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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].


=Laptop News 2007-12-15=
=Laptop News 2007-12-22=


1. Arahuay, Peru: If you haven't yet seen it, please take the time to
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.
read this AP article about the XO in remote Peruvian village
([http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-laptop_webdec22,1,6878223.story]).
The lead paragraph says it all: "Doubts about whether poor, rural
children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as
quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50
primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child
project six months ago."


2. Hinge: Jacques Gagne has been investigating the laptop hinge—the
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.
"clearance" between the two rotating parts should be tighter and this
would reduce wobble. Mary Lou Jepsen and Quanta are investigating a
possible run-in change at the earliest possible date.


3. Hardware certifications and testing data: Mary Lou has created a
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.
compilation of certification and testing data that is available on the
wiki (Please see [[Hardware Testing]]); it will
be expanded over time.


4. Green: EMPA at the Swiss National Labs is continuing its work on
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).
life cycle analysis of the XO laptops by comparing the cost, lifetime,
power consumption, and overall environmental impact with the
refurbished desktops in Columbia. Mary Lou teleconferenced with the
team this week and will assure that they get all the data they need to
complete their analysis. The final report is due in mid-February.
Columbia is widely acknowledged to have one of the most successful
re-furbished desktop programs in Latin America.


5. Water: Anna Bershteyn, an MIT Ph.D. candidate, has been helping
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.
OLPC follow up on some questions from Ban Samhka, Thailand about the
best way to test and improve water quality; water quality is an area
of interest that is expanding in the OLPC community. Anna and Mary Lou
met with Susan Murcott to discuss possible simple hands-on games on
the XOs that will encourage children to test and/or filter their
water. SJ Klein has put Anna in touch with groups from UNICEF and the
Hesperian Foundation who are also working on water safety. To learn
more about Anna, please visit the wiki [[User:Anna B]]).


6. Power measurements: John Watlington instrumented a production
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/).
machine for power measurements this week to allow continued
verification of the laptop power-saving measures. This allows Chris
Ball (and the rest of the software team) to continuously measure the
power consumption at ten different places around the laptop, and also
automatically simulate user input to wake up the laptop (power button,
lid switch, etc.). We have already have a B3 unit with over twenty
power measurement points, but it cannot aggressively suspend/resume,
and doesn't have any of the more recent power-savings-related
engineering changes.


7. Embedded controller: Richard Smith spent time studying oscilloscope
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 help@laptop.org and has begun the task of answering many emails.
traces looking for a possible cause of the reopening of Ticket 1835
(unable to resume); recent software builds were failing on the
suspend/resume testbed. He has been unable to reproduce the problem
with bare-board tests and he now feels that he fully understand the
software causes of 1835 (three distinct causes). Running the latest EC
code with Joyride kernels doesn't seem to have the problem. Richard
and John will continue to run tests on the suspend/resume testbed to
insure that we won't have the problem with Update.1


A second bonus was discovery and verification of EC issues that Chris
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.
Ball and Jim Gettys have run into. Andres helped Richard find an EC
bug where the SCI mask was getting corrupted. The most frequent
manifestation of that was the loss of AC events or battery-charge
level. Richard still don't know the root cause of the corruption, but
has a good test case and kernel debug logs. There appears to be a case
where EC communication fails and error recover is not working. Fixing
it is going to involve more oscilloscope time, because turning on
serial- port debugging appears to make the problem go away. There is
already a workaround in the kernel to fix the mask when it becomes
corrupted, so it's not a show-stopper.


Richard is also writing some cron scripts that will take a snapshot of
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.
the battery ACR while the laptop is running on battery power and then
then send us the data. Richard wants to use these data to build power
usage profiles. The ACR gives us a very accurate reading on the amount
of mA/h drawn from the battery. Plotting it over time will begin to
give us insight on our dynamic power draw.


8. School server We found a serious problem with the mesh networking
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!
in the build of School-server software released last week (Build 137),
which brings down an active antenna if a large file transfer is
attempted. A new build of the software with the new libertas driver
(thanks David Woodhouse) greatly improves the situation. A new build
is being tested and tuned and will be released in the next few days.
The school-server-software build problems have returned, but this time
we identified one of the problems: it turns out that the livecd build
process fails if you have upgraded the kernel. Providing a single
choice for the kernel is the workaround for this problem.


We have encountered scaling problem with the XMPP service on the
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.
server. The eJabber software runs out of memory over time as the
number of active users exceeds a hundred. Collabra is looking into
alternative server implementations. We had thought eJabber has used by
large instant-messaging services, but probably not with all the bells
and whistles we use. The XMPP service is crucial to the efficient
provision of presence information to laptops in a school through a
centralized method. The alternative, used when no server is found, is
for each laptop to send multicast announcements, which spread through
our mesh network at a low rate and using an algorithm best described
as a "flood fill".


In order to support a trial in Mongolia, the server software will
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.
start supporting multiple servers per school in January. Each server
in a school acts as an additional internet portal in a school's
wireless mesh; together they redundantly provide services to all of
the laptops in a school.


9. Active antenna update: We are awaiting a utility from Marvell for
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).
reflashing the firmware on the active antennas we now have, to allow
their use with school servers; presently, they have to be plugged in
after a server has booted. When this arrives, it will be included in a
school server software release. Users in the field should be able to
automatically upgrade any antenna simply by plugging it into a server.


10. Testing: We released a patch to Ship.2, Build 653 to fix a problem
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.
with Spanish laptops coming up in English, as well as a problem
(discovered in Uruguary) with the Journal items going away.


There was a discussion this week that focused on how volunteers could
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 “[[Pippy#Thanks|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.
get started on testing activities by editing the current wiki pages
that describe activities: many of these wiki pages are old and thus
they do not accurately reflect how the activity works. Please watch
the [[Test Issues]] page in the coming weeks to see how
you can help!


11. Schedule: We are at code freeze for the Update1 release. We will
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!
spend the next couple of weeks testing and documenting. Thanks for
everyone's patience for bearing with us during the usual chaos
associated with of the start of shipping that has gotten in the way of
a smooth release cycle. We expect to spend some time on improving
process issues before we move on to serious work in Update2.


12. Support: Adam Holt has done a heroic job this week in answering
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.
emails sent to help@laptop.org, creating and updating the Support
pages (See [[Support]]), the Support FAQ,
helping with the Getting Started Guild (See [http://laptop.org/start])
and coordinating volunteers to help answer emails, IRC, and forum.
This weekend he is holding a volunteer training session in preparation
for a phone bank that could go live as early as next week; look on the
olpc-support IRC channel for info.


We'd like to be able to provide RMA numbers for returns to help
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).
offload the Patriot Donor Services and we would like to put a process
in place where we can get some of the returns sent to OLPC for
analysis.


13. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta helped some language teams
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.
troubleshoot their problems with Pootle. All throughout the week, he
was also testing the system to keep the POT files up to date. The
system seems to be working fine and will be rolling it out (along with
the documentation) during this weekend.


Sayamindu also gained access to build fontconfig for the OLPC in Koji
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.
(thanks Dennis Gilmore), and created a build which should hopefully
fix Ticket #1525 (a long-standing bug due to the interaction between
the font cache and the system time).


Waqas Toor and Salman Minhas have lead a team in Pakistan to the
We are going to try Openfire on jabber.laptop.org this weekend as an alternative to ejabberd.
successful completion of an Urdu translation in Pootle
([https://dev.laptop.org/translate/ur/update1/]); all the strings are
successfully committed and are ready to be included in Update.1. They
have also commenced working on making Zekr a Sugar activity (initially
in two languages: Urdu and Persian (Dari)).


They are also making poems for children by Pakistani national poets
Dafydd Harries worked on Jabber server component and made RPM builds and herded bugs.
Illama Iqbal and Faraz Ahmad Faraz available in the form of e-books;
and they are writing a teacher "training manual" for Afghanistan,
which includes activity tutorials; they are working on materials for
teachers that address their needs in the Constructionist methodology
of education and learning.


14. Kernel: Andres Salomon and Bernie Innocenti finally were able to
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).
reproduce Ticket #2804 (the jumpy touchpad problem) and get enough
useful debug information out of it to deduce a working theory of
what's causing it and how we can workaround it in the kernel. Bernie
has built an experimental kernel with a candidate fix and is eager to
receive feedback from some of the jumpy mouse victims to see if our
helps.


15. Updates and builds: Scott Ananian gave olpc-update the ability to
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.
upgrade from a USB key (Ticket #3881) (See
[[Olpc-update]]); olpc-update also now warns you
if you try to upgrade to a joyride build without a developer key
(Ticket #5309) and is more efficient if it is interrupted in the
middle of an update. OFW will now upgrade you to the latest firmware
even if you have a developer key (Ticket #5371); ntpdate is run on the
XOs when we get network connectivity (Ticket #3359); rtcwake is in the
build to enable timed wakeups from suspend (Tickets #5434 and #5435);
our builds now use sudo to get root—there has been some discussion of
configuring su instead (Ticekt #5537).


Dennis Gilmore has been working on builds and some tools to help make
Morgan Collet has been extending the (See [[Tubes Tutorial]]) by documenting the D-Bus Tubes example in [http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/hellomesh;a=summary 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]]).
them faster to turn around; he has also been tagging packages for
Update.1.


16. View source: The view-source key now works in Chat, Web, Pippy,
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:
and any activities generated by Pippy (Tickets #4909, #5541, #5542).
Next up for Scott: Terminal (Ticket #5543), Gmail (Ticket #5544), and
Clock (Ticket #5545). Any application that can reasonable be written
as a single python source file is a good candidate for Pippy-ization,
which lets children view and customize the activity. This will
undoubtedly stress our handling of activity bundles in the Journal,
which arguably is a good spur in the side!


17. Wireless driver: Dave Woodhouse worked again on the libertas
• Sugar
wireless driver, a certain amount of sleeping and some frustration
• Journal activity
that although he's fixed most of the known bugs in the driver, people
• Record Activity
are still using some ancient kernel in their OS builds which is
• Browse Activity
entirely useless for testing purposes.


18. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg spent the first half of week in Kathmandu.
The following languages have more than 90% of these module translated:
He observed and helped the very active OLPC and Etoys communities in
Nepal. Yoshiki Ohshima continued on fixing bugs on trac. These patches
will show up in the Update.1 stream at some point. Yoshiki also is
working on the packaging for non-OLPC environment. Takashi Yamamiya
started prototyping a simple presentation tool. Ted Kaehler and
Korakurider are looking at the translation of QuickGuide contents.
Scott Wallace and Yoshiki worked together to provide a better way to
report runtime errors.


19. Scratch: Brian Silverman (by phone), John Maloney,and Mitchel
• Urdu (100%)
Resnick came by the OLPC office this week to demonstrate Scratch
• Portuguese (100%)
running on an XO (See [http://scratch.mit.edu/]). While it hasn't been
• Chinese (Taiwan) (100%)
wholy "Sugarized" yet, it is already quite usable. John will be
• French (97%)
posting a bundle on the wiki for those who'd like to explore it (and
• Dutch (96%)
provide feedback) at this stage.
• German (95%)
• Greek (91%)


20. Open hardware management: Chris Ball is working on a particularly
(These statistics are available online from https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/update1/).
entrenched yet subtle bug in OHM's timing code at the moment.
(Richard Hughes confirms that he's been seeing it on non-OLPC
platforms too, all the way back to the beginning of OHM.)


21. Presence/sharing: Morgan Collett helped with testing the
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.
sugar-shell-consumes-all-memory issue (Ticket #5532). (Thanks to
Sjoerd Simons for providing the avahi invocations to fake buddies on
the mesh.) Morgan helped some community people with Jabber questions
on the forums. There has been confusion about why the
ship2.jabber.laptop.org server doesn't work: Robert McQueen spoke with
people on IRC who were interested in trying ejabberd and helping us
work out why it was failing so badly. (There is now a server at
xochat.org that can be used instead of the default at
ship2.jabber.laptop.org. See the Sugar control panel page in the wiki
for instructions on how to configure your Jabber server.) Robert has
updated the Ejabberd configuration pages on the wiki with some updated
patches and clearer instructions.


Dafydd Harries spent most of the week trying to set up OpenFire on
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.
jabber.laptop.org. He managed to export the user database from
Ejabberd and import it to OpenFire, but laptops don't seem to be able
to connect to the server successfully. He'll be investigating why this
is the case and suspect some sort of problem with our client code.
OpenFire developers have been keen to help, however.


Morgan looked into the HippoCanvas bug (Ticket #2351) that is
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.
affecting scrolling of multiline Chat messages; he hasn't found a fix
for it yet. XO users who are annoyed with this bug have resorted to
sharing Write as a primitive chat tool instead.


Morgan also cleaned up some wiki documentation referring to Tubes and
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.
Presence Service; while more documentation is needed, most of the
existing documentation was out of date (predating Salut for instance).


All the bits for Chat copying URLs to the clipboard (Ticket #5080) to
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.
launch in Browse finally landed and work fine, although now it seems
we may be able to do it more directly after all with the Rainbow work
done to address Ticket #4909.


And Morgan has been working on the unreliability of buddy icons
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.
clustering around their shared activity (Ticket #5368); it is still
unclear whether the best place to make a fix is in Sugar or Presence
Service. The problem arises when CurrentActivityChanged occurs before
ActivitiesChanged, so the buddy icon moves before the activity is
known about.


Sjoerd Simons investigated why avahi under some circumstances marks
Scott finally installed pilgrim.laptop.org, starting the long and arduous process of moving our builds off xs-dev.laptop.org.
records as failed a bit too easily, causing the "contacts flashing"
bug. He discovered that the passive-observation-of-failures
implementation was a bit too sensitive and created a patch to make it
less sensitive. The patch needs further testing in a crowded RF
environment like the OLPC headquarters to see if it solves the issue.


Guillaume Desmottes continue to investigate the stream-tubes problem
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.
with Rainbow. The Telepathy side should be fixed in Update.1. He start
to implement/design peer-to-peer connections for stream tubes in
Gabble (Ticket #4047) and improved Gabble-tubes test coverage.


22. Sugar: Reinier Heeres worked on fixing a Read sharing issue
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.
(Ticket #5365), a Calculate internationalization issue (Ticket #5319)
and adding ellipsis to long texts in palettes (Ticket #4562). He also
wrote a simple script to copy a regular file to the datastore/journal
that got extended with quite a bit more functionality by Phil
Bordelon. He tested previous fixes in Joyride and Update-1 and tried
to understand the memory leaks the sugar shell was showing.


Simon Schampijer focused on the browser, testing and implemented a
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.
"solution" for the browser permission issue described here (See
[[Concurrent activity instances]]). Actually we
don't think anymore that copying the profile around is a good thing to
do; we think we should run the browser outside the container for
Update.1 (Ticket #5489). Michael Stone send an email to the mozilla
devs to start discussion with them about a long term solution.


23. Trac: Noah Kantrowitz visited Friday and helped improve our trac
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.
system, adding bug dependencies and sketching out better workflow
features that can now be implemented in it. He also made some great
suggestions for the Support/Help pages.


24. Documentation: Mako Hill and SJ Klein packaged together a new
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.
version of the Getting Started Guide for inclusion in the library on

the laptop itself. (Walter Bender wrote a new stylesheet to fit the
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).
pages in the XO.)

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=
=More News=

Revision as of 16:38, 22 December 2007

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 87848]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2007-12-22

1. Arahuay, Peru: If you haven't yet seen it, please take the time to read this AP article about the XO in remote Peruvian village ([1]). The lead paragraph says it all: "Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago."

2. Hinge: Jacques Gagne has been investigating the laptop hinge—the "clearance" between the two rotating parts should be tighter and this would reduce wobble. Mary Lou Jepsen and Quanta are investigating a possible run-in change at the earliest possible date.

3. Hardware certifications and testing data: Mary Lou has created a compilation of certification and testing data that is available on the wiki (Please see Hardware Testing); it will be expanded over time.

4. Green: EMPA at the Swiss National Labs is continuing its work on life cycle analysis of the XO laptops by comparing the cost, lifetime, power consumption, and overall environmental impact with the refurbished desktops in Columbia. Mary Lou teleconferenced with the team this week and will assure that they get all the data they need to complete their analysis. The final report is due in mid-February. Columbia is widely acknowledged to have one of the most successful re-furbished desktop programs in Latin America.

5. Water: Anna Bershteyn, an MIT Ph.D. candidate, has been helping OLPC follow up on some questions from Ban Samhka, Thailand about the best way to test and improve water quality; water quality is an area of interest that is expanding in the OLPC community. Anna and Mary Lou met with Susan Murcott to discuss possible simple hands-on games on the XOs that will encourage children to test and/or filter their water. SJ Klein has put Anna in touch with groups from UNICEF and the Hesperian Foundation who are also working on water safety. To learn more about Anna, please visit the wiki User:Anna B).

6. Power measurements: John Watlington instrumented a production machine for power measurements this week to allow continued verification of the laptop power-saving measures. This allows Chris Ball (and the rest of the software team) to continuously measure the power consumption at ten different places around the laptop, and also automatically simulate user input to wake up the laptop (power button, lid switch, etc.). We have already have a B3 unit with over twenty power measurement points, but it cannot aggressively suspend/resume, and doesn't have any of the more recent power-savings-related engineering changes.

7. Embedded controller: Richard Smith spent time studying oscilloscope traces looking for a possible cause of the reopening of Ticket 1835 (unable to resume); recent software builds were failing on the suspend/resume testbed. He has been unable to reproduce the problem with bare-board tests and he now feels that he fully understand the software causes of 1835 (three distinct causes). Running the latest EC code with Joyride kernels doesn't seem to have the problem. Richard and John will continue to run tests on the suspend/resume testbed to insure that we won't have the problem with Update.1

A second bonus was discovery and verification of EC issues that Chris Ball and Jim Gettys have run into. Andres helped Richard find an EC bug where the SCI mask was getting corrupted. The most frequent manifestation of that was the loss of AC events or battery-charge level. Richard still don't know the root cause of the corruption, but has a good test case and kernel debug logs. There appears to be a case where EC communication fails and error recover is not working. Fixing it is going to involve more oscilloscope time, because turning on serial- port debugging appears to make the problem go away. There is already a workaround in the kernel to fix the mask when it becomes corrupted, so it's not a show-stopper.

Richard is also writing some cron scripts that will take a snapshot of the battery ACR while the laptop is running on battery power and then then send us the data. Richard wants to use these data to build power usage profiles. The ACR gives us a very accurate reading on the amount of mA/h drawn from the battery. Plotting it over time will begin to give us insight on our dynamic power draw.

8. School server We found a serious problem with the mesh networking in the build of School-server software released last week (Build 137), which brings down an active antenna if a large file transfer is attempted. A new build of the software with the new libertas driver (thanks David Woodhouse) greatly improves the situation. A new build is being tested and tuned and will be released in the next few days. The school-server-software build problems have returned, but this time we identified one of the problems: it turns out that the livecd build process fails if you have upgraded the kernel. Providing a single choice for the kernel is the workaround for this problem.

We have encountered scaling problem with the XMPP service on the server. The eJabber software runs out of memory over time as the number of active users exceeds a hundred. Collabra is looking into alternative server implementations. We had thought eJabber has used by large instant-messaging services, but probably not with all the bells and whistles we use. The XMPP service is crucial to the efficient provision of presence information to laptops in a school through a centralized method. The alternative, used when no server is found, is for each laptop to send multicast announcements, which spread through our mesh network at a low rate and using an algorithm best described as a "flood fill".

In order to support a trial in Mongolia, the server software will start supporting multiple servers per school in January. Each server in a school acts as an additional internet portal in a school's wireless mesh; together they redundantly provide services to all of the laptops in a school.

9. Active antenna update: We are awaiting a utility from Marvell for reflashing the firmware on the active antennas we now have, to allow their use with school servers; presently, they have to be plugged in after a server has booted. When this arrives, it will be included in a school server software release. Users in the field should be able to automatically upgrade any antenna simply by plugging it into a server.

10. Testing: We released a patch to Ship.2, Build 653 to fix a problem with Spanish laptops coming up in English, as well as a problem (discovered in Uruguary) with the Journal items going away.

There was a discussion this week that focused on how volunteers could get started on testing activities by editing the current wiki pages that describe activities: many of these wiki pages are old and thus they do not accurately reflect how the activity works. Please watch the Test Issues page in the coming weeks to see how you can help!

11. Schedule: We are at code freeze for the Update1 release. We will spend the next couple of weeks testing and documenting. Thanks for everyone's patience for bearing with us during the usual chaos associated with of the start of shipping that has gotten in the way of a smooth release cycle. We expect to spend some time on improving process issues before we move on to serious work in Update2.

12. Support: Adam Holt has done a heroic job this week in answering emails sent to help@laptop.org, creating and updating the Support pages (See Support), the Support FAQ, helping with the Getting Started Guild (See [2]) and coordinating volunteers to help answer emails, IRC, and forum. This weekend he is holding a volunteer training session in preparation for a phone bank that could go live as early as next week; look on the olpc-support IRC channel for info.

We'd like to be able to provide RMA numbers for returns to help offload the Patriot Donor Services and we would like to put a process in place where we can get some of the returns sent to OLPC for analysis.

13. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta helped some language teams troubleshoot their problems with Pootle. All throughout the week, he was also testing the system to keep the POT files up to date. The system seems to be working fine and will be rolling it out (along with the documentation) during this weekend.

Sayamindu also gained access to build fontconfig for the OLPC in Koji (thanks Dennis Gilmore), and created a build which should hopefully fix Ticket #1525 (a long-standing bug due to the interaction between the font cache and the system time).

Waqas Toor and Salman Minhas have lead a team in Pakistan to the successful completion of an Urdu translation in Pootle ([3]); all the strings are successfully committed and are ready to be included in Update.1. They have also commenced working on making Zekr a Sugar activity (initially in two languages: Urdu and Persian (Dari)).

They are also making poems for children by Pakistani national poets Illama Iqbal and Faraz Ahmad Faraz available in the form of e-books; and they are writing a teacher "training manual" for Afghanistan, which includes activity tutorials; they are working on materials for teachers that address their needs in the Constructionist methodology of education and learning.

14. Kernel: Andres Salomon and Bernie Innocenti finally were able to reproduce Ticket #2804 (the jumpy touchpad problem) and get enough useful debug information out of it to deduce a working theory of what's causing it and how we can workaround it in the kernel. Bernie has built an experimental kernel with a candidate fix and is eager to receive feedback from some of the jumpy mouse victims to see if our helps.

15. Updates and builds: Scott Ananian gave olpc-update the ability to upgrade from a USB key (Ticket #3881) (See Olpc-update); olpc-update also now warns you if you try to upgrade to a joyride build without a developer key (Ticket #5309) and is more efficient if it is interrupted in the middle of an update. OFW will now upgrade you to the latest firmware even if you have a developer key (Ticket #5371); ntpdate is run on the XOs when we get network connectivity (Ticket #3359); rtcwake is in the build to enable timed wakeups from suspend (Tickets #5434 and #5435); our builds now use sudo to get root—there has been some discussion of configuring su instead (Ticekt #5537).

Dennis Gilmore has been working on builds and some tools to help make them faster to turn around; he has also been tagging packages for Update.1.

16. View source: The view-source key now works in Chat, Web, Pippy, and any activities generated by Pippy (Tickets #4909, #5541, #5542). Next up for Scott: Terminal (Ticket #5543), Gmail (Ticket #5544), and Clock (Ticket #5545). Any application that can reasonable be written as a single python source file is a good candidate for Pippy-ization, which lets children view and customize the activity. This will undoubtedly stress our handling of activity bundles in the Journal, which arguably is a good spur in the side!

17. Wireless driver: Dave Woodhouse worked again on the libertas wireless driver, a certain amount of sleeping and some frustration that although he's fixed most of the known bugs in the driver, people are still using some ancient kernel in their OS builds which is entirely useless for testing purposes.

18. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg spent the first half of week in Kathmandu. 

He observed and helped the very active OLPC and Etoys communities in

Nepal. Yoshiki Ohshima continued on fixing bugs on trac. These patches will show up in the Update.1 stream at some point. Yoshiki also is working on the packaging for non-OLPC environment. Takashi Yamamiya started prototyping a simple presentation tool. Ted Kaehler and Korakurider are looking at the translation of QuickGuide contents. Scott Wallace and Yoshiki worked together to provide a better way to report runtime errors.

19. Scratch: Brian Silverman (by phone), John Maloney,and Mitchel Resnick came by the OLPC office this week to demonstrate Scratch running on an XO (See [4]). While it hasn't been wholy "Sugarized" yet, it is already quite usable. John will be posting a bundle on the wiki for those who'd like to explore it (and provide feedback) at this stage.

20. Open hardware management: Chris Ball is working on a particularly entrenched yet subtle bug in OHM's timing code at the moment. (Richard Hughes confirms that he's been seeing it on non-OLPC platforms too, all the way back to the beginning of OHM.)

21. Presence/sharing: Morgan Collett helped with testing the sugar-shell-consumes-all-memory issue (Ticket #5532). (Thanks to Sjoerd Simons for providing the avahi invocations to fake buddies on the mesh.) Morgan helped some community people with Jabber questions on the forums. There has been confusion about why the ship2.jabber.laptop.org server doesn't work: Robert McQueen spoke with people on IRC who were interested in trying ejabberd and helping us work out why it was failing so badly. (There is now a server at xochat.org that can be used instead of the default at ship2.jabber.laptop.org. See the Sugar control panel page in the wiki for instructions on how to configure your Jabber server.) Robert has updated the Ejabberd configuration pages on the wiki with some updated patches and clearer instructions.

Dafydd Harries spent most of the week trying to set up OpenFire on jabber.laptop.org. He managed to export the user database from Ejabberd and import it to OpenFire, but laptops don't seem to be able to connect to the server successfully. He'll be investigating why this is the case and suspect some sort of problem with our client code. OpenFire developers have been keen to help, however.

Morgan looked into the HippoCanvas bug (Ticket #2351) that is affecting scrolling of multiline Chat messages; he hasn't found a fix for it yet. XO users who are annoyed with this bug have resorted to sharing Write as a primitive chat tool instead.

Morgan also cleaned up some wiki documentation referring to Tubes and Presence Service; while more documentation is needed, most of the existing documentation was out of date (predating Salut for instance).

All the bits for Chat copying URLs to the clipboard (Ticket #5080) to launch in Browse finally landed and work fine, although now it seems we may be able to do it more directly after all with the Rainbow work done to address Ticket #4909.

And Morgan has been working on the unreliability of buddy icons clustering around their shared activity (Ticket #5368); it is still unclear whether the best place to make a fix is in Sugar or Presence Service. The problem arises when CurrentActivityChanged occurs before ActivitiesChanged, so the buddy icon moves before the activity is known about.

Sjoerd Simons investigated why avahi under some circumstances marks records as failed a bit too easily, causing the "contacts flashing" bug. He discovered that the passive-observation-of-failures implementation was a bit too sensitive and created a patch to make it less sensitive. The patch needs further testing in a crowded RF environment like the OLPC headquarters to see if it solves the issue.

Guillaume Desmottes continue to investigate the stream-tubes problem with Rainbow. The Telepathy side should be fixed in Update.1. He start to implement/design peer-to-peer connections for stream tubes in Gabble (Ticket #4047) and improved Gabble-tubes test coverage.

22. Sugar: Reinier Heeres worked on fixing a Read sharing issue (Ticket #5365), a Calculate internationalization issue (Ticket #5319) and adding ellipsis to long texts in palettes (Ticket #4562). He also wrote a simple script to copy a regular file to the datastore/journal that got extended with quite a bit more functionality by Phil Bordelon. He tested previous fixes in Joyride and Update-1 and tried to understand the memory leaks the sugar shell was showing.

Simon Schampijer focused on the browser, testing and implemented a "solution" for the browser permission issue described here (See Concurrent activity instances). Actually we don't think anymore that copying the profile around is a good thing to do; we think we should run the browser outside the container for Update.1 (Ticket #5489). Michael Stone send an email to the mozilla devs to start discussion with them about a long term solution.

23. Trac: Noah Kantrowitz visited Friday and helped improve our trac system, adding bug dependencies and sketching out better workflow features that can now be implemented in it. He also made some great suggestions for the Support/Help pages.

24. Documentation: Mako Hill and SJ Klein packaged together a new version of the Getting Started Guide for inclusion in the library on the laptop itself. (Walter Bender wrote a new stylesheet to fit the pages in the XO.)

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.

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 87848]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2007-12-22

1. Arahuay, Peru: If you haven't yet seen it, please take the time to read this AP article about the XO in remote Peruvian village ([5]). The lead paragraph says it all: "Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago."

2. Hinge: Jacques Gagne has been investigating the laptop hinge—the "clearance" between the two rotating parts should be tighter and this would reduce wobble. Mary Lou Jepsen and Quanta are investigating a possible run-in change at the earliest possible date.

3. Hardware certifications and testing data: Mary Lou has created a compilation of certification and testing data that is available on the wiki (Please see Hardware Testing); it will be expanded over time.

4. Green: EMPA at the Swiss National Labs is continuing its work on life cycle analysis of the XO laptops by comparing the cost, lifetime, power consumption, and overall environmental impact with the refurbished desktops in Columbia. Mary Lou teleconferenced with the team this week and will assure that they get all the data they need to complete their analysis. The final report is due in mid-February. Columbia is widely acknowledged to have one of the most successful re-furbished desktop programs in Latin America.

5. Water: Anna Bershteyn, an MIT Ph.D. candidate, has been helping OLPC follow up on some questions from Ban Samhka, Thailand about the best way to test and improve water quality; water quality is an area of interest that is expanding in the OLPC community. Anna and Mary Lou met with Susan Murcott to discuss possible simple hands-on games on the XOs that will encourage children to test and/or filter their water. SJ Klein has put Anna in touch with groups from UNICEF and the Hesperian Foundation who are also working on water safety. To learn more about Anna, please visit the wiki User:Anna B).

6. Power measurements: John Watlington instrumented a production machine for power measurements this week to allow continued verification of the laptop power-saving measures. This allows Chris Ball (and the rest of the software team) to continuously measure the power consumption at ten different places around the laptop, and also automatically simulate user input to wake up the laptop (power button, lid switch, etc.). We have already have a B3 unit with over twenty power measurement points, but it cannot aggressively suspend/resume, and doesn't have any of the more recent power-savings-related engineering changes.

7. Embedded controller: Richard Smith spent time studying oscilloscope traces looking for a possible cause of the reopening of Ticket 1835 (unable to resume); recent software builds were failing on the suspend/resume testbed. He has been unable to reproduce the problem with bare-board tests and he now feels that he fully understand the software causes of 1835 (three distinct causes). Running the latest EC code with Joyride kernels doesn't seem to have the problem. Richard and John will continue to run tests on the suspend/resume testbed to insure that we won't have the problem with Update.1

A second bonus was discovery and verification of EC issues that Chris Ball and Jim Gettys have run into. Andres helped Richard find an EC bug where the SCI mask was getting corrupted. The most frequent manifestation of that was the loss of AC events or battery-charge level. Richard still don't know the root cause of the corruption, but has a good test case and kernel debug logs. There appears to be a case where EC communication fails and error recover is not working. Fixing it is going to involve more oscilloscope time, because turning on serial- port debugging appears to make the problem go away. There is already a workaround in the kernel to fix the mask when it becomes corrupted, so it's not a show-stopper.

Richard is also writing some cron scripts that will take a snapshot of the battery ACR while the laptop is running on battery power and then then send us the data. Richard wants to use these data to build power usage profiles. The ACR gives us a very accurate reading on the amount of mA/h drawn from the battery. Plotting it over time will begin to give us insight on our dynamic power draw.

8. School server We found a serious problem with the mesh networking in the build of School-server software released last week (Build 137), which brings down an active antenna if a large file transfer is attempted. A new build of the software with the new libertas driver (thanks David Woodhouse) greatly improves the situation. A new build is being tested and tuned and will be released in the next few days. The school-server-software build problems have returned, but this time we identified one of the problems: it turns out that the livecd build process fails if you have upgraded the kernel. Providing a single choice for the kernel is the workaround for this problem.

We have encountered scaling problem with the XMPP service on the server. The eJabber software runs out of memory over time as the number of active users exceeds a hundred. Collabra is looking into alternative server implementations. We had thought eJabber has used by large instant-messaging services, but probably not with all the bells and whistles we use. The XMPP service is crucial to the efficient provision of presence information to laptops in a school through a centralized method. The alternative, used when no server is found, is for each laptop to send multicast announcements, which spread through our mesh network at a low rate and using an algorithm best described as a "flood fill".

In order to support a trial in Mongolia, the server software will start supporting multiple servers per school in January. Each server in a school acts as an additional internet portal in a school's wireless mesh; together they redundantly provide services to all of the laptops in a school.

9. Active antenna update: We are awaiting a utility from Marvell for reflashing the firmware on the active antennas we now have, to allow their use with school servers; presently, they have to be plugged in after a server has booted. When this arrives, it will be included in a school server software release. Users in the field should be able to automatically upgrade any antenna simply by plugging it into a server.

10. Testing: We released a patch to Ship.2, Build 653 to fix a problem with Spanish laptops coming up in English, as well as a problem (discovered in Uruguary) with the Journal items going away.

There was a discussion this week that focused on how volunteers could get started on testing activities by editing the current wiki pages that describe activities: many of these wiki pages are old and thus they do not accurately reflect how the activity works. Please watch the Test Issues page in the coming weeks to see how you can help!

11. Schedule: We are at code freeze for the Update1 release. We will spend the next couple of weeks testing and documenting. Thanks for everyone's patience for bearing with us during the usual chaos associated with of the start of shipping that has gotten in the way of a smooth release cycle. We expect to spend some time on improving process issues before we move on to serious work in Update2.

12. Support: Adam Holt has done a heroic job this week in answering emails sent to help@laptop.org, creating and updating the Support pages (See Support), the Support FAQ, helping with the Getting Started Guild (See [6]) and coordinating volunteers to help answer emails, IRC, and forum. This weekend he is holding a volunteer training session in preparation for a phone bank that could go live as early as next week; look on the olpc-support IRC channel for info.

We'd like to be able to provide RMA numbers for returns to help offload the Patriot Donor Services and we would like to put a process in place where we can get some of the returns sent to OLPC for analysis.

13. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta helped some language teams troubleshoot their problems with Pootle. All throughout the week, he was also testing the system to keep the POT files up to date. The system seems to be working fine and will be rolling it out (along with the documentation) during this weekend.

Sayamindu also gained access to build fontconfig for the OLPC in Koji (thanks Dennis Gilmore), and created a build which should hopefully fix Ticket #1525 (a long-standing bug due to the interaction between the font cache and the system time).

Waqas Toor and Salman Minhas have lead a team in Pakistan to the successful completion of an Urdu translation in Pootle ([7]); all the strings are successfully committed and are ready to be included in Update.1. They have also commenced working on making Zekr a Sugar activity (initially in two languages: Urdu and Persian (Dari)).

They are also making poems for children by Pakistani national poets Illama Iqbal and Faraz Ahmad Faraz available in the form of e-books; and they are writing a teacher "training manual" for Afghanistan, which includes activity tutorials; they are working on materials for teachers that address their needs in the Constructionist methodology of education and learning.

14. Kernel: Andres Salomon and Bernie Innocenti finally were able to reproduce Ticket #2804 (the jumpy touchpad problem) and get enough useful debug information out of it to deduce a working theory of what's causing it and how we can workaround it in the kernel. Bernie has built an experimental kernel with a candidate fix and is eager to receive feedback from some of the jumpy mouse victims to see if our helps.

15. Updates and builds: Scott Ananian gave olpc-update the ability to upgrade from a USB key (Ticket #3881) (See Olpc-update); olpc-update also now warns you if you try to upgrade to a joyride build without a developer key (Ticket #5309) and is more efficient if it is interrupted in the middle of an update. OFW will now upgrade you to the latest firmware even if you have a developer key (Ticket #5371); ntpdate is run on the XOs when we get network connectivity (Ticket #3359); rtcwake is in the build to enable timed wakeups from suspend (Tickets #5434 and #5435); our builds now use sudo to get root—there has been some discussion of configuring su instead (Ticekt #5537).

Dennis Gilmore has been working on builds and some tools to help make them faster to turn around; he has also been tagging packages for Update.1.

16. View source: The view-source key now works in Chat, Web, Pippy, and any activities generated by Pippy (Tickets #4909, #5541, #5542). Next up for Scott: Terminal (Ticket #5543), Gmail (Ticket #5544), and Clock (Ticket #5545). Any application that can reasonable be written as a single python source file is a good candidate for Pippy-ization, which lets children view and customize the activity. This will undoubtedly stress our handling of activity bundles in the Journal, which arguably is a good spur in the side!

17. Wireless driver: Dave Woodhouse worked again on the libertas wireless driver, a certain amount of sleeping and some frustration that although he's fixed most of the known bugs in the driver, people are still using some ancient kernel in their OS builds which is entirely useless for testing purposes.

18. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg spent the first half of week in Kathmandu. 

He observed and helped the very active OLPC and Etoys communities in

Nepal. Yoshiki Ohshima continued on fixing bugs on trac. These patches will show up in the Update.1 stream at some point. Yoshiki also is working on the packaging for non-OLPC environment. Takashi Yamamiya started prototyping a simple presentation tool. Ted Kaehler and Korakurider are looking at the translation of QuickGuide contents. Scott Wallace and Yoshiki worked together to provide a better way to report runtime errors.

19. Scratch: Brian Silverman (by phone), John Maloney,and Mitchel Resnick came by the OLPC office this week to demonstrate Scratch running on an XO (See [8]). While it hasn't been wholy "Sugarized" yet, it is already quite usable. John will be posting a bundle on the wiki for those who'd like to explore it (and provide feedback) at this stage.

20. Open hardware management: Chris Ball is working on a particularly entrenched yet subtle bug in OHM's timing code at the moment. (Richard Hughes confirms that he's been seeing it on non-OLPC platforms too, all the way back to the beginning of OHM.)

21. Presence/sharing: Morgan Collett helped with testing the sugar-shell-consumes-all-memory issue (Ticket #5532). (Thanks to Sjoerd Simons for providing the avahi invocations to fake buddies on the mesh.) Morgan helped some community people with Jabber questions on the forums. There has been confusion about why the ship2.jabber.laptop.org server doesn't work: Robert McQueen spoke with people on IRC who were interested in trying ejabberd and helping us work out why it was failing so badly. (There is now a server at xochat.org that can be used instead of the default at ship2.jabber.laptop.org. See the Sugar control panel page in the wiki for instructions on how to configure your Jabber server.) Robert has updated the Ejabberd configuration pages on the wiki with some updated patches and clearer instructions.

Dafydd Harries spent most of the week trying to set up OpenFire on jabber.laptop.org. He managed to export the user database from Ejabberd and import it to OpenFire, but laptops don't seem to be able to connect to the server successfully. He'll be investigating why this is the case and suspect some sort of problem with our client code. OpenFire developers have been keen to help, however.

Morgan looked into the HippoCanvas bug (Ticket #2351) that is affecting scrolling of multiline Chat messages; he hasn't found a fix for it yet. XO users who are annoyed with this bug have resorted to sharing Write as a primitive chat tool instead.

Morgan also cleaned up some wiki documentation referring to Tubes and Presence Service; while more documentation is needed, most of the existing documentation was out of date (predating Salut for instance).

All the bits for Chat copying URLs to the clipboard (Ticket #5080) to launch in Browse finally landed and work fine, although now it seems we may be able to do it more directly after all with the Rainbow work done to address Ticket #4909.

And Morgan has been working on the unreliability of buddy icons clustering around their shared activity (Ticket #5368); it is still unclear whether the best place to make a fix is in Sugar or Presence Service. The problem arises when CurrentActivityChanged occurs before ActivitiesChanged, so the buddy icon moves before the activity is known about.

Sjoerd Simons investigated why avahi under some circumstances marks records as failed a bit too easily, causing the "contacts flashing" bug. He discovered that the passive-observation-of-failures implementation was a bit too sensitive and created a patch to make it less sensitive. The patch needs further testing in a crowded RF environment like the OLPC headquarters to see if it solves the issue.

Guillaume Desmottes continue to investigate the stream-tubes problem with Rainbow. The Telepathy side should be fixed in Update.1. He start to implement/design peer-to-peer connections for stream tubes in Gabble (Ticket #4047) and improved Gabble-tubes test coverage.

22. Sugar: Reinier Heeres worked on fixing a Read sharing issue (Ticket #5365), a Calculate internationalization issue (Ticket #5319) and adding ellipsis to long texts in palettes (Ticket #4562). He also wrote a simple script to copy a regular file to the datastore/journal that got extended with quite a bit more functionality by Phil Bordelon. He tested previous fixes in Joyride and Update-1 and tried to understand the memory leaks the sugar shell was showing.

Simon Schampijer focused on the browser, testing and implemented a "solution" for the browser permission issue described here (See Concurrent activity instances). Actually we don't think anymore that copying the profile around is a good thing to do; we think we should run the browser outside the container for Update.1 (Ticket #5489). Michael Stone send an email to the mozilla devs to start discussion with them about a long term solution.

23. Trac: Noah Kantrowitz visited Friday and helped improve our trac system, adding bug dependencies and sketching out better workflow features that can now be implemented in it. He also made some great suggestions for the Support/Help pages.

24. Documentation: Mako Hill and SJ Klein packaged together a new version of the Getting Started Guide for inclusion in the library on the laptop itself. (Walter Bender wrote a new stylesheet to fit the pages in the XO.)

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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