Feature requests

Overview

This page provides a space for aggregating feedback from deployments, organized by country, to facilitate the planning and prioritization of features in upcoming releases. This should include verbatim requests from technical leads or translated and reviewed rewrites of initial feedback. Only items specifically requested by a qualified technical lead, administrator, teacher or student in the country should go in this section. As specific goals, features, bugs, and requests accumulate here, OLPC engineers will create new entries on the Feature Roadmap to track them, linking to the raw feedback in this section as appropriate. This page goes hand-in-hand with the Feature roadmap page, as follows:

1. Feature requests

Features, requirements and requests by country. This page contains verbatim requests from technical leads or translated and reviewed rewrites of initial feedback. Only items specifically requested by a qualified technical lead, administrator, teacher or student in the country should go in this section.

2. Feature roadmap

Feature suggestions by technical strategy. Each item on this page should include reference to the;Requester: (e.g. country or engineer or URLs to relevant discussions and sites). It should also include a reference to which element of the strategy it fits in to (if available).

See also: Deployments

Suggestions for providing input

1. Please sign in to the wiki when updating this page so we know who made the edits.
2. Feel free to add to this page following the guidelines described above.
3. Comments on the submissions of others are best provided on the discussion page, or the discussion page for that particular section.
4. Edits to original submissions should be discussed with the original poster beforehand.
5. Use the trac template when referencing tickets/bugs.
6. Additional suggestions for providing input are welcome.
7. Create a new section (At the == header 2 == level) for your country or request if none present are adequate.

Greg's Top 8 Requests

This section lists the items which I (Gregorio 19:48, 3 November 2008 (UTC)) thinks are most important to improving the XO experience in the school. These items were all gathered via direct input from deployments.

1. Activation lease management: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Activation_lease_security
2. Better power management: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Power_management
3. Reliable touchpad: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Accurate_touchpad
4. No lost files: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Journal_never_loses_work
5. Projects and asynchronous collaboration: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Asynchronous_collaboration
6. Reliable synchronous collaboration: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_Collaboration_Requirements
7. More easily run any Linux application: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Easy_.22Sugarization.22
8. Better eBook reader: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Better_eBook_reader

Requests by country

Uruguay

Spanish
Greater than 100K x XOs deployed in schools.

New formulation of requirements from Uruguay. Build customization is top priority. Order of the remaining items does not reflect priority.

1. Build customization, signing / upgrades
2. Lease and theft management systems
3. Journal to USB simplification
4. Sugar performance improvements
5. Collaboration (?)
6. 802.1X (target roll out in 1 month) 802.11i (wireless version).
7. Web signed certificate

Rough notes below this line.

---

From Emiliano and Erik in e-mail:
Allow Uruguay to sign their own builds so that they can take an image from us, add their customizations then sign it and deploy on the XOs with the existing OLPC provided upgrade tools (e.g. olpc-update and USB keys).

They would also like control over their developer key issuance, rather than relying on us to serve them. (Kim, 10/26/08)

An efficient system upgrade method (ideally this preserves user ata, ideally it can be done in schools with minimal manual effort).

"Efficient" needs to be more carefully defined for this to be actionable. What resource is most precious? --Michael Stone 00:00, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

List of changes in the new build (to be used to decide the best time to upgrade their deployed systems).

How are the present release notes inadequate? --Michael Stone 00:00, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Request from Uruguay for HW alerts:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-July/007086.html

In e-mail to Greg S:
Better performance of Sugar. Faster launch and close of activities, faster switching between activities, better network usage, more responsive Sugar including Journal.

Better Flash support. Minimum on par with FF 3 on XP.

From ErikG trip:

1. Upgrade improvements including self signing
2. Faster (better performance) including flash
3. HW clock
4. Journal to USB simplification (direct file system access) - teacher

Notes from the peanut gallery:

an important question which I do not see being approached in these notes is "how are the Uruguay-based folks going to help get these patches written, tested, merged, and released?" --Michael Stone 00:07, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Haiti

Kreyol
13K x XOs

Rough feedback from Bastien. Unedited. Need prioritization and lots more details. Gregorio 20:40, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

1. Power (battery)
2. touchpads
3. server updates, backups, used to recover from or prevent lost work
4. record bugs?
5. collaboration
6. RF
7. Application to sugarize activities

See also: http://lumiere.ens.fr/~guerry/olpc_feedback.php

Comment from Wanda:
Clear ideas of how to create applications.

• Not just an explanation, but quick and easy ways to do it!
• Convert Java applets
• Activities with summer programs, kids exhausted scope of activities.

Wanted more. Application releases that will grow with the kids, have an application release periodically.

Rwanda

10K x XOs with English keyboards.

Raw feedback from Juliano and Brian. Needs clarification, updating and additional details:

• power (better saving, how to charge 70 x XOs in one electric socket) Strips didn't work. porto alegre could use strips? but not Rwanda....
• network
• More activities with authoring and exploration. Scratch was main tool but not completely sugarized. (ask - which one?). Pippy was good for core team. More than Scratch for long term exploration.

Ethiopia

Amharic

5k x XOs

They need some fixes to Amharic implementation which require a piece of software called SCIM. See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Localization for more details.

No Internet access currently available and no school servers planned.

May consider school servers if they can get critical features from them (e.g. lease activation).

Top request so far is lease activation that times out if XO doesn't call home.

Verbatim from Eskender:

• Security / leasing using the school server
• Content update using the school server
• Amharic input method ( consonant + vowel) instead of vowel consonant. Ticket No.8494
• we would like to have features where we can install .rpm files which we need for some activities

Dan's input on top priorities from Ethiopia:
Lease activation P1
Lower Power Consumption P1
Touchpad P1
Amharic fix bug ID 8494
RPM install to allow Akili P2
Power button not understood P2
PDF reader issues P2
Amharic OCR P3
School server scale P3

Arabic

Lebanon?
500 x XOs

Birmingham

English

G1G1

English

Mexico

Spanish
50K x XOs

Mongolia

Mongolian?
Journal entries saved it Cyrillic can be opened. Ability to easily upgrade. So Students do not have to go to terminal and type olpc-update --usb. Build this into an "Upgrade Stick" similar to Customization Key.

20K x XOs

Comments from Elana: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/019994.html

Abbreviated here:
1) Computers are slow
2) Can't save files - this should probably be the first item on my list.
3) Basically - The journal is really hard for people/ kids to use over a longer period of time. Kids and teachers can't find things that they did unless it was done within the last 30 minutes.
4) Mesh problems - my sense is that you are all pretty aware of those issues.