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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 2008-01-19=
=Laptop News 2008-01-26=


1. Davos, Switzerland: Nicholas reports that the World Economic Forum, usually a storm, was a hurricane this year, with gale winds of press and interest in OLPC. The Intel debacle dominated the debate far less than he anticipated. The sheer existence of OLPC was marveled. The traditional Saturday-morning breakfast debate, at which Intel and OLPC have battled fiercely in the past, was not attended by Craig Barrett.
1. Cambridge: A third Learning Workshop was held at OLPC this past week. There was excellent attendance and participation; a real network of laptop learning activists is forming. Workshop attendees are not merely listening but are contributing to the conceptual basis of practice in schools and communities. There was a blend between the conceptual and practical concepts, and the localities beginning will help innovate the learning environments and communities of the 21st century. The presentation by Dr. Felton Earls and Maya Carlson of the Harvard School of Public Health on participatory surveys and indicators for community development as well as their work in Tanzania and Chicago was inspirational. The Learning team of Edith Ackermann, Ed Baafi, Fatimata Seye Sylla, Juliano Bittencourt, Elana Langer, Julain Daily, Cynthia Solomon, Alice Cavallo, and David Cavallo contributed mightily. Special thanks for support especially to Felice Gardner, as well as Tracy Price and Jennifer Amaya. As always, a highlight is the Activity Open House where developers demonstrate their activities on the XO.


2. OLPC and Brightstar, along with Quanta, are reviewing current inventory and the immediate production schedule to fulfill the balance of the Give One Get One program. At present their is a gap in supply, given the need for US keyboards and power supplies—most of the remaining “Get” laptops will likely ship in March.
2. G1G1: During the reconciliation process of the “get” laptops shipped during Give One Get One, a number of unfulfilled order records were uncovered. The OLPC team has been working hard with our partners to resolve all open issues. We expect another ~5000 XO laptops will be shipped on Monday. The remaining orders pose an extra challenge as they either have incomplete or no shipping and contact information. If you have not yet received your XO laptop, you should be getting an individualized email that addresses your specific situation. If you are scheduled to receive your laptop next week, you will also be getting a follow-up email with tracking information. We'll be adding additional phone lines and shifting agents to reduce wait times. A further reconciliation of the data will be conducted this week, although hopeful, we can anticipate additional incomplete orders. Our apologies for these delays.


3. School server: John Watlington reports that the school server software is moving along: a new release, including web caching and minor bug fixes, is being tested and should be ready by Monday. This release will also allow web filtering—we plan to use DansGuardian for now—to be easily enabled. Countries will be responsible for selecting and providing a list of filtered sites/content, but there are a number of commercial suppliers of suitable lists as a starting point. Upcoming development will concentrate on a short-term laptop backup solution, the activation server, packaging the multicast updater that has been so useful this week in Mongolia, and improving the ease of configuration somewhat.
3. Ulaan Baatar: Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, Carla Gomez Monroy, Jan Jungclaus, and RedHat’s David Woodhouse are working hard to set up a structure that can provide sustainability to the project in Mongolia such that it can spread it throughout the country. On Wednesday, the Minister of Education visited the school for the “laptop hand out” event. On Friday, an optical-fiber cable was set up, in spite of the extreme low temperatures; on Saturday, the schools were connected to the Internet. David has been working with a group of local technical people on the servers and Internet set up infrastructure as well as on configuration. John Watlington has been providing support remotely from OLPC.


We have painfully discovered the limitations of the mesh and current collaborative software in Mongolia, where the convolution of the number of laptops with bugs #5335 (more mDNS traffic than expected) and #5007 (mesh repeats multicast too much) make the perfect storm, which prevents anybody from using the network. We will continue to improve the mesh performance, but clear guidelines are needed as to what network infrastructure to deploy under what conditions. Once a certain density of students is exceeded, a wired backbone and conventional access points will be required.
We have been meeting almost every evening with the strategic team of the Ministry of Education to provide feedback and sort out challenges. We met yesterday with the Ministry of Education team, teachers, principals, ICTA, content team and pilot research team to provide detailed feedback of how the project is going so far and to bring up things to be considered for the short and long terms.


4. Embedded controller: Richard Smith finished up a round of EC code changes for Update.1 and released PQ2D10, which went into system firmware Q2D10. This firmware should enable safe suspend/resume operation and it should be better at handling games key events as they wakeup the laptop from suspend. Richard won't claim the bugs (Ticket #6105: “New EC firmware in Q2D09 seems wonky”) are fixed until it has widespread testing. The keyboard handling code is quite complex. Richard also modified the firmware build scripts so that they will build a bootfw rpm package for inclusion into Joyride.
Teachers are putting their hearts into the program. They had their first sessions with the children. Parents, too, have shown support. And the children, of course, love it. The Constructionist model of learning has found wide-spread support within the MoE.


5. Batteries: Carla Gomez Monroy reports from Mongolia that the batteries are not lasting as long as expected. The extreme cold was the first suspect. Richard had Carla collect data via olpc-logbat and ran some tests of his own in the freezer (which isn’t as cold as Ulaanbaatar). These data, along with a closer examination of the GoldPeak data sheet, make it pretty obvious that batteries don't work so well in the –20 to –40C range. The extreme cold makes the output voltage drop considerably. The result is that at around the 50% capacity mark the voltage is so low that the low-voltage cutoff kicks in and shuts the laptop off. Richard does worry about when the children take their XO laptops outside while suspended; the power dissipation (and thus self-heating) is at its lowest. It may shut off. The question to work out with our battery vendors is that is it OK to de-rate the low-voltage shutoff when it’s so cold. Will this do any damage to the battery?
There are more photos (See [[Ulaanbaatar]]) in our wiki.


6. Testing: Chih-yu Chao spent most of the week on Update.1 testing and test-case development. Test cases include power management, suspend and ebook mode, activity isolation, network manager, scaling tests, and localization of content bundle. Please review and help execute these test cases ([[Update.1]]). Also the automated olpc-update feature was tested as part of the final testing for Ship.2-656.
4. School Server: John Watington reports that we have a new build which supports schools with multiple servers in a school and including a Jabber server! Build 150 was released, along with lengthy configuration notes (See [[XS Installing Software#OLPC XS 150]]).


Dennis Gilmore has released Update.1 Build 690 as the first release candidate for Update.1 (See http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/olpc/streams/update1/build690). Please give this build extensive testing. There have been some reports of WEP and WPA problems with this build—expect these issues to be addressed in a subsequent release candidate.
The configuration interface is still stone knife and bear skin, but functionality appears to be there. We hope to have a build improving the configuration process and adding web caching by the end of next week.


7. Schedule: Due to resources being diverted to help resolve some G1G1 issues; the Mongolia deployment; and the need to some bugs in OHM and security, the Update.1 release is slipping. The current schedule is reflected on the Roadmap page in the developer wiki (http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap). To help with triage, it would be great if people can look at the critical bugs that are currently assigned to this release as well as the bugs coming in from testing. Even more important: please help test! We can't say what the critical bugs are if we haven't found them yet!
David Woodhouse is in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia helping Carla Gomez Monroy deploy school servers along with the laptops. The servers we shipped from Cambridge have arrived and are being installed. David has been handling the difficult task of positioning two servers (with six antennae) to cover a three-floor school. He is also facing the need to upgrade the laptops right away to avoid a networking meltdown. The good news is that the school is finally connected to the Internet; we can assist from Cambridge.


8. Support: Adam Holt and his support group continue to battle the question of “when will I get my laptop.” We are working with our partners on a daily basis to get the numbers, order information, production information, shipping information, and to compose emails and set donor policies.
5: Firmware: Richard Smith fixed the “repeated game keys on resume bug” (Ticket #2401). During a resume, the main processor is not ready to receive key codes for about 100ms after the delivery of the SCI wakeup event. The EC dealt with this long delay badly. Fixing this should unblock ebook mode. Richard released a new EC code version that is available in Firmware Q2D09. This should show up in a signed Joyride build soon.


In Mongolia, Carla Gomez Monroy and Dave Woodhouse have been bringing up 1000 laptops, battling issues associated with RF connectivity, and the need to upgrade large numbers of laptops—because we rushed the initial order to Ulaanbaatar, we didn’t have time to update the build in the factory. We are also starting to get the first “support” issues for the laptops that have already been distributed to the children.
6. Battery issues: Richard did a large amount work on batman.fth; he added the ability to run a manual charge while watching voltage, current, and accumulated current registers. He received three laptops from the field with battery problems. One has a battery that just won't take a charge. The other two laptops won't recognize that the battery is present. Richard plans on tearing into these two machines next week to determine root cause. We need to discuss with Quanta what to do with problem batteries.


Adam organized another very successful Sunday conference-call for the support team. This week’s guest speakers were Anders Mogensen, who discussed his observations of OLPC from a recent visit to Nigeria, and Joshua Beal from Belkin, who discussed new power options and their potential deployment consequences. Their generosity in speaking to the support team, and answering all sorts of great questions, was exactly the refresher the team needed among the shipping madness dragging it down.
7. Schedules: Final testing for Ship2.2, Build 656, was held up this week as we tried to iron out some final details of the new process for “Unscheduled Software Release” (USR) (For those interested in process, please see [[Unscheduled software release process]]).


Adam restructured the support team to more efficiently deal with the scourge of billing/shipping issues flooding in from the Give One Get One program, focusing on “one basically good response” for all, which will include more detailed order tracking. Sandy Culver, Steve Holton, Greg Babbing, and Guynn Prince have been of exceptional help dealing with RMAs and “undeliverables.”
Update 1 is about to start the release process. Highlights include:
* suspend and resume is mostly, but not entirely implemented;
* Rainbow security is enabled;
* the Browse activity has been updated to use the technology in Firefox 3 Beta 2, which is significantly faster and better at memory usage. Innumerable bugs have been fixed. Performance is significantly improved. Memory and file leakage greatly improved.


9. Satellites: Michail Bletsas will be joining Thomas Jacobson and Roland Burger for a workshop at the upcoming Satellite 2008 conference in Washington DC on February 27 entitled: “Low-cost satellite Internet infrastructure to support education in remote and developing regions.” The goals of this informal workshop will be to gather and document design requirements and their justifications; to examine how current products might be used to meet them; and to identify areas where further research and development is needed. Exhibits-only registration (free if you use VIP code BOF) is all that is needed if you would like to join in the discussion.
Update.1RC1 (release candidate 1) is almost ready (Monday with luck). Joyride 1551 is very, very close to Update.1's contents, although it has some additional activities bundled in the base system that we do no plan to ship in Update.1. Please do test it, along with the new firmware version (Q2D09).


10. Mesh: Cramming 500 laptops under the same roof is a difficult (but tractable) engineering problem. We haven't done any testing of such deployment scenarios and Mongolia is not really the most convenient place for that testing. Despite that, common sense can still carry us a long way. We have set the limit of XO laptops to school servers to 180 (60 per channel in mesh mode)—after optimizing the laptop for “dense” deployment (which hasn't been a priority in our software development schedules). However, deploying more school servers under the same roof doesn't immediately translate to increased capacity, since school servers don't add spectrum. While a school server still costs several hundred dollars, it is more economical to install standard low-cost access points instead of multiple servers. (The OLPC mesh implementation was to maximize the “connected” time for sparse deployments (children in villages in Cambodia, rural schools in Rwanda) and to simplify and extend connectivity away from an access point.
We will then start a testing cycle:
* suspend-and-resume cycling for reliability—during the run up to mass production the laptop was found to be able to reliably suspend and resume at least 50,000 cycles (the length of the tests we were willing to tolerate). We need to ensure there are not software or firmware regressions in this area.
11. OLPC infrastructure: Ivan Krstić completely overhauled the public-facing infrastructure (wiki, static web, git, trac, hosting, mail, mailing lists). We are now in much better shape and will hopefully see less downtime on key systems such as dev.laptop.org.
* scaling tests—we need to ensure sane behavior of the systems in circumstances such as 300 children resuming their laptops all at once in the morning.
* verification of power use in different use states, on our power measurement systems;
* wireless driver testing and upgrade testing;
* testing with the school-server software;


12. Datastore: Ivan continues to work on a new DS specification that was the outcome of the datastore summit held at the OLPC office in Cambridge last week. He plans to have something to vet with the community in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Marco Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, and Eben Eliason spent a second week in Cambridge working through a number of design changes for the Sugar user experience that are potentially targeted for Update.2. More on those proposals soon.
RC2 (release candidate 2) will pick up additional translations and key bug fixes that missed RC1. The community is working to complete the Spanish translation, which was not complete by the string freeze date due to the holidays. There will therefore be a refresh of packages to complete the translations. Activity developers should only be picking up translations (and fixes for approved bugs).


13. Security: Nortel’s Marcus Leech continues his work on Rainbow, the isolation shell for the [[Bitfrost]] security mechanism. He has provided invaluable testing and patches, is developing a Rainbow filesystem verification tool, and generally being incredibly helpful in moving Rainbow development forward rapidly.
RC3 (release candidate 3) is intended to pick up critical bug fixes discovered during testing, and is the first candidate that is a real candidate for widespread release.


Michael Stone worked with Blake Setlow, visiting from Tower Research, to rewrite the nss-rainbow module. Together, they succeeded in removing the need for Rainbow to modify /etc/passwd. Now that they understand the interface and the required debugging techniques, Michael anticipates that /etc/group will straight-forward to handle. He hopes to make a new Rainbow release early in the Update.2 cycle incorporating these improvements.
Joyride will be reopened for the start of Update.2 development later
this week.


Michael also updated or rewrote lots of dated documentation:
8. Testing: Chih-yu Chao has created the Update.1 Test page, which outlines the major features and bug fixes of this release and links to the test cases to be run and their results (See [[Update.1]]). The goal is to have enough planning and information around this release to be able to ask for help from the development and test community over the next two weeks to really hammer on the release. If we can do it, this will be the first release that gets organized, methodical community testing. Keep tuned to your email for more information (testing, devel, sugar mailing lists).


* [[Taste the Rainbow]]
Yani Galanis is back from a short hiatus and has jumped right back into various wireless testing and debug activities. So far he is happy with David Woodhouse's rewrite of the wireless driver. He has fixed some problems with olpc-netstatus so it will accurate report the laptop's network and mesh configurations. He was able to get olpc-netlog working again (with Noah Kantrowitz's help) to zip up the logs, and olpc-netcapture to capture network traffic.
* http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/mstone/security
* http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/mstone/horizon


Finally, he researched several mechanisms for controlling and monitoring network access, including SELinux, NetLabel, and a sys_disablenetwork() patch. Experimentation will soon follow.
9. Support: This week, when all the laptops to Give One Get One donors were anticipated to have been delivered, Kim Quirk suggested we ask people to send email if they are still waiting for their laptop. When we hit 100 emails in less than a day, it became obvious that were dealing with a much larger problem than anyone at OLPC had imagined. This prompted some quick meetings between the companies involved in the order processing and distribution to try to get a handle on the scope of the problem and how to fix it fast. We learned about orders that could not be matched up between daily and monthly reports, orders that do not have enough information to ship, addresses that couldn't be verified, PO boxes, and miscellaneous other issues—about 10% of the total order volume. Adam Holt's support gang (up to 55 people now!) were inundated by mid-week with donor information requests, as was the Donor Services 800 number. Adam recruited two of the volunteers, Sandy Culver and Steve Holton, to join Greg Babbin and Adam to access the shipping database to help answer these requests.


14. Licensing: Jon Phillips, Rebecca Rojer, and a team from Creative Commons have put together an illustrated primer to “Sharing Creative Works” (See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works). Jon observes that “in developing for OLPC, we have had to learn much about licensing for kids and generally how to educate around the topics.” The primer will go into CC’s custom licensing activity, which allows for a disclaimer about child licensing, comics to describe the concepts, and a license chooser (See [[Creative Commons]]).
Thanks to the entire support team who have been working day and night to respond to these extra requests!


15. Activities: Arjan Sarwal completed his integration of sensor input into Turtle Art. He has created a temporary fork called “Turtle Art with sensors” that included a new palette containing sensor blocks. It will be made available for download on the [[Activities]] page this weekend.
10. Datastore: Ivan Krstić ran a Journal/datastore summit at OLPC this week. In attendance through out the week were Marco Pesenti Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, Eben Eliason, Erik Blankinship, and Bert Freudenberg. A number of other members of the core team and the community joined periodically. It was a very productive week: the team nailed down almost all the details required before a first pass at implementation can begin. But before we do so, and while we continue conversations about the new API, Ivan will publish specification in the next few weeks for a round of public discussion. Look forward to a new object model, a refined set of interactions, and new features such as versioning and action-based journal entries.


Arjan also undertook some experiments with the Measure activity with high- school students at the Boston “Fab Lab.” Children were introduced to the sensor concept and they caught on quite well. They arranged themselves into groups worked on projects: (A) using a touch sensor switch to count the number of times people enter through a particular door and display it in the form of a bar graph in Turtle Art;(B) plotting the temperature vs time graph in the form of points by using a temperature sensor connected to the XO laptop; and (C) making a turtle draw a smiling face when a high note was played and a sad face when the note was low note was played. Thanks to Edward Baafi for his help in the session.
11. Sugar activities: Arjun Sarwal incorporated sensor input into Turtle Art this week. One can control any aspect of the Turtle's motion based on sensor input. The next step is to integrate the concept into a Turtle Art “block” (See [[Measure#Sensor Input into Turtle Art]]).


Manusheel Gupta, Marco Gritti, and Tomeu Vizoso modified the Read activity to support DJVU and the TIFF format. Read activity can now be easily extended to support the other common formats.
Arjan has been talking to educators and teachers how they can organize some activities around the Measure Activity. He has also spoke with representatives of the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) chapter who have made a video documentary of experiments with sound using the Measure Activity (See [[Illinois Math and Science Academy Chapter]]).


Manu also developed a framework and ideas for implementation of a spreasheet activity. With input from Jim Gettys and Eben Eliason, he has started an implementation based upon the GNumeric codebase. Manu be discussing implementation ideas with Jody Goldberg from GNumeric Team this week. Other people who are interested in working on the activity should please chime in.
Manusheel Gupta is investigating options for building a spreadsheet actvitiy for the XO. Python-powered spreadsheet (PPSS) seems to be a good choice for integrating into the Sugar environment, while perhaps pulling in some features from GNumeric. Eben Eliason will be discussing the ideas on the UI of the spreadsheet during the coming week. (See http://olivier.friard.free.fr/software/ppss/index.php).


16. Keyboards: Bernardo Innocenti gave a tutorial to Arjan and Manu on xkeyboard-config, xkb files and keyboard package maintenance. With Bernie’s help, Arjan made and sent three patches upstream this week. Together with Walter Bender, they make some final touches to the Devanagari and Armenian keyboards and made much progress on the Nepali keyboard layout. (In regard to the latter, we are exploring the use of Compose within the X Window System as an alternative to SCIM.) Walter also roughed out Khmer and French keyboard layouts this week (See [[OLPC Keyboard layouts#OLPC keyboard layouts]]).
Simon Schampijer fixed an error in the download handling within the Browse activity (Ticket #6018). Dan Williams and Simon finally think we have a good solution for “airplane mode”, e.g., operation with the radio off. A new network manager went into Joyride-1548 and the sugar rpm is building.


17. Localization: Dr. Habib Khan reports from Islamabad that Salman Minhas and Waqas Toor are progressing on Dari localization. Dari language support is completed in XO core, XO bundle, and Update.1; Etoys and Packaging are remaining. The strings in Pootle are now 100% translated in Dari language. Translation in Pashto is 88% completed. The XO core, Update.1, and Packaging are completed; Etoys and XO bundle strings that will follow next. Undaunted by a Pootle bug that was preventing them from committing strings in Pashto, Salman and Waqas continue to work together with Afghan volunteers and hope to accomplish the localization work in the near future.
Simon does not really understand what happens in regard to reports that Browse is running slow after an update to Update.1 (Ticket #6046) (as opposed to a clean install).


A translation of an XO laptop user manual into the Dari and Pashto languages was completed this week by our Afghan volunteers Osman and Sohail. We appreciate their commitment and hard work. Next week, the OLPC Pakistan team will give it a trial with teachers from an Afghan local school in Islamabad. Their review and feed back will help them finalize the manual.
Eva Schroth successfully conducted an interview using the XO laptop’s Record activity: after modifying some constants, she was able to record a one-hour conversation.


18. Accessibility: Jutta Treviranus, from the University of Toronto, and Cynthia Waddell, executive director of the International Centre for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI) and the government services accessibility expert for the United Nations Global Alliance for Inclusive ICTs, would like to get involved in our efforts to make the OLPC accessible. Jutta will try to organize a meet up of interested parties in the coming months. In parallel, Rob Taylor, Codethink, contacted Jim Gettys in regard to an investigation of moving AT-SPI over to D-Bus (See http://live.gnome.org/GAP/AtSpiDbusInvestigation).
On the Etoys front, most of the core team members visited Poitiers, France this week; an IEEE conference called C5 was held. Many researchers, educators and Squeakers who are interested in collaboration and education met together and had interesting conversation. Bert, in response to Arjun’s Turtle Art demonstration, exposed some code in Etoys to enable the microphone level to be used as a data stream within scripts.


19. Library: SJ Klein led a review of repository and bundle use cases; topics included the metadata needed for better tracking and sharing of bundles and specific use cases from India and Nepal (Bryan Berry was present). Lauren Klein, Martin Langhoff, Moodle, and Joshua Marks, Curriki, joined a discussion of how children and teachers should upload materials to the local network and to the Web. Curriki has recently added groups features that allow for a customized OLPC portal for educators (under development). They have an 80%-localized Hindi version available that can be used off line in India.
12. System software medley: Giannis Galanis contributed network fixes to olpc-utils that solve two Update.1 blockers. Phil Bordelon sent a tool to cleanup orphan Journal previews, which was also an Update.1 blocker.


Regarding metadata, it was recommended that bundles should include: author, license, and URL. A new .info file format is being proposed and is open for discussion. Mako Hill and Dennis Gilmore have helped define how we should link to source information and identify contributors to bundles (See [[Bundle metadata]]).
FFM packaged up the python-gasp, an API wrapper for pygame for new programmers, which has just gone through the Fedora review process.


Collections that are in development and testing this week include: an updated set of books from ICDL, with Mongolian stories and higher-resolution images; a PDF version of Where There is No Doctor; three language versions of the Holocaust Encyclopedia; flash math and language materials from AJ van der Voort and the EFK foundation; and compressed high-resolution PDFs from the Internet Archive curated by Marcus Lucero.
Chris Ball worked on OHM timing code, and with Reinier Heeres on fixing “ebook mode” to work inside Rainbow.


20. Game Jams: Rut Jesus and perhaps others from OLPC Nederlands will be joining some 150 developers at the Nordic Game Jam next weekend in Copenhagen.
Reinier Heeres mostly worked on improving and build-testing of some bugfixes of last week. He also activated the new build announcer script, which needed a few minor fixes. For Sugar he fixed an issue with the stop button disappearing when rotating the screen (#5824), and for Read the eBook suspend problem (#1396).


21. Health: Adam Holt helped Arjun Sarwal to organize a group of volunteers around the theme of OLPC and health (See [[Health]]). Together, they have developed a leadership/coordination model to drive this initiative forward. Interest in Health collections has also spiked recently, with Arjan, David Greisen, Erica Frank, Anna Bershteyn, Mika Matsuzaki, Ian Daniher, and Seth Woodworth all working on related projects. Discussions around these topics are ongoing on the Library mailing list.
Andres Salomon mostly worked on the touchpad driver this week and has made great progress on fixing problems, and improving its behavior. More importantly, Andres work made clear we should use the tablet sensor in relative mode by default, a conceptual breakthrough that had eluded us. A test kernel with the new driver is available here:
http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/master/kernel-latest.i586.rpm.

13. Presence: Dafydd Harries spent most of this week again working on the Jabber server component. A large part of this was working out how to effectively expose the person/activity information that the component will store over XMPP. Dafydd thinks he has a reasonable protocol; he plans to set up a test server that we can measure performance against.

Robert McQueen attended an introductory conference call with Ivan and Jon Herzog about collaboration and security; they are planning a specification-writing fest in late February.

Morgan Collett has been going through the wiki getting the references to Presence, Telepathy, and Tubes up to date, and working on a more
comprehensive reference for Presence Service. Morgan also modified Chat to make sure web links copied to the clipboard can be pasted in Write, Web location bar, and Terminal (Ticket #6066). That patch will land when the Spanish translation of Chat is complete.

Guillaume Desmottes continued work on Hyperactivity, a collaboration
stress-testing tool (Ticket #5817). It is now able to create/join/leave activities, set up and use D-Bus tubes. Guillaume started to test Salut using it and discovered some interesting bugs; most of them are already fixed.

14. Localization: Bernie Innocenti has been doing some integration work with Manusheel Gupta on Devanagari input support, but it seems there's more work to do, especially in the Write activity. Bernie met with Lidet Tilahun for a roundup on our Ethiopian support, and filed a bunch of bugs out of it. Lidet will contribute translations in Pootle.

Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Dari, Fula and Telugu. He also tracked down a problem in Pootle that was preventing him from updating the PO files in the XO Bundled project. This has been quite difficult to trace down. The rest of the week was spent on more mundane things:
* he polished and debugged the various helper scripts that is used to run Pootle more smoothly;
* he helped Simon cross check the list of languages that are given as options by the sugar-control-panel (In the process, they identified a few languages that would require new locales to be added to glibc in order to be supported);
* he helped a number of users get started with the translations; and
* he added Slider Puzzle to Pootle.

Dr. Habib Khan reports that localization into Pashto is in final phase and that after some confusion on the Pootle server in regard to Dari and Farsi, progress in being made there as well.

15. Build system: Dennis Gilmore submitted patches to rpm enabling support for the AMD Geode. He has done some work on koji in preparation for supporting us. Patches will be submitted next week for upstream inclusion. These add Geode support and allowing us to pull upstream builds into our instance. Once initial support is in koji, Dennis want to add support to allow .xo building. This would result in a side effect that we get a .src.rpm and .noarch.rpm out of the process

We will need to have a git tree setup that will mimic Fedora’s cvs for things that we keep out of Fedora.

Dennis and Michael Stone looked at possibly using livecd-tools for Update.2: what would be involved in it and if its worth the effort.

This week, Michael talked with Bernie, Scott, and Dennis on ways to improve build infrastructure, offered occasional questions in the Journal
summit, and diagnosed the 'upgrade-server can't download builds' bug.

Update.1 is mostly synced up with Joyride. There are a few small pieces that need to be finished. As noted, we are very close to having an Update.1

16. Content: The inclusion of the Doom activity in the wiki has sparked a healthy email discussion about content and filtering. Although heated at times, it has generally been productive. The gist of the debate revolves around the twin issues of (1) should OLPC be adjudicating what is appropriate content and (2) how should content be tagged such that children, parents, teachers, and others can make informed decisions about what content they access.

Suggestions have ranged from adopting “Terms of Use” such as those found on the Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu/terms) to fleshing out our guidelines ([[Activity guidelines]]) to making it easier for community members to search and sort favorites (requiring possible extentions to MediaWiki).

This discussion is by no means over, but please continue the thread on the olpc-open <olpc-open@lists.laptop.org> list rather than devel, which is intended for discussion of technical rather than policy topics.

17. OLPC Health: Arjun Sarwal continues his efforts to organize the community in medical and health applications around the XO laptop. He reports that we have a growing list of volunteers in three areas:
:(1) Creating a Library/repository of information that would be shipped on the XO laptop as part of the default software on it. This would be a ready reference for preliminary diagnosis of diseases and a reference for symptoms. This would also include general information on an array of topics such as hygiene, nutrition, balanced diets, etc.
:(2) Developing software that asks the user a series of questions and helps in a preliminary diagnosis. Links to useful websites and online portals.
:(3) Developing and using hardware peripherals that connect to the XO laptop. These include, but are not limited to the build-in camera (with the possibility of add-on optical elements; an EKG; and a pulse oxymeter.

18. Activity Handbook: Christoph Derndorfer reports that the first few chapters of an Activity Handbook are finished. The purpose of this handbook is to provide all the information needed in order to get started with software development for the OLPC XO. The current draft includes the first four chapters:
:1. Welcome to the Activity Handbook!
:2. Introduction to Sugar
:3. Preparation
:4. Sugar Basics

Christoph et alia will be expanding the handbook over the coming weeks to include chapters about using the Journal, collaboration, using the various XO input devices, and “Sugarizing” software. (Please see
http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook and
http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/upload/a/af/Handbook_20080113.pdf).

19. Hello World: In a related effort, Chris Hager and Jaume Nualart report that they have created two new tutorials (during a “pizza-and-beer” coding session) for creating Activities with PyGTK, one of them using Glade (See [[PyGTK/Hello World Tutorial]]).
Chris and Jaume are using activity.py as a wrapper, which loads the code and GTK interface from gtktest.py. This way, very little code is required to get a PyGTK Activity running in Sugar—just six lines in gtktest.py—and PyGTK Activities can run as standalone versions on any Linux system by default.

Example Bundles:
:http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/ba/Gtktest.xo
:http://wiki.laptop.org/images/0/02/Gtktest-glade.xo

20. Mongolia: Dave Woodhouse is in Mongolia setting up servers in two schools, which as been an educational experience. Firstly, the wireless penetration through the walls they have here to cope with temperatures of –40°C is fairly dismal—Dave reports that we are having to use a lot of active antennae to get the coverage we need. We're laying them out as if they were “normal” access points, to try to get coverage of all the rooms they'll be teaching the 2nd–5th grades in. Hopefully, the nature of the mesh will improve coverage.

To start with, each school will have five antennae, with two servers. That setup will be re-evaluated when it's fully deployed and tested in the classrooms. It is physically installed in one school so far, and fully
cabled (including CAT5 to the other rooms where they have computers). The other school should be similarly set up by the end of Monday.

21. Pakistan: Habib reports progress on the e-book project in Islamabad. Eight elementary text books based on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad have been made into e-text books.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 20:01, 26 January 2008

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 101840]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-01-26

1. Davos, Switzerland: Nicholas reports that the World Economic Forum, usually a storm, was a hurricane this year, with gale winds of press and interest in OLPC. The Intel debacle dominated the debate far less than he anticipated. The sheer existence of OLPC was marveled. The traditional Saturday-morning breakfast debate, at which Intel and OLPC have battled fiercely in the past, was not attended by Craig Barrett.

2. OLPC and Brightstar, along with Quanta, are reviewing current inventory and the immediate production schedule to fulfill the balance of the Give One Get One program. At present their is a gap in supply, given the need for US keyboards and power supplies—most of the remaining “Get” laptops will likely ship in March.

3. School server: John Watlington reports that the school server software is moving along: a new release, including web caching and minor bug fixes, is being tested and should be ready by Monday. This release will also allow web filtering—we plan to use DansGuardian for now—to be easily enabled. Countries will be responsible for selecting and providing a list of filtered sites/content, but there are a number of commercial suppliers of suitable lists as a starting point. Upcoming development will concentrate on a short-term laptop backup solution, the activation server, packaging the multicast updater that has been so useful this week in Mongolia, and improving the ease of configuration somewhat.

We have painfully discovered the limitations of the mesh and current collaborative software in Mongolia, where the convolution of the number of laptops with bugs #5335 (more mDNS traffic than expected) and #5007 (mesh repeats multicast too much) make the perfect storm, which prevents anybody from using the network. We will continue to improve the mesh performance, but clear guidelines are needed as to what network infrastructure to deploy under what conditions. Once a certain density of students is exceeded, a wired backbone and conventional access points will be required.

4. Embedded controller: Richard Smith finished up a round of EC code changes for Update.1 and released PQ2D10, which went into system firmware Q2D10. This firmware should enable safe suspend/resume operation and it should be better at handling games key events as they wakeup the laptop from suspend. Richard won't claim the bugs (Ticket #6105: “New EC firmware in Q2D09 seems wonky”) are fixed until it has widespread testing. The keyboard handling code is quite complex. Richard also modified the firmware build scripts so that they will build a bootfw rpm package for inclusion into Joyride.

5. Batteries: Carla Gomez Monroy reports from Mongolia that the batteries are not lasting as long as expected. The extreme cold was the first suspect. Richard had Carla collect data via olpc-logbat and ran some tests of his own in the freezer (which isn’t as cold as Ulaanbaatar). These data, along with a closer examination of the GoldPeak data sheet, make it pretty obvious that batteries don't work so well in the –20 to –40C range. The extreme cold makes the output voltage drop considerably. The result is that at around the 50% capacity mark the voltage is so low that the low-voltage cutoff kicks in and shuts the laptop off. Richard does worry about when the children take their XO laptops outside while suspended; the power dissipation (and thus self-heating) is at its lowest. It may shut off. The question to work out with our battery vendors is that is it OK to de-rate the low-voltage shutoff when it’s so cold. Will this do any damage to the battery?

6. Testing: Chih-yu Chao spent most of the week on Update.1 testing and test-case development. Test cases include power management, suspend and ebook mode, activity isolation, network manager, scaling tests, and localization of content bundle. Please review and help execute these test cases (Update.1). Also the automated olpc-update feature was tested as part of the final testing for Ship.2-656.

Dennis Gilmore has released Update.1 Build 690 as the first release candidate for Update.1 (See http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/olpc/streams/update1/build690). Please give this build extensive testing. There have been some reports of WEP and WPA problems with this build—expect these issues to be addressed in a subsequent release candidate.

7. Schedule: Due to resources being diverted to help resolve some G1G1 issues; the Mongolia deployment; and the need to some bugs in OHM and security, the Update.1 release is slipping. The current schedule is reflected on the Roadmap page in the developer wiki (http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap). To help with triage, it would be great if people can look at the critical bugs that are currently assigned to this release as well as the bugs coming in from testing. Even more important: please help test! We can't say what the critical bugs are if we haven't found them yet!

8. Support: Adam Holt and his support group continue to battle the question of “when will I get my laptop.” We are working with our partners on a daily basis to get the numbers, order information, production information, shipping information, and to compose emails and set donor policies.

In Mongolia, Carla Gomez Monroy and Dave Woodhouse have been bringing up 1000 laptops, battling issues associated with RF connectivity, and the need to upgrade large numbers of laptops—because we rushed the initial order to Ulaanbaatar, we didn’t have time to update the build in the factory. We are also starting to get the first “support” issues for the laptops that have already been distributed to the children.

Adam organized another very successful Sunday conference-call for the support team. This week’s guest speakers were Anders Mogensen, who discussed his observations of OLPC from a recent visit to Nigeria, and Joshua Beal from Belkin, who discussed new power options and their potential deployment consequences. Their generosity in speaking to the support team, and answering all sorts of great questions, was exactly the refresher the team needed among the shipping madness dragging it down.

Adam restructured the support team to more efficiently deal with the scourge of billing/shipping issues flooding in from the Give One Get One program, focusing on “one basically good response” for all, which will include more detailed order tracking. Sandy Culver, Steve Holton, Greg Babbing, and Guynn Prince have been of exceptional help dealing with RMAs and “undeliverables.”

9. Satellites: Michail Bletsas will be joining Thomas Jacobson and Roland Burger for a workshop at the upcoming Satellite 2008 conference in Washington DC on February 27 entitled: “Low-cost satellite Internet infrastructure to support education in remote and developing regions.” The goals of this informal workshop will be to gather and document design requirements and their justifications; to examine how current products might be used to meet them; and to identify areas where further research and development is needed. Exhibits-only registration (free if you use VIP code BOF) is all that is needed if you would like to join in the discussion.

10. Mesh: Cramming 500 laptops under the same roof is a difficult (but tractable) engineering problem. We haven't done any testing of such deployment scenarios and Mongolia is not really the most convenient place for that testing. Despite that, common sense can still carry us a long way. We have set the limit of XO laptops to school servers to 180 (60 per channel in mesh mode)—after optimizing the laptop for “dense” deployment (which hasn't been a priority in our software development schedules). However, deploying more school servers under the same roof doesn't immediately translate to increased capacity, since school servers don't add spectrum. While a school server still costs several hundred dollars, it is more economical to install standard low-cost access points instead of multiple servers. (The OLPC mesh implementation was to maximize the “connected” time for sparse deployments (children in villages in Cambodia, rural schools in Rwanda) and to simplify and extend connectivity away from an access point.

11. OLPC infrastructure: Ivan Krstić completely overhauled the public-facing infrastructure (wiki, static web, git, trac, hosting, mail, mailing lists). We are now in much better shape and will hopefully see less downtime on key systems such as dev.laptop.org.

12. Datastore: Ivan continues to work on a new DS specification that was the outcome of the datastore summit held at the OLPC office in Cambridge last week. He plans to have something to vet with the community in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Marco Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, and Eben Eliason spent a second week in Cambridge working through a number of design changes for the Sugar user experience that are potentially targeted for Update.2. More on those proposals soon.

13. Security: Nortel’s Marcus Leech continues his work on Rainbow, the isolation shell for the Bitfrost security mechanism. He has provided invaluable testing and patches, is developing a Rainbow filesystem verification tool, and generally being incredibly helpful in moving Rainbow development forward rapidly.

Michael Stone worked with Blake Setlow, visiting from Tower Research, to rewrite the nss-rainbow module. Together, they succeeded in removing the need for Rainbow to modify /etc/passwd. Now that they understand the interface and the required debugging techniques, Michael anticipates that /etc/group will straight-forward to handle. He hopes to make a new Rainbow release early in the Update.2 cycle incorporating these improvements.

Michael also updated or rewrote lots of dated documentation:

Finally, he researched several mechanisms for controlling and monitoring network access, including SELinux, NetLabel, and a sys_disablenetwork() patch. Experimentation will soon follow.

14. Licensing: Jon Phillips, Rebecca Rojer, and a team from Creative Commons have put together an illustrated primer to “Sharing Creative Works” (See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works). Jon observes that “in developing for OLPC, we have had to learn much about licensing for kids and generally how to educate around the topics.” The primer will go into CC’s custom licensing activity, which allows for a disclaimer about child licensing, comics to describe the concepts, and a license chooser (See Creative Commons).

15. Activities: Arjan Sarwal completed his integration of sensor input into Turtle Art. He has created a temporary fork called “Turtle Art with sensors” that included a new palette containing sensor blocks. It will be made available for download on the Activities page this weekend.

Arjan also undertook some experiments with the Measure activity with high- school students at the Boston “Fab Lab.” Children were introduced to the sensor concept and they caught on quite well. They arranged themselves into groups worked on projects: (A) using a touch sensor switch to count the number of times people enter through a particular door and display it in the form of a bar graph in Turtle Art;(B) plotting the temperature vs time graph in the form of points by using a temperature sensor connected to the XO laptop; and (C) making a turtle draw a smiling face when a high note was played and a sad face when the note was low note was played. Thanks to Edward Baafi for his help in the session.

Manusheel Gupta, Marco Gritti, and Tomeu Vizoso modified the Read activity to support DJVU and the TIFF format. Read activity can now be easily extended to support the other common formats.

Manu also developed a framework and ideas for implementation of a spreasheet activity. With input from Jim Gettys and Eben Eliason, he has started an implementation based upon the GNumeric codebase. Manu be discussing implementation ideas with Jody Goldberg from GNumeric Team this week. Other people who are interested in working on the activity should please chime in.

16. Keyboards: Bernardo Innocenti gave a tutorial to Arjan and Manu on xkeyboard-config, xkb files and keyboard package maintenance. With Bernie’s help, Arjan made and sent three patches upstream this week. Together with Walter Bender, they make some final touches to the Devanagari and Armenian keyboards and made much progress on the Nepali keyboard layout. (In regard to the latter, we are exploring the use of Compose within the X Window System as an alternative to SCIM.) Walter also roughed out Khmer and French keyboard layouts this week (See OLPC Keyboard layouts#OLPC keyboard layouts).

17. Localization: Dr. Habib Khan reports from Islamabad that Salman Minhas and Waqas Toor are progressing on Dari localization. Dari language support is completed in XO core, XO bundle, and Update.1; Etoys and Packaging are remaining. The strings in Pootle are now 100% translated in Dari language. Translation in Pashto is 88% completed. The XO core, Update.1, and Packaging are completed; Etoys and XO bundle strings that will follow next. Undaunted by a Pootle bug that was preventing them from committing strings in Pashto, Salman and Waqas continue to work together with Afghan volunteers and hope to accomplish the localization work in the near future.

A translation of an XO laptop user manual into the Dari and Pashto languages was completed this week by our Afghan volunteers Osman and Sohail. We appreciate their commitment and hard work. Next week, the OLPC Pakistan team will give it a trial with teachers from an Afghan local school in Islamabad. Their review and feed back will help them finalize the manual.

18. Accessibility: Jutta Treviranus, from the University of Toronto, and Cynthia Waddell, executive director of the International Centre for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI) and the government services accessibility expert for the United Nations Global Alliance for Inclusive ICTs, would like to get involved in our efforts to make the OLPC accessible. Jutta will try to organize a meet up of interested parties in the coming months. In parallel, Rob Taylor, Codethink, contacted Jim Gettys in regard to an investigation of moving AT-SPI over to D-Bus (See http://live.gnome.org/GAP/AtSpiDbusInvestigation).

19. Library: SJ Klein led a review of repository and bundle use cases; topics included the metadata needed for better tracking and sharing of bundles and specific use cases from India and Nepal (Bryan Berry was present). Lauren Klein, Martin Langhoff, Moodle, and Joshua Marks, Curriki, joined a discussion of how children and teachers should upload materials to the local network and to the Web. Curriki has recently added groups features that allow for a customized OLPC portal for educators (under development). They have an 80%-localized Hindi version available that can be used off line in India.

Regarding metadata, it was recommended that bundles should include: author, license, and URL. A new .info file format is being proposed and is open for discussion. Mako Hill and Dennis Gilmore have helped define how we should link to source information and identify contributors to bundles (See Bundle metadata).

Collections that are in development and testing this week include: an updated set of books from ICDL, with Mongolian stories and higher-resolution images; a PDF version of Where There is No Doctor; three language versions of the Holocaust Encyclopedia; flash math and language materials from AJ van der Voort and the EFK foundation; and compressed high-resolution PDFs from the Internet Archive curated by Marcus Lucero.

20. Game Jams: Rut Jesus and perhaps others from OLPC Nederlands will be joining some 150 developers at the Nordic Game Jam next weekend in Copenhagen.

21. Health: Adam Holt helped Arjun Sarwal to organize a group of volunteers around the theme of OLPC and health (See Health). Together, they have developed a leadership/coordination model to drive this initiative forward. Interest in Health collections has also spiked recently, with Arjan, David Greisen, Erica Frank, Anna Bershteyn, Mika Matsuzaki, Ian Daniher, and Seth Woodworth all working on related projects. Discussions around these topics are ongoing on the Library mailing list.

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# 101840]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-01-26

1. Davos, Switzerland: Nicholas reports that the World Economic Forum, usually a storm, was a hurricane this year, with gale winds of press and interest in OLPC. The Intel debacle dominated the debate far less than he anticipated. The sheer existence of OLPC was marveled. The traditional Saturday-morning breakfast debate, at which Intel and OLPC have battled fiercely in the past, was not attended by Craig Barrett.

2. OLPC and Brightstar, along with Quanta, are reviewing current inventory and the immediate production schedule to fulfill the balance of the Give One Get One program. At present their is a gap in supply, given the need for US keyboards and power supplies—most of the remaining “Get” laptops will likely ship in March.

3. School server: John Watlington reports that the school server software is moving along: a new release, including web caching and minor bug fixes, is being tested and should be ready by Monday. This release will also allow web filtering—we plan to use DansGuardian for now—to be easily enabled. Countries will be responsible for selecting and providing a list of filtered sites/content, but there are a number of commercial suppliers of suitable lists as a starting point. Upcoming development will concentrate on a short-term laptop backup solution, the activation server, packaging the multicast updater that has been so useful this week in Mongolia, and improving the ease of configuration somewhat.

We have painfully discovered the limitations of the mesh and current collaborative software in Mongolia, where the convolution of the number of laptops with bugs #5335 (more mDNS traffic than expected) and #5007 (mesh repeats multicast too much) make the perfect storm, which prevents anybody from using the network. We will continue to improve the mesh performance, but clear guidelines are needed as to what network infrastructure to deploy under what conditions. Once a certain density of students is exceeded, a wired backbone and conventional access points will be required.

4. Embedded controller: Richard Smith finished up a round of EC code changes for Update.1 and released PQ2D10, which went into system firmware Q2D10. This firmware should enable safe suspend/resume operation and it should be better at handling games key events as they wakeup the laptop from suspend. Richard won't claim the bugs (Ticket #6105: “New EC firmware in Q2D09 seems wonky”) are fixed until it has widespread testing. The keyboard handling code is quite complex. Richard also modified the firmware build scripts so that they will build a bootfw rpm package for inclusion into Joyride.

5. Batteries: Carla Gomez Monroy reports from Mongolia that the batteries are not lasting as long as expected. The extreme cold was the first suspect. Richard had Carla collect data via olpc-logbat and ran some tests of his own in the freezer (which isn’t as cold as Ulaanbaatar). These data, along with a closer examination of the GoldPeak data sheet, make it pretty obvious that batteries don't work so well in the –20 to –40C range. The extreme cold makes the output voltage drop considerably. The result is that at around the 50% capacity mark the voltage is so low that the low-voltage cutoff kicks in and shuts the laptop off. Richard does worry about when the children take their XO laptops outside while suspended; the power dissipation (and thus self-heating) is at its lowest. It may shut off. The question to work out with our battery vendors is that is it OK to de-rate the low-voltage shutoff when it’s so cold. Will this do any damage to the battery?

6. Testing: Chih-yu Chao spent most of the week on Update.1 testing and test-case development. Test cases include power management, suspend and ebook mode, activity isolation, network manager, scaling tests, and localization of content bundle. Please review and help execute these test cases (Update.1). Also the automated olpc-update feature was tested as part of the final testing for Ship.2-656.

Dennis Gilmore has released Update.1 Build 690 as the first release candidate for Update.1 (See http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/olpc/streams/update1/build690). Please give this build extensive testing. There have been some reports of WEP and WPA problems with this build—expect these issues to be addressed in a subsequent release candidate.

7. Schedule: Due to resources being diverted to help resolve some G1G1 issues; the Mongolia deployment; and the need to some bugs in OHM and security, the Update.1 release is slipping. The current schedule is reflected on the Roadmap page in the developer wiki (http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap). To help with triage, it would be great if people can look at the critical bugs that are currently assigned to this release as well as the bugs coming in from testing. Even more important: please help test! We can't say what the critical bugs are if we haven't found them yet!

8. Support: Adam Holt and his support group continue to battle the question of “when will I get my laptop.” We are working with our partners on a daily basis to get the numbers, order information, production information, shipping information, and to compose emails and set donor policies.

In Mongolia, Carla Gomez Monroy and Dave Woodhouse have been bringing up 1000 laptops, battling issues associated with RF connectivity, and the need to upgrade large numbers of laptops—because we rushed the initial order to Ulaanbaatar, we didn’t have time to update the build in the factory. We are also starting to get the first “support” issues for the laptops that have already been distributed to the children.

Adam organized another very successful Sunday conference-call for the support team. This week’s guest speakers were Anders Mogensen, who discussed his observations of OLPC from a recent visit to Nigeria, and Joshua Beal from Belkin, who discussed new power options and their potential deployment consequences. Their generosity in speaking to the support team, and answering all sorts of great questions, was exactly the refresher the team needed among the shipping madness dragging it down.

Adam restructured the support team to more efficiently deal with the scourge of billing/shipping issues flooding in from the Give One Get One program, focusing on “one basically good response” for all, which will include more detailed order tracking. Sandy Culver, Steve Holton, Greg Babbing, and Guynn Prince have been of exceptional help dealing with RMAs and “undeliverables.”

9. Satellites: Michail Bletsas will be joining Thomas Jacobson and Roland Burger for a workshop at the upcoming Satellite 2008 conference in Washington DC on February 27 entitled: “Low-cost satellite Internet infrastructure to support education in remote and developing regions.” The goals of this informal workshop will be to gather and document design requirements and their justifications; to examine how current products might be used to meet them; and to identify areas where further research and development is needed. Exhibits-only registration (free if you use VIP code BOF) is all that is needed if you would like to join in the discussion.

10. Mesh: Cramming 500 laptops under the same roof is a difficult (but tractable) engineering problem. We haven't done any testing of such deployment scenarios and Mongolia is not really the most convenient place for that testing. Despite that, common sense can still carry us a long way. We have set the limit of XO laptops to school servers to 180 (60 per channel in mesh mode)—after optimizing the laptop for “dense” deployment (which hasn't been a priority in our software development schedules). However, deploying more school servers under the same roof doesn't immediately translate to increased capacity, since school servers don't add spectrum. While a school server still costs several hundred dollars, it is more economical to install standard low-cost access points instead of multiple servers. (The OLPC mesh implementation was to maximize the “connected” time for sparse deployments (children in villages in Cambodia, rural schools in Rwanda) and to simplify and extend connectivity away from an access point.

11. OLPC infrastructure: Ivan Krstić completely overhauled the public-facing infrastructure (wiki, static web, git, trac, hosting, mail, mailing lists). We are now in much better shape and will hopefully see less downtime on key systems such as dev.laptop.org.

12. Datastore: Ivan continues to work on a new DS specification that was the outcome of the datastore summit held at the OLPC office in Cambridge last week. He plans to have something to vet with the community in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Marco Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, and Eben Eliason spent a second week in Cambridge working through a number of design changes for the Sugar user experience that are potentially targeted for Update.2. More on those proposals soon.

13. Security: Nortel’s Marcus Leech continues his work on Rainbow, the isolation shell for the Bitfrost security mechanism. He has provided invaluable testing and patches, is developing a Rainbow filesystem verification tool, and generally being incredibly helpful in moving Rainbow development forward rapidly.

Michael Stone worked with Blake Setlow, visiting from Tower Research, to rewrite the nss-rainbow module. Together, they succeeded in removing the need for Rainbow to modify /etc/passwd. Now that they understand the interface and the required debugging techniques, Michael anticipates that /etc/group will straight-forward to handle. He hopes to make a new Rainbow release early in the Update.2 cycle incorporating these improvements.

Michael also updated or rewrote lots of dated documentation:

Finally, he researched several mechanisms for controlling and monitoring network access, including SELinux, NetLabel, and a sys_disablenetwork() patch. Experimentation will soon follow.

14. Licensing: Jon Phillips, Rebecca Rojer, and a team from Creative Commons have put together an illustrated primer to “Sharing Creative Works” (See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works). Jon observes that “in developing for OLPC, we have had to learn much about licensing for kids and generally how to educate around the topics.” The primer will go into CC’s custom licensing activity, which allows for a disclaimer about child licensing, comics to describe the concepts, and a license chooser (See Creative Commons).

15. Activities: Arjan Sarwal completed his integration of sensor input into Turtle Art. He has created a temporary fork called “Turtle Art with sensors” that included a new palette containing sensor blocks. It will be made available for download on the Activities page this weekend.

Arjan also undertook some experiments with the Measure activity with high- school students at the Boston “Fab Lab.” Children were introduced to the sensor concept and they caught on quite well. They arranged themselves into groups worked on projects: (A) using a touch sensor switch to count the number of times people enter through a particular door and display it in the form of a bar graph in Turtle Art;(B) plotting the temperature vs time graph in the form of points by using a temperature sensor connected to the XO laptop; and (C) making a turtle draw a smiling face when a high note was played and a sad face when the note was low note was played. Thanks to Edward Baafi for his help in the session.

Manusheel Gupta, Marco Gritti, and Tomeu Vizoso modified the Read activity to support DJVU and the TIFF format. Read activity can now be easily extended to support the other common formats.

Manu also developed a framework and ideas for implementation of a spreasheet activity. With input from Jim Gettys and Eben Eliason, he has started an implementation based upon the GNumeric codebase. Manu be discussing implementation ideas with Jody Goldberg from GNumeric Team this week. Other people who are interested in working on the activity should please chime in.

16. Keyboards: Bernardo Innocenti gave a tutorial to Arjan and Manu on xkeyboard-config, xkb files and keyboard package maintenance. With Bernie’s help, Arjan made and sent three patches upstream this week. Together with Walter Bender, they make some final touches to the Devanagari and Armenian keyboards and made much progress on the Nepali keyboard layout. (In regard to the latter, we are exploring the use of Compose within the X Window System as an alternative to SCIM.) Walter also roughed out Khmer and French keyboard layouts this week (See OLPC Keyboard layouts#OLPC keyboard layouts).

17. Localization: Dr. Habib Khan reports from Islamabad that Salman Minhas and Waqas Toor are progressing on Dari localization. Dari language support is completed in XO core, XO bundle, and Update.1; Etoys and Packaging are remaining. The strings in Pootle are now 100% translated in Dari language. Translation in Pashto is 88% completed. The XO core, Update.1, and Packaging are completed; Etoys and XO bundle strings that will follow next. Undaunted by a Pootle bug that was preventing them from committing strings in Pashto, Salman and Waqas continue to work together with Afghan volunteers and hope to accomplish the localization work in the near future.

A translation of an XO laptop user manual into the Dari and Pashto languages was completed this week by our Afghan volunteers Osman and Sohail. We appreciate their commitment and hard work. Next week, the OLPC Pakistan team will give it a trial with teachers from an Afghan local school in Islamabad. Their review and feed back will help them finalize the manual.

18. Accessibility: Jutta Treviranus, from the University of Toronto, and Cynthia Waddell, executive director of the International Centre for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI) and the government services accessibility expert for the United Nations Global Alliance for Inclusive ICTs, would like to get involved in our efforts to make the OLPC accessible. Jutta will try to organize a meet up of interested parties in the coming months. In parallel, Rob Taylor, Codethink, contacted Jim Gettys in regard to an investigation of moving AT-SPI over to D-Bus (See http://live.gnome.org/GAP/AtSpiDbusInvestigation).

19. Library: SJ Klein led a review of repository and bundle use cases; topics included the metadata needed for better tracking and sharing of bundles and specific use cases from India and Nepal (Bryan Berry was present). Lauren Klein, Martin Langhoff, Moodle, and Joshua Marks, Curriki, joined a discussion of how children and teachers should upload materials to the local network and to the Web. Curriki has recently added groups features that allow for a customized OLPC portal for educators (under development). They have an 80%-localized Hindi version available that can be used off line in India.

Regarding metadata, it was recommended that bundles should include: author, license, and URL. A new .info file format is being proposed and is open for discussion. Mako Hill and Dennis Gilmore have helped define how we should link to source information and identify contributors to bundles (See Bundle metadata).

Collections that are in development and testing this week include: an updated set of books from ICDL, with Mongolian stories and higher-resolution images; a PDF version of Where There is No Doctor; three language versions of the Holocaust Encyclopedia; flash math and language materials from AJ van der Voort and the EFK foundation; and compressed high-resolution PDFs from the Internet Archive curated by Marcus Lucero.

20. Game Jams: Rut Jesus and perhaps others from OLPC Nederlands will be joining some 150 developers at the Nordic Game Jam next weekend in Copenhagen.

21. Health: Adam Holt helped Arjun Sarwal to organize a group of volunteers around the theme of OLPC and health (See Health). Together, they have developed a leadership/coordination model to drive this initiative forward. Interest in Health collections has also spiked recently, with Arjan, David Greisen, Erica Frank, Anna Bershteyn, Mika Matsuzaki, Ian Daniher, and Seth Woodworth all working on related projects. Discussions around these topics are ongoing on the Library mailing list.

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.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

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