OLPC:News: Difference between revisions
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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site]. |
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site]. |
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=Laptop News 2007-12- |
=Laptop News 2007-12-30= |
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1. Give One Get One: The G1G1 program ends on December 31. G1G1 has |
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1. Arahuay, Peru: If you haven't yet seen it, please take the time to |
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not only made it possible to seed the launch of programs in Haiti, |
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read this AP article about the XO in remote Peruvian village |
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Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Afghanistan, but we have |
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([http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h39xDUaVB_AAIyMNnlTSCaldwrTwD8TO0NTO0]). |
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also greatly broaden the community of participation in the project. |
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The lead paragraph says it all: "Doubts about whether poor, rural |
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The community has already jumped in to help: the level of activity in |
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children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as |
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our forums, IRC, email lists, wiki, etc. has risen dramatically over |
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quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 |
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the past few weeks. G1G1 participants have asked lots of questions—and have |
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primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child |
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uncovered some new bugs—but they also have lots of answers—and have |
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project six months ago." |
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submitted some new patches. The community model seems to be scaling. |
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Many thanks to Hilary Meserole and the tireless efforts from the teams |
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2. Hinge: Jacques Gagne has been investigating the laptop hinge—the |
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at Pentagram, Nurun, Eleven, Patriot, and Brightstar. |
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"clearance" between the two rotating parts should be tighter and this |
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would reduce wobble. Mary Lou Jepsen and Quanta are investigating a |
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possible run-in change at the earliest possible date. |
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2. Mary Lou Jepsen: Mary Lou's last day at OLPC is December 31. She |
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3. Hardware certifications and testing data: Mary Lou has created a |
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will be continuing to consult with us on a number of different fronts |
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compilation of certification and testing data that is available on the |
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as she chases after her next miracle in display technology. Mary Lou |
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wiki (Please see [[Hardware Testing]]); it will |
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was OLPC employee Number One, both in terms of when she joined the |
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be expanded over time. |
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organization and in terms of the breadth and depth of her |
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contributions. Thank you and best of luck with your adventures in a |
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new role and new year. |
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3. Embedded controller (EC): Richard Smith has tested a battery EEPROM |
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4. Green: EMPA at the Swiss National Labs is continuing its work on |
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dumping feature recently added by Andres Salomon: it seems to work |
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life cycle analysis of the XO laptops by comparing the cost, lifetime, |
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great. Richard has written crontab scripts and "phone home" scripts |
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power consumption, and overall environmental impact with the |
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for inclusion in joyride builds, with the intent to include them in an |
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refurbished desktops in Columbia. Mary Lou teleconferenced with the |
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upcoming release to build an anonymous database of battery |
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team this week and will assure that they get all the data they need to |
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performance. These scripts will sample the power used every five |
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complete their analysis. The final report is due in mid-February. |
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minutes and log it. They only sample when the battery is charging or |
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Columbia is widely acknowledged to have one of the most successful |
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discharging. The hope is to gather a composite view of battery |
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re-furbished desktop programs in Latin America. |
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performance under realistic conditions of use. |
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Richard noticed that on the community-development list there are at |
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5. Water: Anna Bershteyn, an MIT Ph.D. candidate, has been helping |
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least two reports of the EC going "terminal", meaning that on boot |
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OLPC follow up on some questions from Ban Samhka, Thailand about the |
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they get the error message: "EC problem. Remove all power and |
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best way to test and improve water quality; water quality is an area |
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restart." We need to get those machines to Cambridge to investigate |
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of interest that is expanding in the OLPC community. Anna and Mary Lou |
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further. |
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met with Susan Murcott to discuss possible simple hands-on games on |
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the XOs that will encourage children to test and/or filter their |
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water. SJ Klein has put Anna in touch with groups from UNICEF and the |
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Hesperian Foundation who are also working on water safety. To learn |
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more about Anna, please visit the wiki [[User:Anna B]]). |
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Another issue found on the community-list are reports from a few |
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6. Power measurements: John Watlington instrumented a production |
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people about their batteries not charging. Richard says this would not |
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machine for power measurements this week to allow continued |
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surprise him if they were NiMH batteries, but G1G1 machines have the |
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verification of the laptop power-saving measures. This allows Chris |
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LiFePo batteries. He did had one person run "logbat" and send him the |
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Ball (and the rest of the software team) to continuously measure the |
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results: the EC reads the battery fine and is attempting to charge the |
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power consumption at ten different places around the laptop, and also |
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battery but no current ever goes into the battery. Again, we need to |
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automatically simulate user input to wake up the laptop (power button, |
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get these machines to Cambridge as we haven't seen this behavior |
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lid switch, etc.). We have already have a B3 unit with over twenty |
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before. |
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power measurement points, but it cannot aggressively suspend/resume, |
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and doesn't have any of the more recent power-savings-related |
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engineering changes. |
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4. Open Firmware: Mitch Bradley continued to provide G1G1 customer |
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7. Embedded controller: Richard Smith spent time studying oscilloscope |
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support, for example, chasing down some problems with SD cards. He |
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traces looking for a possible cause of the reopening of Ticket 1835 |
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also added the ability to delete JFFS2 files from Open Firmware and |
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(unable to resume); recent software builds were failing on the |
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fixed Tickets #5717, #5585, and #5727, all improvements to the overall |
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suspend/resume testbed. He has been unable to reproduce the problem |
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OFW performance and reliability. Preparations continue on OFW for the |
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with bare-board tests and he now feels that he fully understand the |
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Intel prototype XO board. |
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software causes of 1835 (three distinct causes). Running the latest EC |
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code with Joyride kernels doesn't seem to have the problem. Richard |
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and John will continue to run tests on the suspend/resume testbed to |
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insure that we won't have the problem with Update.1 |
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5. Wireless firmware: Marvell released firmware version 5.110.20.p49 |
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A second bonus was discovery and verification of EC issues that Chris |
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which addresses Ticket #5194. With this firmware release, all known |
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Ball and Jim Gettys have run into. Andres helped Richard find an EC |
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major low-level bugs have been addressed. With the wireless driver |
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bug where the SCI mask was getting corrupted. The most frequent |
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that's in the current ship builds, we see locking errors under heavy |
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manifestation of that was the loss of AC events or battery-charge |
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load from which the driver recovers automatically. David Woodhouse is |
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level. Richard still don't know the root cause of the corruption, but |
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doing a major rewrite of the driver which should eventually address |
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has a good test case and kernel debug logs. There appears to be a case |
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that issue. |
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where EC communication fails and error recover is not working. Fixing |
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it is going to involve more oscilloscope time, because turning on |
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serial- port debugging appears to make the problem go away. There is |
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already a workaround in the kernel to fix the mask when it becomes |
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corrupted, so it's not a show-stopper. |
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6. Software ECOs: From time to time there may be critical bug fixes |
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Richard is also writing some cron scripts that will take a snapshot of |
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that must be released between our regularly scheduled releases. These |
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the battery ACR while the laptop is running on battery power and then |
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may occur due to security issues, from unexpected hardware problems, |
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then send us the data. Richard wants to use these data to build power |
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or the discovery of latent bugs that affect large numbers of users. |
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usage profiles. The ACR gives us a very accurate reading on the amount |
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We've started a page in wiki discuss the software engineering change |
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of mA/h drawn from the battery. Plotting it over time will begin to |
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order (ECO) process (See [[Operating_system_release_procedures]]). |
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give us insight on our dynamic power draw. |
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7. Support: The past week has been a busy one for Adam Holt and the |
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8. School server We found a serious problem with the mesh networking |
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OLPC support team. Adam has organized a team of 30 support volunteers |
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in the build of School-server software released last week (Build 137), |
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to comprehensively answer help@laptop.org tickets. (Each ticket is an |
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which brings down an active antenna if a large file transfer is |
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ongoing email conversation with a donor/client.) The volunteer team is |
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attempted. A new build of the software with the new libertas driver |
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working hard, but keeping up with the support load. Part of the |
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(thanks David Woodhouse) greatly improves the situation. A new build |
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process includes the compilation of a Support FAQ (See [[Support_FAQ]]). Adam is also organizing a |
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is being tested and tuned and will be released in the next few days. |
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"virtual call center" based on asterisk.org VoIP. Matthew O'Gorman is |
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The school-server-software build problems have returned, but this time |
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helping finalize the server. Callers will access a local US number in |
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we identified one of the problems: it turns out that the livecd build |
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the 617 area code. It will be informal, but we hope it will provide a |
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process fails if you have upgraded the kernel. Providing a single |
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critical outreach to those users who need it most. We hope to complete |
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choice for the kernel is the workaround for this problem. |
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testing and possibly an initial rollout within the coming week. |
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Please everyone recruit your XO-aware friends as: |
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We have encountered scaling problem with the XMPP service on the |
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(1) "charming" volunteers to answer phones; and |
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server. The eJabber software runs out of memory over time as the |
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(2) "perfectionist" volunteers to help organize our wiki pages. |
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number of active users exceeds a hundred. Collabra is looking into |
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alternative server implementations. We had thought eJabber has used by |
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large instant-messaging services, but probably not with all the bells |
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and whistles we use. The XMPP service is crucial to the efficient |
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provision of presence information to laptops in a school through a |
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centralized method. The alternative, used when no server is found, is |
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for each laptop to send multicast announcements, which spread through |
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our mesh network at a low rate and using an algorithm best described |
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as a "flood fill". |
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You can email Adam regarding your talents, motivations, and a phone |
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In order to support a trial in Mongolia, the server software will |
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number at "holt AT laptop DOT org". Thanks! |
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start supporting multiple servers per school in January. Each server |
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in a school acts as an additional internet portal in a school's |
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wireless mesh; together they redundantly provide services to all of |
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the laptops in a school. |
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There will be an "Organizing Sunday" meeting among our volunteers on |
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9. Active antenna update: We are awaiting a utility from Marvell for |
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30 December, 4PM EST. All interested parties can join if they email |
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reflashing the firmware on the active antennas we now have, to allow |
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Adam first. |
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their use with school servers; presently, they have to be plugged in |
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after a server has booted. When this arrives, it will be included in a |
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school server software release. Users in the field should be able to |
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automatically upgrade any antenna simply by plugging it into a server. |
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Noah Kantrowitz has helped to organize the RT system so that |
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10. Testing: We released a patch to Ship.2, Build 653 to fix a problem |
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volunteers' workflow is more efficient. Instant-response RTFM entries |
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with Spanish laptops coming up in English, as well as a problem |
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(canned answers auto-pasted into emails) are growing too. |
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(discovered in Uruguay) with the Journal items going away. |
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Chih-yu Chao is helping Adam to answer questions from G1G1 recipients; |
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There was a discussion this week that focused on how volunteers could |
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she has noticed that many parents are asking whether our browser |
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get started on testing activities by editing the current wiki pages |
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support Flash/Java websites, an area we need to improve upon. |
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that describe activities: many of these wiki pages are old and thus |
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they do not accurately reflect how the activity works. Please watch |
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the [[Test issues]] page in the coming weeks to see how |
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you can help! |
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Michael Burns of the Oregon State Open Source Lab has been working |
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11. Schedule: We are at code freeze for the Update1 release. We will |
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each night improving and growing the Community Support forum (See |
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spend the next couple of weeks testing and documenting. Thanks for |
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http://olpc.osuosl.org/), which is now exceeding 1,000 posts; 200 |
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everyone's patience for bearing with us during the usual chaos |
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registered users have answered hundreds of first-time computer |
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associated with of the start of shipping that has gotten in the way of |
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questions from G1G1 donors. There is already a growing community of |
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a smooth release cycle. We expect to spend some time on improving |
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users helping other users on the site. The site includes a live (IRC) |
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process issues before we move on to serious work in Update2. |
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chat (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/chat), a feature that works from any |
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computer, including directly from the XO, and a volunteers map (See |
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http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/phoogle_map.php) that lets developers, |
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enthusiasts and users put a push-pin next to their home town. |
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8. Etoys: 2007 was a busy year for the Etoys team: they made over 700 |
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12. Support: Adam Holt has done a heroic job this week in answering |
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patches this calendar year. In addition to these code changes, there |
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emails sent to help@laptop.org, creating and updating the Support |
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is new content: examples, help contents, and documentation. Etoys was |
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pages (See [[Support]]), the Support FAQ, |
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more or less stable and mature before 2007, but the effort in the year |
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helping with the Getting Started Guild (See [http://laptop.org/start]) |
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made it even more stable, useful and be fit to the XO platform. |
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and coordinating volunteers to help answer emails, IRC, and forum. |
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Notable improvements and contributions include: sane mathematical |
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This weekend he is holding a volunteer training session in preparation |
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operator precedence by Yoshiki Ohshima; better natural language |
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for a phone bank that could go live as early as next week; look on the |
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translation by Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider; display scaling by |
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olpc-support IRC channel for info. |
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Andreas Raab; an event recording system (called Event Theatre) by |
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Scott Wallace; a camera interface by Diego Gomez Deck; the World |
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Stethoscope by Kazuhiro Abe; the Quick Guide help system by Kathleen |
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Harness, Ted Kaehler and Yoshiki; drag and drop by Takashi; IPv6 |
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support by Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger; documentation by Alan Kay, |
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Kim Rose and Rebecca Cannara; and numerous fixes and usability |
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improvements from the Etoys team and community, including |
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contributions by Karl Ramberg and Marcus Denker. |
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In 2007, there were many deadlines in short successions, putting |
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We'd like to be able to provide RMA numbers for returns to help |
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pressure on the team to deliver stable versions—pushing the team |
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offload the Patriot Donor Services and we would like to put a process |
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towards a conservative approach to development. Many big changes were |
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in place where we can get some of the returns sent to OLPC for |
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punted. In hindsight, perhaps delivering some unstable versions with |
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analysis. |
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bigger changes would have been better strategy. On the other hand, it |
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is worth to mention that Etoys is one of the most reliable packages |
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over the course of XO development and has seen extensive use in most |
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of the school trials. Kudos to Bert Freudenberg, who maintains the |
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Etoys integration with Sugar (Bert not only led the effort to |
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integrate Etoys with Sugar; he also contributed Sugar's overall |
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development). |
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There were various Etoys-based activities proposed: a programming |
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13. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta helped some language teams |
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tutorial called Bots Inc by Stéphane Ducasse; an interactive geometry |
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troubleshoot their problems with Pootle. All throughout the week, he |
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program called Dr Geo II by Hilaire Hernandez; and education contents |
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was also testing the system to keep the POT files up to date. The |
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suite by Luke Gorrie, Bryan Berry, and the OLPC Nepal developers. |
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system seems to be working fine and will be rolling it out (along with |
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"Conservativeness" was a major issue when discussing the possible |
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the documentation) during this weekend. |
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inclusion of Dr Geo II into the base Etoys image; accommodating such |
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code in a graceful way is a challenge for 2008. |
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9. Translation: One of the last pieces in our Pootle deployment is now |
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Sayamindu also gained access to build fontconfig for the OLPC in Koji |
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in place: a mechanism to update PO template files for each module |
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(thanks Dennis Gilmore), and created a build which should hopefully |
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automatically. Sayamindu Dasgupta has fine tuned the script that does |
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fix Ticket #1525 (a long-standing bug due to the interaction between |
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this updating to change POT files only if the strings have changed. |
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the font cache and the system time). |
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(This work is based on Damned Lies, the GNOME translation management |
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system). This helps avoid the redundant updating of PO files. The |
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string-change detection feature will also be useful in the future to |
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detect string-freeze breakages and also to notify translators when new |
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strings are added to a module. |
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This week also saw the first package release of the Update 1 branch to |
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Waqas Toor and Salman Minhas have lead a team in Pakistan to the |
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pick up new translators. Thanks to the excellent effort put in by the |
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successful completion of an Urdu translation in Pootle |
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translators, the Update.1 project (which consisted of the Update 1 |
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([https://dev.laptop.org/translate/ur/update1/]); all the strings are |
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branches of the Sugar, Journal activity, Record activity and Browse |
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successfully committed and are ready to be included in Update.1. They |
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activity) is, on an average, 50% translated for each language. |
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have also commenced working on making Zekr a Sugar activity (initially |
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Languages that have more than 90% of their strings translated are: |
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in two languages: Urdu and Persian (Dari)). |
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• Urdu (100%) |
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They are also making poems for children by Pakistani national poets |
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• Nepali (100%) |
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Illama Iqbal and Faraz Ahmad Faraz available in the form of e-books; |
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• Dutch (100%) |
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and they are writing a teacher "training manual" for Afghanistan, |
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• Chinese (Taiwan) (100%) |
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which includes activity tutorials; they are working on materials for |
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• Bengali (100%) |
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teachers that address their needs in the Constructionist methodology |
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• Arabic (100%) |
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of education and learning. |
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• Portuguese (Brazil) (99%) |
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• Portuguese (99%) |
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• Macedonian (99%) |
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• Russian (98%) |
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• Greek (98%) |
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• French (98%) |
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• Chinese (China) (98%) |
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• German (96%) |
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• Mongolian (94%) |
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The focus has shifted to the master branches once again, although |
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14. Kernel: Andres Salomon and Bernie Innocenti finally were able to |
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language teams are encouraged to update their translations in Update.1 |
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reproduce Ticket #2804 (the jumpy touchpad problem) and get enough |
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project (there will be another package release for Update.1 that would |
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useful debug information out of it to deduce a working theory of |
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pick up any new translations). |
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what's causing it and how we can workaround it in the kernel. Bernie |
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has built an experimental kernel with a candidate fix and is eager to |
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receive feedback from some of the jumpy mouse victims to see if our |
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helps. |
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In the middle of the week, Sayamindu also managed to track down a |
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15. Updates and builds: Scott Ananian gave olpc-update the ability to |
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problem in Pootle that was holding up the work being done by the Urdu |
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upgrade from a USB key (Ticket #3881) (See |
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team. The issue was being caused by a corrupt stats file in the |
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[[Olpc-update]]); olpc-update also now warns you |
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Pootle-Urdu directory. |
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if you try to upgrade to a joyride build without a developer key |
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(Ticket #5309) and is more efficient if it is interrupted in the |
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middle of an update. OFW will now upgrade you to the latest firmware |
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even if you have a developer key (Ticket #5371); ntpdate is run on the |
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XOs when we get network connectivity (Ticket #3359); rtcwake is in the |
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build to enable timed wakeups from suspend (Tickets #5434 and #5435); |
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our builds now use sudo to get root—there has been some discussion of |
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configuring su instead (Ticekt #5537). |
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10. Touchpad: Bernardo Innocenti spent much of the week testing a |
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Dennis Gilmore has been working on builds and some tools to help make |
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solution to the "jumpy mouse" touchpad bug. We'll soon be pushing out |
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them faster to turn around; he has also been tagging packages for |
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a patch that should cover the majority of touchpad problems. |
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Update.1. |
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11. Journal: Reinier Heeres wrote a script to copy files from the |
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16. View source: The view-source key now works in Chat, Web, Pippy, |
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Journal to the Linux file system (Ticket #5571). This got extended by |
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and any activities generated by Pippy (Tickets #4909, #5541, #5542). |
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Phil Bordelon, just like the copy-to-journal script. Reinier also |
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Next up for Scott: Terminal (Ticket #5543), Gmail (Ticket #5544), and |
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fixed some equation parser issues in the Calculator (Ticket #5734) and |
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Clock (Ticket #5545). Any application that can reasonable be written |
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an issue with Browse not exiting when a keep error occurred (Ticket |
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as a single python source file is a good candidate for Pippy-ization, |
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#5493). |
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which lets children view and customize the activity. This will |
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undoubtedly stress our handling of activity bundles in the Journal, |
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which arguably is a good spur in the side! |
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12. Debian: Ivan Krstić is overhauling the OLPC server infrastructure, |
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17. Wireless driver: Dave Woodhouse worked again on the libertas |
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but also found the time to put together an "unofficial" etch/xfce4 |
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wireless driver, a certain amount of sleeping and some frustration |
|||
build. It includes Firefox, Thunderbird, a suite of development tools |
|||
that although he's fixed most of the known bugs in the driver, people |
|||
(python, git, gcc, gdb, flex, bison, automake, autoconf, libtool), a |
|||
are still using some ancient kernel in their OS builds which is |
|||
music player (XMMS), IRC client (irssi) and a graphical wireless AP |
|||
entirely useless for testing purposes. |
|||
selector. The entire build takes up 250MB of flash. Ivan optimized the |
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Firefox window layout to maximum screen estate and configured a number |
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of keyboard shortcuts. |
|||
13. Cow power: Arjun Sarwal along with the Mumbai team made some good |
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18. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg spent the first half of week in Kathmandu. |
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progress on the cow-power system for charging the XO. They made some |
|||
He observed and helped the very active OLPC and Etoys communities in |
|||
changes in the electrical design (e.g., using an alternator now |
|||
Nepal (See [http://nepal.ole.org/home/?q=node/107]). Yoshiki Ohshima continued on fixing bugs on trac. These patches |
|||
instead of a dynamo) and they have a plan regarding the mechanical |
|||
will show up in the Update.1 stream at some point. Yoshiki also is |
|||
design based upon a better understanding of what are readily available |
|||
working on the packaging for non-OLPC environment. Takashi Yamamiya |
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parts. The current setup easily charges two laptops, however with the |
|||
started prototyping a simple presentation tool. Ted Kaehler and |
|||
planned mechanical design changes, they hope to charge at least ten |
|||
Korakurider are looking at the translation of QuickGuide contents. |
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laptops simultaneously. |
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Scott Wallace and Yoshiki worked together to provide a better way to |
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report runtime errors. |
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14. Games: Don Hopkins has been working on the new Micropolis codebase |
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19. Scratch: Brian Silverman (by phone), John Maloney,and Mitchel |
|||
(See http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/micropolis). He has made a web |
|||
Resnick came by the OLPC office this week to demonstrate Scratch |
|||
server out of the Micropolis python module for testing and has |
|||
running on an XO (See [http://scratch.mit.edu/]). While it hasn't been |
|||
modularized python code for tile and cellular automation rendering. |
|||
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. |
|||
15. OurStories: Pablo Flores reports that Uruguay will start |
|||
20. Open hardware management: Chris Ball is working on a particularly |
|||
collecting stories in late January in different localities, like their |
|||
entrenched yet subtle bug in OHM's timing code at the moment. |
|||
recent work in Sarand Grande (See |
|||
(Richard Hughes confirms that he's been seeing it on non-OLPC |
|||
http://olpc-ceibal.blogspot.com/2007/12/day-of-activities-in-sarand-grande.html). |
|||
platforms too, all the way back to the beginning of OHM.) |
|||
Announcements of the site in Spanish and Nigerian languages are being |
|||
prepared for late January. |
|||
16. Library: Lauren Klein has been working on interfaces to make |
|||
21. Presence/sharing: Morgan Collett helped with testing the |
|||
generating content bundles easier, starting with forms to generate |
|||
sugar-shell-consumes-all-memory issue (Ticket #5532). (Thanks to |
|||
bundle metadata. Next up are automatic bundlers that check and |
|||
Sjoerd Simons for providing the avahi invocations to fake buddies on |
|||
generate manifests and metadata from uploaded tars and zips (See |
|||
the mesh.) Morgan helped some community people with Jabber questions |
|||
http://crank.laptop.org/~lauren/libraryInfo/). |
|||
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. |
|||
17. Installing activities: OLPC Austria is improving their "xo-get" |
|||
Dafydd Harries spent most of the week trying to set up OpenFire on |
|||
command-line script for downloading and installing activities. (The |
|||
jabber.laptop.org. He managed to export the user database from |
|||
script is a complement to the current process of clicking on .xo files |
|||
Ejabberd and import it to OpenFire, but laptops don't seem to be able |
|||
from the Browse activity.) They are making it work with the activities |
|||
to connect to the server successfully. He'll be investigating why this |
|||
found on the [[Activities]] page, having added a |
|||
is the case and suspect some sort of problem with our client code. |
|||
field there to include tags (See |
|||
OpenFire developers have been keen to help, however. |
|||
http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get and |
|||
http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get/Repository). |
|||
18. OLPC Communities: Holger Levsen, Aaron Kaplan, and others from |
|||
Morgan looked into the HippoCanvas bug (Ticket #2351) that is |
|||
Austrian and German OLPC groups spent the last days of the week at the |
|||
affecting scrolling of multiline Chat messages; he hasn't found a fix |
|||
24C3 conference in Berlin, Germany. John Crispin and the OpenWRT |
|||
for it yet. XO users who are annoyed with this bug have resorted to |
|||
contingent showed off OpenWRT booting on an XO and let a growing |
|||
sharing Write as a primitive chat tool instead. |
|||
number of XOs share their space. At one point there were over 20 XOs |
|||
in use in the area, most in the hands of developers and early G1G1 |
|||
arrivals. |
|||
OLPC Switzerland is having its first meeting January 15 in Bern, |
|||
Morgan also cleaned up some wiki documentation referring to Tubes and |
|||
organized by Michele Notari (See [[OLPC_Switzerland]]). |
|||
Presence Service; while more documentation is needed, most of the |
|||
existing documentation was out of date (predating Salut for instance). |
|||
Greg DeKoenigsberg and Jack Aboutbol are starting to organize a social |
|||
All the bits for Chat copying URLs to the clipboard (Ticket #5080) to |
|||
and musical OLPC event in New York City for next August. They are |
|||
launch in Browse finally landed and work fine, although now it seems |
|||
presenting a proposal to the NYC parks and recreation committee next |
|||
we may be able to do it more directly after all with the Rainbow work |
|||
Friday. |
|||
done to address Ticket #4909. |
|||
19. Developer community: Almost 1000 developers are active in our Trac |
|||
And Morgan has been working on the unreliability of buddy icons |
|||
system (http://dev.laptop.org). There are thousands more contributors |
|||
clustering around their shared activity (Ticket #5368); it is still |
|||
to wiki.laptop.org and to various fori, mailing lists, IRCs, etc. This |
|||
unclear whether the best place to make a fix is in Sugar or Presence |
|||
participation is invaluable to the success of OLPC mission. We'd like |
|||
Service. The problem arises when CurrentActivityChanged occurs before |
|||
to thank, among others: |
|||
ActivitiesChanged, so the buddy icon moves before the activity is |
|||
known about. |
|||
a-12, aalam, abelay, abrar.momin, aconbere, adeighton, adetola, |
|||
Sjoerd Simons investigated why avahi under some circumstances marks |
|||
admford, adricnet, aegis, aenertia, aferti, afranke, agdelma, ahmad, |
|||
records as failed a bit too easily, causing the "contacts flashing" |
|||
ajax, akauppi, akeemolabiyi, alagu, albertcahalan, aleph, alexandre, |
|||
bug. He discovered that the passive-observation-of-failures |
|||
alexl, alfonsodg, als, altemusm, alxx, ambros, amitgogna, andic, |
|||
implementation was a bit too sensitive and created a patch to make it |
|||
andreasraab, andre.mossinato, andrey, angel, angieklein123, angus, |
|||
less sensitive. The patch needs further testing in a crowded RF |
|||
anna chang, annegentle, ant, antoninoiacono, antonio correia, |
|||
environment like the OLPC headquarters to see if it solves the issue. |
|||
antoniojf, approvalforupdate, aprodan, arangelangov, arauto, |
|||
argento78, ariana, arjs, arnd, arnold, aroscha, artpro, arvinliu, |
|||
ashish, ashsong, assim, astein, atodorov, aturist, aumana, avocade, |
|||
avoine, awjrichards, awong9702, axboe, bamdad, bananascanner, barbolo, |
|||
barry, bart massey, basil, bbaston, bbbush, bcavagnolo, bcsaller, |
|||
bdoin, beaubrewer, beauty, beckerde, behdad, behnam, bemasc, benzea, |
|||
bernie, bert, bertl, bfcatfriends, biarm, bigbaaadbob, bigwally, |
|||
bilboed, billaspell, billjank, bill_mcgonigle, billy, bjfreeman, |
|||
bkublik, blahedo, blanchet, blankverse, blix, blizzard, bluefoxicy, |
|||
blueyed, bmcarnes, bnardone, bob, bobbysmith007, bobkeyes, |
|||
boujelbenhichem, brainrecall, briandorsey, briandorsey, bronson, |
|||
bryan.ma, bss, bsugarse, btate, budbird, buendia, byodo, c9damico, |
|||
cafl, cak, calyth, campbell, candy, candy lu, candy_man, cannonjt, |
|||
carl2, carla, carlfk, carlofalciola, carrano, cavallo, cbramsey, |
|||
cdoty, cdurrett, cgalpin, chaos, chatworthy, cheetahman, chenz, |
|||
chiaying.lin, chihyu, chitraspai, chrisb143, christianmarc, |
|||
christophd, christoph_hagemeyer, chuck, cialis, cihan, ciscos151, cjb, |
|||
c.kutzleb, clifft135, cmeadors, cmusodza, coderanger, codyl, colonwq, |
|||
company, corbet, crazy-chris, crazymonk, crichardson, crouchjay, |
|||
crschmidt, cscott, cshields, csounder, csutton, curlydude007, cwhii, |
|||
cworth, cycho, czhower, dabender, daf, damonkohler, danarnold, |
|||
dandelion, danerogers, danielfuhry, daniher, daniher, danjared, |
|||
dan_margo, danw, dao, dark314, davidgr, david_leeh, david.lin, |
|||
davidpfarrell, davidz, dbpatterson, dcbw, dcolivares, ddhoppe, ddo, |
|||
dds, deanbrettle, deborah hanley, dedekind, dennisdanso, |
|||
dennisfrancis, desertgojo, devinliu, devlware, devwillie, dgd, |
|||
dgilmore, dhabersa, dhopkins, dhuff, dialectric, diegozacarao, |
|||
dilinger, diyoung, djbclark, djihed, djneu, dking, dlang, dmd, docdtv, |
|||
dolphinling, doom, douglas_goodall, drewish, dulouz, duncanb, |
|||
dushyantgautam, dvsullivan, dwmw2, dyd, dydimustk, dysumner, ea, |
|||
ealtin, eamaya, ebelechukwu2005, eben, ebf, ebodfish, ebotee, |
|||
echeonwugbenu, edbatalha, ediaz, edsiper, edstoner, edwardbaafi, |
|||
eenii, ejkrohne, eli amesefe, elife, elijah, elite231, |
|||
elizabeth251964, elranchero, elvis, elyip, emilmont, enalax, enjahova, |
|||
eric, eric, erick, ericsilva2, erikb, erikhatcher, erikos, eteo, |
|||
ethrop, etoys, evenremy, fab, fabiand, fabiomarcio, factor, fade, |
|||
faga, fahmi, fayoeu, fc, fciron, fdraeger, felix01, feranick, |
|||
fernandodotnet, ffm, fgrose, fhill, finalzone, fiorella, fireball, |
|||
firewing1, florentin_raud, foddex, follower, fongoses, foot, |
|||
franka001, frazermarge, frief, fuseproject, gabaug, garlick, garrison, |
|||
gary, garysu, gauravchem, gauthierancelin, gblaufuss, gbulfon, |
|||
gcarrier, gcase, gcerchio, gdesmott, george rey, george yeager, |
|||
gesmit, gfw123, ghopper, gi693362, giangy, giles, glezos, glochan, |
|||
gnrfan, gnu, godiard, gonzalo, grantbow, greg, gregdek, gregm, gregt, |
|||
gregthompson, grendelt, grenoble, griffithbuilt, grig, gustavo, |
|||
gustavoo, gwlc, gwright, h7bse1c, hai, hal, hal, hallie, hal.murray, |
|||
hamed, happyolpc, hartwellfong, hartwellfong, hazardouswaster, |
|||
hchennings, hello1024, hemantg, henninger, hiper, hitoro, hmes, |
|||
hoboprimate, holger, holt, holtzman, homunq, hopsman, hsin wu, |
|||
hsin.wu, huangcza, hughsient, hummingbird, humptybump, hyppy, ianb, |
|||
ianissitt, iceberg, iknowjoseph, indradg, indutiomarus, info_anarchy, |
|||
intrader, irish_moss, isforinsects, ismaell, ivazquez, ivo, j5, |
|||
jaberg, jack, jackeyzhao, jafo, jaimebalb, jaing, jake h, jamesm, |
|||
jamespaige, jamil, jani, jaq, jason liu, jayakumar, jbarahona, |
|||
jcallas, jcardona, jcfrench, jdub, jecel, jeckson, jennjacobsen, |
|||
jenny2, jensjorgensen, jeremyvisser, jeroentb, jerub, jerub, |
|||
jfallgatter, jfc, jfuhrer, jg, jherzog, jhuangtw, jhulten, jiffy, |
|||
jimfare, jim.morey, jirwin, jlstomp66, jm3, joaoboscoapf, jochang, |
|||
joebergin, joeclark, joeywang, john, johnkemeny, johnlin, johnson, |
|||
jondo, jonknee, jonsd, jordancrouse, jorgecortes, josepht, joshseal, |
|||
jpff, jpritikin, jrus, juanayup, juliano, julibio, junia, junwiseman, |
|||
jwildebo, k2nt23, karl, karmaflux, kayseon, kazuhiro abe, kenh, ken |
|||
lin, kentquirk, kenwatford, kevinprt, kfieldho, khaled, khassounah, |
|||
kiddo, kimquirk, kim rose, kiran, kityoko, kkv, konrad1134, |
|||
konrad_kleine, korakurider, kraetzichriz, kreneskyp, krstic, kruemel, |
|||
ksankar, kylesteinfatt, kylin, larryapple, lathiat, laural, lauren, |
|||
lbenavente, lcatania, lcbiazon, leejc, leemingd, leetcharmer, |
|||
legolas558, legutierr, lenkawell, lferre, liam henry, lileeanna, |
|||
linagee, lincolnquirk, lionstone, lmaltin, lmanul, lorenzen, lrhowa5, |
|||
lucia, lucks, luisca, lukego, luna, lwalter42, ma895907, mac, madcat, |
|||
madd, magnum34, mako, maku, mallum, mantaraya36, mantas, manu, |
|||
manusheel, marcelo, marco, marcos ficarelli, marcus, markharrison, |
|||
martine, martin.langhoff, martoro, martyvis, marv, massimo, mathew, |
|||
maurotorres, maxim_o, mbletsas, mbrubeck, mburns, mcalef, mcfletch, |
|||
mchehab, mchenetz, mchua, mduvigneaud, melekim, methril, meyers, |
|||
mfoster, mi370560, michael, michael.tiemann, midiwall, miguelon, |
|||
mihai, mihi, mikelee_aarp, mikes, mikus, mime, mitchellncharity, mitu, |
|||
mjr, mk8, mkgobaco, mleech, mlj, mohsen, mokurai, monkeyfork, monyu, |
|||
morgs, morningstar, moshez, motherhoose, mpal, mpdevine, mrdomino, |
|||
m.scott, msevior, mstone, mtklein, mucca, muccini, murielgodoi, |
|||
murray, murrays, musallam, mvirkkil, myles, mylesb, nacholudo, |
|||
nalrawahi, nandoa, nasa, nat, nathalia.sautchuk, naustin, ncorrare, |
|||
nelhage, nelson, neptune, newsham, ni762428, nibhatish, nicomy, |
|||
ninjakitten, nirmal, nitin, nnorwitz, nolambar, nornagon, nrp, nuke, |
|||
nuwdle, obc_spike, oeka, ohm, ohshima, okada, olafura, ollybetts, |
|||
ondal, openspark, orospakr, osbornisle, osmosys, otakuj462, ozwald, |
|||
pacease, pamela.dallas, pascal, path, paul, paulproteus, pavel, pavel, |
|||
pd, peiwei, pekayatt, pengo, pepboy, pepboy, perlhacker, peter, |
|||
peter.lorenzen, petria, pezhman, phil, philipmac, phollings, php5, |
|||
pierre, pierreossman, ping, pmj, pnasrat, polvi, ponafarioli, power |
|||
guo, pr3d4t0r, prasanna, prashant.thakkar, probono, pvanhoof, |
|||
pwiltsey, pwr, py_geek, pzelenka, qq, quantumcat, quantumg, quozl, |
|||
rabeeh, rafaelortiz, ramaseshanr, raven, ravikondamuru, ravualhemio, |
|||
ray.tseng, rbh00, rbhagwat, rblengio, rbwjrw, rcauk, rchokshi, |
|||
rdebath, rdike, rdobson, rebecca, rebecca, rebecca allen, rebeccag, |
|||
rebeccagettys, redpawn, reg, regan20, reillysl, rejon, reservedoc, |
|||
retired_techie, retroplumido, reynaldo, rgs, rharrison, rhindak, |
|||
rhindak, richard, richie.wang, riv, rj_dean, rkevans, rminnich, |
|||
robertfadel, robot101, robsta, rock, rodarvus, roel, roozbeh, rorrim, |
|||
roscherfr, roubert, roy, rsavoye, rsmith, rsriniva, rtlm, ruby, |
|||
russnelson, rwh, ry313323, ryankelln, ryant5000, ryebo1, sabu, sam, |
|||
samuel bizien, sandeepdutta, sankarshan, santanu, sarahmoodoo, |
|||
saramah, satch89450, satyajeet, sayamindu, sbelter, scomst, |
|||
scott_kirkwood, scottwallace, sdalvi, seberg, segher, seph, |
|||
seralewise, sero189, shailen, shang, shankar, sharon, shekay, shenki, |
|||
shiu, sholton, sierrahombre, simon, simon, simosx, sirjuanlu, sj, sjg, |
|||
sjoerd, skeezix, skiboo, skierpage, slasc, sleet01, smcv, smetz52, |
|||
smohan, spacey, spditner, splinux, sprezzatura, ssb22, ssc, sssss, |
|||
steck, steeg, stepheneb, steveb, steve fullerton, stevew, stevo, |
|||
stoecker, stoutbigred, stressyndrome, sturnfie, subbu, sulmanminhas, |
|||
sunny, sverma, svu, swagle, sxpert, syd, sylvinus, s.zytkiewicz, t3, |
|||
tags07, takashi, talmage, tamichan, tannewt, tbpringle, te294177, |
|||
tedch, ted.juan, tedkaehler, teefal, term, terry su, tess, testing, |
|||
teus, tf, theperturbator, thiago_s, timbutler, tim.millerdyck, titus, |
|||
tomeu, tomhannen, tonsofpcs, toygmail, trapdoor, trevor, tribleyl, |
|||
trobertson, tsylla, tudd, turadg, tushards, twinkle, uden, ufg, |
|||
uflchamp, ujwal2, usman ansari, usman.ansari, uwog, vadim, vance.ke, |
|||
vandien, vasukrishnan, vbhunt, vegpuff, vgiasolli, victorchao, |
|||
victor-y, vjohn, vmb, voden, vorburger, vradok, wad, wadeb, walter, |
|||
wangwebbxydd, waqastoor, warp, watchhillfarm, wcohen, weixiang, |
|||
wenmi01, we.three.tees, wildem, williamb68, wiswaud, wkraimer, wmb, |
|||
wmfwlr, wolf, wolfgang, wvbailey, wwworkshop shannon, wwworkshop |
|||
terrence, wybiral, xardox, xatzipe, xavi, xiang.wei, xorAxAx, yani, |
|||
ychao, yhosoai, yosch, youssef, ypod, ywwg, zack, zakarpatska, |
|||
zapador, zarcher, znmeb, zogger50, zoltanthegypsy, zwl821022, and |
|||
zztopd. |
|||
Best wishes for the new year. |
|||
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. |
|||
20. Special thanks: As mentioned, the contributions to the project |
|||
22. Sugar: Reinier Heeres worked on fixing a Read sharing issue |
|||
have been numerous and diverse. However, I'd like to acknowledge one |
|||
(Ticket #5365), a Calculate internationalization issue (Ticket #5319) |
|||
contributor who has quietly been playing a central role in perhaps the |
|||
and adding ellipsis to long texts in palettes (Ticket #4562). He also |
|||
most critical user-facing aspect of the OLPC effort, Sugar. Red Hat's |
|||
wrote a simple script to copy a regular file to the datastore/journal |
|||
Marco Pesenti Gritti seems to never rest; he never tires of answering |
|||
that got extended with quite a bit more functionality by Phil |
|||
questions, writing patches, and engaging in design discussions. His |
|||
Bordelon. He tested previous fixes in Joyride and Update-1 and tried |
|||
productivity is monumental; his insights are invaluable. |
|||
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= |
=More News= |
Revision as of 14:20, 30 December 2007
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.
Laptop News 2007-12-30
1. Give One Get One: The G1G1 program ends on December 31. G1G1 has not only made it possible to seed the launch of programs in Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Afghanistan, but we have also greatly broaden the community of participation in the project. The community has already jumped in to help: the level of activity in our forums, IRC, email lists, wiki, etc. has risen dramatically over the past few weeks. G1G1 participants have asked lots of questions—and have uncovered some new bugs—but they also have lots of answers—and have submitted some new patches. The community model seems to be scaling.
Many thanks to Hilary Meserole and the tireless efforts from the teams at Pentagram, Nurun, Eleven, Patriot, and Brightstar.
2. Mary Lou Jepsen: Mary Lou's last day at OLPC is December 31. She will be continuing to consult with us on a number of different fronts as she chases after her next miracle in display technology. Mary Lou was OLPC employee Number One, both in terms of when she joined the organization and in terms of the breadth and depth of her contributions. Thank you and best of luck with your adventures in a new role and new year.
3. Embedded controller (EC): Richard Smith has tested a battery EEPROM dumping feature recently added by Andres Salomon: it seems to work great. Richard has written crontab scripts and "phone home" scripts for inclusion in joyride builds, with the intent to include them in an upcoming release to build an anonymous database of battery performance. These scripts will sample the power used every five minutes and log it. They only sample when the battery is charging or discharging. The hope is to gather a composite view of battery performance under realistic conditions of use.
Richard noticed that on the community-development list there are at least two reports of the EC going "terminal", meaning that on boot they get the error message: "EC problem. Remove all power and restart." We need to get those machines to Cambridge to investigate further.
Another issue found on the community-list are reports from a few people about their batteries not charging. Richard says this would not surprise him if they were NiMH batteries, but G1G1 machines have the LiFePo batteries. He did had one person run "logbat" and send him the results: the EC reads the battery fine and is attempting to charge the battery but no current ever goes into the battery. Again, we need to get these machines to Cambridge as we haven't seen this behavior before.
4. Open Firmware: Mitch Bradley continued to provide G1G1 customer support, for example, chasing down some problems with SD cards. He also added the ability to delete JFFS2 files from Open Firmware and fixed Tickets #5717, #5585, and #5727, all improvements to the overall OFW performance and reliability. Preparations continue on OFW for the Intel prototype XO board.
5. Wireless firmware: Marvell released firmware version 5.110.20.p49 which addresses Ticket #5194. With this firmware release, all known major low-level bugs have been addressed. With the wireless driver that's in the current ship builds, we see locking errors under heavy load from which the driver recovers automatically. David Woodhouse is doing a major rewrite of the driver which should eventually address that issue.
6. Software ECOs: From time to time there may be critical bug fixes that must be released between our regularly scheduled releases. These may occur due to security issues, from unexpected hardware problems, or the discovery of latent bugs that affect large numbers of users. We've started a page in wiki discuss the software engineering change order (ECO) process (See Operating_system_release_procedures).
7. Support: The past week has been a busy one for Adam Holt and the OLPC support team. Adam has organized a team of 30 support volunteers to comprehensively answer help@laptop.org tickets. (Each ticket is an ongoing email conversation with a donor/client.) The volunteer team is working hard, but keeping up with the support load. Part of the process includes the compilation of a Support FAQ (See Support_FAQ). Adam is also organizing a "virtual call center" based on asterisk.org VoIP. Matthew O'Gorman is helping finalize the server. Callers will access a local US number in the 617 area code. It will be informal, but we hope it will provide a critical outreach to those users who need it most. We hope to complete testing and possibly an initial rollout within the coming week.
Please everyone recruit your XO-aware friends as: (1) "charming" volunteers to answer phones; and (2) "perfectionist" volunteers to help organize our wiki pages.
You can email Adam regarding your talents, motivations, and a phone number at "holt AT laptop DOT org". Thanks!
There will be an "Organizing Sunday" meeting among our volunteers on 30 December, 4PM EST. All interested parties can join if they email Adam first.
Noah Kantrowitz has helped to organize the RT system so that volunteers' workflow is more efficient. Instant-response RTFM entries (canned answers auto-pasted into emails) are growing too.
Chih-yu Chao is helping Adam to answer questions from G1G1 recipients; she has noticed that many parents are asking whether our browser support Flash/Java websites, an area we need to improve upon.
Michael Burns of the Oregon State Open Source Lab has been working each night improving and growing the Community Support forum (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/), which is now exceeding 1,000 posts; 200 registered users have answered hundreds of first-time computer questions from G1G1 donors. There is already a growing community of users helping other users on the site. The site includes a live (IRC) chat (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/chat), a feature that works from any computer, including directly from the XO, and a volunteers map (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/phoogle_map.php) that lets developers, enthusiasts and users put a push-pin next to their home town.
8. Etoys: 2007 was a busy year for the Etoys team: they made over 700 patches this calendar year. In addition to these code changes, there is new content: examples, help contents, and documentation. Etoys was more or less stable and mature before 2007, but the effort in the year made it even more stable, useful and be fit to the XO platform. Notable improvements and contributions include: sane mathematical operator precedence by Yoshiki Ohshima; better natural language translation by Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider; display scaling by Andreas Raab; an event recording system (called Event Theatre) by Scott Wallace; a camera interface by Diego Gomez Deck; the World Stethoscope by Kazuhiro Abe; the Quick Guide help system by Kathleen Harness, Ted Kaehler and Yoshiki; drag and drop by Takashi; IPv6 support by Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger; documentation by Alan Kay, Kim Rose and Rebecca Cannara; and numerous fixes and usability improvements from the Etoys team and community, including contributions by Karl Ramberg and Marcus Denker.
In 2007, there were many deadlines in short successions, putting pressure on the team to deliver stable versions—pushing the team towards a conservative approach to development. Many big changes were punted. In hindsight, perhaps delivering some unstable versions with bigger changes would have been better strategy. On the other hand, it is worth to mention that Etoys is one of the most reliable packages over the course of XO development and has seen extensive use in most of the school trials. Kudos to Bert Freudenberg, who maintains the Etoys integration with Sugar (Bert not only led the effort to integrate Etoys with Sugar; he also contributed Sugar's overall development).
There were various Etoys-based activities proposed: a programming tutorial called Bots Inc by Stéphane Ducasse; an interactive geometry program called Dr Geo II by Hilaire Hernandez; and education contents suite by Luke Gorrie, Bryan Berry, and the OLPC Nepal developers. "Conservativeness" was a major issue when discussing the possible inclusion of Dr Geo II into the base Etoys image; accommodating such code in a graceful way is a challenge for 2008.
9. Translation: One of the last pieces in our Pootle deployment is now in place: a mechanism to update PO template files for each module automatically. Sayamindu Dasgupta has fine tuned the script that does this updating to change POT files only if the strings have changed. (This work is based on Damned Lies, the GNOME translation management system). This helps avoid the redundant updating of PO files. The string-change detection feature will also be useful in the future to detect string-freeze breakages and also to notify translators when new strings are added to a module.
This week also saw the first package release of the Update 1 branch to pick up new translators. Thanks to the excellent effort put in by the translators, the Update.1 project (which consisted of the Update 1 branches of the Sugar, Journal activity, Record activity and Browse activity) is, on an average, 50% translated for each language. Languages that have more than 90% of their strings translated are:
• Urdu (100%) • Nepali (100%) • Dutch (100%) • Chinese (Taiwan) (100%) • Bengali (100%) • Arabic (100%) • Portuguese (Brazil) (99%) • Portuguese (99%) • Macedonian (99%) • Russian (98%) • Greek (98%) • French (98%) • Chinese (China) (98%) • German (96%) • Mongolian (94%)
The focus has shifted to the master branches once again, although language teams are encouraged to update their translations in Update.1 project (there will be another package release for Update.1 that would pick up any new translations).
In the middle of the week, Sayamindu also managed to track down a problem in Pootle that was holding up the work being done by the Urdu team. The issue was being caused by a corrupt stats file in the Pootle-Urdu directory.
10. Touchpad: Bernardo Innocenti spent much of the week testing a solution to the "jumpy mouse" touchpad bug. We'll soon be pushing out a patch that should cover the majority of touchpad problems.
11. Journal: Reinier Heeres wrote a script to copy files from the Journal to the Linux file system (Ticket #5571). This got extended by Phil Bordelon, just like the copy-to-journal script. Reinier also fixed some equation parser issues in the Calculator (Ticket #5734) and an issue with Browse not exiting when a keep error occurred (Ticket
- 5493).
12. Debian: Ivan Krstić is overhauling the OLPC server infrastructure, but also found the time to put together an "unofficial" etch/xfce4 build. It includes Firefox, Thunderbird, a suite of development tools (python, git, gcc, gdb, flex, bison, automake, autoconf, libtool), a music player (XMMS), IRC client (irssi) and a graphical wireless AP selector. The entire build takes up 250MB of flash. Ivan optimized the Firefox window layout to maximum screen estate and configured a number of keyboard shortcuts.
13. Cow power: Arjun Sarwal along with the Mumbai team made some good progress on the cow-power system for charging the XO. They made some changes in the electrical design (e.g., using an alternator now instead of a dynamo) and they have a plan regarding the mechanical design based upon a better understanding of what are readily available parts. The current setup easily charges two laptops, however with the planned mechanical design changes, they hope to charge at least ten laptops simultaneously.
14. Games: Don Hopkins has been working on the new Micropolis codebase (See http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/micropolis). He has made a web server out of the Micropolis python module for testing and has modularized python code for tile and cellular automation rendering.
15. OurStories: Pablo Flores reports that Uruguay will start collecting stories in late January in different localities, like their recent work in Sarand Grande (See http://olpc-ceibal.blogspot.com/2007/12/day-of-activities-in-sarand-grande.html). Announcements of the site in Spanish and Nigerian languages are being prepared for late January.
16. Library: Lauren Klein has been working on interfaces to make generating content bundles easier, starting with forms to generate bundle metadata. Next up are automatic bundlers that check and generate manifests and metadata from uploaded tars and zips (See http://crank.laptop.org/~lauren/libraryInfo/).
17. Installing activities: OLPC Austria is improving their "xo-get" command-line script for downloading and installing activities. (The script is a complement to the current process of clicking on .xo files from the Browse activity.) They are making it work with the activities found on the Activities page, having added a field there to include tags (See http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get and http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get/Repository).
18. OLPC Communities: Holger Levsen, Aaron Kaplan, and others from Austrian and German OLPC groups spent the last days of the week at the 24C3 conference in Berlin, Germany. John Crispin and the OpenWRT contingent showed off OpenWRT booting on an XO and let a growing number of XOs share their space. At one point there were over 20 XOs in use in the area, most in the hands of developers and early G1G1 arrivals.
OLPC Switzerland is having its first meeting January 15 in Bern, organized by Michele Notari (See OLPC_Switzerland).
Greg DeKoenigsberg and Jack Aboutbol are starting to organize a social and musical OLPC event in New York City for next August. They are presenting a proposal to the NYC parks and recreation committee next Friday.
19. Developer community: Almost 1000 developers are active in our Trac system (http://dev.laptop.org). There are thousands more contributors to wiki.laptop.org and to various fori, mailing lists, IRCs, etc. This participation is invaluable to the success of OLPC mission. We'd like to thank, among others:
a-12, aalam, abelay, abrar.momin, aconbere, adeighton, adetola, admford, adricnet, aegis, aenertia, aferti, afranke, agdelma, ahmad, ajax, akauppi, akeemolabiyi, alagu, albertcahalan, aleph, alexandre, alexl, alfonsodg, als, altemusm, alxx, ambros, amitgogna, andic, andreasraab, andre.mossinato, andrey, angel, angieklein123, angus, anna chang, annegentle, ant, antoninoiacono, antonio correia, antoniojf, approvalforupdate, aprodan, arangelangov, arauto, argento78, ariana, arjs, arnd, arnold, aroscha, artpro, arvinliu, ashish, ashsong, assim, astein, atodorov, aturist, aumana, avocade, avoine, awjrichards, awong9702, axboe, bamdad, bananascanner, barbolo, barry, bart massey, basil, bbaston, bbbush, bcavagnolo, bcsaller, bdoin, beaubrewer, beauty, beckerde, behdad, behnam, bemasc, benzea, bernie, bert, bertl, bfcatfriends, biarm, bigbaaadbob, bigwally, bilboed, billaspell, billjank, bill_mcgonigle, billy, bjfreeman, bkublik, blahedo, blanchet, blankverse, blix, blizzard, bluefoxicy, blueyed, bmcarnes, bnardone, bob, bobbysmith007, bobkeyes, boujelbenhichem, brainrecall, briandorsey, briandorsey, bronson, bryan.ma, bss, bsugarse, btate, budbird, buendia, byodo, c9damico, cafl, cak, calyth, campbell, candy, candy lu, candy_man, cannonjt, carl2, carla, carlfk, carlofalciola, carrano, cavallo, cbramsey, cdoty, cdurrett, cgalpin, chaos, chatworthy, cheetahman, chenz, chiaying.lin, chihyu, chitraspai, chrisb143, christianmarc, christophd, christoph_hagemeyer, chuck, cialis, cihan, ciscos151, cjb, c.kutzleb, clifft135, cmeadors, cmusodza, coderanger, codyl, colonwq, company, corbet, crazy-chris, crazymonk, crichardson, crouchjay, crschmidt, cscott, cshields, csounder, csutton, curlydude007, cwhii, cworth, cycho, czhower, dabender, daf, damonkohler, danarnold, dandelion, danerogers, danielfuhry, daniher, daniher, danjared, dan_margo, danw, dao, dark314, davidgr, david_leeh, david.lin, davidpfarrell, davidz, dbpatterson, dcbw, dcolivares, ddhoppe, ddo, dds, deanbrettle, deborah hanley, dedekind, dennisdanso, dennisfrancis, desertgojo, devinliu, devlware, devwillie, dgd, dgilmore, dhabersa, dhopkins, dhuff, dialectric, diegozacarao, dilinger, diyoung, djbclark, djihed, djneu, dking, dlang, dmd, docdtv, dolphinling, doom, douglas_goodall, drewish, dulouz, duncanb, dushyantgautam, dvsullivan, dwmw2, dyd, dydimustk, dysumner, ea, ealtin, eamaya, ebelechukwu2005, eben, ebf, ebodfish, ebotee, echeonwugbenu, edbatalha, ediaz, edsiper, edstoner, edwardbaafi, eenii, ejkrohne, eli amesefe, elife, elijah, elite231, elizabeth251964, elranchero, elvis, elyip, emilmont, enalax, enjahova, eric, eric, erick, ericsilva2, erikb, erikhatcher, erikos, eteo, ethrop, etoys, evenremy, fab, fabiand, fabiomarcio, factor, fade, faga, fahmi, fayoeu, fc, fciron, fdraeger, felix01, feranick, fernandodotnet, ffm, fgrose, fhill, finalzone, fiorella, fireball, firewing1, florentin_raud, foddex, follower, fongoses, foot, franka001, frazermarge, frief, fuseproject, gabaug, garlick, garrison, gary, garysu, gauravchem, gauthierancelin, gblaufuss, gbulfon, gcarrier, gcase, gcerchio, gdesmott, george rey, george yeager, gesmit, gfw123, ghopper, gi693362, giangy, giles, glezos, glochan, gnrfan, gnu, godiard, gonzalo, grantbow, greg, gregdek, gregm, gregt, gregthompson, grendelt, grenoble, griffithbuilt, grig, gustavo, gustavoo, gwlc, gwright, h7bse1c, hai, hal, hal, hallie, hal.murray, hamed, happyolpc, hartwellfong, hartwellfong, hazardouswaster, hchennings, hello1024, hemantg, henninger, hiper, hitoro, hmes, hoboprimate, holger, holt, holtzman, homunq, hopsman, hsin wu, hsin.wu, huangcza, hughsient, hummingbird, humptybump, hyppy, ianb, ianissitt, iceberg, iknowjoseph, indradg, indutiomarus, info_anarchy, intrader, irish_moss, isforinsects, ismaell, ivazquez, ivo, j5, jaberg, jack, jackeyzhao, jafo, jaimebalb, jaing, jake h, jamesm, jamespaige, jamil, jani, jaq, jason liu, jayakumar, jbarahona, jcallas, jcardona, jcfrench, jdub, jecel, jeckson, jennjacobsen, jenny2, jensjorgensen, jeremyvisser, jeroentb, jerub, jerub, jfallgatter, jfc, jfuhrer, jg, jherzog, jhuangtw, jhulten, jiffy, jimfare, jim.morey, jirwin, jlstomp66, jm3, joaoboscoapf, jochang, joebergin, joeclark, joeywang, john, johnkemeny, johnlin, johnson, jondo, jonknee, jonsd, jordancrouse, jorgecortes, josepht, joshseal, jpff, jpritikin, jrus, juanayup, juliano, julibio, junia, junwiseman, jwildebo, k2nt23, karl, karmaflux, kayseon, kazuhiro abe, kenh, ken lin, kentquirk, kenwatford, kevinprt, kfieldho, khaled, khassounah, kiddo, kimquirk, kim rose, kiran, kityoko, kkv, konrad1134, konrad_kleine, korakurider, kraetzichriz, kreneskyp, krstic, kruemel, ksankar, kylesteinfatt, kylin, larryapple, lathiat, laural, lauren, lbenavente, lcatania, lcbiazon, leejc, leemingd, leetcharmer, legolas558, legutierr, lenkawell, lferre, liam henry, lileeanna, linagee, lincolnquirk, lionstone, lmaltin, lmanul, lorenzen, lrhowa5, lucia, lucks, luisca, lukego, luna, lwalter42, ma895907, mac, madcat, madd, magnum34, mako, maku, mallum, mantaraya36, mantas, manu, manusheel, marcelo, marco, marcos ficarelli, marcus, markharrison, martine, martin.langhoff, martoro, martyvis, marv, massimo, mathew, maurotorres, maxim_o, mbletsas, mbrubeck, mburns, mcalef, mcfletch, mchehab, mchenetz, mchua, mduvigneaud, melekim, methril, meyers, mfoster, mi370560, michael, michael.tiemann, midiwall, miguelon, mihai, mihi, mikelee_aarp, mikes, mikus, mime, mitchellncharity, mitu, mjr, mk8, mkgobaco, mleech, mlj, mohsen, mokurai, monkeyfork, monyu, morgs, morningstar, moshez, motherhoose, mpal, mpdevine, mrdomino, m.scott, msevior, mstone, mtklein, mucca, muccini, murielgodoi, murray, murrays, musallam, mvirkkil, myles, mylesb, nacholudo, nalrawahi, nandoa, nasa, nat, nathalia.sautchuk, naustin, ncorrare, nelhage, nelson, neptune, newsham, ni762428, nibhatish, nicomy, ninjakitten, nirmal, nitin, nnorwitz, nolambar, nornagon, nrp, nuke, nuwdle, obc_spike, oeka, ohm, ohshima, okada, olafura, ollybetts, ondal, openspark, orospakr, osbornisle, osmosys, otakuj462, ozwald, pacease, pamela.dallas, pascal, path, paul, paulproteus, pavel, pavel, pd, peiwei, pekayatt, pengo, pepboy, pepboy, perlhacker, peter, peter.lorenzen, petria, pezhman, phil, philipmac, phollings, php5, pierre, pierreossman, ping, pmj, pnasrat, polvi, ponafarioli, power guo, pr3d4t0r, prasanna, prashant.thakkar, probono, pvanhoof, pwiltsey, pwr, py_geek, pzelenka, qq, quantumcat, quantumg, quozl, rabeeh, rafaelortiz, ramaseshanr, raven, ravikondamuru, ravualhemio, ray.tseng, rbh00, rbhagwat, rblengio, rbwjrw, rcauk, rchokshi, rdebath, rdike, rdobson, rebecca, rebecca, rebecca allen, rebeccag, rebeccagettys, redpawn, reg, regan20, reillysl, rejon, reservedoc, retired_techie, retroplumido, reynaldo, rgs, rharrison, rhindak, rhindak, richard, richie.wang, riv, rj_dean, rkevans, rminnich, robertfadel, robot101, robsta, rock, rodarvus, roel, roozbeh, rorrim, roscherfr, roubert, roy, rsavoye, rsmith, rsriniva, rtlm, ruby, russnelson, rwh, ry313323, ryankelln, ryant5000, ryebo1, sabu, sam, samuel bizien, sandeepdutta, sankarshan, santanu, sarahmoodoo, saramah, satch89450, satyajeet, sayamindu, sbelter, scomst, scott_kirkwood, scottwallace, sdalvi, seberg, segher, seph, seralewise, sero189, shailen, shang, shankar, sharon, shekay, shenki, shiu, sholton, sierrahombre, simon, simon, simosx, sirjuanlu, sj, sjg, sjoerd, skeezix, skiboo, skierpage, slasc, sleet01, smcv, smetz52, smohan, spacey, spditner, splinux, sprezzatura, ssb22, ssc, sssss, steck, steeg, stepheneb, steveb, steve fullerton, stevew, stevo, stoecker, stoutbigred, stressyndrome, sturnfie, subbu, sulmanminhas, sunny, sverma, svu, swagle, sxpert, syd, sylvinus, s.zytkiewicz, t3, tags07, takashi, talmage, tamichan, tannewt, tbpringle, te294177, tedch, ted.juan, tedkaehler, teefal, term, terry su, tess, testing, teus, tf, theperturbator, thiago_s, timbutler, tim.millerdyck, titus, tomeu, tomhannen, tonsofpcs, toygmail, trapdoor, trevor, tribleyl, trobertson, tsylla, tudd, turadg, tushards, twinkle, uden, ufg, uflchamp, ujwal2, usman ansari, usman.ansari, uwog, vadim, vance.ke, vandien, vasukrishnan, vbhunt, vegpuff, vgiasolli, victorchao, victor-y, vjohn, vmb, voden, vorburger, vradok, wad, wadeb, walter, wangwebbxydd, waqastoor, warp, watchhillfarm, wcohen, weixiang, wenmi01, we.three.tees, wildem, williamb68, wiswaud, wkraimer, wmb, wmfwlr, wolf, wolfgang, wvbailey, wwworkshop shannon, wwworkshop terrence, wybiral, xardox, xatzipe, xavi, xiang.wei, xorAxAx, yani, ychao, yhosoai, yosch, youssef, ypod, ywwg, zack, zakarpatska, zapador, zarcher, znmeb, zogger50, zoltanthegypsy, zwl821022, and zztopd.
Best wishes for the new year.
20. Special thanks: As mentioned, the contributions to the project have been numerous and diverse. However, I'd like to acknowledge one contributor who has quietly been playing a central role in perhaps the most critical user-facing aspect of the OLPC effort, Sugar. Red Hat's Marco Pesenti Gritti seems to never rest; he never tires of answering questions, writing patches, and engaging in design discussions. His productivity is monumental; his insights are invaluable.
More News
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Milestones
Latest milestones:
Nov. 2007 | Mass Production has started. |
July. 2007 | One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop. |
Apr. 2007 | First pre-B3 machines built. |
Mar. 2007 | First mesh network deployment. |
Feb. 2007 | B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries. |
Jan. 2007 | Rwanda announced its participation in the project. |
All milestones can be found here.
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Laptop News 2007-12-30
1. Give One Get One: The G1G1 program ends on December 31. G1G1 has not only made it possible to seed the launch of programs in Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Afghanistan, but we have also greatly broaden the community of participation in the project. The community has already jumped in to help: the level of activity in our forums, IRC, email lists, wiki, etc. has risen dramatically over the past few weeks. G1G1 participants have asked lots of questions—and have uncovered some new bugs—but they also have lots of answers—and have submitted some new patches. The community model seems to be scaling.
Many thanks to Hilary Meserole and the tireless efforts from the teams at Pentagram, Nurun, Eleven, Patriot, and Brightstar.
2. Mary Lou Jepsen: Mary Lou's last day at OLPC is December 31. She will be continuing to consult with us on a number of different fronts as she chases after her next miracle in display technology. Mary Lou was OLPC employee Number One, both in terms of when she joined the organization and in terms of the breadth and depth of her contributions. Thank you and best of luck with your adventures in a new role and new year.
3. Embedded controller (EC): Richard Smith has tested a battery EEPROM dumping feature recently added by Andres Salomon: it seems to work great. Richard has written crontab scripts and "phone home" scripts for inclusion in joyride builds, with the intent to include them in an upcoming release to build an anonymous database of battery performance. These scripts will sample the power used every five minutes and log it. They only sample when the battery is charging or discharging. The hope is to gather a composite view of battery performance under realistic conditions of use.
Richard noticed that on the community-development list there are at least two reports of the EC going "terminal", meaning that on boot they get the error message: "EC problem. Remove all power and restart." We need to get those machines to Cambridge to investigate further.
Another issue found on the community-list are reports from a few people about their batteries not charging. Richard says this would not surprise him if they were NiMH batteries, but G1G1 machines have the LiFePo batteries. He did had one person run "logbat" and send him the results: the EC reads the battery fine and is attempting to charge the battery but no current ever goes into the battery. Again, we need to get these machines to Cambridge as we haven't seen this behavior before.
4. Open Firmware: Mitch Bradley continued to provide G1G1 customer support, for example, chasing down some problems with SD cards. He also added the ability to delete JFFS2 files from Open Firmware and fixed Tickets #5717, #5585, and #5727, all improvements to the overall OFW performance and reliability. Preparations continue on OFW for the Intel prototype XO board.
5. Wireless firmware: Marvell released firmware version 5.110.20.p49 which addresses Ticket #5194. With this firmware release, all known major low-level bugs have been addressed. With the wireless driver that's in the current ship builds, we see locking errors under heavy load from which the driver recovers automatically. David Woodhouse is doing a major rewrite of the driver which should eventually address that issue.
6. Software ECOs: From time to time there may be critical bug fixes that must be released between our regularly scheduled releases. These may occur due to security issues, from unexpected hardware problems, or the discovery of latent bugs that affect large numbers of users. We've started a page in wiki discuss the software engineering change order (ECO) process (See Operating_system_release_procedures).
7. Support: The past week has been a busy one for Adam Holt and the OLPC support team. Adam has organized a team of 30 support volunteers to comprehensively answer help@laptop.org tickets. (Each ticket is an ongoing email conversation with a donor/client.) The volunteer team is working hard, but keeping up with the support load. Part of the process includes the compilation of a Support FAQ (See Support_FAQ). Adam is also organizing a "virtual call center" based on asterisk.org VoIP. Matthew O'Gorman is helping finalize the server. Callers will access a local US number in the 617 area code. It will be informal, but we hope it will provide a critical outreach to those users who need it most. We hope to complete testing and possibly an initial rollout within the coming week.
Please everyone recruit your XO-aware friends as: (1) "charming" volunteers to answer phones; and (2) "perfectionist" volunteers to help organize our wiki pages.
You can email Adam regarding your talents, motivations, and a phone number at "holt AT laptop DOT org". Thanks!
There will be an "Organizing Sunday" meeting among our volunteers on 30 December, 4PM EST. All interested parties can join if they email Adam first.
Noah Kantrowitz has helped to organize the RT system so that volunteers' workflow is more efficient. Instant-response RTFM entries (canned answers auto-pasted into emails) are growing too.
Chih-yu Chao is helping Adam to answer questions from G1G1 recipients; she has noticed that many parents are asking whether our browser support Flash/Java websites, an area we need to improve upon.
Michael Burns of the Oregon State Open Source Lab has been working each night improving and growing the Community Support forum (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/), which is now exceeding 1,000 posts; 200 registered users have answered hundreds of first-time computer questions from G1G1 donors. There is already a growing community of users helping other users on the site. The site includes a live (IRC) chat (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/chat), a feature that works from any computer, including directly from the XO, and a volunteers map (See http://olpc.osuosl.org/forum/phoogle_map.php) that lets developers, enthusiasts and users put a push-pin next to their home town.
8. Etoys: 2007 was a busy year for the Etoys team: they made over 700 patches this calendar year. In addition to these code changes, there is new content: examples, help contents, and documentation. Etoys was more or less stable and mature before 2007, but the effort in the year made it even more stable, useful and be fit to the XO platform. Notable improvements and contributions include: sane mathematical operator precedence by Yoshiki Ohshima; better natural language translation by Takashi Yamamiya and Korakurider; display scaling by Andreas Raab; an event recording system (called Event Theatre) by Scott Wallace; a camera interface by Diego Gomez Deck; the World Stethoscope by Kazuhiro Abe; the Quick Guide help system by Kathleen Harness, Ted Kaehler and Yoshiki; drag and drop by Takashi; IPv6 support by Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger; documentation by Alan Kay, Kim Rose and Rebecca Cannara; and numerous fixes and usability improvements from the Etoys team and community, including contributions by Karl Ramberg and Marcus Denker.
In 2007, there were many deadlines in short successions, putting pressure on the team to deliver stable versions—pushing the team towards a conservative approach to development. Many big changes were punted. In hindsight, perhaps delivering some unstable versions with bigger changes would have been better strategy. On the other hand, it is worth to mention that Etoys is one of the most reliable packages over the course of XO development and has seen extensive use in most of the school trials. Kudos to Bert Freudenberg, who maintains the Etoys integration with Sugar (Bert not only led the effort to integrate Etoys with Sugar; he also contributed Sugar's overall development).
There were various Etoys-based activities proposed: a programming tutorial called Bots Inc by Stéphane Ducasse; an interactive geometry program called Dr Geo II by Hilaire Hernandez; and education contents suite by Luke Gorrie, Bryan Berry, and the OLPC Nepal developers. "Conservativeness" was a major issue when discussing the possible inclusion of Dr Geo II into the base Etoys image; accommodating such code in a graceful way is a challenge for 2008.
9. Translation: One of the last pieces in our Pootle deployment is now in place: a mechanism to update PO template files for each module automatically. Sayamindu Dasgupta has fine tuned the script that does this updating to change POT files only if the strings have changed. (This work is based on Damned Lies, the GNOME translation management system). This helps avoid the redundant updating of PO files. The string-change detection feature will also be useful in the future to detect string-freeze breakages and also to notify translators when new strings are added to a module.
This week also saw the first package release of the Update 1 branch to pick up new translators. Thanks to the excellent effort put in by the translators, the Update.1 project (which consisted of the Update 1 branches of the Sugar, Journal activity, Record activity and Browse activity) is, on an average, 50% translated for each language. Languages that have more than 90% of their strings translated are:
• Urdu (100%) • Nepali (100%) • Dutch (100%) • Chinese (Taiwan) (100%) • Bengali (100%) • Arabic (100%) • Portuguese (Brazil) (99%) • Portuguese (99%) • Macedonian (99%) • Russian (98%) • Greek (98%) • French (98%) • Chinese (China) (98%) • German (96%) • Mongolian (94%)
The focus has shifted to the master branches once again, although language teams are encouraged to update their translations in Update.1 project (there will be another package release for Update.1 that would pick up any new translations).
In the middle of the week, Sayamindu also managed to track down a problem in Pootle that was holding up the work being done by the Urdu team. The issue was being caused by a corrupt stats file in the Pootle-Urdu directory.
10. Touchpad: Bernardo Innocenti spent much of the week testing a solution to the "jumpy mouse" touchpad bug. We'll soon be pushing out a patch that should cover the majority of touchpad problems.
11. Journal: Reinier Heeres wrote a script to copy files from the Journal to the Linux file system (Ticket #5571). This got extended by Phil Bordelon, just like the copy-to-journal script. Reinier also fixed some equation parser issues in the Calculator (Ticket #5734) and an issue with Browse not exiting when a keep error occurred (Ticket
- 5493).
12. Debian: Ivan Krstić is overhauling the OLPC server infrastructure, but also found the time to put together an "unofficial" etch/xfce4 build. It includes Firefox, Thunderbird, a suite of development tools (python, git, gcc, gdb, flex, bison, automake, autoconf, libtool), a music player (XMMS), IRC client (irssi) and a graphical wireless AP selector. The entire build takes up 250MB of flash. Ivan optimized the Firefox window layout to maximum screen estate and configured a number of keyboard shortcuts.
13. Cow power: Arjun Sarwal along with the Mumbai team made some good progress on the cow-power system for charging the XO. They made some changes in the electrical design (e.g., using an alternator now instead of a dynamo) and they have a plan regarding the mechanical design based upon a better understanding of what are readily available parts. The current setup easily charges two laptops, however with the planned mechanical design changes, they hope to charge at least ten laptops simultaneously.
14. Games: Don Hopkins has been working on the new Micropolis codebase (See http://www.DonHopkins.com/home/micropolis). He has made a web server out of the Micropolis python module for testing and has modularized python code for tile and cellular automation rendering.
15. OurStories: Pablo Flores reports that Uruguay will start collecting stories in late January in different localities, like their recent work in Sarand Grande (See http://olpc-ceibal.blogspot.com/2007/12/day-of-activities-in-sarand-grande.html). Announcements of the site in Spanish and Nigerian languages are being prepared for late January.
16. Library: Lauren Klein has been working on interfaces to make generating content bundles easier, starting with forms to generate bundle metadata. Next up are automatic bundlers that check and generate manifests and metadata from uploaded tars and zips (See http://crank.laptop.org/~lauren/libraryInfo/).
17. Installing activities: OLPC Austria is improving their "xo-get" command-line script for downloading and installing activities. (The script is a complement to the current process of clicking on .xo files from the Browse activity.) They are making it work with the activities found on the Activities page, having added a field there to include tags (See http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get and http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Xo-get/Repository).
18. OLPC Communities: Holger Levsen, Aaron Kaplan, and others from Austrian and German OLPC groups spent the last days of the week at the 24C3 conference in Berlin, Germany. John Crispin and the OpenWRT contingent showed off OpenWRT booting on an XO and let a growing number of XOs share their space. At one point there were over 20 XOs in use in the area, most in the hands of developers and early G1G1 arrivals.
OLPC Switzerland is having its first meeting January 15 in Bern, organized by Michele Notari (See OLPC_Switzerland).
Greg DeKoenigsberg and Jack Aboutbol are starting to organize a social and musical OLPC event in New York City for next August. They are presenting a proposal to the NYC parks and recreation committee next Friday.
19. Developer community: Almost 1000 developers are active in our Trac system (http://dev.laptop.org). There are thousands more contributors to wiki.laptop.org and to various fori, mailing lists, IRCs, etc. This participation is invaluable to the success of OLPC mission. We'd like to thank, among others:
a-12, aalam, abelay, abrar.momin, aconbere, adeighton, adetola, admford, adricnet, aegis, aenertia, aferti, afranke, agdelma, ahmad, ajax, akauppi, akeemolabiyi, alagu, albertcahalan, aleph, alexandre, alexl, alfonsodg, als, altemusm, alxx, ambros, amitgogna, andic, andreasraab, andre.mossinato, andrey, angel, angieklein123, angus, anna chang, annegentle, ant, antoninoiacono, antonio correia, antoniojf, approvalforupdate, aprodan, arangelangov, arauto, argento78, ariana, arjs, arnd, arnold, aroscha, artpro, arvinliu, ashish, ashsong, assim, astein, atodorov, aturist, aumana, avocade, avoine, awjrichards, awong9702, axboe, bamdad, bananascanner, barbolo, barry, bart massey, basil, bbaston, bbbush, bcavagnolo, bcsaller, bdoin, beaubrewer, beauty, beckerde, behdad, behnam, bemasc, benzea, bernie, bert, bertl, bfcatfriends, biarm, bigbaaadbob, bigwally, bilboed, billaspell, billjank, bill_mcgonigle, billy, bjfreeman, bkublik, blahedo, blanchet, blankverse, blix, blizzard, bluefoxicy, blueyed, bmcarnes, bnardone, bob, bobbysmith007, bobkeyes, boujelbenhichem, brainrecall, briandorsey, briandorsey, bronson, bryan.ma, bss, bsugarse, btate, budbird, buendia, byodo, c9damico, cafl, cak, calyth, campbell, candy, candy lu, candy_man, cannonjt, carl2, carla, carlfk, carlofalciola, carrano, cavallo, cbramsey, cdoty, cdurrett, cgalpin, chaos, chatworthy, cheetahman, chenz, chiaying.lin, chihyu, chitraspai, chrisb143, christianmarc, christophd, christoph_hagemeyer, chuck, cialis, cihan, ciscos151, cjb, c.kutzleb, clifft135, cmeadors, cmusodza, coderanger, codyl, colonwq, company, corbet, crazy-chris, crazymonk, crichardson, crouchjay, crschmidt, cscott, cshields, csounder, csutton, curlydude007, cwhii, cworth, cycho, czhower, dabender, daf, damonkohler, danarnold, dandelion, danerogers, danielfuhry, daniher, daniher, danjared, dan_margo, danw, dao, dark314, davidgr, david_leeh, david.lin, davidpfarrell, davidz, dbpatterson, dcbw, dcolivares, ddhoppe, ddo, dds, deanbrettle, deborah hanley, dedekind, dennisdanso, dennisfrancis, desertgojo, devinliu, devlware, devwillie, dgd, dgilmore, dhabersa, dhopkins, dhuff, dialectric, diegozacarao, dilinger, diyoung, djbclark, djihed, djneu, dking, dlang, dmd, docdtv, dolphinling, doom, douglas_goodall, drewish, dulouz, duncanb, dushyantgautam, dvsullivan, dwmw2, dyd, dydimustk, dysumner, ea, ealtin, eamaya, ebelechukwu2005, eben, ebf, ebodfish, ebotee, echeonwugbenu, edbatalha, ediaz, edsiper, edstoner, edwardbaafi, eenii, ejkrohne, eli amesefe, elife, elijah, elite231, elizabeth251964, elranchero, elvis, elyip, emilmont, enalax, enjahova, eric, eric, erick, ericsilva2, erikb, erikhatcher, erikos, eteo, ethrop, etoys, evenremy, fab, fabiand, fabiomarcio, factor, fade, faga, fahmi, fayoeu, fc, fciron, fdraeger, felix01, feranick, fernandodotnet, ffm, fgrose, fhill, finalzone, fiorella, fireball, firewing1, florentin_raud, foddex, follower, fongoses, foot, franka001, frazermarge, frief, fuseproject, gabaug, garlick, garrison, gary, garysu, gauravchem, gauthierancelin, gblaufuss, gbulfon, gcarrier, gcase, gcerchio, gdesmott, george rey, george yeager, gesmit, gfw123, ghopper, gi693362, giangy, giles, glezos, glochan, gnrfan, gnu, godiard, gonzalo, grantbow, greg, gregdek, gregm, gregt, gregthompson, grendelt, grenoble, griffithbuilt, grig, gustavo, gustavoo, gwlc, gwright, h7bse1c, hai, hal, hal, hallie, hal.murray, hamed, happyolpc, hartwellfong, hartwellfong, hazardouswaster, hchennings, hello1024, hemantg, henninger, hiper, hitoro, hmes, hoboprimate, holger, holt, holtzman, homunq, hopsman, hsin wu, hsin.wu, huangcza, hughsient, hummingbird, humptybump, hyppy, ianb, ianissitt, iceberg, iknowjoseph, indradg, indutiomarus, info_anarchy, intrader, irish_moss, isforinsects, ismaell, ivazquez, ivo, j5, jaberg, jack, jackeyzhao, jafo, jaimebalb, jaing, jake h, jamesm, jamespaige, jamil, jani, jaq, jason liu, jayakumar, jbarahona, jcallas, jcardona, jcfrench, jdub, jecel, jeckson, jennjacobsen, jenny2, jensjorgensen, jeremyvisser, jeroentb, jerub, jerub, jfallgatter, jfc, jfuhrer, jg, jherzog, jhuangtw, jhulten, jiffy, jimfare, jim.morey, jirwin, jlstomp66, jm3, joaoboscoapf, jochang, joebergin, joeclark, joeywang, john, johnkemeny, johnlin, johnson, jondo, jonknee, jonsd, jordancrouse, jorgecortes, josepht, joshseal, jpff, jpritikin, jrus, juanayup, juliano, julibio, junia, junwiseman, jwildebo, k2nt23, karl, karmaflux, kayseon, kazuhiro abe, kenh, ken lin, kentquirk, kenwatford, kevinprt, kfieldho, khaled, khassounah, kiddo, kimquirk, kim rose, kiran, kityoko, kkv, konrad1134, konrad_kleine, korakurider, kraetzichriz, kreneskyp, krstic, kruemel, ksankar, kylesteinfatt, kylin, larryapple, lathiat, laural, lauren, lbenavente, lcatania, lcbiazon, leejc, leemingd, leetcharmer, legolas558, legutierr, lenkawell, lferre, liam henry, lileeanna, linagee, lincolnquirk, lionstone, lmaltin, lmanul, lorenzen, lrhowa5, lucia, lucks, luisca, lukego, luna, lwalter42, ma895907, mac, madcat, madd, magnum34, mako, maku, mallum, mantaraya36, mantas, manu, manusheel, marcelo, marco, marcos ficarelli, marcus, markharrison, martine, martin.langhoff, martoro, martyvis, marv, massimo, mathew, maurotorres, maxim_o, mbletsas, mbrubeck, mburns, mcalef, mcfletch, mchehab, mchenetz, mchua, mduvigneaud, melekim, methril, meyers, mfoster, mi370560, michael, michael.tiemann, midiwall, miguelon, mihai, mihi, mikelee_aarp, mikes, mikus, mime, mitchellncharity, mitu, mjr, mk8, mkgobaco, mleech, mlj, mohsen, mokurai, monkeyfork, monyu, morgs, morningstar, moshez, motherhoose, mpal, mpdevine, mrdomino, m.scott, msevior, mstone, mtklein, mucca, muccini, murielgodoi, murray, murrays, musallam, mvirkkil, myles, mylesb, nacholudo, nalrawahi, nandoa, nasa, nat, nathalia.sautchuk, naustin, ncorrare, nelhage, nelson, neptune, newsham, ni762428, nibhatish, nicomy, ninjakitten, nirmal, nitin, nnorwitz, nolambar, nornagon, nrp, nuke, nuwdle, obc_spike, oeka, ohm, ohshima, okada, olafura, ollybetts, ondal, openspark, orospakr, osbornisle, osmosys, otakuj462, ozwald, pacease, pamela.dallas, pascal, path, paul, paulproteus, pavel, pavel, pd, peiwei, pekayatt, pengo, pepboy, pepboy, perlhacker, peter, peter.lorenzen, petria, pezhman, phil, philipmac, phollings, php5, pierre, pierreossman, ping, pmj, pnasrat, polvi, ponafarioli, power guo, pr3d4t0r, prasanna, prashant.thakkar, probono, pvanhoof, pwiltsey, pwr, py_geek, pzelenka, qq, quantumcat, quantumg, quozl, rabeeh, rafaelortiz, ramaseshanr, raven, ravikondamuru, ravualhemio, ray.tseng, rbh00, rbhagwat, rblengio, rbwjrw, rcauk, rchokshi, rdebath, rdike, rdobson, rebecca, rebecca, rebecca allen, rebeccag, rebeccagettys, redpawn, reg, regan20, reillysl, rejon, reservedoc, retired_techie, retroplumido, reynaldo, rgs, rharrison, rhindak, rhindak, richard, richie.wang, riv, rj_dean, rkevans, rminnich, robertfadel, robot101, robsta, rock, rodarvus, roel, roozbeh, rorrim, roscherfr, roubert, roy, rsavoye, rsmith, rsriniva, rtlm, ruby, russnelson, rwh, ry313323, ryankelln, ryant5000, ryebo1, sabu, sam, samuel bizien, sandeepdutta, sankarshan, santanu, sarahmoodoo, saramah, satch89450, satyajeet, sayamindu, sbelter, scomst, scott_kirkwood, scottwallace, sdalvi, seberg, segher, seph, seralewise, sero189, shailen, shang, shankar, sharon, shekay, shenki, shiu, sholton, sierrahombre, simon, simon, simosx, sirjuanlu, sj, sjg, sjoerd, skeezix, skiboo, skierpage, slasc, sleet01, smcv, smetz52, smohan, spacey, spditner, splinux, sprezzatura, ssb22, ssc, sssss, steck, steeg, stepheneb, steveb, steve fullerton, stevew, stevo, stoecker, stoutbigred, stressyndrome, sturnfie, subbu, sulmanminhas, sunny, sverma, svu, swagle, sxpert, syd, sylvinus, s.zytkiewicz, t3, tags07, takashi, talmage, tamichan, tannewt, tbpringle, te294177, tedch, ted.juan, tedkaehler, teefal, term, terry su, tess, testing, teus, tf, theperturbator, thiago_s, timbutler, tim.millerdyck, titus, tomeu, tomhannen, tonsofpcs, toygmail, trapdoor, trevor, tribleyl, trobertson, tsylla, tudd, turadg, tushards, twinkle, uden, ufg, uflchamp, ujwal2, usman ansari, usman.ansari, uwog, vadim, vance.ke, vandien, vasukrishnan, vbhunt, vegpuff, vgiasolli, victorchao, victor-y, vjohn, vmb, voden, vorburger, vradok, wad, wadeb, walter, wangwebbxydd, waqastoor, warp, watchhillfarm, wcohen, weixiang, wenmi01, we.three.tees, wildem, williamb68, wiswaud, wkraimer, wmb, wmfwlr, wolf, wolfgang, wvbailey, wwworkshop shannon, wwworkshop terrence, wybiral, xardox, xatzipe, xavi, xiang.wei, xorAxAx, yani, ychao, yhosoai, yosch, youssef, ypod, ywwg, zack, zakarpatska, zapador, zarcher, znmeb, zogger50, zoltanthegypsy, zwl821022, and zztopd.
Best wishes for the new year.
20. Special thanks: As mentioned, the contributions to the project have been numerous and diverse. However, I'd like to acknowledge one contributor who has quietly been playing a central role in perhaps the most critical user-facing aspect of the OLPC effort, Sugar. Red Hat's Marco Pesenti Gritti seems to never rest; he never tires of answering questions, writing patches, and engaging in design discussions. His productivity is monumental; his insights are invaluable.
More News
Laptop News is archived 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.
- A Frappr Map of G1G1 recipients can be found at [1]
- A collection of several videos can found at OLPC.TV
- IBM Podcast, Walter Bender on One Laptop per Child [2]
- Ivan Krstić delivers a technical presentation of OLPC at the Google TechTalk series
- 60 Minutes, What if Every Child had a Laptop [3]
- CNN, Should Intel Fear $100 Laptop? [4]
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode Four
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode Three
- Red Hat Magazine: Ins/ide One Laptop per Child, Episode Two
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode One
- Portuguese lecture "Perspectivas do uso de laptops pelas crianças (e nas escolas)". Video in Cameraweb Unicamp
- Ivan Krstić delivers a technical presentation of OLPC at the Google TechTalk series
- 60 Minutes, What if Every Child had a Laptop [5]
- CNN, Should Intel Fear $100 Laptop? [6]
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode Four
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode Three
- Red Hat Magazine: Ins/ide One Laptop per Child, Episode Two
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode One
- OLPC Video from Switzerland, 26.01.2007
- Interview with Nicholas Negroponte on the &100 Laptop
- Presentation by Jim Gettys at FOSDEM 2007
- GLOBO- BRASIL: Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop
- Mark Foster delivers presentation to Stanford University
- Technology Review Mini-DocumentaryVideo from Switzerland, 26.01.2007
- Interview with Nicholas Negroponte on the &100 Laptop
- Presentation by Jim Gettys at FOSDEM 2007
- GLOBO- BRASIL: Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop
- Mark Foster delivers presentation to Stanford University
- Technology Review Mini-Documentary
- A Brief Demo
More articles can be found here.
Video
Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.
- A Frappr Map of G1G1 recipients can be found at [7]
- A collection of several videos can found at OLPC.TV
- IBM Podcast, Walter Bender on One Laptop per Child [8]
- Ivan Krstić delivers a technical presentation of OLPC at the Google TechTalk series
- 60 Minutes, What if Every Child had a Laptop [9]
- CNN, Should Intel Fear $100 Laptop? [10]
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode Four
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode Three
- Red Hat Magazine: Ins/ide One Laptop per Child, Episode Two
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode One
- Portuguese lecture "Perspectivas do uso de laptops pelas crianças (e nas escolas)". Video in Cameraweb Unicamp
- Ivan Krstić delivers a technical presentation of OLPC at the Google TechTalk series
- 60 Minutes, What if Every Child had a Laptop [11]
- CNN, Should Intel Fear $100 Laptop? [12]
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode Four
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode Three
- Red Hat Magazine: Ins/ide One Laptop per Child, Episode Two
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode One
- OLPC Video from Switzerland, 26.01.2007
- Interview with Nicholas Negroponte on the &100 Laptop
- Presentation by Jim Gettys at FOSDEM 2007
- GLOBO- BRASIL: Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop
- Mark Foster delivers presentation to Stanford University
- Technology Review Mini-DocumentaryVideo from Switzerland, 26.01.2007
- Interview with Nicholas Negroponte on the &100 Laptop
- Presentation by Jim Gettys at FOSDEM 2007
- GLOBO- BRASIL: Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop
- Mark Foster delivers presentation to Stanford University
- Technology Review Mini-Documentary
- A Brief Demo