OLPC:News: Difference between revisions

From OLPC
Jump to navigation Jump to search
(→‎Laptop News 2007-06-16: added missing image)
Line 3: Line 3:
[[Category:General Public]]
[[Category:General Public]]


=Laptop News 2007-06-16=
=Laptop News 2007-06-24=


1. Shanghai: Mary Lou Jepsen, John Watlington, Richard Smith, and David Woodhouse joined the extensive team from Quanta in Shanghai for the B4 build. 2000 laptops are scheduled to be built by the end of Monday, more than half are already built. Things went so well that the build was started early, leaving the OLPC team ample time to work other components of the OLPC ecosystem: school server, multi-battery charger, active antennae, and WiFi repeaters. The B4 yield (so far) is approximately 99%—up substantially from previous builds. Improvements in B4 include: texture on the upper handle bar; increased hinge tilt; elimination of the hinge “squeak”; rabbit ears that click into place when put into the down position; elimination of a slight camera vignetting by the bezel; minor modifications to the motherboard; etc.
1. Montevideo: On Friday, the Technology Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU)
released a bid for Project Ceibal (Conectividad Educativa de
Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea)—one laptop per child
in Uruguay.


2. EC: Richard Smith and David Woodhouse have moved the kernel battery driver over to new embedded controller (EC) protocol. In the process, David had some some suggestions that Richard will be folding back into the EC code. Meanwhile, Richard has flushed out a few minor EC bugs and submitted fixes back to Quanta.
2. Olin College hosted the first OLPC Game Jam (See
[[Game Jam]]) last weekend, bringing together
ten teams of game developers and some freelance artists, musicians,
and programmers, to make games for the XO. Organizers Mel Chua and SJ
Klein are working on general notes re: organizing game jams and other
local community events to develop materials for the XO. Most of the
teams chose to work in Python, though a few developed in Flash. (A
Flash developer who had rather vehemently against Python at the start
of the weekend, wouldn't stop talking about how nice Python was by
Sunday.) Teams collaborated with one another, in addition to competing
to make the best game; they shared music and artistic expertise, and
code snippets and coding advice. (The Flash developers uniformly
wanted to write things that would work in Gnash on our platform, not
standard Flash 9; they spent part of Friday and Saturday working with
the Gnash team to help improve its utility for game development.)


3. School server: Scott Ananian, John Watlington, and Dan Margo worked on school-server configuration management. The process—a combination of RedHat's RPM system and a version-control system—will allow system updates of OLPC specific configuration files while preserving local configuration modifications.
The two best reviewed games both used PyGame; they were a version of
3D Pong and a version of the old Crossfire game called Spray Play (See
[[Image:3dpong.activity.zip]] and
http://sprayplay.googlecode.com/svn/).


4. Firmware: Mitch Bradley started work on school-server firmware and integrated the cryptographic code into Open Firmware needed for our Bitfrost security system. Lilian Walter modified the TCP layer to support IPv6. She can successfully “finger” and “telnet” to her Fedora Core 7 PC.
[[Image:Taking-the-heat.JPG|thumb|none|The laptop is running days at 52C (125F), and nights at 22C (72F).]]


5. System: Chris Ball wrote a script to backup and restore user data from a USB disk during OS build upgrades, so that laptops can be upgraded to newer builds without losing data. The script is still being tested, since there are some “corner cases” to deal with—for example, some old Sugar configuration files causes newer versions of Sugar to crash at startup.
3. Taking the heat: We have decided to see how much heat XO can take.
Mary Lou Jepsen has instructed UL to test our laptop for a 50C (122F)
operating temperature. Typical laptops are only tested to 35C (95F) or
40C (104F), which is unacceptable for the children who will be using
our laptops in hot temperatures (e.g., in direct sunlight and of
course without air conditioning). Mary Lou and Tracy Price are also
running a simple bake test at the OLPC office. The
laptop is running days at 52C (125F), and nights at 22C (72F). UL and
Quanta are doing more extensive testing, but shown is a laptop,
running the eToys demo that sits in the oven night and day. Try that
with a conventional laptop!


Andres Salomon did some merging (we are up to 2.6.22-rc5 on master) and created a vserver branch and added the vserver patch (See http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/vserver). He also did some bug triaging and worked on merging in the persistence-USB code from Andrew Morton's -mm tree.
4. Green: Mary Lou and Robert Fadel have started the application
process for EPEAT Gold—the highest award given to laptops; one no
other laptop has yet received. Also, late last week Google's Ethan
Beard and Megan Smith, and Red Hat's Mike Evans invited OLPC to join
with Google, Intel, Quanta, Red Hat, AMD, HP and others in the IT
industry to launch Climate Savers, an organization dedicated to
lowering the power consumption of computers through better power
management systems, and more efficient AC adaptors. Climate Savers
picked lower power as the single thing on which to concentrate in
order to have the biggest positive impact on the environment. OLPC
concurs with this belief. At first those that join Climate Savers
agree to meet the Energy Star goals—OLPC is already 14× better than
Energy Star.


Scott Ananian spend the week writing kernel patches for DNS autoconfiguration over Ipv6. The kernel functionality is now working; Scott still has to patch this into “userland” properly (glibc and/or network manager), and get the patches shipped and accepted upstream. In the process, Scott fixed another bug in the router advertisement daemon (radvd) this week, added some kernel documentation, and found a few minor bugs in the kernel to fix.
5. $1 video microscope: Inspired by SJ Klein and EO Smith, Mary Lou
made a 100× video microscope for her XO for $1 (three plastic lenses
in plastic housing). She made videos of the XO screen compared with a
standard LCD screen, where the details of the pixel structure can be
clearly seen. She will be compiling a video for youtube.com in the
coming days.


Bernardo Innocenti has been looking into Geode optimizations of glibc—Rob Savoye had developed some optimizations working from code originally written by John Zulauf.
6. Sugar: Eben Eliason has continued to refine a series of mock-ups
for rollovers, invitations, and notifications. He has created a new
series of Activity mockups, including Browse, Read, Write, Memorize,
Calculate, Photograph/Capture/Record, and TamTam that feature tagging
and tabs. He also created a preliminary specification for keyboard
shortcut design, now open for discussion. Also he worked with Jim
Gettys to figure out some logic for the hand-held buttons in terms of
desired functionality and semantic meaning. Marco Gritti has been
making changes to the GTK theme to incorporate many of these
improvements.


John Palmieri has been working on the Fedora 7 move. Most of the packages we need to worry about now in place. We will be pulling our builds together from three different repository: the F7/OLPC repository, dilinger's (Andres’s) kernel repository, and a temporary repository that exists until we have emergency builds and until Etoys can be put into the Fedora repositories.
7. Marc Maurer continues work on the Write activity, with his focus
mostly around collaboration. He has been working on a new algorithm to
handle collisions in documents when people are editing the same part
of a document. He also spent a lot of time fixing bugs in Abiword to
close a blocker bug in the 406 Build.


Alex Larsson, who is on loan from the Red Hat desktop team, has been working on a new live-update system for the XO. He posted comments for review to the devel mailing list earlier this week and has since then been working on an implementation. He now has code that can update between image versions, including reverting back to older versions of an image. He also has working code that can detect an update that is available from another laptop on the mesh, and can download it locally instead of going to a central server over a potentially slow, high-latency, high-cost network. Finally, he has code that will host an update on a laptop and publish it on the mesh.
8. Muriel de Souza Godoi updated the Memory Activity to the new sugar
API; now all the memory games were unified in one activity. He also
worked Eben designed a new Memorize Game UI; the new scoreboard was
developed as a component, with methods such as: set fill color, set
stroke color, increase score, set_current_player, etc. The new card
table was also developed as a component and can be controlled using
the hand-held-mode buttons. These UI components are designed to be as
flexible as possible, focusing on reusing components.


6. X11: The X11 update is only missing a few package rebuilds and a few new RPMs. The new keyboard descriptions are ready to go. Bernardo, Miles Grimshaw, and Walter Bender have been collecting more localized keyboards (Turkish, Ethiopic) and modularizing our changes to make them acceptable for upstream. Bernardo has gotten a positive response from Sergey Udaltsov regarding our changes and is waiting for final approval.
9. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso has been working on the Journal; he has added
the ability to do screen capture by typing Alt-1; the image is saved
to the Journal. He also has been working to make it possible to launch
downloaded activities directly from the Journal. He has been updating
the web browser in order making it work with the new Journal code as
well as the new code to interface with Python. Ben Saller has been
working on how to get the Journal to support alternate media such as
USB drives. Eben created a new series of Journal mock-ups that
incorporate tabbed toolbars, address support for "sort by, then by,"
and for versioning.


7. USB: Marcelo Tosatti, working with Cozybit and Marvell in California, made great progress in debugging our USB suspend/resume issues. Javier Cardona and Marcelo were able to acquire accurate traces of the activity on the USB bus. Those traces showed that the USB host controller is entering an invalid state during resume if the wireless device detaches after getting the host_sleep_active notification from the host. Their workaround is to have the wireless device idle for 3mS on the USB bus before detaching; they implemented that in wireless firmware version 5.110.16.p0. This is great progress towards fully working suspend/resume.
10. Mesh Activities: Dan Williams made progress with Network Manager
(NM) and the mesh. NM will now automatically scan and get an address
on the mesh network. The Collabora folks continue down the path of
making the peer-to-peer presence-discovery code and tubes code work.
They also added a "Hellomesh" Activity that shows how to build a
tubes-enabled activity. (Please note that the activity will change
over time as the tubes API stabilizes.) Eben worked extensively back
and forth with Pentagram on an updated UI design for the mesh view.


8. Wireless: Marvell's team in India released wireless firmware that incorporates the new mesh frame format as well as mesh beacon frames (5.110.15.p1). Their release was followed by the release of 5.110.16.p0, which incorporates the support for host sleep and the aforementioned workaround for the USB suspend/resume. Cozybit has also released patches for ethereal/wireshark that decode the new frame format. With this release, we are moving closer to the emerging 802.11s standard and we are also averting problems with existing access points that support lazy-WDS. Note that this firmware version is not interoperable with any previous released versions. Nodes running the new firmware will disrupt and be disrupted by nodes running older versions of the firmware. Q&A testing will be proceeding this week with the goal of incorporating the new frame format in the upcoming stable build. From a network-manager perspective this release greatly simplifies sensing for the presence of mesh nodes. Dan Williams continued work on the Libertas wireless driver. He also spent time getting Avahi ready for the network-manager auto-mesh code.
11. Fedora Core 7: John Palmieri has been moving our builds to a
Fedora 7 base. Once that is done we will have a lot more opportunity
to collaborate with the community and also get more direct help from
the 1200 or so Fedora contributors. Moving to Fedora 7 also means that
many of our modified packages are rolled up into the main repository.


9. Sugar: Ben Saller continues work on the data store for the Journal. He has been working on support so that one can store Journal entries on pluggable media (such as USB keys) and access entries over the network. He also fixed several bugs that Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti needed.
12. Build 406.14: Firmware and a stable kernel were released to Quanta
for the Btest-4 build, derived from Build 406. Suspend and resume are
working in a full build for the first time, including autonomous mesh
networking, a first for any system anywhere! It is almost, but not
quite stable enough for widespread use; a few remaining bugs need to
be squashed before deployment to a large audience.


Guillaume Desmottes spent the week working on peer-to-peer tubes support so that more than two people can join an activity (instead of
13. Firmware: This week, Mitch Bradley worked on stabilizing software
activities being strictly peer to peer). Large parts of this code are working today. There will be more progress next week.
and firmware for the B4 build. Mitch also merged ECC checking code
(written by Segher Boessenkool) into CAFE NAND driver and worked out a
plan for storage of the public key that secures firmware updates.


Marco spent much of the week working on the Fedora 7 port. He also made a number of fixes in the Journal, the theme, and Sugar in general.
14. X Window System: Richard Smith worked with Adam Jackson of Red Hat
He is largely concentrating on Trial-2 bug fixes. He wrote a simple
to figure out why his DCON mode patches to the X driver were causing
activity to demonstrate how to integrate with the Journal (See http://dev.laptop.org/~marco/edit-activity).
the DCON to flicker and glitch on the switch from DCON mode to GPU
mode. This will enable the window system to disable the video unit and
allow the GPU to idle when not in use.


Marco and Chris Blizzard worked with the Fedora Translation team to set up an easy-to-use interface for translators to be able to help translate Fedora. A Google Summer of Code student has been working on a web
Bernardo Innocenti has been enhancing our X keyboard definitions to
interface that makes it easy for the several hundred Fedora translators
include all the missing keyboard symbols and working with upstream to
to interact with upstream projects like OLPC (As and example, see http://translate.fedoraproject.org/module/olpc-journal-activity). We do not have all of the work flow completed, but this is an important first step to closing the loop with translators.
cleanup and merge our changes into the official repository. Miles
Grimshaw has designed two new keyboards for the XO: Turkish and
Ethiopic.


Tomeu spent the week doing a lot of bug fixing in the web activity, the
Daniel Stone of Nokia suggested to Jim that our slider keys be
Journal and the Sugar shell. He also did a lot of testing of the data
represented in the X input extension in a better way: we're going to
store and worked with Ben to fix bugs that he found. In addition he
have three "analog" sliders on the first row of the keyboard, which
added a lot of new stuff for Trial 2, including:
will look like absolute axes to programs. This requires some kernel
* implement of modal dialogs for the web browser;
work that Bernie has not yet started.
* in the Journal:
** you can now change an entry title;
** install and execute activities you have downloaded (but are not on the main toolbar);
** take a screenshot of the activity's canvas and use it as a preview for an entry;
** add a save-in-journal button to the default activity toolbar to
** explicitly save something to the journal;
** drag entries from the journal into the clipboard; and
** use the object-type registry;
* in the sugar shell:
** add an option to save objects in the clipboard to the Journal;
** make the clipboard also use the object-type registry.


10. Sugar Activities in the community: Marc Maurer has been working on collision detection for multiple-document editing. He and the rest of the Abiword team have an algorithm they are happy with. The really adventurous can look at the document (See http://uwog.net/~uwog/abiword/abicollab.pdf).
Generally, we are in a much better shape this week. The new input
framework in X works already, EXA rendering pretty much works too.
Next week Bernie will look into packaging issues with Adam. Jordan
Crouse has fixed many bugs in the X driver, and the he number of bugs
blocking #1604 is quickly shrinking, so we may be able to push this
upgrade just in time for the Fedora Core 7 migration.


Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger implemented the IPv6 support for
15. Kernel: Andres Salomon merged the device-tree patch, giving access
Squeak and ready for the testing. This will enable various collaborative tools in Etoys work over the IPv6 mesh network. Scott Wallace published the FunctionTile feature to the public image; this enables the Etoys user to write scripts with mathematical functions. Bert Freudenberg's recent work encompasses: patching Sugar; X Windows System display support code for the Squeak virtual machine; and an Etoys hook to enables smoother integration of Etoys to the Sugar environment. Ted Kaehler and Alan Kay are working on the kids version of text editor written in Etoys, as well as the simulation of colliding billiard balls. Takashi Yamamiya is now looking at the final integration of
to hardware and manufacturing information. The wireless-driver version
a drag-and-drop mechanism. Yoshiki Ohshima helped the code generation part of FunctionTile, as well as the documentation of
supporting suspend/resume was also merged. The EC protocol was
projects.
debugged, and debugged some more, and is now mostly fixed. We have a
kernel/firmware combination that suspends/resumes in about two
seconds. The delay is mostly from libertas and USB; Marcelo Tosatti
and the Cozybit team are actively working on these drivers.


Jean Piché and the core TamTam team spent the first half of the week at the OLPC office in Cambridge working closely with Eben Eliason on reworking the TamTam interface in light of Sugar “tabs” and some new functional and structural ideas that the team has been exploring. The result will be a recasting of MiniTamTam into TamTamJam, which will enable the explorations and improvisations we enjoy in TamTam to extend across multiple machines on the mesh; and a cleaner integration of the rich and varied functionality of TamTamEdit, making this powerful composition tool more accessible. They also did some preliminary exploration of Barry Vercoe’s fixed-point C-Sound implementation; evaluated TamTam on the B3 hardware; and discussed details of Journal integration with Tomeu.
Chris Ball did a lot of stable-build debugging. He found that our
camera's colormap becomes strange after resume and that the
"camera-active" LED comes on at resume even when the camera isn't
being used. Chris wrote a kernel patch to only power up the camera
when a user wants it; Jon Corbet is reviewing the patch.


Kent Quirk reports from the XO game-development front that Patrick DeJarnette has created the beginnings of a generic side-scroller
16. IPV6: Scott Ananian began the week by trying to cram the entirety
game toolkit and has a demonstration game that is beginning to feel a
of "Essential IPv6 Networking" into his head. He set up some IPv6
lot “a-like a-Mario.” It hasn't yet been turned into an activity or tested
tunnels and IPv6-enabled his home site to: (A) make sure he knew how
on the XO, but the approach is sound and we should see it running
things worked; and (B) serve as a testbed for the school server
next week. This toolkit is intended to allow children to easily create
environment, which will likely be behind similar NATs. He took over as
arcade-like games on the XO.
the liaison to SIXXS, which is going to be providing our IPv6
connectivity via tunnels for the short term, at least until we set up
infrastructure (and possibly write some code) to terminate
NAT-tunneling IPv6 tunnels ourselves here in Cambridge. Scott also
confirmed that private IPv4 addresses are properly assigned to the
laptops if a DHCP server cannot be found.


Lincoln Quirk has been working on integrating PyGame with Sugar. He has taken Noah Kantrowitz's wrapper code and extended it, but there are problems integrating properly with GTK. For the last few days, he has been working on a Cairo-based implementation of PyGame, which is starting to work, but is so far quite a bit slower than the existing PyGame code. It may be fast enough to use for some games, it looks beautiful, and we hope it will get faster over time.
Scott's second network-manager-related task was to get it to
understand DNS information sent via Router Advertisement messages as
part of IPv6
autoconfiguration, so that the machines "just work" without requiring
round-trips to a DHCP server or other setup. Scott noticed that radvd
on our local (OLPC) network (tubes) was giving out "bogus"
information, and wrote a patch for radvdump and sent the patch
upstream in the process. As it turns out, radvd was still using a
stale config and just needed to be sent SIGHUP, which was simple
enough. Scott sent mail to a number of people (including the
appropriate kernel mailing list) outlining a plan to add support for
DNS-in-RA to the Linux kernel and to Network Manager. Scott hasn't
heard any objections yet, so will assume
the plan is good and code up a first-draft implementation next week.


Roberto Fagá has been building an adventure game toolkit called ISIS intended to build text-based adventures with graphical illustrations. The longterm goal is to build a drag-and-drop storytelling game toolkit that kids can use. He just got his hands on an XO and is working on getting the graphics portion of the toolkit functional.
17. Hardware: The asynchronous input/output (SPD) bus on the XOs has

problems when coming out of suspend/resume and was causing write to
As a team, the gamers now have a git repository and have checked in all of their work, as well as other games from the OLPC game jam. There are several games that they hope to build on over the next few weeks, including a Mancala/Owari stone game that will support play either on a single machine or across the mesh.
the display controller (DCON) to fail. Mitch figured out the root

cause of a failure to resume that only shows up on some machines: a
Kuku Anakula, a flashcard-style game, has been polished for Trial 2; it can share configuration files and tile sets with the Memonumber game.
DCON/system-management (SM) bus bug was found and a DCON hardware bug

discovered. Richard, Mitch, Andres, Chris, and Jordan Crouse worked
MaMaMedia has finished three activities: a slider puzzle, an e-poll generator, and a teacher center, the latter being a place for teachers to learn and contribute to how they can use activities to integrate XO programs (Paint, Camera, Write) into their teaching. In the teacher center, there are lesson ideas for exploring the XO and the activities, a glossary, some background on Constructionism, etc.
together to find and produce a fix.

11. Content: SJ Klein and Mel Chua, who organized the Game jam, are working on a generalized notion of “jam,” for a broader community audience. The FHSST group in South Africa is running a jam out of Berkeley to make high school curricula and polish their texts. The Polish Free Texts project has their own variant on the theme for teachers. In progress: defining a space for collating links to such initiatives; developing a framework that allows for broad intake of all kinds of material, and for a refinement step that converts scans or documents into final formats for printing, storing in specialized repositories, storing on wikis and other collaboration sites. Meanwhile, SJ has been working on style guidelines for content contributions.

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is planning some content jams for educators and authors towards the end of the summer and early fall. They are expanding their collaboration on free textbooks starting with wikieducator, where public domain texts are being added to the “XXI texts” project, a project to find textbooks that have entered the public domain. They are working with educators to get primary texts online and developing an OLPC project on the site. A new mailing list for free texts has been set up, with COL, an Arabic texts project, the Polish Free Textbook project, Free Culture's college texts project, and OLPC. The Open Society Institute is looking into ways to fund a specific short-term effort to bootstrap these groups and bring their efforts together.

There was an entire track at the third annual iCommons summit dedicated to open education. OLPC and growing rural networks were highlighted as an example of the most revolutionary target audience. Over the course of a year or so, there are many projects aiming to develop free materials and interested n focusing on developing-world primary school; beginning with the Shuttleworth Foundation and FHSST and Schoolnet projects in southern Africa.

Google’s OurStories continues apace and is looking for active contacts in each country to help coordinate story gathering via activities.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 14:16, 24 June 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 45770]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-06-24

1. Shanghai: Mary Lou Jepsen, John Watlington, Richard Smith, and David Woodhouse joined the extensive team from Quanta in Shanghai for the B4 build. 2000 laptops are scheduled to be built by the end of Monday, more than half are already built. Things went so well that the build was started early, leaving the OLPC team ample time to work other components of the OLPC ecosystem: school server, multi-battery charger, active antennae, and WiFi repeaters. The B4 yield (so far) is approximately 99%—up substantially from previous builds. Improvements in B4 include: texture on the upper handle bar; increased hinge tilt; elimination of the hinge “squeak”; rabbit ears that click into place when put into the down position; elimination of a slight camera vignetting by the bezel; minor modifications to the motherboard; etc.

2. EC: Richard Smith and David Woodhouse have moved the kernel battery driver over to new embedded controller (EC) protocol. In the process, David had some some suggestions that Richard will be folding back into the EC code. Meanwhile, Richard has flushed out a few minor EC bugs and submitted fixes back to Quanta.

3. School server: Scott Ananian, John Watlington, and Dan Margo worked on school-server configuration management. The process—a combination of RedHat's RPM system and a version-control system—will allow system updates of OLPC specific configuration files while preserving local configuration modifications.

4. Firmware: Mitch Bradley started work on school-server firmware and integrated the cryptographic code into Open Firmware needed for our Bitfrost security system. Lilian Walter modified the TCP layer to support IPv6. She can successfully “finger” and “telnet” to her Fedora Core 7 PC.

5. System: Chris Ball wrote a script to backup and restore user data from a USB disk during OS build upgrades, so that laptops can be upgraded to newer builds without losing data. The script is still being tested, since there are some “corner cases” to deal with—for example, some old Sugar configuration files causes newer versions of Sugar to crash at startup.

Andres Salomon did some merging (we are up to 2.6.22-rc5 on master) and created a vserver branch and added the vserver patch (See http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/vserver). He also did some bug triaging and worked on merging in the persistence-USB code from Andrew Morton's -mm tree.

Scott Ananian spend the week writing kernel patches for DNS autoconfiguration over Ipv6. The kernel functionality is now working; Scott still has to patch this into “userland” properly (glibc and/or network manager), and get the patches shipped and accepted upstream. In the process, Scott fixed another bug in the router advertisement daemon (radvd) this week, added some kernel documentation, and found a few minor bugs in the kernel to fix.

Bernardo Innocenti has been looking into Geode optimizations of glibc—Rob Savoye had developed some optimizations working from code originally written by John Zulauf.

John Palmieri has been working on the Fedora 7 move. Most of the packages we need to worry about now in place. We will be pulling our builds together from three different repository: the F7/OLPC repository, dilinger's (Andres’s) kernel repository, and a temporary repository that exists until we have emergency builds and until Etoys can be put into the Fedora repositories.

Alex Larsson, who is on loan from the Red Hat desktop team, has been working on a new live-update system for the XO. He posted comments for review to the devel mailing list earlier this week and has since then been working on an implementation. He now has code that can update between image versions, including reverting back to older versions of an image. He also has working code that can detect an update that is available from another laptop on the mesh, and can download it locally instead of going to a central server over a potentially slow, high-latency, high-cost network. Finally, he has code that will host an update on a laptop and publish it on the mesh.

6. X11: The X11 update is only missing a few package rebuilds and a few new RPMs. The new keyboard descriptions are ready to go. Bernardo, Miles Grimshaw, and Walter Bender have been collecting more localized keyboards (Turkish, Ethiopic) and modularizing our changes to make them acceptable for upstream. Bernardo has gotten a positive response from Sergey Udaltsov regarding our changes and is waiting for final approval.

7. USB: Marcelo Tosatti, working with Cozybit and Marvell in California, made great progress in debugging our USB suspend/resume issues. Javier Cardona and Marcelo were able to acquire accurate traces of the activity on the USB bus. Those traces showed that the USB host controller is entering an invalid state during resume if the wireless device detaches after getting the host_sleep_active notification from the host. Their workaround is to have the wireless device idle for 3mS on the USB bus before detaching; they implemented that in wireless firmware version 5.110.16.p0. This is great progress towards fully working suspend/resume.

8. Wireless: Marvell's team in India released wireless firmware that incorporates the new mesh frame format as well as mesh beacon frames (5.110.15.p1). Their release was followed by the release of 5.110.16.p0, which incorporates the support for host sleep and the aforementioned workaround for the USB suspend/resume. Cozybit has also released patches for ethereal/wireshark that decode the new frame format. With this release, we are moving closer to the emerging 802.11s standard and we are also averting problems with existing access points that support lazy-WDS. Note that this firmware version is not interoperable with any previous released versions. Nodes running the new firmware will disrupt and be disrupted by nodes running older versions of the firmware. Q&A testing will be proceeding this week with the goal of incorporating the new frame format in the upcoming stable build. From a network-manager perspective this release greatly simplifies sensing for the presence of mesh nodes. Dan Williams continued work on the Libertas wireless driver. He also spent time getting Avahi ready for the network-manager auto-mesh code.

9. Sugar: Ben Saller continues work on the data store for the Journal. He has been working on support so that one can store Journal entries on pluggable media (such as USB keys) and access entries over the network. He also fixed several bugs that Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti needed.

Guillaume Desmottes spent the week working on peer-to-peer tubes support so that more than two people can join an activity (instead of activities being strictly peer to peer). Large parts of this code are working today. There will be more progress next week.

Marco spent much of the week working on the Fedora 7 port. He also made a number of fixes in the Journal, the theme, and Sugar in general. He is largely concentrating on Trial-2 bug fixes. He wrote a simple activity to demonstrate how to integrate with the Journal (See http://dev.laptop.org/~marco/edit-activity).

Marco and Chris Blizzard worked with the Fedora Translation team to set up an easy-to-use interface for translators to be able to help translate Fedora. A Google Summer of Code student has been working on a web interface that makes it easy for the several hundred Fedora translators to interact with upstream projects like OLPC (As and example, see http://translate.fedoraproject.org/module/olpc-journal-activity). We do not have all of the work flow completed, but this is an important first step to closing the loop with translators.

Tomeu spent the week doing a lot of bug fixing in the web activity, the Journal and the Sugar shell. He also did a lot of testing of the data store and worked with Ben to fix bugs that he found. In addition he added a lot of new stuff for Trial 2, including:

  • implement of modal dialogs for the web browser;
  • in the Journal:
    • you can now change an entry title;
    • install and execute activities you have downloaded (but are not on the main toolbar);
    • take a screenshot of the activity's canvas and use it as a preview for an entry;
    • add a save-in-journal button to the default activity toolbar to
    • explicitly save something to the journal;
    • drag entries from the journal into the clipboard; and
    • use the object-type registry;
  • in the sugar shell:
    • add an option to save objects in the clipboard to the Journal;
    • make the clipboard also use the object-type registry.

10. Sugar Activities in the community: Marc Maurer has been working on collision detection for multiple-document editing. He and the rest of the Abiword team have an algorithm they are happy with. The really adventurous can look at the document (See http://uwog.net/~uwog/abiword/abicollab.pdf).

Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger implemented the IPv6 support for Squeak and ready for the testing. This will enable various collaborative tools in Etoys work over the IPv6 mesh network. Scott Wallace published the FunctionTile feature to the public image; this enables the Etoys user to write scripts with mathematical functions. Bert Freudenberg's recent work encompasses: patching Sugar; X Windows System display support code for the Squeak virtual machine; and an Etoys hook to enables smoother integration of Etoys to the Sugar environment. Ted Kaehler and Alan Kay are working on the kids version of text editor written in Etoys, as well as the simulation of colliding billiard balls. Takashi Yamamiya is now looking at the final integration of a drag-and-drop mechanism. Yoshiki Ohshima helped the code generation part of FunctionTile, as well as the documentation of projects.

Jean Piché and the core TamTam team spent the first half of the week at the OLPC office in Cambridge working closely with Eben Eliason on reworking the TamTam interface in light of Sugar “tabs” and some new functional and structural ideas that the team has been exploring. The result will be a recasting of MiniTamTam into TamTamJam, which will enable the explorations and improvisations we enjoy in TamTam to extend across multiple machines on the mesh; and a cleaner integration of the rich and varied functionality of TamTamEdit, making this powerful composition tool more accessible. They also did some preliminary exploration of Barry Vercoe’s fixed-point C-Sound implementation; evaluated TamTam on the B3 hardware; and discussed details of Journal integration with Tomeu.

Kent Quirk reports from the XO game-development front that Patrick DeJarnette has created the beginnings of a generic side-scroller game toolkit and has a demonstration game that is beginning to feel a lot “a-like a-Mario.” It hasn't yet been turned into an activity or tested on the XO, but the approach is sound and we should see it running next week. This toolkit is intended to allow children to easily create arcade-like games on the XO.

Lincoln Quirk has been working on integrating PyGame with Sugar. He has taken Noah Kantrowitz's wrapper code and extended it, but there are problems integrating properly with GTK. For the last few days, he has been working on a Cairo-based implementation of PyGame, which is starting to work, but is so far quite a bit slower than the existing PyGame code. It may be fast enough to use for some games, it looks beautiful, and we hope it will get faster over time.

Roberto Fagá has been building an adventure game toolkit called ISIS intended to build text-based adventures with graphical illustrations. The longterm goal is to build a drag-and-drop storytelling game toolkit that kids can use. He just got his hands on an XO and is working on getting the graphics portion of the toolkit functional.

As a team, the gamers now have a git repository and have checked in all of their work, as well as other games from the OLPC game jam. There are several games that they hope to build on over the next few weeks, including a Mancala/Owari stone game that will support play either on a single machine or across the mesh.

Kuku Anakula, a flashcard-style game, has been polished for Trial 2; it can share configuration files and tile sets with the Memonumber game.

MaMaMedia has finished three activities: a slider puzzle, an e-poll generator, and a teacher center, the latter being a place for teachers to learn and contribute to how they can use activities to integrate XO programs (Paint, Camera, Write) into their teaching. In the teacher center, there are lesson ideas for exploring the XO and the activities, a glossary, some background on Constructionism, etc.

11. Content: SJ Klein and Mel Chua, who organized the Game jam, are working on a generalized notion of “jam,” for a broader community audience. The FHSST group in South Africa is running a jam out of Berkeley to make high school curricula and polish their texts. The Polish Free Texts project has their own variant on the theme for teachers. In progress: defining a space for collating links to such initiatives; developing a framework that allows for broad intake of all kinds of material, and for a refinement step that converts scans or documents into final formats for printing, storing in specialized repositories, storing on wikis and other collaboration sites. Meanwhile, SJ has been working on style guidelines for content contributions.

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is planning some content jams for educators and authors towards the end of the summer and early fall. They are expanding their collaboration on free textbooks starting with wikieducator, where public domain texts are being added to the “XXI texts” project, a project to find textbooks that have entered the public domain. They are working with educators to get primary texts online and developing an OLPC project on the site. A new mailing list for free texts has been set up, with COL, an Arabic texts project, the Polish Free Textbook project, Free Culture's college texts project, and OLPC. The Open Society Institute is looking into ways to fund a specific short-term effort to bootstrap these groups and bring their efforts together.

There was an entire track at the third annual iCommons summit dedicated to open education. OLPC and growing rural networks were highlighted as an example of the most revolutionary target audience. Over the course of a year or so, there are many projects aiming to develop free materials and interested n focusing on developing-world primary school; beginning with the Shuttleworth Foundation and FHSST and Schoolnet projects in southern Africa.

Google’s OurStories continues apace and is looking for active contacts in each country to help coordinate story gathering via activities.

More News

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News. Also on community-news.

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

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 45770]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-06-24

1. Shanghai: Mary Lou Jepsen, John Watlington, Richard Smith, and David Woodhouse joined the extensive team from Quanta in Shanghai for the B4 build. 2000 laptops are scheduled to be built by the end of Monday, more than half are already built. Things went so well that the build was started early, leaving the OLPC team ample time to work other components of the OLPC ecosystem: school server, multi-battery charger, active antennae, and WiFi repeaters. The B4 yield (so far) is approximately 99%—up substantially from previous builds. Improvements in B4 include: texture on the upper handle bar; increased hinge tilt; elimination of the hinge “squeak”; rabbit ears that click into place when put into the down position; elimination of a slight camera vignetting by the bezel; minor modifications to the motherboard; etc.

2. EC: Richard Smith and David Woodhouse have moved the kernel battery driver over to new embedded controller (EC) protocol. In the process, David had some some suggestions that Richard will be folding back into the EC code. Meanwhile, Richard has flushed out a few minor EC bugs and submitted fixes back to Quanta.

3. School server: Scott Ananian, John Watlington, and Dan Margo worked on school-server configuration management. The process—a combination of RedHat's RPM system and a version-control system—will allow system updates of OLPC specific configuration files while preserving local configuration modifications.

4. Firmware: Mitch Bradley started work on school-server firmware and integrated the cryptographic code into Open Firmware needed for our Bitfrost security system. Lilian Walter modified the TCP layer to support IPv6. She can successfully “finger” and “telnet” to her Fedora Core 7 PC.

5. System: Chris Ball wrote a script to backup and restore user data from a USB disk during OS build upgrades, so that laptops can be upgraded to newer builds without losing data. The script is still being tested, since there are some “corner cases” to deal with—for example, some old Sugar configuration files causes newer versions of Sugar to crash at startup.

Andres Salomon did some merging (we are up to 2.6.22-rc5 on master) and created a vserver branch and added the vserver patch (See http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/vserver). He also did some bug triaging and worked on merging in the persistence-USB code from Andrew Morton's -mm tree.

Scott Ananian spend the week writing kernel patches for DNS autoconfiguration over Ipv6. The kernel functionality is now working; Scott still has to patch this into “userland” properly (glibc and/or network manager), and get the patches shipped and accepted upstream. In the process, Scott fixed another bug in the router advertisement daemon (radvd) this week, added some kernel documentation, and found a few minor bugs in the kernel to fix.

Bernardo Innocenti has been looking into Geode optimizations of glibc—Rob Savoye had developed some optimizations working from code originally written by John Zulauf.

John Palmieri has been working on the Fedora 7 move. Most of the packages we need to worry about now in place. We will be pulling our builds together from three different repository: the F7/OLPC repository, dilinger's (Andres’s) kernel repository, and a temporary repository that exists until we have emergency builds and until Etoys can be put into the Fedora repositories.

Alex Larsson, who is on loan from the Red Hat desktop team, has been working on a new live-update system for the XO. He posted comments for review to the devel mailing list earlier this week and has since then been working on an implementation. He now has code that can update between image versions, including reverting back to older versions of an image. He also has working code that can detect an update that is available from another laptop on the mesh, and can download it locally instead of going to a central server over a potentially slow, high-latency, high-cost network. Finally, he has code that will host an update on a laptop and publish it on the mesh.

6. X11: The X11 update is only missing a few package rebuilds and a few new RPMs. The new keyboard descriptions are ready to go. Bernardo, Miles Grimshaw, and Walter Bender have been collecting more localized keyboards (Turkish, Ethiopic) and modularizing our changes to make them acceptable for upstream. Bernardo has gotten a positive response from Sergey Udaltsov regarding our changes and is waiting for final approval.

7. USB: Marcelo Tosatti, working with Cozybit and Marvell in California, made great progress in debugging our USB suspend/resume issues. Javier Cardona and Marcelo were able to acquire accurate traces of the activity on the USB bus. Those traces showed that the USB host controller is entering an invalid state during resume if the wireless device detaches after getting the host_sleep_active notification from the host. Their workaround is to have the wireless device idle for 3mS on the USB bus before detaching; they implemented that in wireless firmware version 5.110.16.p0. This is great progress towards fully working suspend/resume.

8. Wireless: Marvell's team in India released wireless firmware that incorporates the new mesh frame format as well as mesh beacon frames (5.110.15.p1). Their release was followed by the release of 5.110.16.p0, which incorporates the support for host sleep and the aforementioned workaround for the USB suspend/resume. Cozybit has also released patches for ethereal/wireshark that decode the new frame format. With this release, we are moving closer to the emerging 802.11s standard and we are also averting problems with existing access points that support lazy-WDS. Note that this firmware version is not interoperable with any previous released versions. Nodes running the new firmware will disrupt and be disrupted by nodes running older versions of the firmware. Q&A testing will be proceeding this week with the goal of incorporating the new frame format in the upcoming stable build. From a network-manager perspective this release greatly simplifies sensing for the presence of mesh nodes. Dan Williams continued work on the Libertas wireless driver. He also spent time getting Avahi ready for the network-manager auto-mesh code.

9. Sugar: Ben Saller continues work on the data store for the Journal. He has been working on support so that one can store Journal entries on pluggable media (such as USB keys) and access entries over the network. He also fixed several bugs that Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti needed.

Guillaume Desmottes spent the week working on peer-to-peer tubes support so that more than two people can join an activity (instead of activities being strictly peer to peer). Large parts of this code are working today. There will be more progress next week.

Marco spent much of the week working on the Fedora 7 port. He also made a number of fixes in the Journal, the theme, and Sugar in general. He is largely concentrating on Trial-2 bug fixes. He wrote a simple activity to demonstrate how to integrate with the Journal (See http://dev.laptop.org/~marco/edit-activity).

Marco and Chris Blizzard worked with the Fedora Translation team to set up an easy-to-use interface for translators to be able to help translate Fedora. A Google Summer of Code student has been working on a web interface that makes it easy for the several hundred Fedora translators to interact with upstream projects like OLPC (As and example, see http://translate.fedoraproject.org/module/olpc-journal-activity). We do not have all of the work flow completed, but this is an important first step to closing the loop with translators.

Tomeu spent the week doing a lot of bug fixing in the web activity, the Journal and the Sugar shell. He also did a lot of testing of the data store and worked with Ben to fix bugs that he found. In addition he added a lot of new stuff for Trial 2, including:

  • implement of modal dialogs for the web browser;
  • in the Journal:
    • you can now change an entry title;
    • install and execute activities you have downloaded (but are not on the main toolbar);
    • take a screenshot of the activity's canvas and use it as a preview for an entry;
    • add a save-in-journal button to the default activity toolbar to
    • explicitly save something to the journal;
    • drag entries from the journal into the clipboard; and
    • use the object-type registry;
  • in the sugar shell:
    • add an option to save objects in the clipboard to the Journal;
    • make the clipboard also use the object-type registry.

10. Sugar Activities in the community: Marc Maurer has been working on collision detection for multiple-document editing. He and the rest of the Abiword team have an algorithm they are happy with. The really adventurous can look at the document (See http://uwog.net/~uwog/abiword/abicollab.pdf).

Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger implemented the IPv6 support for Squeak and ready for the testing. This will enable various collaborative tools in Etoys work over the IPv6 mesh network. Scott Wallace published the FunctionTile feature to the public image; this enables the Etoys user to write scripts with mathematical functions. Bert Freudenberg's recent work encompasses: patching Sugar; X Windows System display support code for the Squeak virtual machine; and an Etoys hook to enables smoother integration of Etoys to the Sugar environment. Ted Kaehler and Alan Kay are working on the kids version of text editor written in Etoys, as well as the simulation of colliding billiard balls. Takashi Yamamiya is now looking at the final integration of a drag-and-drop mechanism. Yoshiki Ohshima helped the code generation part of FunctionTile, as well as the documentation of projects.

Jean Piché and the core TamTam team spent the first half of the week at the OLPC office in Cambridge working closely with Eben Eliason on reworking the TamTam interface in light of Sugar “tabs” and some new functional and structural ideas that the team has been exploring. The result will be a recasting of MiniTamTam into TamTamJam, which will enable the explorations and improvisations we enjoy in TamTam to extend across multiple machines on the mesh; and a cleaner integration of the rich and varied functionality of TamTamEdit, making this powerful composition tool more accessible. They also did some preliminary exploration of Barry Vercoe’s fixed-point C-Sound implementation; evaluated TamTam on the B3 hardware; and discussed details of Journal integration with Tomeu.

Kent Quirk reports from the XO game-development front that Patrick DeJarnette has created the beginnings of a generic side-scroller game toolkit and has a demonstration game that is beginning to feel a lot “a-like a-Mario.” It hasn't yet been turned into an activity or tested on the XO, but the approach is sound and we should see it running next week. This toolkit is intended to allow children to easily create arcade-like games on the XO.

Lincoln Quirk has been working on integrating PyGame with Sugar. He has taken Noah Kantrowitz's wrapper code and extended it, but there are problems integrating properly with GTK. For the last few days, he has been working on a Cairo-based implementation of PyGame, which is starting to work, but is so far quite a bit slower than the existing PyGame code. It may be fast enough to use for some games, it looks beautiful, and we hope it will get faster over time.

Roberto Fagá has been building an adventure game toolkit called ISIS intended to build text-based adventures with graphical illustrations. The longterm goal is to build a drag-and-drop storytelling game toolkit that kids can use. He just got his hands on an XO and is working on getting the graphics portion of the toolkit functional.

As a team, the gamers now have a git repository and have checked in all of their work, as well as other games from the OLPC game jam. There are several games that they hope to build on over the next few weeks, including a Mancala/Owari stone game that will support play either on a single machine or across the mesh.

Kuku Anakula, a flashcard-style game, has been polished for Trial 2; it can share configuration files and tile sets with the Memonumber game.

MaMaMedia has finished three activities: a slider puzzle, an e-poll generator, and a teacher center, the latter being a place for teachers to learn and contribute to how they can use activities to integrate XO programs (Paint, Camera, Write) into their teaching. In the teacher center, there are lesson ideas for exploring the XO and the activities, a glossary, some background on Constructionism, etc.

11. Content: SJ Klein and Mel Chua, who organized the Game jam, are working on a generalized notion of “jam,” for a broader community audience. The FHSST group in South Africa is running a jam out of Berkeley to make high school curricula and polish their texts. The Polish Free Texts project has their own variant on the theme for teachers. In progress: defining a space for collating links to such initiatives; developing a framework that allows for broad intake of all kinds of material, and for a refinement step that converts scans or documents into final formats for printing, storing in specialized repositories, storing on wikis and other collaboration sites. Meanwhile, SJ has been working on style guidelines for content contributions.

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is planning some content jams for educators and authors towards the end of the summer and early fall. They are expanding their collaboration on free textbooks starting with wikieducator, where public domain texts are being added to the “XXI texts” project, a project to find textbooks that have entered the public domain. They are working with educators to get primary texts online and developing an OLPC project on the site. A new mailing list for free texts has been set up, with COL, an Arabic texts project, the Polish Free Textbook project, Free Culture's college texts project, and OLPC. The Open Society Institute is looking into ways to fund a specific short-term effort to bootstrap these groups and bring their efforts together.

There was an entire track at the third annual iCommons summit dedicated to open education. OLPC and growing rural networks were highlighted as an example of the most revolutionary target audience. Over the course of a year or so, there are many projects aiming to develop free materials and interested n focusing on developing-world primary school; beginning with the Shuttleworth Foundation and FHSST and Schoolnet projects in southern Africa.

Google’s OurStories continues apace and is looking for active contacts in each country to help coordinate story gathering via activities.

More News

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News. Also on community-news.

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

Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.laptop.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=OLPC:News&oldid=45770"