OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. The software team has released to manufacturing our firmware (version Q2B21) and with the exception of some final test, has the completed the candidate build for the software image for B2 machines (Build 239). This is the software that will be used in testing with children in the coming month in the launch countries.
2. Sydney: Chris Blizzard, Dave Woodhouse, and Jim Gettys attended linux.conf.au. It is a volunteer-run conference located in a different city in Australia or New Zeland and organized by different people every year; it is considered one of the best conferences in the world in support of free and open source software. There were about 800 international attendees and another 400 locals who came for the "open day." Chris gave one of the keynotes at the conference: he talked about Firefox, OLPC, and the relevance of free software outside of the context of the server room. He gave a separate talk on the OLPC user interface. Jim gave a talk on the process of building the OLPC hardware.
3. Thomas Vander Stichele from Fluendo gave a demo of streaming video from a laptop to a laptop that did video encoding to yet another laptop where it was streamed to the Internet at large.
4. Kernel: The wireless driver has gone through two rounds of reviews with the upstream kernel networking folks and work continues to get it into the Linux mainline kernel. Marcelo Tosatti also reports that we are down to 5–6 interrupts per second (minus a really bad i8042 driver). This is compared with a ~200 per second in a standard Linux desktop. This will have a huge positive effect on our battery life.
5. UI: Marco Presenti Gritti made numerous small changes to the UI to try to improve some of the experience. Dan Williams, Erik Blankinship, Bakhtiar Mikhak, and Eben Eliason worked on the camera activity. Dan also spent time pulling together some multimedia extension (MMX) optimizations for our platform that should help with Cairo and X performance.
6. Firmware: Mitch Bradley reports that the firmware for the B2 build is released and seems to be stable. Several new firmware features are working, to be deployed after the B2 build: SD driver for booting from SD; audio driver for startup sound; fixed a longstanding bug that was causing some USB keys (that violate the USB2 spec in a minor way) not to work; a graphical touchpad diagnostic that illustrates the detailed behavior of the "jumping cursor" issue; and Open Firmware can now do the wireless-chip firmware uploading/rewriting process (thanks to Lilian Walter).
7. Community: As we go into B2, we would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the much larger community of people and projects, that have made it possible. It is easy to lose sight of them in the day-to-day engineering we do.
Firmware: Ron Minnich (LANL) and the LinuxBIOS team, Sun Microsystems for freeing up Open FirmWare, Richard Smith (OLPC), Mitch Bradley (OLPC). Tom Sylla has been invaluable with his in-depth knowledge of the AMD Geode.
Audio drivers: Jaya Kumar has, behind the scenes done a superb job with the AD1888 driver and 5536 ALSA support, and has added support for analog input to the driver and the controls to support them, which is dear to the heart of Seymour Papert. He did so in such a quiet, timely way that it has been easy to overlook his contributions. The Alsa project in Linux provides the driver framework we use.
Camera driver: Jon Corbet, well known in the open source community as the editor of LWN, wrote the camera driver under contract to OLPC: but the frame work into which it fits is the Video-4-Linux project.
LED driver: Reynaldo Verdejo wrote our keyboard LED driver (which he wrote without having access to a laptop!).
SD driver: Pierre Ossman is the maintainer of the Linux SD driver and is an invaluable aide in ensuring proper correct support of SD for OLPC. Richard Smith (OLPC) has been debugging the driver and hardware.
NAND Flash driver: Dave Woodhouse of Red Hat's OLPC team implemented our NAND Flash driver and is the original author of the JFFS2 file system, but we'd also like to thank the many people who have contributed to that project over its life.
Power management: Matthew Garret, a PHD student in BioInformatics at Cambridge University has been helping with power management, posting an initial patch for suspend/resume for OLPC and much advice. He is one of Linux's experts at suspend/resume.
Linux kernel: Our kernel, of course, is maintained by a community of over a thousand people from all over the world, too innumerable to name; our immediate thanks to Andy Tannenbaum, who with Minix inspired Linus Torvalds to start Linux. The response of this community to OLPC is overwhelming and our thanks to everyone who in their own way has done their bit to help us. Dave Jones (Red Hat) is doing great work finding performance problems in Linux applications and raising community awareness.
X Window System: The X.org community maintains the window system on OLPC. The template for rotation support in our driver that Jordan Crouse implemented for this release comes from work of Eric Anholt and Keith Packard of Intel, whom we would like to thank for the great work that they are doing to improve the base driver infrastructure. Daniel Stone of Nokia has been working on the new input system for X (Zephaniah Hull has contributed to this work.) Open Hand's Matchbox window manager has been the platform upon which we have been developing our UI.
Cairo graphics: The Cairo Graphics library community started by Carl Worth and Keith Packard has been rapidly improving its performance, which forms the basis of the increasingly high quality of graphics on our system.
GTK+ and Pango libraries: These form the GUI toolkit and internationalization foundation, Behdad Esfahbod (Red Hat) has helped greatly in our internationalization support as well as performance of Pango and Cairo.
Python: The Python community lead by Guido Van Rossum provides the language we use in Sugar, our user interface. They have already started performance work that should appear immediately in our builds after the B2 build.
Sugar: Red Hat's Marco Presenti Gritti has been the lead designer and implementor of Sugar, our UI. Pentagram's Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt, and Takaaki Okada and OLPC's Eben Eliason and Walter Bender have worked on the user interface and graphics design, the "look and feel" of our system.
Camera: A new camera application written by Erik Blankinship and Bakhtiar Mikhak of Media Mods replaces our quick and dirty video demo on the B1 build. Eben Eliason, Dan Williams, and John Palmieri all contributed to this effort.
Abiword: A new version of Abiword is in this release, which should be able to handle complex writing scripts much better; this will also form the input applet for our journal application, when it is ready.
xBook: Manusheel Gupta, Tomeu Vizoso, and Marco Gritti tuned up the PDF viewer for the new build.
Etoys: The Squeak Etoys development is now so well integrated with OLPC release engineering that it "just happens"; there are numerous improvements, too many to note here.
Web Browser: Our web browser is based on the Gecko rendering engine of the Firefox project. Our display, being significantly higher resolution than conventional displays is presenting difficulties; but the the Firefox community is hard at work on a new version which will improve this situation at some point in the future. A new reflow engine should also greatly improve performance in a future version of our system.
Bug reporting: Often overlooked is the work that people do to record bugs so that we can fix them. More and more are from users of our systems, rather than those directly developing the software.
Network testing: James Cameron has been an immense aid at early testing of the OLPC system in radio quiet areas (he lives in the Australian outback). Two of our machines have been able to talk to each other over 1.3km apart.
Infrastructure: It is easy to overlook the importance of infrastructure work that people do. Reynaldo Verdejo's work is essential to the tinderbox we use for performance. The Mozilla organization originally developed the first tinderboxes for automated build and performance regression testing.
Performance: Other often unsung heroes include those who work on performance, only some of which has started to land in our builds. Johan Dahlin wrote (http://blogs.gnome.org/view/johan/2007/01/18/0) a Python-launcher prototype this week that cuts a full second of "import GTK." This translates into at least one second off every activity startup. Chris Ball also worked with Tomeu Vizoso, Adam Jackson (Red Hat), and Dan Williams (Red Hat) on the activity launch notification speedup. They have done numerous sysprof traces and benchmarking, and found the right combination of MMX functions to use; our X performance is much higher now as a result.
Release Engineering: At the inevitable danger of overlooking someone (our apologies), we would like to to thank those directly contributing to the release engineering of this software, including Chris Ball, Walter Bender, Chris Blizzard (Red Hat), Mitch Bradley, Javier Cardona (Cozybit), Ronak Chokshi (Marvell), Jordan Crouse (AMD), Eben Eliason, Jim Gettys, Marco Presenti Gritti (Red Hat), Zephaniah Hull, Adam Jackson (Red Hat), Vance Ke (Quanta), Ivan Krstić, Ted Juan (Quanta), Aswath Mohan (Marvell), John Palmieri (Red Hat), Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, Marcelo Tosatti (Red Hat), Lilian Walter, Bruce Wang
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MILESTONES
| Jan. 2007 | Rwanda announced its participation in the project. |
| Dec. 2006 | Uruguay announced its participation in the project. |
| Nov. 2006 | First B1 machines are built; IDB and OLPC formalize an agreement regarding Latin American and Caribbean education. |
| Oct. 2006 | B-test boards become available; Libya announces plans for one laptop for every child |
| Sep. 2006 | UI designs presented; integrated software build released; SES-Astra joins OLPC |
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| Jun. 2006 | 500 developer boards are shipped worldwide; WiFi operational; Csound demonstrated over the mesh network First video with working prototype [1] |
| May 2006 | eBay joins OLPC; display specs set; A-test boards become available; $100 Server is announced |
| Apr. 2006 | Pre-A test board boots; Squid and FreePlay present first human-power systems |
| Mar. 2006 | Yves Behar and FuseProject are selected as industry designers |
| Feb. 2006 | Marvell joins OLPC and continues to partner on network hardware |
| Jan. 2006 | World Economic Forum, Switzerland UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement news release |
| Dec. 2005 | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop (html)(pdf) |
| Nov. 2005 | WSIS, Tunisia Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; Nortel joins OLPC Photos: (Image 1)
(Image 2) (Image 3) |
| Aug. 2005 | Design Continuum starts design of first laptop |
| Jul. 2005 | Formal signing of original members of OLPC |
| Mar. 2005 | Brightstar and Red Hat come on board |
| Jan. 2005 | Laptop initiative officially announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland; AMD, News Corp. and Google agree to join OLPC |
PRESS
PRESS RELEASES
| Jan. 2007 | OLPC has No Plans to Commercialize XO Computer. |
| Jan. 2007 | OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer. |
| Jan. 2007 | Rwanda Commits to One Laptop per Child Initiative. |
| Dec. 2006 | Low Cost Laptop Could Tranform Learning. |
Video
(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found.)
http://video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM607884-7823-CRIANCAS+TESTAM+COMPUTADOR+PORTATIL,00.html | Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop, GLOBO- BRASIL
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx | Mark Foster delivers presentation to Standford University
http://www.technologyreview.com/ | Technology Review Mini-Documentary
http://www.radiofarda.com/Article/2007/01/04/f2_Interview-laptop.html | A Brief Demo