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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].


=Laptop News 2008-01-12=
=Laptop News 2008-01-19=


1. Cambridge: A third Learning Workshop was held at OLPC this past week. There was excellent attendance and participation; a real network of laptop learning activists is forming. Workshop attendees are not merely listening but are contributing to the conceptual basis of practice in schools and communities. There was a blend between the conceptual and practical concepts, and the localities beginning will help innovate the learning environments and communities of the 21st century. The presentation by Dr. Felton Earls and Maya Carlson of the Harvard School of Public Health on participatory surveys and indicators for community development as well as their work in Tanzania and Chicago was inspirational. The Learning team of Edith Ackermann, Ed Baafi, Fatimata Seye Sylla, Juliano Bittencourt, Elana Langer, Julain Daily, Cynthia Solomon, Alice Cavallo, and David Cavallo contributed mightily. Special thanks for support especially to Felice Gardner, as well as Tracy Price and Jennifer Amaya. As always, a highlight is the Activity Open House where developers demonstrate their activities on the XO.
1. Mongolia is the first beneficiary of the Give One Get One program. Laptops have begun to arrive and a team from OLPC, including Carla Gomez Monroy, Jan Jungclaus, and Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin are on the ground to help with the initial deployment. Dave Woodhouse will be heading to Ulan Bator to help with the School Server later this month.


2. G1G1: During the reconciliation process of the “get” laptops shipped during Give One Get One, a number of unfulfilled order records were uncovered. The OLPC team has been working hard with our partners to resolve all open issues. We expect another ~5000 XO laptops will be shipped on Monday. The remaining orders pose an extra challenge as they either have incomplete or no shipping and contact information. If you have not yet received your XO laptop, you should be getting an individualized email that addresses your specific situation. If you are scheduled to receive your laptop next week, you will also be getting a follow-up email with tracking information. We'll be adding additional phone lines and shifting agents to reduce wait times. A further reconciliation of the data will be conducted this week, although hopeful, we can anticipate additional incomplete orders. Our apologies for these delays.
2. Las Vegas: Nicholas Negroponte gave the keynote at CES' new program entitled, “Technology and Emerging Countries: Advancing Development through Technology Investments.” He spoke about learning, constructionism, and the long history of thinking about thinking, drawing heavily on Seymour Papert's life work.


3. Ulaan Baatar: Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, Carla Gomez Monroy, Jan Jungclaus, and RedHat’s David Woodhouse are working hard to set up a structure that can provide sustainability to the project in Mongolia such that it can spread it throughout the country. On Wednesday, the Minister of Education visited the school for the “laptop hand out” event. On Friday, an optical-fiber cable was set up, in spite of the extreme low temperatures; on Saturday, the schools were connected to the Internet. David has been working with a group of local technical people on the servers and Internet set up infrastructure as well as on configuration. John Watlington has been providing support remotely from OLPC.
3. Cambridge: Walter also met with the X-Prize Foundation Founder and Chairman Peter Diamandis. They discussed two competitions that are in the planning stages: (1) development of a low-cost rural water/power/communications station; and (2) development of a high-impact global learning intervention. The incentive in both competitions is a US $10M prize. OLPC has offered to help define the goals and metrics for the prizes, as there is obvious synergy with our mission in both cases.


We have been meeting almost every evening with the strategic team of the Ministry of Education to provide feedback and sort out challenges. We met yesterday with the Ministry of Education team, teachers, principals, ICTA, content team and pilot research team to provide detailed feedback of how the project is going so far and to bring up things to be considered for the short and long terms.
4. Las Vegas: Michail Bletsas delivered the keynote address at the 5th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC); his talk was about the XO's networking architecture.


Teachers are putting their hearts into the program. They had their first sessions with the children. Parents, too, have shown support. And the children, of course, love it. The Constructionist model of learning has found wide-spread support within the MoE.
5. In the news: Two topics dominated the press coverage of OLPC this week: the Intel departure; and the Microsoft plans for the XO. The Intel departure, which ultimately boiled down to a lack of trust, as been discussed ad nauseum; Ivan Krstić blog provides a good overview of the Microsoft plans from the OLPC perspective (Please visit http://radian.org/notebook/paradox-of-choice).


There are more photos (See [[Ulaanbaatar]]) in our wiki.
6. Embedded controller: Richard Smith spent time working on the SCI mask corruption problem (Ticket #5467). This was a critical bug because the root cause was problems with the EC command implementation. Richard thinks he has finally bested the gremlins: The original implementation depended on interrupts that were being lost; as a result, the EC would at best fail to process the data correctly and at worst completely stop processing commands. The solution in this case is to eliminate these interrupts altogether, as they are unnecessary. Richard implemented a polling scheme instead; the code is passing all his tests and is faster even in its currently unoptimized state. Faster is good because the host issues lots of EC commands on the way into and out of suspend, where every millisecond is critical. Richard is asking that anyone interested in helping us test his solution to upgrade to a firmware release Q2D08A (or higher).


4. School Server: John Watington reports that we have a new build which supports schools with multiple servers in a school and including a Jabber server! Build 150 was released, along with lengthy configuration notes (See [[XS Installing Software#OLPC XS 150]]).
7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2D08 firmware with a long list of “fit and finish” improvements and minor bug fixes. Details can be found in the wiki (See [[OLPC Firmware q2d08]]).


The configuration interface is still stone knife and bear skin, but functionality appears to be there. We hope to have a build improving the configuration process and adding web caching by the end of next week.
8. SD Card support: One nagging problem has been the performance of the SD card on resume. Mitch took time this week to study the problem. He determined that resume can be done in 25 to 200 mS, depending on the card used. The mean value from a sample of seven different cards was 70 mS.


David Woodhouse is in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia helping Carla Gomez Monroy deploy school servers along with the laptops. The servers we shipped from Cambridge have arrived and are being installed. David has been handling the difficult task of positioning two servers (with six antennae) to cover a three-floor school. He is also facing the need to upgrade the laptops right away to avoid a networking meltdown. The good news is that the school is finally connected to the Internet; we can assist from Cambridge.
9. Batteries: Some reports of batteries not charging are coming in from the field. The bulk of the data reports (from olpc-logbat) are almost identical: the XO declares the battery fully charged and quits charging when it's really not. Subsequently, when you use your laptop on battery power, it shuts off with no warning, because the voltage dips below the critical level but the capacity is still >15%. In some cases, the shutdown is very quick (seconds) and in others the battery gets enough charge to last between 10 and 20 minutes.


5: Firmware: Richard Smith fixed the “repeated game keys on resume bug” (Ticket #2401). During a resume, the main processor is not ready to receive key codes for about 100ms after the delivery of the SCI wakeup event. The EC dealt with this long delay badly. Fixing this should unblock ebook mode. Richard released a new EC code version that is available in Firmware Q2D09. This should show up in a signed Joyride build soon.
Richard made some additions to batman.fth that allow the user to reset the percent-full field to back to “low”, thus causing the EC code try to recharge. One person with battery-charge problems has used this utility: the data show the voltage on the battery jumping from low (5V to 6V ) to >= 7.4V (the “full” threshold) in the span of 10 seconds. Repeating the test three times showed one span where the battery actually began to charge normally for a while, but then jumped to full. The EC code seems to be operating properly, but something is causing the battery resistance to suddenly rise. This could be either a battery problem or a manufacturing defect in the XO. Something as simple as a bad connection in the charge path could cause this behavior.


6. Battery issues: Richard did a large amount work on batman.fth; he added the ability to run a manual charge while watching voltage, current, and accumulated current registers. He received three laptops from the field with battery problems. One has a battery that just won't take a charge. The other two laptops won't recognize that the battery is present. Richard plans on tearing into these two machines next week to determine root cause. We need to discuss with Quanta what to do with problem batteries.
10. School Server: The school-server software platform is currently being extended by John Watlington to support multiple servers, each providing internet access to the mesh on all three wireless mesh channels. A two-server system was manually configured at 1CC (and in John's home, a much quieter wireless environment) and largely worked. Its configuration has been automated; a new school-server build is in early testing and will be released in the next few days.


7. Schedules: Final testing for Ship2.2, Build 656, was held up this week as we tried to iron out some final details of the new process for “Unscheduled Software Release” (USR) (For those interested in process, please see [[Unscheduled software release process]]).
The rush on this is the desire to provide access to a common library to a trial of two schools in Mongolia this January, with upcoming deployments elsewhere following as soon as we have Active Antennas in volume. Each school of 500 children will have three servers providing backup storage and access to a large (700 GB) local content library. We shipped off six servers (the lowest end SOHO server from a leading PC manufacturer) to the trials this week after reconfiguring them in Cambridge. Additional machines are being acquired locally and will be tested.


Update 1 is about to start the release process. Highlights include:
The latest version of ejabberd (2.0) has been successfully packaged by Collabora, configured and integrated into a school server build, and is now being tested. The configuration still requires manual intervention and scalability and stability are serious-enough concerns that we continue to explore alternatives.
* suspend and resume is mostly, but not entirely implemented;
* Rainbow security is enabled;
* the Browse activity has been updated to use the technology in Firefox 3 Beta 2, which is significantly faster and better at memory usage. Innumerable bugs have been fixed. Performance is significantly improved. Memory and file leakage greatly improved.


Update.1RC1 (release candidate 1) is almost ready (Monday with luck). Joyride 1551 is very, very close to Update.1's contents, although it has some additional activities bundled in the base system that we do no plan to ship in Update.1. Please do test it, along with the new firmware version (Q2D09).
11. Testing: Chih-yu Chao worked on testing various builds (Joyride 1489 and 1520, and Update.1 681). This included some localization testing, one-hour smoke tests, and content bundles (both activities and library). She also spent some time becoming familiar with school server and created test cases for suspend/resume. Kim Quirk spent some time in localization, keyboard testing, and upgrade testing for the Ship2.2 Build 656. Remember to keep an eye on Test Group Release Notes page in the wiki for information on the latest releases ([[Test Group Release Notes]]).


We will then start a testing cycle:
12. Wireless testing: We are currently testing Build 674 with wireless firmware 5.110.22.p1. Build 674 has all the latest wireless driver modifications from David Woodhouse, which seems to improve stability and performance. The only obvious issue with Build 674 is the inability to associate with WEP-encrypted access points in the Sugar user interface (we can make connections from the command line). Wireless firmware 5.110.22.p1 fixes a rare wireless hang that happens when a link loss condition occurs while the radio is scanning and also rearranges the relative priorities of the internal firmware threads. Thanks to the team at Marvell Pune and Ricardo Carrano for all the hard work.
* suspend-and-resume cycling for reliability—during the run up to mass production the laptop was found to be able to reliably suspend and resume at least 50,000 cycles (the length of the tests we were
willing to tolerate). We need to ensure there are not software or firmware regressions in this area.
* scaling tests—we need to ensure sane behavior of the systems in
circumstances such as 300 children resuming their laptops all at once in the morning.
* verification of power use in different use states, on our power
measurement systems;
* wireless driver testing and upgrade testing;
* testing with the school-server software;


RC2 (release candidate 2) will pick up additional translations and key bug fixes that missed RC1. The community is working to complete the Spanish translation, which was not complete by the string freeze date due to the holidays. There will therefore be a refresh of packages to complete the translations. Activity developers should only be picking up translations (and fixes for approved bugs).
13. Support: Adam Holt and the team of many support volunteers continue to improve systems and documentation. And they continue to make progress with the phone bank system. There are regular Sunday afternoon 4PM (EST) calls—if you are interested in joining, please get in touch with Adam for the details (holt at laptop.org).


RC3 (release candidate 3) is intended to pick up critical bug fixes discovered during testing, and is the first candidate that is a real candidate for widespread release.
Adam organized another very successful support meeting last Sunday; 24 people showed up (See [[Support meetings]]).


Joyride will be reopened for the start of Update.2 development later
Participation by guest developers drive the enthusiasm at the meetings. Thanks to Kim Quirk, Arjun Sarwal, and Bernie Innocenti for their participation. By the end of week, our Support list now contains 51 subscribers. Support volunteer Frank Barcenas, who is based in Lima, Peru started only four days ago and is doing a great job, even without an XO!
this week.


8. Testing: Chih-yu Chao has created the Update.1 Test page, which outlines the major features and bug fixes of this release and links to the test cases to be run and their results (See [[Update.1]]). The goal is to have enough planning and information around this release to be able to ask for help from the development and test community over the next two weeks to really hammer on the release. If we can do it, this will be the first release that gets organized, methodical community testing. Keep tuned to your email for more information (testing, devel, sugar mailing lists).
Adam also recruited likely volunteers for documentation and QA. Felice Gardner and SJ Klein have been helping here. Professor Lee Tesdell at Minnesota State Univ will likely work with us and his entire class improving documentation of particular topics. Similarly, Adam helped Arjun engage with science teachers and curriculum developers to develop further interest in the Measure activity.


Yani Galanis is back from a short hiatus and has jumped right back into various wireless testing and debug activities. So far he is happy with David Woodhouse's rewrite of the wirless driver. He has fixed some problems with olpc-netstatus so it will accurate report the laptops network and mesh configurations. He was able to get olpc-netlog working again (with Noah Kantrowitz's help) to zip up the logs, and olpc-netcapture to capture network traffic.
Adam also resolved troubling tickets by phone, calling donors directly—he focused on especially confused donors who either require RMAs or were accidentally blocking our incoming emails.


9. Support: This week, when all the laptops to Give One Get One donors were anticipated to have been delivered, Kim Quirk suggested we ask people to send email if they are still waiting for their laptop. When we hit 100 emails in less than a day, it became obvious that were dealing with a much larger problem than anyone at OLPC had imagined. This prompted some quick meetings between the companies involved in the order processing and distribution to try to get a handle on the scope of the problem and how to fix it fast. We learned about orders that could not be matched up between daily and monthly reports, orders that do not have enough information to ship, addresses that couldn't be verified, PO boxes, and miscellaneous other issues—about 10% of the total order volume. Adam Holt's support gang (up to 55 people now!) were inundated by mid-week with donor information requests, as was the Donor Services 800 number. Adam recruited two of the volunteers, Sandy Culver and Steve Holton, to join Greg Babbin and Adam to access the shipping database to help answer these requests.
Adam has been helping to navigate through our parts/repair story, towards setting up perhaps 10 volunteer-driven repair centers around the USA and Canada—a model that could be replicated elsewhere.


Thanks to the entire support team who have been working day and night to respond to these extra requests!
Finally, Adam continues to work with Matthew O’Gorman and Joe Phigan on a phone server. Matthew should have the voice prompts recorded ASAP, so we can begin training volunteers.


10. Datastore: Ivan Krstić ran a Journal/datastore summit at OLPC this week. In attendance through out the week were Marco Pesenti Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, Eben Eliason, Erik Blankinship, and Bert Frudenberg. A number of other members of the core team and the community joined periodically. It was a very productive week: the team nailed down almost all the details required before a first pass at implementation can begin. But before we do so, and while we continue conversations about the new API, Ivan will publish specification in the next few weeks for a round of public discussion. Look forward to a new object model, a refined set of interactions, and new features such as versioning and action-based journal entries.
14. Sugar medley: Tomeu Vizoso worked on fixing bugs this week in anticipation of the Update.1 release. He focused on the Sugar shell, the Journal, the datastore, and Read activity. Almost all of his patches have already been tested in the Joyride builds and will pushed into an Update.1 build soon.


11. Sugar activities: Arjun Sarwal incorporated sensor input into Turtle Art this week. One can control any aspect of the Turtle's motion based on sensor input. The next step is to integrate the concept into a Turtle Art “block” (See [[Measure#Sensor Input into Turtle Art]]).
Reinier Heeres has written a patch to improve the palette positioning logic so that palettes don't end up outside the visible screen (Ticket #5944) and he has included support for ellipsis ('...') in long lines (Ticket #4562). Finally a new version of evince was built to reduce the memory usage for pdf files with images, and a patch by Tomeu was included to make the fit-to-width button work.


Arjan has been talking to educators and teachers how they can organize some activities around the Measure Activity. He has also spoke with representatives of the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) chapter who have made a video documentary of experiments with sound using the Measure Activity (See [[Illinois Math and Science Academy Chapter]]).
Marco Pesenti Gritti tracked down the problem with the Turkish locale that was causing crashes at system startup. He's pushed a workaround in the builds. A numpy hacker helped to track down the real cause; it looks like problem in pygtk or Python. Marco worked with Reinier on the palette positioning problem and together they landed multiple fixes. Marco built xulrunner 1.9 beta2. We are going to test it and see if it's stable enough to go in Update.1. He reviewed numerous patches from Simon Schampijer, Reinier, and Tomeu. [These guys rock.] There was lots of bug triaging to ensure that fixes for the most urgent problems land in the build as soon as possible. We’ve been testing all the changes in Joyride to avoid regressions. Altogether, we have managed to cut down the list of Sugar core bugs, especially the blockers. And in the spirit of “if you want something done, find a busy person”, Marco took over gtkmozembed maintenance upstream, to ensure we will have a sane API to migrate to when xpcom is deprecated in Mozilla 3.0.


Manusheel Gupta is investigating options for building a spreadsheet actvitiy for the XO. Python-powered spreadsheet (PPSS) seems to be a good choice for integrating into the Sugar environment, while perhaps pulling in some features from GNumeric. Eben Eliason will be discussing the ideas on the UI of the spreadsheet during the coming week. (See http://olivier.friard.free.fr/software/ppss/index.php).
15. Software Medley: Chris Ball is working on the last power management feature for Update.1—a logfile to record information about how often and why we suspend/resume, together with battery status information. Getting this log back from the field will help turn the current set of timeouts into something more principled, and will give Richard Smith useful power data as well.


Simon Schampijer fixed an error in the download handling within the Browse activity (Ticket #6018). Dan Williams and Simon finally think we have a good solution for “airplane mode”, e.g., operation with the radio off. A new network manager went into Joyride-1548 and the sugar rpm is building.
Andres Salomon worked on the touchpad driver and Debian packaging of some OLPC packages.


Simon does not really understand what happens in regard to reports that Browse is running slow after an update to Update.1 (Ticket #6046) (as opposed to a clean install).
Bernie Innocenti mostly worked on bug squashing for Update.1. Specifically, the pen-tablet not working, permission problems in /home/olpc, and providing automatic login in the console so that we can finally disable the root and olpc passwords. Bernie also helped SJ with the hard drive images for Mongolia, and Arjun with the Measure activity redesign. He and Walter debugged console keymaps for Spanish and Portuguese and Albert Cahalan contributed a nice console font that we may try to integrate.


Eva Schroth successfully conducted an interview using the XO laptop’s Record activity: after modifying some constants, she was able to record an one hour conversation.
As a pet project, Bernie started to port an “oldskool” activity called SoundTracker to the laptop. He is in touch with the original authors for help.


On the Etoys front, most of the core team members visited Poitiers, France this week; an IEEE conference called C5 was held. Many researchers, educators and Squeakers who are interested in collaboration and education met together and had interesting conversation. Bert, in response to Arjun’s Turtle Art demonstration, exposed some code in Etoys to enable the microphone level to be used as a data stream within scripts.
David Woodhouse looked at the unionfs patches which are making their way upstream and likely to land in 2.6.25. Will probably land these in the Fedora kernel sometime soon and play with them some more. They work without any changes to the underlying file systems, which means that whiteouts (where the “upper” layers of the filesystem actively remove an object that exists in a “lower” layer) are a bit of a hack. But that can be fixed. The design goal of requiring nothing special from the filesystem makes sense and we can do it nicely; it just hasn't been done yet.


12. System software medley: Giannis Galanis contributed network fixes to olpc-utils that solve two Update.1 blockers. Phil Bordelon sent a tool to cleanup orphan Journal previews, which was also an Update.1 blocker.
Dave reluctantly reduced the log level at which the (mostly harmless) CRC failure messages are printed by JFFS2. Need to introduce a new “root-only” write threshold and expose all the thresholds through sysfs.


FFM packaged up the python-gasp, an API wrapper for pygame for new programmers, which has just gone through the Fedora review process.
The short-term fix Dave made for SD seems like it might be helpful, according to Tomeu's comment in Ticket #4013. The device goes away and then a 'new' device comes back on suspend/resume. It doesn't help if you're running with your rootfs on the device, or if you have an open file on it while you suspend, but it looks like it does help a lot of use cases. We'll need to work with Marvell to figure out the delays in card detection on resume. They claim it doesn't take as long as our
measurements show.


Chris Ball worked on OHM timing code, and with Reinier Heeres on fixing “ebook mode” to work inside Rainbow.
16. Build system: Reinier has been working on a new build announcer script in Python (http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer). As an improvement over Bert Freudenberg's script, it can collect ChangeLog entries from package versions that have not appeared in a build, and gets ChangeLogs for rpms directly from Koji. Dennis Gilmore spent most the week syncing Joyride and Update.1, trying to chase up missing SRPMS and make sure things are getting better. He also spent time talking to people at Fudcon about OLPC; there were quite a few Give-One-Get-One participants showing real interest in the XO. Dennis will be doing a session on the XO over the weekend.


Reinier Heeres mostly worked on improving and build-testing of some bugfixes of last week. He also activated the new build announcer script, which needed a few minor fixes. For Sugar he fixed an issue with the stop button disappearing when rotating the screen (#5824), and for Read the eBook suspend problem (#1396).
Early in the week, Jim Gettys was spooked by some build problems we were having: we had later packages in Update.1 than Joyride, something that should never occur. Dennis tracked this down to a mistagging. We are now getting very close to having a build together, built consistently and reproducibly, that is close enough to Update.1 to start serious testing.


Andres Salomon mostly worked on the touchpad driver this week and has made great progress on fixing problems, and improving its behavior. More importantly, Andres work made clear we should use the tablet sensor in relative mode by default, a conceptual breakthrough that had eluded us. A test kernel with the new driver is available here:
17. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes designed a proposal of Jingle protocol for transport re-negotation, needed for OOB support in Gabble (See http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Jingle-renegotiation). He started to implement hyperactivity, a collaboration stress-testing tool (Ticket #5817).
http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/master/kernel-latest.i586.rpm.


13. Presence: Dafydd Harries spent most of this week again working on the Jabber server component. A large part of this was working out how to effectively expose the person/activity information that the component will store over XMPP. Dafydd thinks he has a reasonable protocol; he plans to set up a test server that we can measure performance against.
Morgan Collett landed the fix for the presence service bug that prevented buddies from clustering around their shared activity due to signals firing in the wrong order (Ticket #5368); the patch exposed a UI issue in Sugar “snowflake” layout where the first buddy moved into the activity appears next to it, but subsequent buddies simply vanish off mesh view; they reappear when they leave the activity (Ticket #5904). Morgan also worked on a couple of other presence-server issues: blank names in mesh view and hex-key names in mesh view.


Robert McQueen attended an introductory conference call with Ivan and Jon Herzog about collaboration and security; they are planning a specification-writing fest in late February.
18. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta set up a Pootle project for Etoys, so that volunteers translators working on the various activities and Sugar can also work on Etoys as well. He added the memorize activity in Pootle, so that it can be translated by the volunteers. He fixed a problem which was preventing the Spanish translations from showing up in Pippy. (ticket #5504) And he helped set up translation teams for Bengali (India), Catalan, and Polish.


Morgan Collett has been going through the wiki getting the references to Presence, Telepathy and Tubes up to date, and working on a more
Localization into Pashto and Dari languages continues to advance. Dr. Habib Khan reports that his team has engaged Afghan graduate students of International Islamic University in the localization endeavors. They have initiated this project with great enthusiasm but their end-of-semester examinations have started and will end on January 20, so our hopes for early completion does not seem to be on schedule.
comprehensive reference for Presence Service. Morgan also modified Chat to make sure web links copied to the clipboard can be pasted in Write, Web location bar, and Terminal (Ticket #6066). That patch will land when the Spanish translation of Chat is complete.


Guillaume Desmottes continued work on Hyperactivity, a collaboration
Arjun Sarwal and Bernie tested the Devanagari keyboard with the Lohit Hindi fonts. The keyboard and font rendering both seem to be working well. The Lohit Hindi Fonts package is expected to go into Update.1.
stress testing tools (Ticket #5817). It is now able to create/join/leave activities, set up and use D-Bus tubes. Guillaume started to test Salut using it and discovered some interesting bugs; most of them are already fixed.


14. Localization: Bernie Innocenti has been doing some integration work with Manusheel Gupta on Devanagari input support, but it seems there's more work to do, especially in the Write activity. Bernie met with Lidet Tilahun for a roundup on our Ethiopian support, and filed a bunch of bugs out of it. Lidet will contribute translations in Pootle.
19. Wireless driver: Dave Woodhouse did some more work on the libertas driver, but he is letting the earlier batch of patches land and the dust settle before he starts again on that in earnest. It is mostly cleanups to be done now—the real fixes and the “dangerous” stuff are mostly behind us. Dave wants to investigate the suspend/resume behavior—that was working OK in his testing but we’ve seen two bug reports that cause him to suspect the driver might be getting it wrong.


Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Dari, Fula and Telugu. He also tracked down a problem in Pootle that was preventing him from updating the PO files in the XO Bundled project. This has been quite difficult to trace down. The rest of the week was spent on more mundane things:
Dave is also trying to get up to speed on school server stuff to fully understand what to expect when he gets to Mongolia next week (other than -20°C).
* he polished and debugged the various helper scripts that is used to run Pootle more smoothly;
* he helped Simon cross check the list of languages that are given as
options by the sugar-control-panel (In the process, they identified a few languages that would require new locales to be added to glibc in order to be supported);
* he helped a number of users get started with the translations; and
* he added Slider Puzzle to Pootle.


Dr. Habib Khan reports that localization into Pashto is in final phase and that after some confusion on the Pootle server in regard to Dari and Farsi, progress in being made there as well.
20. Rainbow: Michael Stone closed many bugs and contributed many patches. Along with Bernie, Phil, Simon, and Marco, we have now provided or improved proposed fixes or work-arounds for all of the known serious issues with Rainbow for Update.1 including:


15. Build system: Dennis Gilmore submitted patches to rpm enabling support for the AMD Geode. He has done some work on koji in preparation for supporting us. Patches will be submitted next week for upstream inclusion. These add Geode support and allowing us to pull upstream builds into our instance. Once initial support is in koji, Dennis want to add support to allow .xo building. This would result in a side effect that we get a .src.rpm and .noarch.rpm out of the process
* the 'rainbow spool persistence bug' (Ticket #5033);
* the 'SSL failure bug' (Ticket #5489);
* the 'orphaned files bug' (Ticket #5637);
* the 'uid reclamation bug' (Ticket #2527);
* the '/home/olpc permissions bug' (Ticket #5320); and
* the 'sudo vs. su bug' (Ticket #5537).


We will need to have a git tree setup that will mimic Fedora’s cvs for things that we keep out of Fedora.
Michael also assisted Phil Bordelon with the 'orphaned previews bug' (Ticket #5929) and he offered Daniel and Chih-yu an overview of our implementation of activity isolation so that we can begin to construct a test plan for the isolation features scheduled for Update.1. Finally, Michael assisted Sjoerd, Ben, and Erik in their debugging efforts.


Dennis and Michael Stone looked at possibly using livecd-tools for Update.2: what would be involved in it and if its worth the effort.
Marcus Leech’s (Nortel) contributions to our efforts have also been invaluable.


This week, Michael talked with Bernie, Scott, and Dennis on ways to improve build infrastructure, offered occasional questions in the Journal
21. Activities: Joshua Minor made a new activity called Speak. It is a “talking face” for the XO laptop. Anything you type will be spoken aloud using the XO's speech synthesizer, espeak. You can adjust the accent, rate, and pitch of the voice as well as the shape of the eyes and mouth. This is a fun way to experiment with the speech synthesizer, learn to type, or just have fun making a funny face for your XO. Please see [[Speak]] for details. (Josh sends thanks to Arjun Sarwal, Hemant Goyal and Bernardo Innocenti for their help.)
summit, and diagnosed the 'upgrade-server can't download builds' bug.


Update.1 is mostly synced up with Joyride. There are a few small pieces that need to be finished. As noted, we are very close to having an Update.1
Arjun Sarwal continues to improve the Measure activity. He is working towards making the code scalable (so that it is easy to add more graphs, more views, etc.). The mix of having a large drawing area and a lot of real-time processing of data, combined with the goal of a fast response time is a challenging (and interesting) balance of experimentation and optimization.


16. Content: The inclusion of the Doom activity in the wiki has sparked a healthy email discussion about content and filtering. Although heated at times, it has generally been productive. The gist of the debate revolves around the twin issues of (1) should OLPC be adjudicating what is appropriate content and (2) how should content be tagged such that children, parents, teachers, and others can make informed decisions about what content they access.
The Measure page in the wiki ([[Measure]]) now incorporates easy to follow instructions to build one's own low cost probe for connecting sensors to the XO. The “flavor of the month” of Measure Learning activities is “Temperature.” Arjun encourages educators / teachers / enthusiasts to try building their own low-cost temperature sensing probe by following the directions given on the page and get in touch (arjun AT laptop.org) in case of any problems.


Suggestion have ranged from adopting “Terms of Use” such as those found on the Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu/terms) to fleshing out our guidelines ([[Activity_guidelines]]) to making it easier for community members to search and sort favorites (requiring possible extentions to MediaWiki).
In a related effort, Arjun is interested in organizing an OLPC-Health interest group. All interested in participating towards developing medical and health applications around the XO should join the “Library” mailing list and add their names to the volunteers section of the Health wiki page ([[Health]]). Participation is invited from all: hardware developers, programmers, doctors, biologists, etc. A conference call is planned for the last week of January.


This discussion is by no means over, but please continue the thread on the olpc-open <olpc-open@lists.laptop.org> list rather than devel, which is intended for discussion of technical rather than policy topics.
22. E-books: Dr. Khan reports progress on converting all the text books written on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad into e-books. The following text books of Federal Ministry of Education for Grade I for use in English and Urdu mediums of instruction are complete:


17. OLPC Health: Arjun Sarwal continues his efforts to organize the community in medical and health applications around the XO laptop. He reports that we have a growing list of volunteers in three areas:
* My English Reader for Grade I
:(1) Creating a Library/repository of information that would be shipped on the XO laptop as part of the default software on it. This would be a ready reference for preliminary diagnosis of diseases and a reference for symptoms. This would also include general information on an array of topics such as hygiene, nutrition, balanced diets, etc.
* Islamic Studies (Shaoor-e-Islamyat) Grade I
:(2) Developing software that asks the user a series of questions and helps in a preliminary diagnosis. Links to useful websites and online portals.
* Social Studies for Grade I
:(3) Developing and using hardware peripherals that connect to the XO laptop. These include, but are not limited to the build-in camera (with the possibility of add-on optical elements; an EKG; and a pulse oxymeter.
* Science for Grade I


18. Activity Handbook: Christoph Derndorfer reports that the first few chapters of an Activity Handbook are finished. The purpose of this handbook is to provide all the information needed in order to get started with software development for the OLPC XO. The current draft includes the first four chapters:
These text books are now waiting a review by the Department of Education, IIU. After incorporating the suggestion we will make them available on XO library.
:1. Welcome to the Activity Handbook!
:2. Introduction to Sugar
:3. Preparation
:4. Sugar Basics


Christoph et alia will be expanding the handbook over the coming weeks to include chapters about using the Journal, collaboration, using the various XO input devices and “Sugarizing” software. (Please see
23. Curriki: Lauren Klein and SJ Klein started working with Joshua Marks and the group-development team at Curriki to design a space and interfaces for OLPC collections on their site. Joshua is rolling out a “groups” feature that will allow custom design of individual portals within the next week that will make implementing a “compile for XO” button and an OLPC start page easier.
http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook and
http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/upload/a/af/Handbook_20080113.pdf).

19. Hello World: In a related effort, Chris Hager and Jaume Nualart report that they have created two new tutorials (during a “pizza-and-beer” coding session) for creating Activities with PyGTK, one of them using Glade (See [[PyGTK/Hello World Tutorial]]).
Chris and Jaume are using activity.py as a wrapper, which loads the code and GTK interface from gtktest.py. This way, very little code is required to get a PyGTK Activity running in Sugar—just six lines in gtktest.py—and PyGTK Activities can run as standalone versions on any Linux system by default.

Example Bundles:
:http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/ba/Gtktest.xo
:http://wiki.laptop.org/images/0/02/Gtktest-glade.xo

20. Mongolia: Dave Woodhouse is in Mongolia setting up servers in two schools, which as been an educational experience. Firstly, the wireless penetration through the walls they have here to cope with temperatures of –40°C is fairly dismal—Dave reports that we are having to use a lot of active antennae to get the coverage we need. We're laying them out as if they were “normal” access points, to try to get coverage of all the rooms they'll be teaching the 2nd–5th grades in. Hopefully, the nature of the mesh will improve coverage.

To start with, each school will have five antennae, with two servers. That setup will be re-evaluated when it's fully deployed and tested in the classrooms. It is physically installed in one school so far, and fully
cabled (including CAT5 to the other rooms where they have computers). The other school should be similarly set up by the end of Monday.

21. Pakistan: Habib reports progress on the e-book project in Islamabad. Eight elementary text books based on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad have been made into e-text books.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 19:04, 19 January 2008

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 99089]  +/-  

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Laptop News 2008-01-19

1. Cambridge: A third Learning Workshop was held at OLPC this past week. There was excellent attendance and participation; a real network of laptop learning activists is forming. Workshop attendees are not merely listening but are contributing to the conceptual basis of practice in schools and communities. There was a blend between the conceptual and practical concepts, and the localities beginning will help innovate the learning environments and communities of the 21st century. The presentation by Dr. Felton Earls and Maya Carlson of the Harvard School of Public Health on participatory surveys and indicators for community development as well as their work in Tanzania and Chicago was inspirational. The Learning team of Edith Ackermann, Ed Baafi, Fatimata Seye Sylla, Juliano Bittencourt, Elana Langer, Julain Daily, Cynthia Solomon, Alice Cavallo, and David Cavallo contributed mightily. Special thanks for support especially to Felice Gardner, as well as Tracy Price and Jennifer Amaya. As always, a highlight is the Activity Open House where developers demonstrate their activities on the XO.

2. G1G1: During the reconciliation process of the “get” laptops shipped during Give One Get One, a number of unfulfilled order records were uncovered. The OLPC team has been working hard with our partners to resolve all open issues. We expect another ~5000 XO laptops will be shipped on Monday. The remaining orders pose an extra challenge as they either have incomplete or no shipping and contact information. If you have not yet received your XO laptop, you should be getting an individualized email that addresses your specific situation. If you are scheduled to receive your laptop next week, you will also be getting a follow-up email with tracking information. We'll be adding additional phone lines and shifting agents to reduce wait times. A further reconciliation of the data will be conducted this week, although hopeful, we can anticipate additional incomplete orders. Our apologies for these delays.

3. Ulaan Baatar: Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, Carla Gomez Monroy, Jan Jungclaus, and RedHat’s David Woodhouse are working hard to set up a structure that can provide sustainability to the project in Mongolia such that it can spread it throughout the country. On Wednesday, the Minister of Education visited the school for the “laptop hand out” event. On Friday, an optical-fiber cable was set up, in spite of the extreme low temperatures; on Saturday, the schools were connected to the Internet. David has been working with a group of local technical people on the servers and Internet set up infrastructure as well as on configuration. John Watlington has been providing support remotely from OLPC.

We have been meeting almost every evening with the strategic team of the Ministry of Education to provide feedback and sort out challenges. We met yesterday with the Ministry of Education team, teachers, principals, ICTA, content team and pilot research team to provide detailed feedback of how the project is going so far and to bring up things to be considered for the short and long terms.

Teachers are putting their hearts into the program. They had their first sessions with the children. Parents, too, have shown support. And the children, of course, love it. The Constructionist model of learning has found wide-spread support within the MoE.

There are more photos (See Ulaanbaatar) in our wiki.

4. School Server: John Watington reports that we have a new build which supports schools with multiple servers in a school and including a Jabber server! Build 150 was released, along with lengthy configuration notes (See XS Installing Software#OLPC XS 150).

The configuration interface is still stone knife and bear skin, but functionality appears to be there. We hope to have a build improving the configuration process and adding web caching by the end of next week.

David Woodhouse is in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia helping Carla Gomez Monroy deploy school servers along with the laptops. The servers we shipped from Cambridge have arrived and are being installed. David has been handling the difficult task of positioning two servers (with six antennae) to cover a three-floor school. He is also facing the need to upgrade the laptops right away to avoid a networking meltdown. The good news is that the school is finally connected to the Internet; we can assist from Cambridge.

5: Firmware: Richard Smith fixed the “repeated game keys on resume bug” (Ticket #2401). During a resume, the main processor is not ready to receive key codes for about 100ms after the delivery of the SCI wakeup event. The EC dealt with this long delay badly. Fixing this should unblock ebook mode. Richard released a new EC code version that is available in Firmware Q2D09. This should show up in a signed Joyride build soon.

6. Battery issues: Richard did a large amount work on batman.fth; he added the ability to run a manual charge while watching voltage, current, and accumulated current registers. He received three laptops from the field with battery problems. One has a battery that just won't take a charge. The other two laptops won't recognize that the battery is present. Richard plans on tearing into these two machines next week to determine root cause. We need to discuss with Quanta what to do with problem batteries.

7. Schedules: Final testing for Ship2.2, Build 656, was held up this week as we tried to iron out some final details of the new process for “Unscheduled Software Release” (USR) (For those interested in process, please see Unscheduled software release process).

Update 1 is about to start the release process. Highlights include:

  • suspend and resume is mostly, but not entirely implemented;
  • Rainbow security is enabled;
  • the Browse activity has been updated to use the technology in Firefox 3 Beta 2, which is significantly faster and better at memory usage. Innumerable bugs have been fixed. Performance is significantly improved. Memory and file leakage greatly improved.

Update.1RC1 (release candidate 1) is almost ready (Monday with luck). Joyride 1551 is very, very close to Update.1's contents, although it has some additional activities bundled in the base system that we do no plan to ship in Update.1. Please do test it, along with the new firmware version (Q2D09).

We will then start a testing cycle:

  • suspend-and-resume cycling for reliability—during the run up to mass production the laptop was found to be able to reliably suspend and resume at least 50,000 cycles (the length of the tests we were

willing to tolerate). We need to ensure there are not software or firmware regressions in this area.

  • scaling tests—we need to ensure sane behavior of the systems in

circumstances such as 300 children resuming their laptops all at once in the morning.

  • verification of power use in different use states, on our power

measurement systems;

  • wireless driver testing and upgrade testing;
  • testing with the school-server software;

RC2 (release candidate 2) will pick up additional translations and key bug fixes that missed RC1. The community is working to complete the Spanish translation, which was not complete by the string freeze date due to the holidays. There will therefore be a refresh of packages to complete the translations. Activity developers should only be picking up translations (and fixes for approved bugs).

RC3 (release candidate 3) is intended to pick up critical bug fixes discovered during testing, and is the first candidate that is a real candidate for widespread release.

Joyride will be reopened for the start of Update.2 development later this week.

8. Testing: Chih-yu Chao has created the Update.1 Test page, which outlines the major features and bug fixes of this release and links to the test cases to be run and their results (See Update.1). The goal is to have enough planning and information around this release to be able to ask for help from the development and test community over the next two weeks to really hammer on the release. If we can do it, this will be the first release that gets organized, methodical community testing. Keep tuned to your email for more information (testing, devel, sugar mailing lists).

Yani Galanis is back from a short hiatus and has jumped right back into various wireless testing and debug activities. So far he is happy with David Woodhouse's rewrite of the wirless driver. He has fixed some problems with olpc-netstatus so it will accurate report the laptops network and mesh configurations. He was able to get olpc-netlog working again (with Noah Kantrowitz's help) to zip up the logs, and olpc-netcapture to capture network traffic.

9. Support: This week, when all the laptops to Give One Get One donors were anticipated to have been delivered, Kim Quirk suggested we ask people to send email if they are still waiting for their laptop. When we hit 100 emails in less than a day, it became obvious that were dealing with a much larger problem than anyone at OLPC had imagined. This prompted some quick meetings between the companies involved in the order processing and distribution to try to get a handle on the scope of the problem and how to fix it fast. We learned about orders that could not be matched up between daily and monthly reports, orders that do not have enough information to ship, addresses that couldn't be verified, PO boxes, and miscellaneous other issues—about 10% of the total order volume. Adam Holt's support gang (up to 55 people now!) were inundated by mid-week with donor information requests, as was the Donor Services 800 number. Adam recruited two of the volunteers, Sandy Culver and Steve Holton, to join Greg Babbin and Adam to access the shipping database to help answer these requests.

Thanks to the entire support team who have been working day and night to respond to these extra requests!

10. Datastore: Ivan Krstić ran a Journal/datastore summit at OLPC this week. In attendance through out the week were Marco Pesenti Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, Eben Eliason, Erik Blankinship, and Bert Frudenberg. A number of other members of the core team and the community joined periodically. It was a very productive week: the team nailed down almost all the details required before a first pass at implementation can begin. But before we do so, and while we continue conversations about the new API, Ivan will publish specification in the next few weeks for a round of public discussion. Look forward to a new object model, a refined set of interactions, and new features such as versioning and action-based journal entries.

11. Sugar activities: Arjun Sarwal incorporated sensor input into Turtle Art this week. One can control any aspect of the Turtle's motion based on sensor input. The next step is to integrate the concept into a Turtle Art “block” (See Measure#Sensor Input into Turtle Art).

Arjan has been talking to educators and teachers how they can organize some activities around the Measure Activity. He has also spoke with representatives of the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) chapter who have made a video documentary of experiments with sound using the Measure Activity (See Illinois Math and Science Academy Chapter).

Manusheel Gupta is investigating options for building a spreadsheet actvitiy for the XO. Python-powered spreadsheet (PPSS) seems to be a good choice for integrating into the Sugar environment, while perhaps pulling in some features from GNumeric. Eben Eliason will be discussing the ideas on the UI of the spreadsheet during the coming week. (See http://olivier.friard.free.fr/software/ppss/index.php).

Simon Schampijer fixed an error in the download handling within the Browse activity (Ticket #6018). Dan Williams and Simon finally think we have a good solution for “airplane mode”, e.g., operation with the radio off. A new network manager went into Joyride-1548 and the sugar rpm is building.

Simon does not really understand what happens in regard to reports that Browse is running slow after an update to Update.1 (Ticket #6046) (as opposed to a clean install).

Eva Schroth successfully conducted an interview using the XO laptop’s Record activity: after modifying some constants, she was able to record an one hour conversation.

On the Etoys front, most of the core team members visited Poitiers, France this week; an IEEE conference called C5 was held. Many researchers, educators and Squeakers who are interested in collaboration and education met together and had interesting conversation. Bert, in response to Arjun’s Turtle Art demonstration, exposed some code in Etoys to enable the microphone level to be used as a data stream within scripts.

12. System software medley: Giannis Galanis contributed network fixes to olpc-utils that solve two Update.1 blockers. Phil Bordelon sent a tool to cleanup orphan Journal previews, which was also an Update.1 blocker.

FFM packaged up the python-gasp, an API wrapper for pygame for new programmers, which has just gone through the Fedora review process.

Chris Ball worked on OHM timing code, and with Reinier Heeres on fixing “ebook mode” to work inside Rainbow.

Reinier Heeres mostly worked on improving and build-testing of some bugfixes of last week. He also activated the new build announcer script, which needed a few minor fixes. For Sugar he fixed an issue with the stop button disappearing when rotating the screen (#5824), and for Read the eBook suspend problem (#1396).

Andres Salomon mostly worked on the touchpad driver this week and has made great progress on fixing problems, and improving its behavior. More importantly, Andres work made clear we should use the tablet sensor in relative mode by default, a conceptual breakthrough that had eluded us. A test kernel with the new driver is available here: http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/master/kernel-latest.i586.rpm.

13. Presence: Dafydd Harries spent most of this week again working on the Jabber server component. A large part of this was working out how to effectively expose the person/activity information that the component will store over XMPP. Dafydd thinks he has a reasonable protocol; he plans to set up a test server that we can measure performance against.

Robert McQueen attended an introductory conference call with Ivan and Jon Herzog about collaboration and security; they are planning a specification-writing fest in late February.

Morgan Collett has been going through the wiki getting the references to Presence, Telepathy and Tubes up to date, and working on a more comprehensive reference for Presence Service. Morgan also modified Chat to make sure web links copied to the clipboard can be pasted in Write, Web location bar, and Terminal (Ticket #6066). That patch will land when the Spanish translation of Chat is complete.

Guillaume Desmottes continued work on Hyperactivity, a collaboration stress testing tools (Ticket #5817). It is now able to create/join/leave activities, set up and use D-Bus tubes. Guillaume started to test Salut using it and discovered some interesting bugs; most of them are already fixed.

14. Localization: Bernie Innocenti has been doing some integration work with Manusheel Gupta on Devanagari input support, but it seems there's more work to do, especially in the Write activity. Bernie met with Lidet Tilahun for a roundup on our Ethiopian support, and filed a bunch of bugs out of it. Lidet will contribute translations in Pootle.

Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Dari, Fula and Telugu. He also tracked down a problem in Pootle that was preventing him from updating the PO files in the XO Bundled project. This has been quite difficult to trace down. The rest of the week was spent on more mundane things:

  • he polished and debugged the various helper scripts that is used to run Pootle more smoothly;
  • he helped Simon cross check the list of languages that are given as

options by the sugar-control-panel (In the process, they identified a few languages that would require new locales to be added to glibc in order to be supported);

  • he helped a number of users get started with the translations; and
  • he added Slider Puzzle to Pootle.

Dr. Habib Khan reports that localization into Pashto is in final phase and that after some confusion on the Pootle server in regard to Dari and Farsi, progress in being made there as well.

15. Build system: Dennis Gilmore submitted patches to rpm enabling support for the AMD Geode. He has done some work on koji in preparation for supporting us. Patches will be submitted next week for upstream inclusion. These add Geode support and allowing us to pull upstream builds into our instance. Once initial support is in koji, Dennis want to add support to allow .xo building. This would result in a side effect that we get a .src.rpm and .noarch.rpm out of the process

We will need to have a git tree setup that will mimic Fedora’s cvs for things that we keep out of Fedora.

Dennis and Michael Stone looked at possibly using livecd-tools for Update.2: what would be involved in it and if its worth the effort.

This week, Michael talked with Bernie, Scott, and Dennis on ways to improve build infrastructure, offered occasional questions in the Journal summit, and diagnosed the 'upgrade-server can't download builds' bug.

Update.1 is mostly synced up with Joyride. There are a few small pieces that need to be finished. As noted, we are very close to having an Update.1

16. Content: The inclusion of the Doom activity in the wiki has sparked a healthy email discussion about content and filtering. Although heated at times, it has generally been productive. The gist of the debate revolves around the twin issues of (1) should OLPC be adjudicating what is appropriate content and (2) how should content be tagged such that children, parents, teachers, and others can make informed decisions about what content they access.

Suggestion have ranged from adopting “Terms of Use” such as those found on the Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu/terms) to fleshing out our guidelines (Activity_guidelines) to making it easier for community members to search and sort favorites (requiring possible extentions to MediaWiki).

This discussion is by no means over, but please continue the thread on the olpc-open <olpc-open@lists.laptop.org> list rather than devel, which is intended for discussion of technical rather than policy topics.

17. OLPC Health: Arjun Sarwal continues his efforts to organize the community in medical and health applications around the XO laptop. He reports that we have a growing list of volunteers in three areas:

(1) Creating a Library/repository of information that would be shipped on the XO laptop as part of the default software on it. This would be a ready reference for preliminary diagnosis of diseases and a reference for symptoms. This would also include general information on an array of topics such as hygiene, nutrition, balanced diets, etc.
(2) Developing software that asks the user a series of questions and helps in a preliminary diagnosis. Links to useful websites and online portals.
(3) Developing and using hardware peripherals that connect to the XO laptop. These include, but are not limited to the build-in camera (with the possibility of add-on optical elements; an EKG; and a pulse oxymeter.

18. Activity Handbook: Christoph Derndorfer reports that the first few chapters of an Activity Handbook are finished. The purpose of this handbook is to provide all the information needed in order to get started with software development for the OLPC XO. The current draft includes the first four chapters:

1. Welcome to the Activity Handbook!
2. Introduction to Sugar
3. Preparation
4. Sugar Basics

Christoph et alia will be expanding the handbook over the coming weeks to include chapters about using the Journal, collaboration, using the various XO input devices and “Sugarizing” software. (Please see http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook and http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/upload/a/af/Handbook_20080113.pdf).

19. Hello World: In a related effort, Chris Hager and Jaume Nualart report that they have created two new tutorials (during a “pizza-and-beer” coding session) for creating Activities with PyGTK, one of them using Glade (See PyGTK/Hello World Tutorial). Chris and Jaume are using activity.py as a wrapper, which loads the code and GTK interface from gtktest.py. This way, very little code is required to get a PyGTK Activity running in Sugar—just six lines in gtktest.py—and PyGTK Activities can run as standalone versions on any Linux system by default.

Example Bundles:

http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/ba/Gtktest.xo
http://wiki.laptop.org/images/0/02/Gtktest-glade.xo

20. Mongolia: Dave Woodhouse is in Mongolia setting up servers in two schools, which as been an educational experience. Firstly, the wireless penetration through the walls they have here to cope with temperatures of –40°C is fairly dismal—Dave reports that we are having to use a lot of active antennae to get the coverage we need. We're laying them out as if they were “normal” access points, to try to get coverage of all the rooms they'll be teaching the 2nd–5th grades in. Hopefully, the nature of the mesh will improve coverage.

To start with, each school will have five antennae, with two servers. That setup will be re-evaluated when it's fully deployed and tested in the classrooms. It is physically installed in one school so far, and fully cabled (including CAT5 to the other rooms where they have computers). The other school should be similarly set up by the end of Monday.

21. Pakistan: Habib reports progress on the e-book project in Islamabad. Eight elementary text books based on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad have been made into e-text books.

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.

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 99089]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-01-19

1. Cambridge: A third Learning Workshop was held at OLPC this past week. There was excellent attendance and participation; a real network of laptop learning activists is forming. Workshop attendees are not merely listening but are contributing to the conceptual basis of practice in schools and communities. There was a blend between the conceptual and practical concepts, and the localities beginning will help innovate the learning environments and communities of the 21st century. The presentation by Dr. Felton Earls and Maya Carlson of the Harvard School of Public Health on participatory surveys and indicators for community development as well as their work in Tanzania and Chicago was inspirational. The Learning team of Edith Ackermann, Ed Baafi, Fatimata Seye Sylla, Juliano Bittencourt, Elana Langer, Julain Daily, Cynthia Solomon, Alice Cavallo, and David Cavallo contributed mightily. Special thanks for support especially to Felice Gardner, as well as Tracy Price and Jennifer Amaya. As always, a highlight is the Activity Open House where developers demonstrate their activities on the XO.

2. G1G1: During the reconciliation process of the “get” laptops shipped during Give One Get One, a number of unfulfilled order records were uncovered. The OLPC team has been working hard with our partners to resolve all open issues. We expect another ~5000 XO laptops will be shipped on Monday. The remaining orders pose an extra challenge as they either have incomplete or no shipping and contact information. If you have not yet received your XO laptop, you should be getting an individualized email that addresses your specific situation. If you are scheduled to receive your laptop next week, you will also be getting a follow-up email with tracking information. We'll be adding additional phone lines and shifting agents to reduce wait times. A further reconciliation of the data will be conducted this week, although hopeful, we can anticipate additional incomplete orders. Our apologies for these delays.

3. Ulaan Baatar: Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, Carla Gomez Monroy, Jan Jungclaus, and RedHat’s David Woodhouse are working hard to set up a structure that can provide sustainability to the project in Mongolia such that it can spread it throughout the country. On Wednesday, the Minister of Education visited the school for the “laptop hand out” event. On Friday, an optical-fiber cable was set up, in spite of the extreme low temperatures; on Saturday, the schools were connected to the Internet. David has been working with a group of local technical people on the servers and Internet set up infrastructure as well as on configuration. John Watlington has been providing support remotely from OLPC.

We have been meeting almost every evening with the strategic team of the Ministry of Education to provide feedback and sort out challenges. We met yesterday with the Ministry of Education team, teachers, principals, ICTA, content team and pilot research team to provide detailed feedback of how the project is going so far and to bring up things to be considered for the short and long terms.

Teachers are putting their hearts into the program. They had their first sessions with the children. Parents, too, have shown support. And the children, of course, love it. The Constructionist model of learning has found wide-spread support within the MoE.

There are more photos (See Ulaanbaatar) in our wiki.

4. School Server: John Watington reports that we have a new build which supports schools with multiple servers in a school and including a Jabber server! Build 150 was released, along with lengthy configuration notes (See XS Installing Software#OLPC XS 150).

The configuration interface is still stone knife and bear skin, but functionality appears to be there. We hope to have a build improving the configuration process and adding web caching by the end of next week.

David Woodhouse is in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia helping Carla Gomez Monroy deploy school servers along with the laptops. The servers we shipped from Cambridge have arrived and are being installed. David has been handling the difficult task of positioning two servers (with six antennae) to cover a three-floor school. He is also facing the need to upgrade the laptops right away to avoid a networking meltdown. The good news is that the school is finally connected to the Internet; we can assist from Cambridge.

5: Firmware: Richard Smith fixed the “repeated game keys on resume bug” (Ticket #2401). During a resume, the main processor is not ready to receive key codes for about 100ms after the delivery of the SCI wakeup event. The EC dealt with this long delay badly. Fixing this should unblock ebook mode. Richard released a new EC code version that is available in Firmware Q2D09. This should show up in a signed Joyride build soon.

6. Battery issues: Richard did a large amount work on batman.fth; he added the ability to run a manual charge while watching voltage, current, and accumulated current registers. He received three laptops from the field with battery problems. One has a battery that just won't take a charge. The other two laptops won't recognize that the battery is present. Richard plans on tearing into these two machines next week to determine root cause. We need to discuss with Quanta what to do with problem batteries.

7. Schedules: Final testing for Ship2.2, Build 656, was held up this week as we tried to iron out some final details of the new process for “Unscheduled Software Release” (USR) (For those interested in process, please see Unscheduled software release process).

Update 1 is about to start the release process. Highlights include:

  • suspend and resume is mostly, but not entirely implemented;
  • Rainbow security is enabled;
  • the Browse activity has been updated to use the technology in Firefox 3 Beta 2, which is significantly faster and better at memory usage. Innumerable bugs have been fixed. Performance is significantly improved. Memory and file leakage greatly improved.

Update.1RC1 (release candidate 1) is almost ready (Monday with luck). Joyride 1551 is very, very close to Update.1's contents, although it has some additional activities bundled in the base system that we do no plan to ship in Update.1. Please do test it, along with the new firmware version (Q2D09).

We will then start a testing cycle:

  • suspend-and-resume cycling for reliability—during the run up to mass production the laptop was found to be able to reliably suspend and resume at least 50,000 cycles (the length of the tests we were

willing to tolerate). We need to ensure there are not software or firmware regressions in this area.

  • scaling tests—we need to ensure sane behavior of the systems in

circumstances such as 300 children resuming their laptops all at once in the morning.

  • verification of power use in different use states, on our power

measurement systems;

  • wireless driver testing and upgrade testing;
  • testing with the school-server software;

RC2 (release candidate 2) will pick up additional translations and key bug fixes that missed RC1. The community is working to complete the Spanish translation, which was not complete by the string freeze date due to the holidays. There will therefore be a refresh of packages to complete the translations. Activity developers should only be picking up translations (and fixes for approved bugs).

RC3 (release candidate 3) is intended to pick up critical bug fixes discovered during testing, and is the first candidate that is a real candidate for widespread release.

Joyride will be reopened for the start of Update.2 development later this week.

8. Testing: Chih-yu Chao has created the Update.1 Test page, which outlines the major features and bug fixes of this release and links to the test cases to be run and their results (See Update.1). The goal is to have enough planning and information around this release to be able to ask for help from the development and test community over the next two weeks to really hammer on the release. If we can do it, this will be the first release that gets organized, methodical community testing. Keep tuned to your email for more information (testing, devel, sugar mailing lists).

Yani Galanis is back from a short hiatus and has jumped right back into various wireless testing and debug activities. So far he is happy with David Woodhouse's rewrite of the wirless driver. He has fixed some problems with olpc-netstatus so it will accurate report the laptops network and mesh configurations. He was able to get olpc-netlog working again (with Noah Kantrowitz's help) to zip up the logs, and olpc-netcapture to capture network traffic.

9. Support: This week, when all the laptops to Give One Get One donors were anticipated to have been delivered, Kim Quirk suggested we ask people to send email if they are still waiting for their laptop. When we hit 100 emails in less than a day, it became obvious that were dealing with a much larger problem than anyone at OLPC had imagined. This prompted some quick meetings between the companies involved in the order processing and distribution to try to get a handle on the scope of the problem and how to fix it fast. We learned about orders that could not be matched up between daily and monthly reports, orders that do not have enough information to ship, addresses that couldn't be verified, PO boxes, and miscellaneous other issues—about 10% of the total order volume. Adam Holt's support gang (up to 55 people now!) were inundated by mid-week with donor information requests, as was the Donor Services 800 number. Adam recruited two of the volunteers, Sandy Culver and Steve Holton, to join Greg Babbin and Adam to access the shipping database to help answer these requests.

Thanks to the entire support team who have been working day and night to respond to these extra requests!

10. Datastore: Ivan Krstić ran a Journal/datastore summit at OLPC this week. In attendance through out the week were Marco Pesenti Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, Eben Eliason, Erik Blankinship, and Bert Frudenberg. A number of other members of the core team and the community joined periodically. It was a very productive week: the team nailed down almost all the details required before a first pass at implementation can begin. But before we do so, and while we continue conversations about the new API, Ivan will publish specification in the next few weeks for a round of public discussion. Look forward to a new object model, a refined set of interactions, and new features such as versioning and action-based journal entries.

11. Sugar activities: Arjun Sarwal incorporated sensor input into Turtle Art this week. One can control any aspect of the Turtle's motion based on sensor input. The next step is to integrate the concept into a Turtle Art “block” (See Measure#Sensor Input into Turtle Art).

Arjan has been talking to educators and teachers how they can organize some activities around the Measure Activity. He has also spoke with representatives of the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) chapter who have made a video documentary of experiments with sound using the Measure Activity (See Illinois Math and Science Academy Chapter).

Manusheel Gupta is investigating options for building a spreadsheet actvitiy for the XO. Python-powered spreadsheet (PPSS) seems to be a good choice for integrating into the Sugar environment, while perhaps pulling in some features from GNumeric. Eben Eliason will be discussing the ideas on the UI of the spreadsheet during the coming week. (See http://olivier.friard.free.fr/software/ppss/index.php).

Simon Schampijer fixed an error in the download handling within the Browse activity (Ticket #6018). Dan Williams and Simon finally think we have a good solution for “airplane mode”, e.g., operation with the radio off. A new network manager went into Joyride-1548 and the sugar rpm is building.

Simon does not really understand what happens in regard to reports that Browse is running slow after an update to Update.1 (Ticket #6046) (as opposed to a clean install).

Eva Schroth successfully conducted an interview using the XO laptop’s Record activity: after modifying some constants, she was able to record an one hour conversation.

On the Etoys front, most of the core team members visited Poitiers, France this week; an IEEE conference called C5 was held. Many researchers, educators and Squeakers who are interested in collaboration and education met together and had interesting conversation. Bert, in response to Arjun’s Turtle Art demonstration, exposed some code in Etoys to enable the microphone level to be used as a data stream within scripts.

12. System software medley: Giannis Galanis contributed network fixes to olpc-utils that solve two Update.1 blockers. Phil Bordelon sent a tool to cleanup orphan Journal previews, which was also an Update.1 blocker.

FFM packaged up the python-gasp, an API wrapper for pygame for new programmers, which has just gone through the Fedora review process.

Chris Ball worked on OHM timing code, and with Reinier Heeres on fixing “ebook mode” to work inside Rainbow.

Reinier Heeres mostly worked on improving and build-testing of some bugfixes of last week. He also activated the new build announcer script, which needed a few minor fixes. For Sugar he fixed an issue with the stop button disappearing when rotating the screen (#5824), and for Read the eBook suspend problem (#1396).

Andres Salomon mostly worked on the touchpad driver this week and has made great progress on fixing problems, and improving its behavior. More importantly, Andres work made clear we should use the tablet sensor in relative mode by default, a conceptual breakthrough that had eluded us. A test kernel with the new driver is available here: http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/master/kernel-latest.i586.rpm.

13. Presence: Dafydd Harries spent most of this week again working on the Jabber server component. A large part of this was working out how to effectively expose the person/activity information that the component will store over XMPP. Dafydd thinks he has a reasonable protocol; he plans to set up a test server that we can measure performance against.

Robert McQueen attended an introductory conference call with Ivan and Jon Herzog about collaboration and security; they are planning a specification-writing fest in late February.

Morgan Collett has been going through the wiki getting the references to Presence, Telepathy and Tubes up to date, and working on a more comprehensive reference for Presence Service. Morgan also modified Chat to make sure web links copied to the clipboard can be pasted in Write, Web location bar, and Terminal (Ticket #6066). That patch will land when the Spanish translation of Chat is complete.

Guillaume Desmottes continued work on Hyperactivity, a collaboration stress testing tools (Ticket #5817). It is now able to create/join/leave activities, set up and use D-Bus tubes. Guillaume started to test Salut using it and discovered some interesting bugs; most of them are already fixed.

14. Localization: Bernie Innocenti has been doing some integration work with Manusheel Gupta on Devanagari input support, but it seems there's more work to do, especially in the Write activity. Bernie met with Lidet Tilahun for a roundup on our Ethiopian support, and filed a bunch of bugs out of it. Lidet will contribute translations in Pootle.

Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we have new teams for Dari, Fula and Telugu. He also tracked down a problem in Pootle that was preventing him from updating the PO files in the XO Bundled project. This has been quite difficult to trace down. The rest of the week was spent on more mundane things:

  • he polished and debugged the various helper scripts that is used to run Pootle more smoothly;
  • he helped Simon cross check the list of languages that are given as

options by the sugar-control-panel (In the process, they identified a few languages that would require new locales to be added to glibc in order to be supported);

  • he helped a number of users get started with the translations; and
  • he added Slider Puzzle to Pootle.

Dr. Habib Khan reports that localization into Pashto is in final phase and that after some confusion on the Pootle server in regard to Dari and Farsi, progress in being made there as well.

15. Build system: Dennis Gilmore submitted patches to rpm enabling support for the AMD Geode. He has done some work on koji in preparation for supporting us. Patches will be submitted next week for upstream inclusion. These add Geode support and allowing us to pull upstream builds into our instance. Once initial support is in koji, Dennis want to add support to allow .xo building. This would result in a side effect that we get a .src.rpm and .noarch.rpm out of the process

We will need to have a git tree setup that will mimic Fedora’s cvs for things that we keep out of Fedora.

Dennis and Michael Stone looked at possibly using livecd-tools for Update.2: what would be involved in it and if its worth the effort.

This week, Michael talked with Bernie, Scott, and Dennis on ways to improve build infrastructure, offered occasional questions in the Journal summit, and diagnosed the 'upgrade-server can't download builds' bug.

Update.1 is mostly synced up with Joyride. There are a few small pieces that need to be finished. As noted, we are very close to having an Update.1

16. Content: The inclusion of the Doom activity in the wiki has sparked a healthy email discussion about content and filtering. Although heated at times, it has generally been productive. The gist of the debate revolves around the twin issues of (1) should OLPC be adjudicating what is appropriate content and (2) how should content be tagged such that children, parents, teachers, and others can make informed decisions about what content they access.

Suggestion have ranged from adopting “Terms of Use” such as those found on the Scratch website (http://scratch.mit.edu/terms) to fleshing out our guidelines (Activity_guidelines) to making it easier for community members to search and sort favorites (requiring possible extentions to MediaWiki).

This discussion is by no means over, but please continue the thread on the olpc-open <olpc-open@lists.laptop.org> list rather than devel, which is intended for discussion of technical rather than policy topics.

17. OLPC Health: Arjun Sarwal continues his efforts to organize the community in medical and health applications around the XO laptop. He reports that we have a growing list of volunteers in three areas:

(1) Creating a Library/repository of information that would be shipped on the XO laptop as part of the default software on it. This would be a ready reference for preliminary diagnosis of diseases and a reference for symptoms. This would also include general information on an array of topics such as hygiene, nutrition, balanced diets, etc.
(2) Developing software that asks the user a series of questions and helps in a preliminary diagnosis. Links to useful websites and online portals.
(3) Developing and using hardware peripherals that connect to the XO laptop. These include, but are not limited to the build-in camera (with the possibility of add-on optical elements; an EKG; and a pulse oxymeter.

18. Activity Handbook: Christoph Derndorfer reports that the first few chapters of an Activity Handbook are finished. The purpose of this handbook is to provide all the information needed in order to get started with software development for the OLPC XO. The current draft includes the first four chapters:

1. Welcome to the Activity Handbook!
2. Introduction to Sugar
3. Preparation
4. Sugar Basics

Christoph et alia will be expanding the handbook over the coming weeks to include chapters about using the Journal, collaboration, using the various XO input devices and “Sugarizing” software. (Please see http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook and http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/upload/a/af/Handbook_20080113.pdf).

19. Hello World: In a related effort, Chris Hager and Jaume Nualart report that they have created two new tutorials (during a “pizza-and-beer” coding session) for creating Activities with PyGTK, one of them using Glade (See PyGTK/Hello World Tutorial). Chris and Jaume are using activity.py as a wrapper, which loads the code and GTK interface from gtktest.py. This way, very little code is required to get a PyGTK Activity running in Sugar—just six lines in gtktest.py—and PyGTK Activities can run as standalone versions on any Linux system by default.

Example Bundles:

http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/ba/Gtktest.xo
http://wiki.laptop.org/images/0/02/Gtktest-glade.xo

20. Mongolia: Dave Woodhouse is in Mongolia setting up servers in two schools, which as been an educational experience. Firstly, the wireless penetration through the walls they have here to cope with temperatures of –40°C is fairly dismal—Dave reports that we are having to use a lot of active antennae to get the coverage we need. We're laying them out as if they were “normal” access points, to try to get coverage of all the rooms they'll be teaching the 2nd–5th grades in. Hopefully, the nature of the mesh will improve coverage.

To start with, each school will have five antennae, with two servers. That setup will be re-evaluated when it's fully deployed and tested in the classrooms. It is physically installed in one school so far, and fully cabled (including CAT5 to the other rooms where they have computers). The other school should be similarly set up by the end of Monday.

21. Pakistan: Habib reports progress on the e-book project in Islamabad. Eight elementary text books based on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad have been made into e-text books.

More News

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Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

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

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More articles can be found here.

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