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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 2007-10-06=
=Laptop News 2007-10-13=
[It has been suggested that I CC @devel with this weekly update. Feedback from the list members would be appreciated.]
1. Addis Ababa: Matt Keller and David Cavallo ran a learning workshop for leaders from the Ethiopian Ministry of Capacity Building (MoCB), school principals, teachers, university support people, the team from GTZ, and local software people. The GTZ team led by Thomas Rolf is doing an incredible job coordinating with MoCB in implementing the work and guiding the project.


1. Indianapolis: Benjamin Mako Hill and David Cavallo gave keynote talks and led a session on the laptop at the OpenMinds conference in Indianapolis this week. Indiana is in the vanguard in the US on laptops for learning (over 110,000 already deployed) and in using free and open-source software (FOSS) for learning. The conference brought together educators and developers to discuss issues and share experiences. OLPC was highlighted for making laptops more affordable everywhere and for our commitment to FOSS. In attendance were various governmental entities about to begin 1:1 laptop initiatives.
2. Gamepad button: when “left” was pushed on the game-pad controller (on the left side of the bezel) in B3/B4/C machines, the response was usually “down.” A small change in tooling proposed and executed by Quanta has fixed this; “left” will be working in the mass-production units.


2. Suspend/resume: John Watlington has written a long description of the B3/B4/C1 suspend/resume problems, along with what it takes to modify a B4 to correct the problems can be found at in the wiki (See [[B4_Suspend_ECR]]). A small pre-build will be assembled next week to test the circuit changes introduced since the C1 build.
3. Trial 3: We are very close to our Trial-3 build; several key bug fixes are underway and we should close out development very soon. Development for first release (primarily bug fixes) is underway (See [http://dev.laptop.org/milestone/First%20Deployment%2C%20V1.0]). We encourage you to try the current build. Community feedback from the early use of recent builds helps us uncover bugs; for example, a Journal/JFFS2 bug that we are resolving now.


3. Schedules: The Trial-3 Open Firmware (OFW) first code-drop is scheduled for Monday. Testing of the Q2C28i is happening this weekend, and a final drop will be available for Quanta next Wednesday. Trial-3 is essentially complete, but we do not need to drop it to Quanta for another week or two, so we will consider critical bug fixes—if there is adequate time for testing. Everyone should please be focusing on First Deployment bug fixes, minor features, and, most especially, testing.
4. Schedule: We had a number of meetings this week on the feature set (and bugs) for first deployment, including a review meeting with the Collabra team at our Cambridge (MA) offices. The feature-freeze date for First Deployment is October 16; the code-freeze date is November 2 (See [http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap]).


4. Test: Alex Latham spent most of the week performing suspend/resume testing. We now have a setup that is pretty easy to get running and keep running. Yani Galanis has spent the week documenting and testing various network configurations. There were a number of bugs/enhancements found this week that will help people who have recently been experiencing problems connecting to their home access points; for example, now that we support multiple key types, it is necessary to type $: in front of a hex key for a WEP connection.
5. Testing: Alex Latham tested many areas of the latest releases this week in order to find regressions and get through verification of recently fixed bugs. His focus was on mime types—getting the right activities to be available for opening files—and “real” activation testing on firmware-protected laptops. Alex also tested our new Amharic keyboard; Watch and Listen Version 8; human-readable filenames in the Journal; the upgrade process from Build 542 to our more recent builds; and Record playback. Yani Galanis tested various configurations related to network management: link-local mesh and school-server mesh. He is documenting everything we know about routing tables, Gabble and Salut in regard to how they interact with our various network configurations.


Michael Stone is spear-heading a “Test Sprint” day to review test plans, automation, and finding ways to make it easy others community to help out. Next Wednesday will the the test sprint day. Please join in. (Details will be sent to devel, sugar, and testing mailing lists.) SJ Klein will be getting the wiki to produce inline diffs of watched pages in response to changes to those pages so that we can more efficiently track the progress of the sprint.
6. Sugar and activities: Simon Schamijer fixed a bug that was preventing the display of “myself” in the Friends View. Simon modified the behavior of the network icons (AP and MeshDevice) in the Mesh View; they no longer blink when activated—instead, the border circle turns from colored to white. This is in order to save power since blinking graphics require the system to wake up and use power unnecessarily. Simon also made some adjustments to the behavior of the Browse Activity: it now starts with the Browse Tab open; the warning page for about:config has been disabled; browse history has been limited to 50 entries; the history entries are displayed in pages of 15 entries each for both the back and forward buttons. Marco Pesenti Gritti tracked down/fixed a few issues with the media players and mime associations. Thanks to the efforts of the team at NATE-LSI, Universidade de São Paulo, Paint now resumes from the Journal. Erik Blankinship and Bakhtiar Mikhak have re- enabled picture deletion in the Record Activity.


5. Mesh view: Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos has developed a new activity, “Space,” which displays an alternative mesh network neighborhood; it offers a sense of space by placing you in the center and everyone else in the mesh network at a distance proportional to link quality between you and the node that is being displayed (See http://web.media.mit.edu/~ypod/mesh/).
7. Journal and datastore: Tomeu Vizoso profiled, studied and improved the performance of the datastore with Marco and Ben Saller. They fixed the worst bottlenecks in both the datastore and Journal. Preview images had been incorrectly stored, causing slow updates and retrieval of results, high memory usage, and the waste of flash space. Updates were being flushed to the index too often, causing fragmentation in the jffs2 file system to the point that, at startup, the garbage-collector thread took much of the CPU—enough for some services to remain stuck until they were restarted. Improvements were made to the performance and memory consumption of the datastore’s use of Xapian (the search engine). After further testing we hoping to incorporate the changes into Trial-3, as they represent a significant performance improvement.


6. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent much of the week debugging suspend/resume patches related to the display controller (DCON). He also worked with upstream, massaging patches in, getting more patches ready, and helping others with their patches.
Along with Dave Woodhouse, they tracked down the “white journal” problem (trac #3978). David looked at the associated JFFS2 problem; initial diagnosis is fairly much as expected; one of the fixes is to change the criteria for when garbage collection (GC) is triggered. We had been running GC only when we actually need the space, but we should probably do it when we have a lot of obsolete nodes, even if we don't yet need the space. Simon Schamijer corrected the way the Journal displays bundles by exploiting .activity information (trac #3757). Tomeu also worked on a problem regarding the recreation of the datastore index on mount failure of removable devices (trac #3180). He also fixed tags field in the detail view (trac #3180) and refreshed the toolbar filters when an entry is created (trac #3790).


7. Sugar activities: Simon Schampijer set up a page in the wiki for the activity template (See [[Activity_Template]]) in order to set a standard by which activity developers communicate about their projects. (Now that loading new activities is as easy as clicking on an .xo bundle from the browser, there is certain to be more activity-related traffic in the wiki.) Simon also implemented the standard control for providing in-activity alerts (See https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2822); these can be used in the activities and can be placed at the top or bottom of the window. He has also begun work on a Sugar control-panel window.
8. Security: Ivan Krstić reports that the laptop tracking application (named “Bentham”) is finished. Michael Stone—along with Marco and Tomeu—has been actively engaged in a discussion on the Sugar mailing list in regard to user interaction for file open and/or Journal access (See trac #2328). The discussion raises concerns about low-level APIs and semantics and is further documented in trac #3801 (“Rainbow, Sugar, and the Datastore need to integrate to isolate Activities from the Datastore”). Michael also worked with Andres Salomon and Herbert Poetzl to test and fix the available vserver patches. All available patches have been integrated into our kernel and will soon appear in builds. (This work should allow us to close trac #3924.) Andres also prepared new kconfig patches for upstream (something that he had put off for a few weeks while working on power-management stuff). He is finishing them up and get them upstream ASAP.


8. X Window System: Bernardo Innocenti has gotten Xorg 1.4 fully packaged and available for general testing; while we haven’t done any benchmarking yet, it seems to be quite a bit faster. There is still need for a “kludge” in the kernel to help the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and evdev_drv see the glide sensor as a normal mouse, but that will soon be fixed.
9. Suspend/resume: How many suspend/resume cycles does your laptop make before crashing? At OLPC, we strive for millions of cycles, and have been making progress toward that goal. Around one-month ago we realized that our laptop was having hardware problems related to suspending and resuming. These problems were significant when a laptop was woken from suspend by the arrival of a network packet addressed to it.


Bernie also reports that we have a fix for the glibc problems affecting Ethiopian, but it requires upgrading to the F8 version of the library. Replacing glibc at this later stage isn't as destabilizing as it may seem: the only fallout Bernie can see is the exposure of a latent memory allocation bug in the olpc-dm program, which he has already fixed. Of course, we have more testing to do. Rob Savoye may be helping us with the Geode specific optimizations in glibc, for the benefit of Gnash and all other applications that rely heavily on memcpy() and similar functions.
We quickly identified the most significant causes of crashes (waiting until a clock settled, and a precipitous turning on of various parts of the laptop), and have slowly worked on identifying and fixing the remaining problems. The difficulty lies in the infrequent nature of the remaining problems. Obtaining meaningful test results can take several days.


Walter Bender has been working with Bernie, Tushar Sayankar, Jens Petersen, Parag Nemade, Manusheel Gupta, and Rosh Kamath on a Devanagari keyboard for the laptop that will be deployed in Mumbai (See [[Devanagari_keyboard]]).
In order to correct this, we have built a testbed for long-term testing of suspend/resume problems. Presently, around twenty laptops are in the testbed, continually going into suspend and then resuming to respond to a network packet arriving every second. The serial console of the main processor in each laptop (and in some cases, the serial console of the embedded power controller) are continually logged so that we can identify the cause of a crash.


9. Build system: Scott Ananian has made significant progress on our internal build system. We had our first “joyride” builds this week and hope to open it up to the rest of the developers next week. Scott also continued to work on the new hourly build system, creating “Joyride,” “Meshtest,” “Rainbow,” and “Xtest” branches of the main build. Joyride is the current unstable build; Meshtest is a fork for network testing; Rainbow is a fork for testing security-related patches; and Xtest is a fork for testing the Xorg 1.4 bits. (The Meshtest branch contains configuration and testing code to run on the OLPC mesh testbed; Scott has not quite gotten to the point where he can manage the build installed on the entire mesh at once, but he is getting very close.) Michael Stone has begun the process of cloning our build-system onto teach.laptop.org so that he can fully duplicate Scott's knowledge and so that he can document the process of constructing a build machine as he goes. Scott, Michael, and Chris Ball also have made plans for automated changelog collection that they hope to help implement next week.
John Watlington wants to thank the entire OLPC team for their help with this problem. Everyone has pitched in, from Yani Galanis helping to modify the laptops, Alex Latham, Chris Ball, and Danny Clark working on setting up testbeds, Richard Smith providing crucial pieces of firmware (while at the end of a 48 Kbps phone line in Arkansas), Joshua Seals getting tools, to Andres Salomon and Mitch Bradley working on the DCON workaround. Our colleagues at Quanta have also been working hard to fix and test these problems.


10. Incremental updates: Michael worked closely with James Cameron and Reynaldo Verdejo to implement several small enhancements to our present incremental update strategy that user-testing suggested would be particularly valuable. These enhancements include:
10. Build System: Chris Ball worked on automation improvements to our “pilgrim” script for creating builds, with Scott Ananian and Michael Stone
• better documentation of available update options;
Scott Ananian fixed the upgrade server on updates.laptop.org to install
• the ability to list all available builds;
new builds on demand. The three of them discussed and designed refactorings of our current build system and implemented an hourly build of two new build branches, “Joyride” (our new “unstable” branch) and “Meshtest” (automatically installed on our mesh testbed, which auto-runs mesh network tests). To add a package to Joyride, place an RPM in ~/public_rpms/joyride/ in your account on dev.laptop.org. It will automatically be included in the next hourly build (See [http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/]). It may take an extra hour for the presence of a new ~/public_rpms directory to be registered.
• better generic error-reporting;
• retargetable updates, which give us XO-to-XO updates (See [[SoftwareBinaryDifferentialUpdates]]);
• updates that are more robust in the face of intermittent network connectivity (diagnosed and implemented by Reynaldo).


11. Activiation/leases: Scott also finalized MP security requirements with Mitch Bradley; they ensure that we can seamlessly upgrade to new signing keys even after machines are in the field. Scott also prototyped a “manufacturing-server-less” activation process, to reduce our deployment risk; and he began to prototype a simple lease-creation server.
11. Updates: Scott installed sample Debian and Debian-big “updates” on updates.laptop.org as a proof-of-concept. Scott also improved persistence of internationalization settings on upgrade. Note that there is an olpc-update program in our newer builds can now update a system quickly without reimaging or the cumbersome USB update procedure. This makes it very easy to update to the current build (or install other builds entirely).


12. Activity Containerization: Michael Stone reports that you can now update to Rainbow (security-enabled) builds by running
12. Pretty boot: Scott landed improved “pretty boot,”visible when booting in “secure” mode. Scott also added a UL safety warning screen to the shutdown sequence.


# olpc-update rainbow-7
13. X Window System: First the good news: we may have found a smoking gun for the “jumpy mouse” bug. There seems to be a locking bug in the kernel. Andres has not had time to work with Bernardo Innocenti to resolve them yet, but we are confident that we are on the right path. Also, X Server 1.4 is ready for prime time! Input autoconfiguration works. Bernie has a few questions for the author of evdev, but it is good enough for general usage. He is packaging up things for testers. And then the bad news: Ethiopic has regressed somehow. But there is a fix on the horizon: it should work with the latest version of glibc (2.6.90-17).


Build rainbow-7 comes almost ready to use; you just need to
14. Firmware: Dave Woodhouse helped Mitch Bradley to find and fix an ECC correction bug in OpenFirmware, which is what caused Nicholas to bring a non-booting machine back from a demonstration. Dave has also set up a test cycling DCON power on and off repeatedly, with no interesting results so far.


# touch /etc/olpc-security
Mitch released Q2C28 firmware, the test candidate for mass production. It supports security (and pretty boot), and includes a UL safety warning screen behind a button. He also designed the secure NAND filesystem update; implemented the firmware support for it and Linux tools to create the images.


and reboot. The resulting system will demonstrate the current state of
Scott worked with Mitch on firmware security: a secure USB upgrade mechanism for unactivated machines and a key deprecation mechanism.
activity containerization.


This state can be inspected in two places:
Richard Smith released all his EC code patches to Quanta. Quanta is still working on some changes to the NiMH charging code with GoldPeak. Richard merged in their pre-release and re-submitted his patches.


/var/log/rainbow/stdout
15. Core activities: There has been a discussion on the devel list about the criteria for inclusion of core activities on the laptop. We’d like to broaden the discussion. Some proposed “Criteria for Inclusion”:
/var/rainbow/debrief/<id>/stdout
/stderr
/strace


The Rainbow stdout log records a running commentary on Rainbow's actions as the system runs. The per-activity-invocation stdout and stderr files record data printed by activities (including exception traces printed by failing Python activities). The strace log contains a detailed log of all actions performed by activities that can be used to diagnose the causes of activity failure.
A. Epistemological impact—to what degree does this activity positively impact learning? (This is of course the most important criteria.)


13. Language: Ben Lowenstein of Colingo has released Spanish 1-2-3 and Portuguese 1-2-3 and is looking for feedback (See http://dev.colingo.org/media/123/).
B. Fun—is it fun? engaging?


14. Music: The music curation team had a listening jam last week, pulling together works from individual artists and DJs, from the Beatpick and the Free Music Project. This is being coordinated by Romain Becker and Sylvain Zimmer of Jamendo, and by Elizabeth Stark, who are processing the faxed copyright releases and attribution needs of the artists. Artists and bands on-board since last week include DJ C, DJ Spooky, Tripwire (tripwire.in), Rainvan, and Split. All have contributed songs under an attribution license and at least one collection under a non-commercial license (for school libraries).
C. Quality—is the activity sufficiently robust in its implementation that it will not compromise the integrity or supportability of the system? Is the overall quality of the implementation adequate to meet our standards? Can the community be engaged in the process of testing and “certifying” and maintaining the activity?


15. Books: Arjun Sarwal is working with Hemant Goyal and Assim Deodia on a text-to-speech synthesizer for the Read activity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/E-Book_Reader). Biguniverse has 12 authors who have offered OLPC use of their stories.
D.Sugarized—to what extent has the activity been integrated into Sugar, including UI, Journal, security, internationalization, etc.? Does the activity require the folding in of additional libraries and resources? (This has impact on robustness—positive and negative—support, bloat, and the overall usability, aesthetics, and perception of quality of the machine.)


16. Wikitext: Zdenek Broz has been improving the format of topical bundles of articles (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arael/preview/wikislice-physics-en/wikislice-physics-en.xol/index.html). The newer templates now need to be ported to other languages.
E. FOSS—is the activity and all of its dependencies free and open?
The Fudia team developing the “Ksana” multilingual wiki reader are close to releasing a version of their reader/search platform that supports
editing. Fudia wants to sponsor 8G “wikisticks” or SD cards for our partner schools.


The MindTouch team, developers of DekiWiki—a popular derivative of MediaWiki with a “more friendly” editing interface—are working with Mako Hill to make their platform one of the backends that MikMik supports.
F. Extensible—is the activity something the community can extend? Does it span multiple needs? (And does it have—or the potential of having—an upstream community of support?)


17. Community journalism: The Report activity has been updated (See [[Report]]); Dan Sutera and his team have put together a Knight Foundation grant to support making it a scalable platform for local and regional news. They now have the site xotimes.org set up as the global overview of news reported with the activity.
G. Uniqueness—does the activity add a unique feature to the core?


18. Games: A group blog has been set up for OLPC games by the group at the Education and Technology Center at CMU working on a soccer game for the laptop (See http://www.olpcgames.org/). They are running a Pittsburgh Game Jam Nov 16–18 (See http://www.olpcgames.org/?p=16
H. Expectations—does the activity meet the expectations of (children, teachers, parents, G1G1 audience, etc.)?
and http://www.olpcgames.org/?p=18).


Game Jam Brasil was moved to November 10–11, and looks as though it may be larger than previously expected (See [[Game_Jam_Brasil/Organiza%C3%A7%C3%A3o]]).
I. Discoverable—is the core activity discoverable? (This is not to say that it shouldn't be hard work to fully exploit the power of an activity, but it should have a low barrier to entry.)

GAMBIT at MIT are developing a card-game platform on which one could
define and share new card games.

Mind Candy software is turning out a new global puzzle game that they'd love to have as a channel connecting children in the developing world with their core audience in the US. Michael Smith there is planning to turn a developer or two onto making an XO web interface (e.g., no Flash) as soon as their site goes live next month.

19. Other content actvities: Hemant Goyal and a small team is working with Arjun Sarwal in India to develop digital signal processing tools to work with measure. They are going to implement the filters in CSound this coming week.

20. Java: Adam Bouhenguel has an interest in evaluating and benchmarking light-weight versions of Java for the laptop. He would appreciate input from others who have considered the same questions.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 17:20, 13 October 2007

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Laptop News 2007-10-13

[It has been suggested that I CC @devel with this weekly update. Feedback from the list members would be appreciated.]

1. Indianapolis: Benjamin Mako Hill and David Cavallo gave keynote talks and led a session on the laptop at the OpenMinds conference in Indianapolis this week. Indiana is in the vanguard in the US on laptops for learning (over 110,000 already deployed) and in using free and open-source software (FOSS) for learning. The conference brought together educators and developers to discuss issues and share experiences. OLPC was highlighted for making laptops more affordable everywhere and for our commitment to FOSS. In attendance were various governmental entities about to begin 1:1 laptop initiatives.

2. Suspend/resume: John Watlington has written a long description of the B3/B4/C1 suspend/resume problems, along with what it takes to modify a B4 to correct the problems can be found at in the wiki (See B4_Suspend_ECR). A small pre-build will be assembled next week to test the circuit changes introduced since the C1 build.

3. Schedules: The Trial-3 Open Firmware (OFW) first code-drop is scheduled for Monday. Testing of the Q2C28i is happening this weekend, and a final drop will be available for Quanta next Wednesday. Trial-3 is essentially complete, but we do not need to drop it to Quanta for another week or two, so we will consider critical bug fixes—if there is adequate time for testing. Everyone should please be focusing on First Deployment bug fixes, minor features, and, most especially, testing.

4. Test: Alex Latham spent most of the week performing suspend/resume testing. We now have a setup that is pretty easy to get running and keep running. Yani Galanis has spent the week documenting and testing various network configurations. There were a number of bugs/enhancements found this week that will help people who have recently been experiencing problems connecting to their home access points; for example, now that we support multiple key types, it is necessary to type $: in front of a hex key for a WEP connection.

Michael Stone is spear-heading a “Test Sprint” day to review test plans, automation, and finding ways to make it easy others community to help out. Next Wednesday will the the test sprint day. Please join in. (Details will be sent to devel, sugar, and testing mailing lists.) SJ Klein will be getting the wiki to produce inline diffs of watched pages in response to changes to those pages so that we can more efficiently track the progress of the sprint.

5. Mesh view: Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos has developed a new activity, “Space,” which displays an alternative mesh network neighborhood; it offers a sense of space by placing you in the center and everyone else in the mesh network at a distance proportional to link quality between you and the node that is being displayed (See http://web.media.mit.edu/~ypod/mesh/).

6. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent much of the week debugging suspend/resume patches related to the display controller (DCON). He also worked with upstream, massaging patches in, getting more patches ready, and helping others with their patches.

7. Sugar activities: Simon Schampijer set up a page in the wiki for the activity template (See Activity_Template) in order to set a standard by which activity developers communicate about their projects. (Now that loading new activities is as easy as clicking on an .xo bundle from the browser, there is certain to be more activity-related traffic in the wiki.) Simon also implemented the standard control for providing in-activity alerts (See https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2822); these can be used in the activities and can be placed at the top or bottom of the window. He has also begun work on a Sugar control-panel window.

8. X Window System: Bernardo Innocenti has gotten Xorg 1.4 fully packaged and available for general testing; while we haven’t done any benchmarking yet, it seems to be quite a bit faster. There is still need for a “kludge” in the kernel to help the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and evdev_drv see the glide sensor as a normal mouse, but that will soon be fixed.

Bernie also reports that we have a fix for the glibc problems affecting Ethiopian, but it requires upgrading to the F8 version of the library. Replacing glibc at this later stage isn't as destabilizing as it may seem: the only fallout Bernie can see is the exposure of a latent memory allocation bug in the olpc-dm program, which he has already fixed. Of course, we have more testing to do. Rob Savoye may be helping us with the Geode specific optimizations in glibc, for the benefit of Gnash and all other applications that rely heavily on memcpy() and similar functions.

Walter Bender has been working with Bernie, Tushar Sayankar, Jens Petersen, Parag Nemade, Manusheel Gupta, and Rosh Kamath on a Devanagari keyboard for the laptop that will be deployed in Mumbai (See Devanagari_keyboard).

9. Build system: Scott Ananian has made significant progress on our internal build system. We had our first “joyride” builds this week and hope to open it up to the rest of the developers next week. Scott also continued to work on the new hourly build system, creating “Joyride,” “Meshtest,” “Rainbow,” and “Xtest” branches of the main build. Joyride is the current unstable build; Meshtest is a fork for network testing; Rainbow is a fork for testing security-related patches; and Xtest is a fork for testing the Xorg 1.4 bits. (The Meshtest branch contains configuration and testing code to run on the OLPC mesh testbed; Scott has not quite gotten to the point where he can manage the build installed on the entire mesh at once, but he is getting very close.) Michael Stone has begun the process of cloning our build-system onto teach.laptop.org so that he can fully duplicate Scott's knowledge and so that he can document the process of constructing a build machine as he goes. Scott, Michael, and Chris Ball also have made plans for automated changelog collection that they hope to help implement next week.

10. Incremental updates: Michael worked closely with James Cameron and Reynaldo Verdejo to implement several small enhancements to our present incremental update strategy that user-testing suggested would be particularly valuable. These enhancements include: 

• better documentation of available update options;
• the ability to list all available builds;
• better generic error-reporting;
• retargetable updates, which give us XO-to-XO updates (See SoftwareBinaryDifferentialUpdates);
• updates that are more robust in the face of intermittent network connectivity (diagnosed and implemented by Reynaldo).

11. Activiation/leases: Scott also finalized MP security requirements with Mitch Bradley; they ensure that we can seamlessly upgrade to new signing keys even after machines are in the field. Scott also prototyped a “manufacturing-server-less” activation process, to reduce our deployment risk; and he began to prototype a simple lease-creation server.

12. Activity Containerization: Michael Stone reports that you can now update to Rainbow (security-enabled) builds by running 

# olpc-update rainbow-7

Build rainbow-7 comes almost ready to use; you just need to 

# touch /etc/olpc-security

and reboot. The resulting system will demonstrate the current state of activity containerization.

This state can be inspected in two places: 

/var/log/rainbow/stdout
/var/rainbow/debrief/<id>/stdout
                         /stderr
                         /strace

The Rainbow stdout log records a running commentary on Rainbow's actions as the system runs. The per-activity-invocation stdout and stderr files record data printed by activities (including exception traces printed by failing Python activities). The strace log contains a detailed log of all actions performed by activities that can be used to diagnose the causes of activity failure.

13. Language: Ben Lowenstein of Colingo has released Spanish 1-2-3 and Portuguese 1-2-3 and is looking for feedback (See http://dev.colingo.org/media/123/).

14. Music: The music curation team had a listening jam last week, pulling together works from individual artists and DJs, from the Beatpick and the Free Music Project. This is being coordinated by Romain Becker and Sylvain Zimmer of Jamendo, and by Elizabeth Stark, who are processing the faxed copyright releases and attribution needs of the artists. Artists and bands on-board since last week include DJ C, DJ Spooky, Tripwire (tripwire.in), Rainvan, and Split. All have contributed songs under an attribution license and at least one collection under a non-commercial license (for school libraries).

15. Books: Arjun Sarwal is working with Hemant Goyal and Assim Deodia on a text-to-speech synthesizer for the Read activity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/E-Book_Reader). Biguniverse has 12 authors who have offered OLPC use of their stories.

16. Wikitext: Zdenek Broz has been improving the format of topical bundles of articles (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arael/preview/wikislice-physics-en/wikislice-physics-en.xol/index.html). The newer templates now need to be ported to other languages. The Fudia team developing the “Ksana” multilingual wiki reader are close to releasing a version of their reader/search platform that supports editing. Fudia wants to sponsor 8G “wikisticks” or SD cards for our partner schools.

The MindTouch team, developers of DekiWiki—a popular derivative of MediaWiki with a “more friendly” editing interface—are working with Mako Hill to make their platform one of the backends that MikMik supports.

17. Community journalism: The Report activity has been updated (See Report); Dan Sutera and his team have put together a Knight Foundation grant to support making it a scalable platform for local and regional news. They now have the site xotimes.org set up as the global overview of news reported with the activity.

18. Games: A group blog has been set up for OLPC games by the group at the Education and Technology Center at CMU working on a soccer game for the laptop (See http://www.olpcgames.org/). They are running a Pittsburgh Game Jam Nov 16–18 (See http://www.olpcgames.org/?p=16 and http://www.olpcgames.org/?p=18).

Game Jam Brasil was moved to November 10–11, and looks as though it may be larger than previously expected (See Game_Jam_Brasil/Organização).

GAMBIT at MIT are developing a card-game platform on which one could define and share new card games.

Mind Candy software is turning out a new global puzzle game that they'd love to have as a channel connecting children in the developing world with their core audience in the US. Michael Smith there is planning to turn a developer or two onto making an XO web interface (e.g., no Flash) as soon as their site goes live next month.

19. Other content actvities: Hemant Goyal and a small team is working with Arjun Sarwal in India to develop digital signal processing tools to work with measure. They are going to implement the filters in CSound this coming week.

20. Java: Adam Bouhenguel has an interest in evaluating and benchmarking light-weight versions of Java for the laptop. He would appreciate input from others who have considered the same questions.

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.

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

Laptop News 2007-10-13

[It has been suggested that I CC @devel with this weekly update. Feedback from the list members would be appreciated.]

1. Indianapolis: Benjamin Mako Hill and David Cavallo gave keynote talks and led a session on the laptop at the OpenMinds conference in Indianapolis this week. Indiana is in the vanguard in the US on laptops for learning (over 110,000 already deployed) and in using free and open-source software (FOSS) for learning. The conference brought together educators and developers to discuss issues and share experiences. OLPC was highlighted for making laptops more affordable everywhere and for our commitment to FOSS. In attendance were various governmental entities about to begin 1:1 laptop initiatives.

2. Suspend/resume: John Watlington has written a long description of the B3/B4/C1 suspend/resume problems, along with what it takes to modify a B4 to correct the problems can be found at in the wiki (See B4_Suspend_ECR). A small pre-build will be assembled next week to test the circuit changes introduced since the C1 build.

3. Schedules: The Trial-3 Open Firmware (OFW) first code-drop is scheduled for Monday. Testing of the Q2C28i is happening this weekend, and a final drop will be available for Quanta next Wednesday. Trial-3 is essentially complete, but we do not need to drop it to Quanta for another week or two, so we will consider critical bug fixes—if there is adequate time for testing. Everyone should please be focusing on First Deployment bug fixes, minor features, and, most especially, testing.

4. Test: Alex Latham spent most of the week performing suspend/resume testing. We now have a setup that is pretty easy to get running and keep running. Yani Galanis has spent the week documenting and testing various network configurations. There were a number of bugs/enhancements found this week that will help people who have recently been experiencing problems connecting to their home access points; for example, now that we support multiple key types, it is necessary to type $: in front of a hex key for a WEP connection.

Michael Stone is spear-heading a “Test Sprint” day to review test plans, automation, and finding ways to make it easy others community to help out. Next Wednesday will the the test sprint day. Please join in. (Details will be sent to devel, sugar, and testing mailing lists.) SJ Klein will be getting the wiki to produce inline diffs of watched pages in response to changes to those pages so that we can more efficiently track the progress of the sprint.

5. Mesh view: Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos has developed a new activity, “Space,” which displays an alternative mesh network neighborhood; it offers a sense of space by placing you in the center and everyone else in the mesh network at a distance proportional to link quality between you and the node that is being displayed (See http://web.media.mit.edu/~ypod/mesh/).

6. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent much of the week debugging suspend/resume patches related to the display controller (DCON). He also worked with upstream, massaging patches in, getting more patches ready, and helping others with their patches.

7. Sugar activities: Simon Schampijer set up a page in the wiki for the activity template (See Activity_Template) in order to set a standard by which activity developers communicate about their projects. (Now that loading new activities is as easy as clicking on an .xo bundle from the browser, there is certain to be more activity-related traffic in the wiki.) Simon also implemented the standard control for providing in-activity alerts (See https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2822); these can be used in the activities and can be placed at the top or bottom of the window. He has also begun work on a Sugar control-panel window.

8. X Window System: Bernardo Innocenti has gotten Xorg 1.4 fully packaged and available for general testing; while we haven’t done any benchmarking yet, it seems to be quite a bit faster. There is still need for a “kludge” in the kernel to help the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and evdev_drv see the glide sensor as a normal mouse, but that will soon be fixed.

Bernie also reports that we have a fix for the glibc problems affecting Ethiopian, but it requires upgrading to the F8 version of the library. Replacing glibc at this later stage isn't as destabilizing as it may seem: the only fallout Bernie can see is the exposure of a latent memory allocation bug in the olpc-dm program, which he has already fixed. Of course, we have more testing to do. Rob Savoye may be helping us with the Geode specific optimizations in glibc, for the benefit of Gnash and all other applications that rely heavily on memcpy() and similar functions.

Walter Bender has been working with Bernie, Tushar Sayankar, Jens Petersen, Parag Nemade, Manusheel Gupta, and Rosh Kamath on a Devanagari keyboard for the laptop that will be deployed in Mumbai (See Devanagari_keyboard).

9. Build system: Scott Ananian has made significant progress on our internal build system. We had our first “joyride” builds this week and hope to open it up to the rest of the developers next week. Scott also continued to work on the new hourly build system, creating “Joyride,” “Meshtest,” “Rainbow,” and “Xtest” branches of the main build. Joyride is the current unstable build; Meshtest is a fork for network testing; Rainbow is a fork for testing security-related patches; and Xtest is a fork for testing the Xorg 1.4 bits. (The Meshtest branch contains configuration and testing code to run on the OLPC mesh testbed; Scott has not quite gotten to the point where he can manage the build installed on the entire mesh at once, but he is getting very close.) Michael Stone has begun the process of cloning our build-system onto teach.laptop.org so that he can fully duplicate Scott's knowledge and so that he can document the process of constructing a build machine as he goes. Scott, Michael, and Chris Ball also have made plans for automated changelog collection that they hope to help implement next week.

10. Incremental updates: Michael worked closely with James Cameron and Reynaldo Verdejo to implement several small enhancements to our present incremental update strategy that user-testing suggested would be particularly valuable. These enhancements include: 

• better documentation of available update options;
• the ability to list all available builds;
• better generic error-reporting;
• retargetable updates, which give us XO-to-XO updates (See SoftwareBinaryDifferentialUpdates);
• updates that are more robust in the face of intermittent network connectivity (diagnosed and implemented by Reynaldo).

11. Activiation/leases: Scott also finalized MP security requirements with Mitch Bradley; they ensure that we can seamlessly upgrade to new signing keys even after machines are in the field. Scott also prototyped a “manufacturing-server-less” activation process, to reduce our deployment risk; and he began to prototype a simple lease-creation server.

12. Activity Containerization: Michael Stone reports that you can now update to Rainbow (security-enabled) builds by running 

# olpc-update rainbow-7

Build rainbow-7 comes almost ready to use; you just need to 

# touch /etc/olpc-security

and reboot. The resulting system will demonstrate the current state of activity containerization.

This state can be inspected in two places: 

/var/log/rainbow/stdout
/var/rainbow/debrief/<id>/stdout
                         /stderr
                         /strace

The Rainbow stdout log records a running commentary on Rainbow's actions as the system runs. The per-activity-invocation stdout and stderr files record data printed by activities (including exception traces printed by failing Python activities). The strace log contains a detailed log of all actions performed by activities that can be used to diagnose the causes of activity failure.

13. Language: Ben Lowenstein of Colingo has released Spanish 1-2-3 and Portuguese 1-2-3 and is looking for feedback (See http://dev.colingo.org/media/123/).

14. Music: The music curation team had a listening jam last week, pulling together works from individual artists and DJs, from the Beatpick and the Free Music Project. This is being coordinated by Romain Becker and Sylvain Zimmer of Jamendo, and by Elizabeth Stark, who are processing the faxed copyright releases and attribution needs of the artists. Artists and bands on-board since last week include DJ C, DJ Spooky, Tripwire (tripwire.in), Rainvan, and Split. All have contributed songs under an attribution license and at least one collection under a non-commercial license (for school libraries).

15. Books: Arjun Sarwal is working with Hemant Goyal and Assim Deodia on a text-to-speech synthesizer for the Read activity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/E-Book_Reader). Biguniverse has 12 authors who have offered OLPC use of their stories.

16. Wikitext: Zdenek Broz has been improving the format of topical bundles of articles (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arael/preview/wikislice-physics-en/wikislice-physics-en.xol/index.html). The newer templates now need to be ported to other languages. The Fudia team developing the “Ksana” multilingual wiki reader are close to releasing a version of their reader/search platform that supports editing. Fudia wants to sponsor 8G “wikisticks” or SD cards for our partner schools.

The MindTouch team, developers of DekiWiki—a popular derivative of MediaWiki with a “more friendly” editing interface—are working with Mako Hill to make their platform one of the backends that MikMik supports.

17. Community journalism: The Report activity has been updated (See Report); Dan Sutera and his team have put together a Knight Foundation grant to support making it a scalable platform for local and regional news. They now have the site xotimes.org set up as the global overview of news reported with the activity.

18. Games: A group blog has been set up for OLPC games by the group at the Education and Technology Center at CMU working on a soccer game for the laptop (See http://www.olpcgames.org/). They are running a Pittsburgh Game Jam Nov 16–18 (See http://www.olpcgames.org/?p=16 and http://www.olpcgames.org/?p=18).

Game Jam Brasil was moved to November 10–11, and looks as though it may be larger than previously expected (See Game_Jam_Brasil/Organização).

GAMBIT at MIT are developing a card-game platform on which one could define and share new card games.

Mind Candy software is turning out a new global puzzle game that they'd love to have as a channel connecting children in the developing world with their core audience in the US. Michael Smith there is planning to turn a developer or two onto making an XO web interface (e.g., no Flash) as soon as their site goes live next month.

19. Other content actvities: Hemant Goyal and a small team is working with Arjun Sarwal in India to develop digital signal processing tools to work with measure. They are going to implement the filters in CSound this coming week.

20. Java: Adam Bouhenguel has an interest in evaluating and benchmarking light-weight versions of Java for the laptop. He would appreciate input from others who have considered the same questions.

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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