OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS 2007-03-24
We've made a decision to use the AMD Geode LX for the mass-production machine!
1. A team including Chris Ball, Mitch Bradley, Jordan Crouse (AMD), Matthew Garrett (Cambridge), Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, David Woodhouse, Tom Sylla, and Marcelo Tosatti succeeded in the initial "bring up" of suspend and resume.
2. São Paulo: David Cavallo gave a talk at the Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP). The majority of those attending were people from the education and technology program, the curriculum program, the program for indigenous education, and the mathematics department. Included in the group were former colleagues of Paulo Freire, who maintain the Freire House at the university. The discussion among people who have worked long and hard for education reform and equity was excellent and pragmatic, focused on learning from the difficulties of the past.
3. Sugar: Everyone on the Sugar team is working toward an end-of-the-month deadline. Over the last two weeks, Marco Gritti, Tomeu Visoso, John Palmieri, Dan Williams, and the Abiword team have made numerous improvements to the interface.
For Sugar itself, the frame behavior is getting much better—we have made changes based on feedback from the field. Specifically, the heuristics for when the frame is shown and hidden automatically are much more consistent. Rollovers have a much better feel to them and many random performance problems have been fixed.
The team also spent time setting up activity file dialogs; this includes saving entire web pages, images from web pages (from a right click), saving and opening inside the document editor, and the image editor. While file dialogs will eventually be supplanted by the Journal, it helps with usability in the short term.
Abiword now supports image loading and floating the images anywhere in a document. This should let kids create their own documents based on images they find on the web.
Marco and Tomeu have also started adding support for internationalizing those few text strings that do exist in the interface. SJ Klein is organizing a team of people interested in helping with the translations.
Dan has been integrating the mesh functionality into Network Manager. This includes fixing problems in the driver, adding new functionality to Network Manager, and creating the user interface to support it. Pentagram has been iterating on a design for visual feedback for the various network states and modes.
We are approaching a stage of stability in development such that we need to seriously investigating how to enable a wider network of developers. This includes people who want to hack on the base system itself as well as people who want to write activities for the XO. For the latter, we are going to build images that people can download and run in emulators that are available for just about every platform these days. John will be working more on this over the next week.
4. Suspend/resume: Chris Ball measured resume time at 900ms with drivers unloaded and 1400ms with all drivers loaded, according to the kernel. Linux 2.6 currently performs a slow virtual-terminal switch on suspend/resume, which may account for much or most of this delay we will immediately eliminate this switch, as we don't need it. In contrast, resuming conventional laptops running Linux on processors many times faster than our system are measured at 6–12 seconds, so we are already many times faster than most systems. Both the power-draw numbers and suspend/resume-time numbers will head downwards as we start optimizing power management. Mitch Bradley has measured the firmware resume time of approximately 25 milliseconds.
5. Firmware: The firmware end of the suspend/resume code seems to have held up well in this week's kernel testing. Lilian Walters did some work on memtest86 so it can be integrated into the ROMs, giving us a heavy-duty memory test capability that will always be available. Mitch made good progress on the firmware port to the LX; the firmware is interactive and he is now resolving MSR (model-specific register) discrepancies. He expects to have a releasable OFW for the LX development board soon.
6. Kernel: Andres Salomon notes that there is a separate source branch for the suspend/resume and power management work:
Once the code is ready, it will all end up in both the master and stable branches.
Andres updated our kernels to 2.6.21-rc4 (previously 2.6.21-rc2), and merged libertas driver changes. Andres also cleaned up the MFGPT (multi-function general-purpose timers) driver, as these are drivers that we would like to get upstream.
7. Cozybit released a new developer version of the wireless firmware (5.220.10.p1). The driver patches required for correct behavior of FWT and mesh commands are found at:
- http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/libertas-dev/2007-March/000324.html
- http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/libertas-dev/2007-March/000325.html
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.
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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