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=Laptop News 2007-08-04=
=Laptop News 2007-08-11=
1. C-Test: C-Test is underway. These XOs are fully textured (the flat exterior plastic has beaded surface); the keyboard is improved and included a beveled space bar. The most significant electrical change is the new ENE 3700B embedded controller (EC), which includes hardware support for the single-wire protocol used to communicate with the batteries.
1. Walter Bender met with Carole Wacey of Mouse.org. Mouse works with youth on technology mentoring programs. Children at Mouse.org are already actively engaged in authoring tutorials and videos about the XO and the older children (middle and high school) are interested in mentoring the elementary-school children who would be getting the XOs.


2. Kathmandu: Shankar Pokharel, from the self-organized OLPC Nepal, organized a curriculum workshop in coordination with Nepalese department of education. Forty-eight educationists and developers participated in the workshop which was inaugurated by Minister of Education Pradip Nepal. The participants outlined the steps needed for local content creation and digitization.
2. New York: A team from OLPC and Red Hat spent two days at Pentagram working through the outstanding design issues for the first release software on the XO. Together, we made significant progress on the Journal and sharing among groups. Simplicity was our mantra: look forward to more clarity to user interface.


3. Builds: Dan Winship, who joined the Red Hat team a month ago, had a busy week: he has branched x11-xorg-utils package so that we don't have to pull in libGL; made fallback X logins work; fixed some startup issues; and removed some packages to save some disk space. John Palmieri has been cleaning up start-up scripts—for both the machine itself and the graphical environment. Startup speed has improved and we are saving a significant amount of memory (and complexity). John is taking advantage the work that Red Hat's Richard Hughes has done around D-Bus system activation.
3. Villa Cardal: While anyone can watch videos on YouTube, children with XOs are posting videos. A video shot on an XO, “parto de una vaca (birth of a calf),” was posted by a 10-year-old child who is participating in the Villa Cardal trial in Uruguay (Please see http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=BOzBTGGVWNg).


4. Sugar: Dan modified the wedges in the “activity ring” on the home screen reflect memory usage. He also made added rollovers to the activity widgets for “resume” and “stop.” He ported our web activity to WebKit, the rendering engine used in both Apple's Safari and the KDE desktop. He found that memory usage was greatly reduced and performance much better. (The WebKit project is not quite ready for production use yet, but it shows real promise.) Finally, Dan got installation of activities from USB working.
4. Texture and color: Quanta, Foxconn, ZYE, and Fuse Project worked around the clock and through the weekend in order to complete the color and finish review of all parts of the XO. Clear finish guidelines have been established and the color has been tuned to our specification. Not all texture changes are completed, but established parts have been created to serve as reference for both Foxconn and ZYE; both companies are confident that they will be able to match the referenced samples. Two complete sets of C-build mechanicals are en route to OLPC for final approval for the mass production (MP) build.


Marco Gritti was (mostly) on vacation this week, but managed to rework the palette implementation to enable proper packaging of widgets; he made some API improvements and fix some bugs in the process; and he reviewed some patches and did some bug triage.
5. $1 video microscope: A video of Mary Lou's prototype microscope attachment for the XO video camera is posted on the web (Please see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI28-IS9AII). In the video, she compares various LCD screens. The microscope, which has ~ 100× magnification, could be useful to analyzing water quality, among other things.


Ben Saller spent most of the week fixing bugs and also working on a version of the data store that supports versioning.
6. Schedules: We have declared Trial-2 software to be Build 542, which we released to Quanta for the C-build on Thursday evening. This is alpha-level software and it becomes the new stable branch. Critical issues that may still need to be addressed will be back ported to Build 542, but this will allow development to continue toward Trial-3. Please note that we haven’t completed our optimization of memory usage in Build 542; if you are running on B2-1 hardware—which only has 128MB of DRAM—you are advised to hold off on upgrading.


Tomeu Vizoso moved the activity-registration service from the shell to a shell-service process. This service will contain the clipboard and the object-type registry. He moved Sugar, Journal and the Browse Activity to the new activity register.
7. Trial-2 build: Most of our vision for the first generation OLPC software is now present; Build 542 shows off many important collaboration, connectivity, and Journal features, including: real-time collaboration in many activities (Write, Read, Chat, Record, Etoys, TamTam, Memorize, Connect4, etc.); support for automatic configuration of mesh portal points (MPP) and automatic configuration of ad-hoc meshes (allowing collaboration without any dependency on infrastructure or Internet access); anti-theft activation on installation; and registration with and backup to a school server.


The Collabora team refined the definition of buddy and activity properties in anticipation of the first release of the software; once these properties are in the field, the are difficult to change.
A draft of the Software Release Notes can be found in the OLPC wiki (See [[OLPC Trial-2 Software Release Notes]]). The B4 Hardware Release Notes are also found in the wiki (Please see [[BTest-4 Release Notes]]).


Simon Schamijer has been working on the sharing feature in the Browse Activity; a web page to be “shared” appears as a thumbnail in a tray at the bottom of the page. From there you can select which page you want to view. Most of the parts are working and Simon hopes to have something ready for testing soon. Simon has also been adding a simple opcode to Csound that enables the reading of ogg vorbis files. The reason to use Csound rather than gstreamer is that is uses less then half of the CPU power and due to the concept of instruments you can playback different files at the same time easily. John Fitch and Eric de Castro Lopo are currently working on getting the ogg playback upstream into libsndfile, which is normally used in Csound5 to handle I/O of sound files.
As noted above, Build 542 is not suitable for B2-1 systems: memory usage is higher than desired, due to surprises such as a 20MB DHCPD server that we will be replacing (there are several smaller ones to choose from). Also note that the mesh wire packet protocol has changed, so mixtures of builds before 438 and current builds cannot use the same mesh.


5. Repair: After Mitch Bradley asserted that a 10-year old could replace an XO motherboard, Joel Stanley was tasked with overseeing just that. On Tuesday, 10-year old Philip and his 8-year old sister Sophie were given an XO; using the instructions on the OLPC wiki they disassembled and reassembled it (for the most part independently). It didn't work the first time, so they proceeded to disassemble, troubleshoot a loose wire, and reassemble the XO. This second pass, when they were on their own, was successful (See http://dev.laptop.org/~joel/xo-video/).
8. Autoreinstallation and upgrade: Scott Ananian continues to work on the autoreinstallation image. Scott and Chris Ball wrote an upgrade script that preserves the user's home directory, which Kim Quirk has been testing this week. Mitch Bradley, Richard Smith, John Palmieri, and Jim Gettys found a FAT32 corruption bug in the current firmware which ate USB keys. Mitch fixed this bug in q2c20d (and later).


6. Firmware: IPv6 in the firmware is basically working. Lilian Walter has succeeded in downloading files via HTTP from the IPv6 internet. In other words, she has implemented code to support router solicitation and advertisement. Lilian is currently working on DNS AAAA support via an IPv4 DNS server and then she will see if she can get to an IPv6 DNS server. Mitch Bradley still needs to do application testing with the school server. In coordination with with Ivan Krstić and Michael Stone, Mitch Bradley has defined the format for firmware security keys.
Scott also continued work on activation and the initial ramdisk, into which the XO boots. Scott also implemented Eben Eliason's design for an activation GUI (trac #1328), which should appear in Trial-3 builds. Scott also did some more work on network activation from the School Server, with help from Dan Williams and the Cozybit team.


7. Manufacturing software installation: Dave Woodhouse and Mitch Bradley build a manufacturing software installation system using multicast. Rafael Ortiz and Chris Ball worked on testing it with them. Wireless installation of OS images to the NAND flash is looking promising—we now have a simple tool that sends NAND flash blocks in UDP packets (by IPv4 or IPv6, multicast or unicast), with one parity packet per erase block (to allow for a small amount of packet loss). We also have a corresponding client that listens for these packets, checks a
9. Firmware and embedded controller (EC): Richard spent the entire week dealing with a few critical EC problems; He and Andres Salomon made progress was made on “wakeup event is repeated continuously” bug (trac #2401), when they discovered a deadlock in the EC code. Unfortunately, it's not trivial to fix, but they are testing possible workarounds.
simple CRC32 on each one, and reassembles the erase blocks, writing them to a file or to a flash device. Mitch is implementing the client side
for OpenFirmware.


The interesting part turns out to be 802.11 multicast. First, the access point (AP) will retransmit any multicast packets generated by clients—so to avoid wasting bandwidth we actually want the AP itself to generate them in the first place (perhaps bridged from its wired interface). Second, and more importantly, most equipment sends multicasts at the lowest “basic rate”—rates which are mandatory for all clients to support—which tends to be 1Mb/s, and is not fast enough to be useful. One way to fix this is to configure the AP not to include the lower rates in its basic set. This approach has been successfully tested in QSMC, but only by using a Broadcom 4306 wireless device in a laptop as the AP, using the “hostapd” software. Unfortunately, the Broadcom drivers are not reliable at rates above 11Mb/s, so testing at higher rates has not been possible. We need to find a standalone access point where the basic rate can be tuned or, perhaps, find a way to use the Marvell “libertas” devices for this purpose. (There is a possibility that we could use mesh mode for this purpose, but we may have issues with nodes retransmitting multicast packets to each other.) Further testing of this aspect of the distribution system is required.
Chris wrote a kernel patch to set the EC wakeup event mask such that 1% battery charge changes don't bring us back out of suspend. If we suspend with Build 542, we should stay suspended until we get the “battery low” signal to wake us up.


8. Testing infrastructure: Chris Ball worked on Tinderbox additions. Dan Williams gave Chris a recipe for measuring activity startup time; the tinderbox will soon to be able to measure whether each activity in a build starts up okay, and exactly how long each one takes to do so.
Richard received PQ2C20 from Quanta and integrated it into the new firmware releases. We released PQ2C20, 21 and 22 this week. C20 contained the bulk of the EC fixes. C21 and C22 were needed to repair some new OFW bugs that surfaced, most notably the FAT32 corruption bug, which had been responsible for upgrade failures.


9. Wireless resume: Richard Smith, Ronak Chokshi, Marcelo Tosatti, Javier Cardona, Jordan Crouse and others did a full-court press on the wireless-resume problems. While several bugs were found that improved suspend/resume behavior greatly, there is still uncertainty to the cause of the remaining problem(s).
Mitch Bradley released firmware for C-build. He also worked on activation and security support for the firmware, and integrated Lilian Walter's IPv6 firmware support; he hopes to test it in Cambridge next week.


10. NAND data-corruption: Bug #1905, which has been seen in two XOs (one B2 and one B4) has gotten the attention of Mitch Bradley, Dave Woodhouse, Luna Huang, Brian Ma, and others.
Lilian finally made one of Linux boxes into an IPv6 router tunneling to the IPv6 internet. Other Linux boxes with IPv6 enabled can get on to the IPv6 internet also. Next, she will work on implementing the router advertisement/notification and global address/prefix in OFW so that it can get on the IPv6 internet also.


11. Google Books: Luke Hutchison's team has metadata and cross-linkage for most of Google's scanned PD books and can readily share images, OCR text, and metadata for 100,000 volumes, given selection criteria. Luke's summer work has been creating a way to run queries on the existing metadata to make such selections. There are still issues with copyright, surprisingly, as “public domain” in the US does not mean public everywhere; their current stance is to avoid worrying about international copyright law by only providing works through US-based servers, but making a quick selection will soon be possible.
We thank Zephaniah Hull for providing us patches to perform touchpad and keyboard resets on ESD events.


12. Our Stories: The Our Stories team is preparing interfaces for online browsing and uploading stories and have a localization team on reserve to localize interfaces and other materials the last week in August. John Huang, who is maintaining the client Activity for the project that records and uploads stories expects to publish some recording code by the end of August.
Joel Stanley worked on tool chain for OpenEC. He submitted patch to srecord after fixing a bug in their build system. And he reworked script for power instrumentation so it can be included in Chris Ball’s tinderbox regression-testing system.


13. Wikireader: Renaud Gaudin of Mali has been working on Moulin, an off-line wikireader, and is working on making it display well on the XO (See http://moulinwiki.org/). He is also developing ways to let people pass edits upstream through a moderated proxy server.
Chris resurrected the tinderbox on our power-measurement XO and added suspend/resume testing with measurements for power use, memory use, and number of software wakeups. We have lost a lot of memory to the base OS during the Trial-2 buildup; having memory tracked per-build from now on will help better contain these problems.


14. Maps: Schuyler Erle and UNICEF are working on an implementation of OpenLayers and the related FeatureServer to support children creating local maps of their villages, and on building lightweight regional map packs from public data. OpenLayers runs smoothly on a B4 without modification, providing another format for creators: a map layer and associated data.
10. School server: John Watlington continued to work on building a usable, repeatable school-server image. We are very close; the effort is
now going into a script that finalizes the configuration after the image is installed onto a disk. Stable and testing repositories for the software packages going onto the school server have been established.

11. Security: Joel Stanley worked with refining Rainbow for integration into Trail 3. He fixed general bugs and worked with Michael Stone to refactor code for maintainability. He implemented the persistent scratch space, allowing Sugar activities to save to “/data” any files they wish to (e.g., TamTam audio samples); these files are restored on next run of the activity. This allows us to have all other aspects of the filesystem mounted read-only. Finally, he investigated sound support inside containers to implement P_DSP_BG, the Bitfrost permission to allow background activities to continue to play sound. Scott Ananian and Ivan Krstić worked out the details of the anti-theft client and server; Scott and Michael worked on early boot and upgrade integration with the Rainbow security service.

12. Etoys: The SqueakFest 2007 conference was held at Columbia College in Chicago. One of the major themes of the conference this year was OLPC; there were ~100 participants (from various countries including Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Japan, Colombia, Nepal, and the US), many of them are involved in the OLPC pilot programs. Yoshiki Ohshima gave a talk on the OLPC project and the Etoys activity. Scott Wallace conducted a tutorial of advanced use of Etoys, Takashi Yamamiya explained the GetText interoperability feature at birds-of-a-feather gathering. Alan Kay gave a talk titled, “A Call for Content.” Unlike typical technology conferences, SqueakFest is focused on education; there were a lot of good discussion about learning in and between sessions.

13. Measure: Arjun Sarwal reports that the Measure Activity now features a frequency-domain representation in addition to a time-domain representation. Journal integration is complete. He also built a $1 temperature-sensing peripheral and a $1.50 intrusion alarm system; both have been tested using the measure activity. “The great thing about the XOs is that they are inherently networked, so by simply connecting a sensor to each XO, and using a combination of such sensors and the cameras, a highly powerful, flexible and robust sensor network for surveillance can be built.”

Arjun also had a very positive meeting with the Scratch team who are working on an XO port. He demonstrated the use of low-cost sensors around the measure activity. The demonstration, which utilizes the microphone port built into the XO rivaled the $25 board that is included with the PC version of Scratch. I would be helping them develop the analog input modules within Scratch.

14. Environmental testing: Four XOs have been running in an oven at temperatures above 45C for a continuous period of 6 days; they are running perfectly. This test is more extreme than real-life conditions, where at night the temperature generally goes down. A room humidifier has been placed in the oven, where is has been running continuously. None of the XOs show any problem.

15. OurStories: Stephen Cho, Google, reports that the OurStories engineering team has been through several iterations of potential solutions, and we have settled on what we hope to be a workable model for the first version of a story-collection website. The site will have the StoryCorps U.S. stories mapped on a Google Map, with the ability for users to find by location and download those stories. These are the roughly 3-minute edited versions of the stories that are on NPR on Fridays (roughly 300 stories for the U.S.). Stephen will over time work through the distribution rights issues to get all of the 12,000+ StoryCorps stories on the map. In addition, he is expecting 50 stories from Uganda and 50 stories from Pakistan through the UNICEF team. Uruguay is also looking to participate. The Museum of the Person project in Brazil also has several thousand audio stories.

The team has developed a client application with which children will record stories on their XO laptops; these will be backed up to the OLPC school server. From there, stories can be uploaded and mapped. The enables children to record a story, play a story, share a story, and find a story. Plans are underway for testing the system at the school trial in Nigeria.

16. Library: Library-creation scripts for making library bundles are now in git under “content-bundler”; a step towards automated builds of content images. A number of content publishers and platforms—Curriki (curriki.org), Connexions (cnx.org), CK12, and Jamendo (jamendo.org)—have committed to setting up simplified portals for creators who want to make OLPC material, and to adding an option to export books, music, or other collections as XO content bundles. CK12 and Connexions have full sets of books and modules available; Curriki is involved in the discussion of how to fill available gaps with wiki materials, and Jamendo has music across all continents and genres which its community are organizing into playlist-bundles. Sylvain Zimmer of Jamendo has developed bundling scripts for music, and Zdenek Broz has done the same for web sites, to simplify culling the pages from a directory of links into a usable content bundle. These will help curators with their own collections, and site-scrapers for dealing with open sites that do not have active curators.

17. Licensing: Scott Shawcroft and Jason Kivlighn are looking into “Sugarizing” the Creative Commons (CC) liblicense chooser, as a first step in integrating it with creative applications on the XO. They have a working Sugar patch, but are revising it to make it less complicated.

18. Language: Andrew Lee has been working on a SCIM-based input widget for Sugar; SCIM is used for Chinese and other stroke-based input (Please see http://wiki.tossug.org/OLPCinChinese).

19. Wikis: Shoichi Chou has been working on a standalone browser for wiki-snapshots called Ksana (ksana.tw), which supports Unicode and RTL displays, fast on-the-fly indexing of any Mediawiki dump, and link-cleaning. It is more general than other available engines, and has a facility for loading dumps as modules. A French reader/browser, Moulin, is another option; it remains to compare how much CPU and RAM they use while reading a large snapshot.

Mako Hill’s [[MikMik]], the wiki client being considered for use on the laptops, received a face-lift this week; a suitable gateway service for merging offline edits with a global Wikipedia is being discussed—an editing API needed to support this kind of editing without visiting a web page is being developed by Yuri Astrakhan with support from Vodafone. Denny Vrandecic, one of the creators of Semantic Mediawiki wants to work on offline merging; his lab at the University of Karlsruhe is doing related software development.

20. Annotation: Alec Thomas and Alan Green, working on generalized content stamping at Google, confirmed that their work can be open sourced and are in active discussion about merging their work with existing work for OLPC (Please see [[Annotation]]; [[Original Annotation API Proposal]]; and
[[Comment Anywhere Annotation Protocol Proposal]]).

21. Jams: ccTaiwan helped organize a curriculum jam with a number of Taiwanese student and CC groups in Taipei. In the US, the Columbia Journalism School and Columbia Prep confirmed that they will run a NYC jam in October.

22. Summer of Content: The trial of the Summer of Content was broadly discussed this weekend (at Wikimania), with a number of brainstorming sessions about project ideas and mentors; it will run for 6 weeks starting August 17. The southern summer starting in early December will be the true launch of the project, with a target of 500 internships and 50 mentor organizations.

23. Games: Lincoln Quirk has the mesh working nicely with olpcgames and pygame. Game developers and players alike are quite excited about this integration as it will make porting a number of existing multi-player games extremely easy. The chose-your-own-adventure framework that Roberto Faga is working on should be done in draft next week.

24. Biology: The E.O. Wilson foundation is working on a simple Bug Blitz activity for XO communities. They have a rough draft out; Santi from the Thai team wants to try it with their children.

==Upcoming Highlights:==
{|
|-
|– Aug 6 ||[http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikimania], Taipei
|-
|Aug 6 ||OLPC Nepal Curriculum Workshop, Kathmandu (in collaboration with the Nepalese MoE)
|}


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 17:27, 11 August 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 58576]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-08-11

1. C-Test: C-Test is underway. These XOs are fully textured (the flat exterior plastic has beaded surface); the keyboard is improved and included a beveled space bar. The most significant electrical change is the new ENE 3700B embedded controller (EC), which includes hardware support for the single-wire protocol used to communicate with the batteries.

2. Kathmandu: Shankar Pokharel, from the self-organized OLPC Nepal, organized a curriculum workshop in coordination with Nepalese department of education. Forty-eight educationists and developers participated in the workshop which was inaugurated by Minister of Education Pradip Nepal. The participants outlined the steps needed for local content creation and digitization.

3. Builds: Dan Winship, who joined the Red Hat team a month ago, had a busy week: he has branched x11-xorg-utils package so that we don't have to pull in libGL; made fallback X logins work; fixed some startup issues; and removed some packages to save some disk space. John Palmieri has been cleaning up start-up scripts—for both the machine itself and the graphical environment. Startup speed has improved and we are saving a significant amount of memory (and complexity). John is taking advantage the work that Red Hat's Richard Hughes has done around D-Bus system activation.

4. Sugar: Dan modified the wedges in the “activity ring” on the home screen reflect memory usage. He also made added rollovers to the activity widgets for “resume” and “stop.” He ported our web activity to WebKit, the rendering engine used in both Apple's Safari and the KDE desktop. He found that memory usage was greatly reduced and performance much better. (The WebKit project is not quite ready for production use yet, but it shows real promise.) Finally, Dan got installation of activities from USB working.

Marco Gritti was (mostly) on vacation this week, but managed to rework the palette implementation to enable proper packaging of widgets; he made some API improvements and fix some bugs in the process; and he reviewed some patches and did some bug triage.

Ben Saller spent most of the week fixing bugs and also working on a version of the data store that supports versioning.

Tomeu Vizoso moved the activity-registration service from the shell to a shell-service process. This service will contain the clipboard and the object-type registry. He moved Sugar, Journal and the Browse Activity to the new activity register.

The Collabora team refined the definition of buddy and activity properties in anticipation of the first release of the software; once these properties are in the field, the are difficult to change.

Simon Schamijer has been working on the sharing feature in the Browse Activity; a web page to be “shared” appears as a thumbnail in a tray at the bottom of the page. From there you can select which page you want to view. Most of the parts are working and Simon hopes to have something ready for testing soon. Simon has also been adding a simple opcode to Csound that enables the reading of ogg vorbis files. The reason to use Csound rather than gstreamer is that is uses less then half of the CPU power and due to the concept of instruments you can playback different files at the same time easily. John Fitch and Eric de Castro Lopo are currently working on getting the ogg playback upstream into libsndfile, which is normally used in Csound5 to handle I/O of sound files.

5. Repair: After Mitch Bradley asserted that a 10-year old could replace an XO motherboard, Joel Stanley was tasked with overseeing just that. On Tuesday, 10-year old Philip and his 8-year old sister Sophie were given an XO; using the instructions on the OLPC wiki they disassembled and reassembled it (for the most part independently). It didn't work the first time, so they proceeded to disassemble, troubleshoot a loose wire, and reassemble the XO. This second pass, when they were on their own, was successful (See http://dev.laptop.org/~joel/xo-video/).

6. Firmware: IPv6 in the firmware is basically working. Lilian Walter has succeeded in downloading files via HTTP from the IPv6 internet. In other words, she has implemented code to support router solicitation and advertisement. Lilian is currently working on DNS AAAA support via an IPv4 DNS server and then she will see if she can get to an IPv6 DNS server. Mitch Bradley still needs to do application testing with the school server. In coordination with with Ivan Krstić and Michael Stone, Mitch Bradley has defined the format for firmware security keys.

7. Manufacturing software installation: Dave Woodhouse and Mitch Bradley build a manufacturing software installation system using multicast. Rafael Ortiz and Chris Ball worked on testing it with them. Wireless installation of OS images to the NAND flash is looking promising—we now have a simple tool that sends NAND flash blocks in UDP packets (by IPv4 or IPv6, multicast or unicast), with one parity packet per erase block (to allow for a small amount of packet loss). We also have a corresponding client that listens for these packets, checks a simple CRC32 on each one, and reassembles the erase blocks, writing them to a file or to a flash device. Mitch is implementing the client side for OpenFirmware.

The interesting part turns out to be 802.11 multicast. First, the access point (AP) will retransmit any multicast packets generated by clients—so to avoid wasting bandwidth we actually want the AP itself to generate them in the first place (perhaps bridged from its wired interface). Second, and more importantly, most equipment sends multicasts at the lowest “basic rate”—rates which are mandatory for all clients to support—which tends to be 1Mb/s, and is not fast enough to be useful. One way to fix this is to configure the AP not to include the lower rates in its basic set. This approach has been successfully tested in QSMC, but only by using a Broadcom 4306 wireless device in a laptop as the AP, using the “hostapd” software. Unfortunately, the Broadcom drivers are not reliable at rates above 11Mb/s, so testing at higher rates has not been possible. We need to find a standalone access point where the basic rate can be tuned or, perhaps, find a way to use the Marvell “libertas” devices for this purpose. (There is a possibility that we could use mesh mode for this purpose, but we may have issues with nodes retransmitting multicast packets to each other.) Further testing of this aspect of the distribution system is required.

8. Testing infrastructure: Chris Ball worked on Tinderbox additions. Dan Williams gave Chris a recipe for measuring activity startup time; the tinderbox will soon to be able to measure whether each activity in a build starts up okay, and exactly how long each one takes to do so.

9. Wireless resume: Richard Smith, Ronak Chokshi, Marcelo Tosatti, Javier Cardona, Jordan Crouse and others did a full-court press on the wireless-resume problems. While several bugs were found that improved suspend/resume behavior greatly, there is still uncertainty to the cause of the remaining problem(s).

10. NAND data-corruption: Bug #1905, which has been seen in two XOs (one B2 and one B4) has gotten the attention of Mitch Bradley, Dave Woodhouse, Luna Huang, Brian Ma, and others.

11. Google Books: Luke Hutchison's team has metadata and cross-linkage for most of Google's scanned PD books and can readily share images, OCR text, and metadata for 100,000 volumes, given selection criteria. Luke's summer work has been creating a way to run queries on the existing metadata to make such selections. There are still issues with copyright, surprisingly, as “public domain” in the US does not mean public everywhere; their current stance is to avoid worrying about international copyright law by only providing works through US-based servers, but making a quick selection will soon be possible.

12. Our Stories: The Our Stories team is preparing interfaces for online browsing and uploading stories and have a localization team on reserve to localize interfaces and other materials the last week in August. John Huang, who is maintaining the client Activity for the project that records and uploads stories expects to publish some recording code by the end of August.

13. Wikireader: Renaud Gaudin of Mali has been working on Moulin, an off-line wikireader, and is working on making it display well on the XO (See http://moulinwiki.org/). He is also developing ways to let people pass edits upstream through a moderated proxy server.

14. Maps: Schuyler Erle and UNICEF are working on an implementation of OpenLayers and the related FeatureServer to support children creating local maps of their villages, and on building lightweight regional map packs from public data. OpenLayers runs smoothly on a B4 without modification, providing another format for creators: a map layer and associated data.

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# 58576]  +/-  

Laptop News 2007-08-11

1. C-Test: C-Test is underway. These XOs are fully textured (the flat exterior plastic has beaded surface); the keyboard is improved and included a beveled space bar. The most significant electrical change is the new ENE 3700B embedded controller (EC), which includes hardware support for the single-wire protocol used to communicate with the batteries.

2. Kathmandu: Shankar Pokharel, from the self-organized OLPC Nepal, organized a curriculum workshop in coordination with Nepalese department of education. Forty-eight educationists and developers participated in the workshop which was inaugurated by Minister of Education Pradip Nepal. The participants outlined the steps needed for local content creation and digitization.

3. Builds: Dan Winship, who joined the Red Hat team a month ago, had a busy week: he has branched x11-xorg-utils package so that we don't have to pull in libGL; made fallback X logins work; fixed some startup issues; and removed some packages to save some disk space. John Palmieri has been cleaning up start-up scripts—for both the machine itself and the graphical environment. Startup speed has improved and we are saving a significant amount of memory (and complexity). John is taking advantage the work that Red Hat's Richard Hughes has done around D-Bus system activation.

4. Sugar: Dan modified the wedges in the “activity ring” on the home screen reflect memory usage. He also made added rollovers to the activity widgets for “resume” and “stop.” He ported our web activity to WebKit, the rendering engine used in both Apple's Safari and the KDE desktop. He found that memory usage was greatly reduced and performance much better. (The WebKit project is not quite ready for production use yet, but it shows real promise.) Finally, Dan got installation of activities from USB working.

Marco Gritti was (mostly) on vacation this week, but managed to rework the palette implementation to enable proper packaging of widgets; he made some API improvements and fix some bugs in the process; and he reviewed some patches and did some bug triage.

Ben Saller spent most of the week fixing bugs and also working on a version of the data store that supports versioning.

Tomeu Vizoso moved the activity-registration service from the shell to a shell-service process. This service will contain the clipboard and the object-type registry. He moved Sugar, Journal and the Browse Activity to the new activity register.

The Collabora team refined the definition of buddy and activity properties in anticipation of the first release of the software; once these properties are in the field, the are difficult to change.

Simon Schamijer has been working on the sharing feature in the Browse Activity; a web page to be “shared” appears as a thumbnail in a tray at the bottom of the page. From there you can select which page you want to view. Most of the parts are working and Simon hopes to have something ready for testing soon. Simon has also been adding a simple opcode to Csound that enables the reading of ogg vorbis files. The reason to use Csound rather than gstreamer is that is uses less then half of the CPU power and due to the concept of instruments you can playback different files at the same time easily. John Fitch and Eric de Castro Lopo are currently working on getting the ogg playback upstream into libsndfile, which is normally used in Csound5 to handle I/O of sound files.

5. Repair: After Mitch Bradley asserted that a 10-year old could replace an XO motherboard, Joel Stanley was tasked with overseeing just that. On Tuesday, 10-year old Philip and his 8-year old sister Sophie were given an XO; using the instructions on the OLPC wiki they disassembled and reassembled it (for the most part independently). It didn't work the first time, so they proceeded to disassemble, troubleshoot a loose wire, and reassemble the XO. This second pass, when they were on their own, was successful (See http://dev.laptop.org/~joel/xo-video/).

6. Firmware: IPv6 in the firmware is basically working. Lilian Walter has succeeded in downloading files via HTTP from the IPv6 internet. In other words, she has implemented code to support router solicitation and advertisement. Lilian is currently working on DNS AAAA support via an IPv4 DNS server and then she will see if she can get to an IPv6 DNS server. Mitch Bradley still needs to do application testing with the school server. In coordination with with Ivan Krstić and Michael Stone, Mitch Bradley has defined the format for firmware security keys.

7. Manufacturing software installation: Dave Woodhouse and Mitch Bradley build a manufacturing software installation system using multicast. Rafael Ortiz and Chris Ball worked on testing it with them. Wireless installation of OS images to the NAND flash is looking promising—we now have a simple tool that sends NAND flash blocks in UDP packets (by IPv4 or IPv6, multicast or unicast), with one parity packet per erase block (to allow for a small amount of packet loss). We also have a corresponding client that listens for these packets, checks a simple CRC32 on each one, and reassembles the erase blocks, writing them to a file or to a flash device. Mitch is implementing the client side for OpenFirmware.

The interesting part turns out to be 802.11 multicast. First, the access point (AP) will retransmit any multicast packets generated by clients—so to avoid wasting bandwidth we actually want the AP itself to generate them in the first place (perhaps bridged from its wired interface). Second, and more importantly, most equipment sends multicasts at the lowest “basic rate”—rates which are mandatory for all clients to support—which tends to be 1Mb/s, and is not fast enough to be useful. One way to fix this is to configure the AP not to include the lower rates in its basic set. This approach has been successfully tested in QSMC, but only by using a Broadcom 4306 wireless device in a laptop as the AP, using the “hostapd” software. Unfortunately, the Broadcom drivers are not reliable at rates above 11Mb/s, so testing at higher rates has not been possible. We need to find a standalone access point where the basic rate can be tuned or, perhaps, find a way to use the Marvell “libertas” devices for this purpose. (There is a possibility that we could use mesh mode for this purpose, but we may have issues with nodes retransmitting multicast packets to each other.) Further testing of this aspect of the distribution system is required.

8. Testing infrastructure: Chris Ball worked on Tinderbox additions. Dan Williams gave Chris a recipe for measuring activity startup time; the tinderbox will soon to be able to measure whether each activity in a build starts up okay, and exactly how long each one takes to do so.

9. Wireless resume: Richard Smith, Ronak Chokshi, Marcelo Tosatti, Javier Cardona, Jordan Crouse and others did a full-court press on the wireless-resume problems. While several bugs were found that improved suspend/resume behavior greatly, there is still uncertainty to the cause of the remaining problem(s).

10. NAND data-corruption: Bug #1905, which has been seen in two XOs (one B2 and one B4) has gotten the attention of Mitch Bradley, Dave Woodhouse, Luna Huang, Brian Ma, and others.

11. Google Books: Luke Hutchison's team has metadata and cross-linkage for most of Google's scanned PD books and can readily share images, OCR text, and metadata for 100,000 volumes, given selection criteria. Luke's summer work has been creating a way to run queries on the existing metadata to make such selections. There are still issues with copyright, surprisingly, as “public domain” in the US does not mean public everywhere; their current stance is to avoid worrying about international copyright law by only providing works through US-based servers, but making a quick selection will soon be possible.

12. Our Stories: The Our Stories team is preparing interfaces for online browsing and uploading stories and have a localization team on reserve to localize interfaces and other materials the last week in August. John Huang, who is maintaining the client Activity for the project that records and uploads stories expects to publish some recording code by the end of August.

13. Wikireader: Renaud Gaudin of Mali has been working on Moulin, an off-line wikireader, and is working on making it display well on the XO (See http://moulinwiki.org/). He is also developing ways to let people pass edits upstream through a moderated proxy server.

14. Maps: Schuyler Erle and UNICEF are working on an implementation of OpenLayers and the related FeatureServer to support children creating local maps of their villages, and on building lightweight regional map packs from public data. OpenLayers runs smoothly on a B4 without modification, providing another format for creators: a map layer and associated data.

More News

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Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

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Video

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