Release notes/13.2.0

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Overview

13.2.0 is not released yet; this page is a work in progress.

OLPC OS 13.2.0 is a new software release focusing on cleaning up a few edges from our previous release, and finishing off support for the new XO-4 laptop. As usual, we maintain support and consistency for older laptops models, with XO-1.75, XO-1.5 and XO-1 also included in the release.

Features

XO-4 power management

After much development and diagnosis, XO-4 power management is now stable and enabled by default, matching the XO-1.5 and XO-1.75. This is our core power saving technique where we suspend the processor after a few seconds of system inactivity ("idle suspend"), but we leave the screen and wireless interfaces running to provide the illusion that the system is still running as usual. Upon user input or incoming network activity, the system wakes up immediately and transparently.

XO-4 bluetooth support

The new XO-4 laptop comes with bluetooth support as a purchase option. While such Bluetooth support is not immediately available in the user interface, we have enabled this functionality in the underlying system, ready for developers and deployers to use in their custom applications.

Performance improvements

The behind-the-scenes technological shift that happened in order to implement touch support throughout the user interface unfortunately introduced some performance regressions, which were especially noticable on the XO-1 platform. We have added some optimizations to help decrease Sugar startup time, activity startup time, and (in some cases) general activity performance.

Recent OS builds exhibited a slow first-time startup sequence while the system performed some background first-time configuration. We've revisited this area and as a result, first boot is much faster than before - almost as fast as subsequent boots where no setup work is needed.

Bug fixes

This release also fixes a number of bugs. Notably:

• Sugar and activities have been updated to the latest bugfix releases. This polishes off a few minor issues and glitches from the previous release.
• XO-4 laptops with the new 8787 wireless card no longer suffer significant connectivity interruptions while periodic background scans happen (<trac>12151</trac>).
• XO-4 sound recording in Squeak now works (<trac>12400</trac>)
• XO-4 sound recording in Etoys now works (<trac>12549</trac>)
• The XO-4 no longer exhibits a white screen on shutdown (<trac>12543</trac>)
• The XO-4 mouse cursor no longer becomes corrupt (<trac>12556</trac>)
• Screenshots taken in Sugar are no longer blackened (<trac>12572</trac>).
• General XO-4 graphics corruption problems have been resolved (<trac>12536</trac>)
• The school server datastore backup service works again (<trac>12663</trac>)
• The Spanish high-school keyboard works again (<trac>12645</trac>).
• The Write activity now works when the XO-1.75/XO-4 screen is rotated (<trac>12339</trac>)
• Badly behaving access points no longer disappear from view (<trac>12670</trac>)
• |vMeta video playback is more stable (<trac>12644</trac>)

Known problems

This section lists significant known issues that we hope to solve in future releases.

If deployments have solid plans and schedules to deploy this release but feel blocked by some of these issues in particular, they are encouraged to get in contact with OLPC far in advance of the installation date. OLPC may be able to produce a limited scope point-release fixing highlighted issues.

Sugar

• When pressing the volume hotkeys (F11/F12), the volume levels are changed accordingly, but the icon in the Sugar frame does not show the change - <trac>9913</trac>.
• The option to disable wireless networking in the Sugar Settings dialog no longer results in removal of power from the wifi hardware (<trac>10913</trac>) and does not disable XO-1 mesh functionality.
• Etoys sound recording may freeze or record low-quality audio (<trac>9724</trac>, <trac>9527</trac>). When collaborating, items may fail to be transferred (<trac>10744</trac>), and chat messages may fail to display the sender icon (<trac>10745</trac>).
• Record does not correctly pause itself when it is left running but is no longer the active activity. Multiple instances of Record will not always work correctly when run simultaneously (SL#2570, SL#3027). Other A/V-capable activities are likely to be affected too.
• The Moon activity fails to launch if the system date is wildly incorrect (SL#3223).
• When upgrading activities using the Software Update functionality, activity icons may be duplicated in the home screen until reboot (<trac>11373</trac>).
• After running for extended periods of time (measured in days) in an environment with many Wireless Access Points, a memory leak in Sugar Shell may prevent opening activities and lead the system to an out-of-memory (OOM) condition (<trac>11708</trac>).
• After using the text-to-speech functionality included in the Write activity, the desktop-wide text-to-speech functionality included in Sugar will no longer produce audible output (SL#3694).
• In Browse, previous releases including a "click-to-play" banner on Flash content, to avoid Flash content loading automatically and draining system resources. This banner is not present in this release (SL#3613).
• Scratch cannot detect USB storage media like it could before (SL#3625).

Sugar collaboration

The following issues are all believed to be regressions over OLPC OS 10.1.3.

• When the initiator of a shared activity leaves the activity, the icon of the shared activity will disappear from the neighborhood view of other participants (<trac>10674</trac>).
• When collaborating over a jabber server, names of other users may be displayed as their account hashes (e.g. c72019147aed6de8731769a126c2931a8a9ecfeb) rather than their name (<trac>10750</trac>).
• If a user changes his name, the new name is not reliably communicated to his peers (<trac>10749</trac>).
• The friends tray in the Sugar frame is incorrect for the initiator of a shared activity; it will not show other users who have joined (<trac>10801</trac>)
• When collaborating over a jabber server, information regarding who has joined and left an activity is not displayed reliably (<trac>11075</trac>)
• If a user is invited to an activity but does not have that activity installed, a confusing grey circle is displayed where the invitation would normally be (<trac>10821</trac>).
• Upon accepting a private invitation via the frame, if the frame is left open during activity launch then the invitation will not disappear as it should (<trac>11073</trac>).
• The olpc-xos diagnostic tool for developers no longer shows the users connected to the jabber server (<trac>10677</trac>).
• When inviting another learner to an activity the frame does only show ourself, this is true for both members of the session <trac>11074</trac>

GNOME

• Some GNOME applications now use Clutter, which we do not (yet) support because it requires 3D graphics. Such applications will crash on launch (<trac>11810</trac>).
  • None of the applications shipped in the official release are affected; this will only affect those who decide to add additional software to the GNOME desktop.
  • Affected applications include cheese and the GNOME control center.

Input

• F5 and F6 are bound to Search and Frame on all laptops, when these mappings should ideally only apply to XO High-School laptops where these icons are printed on the keys (<trac>10534</trac>)
• Some keyboard layouts (ie: Pt_BR) are missing the Linux console keyboard map -- can still be used correctly in Sugar's Terminal activity and in GNOME's Terminal (<trac>11557</trac>).

Power management

Automatic power management is enabled on XO-1.75 and XO-1.5 by default, and can be optionally enabled on XO-1 and XO-4 via the Sugar Settings dialog.

When enabled, the following bugs are present:

• On XO-1, wireless network connectivity may disappear while the system is sleeping (<trac>10232</trac>)
• On XO-1, touchpad may seem slow to respond as the system wakes (<trac>10233</trac>)
• XO-1.5 and XO-1.75 may fail to be woken up by network traffic directed at it (<trac>9960</trac>)
• XO-1.5 and XO-1.75 wireless may fail and be automatically reset during system resume. This will cause a momentary interruption of connectivity, and could result in the XO-1.5 connecting to a different network after the reset.
• On XO-1.75, suspending/resuming with a SD card inserted in the external slot will behave as if the card was removed and re-inserted, potentially losing data in any open files (<trac>11647</trac>)
• The laptop may only sleep for short periods of time due to being woken up by unrelated/uninteresting multicast network traffic.
• The mouse will occasionally be excessively jumpy for a few seconds after system wakeup, before it gets automatically recalibrated (<trac>10967</trac>).
• If put into a state where the system is suspended and cannot be woken up with the power button, typing on the keyboard while in suspended state may result in a misbehaving keyboard when the system resumes (<trac>11223</trac>).

XO-1.75

• The new XO-1.75 firmware included in this release cannot be used on older releases, otherwise audio will not work (<trac>12637</trac>)
• Sound quality may suffer when the system is busy (<trac>11187</trac>). Some clicks or scratches can be heard sometiems every 80ms (<trac>11334</trac>).

XO-1.5

• The microphone recording level is believed to be too low in comparison to XO-1 (<trac>10903</trac>).
• Text is sometimes rendered badly in drop-down menus (<trac>12438</trac>)