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


=Laptop News 2008-01-05=
=Laptop News 2008-01-12=


1. Mongolia is the first beneficiary of the Give One Get One program. Laptops have begun to arrive and a team from OLPC, including Carla Gomez Monroy, Jan Jungclaus, and Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin are on the ground to help with the initial deployment. Dave Woodhouse will be heading to Ulan Bator to help with the School Server later this month.
1. Intel: John Markoff’s article in Saturday’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. Las Vegas: Nicholas Negroponte gave the keynote at CES' new program entitled, “Technology and Emerging Countries: Advancing Development through Technology Investments.” He spoke about learning, constructionism, and the long history of thinking about thinking, drawing heavily on Seymour Papert's life work.
See also two recent ''Wall Street Journal'' articles (access to the full 2nd article requires a subscription until two weeks have elapsed from date of publishing): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119948070480568405.html and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119940537839566305.html.


3. Cambridge: Walter also met with the X-Prize Foundation Founder and Chairman Peter Diamandis. They discussed two competitions that are in the planning stages: (1) development of a low-cost rural water/power/communications station; and (2) development of a high-impact global learning intervention. The incentive in both competitions is a US $10M prize. OLPC has offered to help define the goals and metrics for the prizes, as there is obvious synergy with our mission in both cases.
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).


4. Las Vegas: Michail Bletsas delivered the keynote address at the 5th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC); his talk was about the XO's networking architecture.
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 ([[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.)


5. In the news: Two topics dominated the press coverage of OLPC this week: the Intel departure; and the Microsoft plans for the XO. The Intel departure, which ultimately boiled down to a lack of trust, as been discussed ad nauseum; Ivan Krstić blog provides a good overview of the Microsoft plans from the OLPC perspective (Please visit http://radian.org/notebook/paradox-of-choice).
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.


6. Embedded controller: Richard Smith time working on the SCI mask corruption problem (Ticket #5467). This was a critical bug because the root cause was problems with the EC command implementation. Richard thinks he has finally bested the gremlins: The original implementation depended on interrupts that were being lost; as a result, the EC would at best fail to process the data correctly and at worst completely stop processing commands. The solution in this case is to eliminate these interrupts altogether, as they are unnecessary. Richard implemented a polling scheme instead; the code is passing all his tests and is faster even in its currently unoptimized state. Faster is good because the host issues lots of EC commands on the way into and out of suspend, where every millisecond is critical. Richard is asking that anyone interested in helping us test his solution to upgrade to a firmware release Q2D08A (or higher).
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.


7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2D08 firmware with a long list of “fit and finish” improvements and minor bug fixes. Details can be found in the wiki (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_q2d08).
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.


8. SD Card support: One nagging problem has been the performance of the SD card on resume. Mitch took time this week to study the problem. He determined that resume can be done in 25 to 200 mS, depending on the card used. The mean value from a sample of seven different cards was 70 mS.
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.


9. Batteries: Some reports of batteries not charging are coming in from the field. The bulk of the data reports (from olpc-logbat) are almost identical: the XO declares the battery fully charged and quits charging when its really not. Subsequently, when you use your laptop on battery power, it shuts off with no warning, because the voltage dips below the critical level but the capacity is still >15%. In some cases, the shutdown is very quick (seconds) and in others the battery gets enough charge to last between 10 and 20 minutes.
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.


Richard made some additions to batman.fth that allow the user to reset the percent-full field to back to “low”, thus causing the EC code try to recharge. One person with battery-charge problems has used this utility: the data show the voltage on the battery jumping from low (5V to 6V ) to >= 7.4V (the “full” threshold) in the span of 10 seconds. Repeating the test three times showed one span where the battery actually began to charge normally for a while, but then jumped to full. The EC code seems to be operating properly, but something is causing the battery resistance to suddenly rise. This could be either a battery problem or a manufacturing defect in the XO. Something as simple as a bad connection in the charge path could cause this behavior.
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]]).


10. School Sserver: The school-server software platform is currently being extended by John Watlington to support multiple servers, each providing internet access to the mesh on all three wireless mesh channels. A two-server system was manually configured at 1CC (and in John's home, a much quieter wireless environment) and largely worked. Its configuration has been automated; a new school-server build is in early testing and will be released in the next few days.
7. Test: Chih-Yu Chao 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.


The rush on this is the desire to provide access to a common library to a trial of two schools in Mongolia this January, with upcoming deployments elsewhere following as soon as we have Active Antennas in volume. Each school of 500 children will have three servers providing backup storage and access to a large (700 GB) local content library. We shipped off six servers (the lowest end SOHO server from a leading PC manufacturer) to the trials this week after reconfiguring them in Cambridge. Additional machines are being acquired locally and will be tested.
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.


The latest version of ejabberd (2.0) has been successfully packaged by Collabora, configured and integrated into a school server build, and is now being tested. The configuration still requires manual intervention and scalability and stability are serious-enough concerns that we continue to explore alternatives.
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.)


11. Testing: Chih-yu Chao worked on testing various builds (Joyride 1489 and 1520, and Update.1 681). This included some localization testing, one-hour smoke tests, and content bundles (both activities and library). She also spent some time becoming familiar with school server and created test cases for suspend/resume. Kim Quirk spent some time in localization, keyboard testing, and upgrade testing for the Ship2.2 Build 656. Remember to keep an eye on Test Group Release Notes page in the wiki for information on the latest releases (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Group_Release_Notes).
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.


12. Wireless testing: We are currently testing Build 674 with wireless firmware 5.110.22.p1. Build 674 has all the latest wireless driver modifications from David Woodhouse, which seems to improve stability and performance. The only obvious issue with Build 674 is the inability to associate with WEP-encrypted access points the Sugar user interface (we can make connections from the command line). Wireless firmware 5.110.22.p1 fixes a rare wireless hang that happens when a link loss condition occurs while the radio is scanning and also rearranges the relative priorities of the internal firmware threads. Thanks to the team at Marvell Pune and Ricardo Carrano for all the hard work.
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.


13. Support: Adam Holt and the team of many support volunteers continue to improve systems and documentation. And they continue to make progress with the phone bank system. There are regular Sunday afternoon 4PM (EST) calls—if you are interested in joining, please get in touch with Adam for the details (holt at laptop.org).
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.


Adam organized another very successful support meeting last Sunday; 24 people showed up (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_meetings).
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).


Participation by guest developers drive the enthusiasm at the meetings. Thanks to Kim Quirk, Arjun Sarwal, and Bernie Innocenti for their participation. By the end of week, our Support list now contains 51 subscribers. Support volunteer Frank Barcenas, who is based in Lima, Peru started only four days ago and is doing a great job, even without an XO!
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.


Adam also recruited likely volunteers for documentation and QA. Felice Gardner and SJ Klein have been helping here. Professor Lee Tesdell at Minnesota State Univ will likely work with us and his entire class improving documentation of particular topics. Similarly, Adam helped Arjun engage with science teachers and curriculum developers to develop further interest in the Measure activity.
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.


Adam also resolved troubling tickets by phone, calling donors directly—he focused on especially confused donors who either require RMAs or were accidentally block our incoming emails.
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.


Adam has been helping to navigate through our parts/repair story, towards setting up perhaps 10 volunteer-driven repair centers around the USA and Canada—a model that could be replicated elsewhere.
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.


Finally, Adam continues to work with Matthew O’Gorman and Joe Phigan on a phone server. Matthew should have the voice prompts recorded ASAP, so we can begin training volunteers.
Ivan Krstić is exploring a more secure way of isolating Browse for Update.1; it might be trivial.


14. Sugar medley: Tomeu Vizoso worked on fixing bugs this week in anticipation of the Update.1 release. He focused on the Sugar shell, the Journal, the datastore, and Read activity. Almost all of his patches have already been tested in the Joyride builds and will pushed into an Update.1 build soon.
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.


Reinier Heeres has written a patch to improve the palette positioning logic so that palettes don't end up outside the visible screen (Ticket #5944) and he has included support for ellipsis ('...') in long lines (Ticket #4562). Finally a new version of evince was built to reduce the memory usage for pdf files with images and a patch by Tomeu was included to make the fit-to-width button work.
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.


Marco Pesenti Gritti tracked down the problem with the Turkish locale that was causing crashes at system startup. He's pushed a work around in the builds. A numpy hacker helped to track down the real cause, it looks like problem in pygtk or Python. Marco worked with Reinier on the palette positioning problem and together they landed multiple fixes. Marco built xulrunner 1.9 beta2. We are going to test it and see if it's stable enough to go in Update.1. He reviewed numerous patches from Simon Schampijer, Reinier and Tomeu. [These guys rock.] There was lots of bug triaging to ensure fixes for the most urgent problems land in the build as soon as possible. We’ve been testing all the changes in Joyride to avoid regressions. Altogether, we have managed to cut down the list of Sugar core bugs, especially the blockers. And in the spirit of “if you want something done, find a busy person”, Marco took over gtkmozembed maintenance upstream, to ensure we will have a sane API to migrate to when xpcom is deprecated in Mozilla 3.0.
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.


15. Software Medley: Chris Ball is working on the last power management feature for Update.1—a logfile to record information about how often and why we suspend/resume, together with battery status information. Getting this log back from the field will help turn the current set of timeouts into something more principled, and will give Richard Smith useful power data as well.
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.


Andres Salomon worked on the touchpad driver and Debian packaging of some OLPC packages.
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.


Bernie Innocenti mostly worked on bug squashing for Update.1. Specifically, the pen-tablet not working, permission problems in /home/olpc, and providing automatic login in the console so that we can finally disable the root and olpc passwords. Bernie also helped SJ with the hard drive images for Mongolia, and Arjun with the Measure activity redesign. He and Walter debugged console keymaps for Spanish and Portuguese and Albert Cahalan contributed a nice console font that we may try to integrate.
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.


As a pet project, Bernie started to port an “oldskool” activity called SoundTracker to the laptop. He is in touch with the original authors for help.
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.


David Woodhouse looked at the unionfs patches which are making their way upstream and likely to land in 2.6.25. Will probably land these in the Fedora kernel some time soon and play with them some more. They work without any changes to the underlying file systems, which means that whiteouts (where the “upper” layers of the filesystem actively remove an object that exists in a “lower” layer) are a bit of a hack. But that can be fixed. The design goal of requiring nothing special from the filesystem makes sense and we can do it nicely; it just hasn't been done yet.
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.


Dave reluctantly reduced the log level at which the (mostly harmless) CRC failure messages are printed by JFFS2. Need to introduce a new “root-only” write threshold and expose all the thresholds through sysfs.
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.


The short-term fix Dave made for SD seems like it might be helpful, according to Tomeu's comment in Ticket #4013. The device goes away and then a 'new' device comes back on suspend/resume. It doesn't help if you're running with your rootfs on the device, or if you have an open file on it while you suspend, but it looks like it does help a lot of use cases. We'll need to work with Marvell to figure out the delays in card detection on resume. They claim it doesn't take as long as our
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.
measurements show.
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.


16. Build system: Reinier has been working on a new build announcer script in Python (http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer). As an improvement over Bert Freudenberg's script, it can collect ChangeLog entries from package versions that have not appeared in a build, and gets ChangeLogs for rpms directly from Koji. Dennis Gilmore spent most the week syncing Joyride and Update.1, trying to chase up missing SRPMS and make sure things are getting better. He also spent time talking to people at Fudcon about OLPC; there were quite a few Give-One-Get-One participants showing real interest in the XO. Dennis will be doing a session on the XO over the weekend.
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.
Early in the week, Jim Gettys was spooked by some build problems we were having: we had later packages in Update.1 than Joyride, something that should never occur. Dennis tracked this down to a mistagging. We are now getting very close to having a build together, built consistently and reproducibly, that is close enough to Update.1 to start serious testing.

17. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes designed a proposal of Jingle protocol for transport re-negotation, needed for OOB support in Gabble (See http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Jingle-renegotiation). He started to implement hyperactivity, a collaboration stress-testing tool (Ticket #5817).

Morgan Collett landed the fix for the presence service bug that prevented buddies from clustering around their shared activity due to signals firing in the wrong order (Ticket #5368); the patch exposed a UI issue in Sugar “snowflake” layout where the first buddy moved into the activity appears next to it, but subsequent buddies simply vanish off mesh view; they reappear when they leave the activity (Ticket #5904). Morgan also worked on a couple of other presence-server issues: blank names in mesh view and hex-key names in mesh view.

18. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta set up a Pootle project for Etoys, so that volunteers translators working on the various activities and Sugar can also work on Etoys as well. He added the memorize activity in Pootle, so that it can be translated by the volunteers. He fixed a problem which was preventing the Spanish translations from showing up in Pippy. (ticket #5504) And he helped set up translation teams for Bengali (India), Catalan, and Polish.

Localization into Pashto and Dari languages continues to advance. Dr. Habib Khan reports that his team has engaged Afghan graduate students of International Islamic University, in the localization endeavors. They have initiated this project with great enthusiasm but their end of semester examination have started and will end on January 20, so our hopes for early completion does not seem to be on schedule.

Arjun Sarwal and Bernie tested the Devanagari keyboard with the Lohit Hindi fonts. The keyboard and font rendering both seem to be working well. The Lohit Hindi Fonts package is expected to go into Update.1

19. Wireless driver: Dave Woodhouse did some more work on the libertas driver, but he is letting the earlier batch of patches land and the dust settle before he starts again on that in earnest. It is mostly cleanups to be done now—the real fixes and the “dangerous” stuff are mostly behind us. Dave wants to investigate the suspend/resume behavior—that was working OK in his testing but we’ve seen two bug reports that cause him to suspect the driver might be getting it wrong.

Dave is also trying to get up to speed on school server stuff to fully understand what to expect when he gets to Mongolia next week (other than -20°C).

20. Rainbow: Michael Stone closed many bugs and contributed many patches. Along with Bernie, Phil, Simon, and Marco, we have now provided or improved proposed fixes or work-arounds for all of the known serious issues with Rainbow for Update.1 including:

• the 'rainbow spool persistence bug' (Ticket #5033);
• the 'SSL failure bug' (Ticket #5489);
• the 'orphaned files bug' (Ticket #5637);
• the 'uid reclamation bug' (Ticket #2527);
• the '/home/olpc permissions bug' (Ticket #5320); and
• the 'sudo vs. su bug' (Ticket #5537).

Michael also assisted Phil Bordelon with the 'orphaned previews bug' (Ticket #5929) and he offered Daniel and Chih-yu an overview of our implementation of activity isolation so that we can begin to construct a test plan for the isolation features scheduled for Update.1. Finally, Michael assisted Sjoerd, Ben, and Erik in their debugging efforts.

Marcus Leech’s (Nortel) contributions to our efforts have also been invaluable.

21. Activities: Joshua Minor made a new activity called Speak. It is a “talking face” for the XO laptop. Anything you type will be spoken aloud using the XO's speech synthesizer, espeak. You can adjust the accent, rate and pitch of the voice as well as the shape of the eyes and mouth. This is a fun way to experiment with the speech synthesizer, learn to type or just have fun making a funny face for your XO. Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speak for details. (Josh sends thanks to Arjun Sarwal, Hemant Goyal and Bernardo Innocenti for their help.)

Arjun Sarwal continues to improve the Measure activity. He is working towards making the code scalable (so that it is easy to add more graphs, more views, etc.). The mix of having a large drawing area and a lot of real-time processing of data, combined with the goal of a fast response time is a challenging (and interesting) balance of experimentation and optimization.

The Measure page in the wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure) now incorporates easy to follow instructions to build one's own low cost probe for connecting sensors to the XO. The “flavor of the month” of Measure Learning activities is “Temperature.” Arjun encourages educators / teachers / enthusiasts to try building their own low-cost temperature sensing probe by following the directions given on the page and get in touch (arjun AT laptop.org) in case of any problems.

In a related effort, Arjun is interested in organizing an OLPC-Health interest group. All interested in participating towards developing medical and health applications around the XO should join the “Library” mailing list and add their names to the volunteers section of the Health wiki page (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health). Participation is invited from all: hardware developers, programmers, doctors, biologists, etc. A conference call is planned for the last week of January.

22. E-books: Dr. Khan reports progress on converting all the text books written on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad into e-books. The following text books of Federal Ministry of Education for Grade I for use in English and Urdu mediums of instruction are complete:

• My English Reader for Grade I
• Islamic Studies (Shaoor-e-Islamyat) Grade I
• Social Studies for Grade I
• Science for Grade I

These text books are now waiting a review by the Department of Education, IIU. After incorporating the suggestion we will make them available on XO library.

23. Curriki: Lauren Klein and SJ Klein started working with Joshua Marks and the group-development team at Curriki to design a space and interfaces for OLPC collections on their site. Joshua is rolling out a “groups” feature that will allow custom design of individual portals within the next week that will make implementing a “compile for XO” button and an OLPC start page easier.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 22:12, 12 January 2008

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Laptop News 2008-01-12

1. Mongolia is the first beneficiary of the Give One Get One program. Laptops have begun to arrive and a team from OLPC, including Carla Gomez Monroy, Jan Jungclaus, and Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin are on the ground to help with the initial deployment. Dave Woodhouse will be heading to Ulan Bator to help with the School Server later this month.

2. Las Vegas: Nicholas Negroponte gave the keynote at CES' new program entitled, “Technology and Emerging Countries: Advancing Development through Technology Investments.” He spoke about learning, constructionism, and the long history of thinking about thinking, drawing heavily on Seymour Papert's life work.

3. Cambridge: Walter also met with the X-Prize Foundation Founder and Chairman Peter Diamandis. They discussed two competitions that are in the planning stages: (1) development of a low-cost rural water/power/communications station; and (2) development of a high-impact global learning intervention. The incentive in both competitions is a US $10M prize. OLPC has offered to help define the goals and metrics for the prizes, as there is obvious synergy with our mission in both cases.

4. Las Vegas: Michail Bletsas delivered the keynote address at the 5th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC); his talk was about the XO's networking architecture.

5. In the news: Two topics dominated the press coverage of OLPC this week: the Intel departure; and the Microsoft plans for the XO. The Intel departure, which ultimately boiled down to a lack of trust, as been discussed ad nauseum; Ivan Krstić blog provides a good overview of the Microsoft plans from the OLPC perspective (Please visit http://radian.org/notebook/paradox-of-choice).

6. Embedded controller: Richard Smith time working on the SCI mask corruption problem (Ticket #5467). This was a critical bug because the root cause was problems with the EC command implementation. Richard thinks he has finally bested the gremlins: The original implementation depended on interrupts that were being lost; as a result, the EC would at best fail to process the data correctly and at worst completely stop processing commands. The solution in this case is to eliminate these interrupts altogether, as they are unnecessary. Richard implemented a polling scheme instead; the code is passing all his tests and is faster even in its currently unoptimized state. Faster is good because the host issues lots of EC commands on the way into and out of suspend, where every millisecond is critical. Richard is asking that anyone interested in helping us test his solution to upgrade to a firmware release Q2D08A (or higher).

7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2D08 firmware with a long list of “fit and finish” improvements and minor bug fixes. Details can be found in the wiki (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_q2d08).

8. SD Card support: One nagging problem has been the performance of the SD card on resume. Mitch took time this week to study the problem. He determined that resume can be done in 25 to 200 mS, depending on the card used. The mean value from a sample of seven different cards was 70 mS.

9. Batteries: Some reports of batteries not charging are coming in from the field. The bulk of the data reports (from olpc-logbat) are almost identical: the XO declares the battery fully charged and quits charging when its really not. Subsequently, when you use your laptop on battery power, it shuts off with no warning, because the voltage dips below the critical level but the capacity is still >15%. In some cases, the shutdown is very quick (seconds) and in others the battery gets enough charge to last between 10 and 20 minutes.

Richard made some additions to batman.fth that allow the user to reset the percent-full field to back to “low”, thus causing the EC code try to recharge. One person with battery-charge problems has used this utility: the data show the voltage on the battery jumping from low (5V to 6V ) to >= 7.4V (the “full” threshold) in the span of 10 seconds. Repeating the test three times showed one span where the battery actually began to charge normally for a while, but then jumped to full. The EC code seems to be operating properly, but something is causing the battery resistance to suddenly rise. This could be either a battery problem or a manufacturing defect in the XO. Something as simple as a bad connection in the charge path could cause this behavior.

10. School Sserver: The school-server software platform is currently being extended by John Watlington to support multiple servers, each providing internet access to the mesh on all three wireless mesh channels. A two-server system was manually configured at 1CC (and in John's home, a much quieter wireless environment) and largely worked. Its configuration has been automated; a new school-server build is in early testing and will be released in the next few days.

The rush on this is the desire to provide access to a common library to a trial of two schools in Mongolia this January, with upcoming deployments elsewhere following as soon as we have Active Antennas in volume. Each school of 500 children will have three servers providing backup storage and access to a large (700 GB) local content library. We shipped off six servers (the lowest end SOHO server from a leading PC manufacturer) to the trials this week after reconfiguring them in Cambridge. Additional machines are being acquired locally and will be tested.

The latest version of ejabberd (2.0) has been successfully packaged by Collabora, configured and integrated into a school server build, and is now being tested. The configuration still requires manual intervention and scalability and stability are serious-enough concerns that we continue to explore alternatives.

11. Testing: Chih-yu Chao worked on testing various builds (Joyride 1489 and 1520, and Update.1 681). This included some localization testing, one-hour smoke tests, and content bundles (both activities and library). She also spent some time becoming familiar with school server and created test cases for suspend/resume. Kim Quirk spent some time in localization, keyboard testing, and upgrade testing for the Ship2.2 Build 656. Remember to keep an eye on Test Group Release Notes page in the wiki for information on the latest releases (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Group_Release_Notes).

12. Wireless testing: We are currently testing Build 674 with wireless firmware 5.110.22.p1. Build 674 has all the latest wireless driver modifications from David Woodhouse, which seems to improve stability and performance. The only obvious issue with Build 674 is the inability to associate with WEP-encrypted access points the Sugar user interface (we can make connections from the command line). Wireless firmware 5.110.22.p1 fixes a rare wireless hang that happens when a link loss condition occurs while the radio is scanning and also rearranges the relative priorities of the internal firmware threads. Thanks to the team at Marvell Pune and Ricardo Carrano for all the hard work.

13. Support: Adam Holt and the team of many support volunteers continue to improve systems and documentation. And they continue to make progress with the phone bank system. There are regular Sunday afternoon 4PM (EST) calls—if you are interested in joining, please get in touch with Adam for the details (holt at laptop.org).

Adam organized another very successful support meeting last Sunday; 24 people showed up (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_meetings).

Participation by guest developers drive the enthusiasm at the meetings. Thanks to Kim Quirk, Arjun Sarwal, and Bernie Innocenti for their participation. By the end of week, our Support list now contains 51 subscribers. Support volunteer Frank Barcenas, who is based in Lima, Peru started only four days ago and is doing a great job, even without an XO!

Adam also recruited likely volunteers for documentation and QA. Felice Gardner and SJ Klein have been helping here. Professor Lee Tesdell at Minnesota State Univ will likely work with us and his entire class improving documentation of particular topics. Similarly, Adam helped Arjun engage with science teachers and curriculum developers to develop further interest in the Measure activity.

Adam also resolved troubling tickets by phone, calling donors directly—he focused on especially confused donors who either require RMAs or were accidentally block our incoming emails.

Adam has been helping to navigate through our parts/repair story, towards setting up perhaps 10 volunteer-driven repair centers around the USA and Canada—a model that could be replicated elsewhere.

Finally, Adam continues to work with Matthew O’Gorman and Joe Phigan on a phone server. Matthew should have the voice prompts recorded ASAP, so we can begin training volunteers.

14. Sugar medley: Tomeu Vizoso worked on fixing bugs this week in anticipation of the Update.1 release. He focused on the Sugar shell, the Journal, the datastore, and Read activity. Almost all of his patches have already been tested in the Joyride builds and will pushed into an Update.1 build soon.

Reinier Heeres has written a patch to improve the palette positioning logic so that palettes don't end up outside the visible screen (Ticket #5944) and he has included support for ellipsis ('...') in long lines (Ticket #4562). Finally a new version of evince was built to reduce the memory usage for pdf files with images and a patch by Tomeu was included to make the fit-to-width button work.

Marco Pesenti Gritti tracked down the problem with the Turkish locale that was causing crashes at system startup. He's pushed a work around in the builds. A numpy hacker helped to track down the real cause, it looks like problem in pygtk or Python. Marco worked with Reinier on the palette positioning problem and together they landed multiple fixes. Marco built xulrunner 1.9 beta2. We are going to test it and see if it's stable enough to go in Update.1. He reviewed numerous patches from Simon Schampijer, Reinier and Tomeu. [These guys rock.] There was lots of bug triaging to ensure fixes for the most urgent problems land in the build as soon as possible. We’ve been testing all the changes in Joyride to avoid regressions. Altogether, we have managed to cut down the list of Sugar core bugs, especially the blockers. And in the spirit of “if you want something done, find a busy person”, Marco took over gtkmozembed maintenance upstream, to ensure we will have a sane API to migrate to when xpcom is deprecated in Mozilla 3.0.

15. Software Medley: Chris Ball is working on the last power management feature for Update.1—a logfile to record information about how often and why we suspend/resume, together with battery status information. Getting this log back from the field will help turn the current set of timeouts into something more principled, and will give Richard Smith useful power data as well.

Andres Salomon worked on the touchpad driver and Debian packaging of some OLPC packages.

Bernie Innocenti mostly worked on bug squashing for Update.1. Specifically, the pen-tablet not working, permission problems in /home/olpc, and providing automatic login in the console so that we can finally disable the root and olpc passwords. Bernie also helped SJ with the hard drive images for Mongolia, and Arjun with the Measure activity redesign. He and Walter debugged console keymaps for Spanish and Portuguese and Albert Cahalan contributed a nice console font that we may try to integrate.

As a pet project, Bernie started to port an “oldskool” activity called SoundTracker to the laptop. He is in touch with the original authors for help.

David Woodhouse looked at the unionfs patches which are making their way upstream and likely to land in 2.6.25. Will probably land these in the Fedora kernel some time soon and play with them some more. They work without any changes to the underlying file systems, which means that whiteouts (where the “upper” layers of the filesystem actively remove an object that exists in a “lower” layer) are a bit of a hack. But that can be fixed. The design goal of requiring nothing special from the filesystem makes sense and we can do it nicely; it just hasn't been done yet.

Dave reluctantly reduced the log level at which the (mostly harmless) CRC failure messages are printed by JFFS2. Need to introduce a new “root-only” write threshold and expose all the thresholds through sysfs.

The short-term fix Dave made for SD seems like it might be helpful, according to Tomeu's comment in Ticket #4013. The device goes away and then a 'new' device comes back on suspend/resume. It doesn't help if you're running with your rootfs on the device, or if you have an open file on it while you suspend, but it looks like it does help a lot of use cases. We'll need to work with Marvell to figure out the delays in card detection on resume. They claim it doesn't take as long as our measurements show.

16. Build system: Reinier has been working on a new build announcer script in Python (http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer). As an improvement over Bert Freudenberg's script, it can collect ChangeLog entries from package versions that have not appeared in a build, and gets ChangeLogs for rpms directly from Koji. Dennis Gilmore spent most the week syncing Joyride and Update.1, trying to chase up missing SRPMS and make sure things are getting better. He also spent time talking to people at Fudcon about OLPC; there were quite a few Give-One-Get-One participants showing real interest in the XO. Dennis will be doing a session on the XO over the weekend.

Early in the week, Jim Gettys was spooked by some build problems we were having: we had later packages in Update.1 than Joyride, something that should never occur. Dennis tracked this down to a mistagging. We are now getting very close to having a build together, built consistently and reproducibly, that is close enough to Update.1 to start serious testing.

17. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes designed a proposal of Jingle protocol for transport re-negotation, needed for OOB support in Gabble (See http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Jingle-renegotiation). He started to implement hyperactivity, a collaboration stress-testing tool (Ticket #5817).

Morgan Collett landed the fix for the presence service bug that prevented buddies from clustering around their shared activity due to signals firing in the wrong order (Ticket #5368); the patch exposed a UI issue in Sugar “snowflake” layout where the first buddy moved into the activity appears next to it, but subsequent buddies simply vanish off mesh view; they reappear when they leave the activity (Ticket #5904). Morgan also worked on a couple of other presence-server issues: blank names in mesh view and hex-key names in mesh view.

18. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta set up a Pootle project for Etoys, so that volunteers translators working on the various activities and Sugar can also work on Etoys as well. He added the memorize activity in Pootle, so that it can be translated by the volunteers. He fixed a problem which was preventing the Spanish translations from showing up in Pippy. (ticket #5504) And he helped set up translation teams for Bengali (India), Catalan, and Polish.

Localization into Pashto and Dari languages continues to advance. Dr. Habib Khan reports that his team has engaged Afghan graduate students of International Islamic University, in the localization endeavors. They have initiated this project with great enthusiasm but their end of semester examination have started and will end on January 20, so our hopes for early completion does not seem to be on schedule.

Arjun Sarwal and Bernie tested the Devanagari keyboard with the Lohit Hindi fonts. The keyboard and font rendering both seem to be working well. The Lohit Hindi Fonts package is expected to go into Update.1

19. Wireless driver: Dave Woodhouse did some more work on the libertas driver, but he is letting the earlier batch of patches land and the dust settle before he starts again on that in earnest. It is mostly cleanups to be done now—the real fixes and the “dangerous” stuff are mostly behind us. Dave wants to investigate the suspend/resume behavior—that was working OK in his testing but we’ve seen two bug reports that cause him to suspect the driver might be getting it wrong.

Dave is also trying to get up to speed on school server stuff to fully understand what to expect when he gets to Mongolia next week (other than -20°C).

20. Rainbow: Michael Stone closed many bugs and contributed many patches. Along with Bernie, Phil, Simon, and Marco, we have now provided or improved proposed fixes or work-arounds for all of the known serious issues with Rainbow for Update.1 including:

• the 'rainbow spool persistence bug' (Ticket #5033); • the 'SSL failure bug' (Ticket #5489); • the 'orphaned files bug' (Ticket #5637); • the 'uid reclamation bug' (Ticket #2527); • the '/home/olpc permissions bug' (Ticket #5320); and • the 'sudo vs. su bug' (Ticket #5537).

Michael also assisted Phil Bordelon with the 'orphaned previews bug' (Ticket #5929) and he offered Daniel and Chih-yu an overview of our implementation of activity isolation so that we can begin to construct a test plan for the isolation features scheduled for Update.1. Finally, Michael assisted Sjoerd, Ben, and Erik in their debugging efforts.

Marcus Leech’s (Nortel) contributions to our efforts have also been invaluable.

21. Activities: Joshua Minor made a new activity called Speak. It is a “talking face” for the XO laptop. Anything you type will be spoken aloud using the XO's speech synthesizer, espeak. You can adjust the accent, rate and pitch of the voice as well as the shape of the eyes and mouth. This is a fun way to experiment with the speech synthesizer, learn to type or just have fun making a funny face for your XO. Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speak for details. (Josh sends thanks to Arjun Sarwal, Hemant Goyal and Bernardo Innocenti for their help.)

Arjun Sarwal continues to improve the Measure activity. He is working towards making the code scalable (so that it is easy to add more graphs, more views, etc.). The mix of having a large drawing area and a lot of real-time processing of data, combined with the goal of a fast response time is a challenging (and interesting) balance of experimentation and optimization.

The Measure page in the wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure) now incorporates easy to follow instructions to build one's own low cost probe for connecting sensors to the XO. The “flavor of the month” of Measure Learning activities is “Temperature.” Arjun encourages educators / teachers / enthusiasts to try building their own low-cost temperature sensing probe by following the directions given on the page and get in touch (arjun AT laptop.org) in case of any problems.

In a related effort, Arjun is interested in organizing an OLPC-Health interest group. All interested in participating towards developing medical and health applications around the XO should join the “Library” mailing list and add their names to the volunteers section of the Health wiki page (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health). Participation is invited from all: hardware developers, programmers, doctors, biologists, etc. A conference call is planned for the last week of January.

22. E-books: Dr. Khan reports progress on converting all the text books written on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad into e-books. The following text books of Federal Ministry of Education for Grade I for use in English and Urdu mediums of instruction are complete:

• My English Reader for Grade I • Islamic Studies (Shaoor-e-Islamyat) Grade I • Social Studies for Grade I • Science for Grade I

These text books are now waiting a review by the Department of Education, IIU. After incorporating the suggestion we will make them available on XO library.

23. Curriki: Lauren Klein and SJ Klein started working with Joshua Marks and the group-development team at Curriki to design a space and interfaces for OLPC collections on their site. Joshua is rolling out a “groups” feature that will allow custom design of individual portals within the next week that will make implementing a “compile for XO” button and an OLPC start page easier.

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.

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

Laptop News 2008-01-12

1. Mongolia is the first beneficiary of the Give One Get One program. Laptops have begun to arrive and a team from OLPC, including Carla Gomez Monroy, Jan Jungclaus, and Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin are on the ground to help with the initial deployment. Dave Woodhouse will be heading to Ulan Bator to help with the School Server later this month.

2. Las Vegas: Nicholas Negroponte gave the keynote at CES' new program entitled, “Technology and Emerging Countries: Advancing Development through Technology Investments.” He spoke about learning, constructionism, and the long history of thinking about thinking, drawing heavily on Seymour Papert's life work.

3. Cambridge: Walter also met with the X-Prize Foundation Founder and Chairman Peter Diamandis. They discussed two competitions that are in the planning stages: (1) development of a low-cost rural water/power/communications station; and (2) development of a high-impact global learning intervention. The incentive in both competitions is a US $10M prize. OLPC has offered to help define the goals and metrics for the prizes, as there is obvious synergy with our mission in both cases.

4. Las Vegas: Michail Bletsas delivered the keynote address at the 5th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC); his talk was about the XO's networking architecture.

5. In the news: Two topics dominated the press coverage of OLPC this week: the Intel departure; and the Microsoft plans for the XO. The Intel departure, which ultimately boiled down to a lack of trust, as been discussed ad nauseum; Ivan Krstić blog provides a good overview of the Microsoft plans from the OLPC perspective (Please visit http://radian.org/notebook/paradox-of-choice).

6. Embedded controller: Richard Smith time working on the SCI mask corruption problem (Ticket #5467). This was a critical bug because the root cause was problems with the EC command implementation. Richard thinks he has finally bested the gremlins: The original implementation depended on interrupts that were being lost; as a result, the EC would at best fail to process the data correctly and at worst completely stop processing commands. The solution in this case is to eliminate these interrupts altogether, as they are unnecessary. Richard implemented a polling scheme instead; the code is passing all his tests and is faster even in its currently unoptimized state. Faster is good because the host issues lots of EC commands on the way into and out of suspend, where every millisecond is critical. Richard is asking that anyone interested in helping us test his solution to upgrade to a firmware release Q2D08A (or higher).

7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2D08 firmware with a long list of “fit and finish” improvements and minor bug fixes. Details can be found in the wiki (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_q2d08).

8. SD Card support: One nagging problem has been the performance of the SD card on resume. Mitch took time this week to study the problem. He determined that resume can be done in 25 to 200 mS, depending on the card used. The mean value from a sample of seven different cards was 70 mS.

9. Batteries: Some reports of batteries not charging are coming in from the field. The bulk of the data reports (from olpc-logbat) are almost identical: the XO declares the battery fully charged and quits charging when its really not. Subsequently, when you use your laptop on battery power, it shuts off with no warning, because the voltage dips below the critical level but the capacity is still >15%. In some cases, the shutdown is very quick (seconds) and in others the battery gets enough charge to last between 10 and 20 minutes.

Richard made some additions to batman.fth that allow the user to reset the percent-full field to back to “low”, thus causing the EC code try to recharge. One person with battery-charge problems has used this utility: the data show the voltage on the battery jumping from low (5V to 6V ) to >= 7.4V (the “full” threshold) in the span of 10 seconds. Repeating the test three times showed one span where the battery actually began to charge normally for a while, but then jumped to full. The EC code seems to be operating properly, but something is causing the battery resistance to suddenly rise. This could be either a battery problem or a manufacturing defect in the XO. Something as simple as a bad connection in the charge path could cause this behavior.

10. School Sserver: The school-server software platform is currently being extended by John Watlington to support multiple servers, each providing internet access to the mesh on all three wireless mesh channels. A two-server system was manually configured at 1CC (and in John's home, a much quieter wireless environment) and largely worked. Its configuration has been automated; a new school-server build is in early testing and will be released in the next few days.

The rush on this is the desire to provide access to a common library to a trial of two schools in Mongolia this January, with upcoming deployments elsewhere following as soon as we have Active Antennas in volume. Each school of 500 children will have three servers providing backup storage and access to a large (700 GB) local content library. We shipped off six servers (the lowest end SOHO server from a leading PC manufacturer) to the trials this week after reconfiguring them in Cambridge. Additional machines are being acquired locally and will be tested.

The latest version of ejabberd (2.0) has been successfully packaged by Collabora, configured and integrated into a school server build, and is now being tested. The configuration still requires manual intervention and scalability and stability are serious-enough concerns that we continue to explore alternatives.

11. Testing: Chih-yu Chao worked on testing various builds (Joyride 1489 and 1520, and Update.1 681). This included some localization testing, one-hour smoke tests, and content bundles (both activities and library). She also spent some time becoming familiar with school server and created test cases for suspend/resume. Kim Quirk spent some time in localization, keyboard testing, and upgrade testing for the Ship2.2 Build 656. Remember to keep an eye on Test Group Release Notes page in the wiki for information on the latest releases (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Group_Release_Notes).

12. Wireless testing: We are currently testing Build 674 with wireless firmware 5.110.22.p1. Build 674 has all the latest wireless driver modifications from David Woodhouse, which seems to improve stability and performance. The only obvious issue with Build 674 is the inability to associate with WEP-encrypted access points the Sugar user interface (we can make connections from the command line). Wireless firmware 5.110.22.p1 fixes a rare wireless hang that happens when a link loss condition occurs while the radio is scanning and also rearranges the relative priorities of the internal firmware threads. Thanks to the team at Marvell Pune and Ricardo Carrano for all the hard work.

13. Support: Adam Holt and the team of many support volunteers continue to improve systems and documentation. And they continue to make progress with the phone bank system. There are regular Sunday afternoon 4PM (EST) calls—if you are interested in joining, please get in touch with Adam for the details (holt at laptop.org).

Adam organized another very successful support meeting last Sunday; 24 people showed up (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_meetings).

Participation by guest developers drive the enthusiasm at the meetings. Thanks to Kim Quirk, Arjun Sarwal, and Bernie Innocenti for their participation. By the end of week, our Support list now contains 51 subscribers. Support volunteer Frank Barcenas, who is based in Lima, Peru started only four days ago and is doing a great job, even without an XO!

Adam also recruited likely volunteers for documentation and QA. Felice Gardner and SJ Klein have been helping here. Professor Lee Tesdell at Minnesota State Univ will likely work with us and his entire class improving documentation of particular topics. Similarly, Adam helped Arjun engage with science teachers and curriculum developers to develop further interest in the Measure activity.

Adam also resolved troubling tickets by phone, calling donors directly—he focused on especially confused donors who either require RMAs or were accidentally block our incoming emails.

Adam has been helping to navigate through our parts/repair story, towards setting up perhaps 10 volunteer-driven repair centers around the USA and Canada—a model that could be replicated elsewhere.

Finally, Adam continues to work with Matthew O’Gorman and Joe Phigan on a phone server. Matthew should have the voice prompts recorded ASAP, so we can begin training volunteers.

14. Sugar medley: Tomeu Vizoso worked on fixing bugs this week in anticipation of the Update.1 release. He focused on the Sugar shell, the Journal, the datastore, and Read activity. Almost all of his patches have already been tested in the Joyride builds and will pushed into an Update.1 build soon.

Reinier Heeres has written a patch to improve the palette positioning logic so that palettes don't end up outside the visible screen (Ticket #5944) and he has included support for ellipsis ('...') in long lines (Ticket #4562). Finally a new version of evince was built to reduce the memory usage for pdf files with images and a patch by Tomeu was included to make the fit-to-width button work.

Marco Pesenti Gritti tracked down the problem with the Turkish locale that was causing crashes at system startup. He's pushed a work around in the builds. A numpy hacker helped to track down the real cause, it looks like problem in pygtk or Python. Marco worked with Reinier on the palette positioning problem and together they landed multiple fixes. Marco built xulrunner 1.9 beta2. We are going to test it and see if it's stable enough to go in Update.1. He reviewed numerous patches from Simon Schampijer, Reinier and Tomeu. [These guys rock.] There was lots of bug triaging to ensure fixes for the most urgent problems land in the build as soon as possible. We’ve been testing all the changes in Joyride to avoid regressions. Altogether, we have managed to cut down the list of Sugar core bugs, especially the blockers. And in the spirit of “if you want something done, find a busy person”, Marco took over gtkmozembed maintenance upstream, to ensure we will have a sane API to migrate to when xpcom is deprecated in Mozilla 3.0.

15. Software Medley: Chris Ball is working on the last power management feature for Update.1—a logfile to record information about how often and why we suspend/resume, together with battery status information. Getting this log back from the field will help turn the current set of timeouts into something more principled, and will give Richard Smith useful power data as well.

Andres Salomon worked on the touchpad driver and Debian packaging of some OLPC packages.

Bernie Innocenti mostly worked on bug squashing for Update.1. Specifically, the pen-tablet not working, permission problems in /home/olpc, and providing automatic login in the console so that we can finally disable the root and olpc passwords. Bernie also helped SJ with the hard drive images for Mongolia, and Arjun with the Measure activity redesign. He and Walter debugged console keymaps for Spanish and Portuguese and Albert Cahalan contributed a nice console font that we may try to integrate.

As a pet project, Bernie started to port an “oldskool” activity called SoundTracker to the laptop. He is in touch with the original authors for help.

David Woodhouse looked at the unionfs patches which are making their way upstream and likely to land in 2.6.25. Will probably land these in the Fedora kernel some time soon and play with them some more. They work without any changes to the underlying file systems, which means that whiteouts (where the “upper” layers of the filesystem actively remove an object that exists in a “lower” layer) are a bit of a hack. But that can be fixed. The design goal of requiring nothing special from the filesystem makes sense and we can do it nicely; it just hasn't been done yet.

Dave reluctantly reduced the log level at which the (mostly harmless) CRC failure messages are printed by JFFS2. Need to introduce a new “root-only” write threshold and expose all the thresholds through sysfs.

The short-term fix Dave made for SD seems like it might be helpful, according to Tomeu's comment in Ticket #4013. The device goes away and then a 'new' device comes back on suspend/resume. It doesn't help if you're running with your rootfs on the device, or if you have an open file on it while you suspend, but it looks like it does help a lot of use cases. We'll need to work with Marvell to figure out the delays in card detection on resume. They claim it doesn't take as long as our measurements show.

16. Build system: Reinier has been working on a new build announcer script in Python (http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer). As an improvement over Bert Freudenberg's script, it can collect ChangeLog entries from package versions that have not appeared in a build, and gets ChangeLogs for rpms directly from Koji. Dennis Gilmore spent most the week syncing Joyride and Update.1, trying to chase up missing SRPMS and make sure things are getting better. He also spent time talking to people at Fudcon about OLPC; there were quite a few Give-One-Get-One participants showing real interest in the XO. Dennis will be doing a session on the XO over the weekend.

Early in the week, Jim Gettys was spooked by some build problems we were having: we had later packages in Update.1 than Joyride, something that should never occur. Dennis tracked this down to a mistagging. We are now getting very close to having a build together, built consistently and reproducibly, that is close enough to Update.1 to start serious testing.

17. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes designed a proposal of Jingle protocol for transport re-negotation, needed for OOB support in Gabble (See http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Jingle-renegotiation). He started to implement hyperactivity, a collaboration stress-testing tool (Ticket #5817).

Morgan Collett landed the fix for the presence service bug that prevented buddies from clustering around their shared activity due to signals firing in the wrong order (Ticket #5368); the patch exposed a UI issue in Sugar “snowflake” layout where the first buddy moved into the activity appears next to it, but subsequent buddies simply vanish off mesh view; they reappear when they leave the activity (Ticket #5904). Morgan also worked on a couple of other presence-server issues: blank names in mesh view and hex-key names in mesh view.

18. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta set up a Pootle project for Etoys, so that volunteers translators working on the various activities and Sugar can also work on Etoys as well. He added the memorize activity in Pootle, so that it can be translated by the volunteers. He fixed a problem which was preventing the Spanish translations from showing up in Pippy. (ticket #5504) And he helped set up translation teams for Bengali (India), Catalan, and Polish.

Localization into Pashto and Dari languages continues to advance. Dr. Habib Khan reports that his team has engaged Afghan graduate students of International Islamic University, in the localization endeavors. They have initiated this project with great enthusiasm but their end of semester examination have started and will end on January 20, so our hopes for early completion does not seem to be on schedule.

Arjun Sarwal and Bernie tested the Devanagari keyboard with the Lohit Hindi fonts. The keyboard and font rendering both seem to be working well. The Lohit Hindi Fonts package is expected to go into Update.1

19. Wireless driver: Dave Woodhouse did some more work on the libertas driver, but he is letting the earlier batch of patches land and the dust settle before he starts again on that in earnest. It is mostly cleanups to be done now—the real fixes and the “dangerous” stuff are mostly behind us. Dave wants to investigate the suspend/resume behavior—that was working OK in his testing but we’ve seen two bug reports that cause him to suspect the driver might be getting it wrong.

Dave is also trying to get up to speed on school server stuff to fully understand what to expect when he gets to Mongolia next week (other than -20°C).

20. Rainbow: Michael Stone closed many bugs and contributed many patches. Along with Bernie, Phil, Simon, and Marco, we have now provided or improved proposed fixes or work-arounds for all of the known serious issues with Rainbow for Update.1 including:

• the 'rainbow spool persistence bug' (Ticket #5033); • the 'SSL failure bug' (Ticket #5489); • the 'orphaned files bug' (Ticket #5637); • the 'uid reclamation bug' (Ticket #2527); • the '/home/olpc permissions bug' (Ticket #5320); and • the 'sudo vs. su bug' (Ticket #5537).

Michael also assisted Phil Bordelon with the 'orphaned previews bug' (Ticket #5929) and he offered Daniel and Chih-yu an overview of our implementation of activity isolation so that we can begin to construct a test plan for the isolation features scheduled for Update.1. Finally, Michael assisted Sjoerd, Ben, and Erik in their debugging efforts.

Marcus Leech’s (Nortel) contributions to our efforts have also been invaluable.

21. Activities: Joshua Minor made a new activity called Speak. It is a “talking face” for the XO laptop. Anything you type will be spoken aloud using the XO's speech synthesizer, espeak. You can adjust the accent, rate and pitch of the voice as well as the shape of the eyes and mouth. This is a fun way to experiment with the speech synthesizer, learn to type or just have fun making a funny face for your XO. Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Speak for details. (Josh sends thanks to Arjun Sarwal, Hemant Goyal and Bernardo Innocenti for their help.)

Arjun Sarwal continues to improve the Measure activity. He is working towards making the code scalable (so that it is easy to add more graphs, more views, etc.). The mix of having a large drawing area and a lot of real-time processing of data, combined with the goal of a fast response time is a challenging (and interesting) balance of experimentation and optimization.

The Measure page in the wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure) now incorporates easy to follow instructions to build one's own low cost probe for connecting sensors to the XO. The “flavor of the month” of Measure Learning activities is “Temperature.” Arjun encourages educators / teachers / enthusiasts to try building their own low-cost temperature sensing probe by following the directions given on the page and get in touch (arjun AT laptop.org) in case of any problems.

In a related effort, Arjun is interested in organizing an OLPC-Health interest group. All interested in participating towards developing medical and health applications around the XO should join the “Library” mailing list and add their names to the volunteers section of the Health wiki page (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health). Participation is invited from all: hardware developers, programmers, doctors, biologists, etc. A conference call is planned for the last week of January.

22. E-books: Dr. Khan reports progress on converting all the text books written on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad into e-books. The following text books of Federal Ministry of Education for Grade I for use in English and Urdu mediums of instruction are complete:

• My English Reader for Grade I • Islamic Studies (Shaoor-e-Islamyat) Grade I • Social Studies for Grade I • Science for Grade I

These text books are now waiting a review by the Department of Education, IIU. After incorporating the suggestion we will make them available on XO library.

23. Curriki: Lauren Klein and SJ Klein started working with Joshua Marks and the group-development team at Curriki to design a space and interfaces for OLPC collections on their site. Joshua is rolling out a “groups” feature that will allow custom design of individual portals within the next week that will make implementing a “compile for XO” button and an OLPC start page easier.

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.


Press

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