation ideas for our Support FAQ.

Adam is also coordinating “4PM Sunday” (Eastern Standard Time) conference calls for the entire support-volunteers team. Last week’s call was extremely successful due to the contributions of the OLPC developer community (special thanks to Bernie Innocenti and Arjun Sarwal) (See Support meetings). Anyone you wants to join, email me well in advance at “holt AT laptop DOT org” and be sure to include your phone number! All volunteers worldwide will be considered, after a very brief phone call. (See http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang if you are interested in volunteering.)

Adam, Kim Quirk, and Greg Babbin are now able to provide RMAs, which will help off-load the donor support 800-number and email. Kudos to Greg’s genuine heroics. Our Asterisk-based VoIP virtual call center has been briefly delayed. Matthew O’Gorman and Joe Phigan continue to work hard on this, scripting prompts for rudimentary integration with http://rt.laptop.org, and we should have our volunteer-training shortly.

9. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta helped start Pashto and Bulgarian translation teams and resolve an issue with Pootle that caused it to reject new user registrations; it was being caused by a invalid username in the Pootle database.

A long-standing blocker bug (Ticket #1525) regarding the invalidation of the fontconfig cache was finally fixed. Font cache generation in the XO should be more robust now, even in the face of clock failures.

10. Software potpourri: Tomeu Vizoso proposed fixes for a number of bugs that have highest priority: previews are not deleted when their matching datastore objects are removed (Ticket #5707); deleting a large file from a USB stick copies it into NAND (often filling NAND) (Ticket #5719); Sugar shell consuming vast amounts of memory (Ticket #5532); “resuming” a large file from USB copies it into NAND (filling NAND) (Ticket #5744); and objects accumulate on the clipboard, impacting system performance (Ticket #5760).

Chris Ball fixed many power manager bugs. We now perform power management regardless of whether you're on an external power source, we remember the user's previous brightness setting when we dim the screen during suspend, and open hardware manager (OHM) no longer exits when X does.

Chris Ball wrote “slideshow” over Christmas, which is a Pippy example that queries the datastore for camera images and then shows them full-screen in a slideshow. He can't decide whether it should be a Pippy example (since it demonstrates performing datastore searches in Python) or a separate activity.

Dennis Gilmore spent most of the week troubleshooting issues, working around an issue today causing build failures and mostly trying to put the pieces together to make things better.

Michael Stone and Dennis spent some time working out why iputils fell out of our builds. Michael also worked with Bernie and Tomeu on address a problem with olpc-update in regards to persistent activity directories (Ticket #5033), with Ben Schwartz on problem with stream sockets (Ticket #5818), and with Eben Eliason on the beginnings of a security user interface.

Ivan Krstić is exploring a more secure way of isolating Browse for Update.1; it might be trivial.

11. Presence: Robert McQueen finished an out-of-band data (OOB) implementation (he added IP detection code) and wrote tests for it. That means OOB bytestream is now working with Gabble. The next step will be to define and implement bytestream renegotiation and fallback.

Dafydd Harries made updated packages for Presence Service and Avahi, although Koji cannot build the former for some reason. He also debugged problems registering laptops with school servers (Ticket #5834); it turns out that the ejabberd RPM doesn't generate an X.509 certificate. Dafydd also spent time trying to coax OpenFire into working. It works ok as long as your account is not in the shared roster group, but authenticating becomes unreliable as soon as you are a member. The web interface becomes unreliable from time to time too, necessitating restarting the server. It seems that, like with ejabberd, we are using it in a way it is not designed to handle. Our scalability improvements should solve this for Update.2, but it is not clear yet what the best approach is for the Update.1 time frame.

Morgan Collett fixed the scrolling bug (Ticket #2351) in Chat for Update.1 thanks to a patch from Marco Pesenti Gritti. (C. Scott Ananian’s view source changes for Chat are in Update.1, but will require a newer Pippy.) Morgan is testing a fix for Presence Service #5368 where the buddies in an activity weren't reliably clustering around the shared activity icon.

12. Activities: Muriel Godoi progressing on his port of Food Force for the XO (See Food Force 2). Progress includes artwork (builds and villagers); next, the game model need more work to get a playable game. The code is in his public_git folder (https://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/murielgodoi/foodforce2;a=summary). Please contact Muriel if you’d like to help.

Arjun Sarwal reports progress on the Measure activity: he is rethinking certain aspects of the code design of the activity that would make it more easily expandable and scalable.

13. OLPC Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports progress amidst chaos. Urdu localization is 100% complete. They have had a useful discussion with an Afghan graduate student of International Islamic University (IIU) who is keenly interested in translating OLPC bundles into Dari and Pashto. They are also mobilizing volunteers from the Pakistan Institute of Engineering & Applied Sciences, (PIEAS). A training package for Afghan teachers is nearing completion, including software, hardware, and activities tutorials. They’ve also launched an effort to convert into e-books all the text books written on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad. Beta versions for Grades one through four are ready. The subjects are English, Social Studies, Science, and Urdu.

14. Cow power: Arjun have completed documentation of the project (See Cow Power). The page details the current design and the proposed mechanical design. He is hoping to get feedback from the community on the proposed mechanical design before moving forward in the implementation of the changes.

15. Community: The OLPC Austria team reports progress on OpenWRT. It boots an XO (currently with minimal driver support) in 15–20 seconds. John Crispin and others want to look into porting Sugar to OpenWRT if there is community interest.

Pascal Martin of Linterweb, an open source software company based in France that has worked on desktop and wiki search tools, has offered their support and development time to help with the search component for the Journal. Tomeu Vizoso spent some time explaining to Fabien Coulon from their team what has been done to date in the datastore.

Jesper Taxbøl is helping organize this year's Nordic Game Jam; he is angling to run it on XOs and lead off with an introduction to PyGame. They are looking for 10 laptops for their 100 participants to use February 1–3. This is quite a popular jam and produces some pretty polished games each year.

Many people are asking for ways to contact the creators of bundles and activities. Please add your name and some sort of contact info to projects you have worked on, on their own wiki pages, and on the Activities page.

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

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# 92607]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-01-05

1. Intel: John Markoff’s article in today’s New York Times provides an accurate description of the events of the past 48 hours regarding Intel (See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/technology/05laptop.html). We made a sincere effort of rapprochement, but it was clear from even the way that Intel terminated the relationship—with an “inadvertent leak”—that their was no reciprocal sincerity. We made great strides before Intel joined us and we will continue to make great strides now that they have left the OLPC association.

2. Lagos: Ayo Kusamotu filed a preliminary objection to the Nigerian keyboard lawsuit (See Lancor). The details of the case have been discussed extensively on Groklaw (See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20071226210020415).

3. School Server: A long delayed update to the School Server software to fix problems with large file transfers due to a now antiquated libertas driver has finally happened. Pick up Build 141 (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Installing_Software#OLPC_XS_141), request an Active Antenna build through our developer program, and turn some old junker PC near you into a school server! This was delayed by the holidays and a QA process which turned out to be as necessary as it was difficult. Several problems and unwanted interactions had crept into the build, but these were mostly fixed in this release. (John Watlington finally gave up getting an early version of the school server software to work properly with the Active Antenna he had for testing the upgrade process. After upgrading to Build 141 (stable) it worked fine.)

We now have a jabber server running on the schoolserver in Cambridge (See Ejabberd Configuration), and are starting to test against it. We have seen the “register” button work! This should reach a school server build by the beginning of next week.

4. Open firmware (OFW): Mitch Bradley made a number of improvements this week. It now reports the OFW version when in a failure condition to simplify field support; the “remove all power” error message has been made clearer; and the status of the game buttons is indicated when pressed.

5. Embedded controller (EC): Richard Smith reports that several EC issues are pending. The one that has received attention the SCI Mask Corruption bug (Ticket #5467). While chasing this bug, Richard found several small but critical typos in the handling of some of the commands he had added since November. The net result of these typos is that under some conditions, a value passed in as data would be run as a command and some commands would not get run at all. Unfortunately, fixing those typos does not fix #5467. Its cause goes much deeper into the EC protocol handling. The next couple of days should shake out what the problem is and get it fixed for good.

Battery problems: A growing number of reports of short battery life are coming in. People are starting to run olpc-logbat bat and Richard has been looking at the resulting data. Based on the data he's seen so far, he conjects that either (1) there are some “funky” batteries in the field; or (2) the EC is failing to charge the battery up to full capacity, yet it is marking it as full. Most of the data gathered so far has been discharge info. Richard will be responding to many of the trouble tickets requesting several cycles of charge/discharge while running olpc-logbat to flush out whats going on.

The report of “shutdown yet no red LED” is the result of the capacity never going below 15% but the battery voltage dropped to the critical cutoff point, followed by the EC dropping system power. An enhancement Richard will make to the EC code is to also do something with the status LED to indicted that a critical voltage shutdown is looming so there's some warning your laptop is about to shutdown.

6. Schedules: For the next few weeks we will be focused on stabilizing Update.1 (based on Joyride) through testing, documentation, and limited number of bug fixes. We recently found two more critical bugs that will need an unscheduled software release (USR): touchpad/mouse jumpiness and data loss if you fill up the memory. We have created a procedure for these USRs; we are using this process to get these fixes out sooner than the next scheduled release (See Operating system release procedures).

7. Test: Chih-Yu Choa is helping out with both test and support this week. She has gotten through the 1-Hour Smoke Test on a recent Joyride build, which revealed a few regression bugs from the Ship.2 (650) release. Next we need to create and document some test cases for the new features in Update.1, and some testing with the school server.

8. Support: Adam Holt has been working days, nights, and weekends to grow the volunteer support group (now up to 40 people), who are answering emails, hanging out on forums and IRC to help people. A core crew of about 15 volunteers drives the process forward with increasingly sophisticated answers. Others contribute part-time working from the Support FAQ (Support FAQ) and “RTFM” template answers as they get up to speed. We have almost hit 1000 email help requests in the database! Katie Belisle and Casey Ratliff are working on a next-generation documentation ideas for our Support FAQ.

Adam is also coordinating “4PM Sunday” (Eastern Standard Time) conference calls for the entire support-volunteers team. Last week’s call was extremely successful due to the contributions of the OLPC developer community (special thanks to Bernie Innocenti and Arjun Sarwal) (See Support meetings). Anyone you wants to join, email me well in advance at “holt AT laptop DOT org” and be sure to include your phone number! All volunteers worldwide will be considered, after a very brief phone call. (See http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang if you are interested in volunteering.)

Adam, Kim Quirk, and Greg Babbin are now able to provide RMAs, which will help off-load the donor support 800-number and email. Kudos to Greg’s genuine heroics. Our Asterisk-based VoIP virtual call center has been briefly delayed. Matthew O’Gorman and Joe Phigan continue to work hard on this, scripting prompts for rudimentary integration with http://rt.laptop.org, and we should have our volunteer-training shortly.

9. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta helped start Pashto and Bulgarian translation teams and resolve an issue with Pootle that caused it to reject new user registrations; it was being caused by a invalid username in the Pootle database.

A long-standing blocker bug (Ticket #1525) regarding the invalidation of the fontconfig cache was finally fixed. Font cache generation in the XO should be more robust now, even in the face of clock failures.

10. Software potpourri: Tomeu Vizoso proposed fixes for a number of bugs that have highest priority: previews are not deleted when their matching datastore objects are removed (Ticket #5707); deleting a large file from a USB stick copies it into NAND (often filling NAND) (Ticket #5719); Sugar shell consuming vast amounts of memory (Ticket #5532); “resuming” a large file from USB copies it into NAND (filling NAND) (Ticket #5744); and objects accumulate on the clipboard, impacting system performance (Ticket #5760).

Chris Ball fixed many power manager bugs. We now perform power management regardless of whether you're on an external power source, we remember the user's previous brightness setting when we dim the screen during suspend, and open hardware manager (OHM) no longer exits when X does.

Chris Ball wrote “slideshow” over Christmas, which is a Pippy example that queries the datastore for camera images and then shows them full-screen in a slideshow. He can't decide whether it should be a Pippy example (since it demonstrates performing datastore searches in Python) or a separate activity.

Dennis Gilmore spent most of the week troubleshooting issues, working around an issue today causing build failures and mostly trying to put the pieces together to make things better.

Michael Stone and Dennis spent some time working out why iputils fell out of our builds. Michael also worked with Bernie and Tomeu on address a problem with olpc-update in regards to persistent activity directories (Ticket #5033), with Ben Schwartz on problem with stream sockets (Ticket #5818), and with Eben Eliason on the beginnings of a security user interface.

Ivan Krstić is exploring a more secure way of isolating Browse for Update.1; it might be trivial.

11. Presence: Robert McQueen finished an out-of-band data (OOB) implementation (he added IP detection code) and wrote tests for it. That means OOB bytestream is now working with Gabble. The next step will be to define and implement bytestream renegotiation and fallback.

Dafydd Harries made updated packages for Presence Service and Avahi, although Koji cannot build the former for some reason. He also debugged problems registering laptops with school servers (Ticket #5834); it turns out that the ejabberd RPM doesn't generate an X.509 certificate. Dafydd also spent time trying to coax OpenFire into working. It works ok as long as your account is not in the shared roster group, but authenticating becomes unreliable as soon as you are a member. The web interface becomes unreliable from time to time too, necessitating restarting the server. It seems that, like with ejabberd, we are using it in a way it is not designed to handle. Our scalability improvements should solve this for Update.2, but it is not clear yet what the best approach is for the Update.1 time frame.

Morgan Collett fixed the scrolling bug (Ticket #2351) in Chat for Update.1 thanks to a patch from Marco Pesenti Gritti. (C. Scott Ananian’s view source changes for Chat are in Update.1, but will require a newer Pippy.) Morgan is testing a fix for Presence Service #5368 where the buddies in an activity weren't reliably clustering around the shared activity icon.

12. Activities: Muriel Godoi progressing on his port of Food Force for the XO (See Food Force 2). Progress includes artwork (builds and villagers); next, the game model need more work to get a playable game. The code is in his public_git folder (https://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/murielgodoi/foodforce2;a=summary). Please contact Muriel if you’d like to help.

Arjun Sarwal reports progress on the Measure activity: he is rethinking certain aspects of the code design of the activity that would make it more easily expandable and scalable.

13. OLPC Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports progress amidst chaos. Urdu localization is 100% complete. They have had a useful discussion with an Afghan graduate student of International Islamic University (IIU) who is keenly interested in translating OLPC bundles into Dari and Pashto. They are also mobilizing volunteers from the Pakistan Institute of Engineering & Applied Sciences, (PIEAS). A training package for Afghan teachers is nearing completion, including software, hardware, and activities tutorials. They’ve also launched an effort to convert into e-books all the text books written on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad. Beta versions for Grades one through four are ready. The subjects are English, Social Studies, Science, and Urdu.

14. Cow power: Arjun have completed documentation of the project (See Cow Power). The page details the current design and the proposed mechanical design. He is hoping to get feedback from the community on the proposed mechanical design before moving forward in the implementation of the changes.

15. Community: The OLPC Austria team reports progress on OpenWRT. It boots an XO (currently with minimal driver support) in 15–20 seconds. John Crispin and others want to look into porting Sugar to OpenWRT if there is community interest.

Pascal Martin of Linterweb, an open source software company based in France that has worked on desktop and wiki search tools, has offered their support and development time to help with the search component for the Journal. Tomeu Vizoso spent some time explaining to Fabien Coulon from their team what has been done to date in the datastore.

Jesper Taxbøl is helping organize this year's Nordic Game Jam; he is angling to run it on XOs and lead off with an introduction to PyGame. They are looking for 10 laptops for their 100 participants to use February 1–3. This is quite a popular jam and produces some pretty polished games each year.

Many people are asking for ways to contact the creators of bundles and activities. Please add your name and some sort of contact info to projects you have worked on, on their own wiki pages, and on the Activities page.

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

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.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.laptop.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=OLPC:News&oldid=92607"