OLPC:News: Difference between revisions

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18. Mplayer: Reynaldo Verdejo and Eduardo Silva have been working on getting full screen decoding of video/audio with MPlayer on the XO; so far they have succeeded using the most used codecs/formats as a test case. They are working on an activity bundle to let anyone try this out.
18. Mplayer: Reynaldo Verdejo and Eduardo Silva have been working on getting full screen decoding of video/audio with MPlayer on the XO; so far they have succeeded using the most used codecs/formats as a test case. They are working on an activity bundle to let anyone try this out.


=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=
=More News=

Revision as of 16:45, 15 December 2007

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Laptop News 2007-12-15

1. Kuala Lumpur: Matt Keller attended the Global Knowledge Conference this past week; the conference brought together over 2000 people from around the world. Matt was part of a BBC World debate on technology and the developing world generally, and the XO specifically. While most of the panelists were somewhat critical of olpc and OLPC, the audience was very much in favor. The debate will be broadcast on BBC World on five different occasions in January.

2. Montevideo: Michail Bletsas attended a technical meeting organized by LATU to discuss the technical requirements for the connectivity infrastructure of the schools in the Colonia and Durazno districts: the next (after Florida) to get XO laptops after school commences again in March. The main purpose of the meeting was to discuss the main requirements of the RFP that is going to be issued in the next few days. Michail also spent several hours at LATU discussing connectivity details with the Ceibal team and left Uruguay impressed with both the enthusiasm of the people involved in the project as well as their accomplishments.

3. Cambridge: The learning team (Carla Gomez Munroy, Ed Baafi, Julian Daily, Mel King, and David Cavallo) conducted the second monthly workshop for countries. Attending were teams from Mongolia, Panama, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, the US State Department for schools in Iraq, and Calestus Juma as both a contributor and looking towards Kenya and East Africa. The week went extremely well and most encouraging is how participants are turning themselves into a strong network for advancing learning in their countries. Special thanks also to Erik Blankinship, Bakhtiar Mikhak, Ben Schwartz, and Shannon Sullivan for demoing their activities on the XO during an afternoon open house. The youth from the Learn to Teach: Teach to Learn program working with Ed and Mel once again presented their work and convincingly demonstrated the tremendous benefits for both the “teachers” and “learners” when kids teach other kids.

4. Schedules: We did not quite get to code freeze today and will need a few more days to get the most important bugs fixed for the Update1 release. (As Jim Gettys pointed out, the Update.1 release is driven by completion of content, rather than driven by necessity of hardware schedules.) We will start creating candidate releases next week. Please see http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap for the list of bugs being addressed and to look ahead to what we would like to go into Update.2. Testing should be on-going on the Update.1 (stabilizing for release in mid-January) and Joyride streams (mainline, features/fixes for Update.2).

There is a discussion on the devel list about how to improve the build process. Please feel free to make additional suggestions: we want to the process to be more efficient for everyone.

5. Support Issues: A problem was found in Uruguay where where laptops were losing the ability to display their Journal contents and launch activities. Ivan Krstić did some heroic emergency debugging, created a patch, and helped them to distribute a fix to all the students before they were released for their summer vacation. There was also a problem found in manufacturing where Spanish language laptops were booting up in English. These two fixes, along with support for WPA were combined into a patch release, Ship2-653, that should be available for manufacturing early next week and to the general public soon thereafter. People interested in testing this patch can download the signed version (See http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/653/).

The first G1G1 recipients have started receiving laptops this week. That means the calls, emails, IRC questions, and new community members are beginning to show up all over. This week Adam Holt set up these two Support wiki pages: Support and Support FAQ, which is a good launching point for FAQs, as well as community-supported email, portals, and IRC. He also set up mail@laptop.org and has begun the task of answering many emails.

6. Documentation: We have a number of new pages on laptop.org geared towards helping introduce the laptop to new users (Please see http://laptop.org/start). These pages will evolve (and hopefully improve) over the next few weeks as we get a better sense of the types of questions people are asking from the field—we’ve deployed more laptops in the past few weeks than in the entirety of our beta programs, so we expect a lot of valuable feedback in the coming days. Your feedback on these pages would also be greatly appreciated: please send email to walter AT laptop.org. The plan is to make these “getting started” pages available for translation in Pootle over the next week or so. Note that the page devoted to describing the activities (http://laptop.org/en/laptop/start/activities.shtml) directs people to the individual activity pages in the wiki, e.g., Journal. Please help us tidy up those pages as well.

7. Testing: Yani Galanis updated versions of olpc-netstatus to provide information on build versions, firmware, net status, etc. and olpc-netlog to capture all possible logs, such as dmesg, messages, .sugar/default/logs (and the output of several commands). These debugging utilities should get into Update1. Yani also spent time investigating a bug in Avahi that results in XOs coming and going in the mesh neighborhood view (flashing in and out). Ricardo Carrano, Yani Galanis, and Adam Holt also joined SJ Klein for some collaborative activity testing with a group of students.

This was Alex Latham's last day as an intern at OLPC. He spent the week documenting everything he could, as well as testing joyride, Update1 and Ship2 builds. Much of his work can be found in the wiki (Please see Test Config Notes and Upgrade Paths) as well as many contributions to test plans, including our One Hour Smoke Test. Many thanks for all your contributions, Alex!

8. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso profiled activity startup time and memory usage. He is optimistic that we can improve significantly what we have today with small risk and effort.

Simon Schampijer became a Fedora developer this week and build with Marco's help his first xulrunner package this week. We are considering this for Update.1. The ticket which references this is #5041. This can be tested in Joyride > 1421.

This new package contains a reworked theme patch from Marco which fixes the “hatched browser scroll bar” bug (Ticket #5397) and the “not highlighted entries in drop down menus” bug (Ticket #5398). He applied a patch that came from upstream as well against a Pango error; the patch fixes the crashing of Browse by accessing the BofA page (Ticket #5410). Simon is quite confident due to testing that the “missing cursor in browser rich-text fields” bug (Ticket #5340) is fixed with the latest xulrunner version as well. Simon, Marco and Michael had some deeper discussions about how to solve the permissions problem of the browser profile (Ticket #5476). Another little fix was the correct advertising of the browser (Ticket #5269).

Reinier Heeres landed the new Evince version in Joyride and updated Read to work with that version. Beside that there was more work on Sugar: a patch to upgrade activities, a patch to scale emblems, some minor layout bugs and a way to request the Journal to pop-up with a Datastore object. This could lead to a way for applications to start other applications or view source—through the trusted Journal.

Scott Ananian worked on numerous Pippy enhancements, the most intriguing being that Pippy can now create activity bundles, so you can run your pippy programs as stand-alone applications. Scott improved the built-in “Thanks” example so that it runs quite nicely stand-alone. Also, Scott reports that Pippy is now a Pippy application! That's right, you can load the pippy source code in Pippy, edit it, and create the Pippy application within Pippy.

In progress: proper support for the “view source” key. This stalled a little bit pending resolution of Ticket #4909, but Scott thinks we've got a workable solution in hand. View source on an activity generated by Pippy should launch Pippy with the activity's source code; pressing view source again will land you in Pippy editing Pippy's source code!

In anticipation, Scott has a very simple ten-line rewrite of our Terminal activity; using this would have the benefit of making “view source”in Terminal do something reasonable. Any existing activity that can reasonably be represented in a single source file is a candidate for Pippy-ization! Let Scott or Chris Ball know if you've got suitable candidates.

Scott also created a library of Pippy examples suitable for learning Python programming (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/pippy-examples;a=tree). These are based on the BASIC examples in the Commodore 64 manual (http://www.lemon64.com/manual/). Help is wanted with sound examples: we should be able to write a Pippy “standard library” that makes it easy to write simple “play a song” examples using the csound engine (see Chapter 8 in the C64 manual).

9. Presence: Robert McQueen spent some time making patches to ejabberd to reduce the server load as the developers suggested over-long rosters (the 7000-strong “Everyone”) were causing the out of memory crashes we were experiencing (causes of Ticket #5313). The first patch made a “Recent” group, which took the last seven-days worth of users (roughly 1500), and the second made an “Online" group, which just tracks those users who were online (100–150 or so), reducing server load significantly, and paving the way for the desired “Nearby” and “Random” groups as outlined in Ticket #5311.

Both patches seemed to significantly aid stability, such that it is now better than ever before: we reached 150 online users on the server. We managed to hit some file-descriptor limits that needed tweaking upwards and we seem to sporadically hit out-of-memory errors that have as yet no explanation. This load is still short of the “large school” scalability target we have in mind for Update.1.

We are going to try Openfire on jabber.laptop.org this weekend as an alternative to ejabberd.

Dafydd Harries worked on Jabber server component and made RPM builds and herded bugs.

Guillaume Desmottes reported ejabberd bug about default PEP node policy (See https://support.process-one.net/browse/EJAB-453); he report edOpenFire and Ejabberd bugs about publishing options not implemented (http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/thread/30566) and (https://support.process-one.net/browse/EJAB-458); he tracked “stream tube broken because of Rainbow” (Tickets #5442, #5445, and #5446); he continued to implement new XMPP protocol in Gabble; and he updated sugar-jhbuild moduleset to use exactly the same Salut/Gabble code as in Joyride, including patches (needed to fix a jhbuild upstream bug—thanks to Frédéric Peters for his patch).

Sjoerd Simons helped Morgan Collett analyze an issue with activities not working on Salut caused by a problem which causes the wireless card to stops sending out multicast traffic (Ticket #5432). The root cause is still unknown. Sjoerd cleaned up his patch to dissect the Clique RM protocol in Wireshark and sent it upstream. With some luck the next version of Wireshark will thus be able to dissect our reliable multicast protocol.

Morgan Collet has been extending the (See Tubes Tutorial) by documenting the D-Bus Tubes example in HelloMesh and will continue to work on it. He has started documentation for Presence Service which he will update on the wiki soon. All the outstanding Presence Service patches have been approved and landed in Update.1. Morgan has also continued to educate G1G1 recipients on the lack of a single Jabber server that can handle 100s of thousands of them: we are hoping that people will point to local Jabber servers that are set up for communities and special interest groups (See Ejabberd_Configuration).

10. Pootle: Sayamindo Dasgupta created an Update.1 project in Pootle to track modules for new Update.1 branch. The older Update.1 (Core) project has been renamed to Ship.2 (following the GIT branch renaming). Developers who have a Update.1 branch in GIT can inform us (via filing a ticket or by mailing localization@lists.laptop.org), so that we can add their module in the Update.1 project. The following modules are covered by the Update.1 project at the moment:

• Sugar • Journal activity • Record Activity • Browse Activity

The following languages have more than 90% of these module translated:

• Urdu (100%) • Portuguese (100%) • Chinese (Taiwan) (100%) • French (97%) • Dutch (96%) • German (95%) • Greek (91%)

(These statistics are available online from https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/update1/).

11. Kernel: Andres Salomon synced up the master and stable kernel trees, which, as a side effect, fixed the debian kernel autobuilder that had been broken for the past six months (See http://queued.mit.edu/~dilinger/builds-master/). Andres also pulled Dave Woodhouse's latest libertas work into stable. The Libertas code is in a lot of flux right now (and is by no means finished), so reports of regressions are highly appreciated.

Andres poked at LXFB code, worked on and discussed EC issues (Ticket-#1835 related) with Richard Smith. There is also talk of EC SCI mask read corruption, so he made a few changes that should both work around it, and report a warning/backtrace when it is seen (and hey, if you see it, report it!) Finally, there was work on a sysfs knob to dump battery EEPROM contents, and reworking the upstream battery API.

12. Open hardware manager: Chris Ball turned on idleness detection in OHM and also allowed OHM to suspend automatically while an AC adapter is plugged in. If DC input to the laptop is a solar panel, a battery, or other off grid source, conserving power is as important as when the laptop is running from its internal battery. Conservation is generally a good idea under all circumstances.

13. Libertas: Dave Woodhouse worked on the Libertas wireless driver: 25 files changed, 3143 insertions(+), 3288 deletions(–). 107 commits so far, of which 11 have 'kill' in the title. The Libertas driver upstream is a whole lot saner, and has been backported into our stable tree too.

14. Build system: Dennis Gilmore spent the week working on Update.1 builds and yesterday on a Ship.2 build. He got libertas-usb8388-firmware into Fedora and added a sanity check in the build process that verifies the md5sum of the firmware image.

Dennis worked on pyevent, gave Ivan Krstić RPMS to enable him to do his work, and patched it to be built on all platforms; the next step is to reopen the Fedora review on pyevent and get it into Fedora.

Scott finally installed pilgrim.laptop.org, starting the long and arduous process of moving our builds off xs-dev.laptop.org.

Bernie Innocenti worked with Dennis on consolidating our Xorg packages for Joyride and Update.1, including the drivers for QEMU and VMware. Moreover, they analyzed a failure in our build system that seems to be triggered by recent olpc-utils packages, but so far we found nothing conclusive.

Bernie has been working on fixing a nasty localization bug that would make Ship.2 machines autoconfigure in English regardless of what the manufacturing data said. They had it working in Joyride for some time, but the fix did not make it to Ship.2, and his first attempt at a backport caused even more breakage.

On the R&D front, Bernie and Dennis started looking at how we could improve our boot time, or at least bring some useful interface up while the user is waiting. Some eyebrows may rise hearing that we can easily start the X server in a few seconds, with absolutely no prerequisites other than mounted /proc and /sys and a few device nodes in /dev. So we are confident we can enhance our pretty boot graphics with a fluid Cairo animation that Carl Worth contributed.

Additionally, we could try to start Sugar very early, before NetworkManager and other services are up and running. It may require some bug fixing around, so it's not material for an upcoming release.

15. Updates: Scott Ananian released olpc-update 1.9, which avoids wasting work if it is interrupted and resumed later, and also properly warns the user if they try to update to an unsigned build on a locked machine. He properly fixed Ticket #5197, which could cause machines to crash if interrupted during first boot (olpcrd-0.37). He pestered Dave Woodhouse enough that he gave him a new mkjffs2 for a better fix for 5197 (Ticket #5174). And he worked out more details of an automated test framework for XO builds with Michael Stone and others.

16. Security: Michael Stone learned (and reported) many things about encryption export control (Ticket #5346)—community coordination on this issue is a must; he discussed the Mozilla permissions stuff with Marco and Simon (Ticket #5489); he helped Erik Blankinship correct Record's permissions-violations (Ticket #5448); he verified that causing rainbow-daemon to request utf8-encoded strings fixes the bug that prevented us from launching activities whose names contained non-ASCII characters (Ticket #5013); and he suggested implementation proposals for the “view-source” feature (Tickets #4909 and #5475).

17. Etoys: Scott Wallace and Yoshiki Ohshima fixed dozens of isolated bugs reported on trac. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness experimented with a static web version of Etoys Quick Guides (Please see http://tinlizzie.org/olpc/QG-web/). Takashi Yamamiya fixed a bug in OggPlugin for Squeak. Yoshiki wrote up a “little wiki page” for Smalltalk programming on XO (Please see Smalltalk Development on XO).

Bert Freudenberg is in Kathmanzu give some local Nepali groups a deeper understanding of Squeak and Etoys. They are using Squeak to develop learning activities for the XO even before they have machines. Bert is participating in an Etoys Workshop today at Kathmandu Prime College. Students and adults are having great fun implementing a car racing game in Etoys. Bert is also experimenting with the new Devanagari rendering engine (with a Squeak-Cairo-Pango interface) that he and Yoshiki developed.

18. Mplayer: Reynaldo Verdejo and Eduardo Silva have been working on getting full screen decoding of video/audio with MPlayer on the XO; so far they have succeeded using the most used codecs/formats as a test case. They are working on an activity bundle to let anyone try this out.


More News

Laptop News is archived here and here.

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 2007-12-15

1. Kuala Lumpur: Matt Keller attended the Global Knowledge Conference this past week; the conference brought together over 2000 people from around the world. Matt was part of a BBC World debate on technology and the developing world generally, and the XO specifically. While most of the panelists were somewhat critical of olpc and OLPC, the audience was very much in favor. The debate will be broadcast on BBC World on five different occasions in January.

2. Montevideo: Michail Bletsas attended a technical meeting organized by LATU to discuss the technical requirements for the connectivity infrastructure of the schools in the Colonia and Durazno districts: the next (after Florida) to get XO laptops after school commences again in March. The main purpose of the meeting was to discuss the main requirements of the RFP that is going to be issued in the next few days. Michail also spent several hours at LATU discussing connectivity details with the Ceibal team and left Uruguay impressed with both the enthusiasm of the people involved in the project as well as their accomplishments.

3. Cambridge: The learning team (Carla Gomez Munroy, Ed Baafi, Julian Daily, Mel King, and David Cavallo) conducted the second monthly workshop for countries. Attending were teams from Mongolia, Panama, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, the US State Department for schools in Iraq, and Calestus Juma as both a contributor and looking towards Kenya and East Africa. The week went extremely well and most encouraging is how participants are turning themselves into a strong network for advancing learning in their countries. Special thanks also to Erik Blankinship, Bakhtiar Mikhak, Ben Schwartz, and Shannon Sullivan for demoing their activities on the XO during an afternoon open house. The youth from the Learn to Teach: Teach to Learn program working with Ed and Mel once again presented their work and convincingly demonstrated the tremendous benefits for both the “teachers” and “learners” when kids teach other kids.

4. Schedules: We did not quite get to code freeze today and will need a few more days to get the most important bugs fixed for the Update1 release. (As Jim Gettys pointed out, the Update.1 release is driven by completion of content, rather than driven by necessity of hardware schedules.) We will start creating candidate releases next week. Please see http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap for the list of bugs being addressed and to look ahead to what we would like to go into Update.2. Testing should be on-going on the Update.1 (stabilizing for release in mid-January) and Joyride streams (mainline, features/fixes for Update.2).

There is a discussion on the devel list about how to improve the build process. Please feel free to make additional suggestions: we want to the process to be more efficient for everyone.

5. Support Issues: A problem was found in Uruguay where where laptops were losing the ability to display their Journal contents and launch activities. Ivan Krstić did some heroic emergency debugging, created a patch, and helped them to distribute a fix to all the students before they were released for their summer vacation. There was also a problem found in manufacturing where Spanish language laptops were booting up in English. These two fixes, along with support for WPA were combined into a patch release, Ship2-653, that should be available for manufacturing early next week and to the general public soon thereafter. People interested in testing this patch can download the signed version (See http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/653/).

The first G1G1 recipients have started receiving laptops this week. That means the calls, emails, IRC questions, and new community members are beginning to show up all over. This week Adam Holt set up these two Support wiki pages: Support and Support FAQ, which is a good launching point for FAQs, as well as community-supported email, portals, and IRC. He also set up mail@laptop.org and has begun the task of answering many emails.

6. Documentation: We have a number of new pages on laptop.org geared towards helping introduce the laptop to new users (Please see http://laptop.org/start). These pages will evolve (and hopefully improve) over the next few weeks as we get a better sense of the types of questions people are asking from the field—we’ve deployed more laptops in the past few weeks than in the entirety of our beta programs, so we expect a lot of valuable feedback in the coming days. Your feedback on these pages would also be greatly appreciated: please send email to walter AT laptop.org. The plan is to make these “getting started” pages available for translation in Pootle over the next week or so. Note that the page devoted to describing the activities (http://laptop.org/en/laptop/start/activities.shtml) directs people to the individual activity pages in the wiki, e.g., Journal. Please help us tidy up those pages as well.

7. Testing: Yani Galanis updated versions of olpc-netstatus to provide information on build versions, firmware, net status, etc. and olpc-netlog to capture all possible logs, such as dmesg, messages, .sugar/default/logs (and the output of several commands). These debugging utilities should get into Update1. Yani also spent time investigating a bug in Avahi that results in XOs coming and going in the mesh neighborhood view (flashing in and out). Ricardo Carrano, Yani Galanis, and Adam Holt also joined SJ Klein for some collaborative activity testing with a group of students.

This was Alex Latham's last day as an intern at OLPC. He spent the week documenting everything he could, as well as testing joyride, Update1 and Ship2 builds. Much of his work can be found in the wiki (Please see Test Config Notes and Upgrade Paths) as well as many contributions to test plans, including our One Hour Smoke Test. Many thanks for all your contributions, Alex!

8. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso profiled activity startup time and memory usage. He is optimistic that we can improve significantly what we have today with small risk and effort.

Simon Schampijer became a Fedora developer this week and build with Marco's help his first xulrunner package this week. We are considering this for Update.1. The ticket which references this is #5041. This can be tested in Joyride > 1421.

This new package contains a reworked theme patch from Marco which fixes the “hatched browser scroll bar” bug (Ticket #5397) and the “not highlighted entries in drop down menus” bug (Ticket #5398). He applied a patch that came from upstream as well against a Pango error; the patch fixes the crashing of Browse by accessing the BofA page (Ticket #5410). Simon is quite confident due to testing that the “missing cursor in browser rich-text fields” bug (Ticket #5340) is fixed with the latest xulrunner version as well. Simon, Marco and Michael had some deeper discussions about how to solve the permissions problem of the browser profile (Ticket #5476). Another little fix was the correct advertising of the browser (Ticket #5269).

Reinier Heeres landed the new Evince version in Joyride and updated Read to work with that version. Beside that there was more work on Sugar: a patch to upgrade activities, a patch to scale emblems, some minor layout bugs and a way to request the Journal to pop-up with a Datastore object. This could lead to a way for applications to start other applications or view source—through the trusted Journal.

Scott Ananian worked on numerous Pippy enhancements, the most intriguing being that Pippy can now create activity bundles, so you can run your pippy programs as stand-alone applications. Scott improved the built-in “Thanks” example so that it runs quite nicely stand-alone. Also, Scott reports that Pippy is now a Pippy application! That's right, you can load the pippy source code in Pippy, edit it, and create the Pippy application within Pippy.

In progress: proper support for the “view source” key. This stalled a little bit pending resolution of Ticket #4909, but Scott thinks we've got a workable solution in hand. View source on an activity generated by Pippy should launch Pippy with the activity's source code; pressing view source again will land you in Pippy editing Pippy's source code!

In anticipation, Scott has a very simple ten-line rewrite of our Terminal activity; using this would have the benefit of making “view source”in Terminal do something reasonable. Any existing activity that can reasonably be represented in a single source file is a candidate for Pippy-ization! Let Scott or Chris Ball know if you've got suitable candidates.

Scott also created a library of Pippy examples suitable for learning Python programming (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/pippy-examples;a=tree). These are based on the BASIC examples in the Commodore 64 manual (http://www.lemon64.com/manual/). Help is wanted with sound examples: we should be able to write a Pippy “standard library” that makes it easy to write simple “play a song” examples using the csound engine (see Chapter 8 in the C64 manual).

9. Presence: Robert McQueen spent some time making patches to ejabberd to reduce the server load as the developers suggested over-long rosters (the 7000-strong “Everyone”) were causing the out of memory crashes we were experiencing (causes of Ticket #5313). The first patch made a “Recent” group, which took the last seven-days worth of users (roughly 1500), and the second made an “Online" group, which just tracks those users who were online (100–150 or so), reducing server load significantly, and paving the way for the desired “Nearby” and “Random” groups as outlined in Ticket #5311.

Both patches seemed to significantly aid stability, such that it is now better than ever before: we reached 150 online users on the server. We managed to hit some file-descriptor limits that needed tweaking upwards and we seem to sporadically hit out-of-memory errors that have as yet no explanation. This load is still short of the “large school” scalability target we have in mind for Update.1.

We are going to try Openfire on jabber.laptop.org this weekend as an alternative to ejabberd.

Dafydd Harries worked on Jabber server component and made RPM builds and herded bugs.

Guillaume Desmottes reported ejabberd bug about default PEP node policy (See https://support.process-one.net/browse/EJAB-453); he report edOpenFire and Ejabberd bugs about publishing options not implemented (http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/thread/30566) and (https://support.process-one.net/browse/EJAB-458); he tracked “stream tube broken because of Rainbow” (Tickets #5442, #5445, and #5446); he continued to implement new XMPP protocol in Gabble; and he updated sugar-jhbuild moduleset to use exactly the same Salut/Gabble code as in Joyride, including patches (needed to fix a jhbuild upstream bug—thanks to Frédéric Peters for his patch).

Sjoerd Simons helped Morgan Collett analyze an issue with activities not working on Salut caused by a problem which causes the wireless card to stops sending out multicast traffic (Ticket #5432). The root cause is still unknown. Sjoerd cleaned up his patch to dissect the Clique RM protocol in Wireshark and sent it upstream. With some luck the next version of Wireshark will thus be able to dissect our reliable multicast protocol.

Morgan Collet has been extending the (See Tubes Tutorial) by documenting the D-Bus Tubes example in HelloMesh and will continue to work on it. He has started documentation for Presence Service which he will update on the wiki soon. All the outstanding Presence Service patches have been approved and landed in Update.1. Morgan has also continued to educate G1G1 recipients on the lack of a single Jabber server that can handle 100s of thousands of them: we are hoping that people will point to local Jabber servers that are set up for communities and special interest groups (See Ejabberd_Configuration).

10. Pootle: Sayamindo Dasgupta created an Update.1 project in Pootle to track modules for new Update.1 branch. The older Update.1 (Core) project has been renamed to Ship.2 (following the GIT branch renaming). Developers who have a Update.1 branch in GIT can inform us (via filing a ticket or by mailing localization@lists.laptop.org), so that we can add their module in the Update.1 project. The following modules are covered by the Update.1 project at the moment:

• Sugar • Journal activity • Record Activity • Browse Activity

The following languages have more than 90% of these module translated:

• Urdu (100%) • Portuguese (100%) • Chinese (Taiwan) (100%) • French (97%) • Dutch (96%) • German (95%) • Greek (91%)

(These statistics are available online from https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/update1/).

11. Kernel: Andres Salomon synced up the master and stable kernel trees, which, as a side effect, fixed the debian kernel autobuilder that had been broken for the past six months (See http://queued.mit.edu/~dilinger/builds-master/). Andres also pulled Dave Woodhouse's latest libertas work into stable. The Libertas code is in a lot of flux right now (and is by no means finished), so reports of regressions are highly appreciated.

Andres poked at LXFB code, worked on and discussed EC issues (Ticket-#1835 related) with Richard Smith. There is also talk of EC SCI mask read corruption, so he made a few changes that should both work around it, and report a warning/backtrace when it is seen (and hey, if you see it, report it!) Finally, there was work on a sysfs knob to dump battery EEPROM contents, and reworking the upstream battery API.

12. Open hardware manager: Chris Ball turned on idleness detection in OHM and also allowed OHM to suspend automatically while an AC adapter is plugged in. If DC input to the laptop is a solar panel, a battery, or other off grid source, conserving power is as important as when the laptop is running from its internal battery. Conservation is generally a good idea under all circumstances.

13. Libertas: Dave Woodhouse worked on the Libertas wireless driver: 25 files changed, 3143 insertions(+), 3288 deletions(–). 107 commits so far, of which 11 have 'kill' in the title. The Libertas driver upstream is a whole lot saner, and has been backported into our stable tree too.

14. Build system: Dennis Gilmore spent the week working on Update.1 builds and yesterday on a Ship.2 build. He got libertas-usb8388-firmware into Fedora and added a sanity check in the build process that verifies the md5sum of the firmware image.

Dennis worked on pyevent, gave Ivan Krstić RPMS to enable him to do his work, and patched it to be built on all platforms; the next step is to reopen the Fedora review on pyevent and get it into Fedora.

Scott finally installed pilgrim.laptop.org, starting the long and arduous process of moving our builds off xs-dev.laptop.org.

Bernie Innocenti worked with Dennis on consolidating our Xorg packages for Joyride and Update.1, including the drivers for QEMU and VMware. Moreover, they analyzed a failure in our build system that seems to be triggered by recent olpc-utils packages, but so far we found nothing conclusive.

Bernie has been working on fixing a nasty localization bug that would make Ship.2 machines autoconfigure in English regardless of what the manufacturing data said. They had it working in Joyride for some time, but the fix did not make it to Ship.2, and his first attempt at a backport caused even more breakage.

On the R&D front, Bernie and Dennis started looking at how we could improve our boot time, or at least bring some useful interface up while the user is waiting. Some eyebrows may rise hearing that we can easily start the X server in a few seconds, with absolutely no prerequisites other than mounted /proc and /sys and a few device nodes in /dev. So we are confident we can enhance our pretty boot graphics with a fluid Cairo animation that Carl Worth contributed.

Additionally, we could try to start Sugar very early, before NetworkManager and other services are up and running. It may require some bug fixing around, so it's not material for an upcoming release.

15. Updates: Scott Ananian released olpc-update 1.9, which avoids wasting work if it is interrupted and resumed later, and also properly warns the user if they try to update to an unsigned build on a locked machine. He properly fixed Ticket #5197, which could cause machines to crash if interrupted during first boot (olpcrd-0.37). He pestered Dave Woodhouse enough that he gave him a new mkjffs2 for a better fix for 5197 (Ticket #5174). And he worked out more details of an automated test framework for XO builds with Michael Stone and others.

16. Security: Michael Stone learned (and reported) many things about encryption export control (Ticket #5346)—community coordination on this issue is a must; he discussed the Mozilla permissions stuff with Marco and Simon (Ticket #5489); he helped Erik Blankinship correct Record's permissions-violations (Ticket #5448); he verified that causing rainbow-daemon to request utf8-encoded strings fixes the bug that prevented us from launching activities whose names contained non-ASCII characters (Ticket #5013); and he suggested implementation proposals for the “view-source” feature (Tickets #4909 and #5475).

17. Etoys: Scott Wallace and Yoshiki Ohshima fixed dozens of isolated bugs reported on trac. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness experimented with a static web version of Etoys Quick Guides (Please see http://tinlizzie.org/olpc/QG-web/). Takashi Yamamiya fixed a bug in OggPlugin for Squeak. Yoshiki wrote up a “little wiki page” for Smalltalk programming on XO (Please see Smalltalk Development on XO).

Bert Freudenberg is in Kathmanzu give some local Nepali groups a deeper understanding of Squeak and Etoys. They are using Squeak to develop learning activities for the XO even before they have machines. Bert is participating in an Etoys Workshop today at Kathmandu Prime College. Students and adults are having great fun implementing a car racing game in Etoys. Bert is also experimenting with the new Devanagari rendering engine (with a Squeak-Cairo-Pango interface) that he and Yoshiki developed.

18. Mplayer: Reynaldo Verdejo and Eduardo Silva have been working on getting full screen decoding of video/audio with MPlayer on the XO; so far they have succeeded using the most used codecs/formats as a test case. They are working on an activity bundle to let anyone try this out.


More News

Laptop News is archived here and here.

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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