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Laptop News 2007-12-13

1. Think that the XO laptop will not succeed as an educational tool? Go ask Rufus, he'll put you straight.

Laptop News 2007-12-08

1. Santiago: David Cavallo keynoted TISE 2007, the workshop on Educational Software.

2. Schedule: The release of our Ship.2 Build (650) and firmware (Q2D07) occurred in time to be installed on the G1G1 laptops that will begin shipping on Monday.

The roadmap for Update.1 has been enhanced with more detailed dates and important bug fixes that are being worked on (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap). We have already passed feature freeze and string freeze (for translations). The next milestone is code freeze on December 15. Developers not fixing critical bugs for Update.1 should provide their recommended feature set for Update.2 (and beyond).

3. Testing: Ricardo Carrano, Yani Galanis, and Michail Bletsas spent a number of hours with a forty (40) laptop test bed in a quiet RF environment to ensure that we have fixed our most egregious wireless bug—the lazyWDS problem—and to dig deeper into an occasional wireless crash problems in mesh networks of more than 30 laptops. They have also been working with Robert McQueen and the Collabra team to document and simplify the process of creating a Jabber server –so individuals and groups can create their own Jabber servers to make their own mesh neighborhood clusters. Yani is working on a test plan to scale the number laptops virtually connected to a Jabber server so we can simulate having 100s of users while using only a few laptops.

Alex Latham has moved on to testing Joyride builds after adding some notes to the Ship.2 release notes—not complete, but there is a link from the Software Release Notes page (Please see OLPC Ship.2 Software Release Notes). Alex also spent time reviewing and documenting the activation and developer key processes (Please see Activation and Developer Keys).

4. Support: We had meetings between OLPC, Brightstar, RMS (Brightstar's tech-support call center), and Patriot to map out the phone, email, webpages, and processes that will help our new laptop users to get up to speed quickly and diagnose some problems they might encounter (Please send comments regarding http://laptop.org/gettingstarted). Adam has been helping to coordinate and document the internal and externally facing support mechanisms.

5. Wireless: Michail Bletsas reports that the past week was spent testing reliability, functionality, and scalability.

On the reliability front, David Woodhouse is in the process of sanitizing the command queueing used in the wireless driver; this should eliminate the occasional fall into catatonia by the firmware.

Testing this week confirmed that these problems only manifest in very busy wireless environments. Even in such environments, they tend to only affect idle machines. When XOs are idle, the are exchanging Salut traffic (useful) and generating probes and probe responses for WLAN discovery (useless and a big nuisance with large numbers of XOs). Michail is currently testing a version of the firmware that disables probe responses from XOs with the intent to deploy it in the upcoming learning workshops so that we can comfortably run all the machines in the room concurrently.

Collabora also found a number of bugs in the local-link presence code which will improve scaling in the next release. Ricardo tested various workarounds for the UI's wireless encryption configuration bugs.

6. Active antennae: Marvell is going to release the firmware update tool for the active antennae next week. This became more urgent after the recent frame-format change and John Watlington's observation that the school server’s boot time is longer than the time period during which the active antennas wait for the host to talk them after power-up (See further discussion below). The current modules switch into autonomous mode before the server has finished with its boot-up sequence and thus they fail to be properly configured by the server. We will have to increase the host-wait timeout on the antennae to avoid this in the future and flash server modules with the standard radio boot code (to prevent them from going into autonomous mode).

7. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso moved the object chooser from the Sugar library to the Journal. Activities now ask the Journal to display the object chooser so the user may choose which Journal entry the activity should have access to. This will help to protect the privacy of the user while allowing activities to consume data from other activities. Also, this removes duplicate code and facilitates sharing of features between the Journal and the object chooser.

Tomeu also is investigating why activities startup has gotten to be so slow of late. He has already identified some areas that can be easily improved for Update.1. Other improvements will come later.

Simon Shampijer worked this week on tracking down and fixing issues in the browser regarding Rainbow security: the data generated by the “view source” command are saved in $SAR/instance and the browser profile is saved in $SAR/data. There is still a remaining issue with the permissions for the profile, since these are files sometimes generated and accessed by the library. Will have to discuss this again with Michael Stone and Marco Pesenti Gritti. Working along with Morgan Collett, we finally have all the parts for a fix to the Rainbow-related problem with opening links from Chat in the browser. But not everything is in Joyride yet for testing.

Reinier Heeres spent last week getting a new evince version working (evince is the PDF back-end for Read). It was already working in jhbuild, but some library dependencies had to be removed and new rpm packages built. This is now complete, so everything is in place to get packages in Joyride soon. Reinier is also working on supporting bundle upgrades from the Journal. Beside that, he fixed some Sugar bugs, like leaking of icons in /tmp, and has written code to improve unmount-failure feedback in the Journal.

8. Open hardware manager: Chris Ball worked on power manager bugs and features. The version of OHM in the Joyride build is complete except for two new features being added for Update.1—better handling of user-set brightness (currently OHM will override it) and inhibiting suspend when the CPU is not idle. These should land in Joyride next week.

Chris hasn't had much time to work on Pippy—if anyone can think of Pippy “examples” they'd like to see in Update.1, please let him know.

9. Emulation: Bernie Innocenti and Mitchell Charity improved the experience for users of QEMU, Vmware, and other emulated environments. We now support the video driver vmware_drv, which also works with the latest CVS snapshots of QEMU and provides a 1200x900 mode.

10. Utilities: Bernie also made changes to the boot process and olpc-utils for better UTF-8 support. olpc-configure now regenerates the library index after updates. The experimental Xserver 1.5 is still in the works, and lives in a separate xtest build for now.

11. Rainbow: Michael Stone experimented with an architecture for our automated testing; he also spent time answering Sugar-related questions about Rainbow, he a little bit on Rainbow bug-fixing, and helped get us unstuck on encryption export controls and P_DOCUMENT/P_DOCUMENT_RO.

12. Builds: Last week, C Scott Ananian managed stable builds through 649, making our builds substantially less sexy, and finished and tuned olpc-update-query, which allows you to subscribe to any one of a number of “update streams” to keep your machine up to date.

This week Scott shepherded build 650 with Q2D06 and fixed the “fail to boot on upgrade” bug. He has automated generation of activation/developer keys—there are no more “sneakernet” delays! He also added statistics collection code to the activation server in order to let us track which builds are “in the wild”; he promises pretty graphs next week.

Scott also cleaned up the server-side component of the XO dev key request page; he worked with Michael on integrating automated testing into our build system, using the pybots/buildbots framework; he edited Activation and Developer Keys; and he did a “sticker drive” at OLPC HQ, trying to remove machines running ancient versions of libertas firmware from our network.

13. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes wrote a wiki page explaining how to deploy an Openfire server (Please see Openfire Configuration). He also investigated an alias problem with Openfire (Please see Openfire Configuration#Alias droped). He worked on the server component XMPP protocol; wrote a fix for http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13156, and started to implement new XMPP protocol in Gabble.

Sjoerd Simons analyzed some network traces of tests with 10 or more XOs, which lead to the discovery that idle session of Salut’s Clique protocol didn’t scale as they are supposed to. He released telepathy-salut-0.2.0, which is the start of a bug-fix-only branch for salut. This release fixes stream tubes on machines without nss-mdns (such as the XO) and the aforementioned scaling issue of idle Clique sessions.

Rob McQueen has been working with Dafydd Harries, Guillaume Desmottes, and Simon McVittie to write up proposed XMPP component protocol. Rob has also been liaising (or nagging :D) with ejabberd upstream to try and address stability issues on jabber.laptop.org and hence school server deployments. He has packaged the ejabberd trunk and is trying it on jabber.laptop.org and he has tracked outstanding ejabberd issues that affect jabber.laptop.org and school server (automatic configuration of shared roster). He has been applying hacks to keep jabber.laptop.org running (such as watch ejabberd with monit, reduce the shared roster to recently-active users rather than all registered users, etc.) and the odd bit of packaging/trac herding for telepathy components.

Dafydd Harries began work on the Jabber-server extension planned for Update 2 that we hope will greatly improve collaboration scalability.

Morgan Collett engaged in various discussions on mailing lists and IRC about jabber servers and appropriate expectations for Ship.2 users. Please note that there is not be a working server configured in the Ship.2 software, since we cannot support that kind of volume on our current server infrastructure. Anyone interested in running a server for themselves or a specific community should see the latest information in the wiki (See Run your own jabber server). Morgan also tested Ship.2 collaboration and herded patches and bugs through the Update.1 approval process, including Presence Service patches that have been pending for a while.

14. Laptop firmware: Mitch Bradley released two new firmware for the laptop this week. Q2D06 was release on Tuesday night to fix a problem found which might cause problems when upgrading the laptops. It was quickly superseded by Q2D07 on Thursday night, when a bug was found by Quanta which will brick the laptop if the RTC battery (on the motherboard) fails. If you are running Q2D05 or Q2D06, please update immediately to Q2D07.

15. School server: A new build of school server software (137) was released this week. This includes newer libertas (wireless mesh) drivers and firmware, as well as supporting the hot-plugging of Active Antennas. It was decided on Tuesday to proceed with the laptop backup/restore protocol developed by Ivan Krstić and the Journal team for Update.1; it will be included in an upcoming release to allow testing over the next few weeks. Upcoming features are the addition of the Jabber server and web caching.

We discovered a serious problem with the new Active Antenna prototypes this week. These are the ones assembled around the beginning of November, and handed out to a number of countries and developers. The Boot2 firmware placed on them in manufacturing (3109) enters standalone repeater mode too quickly, and once in that mode they stop talking over USB. By the time a server has booted it can no longer talk to its Active Antennas! Attempts to downgrade the Boot2 firmware to the latest—which doesn't support standalone repeater mode (3107)—using the libertas-flash tool developed last year by Dan Williams are failing due to changes in the Boot2 API. As the most recent software builds now support hot-plugging of the antenna, the temporary work-around is to plug the antennas into the server after it has booted up.

16. From the community: Bruno Coudoin uploaded a new release of the GCompris activities. Bruno followed Bert Freudenberg 's EToys scripts to stay retro-compatible with previous startup sequence. Changes include a new sugar compliant icon; a Spanish translation; a fix to some some broken activities (e.g., algebra_plus-activity); and better Rainbow compatibility (e.g., no more writing in the home directory).

Eduardo Silva has been working on a new application called “XO-Monitor.” The goal is to watch the XO resources from a normal PC or laptop through the network with a simple graphical user interface written in PyGTK. It is very similar to the old developer console and it can aquire basic information such as build, kernel, firmware, model, serial number, etc.; trace system CPU usage; view logs; report simple network statistics; and list all of the XOs in the local network. More information about the project can be found in the wiki (Please see XO Monitor).

Wolfgang Rohrmoser and Kurt Gramlich are proud to announce the initial version of their OLPC XO-LiveCD. This new project targets these goals:

• give children, students, teachers and parents the opportunity to participate and use the Sugar educational software on a common PC;
• support demonstration of OLPC software to non-developers;
• provide an easy maintainable Live-System for developers to test activities on the sugar desktop, this could be regarded as an alternative to existing OLPC virtualbox and qemu images.

The technology they choose embeds an unmodified official Redhat build into a framework (LiveBackup), which provides everything needed to run a live system. Going this way we are able to minimize the work for updates as new OLPC builds get released.

The ISO image are available at:

ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/

as: XO-LiveCD_<date>.iso

Images will be mirrored to:

http://skolelinux.de:/XO-LiveCD/

Wolfgang and Kurt encourage everybody to try it out and give them feedback for improvements; please send mail to:

XO-LiveCD@skolelinux.de. Further information is available in the XO-LiveCD.pdf document at:

http://skolelinux.de:/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD.pdf

17. Urdu localization: Waqas Toor and Salman Minhasreport have almost completed their Urdu Glossary Project; Waqas be will be testing it over this weekend and will be ready/tested/debugged on Monday. An ebook of science is 100% complete and ready to be included. An ebook of Urdu (Meri Kitab) is 60% complete. Salman will attempt to complete it over the weekend. The Urdu localization of EToys is 75% complete; Waqas and Salman are confident to complete it sometimes next week.

18. Documentation: Anne Gentle and Seth Woodhouse are finishing laying out a simple introductory guide to ownership and care of the XO, working with material from Todd Kelsey and older demo notes and a number of community artists. Translation will begin this week (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/~sj/quickstart/).

Anne is working on fixing the banner and adding an actual index; generated by Author-IT, a commercial tool that we are currently using. Adam Hyde of FLOSSManuals has offered to port the documents to his site and set up a system to auto-update manuals there with text from the olpc wiki; we may switch to this next month.

19. Science fare: Sunee Piromprames has been working with Lauren Klein and teacher Srinuan to organize a bug-identification project at Ban Samhka, Thailand. David Stang of the BayScience Foundation is setting up forums for them to use to classify their findings, with photos and local text and pronunciation of bug names. They will have a worked example this week for the children to follow, and are working with Thai strings.

20. Library: Mako Hill, Lauren, and SJ Klein have worked out what bundling scripts need to be written to provide for simple bundle creation. It will be possible to make (and verify) bundles through a web upload form soon.

21. Our Stories: Google, UNICEF, and OLPC issued a joint press release regarding a global storytelling project being orchestrated by Google’s Stephen Cho. The goal of the initiative is to preserve and share stories, histories, and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages. Using XO laptops, mobile phones, and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends. These stories will be shared globally through the Our Stories website (See http://www.ourstories.org/), where they can be found on a Google Map.

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