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


=Laptop News 2007-09-22=
=Laptop News 2007-09-29=
1. Mumbai: Carla Gomez Monroy has been working with a team from Reliance to launch a new trial at the Khairat School.
1. David Cavallo has formed a learning team that will work with countries to develop their own learning teams. The goal is to help each country develop a deeper understanding and richer practice in using laptops for learning. We will hold workshops at OLPC each month, work in countries, and collaborate internationally. The first workshops in countries will be in Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda and Nigeria during October.


2. Sugar: Simon Schamijer, Tomeu Vizoso, and Marco Pesenti Gritti spent most of the week sorting through trac entries to determine what needs to be done for our first release (FRS). Simon fixed a bug with “set title”; activities now have the same title on the home screen and in the Journal. Tomeu worked on the key dialog in the neighborhood view so it accepts ASCII pass-phrases in WEP networks. He discussed with Marco and Benjamin Berg possibilities of improving the preview support in the Journal. And he improved Journal's tolerance to malformed entries.
2. Schedule: We still have not gotten to a full code freeze as there are too many open critical bugs. If you have blocking or high-priority bugs open for Trial-3, please help us by analyzing the work load, making a suggestion for a work-around or how to document the issue, and setting the bug to “untriaged” so that the triage team will review it. Please check with Jim Gettys or Kim Quirk before checking in any code changes.
There has been a good discussion on the Sugar mailing list about integration of the datastore in the security framework; progress is being made.


3. Kernel: Andres Salomon merged bugfixes into the vserver branch of the kernel; updated the playground branch; and fixed the “green boxes” bug (the DCON driver was restoring bogus register states). He is also fixing the “smbus is unstable on resume” bug. In the process the “VMEM being funky” bug was discovered and fixed (via ECO). The DCON kernel code has slowly drifted away from the Open Firmware DCON code, so Andres is synchronizing the two.
3. Test: Alex Latham updated the test configuration notes in the wiki to address network-access configuration scenarios: two laptops under a tree; laptop connected to an access point; and laptop connected to a school server mesh. There are also some additional configuration notes and test plans for localization (See [[Test_issues]]). Alex Khitrick and Yani Galanis have both “joined” the test team this week to help with executing test cases, debugging, and writing up bugs.


Chris Ball found some time to work on our power manager, OHM. It now
4. Hardware: The hardware team (which includes people from Quanta and AMD) spent this week trying to track down some of the remaining problems with suspend/resume. We have reached a point where many laptops are running for hundreds of thousands of cycles without crashing, but occasional crashes still occur (and some laptops are more susceptible than others.) No other laptop comes close; but neither do they have our ambition to suspending between each page read (or maybe even suspending between keystrokes), with potentially thousands of page views/day.
knows which power state we're in when deciding which action to take; the first behavior change is that we no longer suspend when the lid closes if we're on AC power. This and more power changes will be in FRS.


4. Laptop Suspend/Resume Hunt: The hardware team was consumed with the continuing search for suspend/resume problems. We have been identifying the source of glitches on the laptop power rails, and fixing them one by one. We are still seeing a mix of bug manifestations, although the frequency of crashes has been reduced. At this time, modified laptops typically run for ten- to twenty-thousand suspend/resume cycles, being woken each time by the arrival of a network packet.
The low noise margin of the +3.3V line that powers most inter-chip communication (and the WLAN) on the laptop was the big surprise. An even bigger surprise was that the margin was critically dependent on battery voltage! When the battery was low, our 3.3V supply was dropping to below 3.15V, due to insufficiently turning on the transistor used to switch +3.3V off during suspend.


We are reaching the point where testing to see the effect of a hardware change is time consuming; we have a testbed of eight machines cycling continuously whose serial consoles are being logged to allow us to qualify where in the cycle a crash occurred. If woken by a timer instead of the arrival of a network packet, modified laptops have not been seen to crash, but we have not yet run one for
John Watlington and Quanta have a proposed solution which is being tested. We hope that improving this will close out the “unable to resume via power button or wireless” bug completely (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1835) — it was actually two distinct problems, one of which was fixed last week—and we have reason to hope that it might be at least partially responsible for the “USB wireless suspend/resume failure at setup phase” bugs (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1752 and http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2621).
more than 50-thousand cycles.


5. Firmware: Mitch Bradley implemented a full firmware secure-boot sequence including firmware updates and developer-key checks. The secure-boot sequence will doubtless undergo some revisions as we shake it out. Mitch also implemented the firmware end of pretty-boot, including the XO-man background and graphical depiction of the secure update/boot sequence He also defined and began implementing NAND boot speedups, using existing upstream kernel features for making a small boot partition on NAND.
Note: anyone working on a suspend/resume problem should keep their machine plugged into line power until it has been properly modified.


6. Schedules: First candidate release of Trial-3 code was dropped to Quanta, build 608. Next week we will do final testing on the OFW security features, finalize on EC and kernel fixes needed for suspend and resume, and create Candidate 2. We will also focus on prioritization of the first deployment (FRS) bug/task list.
Chris Ball ran overnight tests on many of the proposed hardware changes. The wireless resume bugs are now occurring rarely enough to have taken a backseat to other kernel bugs related to resume (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3477 and http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3479).


7. Testing: There was a big push this week to get to a lot of functional testing, document the open issues and find work-arounds whenever possible for the Trial-3 release. Alex Latham tested: transfer of files using USB; human-readable file names in the Journal; clipboard objects; and Gstreamer (the browser media player) and Watch and Listen. He also compiled group of test files of all supported mime types. Alex tested upgrades (from Build 542 to current builds) and noted that some activities that have changed greatly cannot resume old journal entries. And he tested upgrading from web. Zack Cerza and Yani Galanis focused their efforts on wireless and collaboration. Collaboration is not as reliable as we’d like it to be; for example, one is not notified when one’s buddies leave a session. WPA will not be supported in Trial 3.
5. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2C27, the firmware released planned for Trial-3. It includes secure boot capability (but can also boot in a non-secure fashion). It has been tested on B1, B2-1, pre-B3, B3, and B4 systems. Do not use it on pre-B1 boards—it will brick them because of changes to the embedded controller (EC) microcode. Also note that it does not work on A-Test boards as support for A-Test has been eliminated from the EC microcode.


8. Journalism Jam New York: Last weekend's journalism jam included presentations by Eben Moglen and Susan Crawford; with coordination from Brendan Ballou and help from Lauren Klein, Danny Clark, and a team of high school testers, it came off smoothly. The result was a working prototype activity for recording and blogging articles, and some guidelines for how to write a good article and how to present it to an audience (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Report). Dan Sutera, who worked on the project, has offered to maintain it and turn it into something that will scale to thousands of schools.
6. EC code: Richard Smith re-factored the way the EC does its startup procedure so that an automatic restart now happens after a reflash. This involved re-working the way the IO maps (B2,B3,B4,C1) were detected. Alas, the rework seems to have broken the power button; when Richard gets that issue sorted out, we should be able to do fully automatic firmware updates.


9. Libraries: The Boston Public Library has offered to curate a collection similar to the school libraries their librarians help develop for local schools, for international use. Bernie Margolis, the BPL's president, and Maura Manx, heading their digital collections, got general approval for the idea from their board and have Brewster Kahle's explicit support. They would like to make some of their first collections for children and specifically for schools, and would like to showcase the results on laptops in their main library; including in a display indicating the lifecycle of a digitized work.
7. X Window System: Bernie Innocenti has been working mostly on visual bugs this week. The “iGoogle” bug was hard to find and easy to fix. The “green icons” bug was easy to find and hard to fix. Bernie has also pushed the Ethiopian and Urdu fonts in the builds.

8. Security and updates: Scott Ananian and Michael Stone worked closely together to implement the “live updates” feature (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2517). This feature, available since Build 595, allows the laptop user to run the command “olpc-update NNN” to update to Build NNN. Scott worked with Michael Stone to get an initial in-system network upgrade in place. After completing live updates, they discovered certain inefficiencies in our implementation of manifest verification. Michael profiled the software and, with Scott and Ivan Krstić's help, developed an enhancement that halves the time required to verify a manifest. Scott improved the speed of the in-place upgrade by 10× by rewriting contents verification.

Scott worked with Mitch Bradley on shaking out the secure-boot process. Among other things, they tweaked the developer and activation lease
formats based on suggestions from Michael Stone and SJ Klein. Scott also worked on creating a pure-Linux reimplementation of the
auto-reinstallation process, eliminating the two reboots into OFW and making it more compatible with the secure-boot process.

9. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent the week testing open bugs; he helped folks who were working on the i2c timeout issues, prepared patches for upstream, reviewed lots of patches, and did a cleanup of the olpc-2.6 git repository. The git cleanup means a clone takes only 15 minutes, down from 90 minutes.

10. Licensing content: Jon Phillips has been leading an effort to integrate Creative Commons licenses into the Journal. Screen shots of his mock ups are in the trac system (See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3529).

11. Sound samples: Dr. Richard Boulanger continues to gather together collections of sound samples recorded specifically for OLPC by the team at Open Path Music. The most recent additions are are vocal sounds: animal noises, grunts, groans, growls, etc., plus some singing. These samples are being incorporated into activities such as TamTam.

12. Library: Mako Hill helped rewrite the Javascript bits of the library to use Python templates using the Jinja templating system (See http://jinja.pocoo.org/). This is a more robust implementation if Javascript is turned off. The templates will be reused once we turn on a web server in the builds and change from a model of “update bundle-list on download” to a dynamic view that checks the filesystem.

The default browser page will point to the local content repository and have links to browse the web. Currently, there are links to:
* google.com, which will auto-redirect to the proper language for the country;
* the school server;
* wiki.laptop.org/go/Home (initially English by default) from which the activity and content bundle download pages will be more prominently linked;
* wiki.clusty.com, to search Wikipedia (initially English by default)
Additional suggestions are welcome.

13. Biology activities: David Stang of ZipcodeZoo is working with Lauren Klein to provide a kid-friendly interface to his database of bug information for bug blitzes. Charles Smith at the EOWilson foundation is working on basic ideas and background information for classes running blitzes. Misha Herscu, a teenager who has already published his first book on herpetology in Massachusetts, is helping organize the work with zipcodezoo. Misha also helped connect the Thai group that was doing their own bug-finding activity with an unusual bug zoo in northern Thailand, who may be able to help them extend the work they have done. and perhaps take some of the first online photos of certain species (See http://www.malaeng.com/).

14. Schuyler Erle, working on mapping and radio projects for UNICEF, has gotten a radio program to work on the XO, which can make the XO an audio receiver and broadcaster.

15. OLPC Philippines http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Philippines has created a website, this will be a common place to put in notes soon. A project management site in zoho.com is under request for free account on open-source development. Rowen Remis Iral and Timothy Paul Martinez are receiving emails on how to get in touch with the government. List of some contact details are provided to OLPCPH.

OLPCPH was prepared to attend the Curriculum Jam with some educators joining the Jam in Manila and to meet Mel Chua in the Jam.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 21:34, 29 September 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 67495]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2007-09-29

1. Mumbai: Carla Gomez Monroy has been working with a team from Reliance to launch a new trial at the Khairat School.

2. Sugar: Simon Schamijer, Tomeu Vizoso, and Marco Pesenti Gritti spent most of the week sorting through trac entries to determine what needs to be done for our first release (FRS). Simon fixed a bug with “set title”; activities now have the same title on the home screen and in the Journal. Tomeu worked on the key dialog in the neighborhood view so it accepts ASCII pass-phrases in WEP networks. He discussed with Marco and Benjamin Berg possibilities of improving the preview support in the Journal. And he improved Journal's tolerance to malformed entries. There has been a good discussion on the Sugar mailing list about integration of the datastore in the security framework; progress is being made.

3. Kernel: Andres Salomon merged bugfixes into the vserver branch of the kernel; updated the playground branch; and fixed the “green boxes” bug (the DCON driver was restoring bogus register states). He is also fixing the “smbus is unstable on resume” bug. In the process the “VMEM being funky” bug was discovered and fixed (via ECO). The DCON kernel code has slowly drifted away from the Open Firmware DCON code, so Andres is synchronizing the two.

Chris Ball found some time to work on our power manager, OHM. It now knows which power state we're in when deciding which action to take; the first behavior change is that we no longer suspend when the lid closes if we're on AC power. This and more power changes will be in FRS.

4. Laptop Suspend/Resume Hunt: The hardware team was consumed with the continuing search for suspend/resume problems. We have been identifying the source of glitches on the laptop power rails, and fixing them one by one. We are still seeing a mix of bug manifestations, although the frequency of crashes has been reduced. At this time, modified laptops typically run for ten- to twenty-thousand suspend/resume cycles, being woken each time by the arrival of a network packet.

We are reaching the point where testing to see the effect of a hardware change is time consuming; we have a testbed of eight machines cycling continuously whose serial consoles are being logged to allow us to qualify where in the cycle a crash occurred. If woken by a timer instead of the arrival of a network packet, modified laptops have not been seen to crash, but we have not yet run one for more than 50-thousand cycles.

5. Firmware: Mitch Bradley implemented a full firmware secure-boot sequence including firmware updates and developer-key checks. The secure-boot sequence will doubtless undergo some revisions as we shake it out. Mitch also implemented the firmware end of pretty-boot, including the XO-man background and graphical depiction of the secure update/boot sequence He also defined and began implementing NAND boot speedups, using existing upstream kernel features for making a small boot partition on NAND.

6. Schedules: First candidate release of Trial-3 code was dropped to Quanta, build 608. Next week we will do final testing on the OFW security features, finalize on EC and kernel fixes needed for suspend and resume, and create Candidate 2. We will also focus on prioritization of the first deployment (FRS) bug/task list.

7. Testing: There was a big push this week to get to a lot of functional testing, document the open issues and find work-arounds whenever possible for the Trial-3 release. Alex Latham tested: transfer of files using USB; human-readable file names in the Journal; clipboard objects; and Gstreamer (the browser media player) and Watch and Listen. He also compiled group of test files of all supported mime types. Alex tested upgrades (from Build 542 to current builds) and noted that some activities that have changed greatly cannot resume old journal entries. And he tested upgrading from web. Zack Cerza and Yani Galanis focused their efforts on wireless and collaboration. Collaboration is not as reliable as we’d like it to be; for example, one is not notified when one’s buddies leave a session. WPA will not be supported in Trial 3.

8. Journalism Jam New York: Last weekend's journalism jam included presentations by Eben Moglen and Susan Crawford; with coordination from Brendan Ballou and help from Lauren Klein, Danny Clark, and a team of high school testers, it came off smoothly. The result was a working prototype activity for recording and blogging articles, and some guidelines for how to write a good article and how to present it to an audience (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Report). Dan Sutera, who worked on the project, has offered to maintain it and turn it into something that will scale to thousands of schools.

9. Libraries: The Boston Public Library has offered to curate a collection similar to the school libraries their librarians help develop for local schools, for international use. Bernie Margolis, the BPL's president, and Maura Manx, heading their digital collections, got general approval for the idea from their board and have Brewster Kahle's explicit support. They would like to make some of their first collections for children and specifically for schools, and would like to showcase the results on laptops in their main library; including in a display indicating the lifecycle of a digitized work.

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

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

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 67495]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2007-09-29

1. Mumbai: Carla Gomez Monroy has been working with a team from Reliance to launch a new trial at the Khairat School.

2. Sugar: Simon Schamijer, Tomeu Vizoso, and Marco Pesenti Gritti spent most of the week sorting through trac entries to determine what needs to be done for our first release (FRS). Simon fixed a bug with “set title”; activities now have the same title on the home screen and in the Journal. Tomeu worked on the key dialog in the neighborhood view so it accepts ASCII pass-phrases in WEP networks. He discussed with Marco and Benjamin Berg possibilities of improving the preview support in the Journal. And he improved Journal's tolerance to malformed entries. There has been a good discussion on the Sugar mailing list about integration of the datastore in the security framework; progress is being made.

3. Kernel: Andres Salomon merged bugfixes into the vserver branch of the kernel; updated the playground branch; and fixed the “green boxes” bug (the DCON driver was restoring bogus register states). He is also fixing the “smbus is unstable on resume” bug. In the process the “VMEM being funky” bug was discovered and fixed (via ECO). The DCON kernel code has slowly drifted away from the Open Firmware DCON code, so Andres is synchronizing the two.

Chris Ball found some time to work on our power manager, OHM. It now knows which power state we're in when deciding which action to take; the first behavior change is that we no longer suspend when the lid closes if we're on AC power. This and more power changes will be in FRS.

4. Laptop Suspend/Resume Hunt: The hardware team was consumed with the continuing search for suspend/resume problems. We have been identifying the source of glitches on the laptop power rails, and fixing them one by one. We are still seeing a mix of bug manifestations, although the frequency of crashes has been reduced. At this time, modified laptops typically run for ten- to twenty-thousand suspend/resume cycles, being woken each time by the arrival of a network packet.

We are reaching the point where testing to see the effect of a hardware change is time consuming; we have a testbed of eight machines cycling continuously whose serial consoles are being logged to allow us to qualify where in the cycle a crash occurred. If woken by a timer instead of the arrival of a network packet, modified laptops have not been seen to crash, but we have not yet run one for more than 50-thousand cycles.

5. Firmware: Mitch Bradley implemented a full firmware secure-boot sequence including firmware updates and developer-key checks. The secure-boot sequence will doubtless undergo some revisions as we shake it out. Mitch also implemented the firmware end of pretty-boot, including the XO-man background and graphical depiction of the secure update/boot sequence He also defined and began implementing NAND boot speedups, using existing upstream kernel features for making a small boot partition on NAND.

6. Schedules: First candidate release of Trial-3 code was dropped to Quanta, build 608. Next week we will do final testing on the OFW security features, finalize on EC and kernel fixes needed for suspend and resume, and create Candidate 2. We will also focus on prioritization of the first deployment (FRS) bug/task list.

7. Testing: There was a big push this week to get to a lot of functional testing, document the open issues and find work-arounds whenever possible for the Trial-3 release. Alex Latham tested: transfer of files using USB; human-readable file names in the Journal; clipboard objects; and Gstreamer (the browser media player) and Watch and Listen. He also compiled group of test files of all supported mime types. Alex tested upgrades (from Build 542 to current builds) and noted that some activities that have changed greatly cannot resume old journal entries. And he tested upgrading from web. Zack Cerza and Yani Galanis focused their efforts on wireless and collaboration. Collaboration is not as reliable as we’d like it to be; for example, one is not notified when one’s buddies leave a session. WPA will not be supported in Trial 3.

8. Journalism Jam New York: Last weekend's journalism jam included presentations by Eben Moglen and Susan Crawford; with coordination from Brendan Ballou and help from Lauren Klein, Danny Clark, and a team of high school testers, it came off smoothly. The result was a working prototype activity for recording and blogging articles, and some guidelines for how to write a good article and how to present it to an audience (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Report). Dan Sutera, who worked on the project, has offered to maintain it and turn it into something that will scale to thousands of schools.

9. Libraries: The Boston Public Library has offered to curate a collection similar to the school libraries their librarians help develop for local schools, for international use. Bernie Margolis, the BPL's president, and Maura Manx, heading their digital collections, got general approval for the idea from their board and have Brewster Kahle's explicit support. They would like to make some of their first collections for children and specifically for schools, and would like to showcase the results on laptops in their main library; including in a display indicating the lifecycle of a digitized work.

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

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site. Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

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