OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Thailand: Prime Minister Taksin Shinawatra used an extraordinarily long segment of his Saturday morning, weekly, one-hour broadcast to describe OLPC, its purpose and its timing.
2. Taipei: Taiwan's President Chen publicly shared his pride that his country is assisting One Laptop per Child: “I am glad that Taiwan is contributing to this project to build a digital bridge for the kids around the world.”
3. Ivan Krstić had another discussion with Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart and CTO Greg Newby about bringing their eBook content to the laptop.
4. Mark Foster and David Woodhouse worked with the core LinuxBIOS developers to move LinuxBIOS onto the DCON debugging platforms. With this transition, the A-Test motherboards are capable of self-booting from the internal serial-boot Flash device, as well as utilizing the internal NAND Flash device for mass storage. Until now, most developers have been using external USB devices, but these setups are reliably supporting fully stand-alone operation. Practically speaking, this not only simplifies debugging, it also will greatly simplify future distribution and bring-up efforts for OLPC software developers. Special kudos to David, whose exceptional efforts were appreciated by the entire team!
5. Software: Many additional key software pieces fell into place this week. David Zeuthen (Red Hat) reports that the udev-based initial ram file system now works and waits for USB devices to be ready, so full integration of OLPC installation into the Red Hat Fedora distribution is now feasible. Zephaniah Hull and Ron Minnich (LANL) report that the PS/2 ports are working on LinuxBIOS, allowing testing of the dual-mode touchpad on the OLPC hardware. Ron, along with on Richard Smith and Jordan Crouse (AMD) report that the programming of LinuxBIOS is in place on PLCC flash chips on A-Test boards. Jordan also reports that the X Window System graphics and console driver no longer depend on VESA graphics or conventional INT 10 initialization. This EXA X driver has early support for alpha blending on the Geode processor. The fbdev driver for the Geode has beginnings of support for the DCON and the X Window System has been run on the OLPC display.
6. Marcelo Tosatti appeared on IRC on Friday. He's come home from the hospital, but he will be in a wheel chair for quite some time.
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MILESTONES
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| 06 Jun. 2006 | First video with working prototype [1] |
| 28 Jan. 2006 | World Economic Forum, Switzerland UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement news release |
| 13 Dec. 2005 | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop (html)(pdf) |
| 16 Nov. 2005 | WSIS, Tunisia Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Photos: (Image 1)
(Image 2) (Image 3) |
| Jan. 2005 | Laptop Intiative Officially Announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland |
PRESS
Video
(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found here.)