OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Cambridge: A three-day (36 hour) working session took place at OLPC headquarters with a subset of launch countries (Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Nigeria and Rwanda), asking the countries to be partners and critics. An extremely interactive meeting ensued, at times boisterous and combative, from early morning to late evening with only a few breaks and minimal sleep. Every topic was touched from firmware to firm agreements.
2. Cambridge: At a two-day design review with Quanta and Fuse Project we finalized all ID and mechanical changes and most electrical changes.
3. A team from the MIT Media Lab spent the day at OLPC presenting current and potential plans for the XO. A highlight was a presentation of projects from a class being taught by Henry Holtzman and Ted Selker.
4. A method for creating 400 different colors of XOs on the back cover of the laptop was decided: multi-color XO pieces of plastic will be attached via heat stake to the back cover of the laptop. 20 colors will be used for the X and the O, creating 400 unique combinations, enough for each child in a small school to have their own colors.
5. The Red Hat team has generated 60 builds in the last month and a half—a strenuous pace. Build 299 was released this week. A new stable build, the first one that will be used by children, will have many improvements and some new activities: a Tetris-like game, a slide-show activity, and a preview of the journal. The firmware team at OLPC was also been busy preparing release B76, which fixes many of the battery problems experienced in earlier releases.
The new build contains some new activities and also improvements in many of the existing activities. The Abiword word processor activity has had a number of bug fixes and is the first activity that saves to the journal when you close it. TamTam has been vastly improved and now includes a track editor. The web browser is vastly improved: it properly scales pages, text, and images to our 200dpi display and includes the Gnash free-software flash viewer. The news reader included is also more obviously named.
There are also changes to the Sugar API to support new functionality; lots of bug fixes and changes have been made to the new mesh view, which is where network activation now takes place. Also, a splash screen that takes a child's picture and asks their name is included with this build.
This build also includes a new Marvell firmware that fixes a few mesh-related problems; a big step forward. This is in conjunction with a new kernel that fixes some problems that were showing up under heavy network traffic will make a big difference in our networking experience.
We are about to release a new auto update image that will let people upgrade from version B43 (the last stable release) or B61 (included on the B2 machines) to B76 which includes important battery charging fixes that many people have run into. It also fixes the problem where the wireless does not show up after a reboot. Please upgrade your systems (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Btest_Boards).
The kernel in this build also contains a software work around for the problem we were seeing where the touch pad jumped around when you released your finger.
Many thanks to Dan Williams, Marco Gritti, Richard Smith, Marcelo Tosatti, John Palmieri, Chris Ball, Tomeu Vizoso, the Abiword team, the TamTam team, Andres Salomon, and Owen Williams, who worked very hard on this release.
6. From the community: Build 299 includes the beta release of the TamTam music editor. TamTam Edit is a page-driven event sequencer featuring a powerful music generator, a colorful and intuitive graphical interface to create, modify, and organize notes on five virtual "tracks," a palette of almost one-hundred sounds, and a music-construction model that allows virtually limitless variations in all musical styles.
TamTam Edit joins miniTamTam and TamTam synthLab as the third component of a complete music and sound creation and collaboration environment on the XO. A fourth component, consisting of a collaborative playing and composing tool, will be forthcoming as soon as the mesh-network APIs stabilize.
TamTam Edit uses about 55–65% of the CPU when running full tilt and presently occupies about 20MB of RAM. Kudos to Jean Piché, James Bergstra of the Université de Montréal and Adrian Martin of the University of Toronto for making this a reality—given the constraints, this is an engineering feat of no small proportion. Olivier Bélanger and Nathanael Lécaudé, both of the Université de Montréal have also contributed an enormous amount of time to create what is turning out to be a suite of expressive tools we are extremely proud of.
7. Video: Erik Blankinship and Bakhtiar Mikhak from Media Mods have video capture and playback working within in the Camera Activity. It will be folded into a build coming soon.
8. Richard prepared a CD that contained a Build 282 set up for QEmu and the latest Develop Activity from Andrew Clunis (orospaker). SJ Klein distributed the CDs at the Serious Games conference. Special thanks to Andrew, who pulled together an easy QEmu install built and integrated the Develop Activity in to Build 282.
9. Kernel: In the quest to get a stable kernel ready for our new stable build, Andres worked with Tom Gleixner to fix the kernel crash we were seeing; that has since made it upstream (along with a few other problems that were noticed in hrtimers). There were some libertas wireless driver changes that went into the kernel, and Andres enabled some netfilter modules to allow NAT to work. Chris notes that the dyntick bug that we had been seeing (#954) isn't really fixed, it is just harder to reproduce. Ah, races are fun.
10. Performance: We've recently focused effort on solving a problem that costs 30% of the performance of the system when a network interface is enabled. This is due to a cache snooping issue with USB that the GX processor has. Mitch Bradley verified that the "uncached descriptor" workaround for the USB/BTB performance problem nearly eliminates the CPU performance hit. Andres worked on adding a new memory zone to the kernel for uncached memory allocations; that work lives in a separate kernel branch [0]. Marcelo is in the process of testing it to see whether it actually makes a difference for GX performance with DMA.
11. Firmware: Mitch Bradley made good progress on suspend/resume on B2 using firmware tests. With the board modified to pull DCONLOAD down instead of up, Mitch can suspend and resume without losing display integrity and display interaction continues to work after resume. The core resume is pretty fast: less than 15mS (not counting the time to resync the DCON to the video, which add an extra 30mS or so). Mitch can also access the NAND FLASH and SD after resume but does not have USB resume working yet.
Mitch started to look into use cases for firmware wireless support, now that Lilian Walter has released a working firmware wireless driver and Wifi supplicant. Earlier in the week, Lilian released the first version of the supplicant and wireless ethernet driver to Mitch. Lilian also worked on country the country code, channel, and transmit power information so that the driver will comply with local regulatory constraints (called IE support.) Lilian currently debugging the ad-hoc join operation.
12. Touch-pad driver: Zephaniah Hull reports the lack of debounce on the PT to GS switch has been corrected, and the touch pad continues to work properly.
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MILESTONES
| 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. |
| 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