OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. OLPC's Mary Lou Jepsen was married to John Ryan today at a sea-side ceremony in New London, Conn.
2. We are close to converting over to LinuxBIOS/Linux as bootloader, a new X graphics driver, a new display kernel driver, easy installation path onto internal flash and disk, and the ability to run off of internal flash; some last minute bugs have delayed this conversion until sometime next week.
3. Mitch Bradley has learned his way around LinuxBIOS, and has brought up a Forth implementation on it. Forth is a very productive environment for test and debugging of hardware, and will come in very handy for easier debug, testing, and exercise of the CAFE chip. A Forth environment allows for immediate turn around of tests on hardware without a compile, link, reboot step that a conventional device driver requires.
4. Zephaniah Hull has been working on the X Input Extension support for the new dual-mode touchpad, along with work on the X configuration extension needed for better calibration support for the device. It looks likely we will base our first release on the upcoming X.org 7.2 release, due to its support for hotplug of input devices, being implemented by Daniel Stone of Nokia.
5. Jonathan Corbet is contracting with OLPC to develop the camera driver for CAFE. Jonathan is well known in the Linux community, operates the “Linux Weekly News” web site that is a vital communications point of the developer community and literally wrote “the book” on Linux device drivers, now in its third edition.
6. Jim Gettys met with Adam Jackson of Red Hat to discuss how to best modify the X Window System in support of our power-saving schemes. These include: (1) dropping the refresh rate when updates slow; and (2) driving the display from the display controller, allowing us to disable the Geode's video drivers.
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.
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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.)