OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Nicholas, Khaled Hassounah, Michail Bletsas, SJ Klein, and Stephen Michaud participated in Nigeria's two-day Digital Africa Conference, with one or the other of them being the keynote speaker, chairman, or panelist literally in every session. OLPC was omnipresent in the press and for the 400 delegates from 30 countries.
2. Alan Kay, Kim Rose, and the eToys team spent the week in Cambridge at the OLPC offices. They continue to make rapid progress towards the integration of eToys into the laptop software environment (they also provided useful feedback) and have eToys running on the laptop. Ian Piumarta gave the OLPC team an update on his “dynamically reconfigurable virtual machine”, which may be—in the longer term—the basis of programming environment for the Laptop, in that it is simple, fast, extremely flexible and quite eloquent.
3. Welcome Jenn Lucien to OLPC. Jenn will be working with the administrative team and covering the reception area. Originally from O`ahu, she served as the office manager to the Hawai`i Legislative Committee on Energy and Environmental Protection for five years. She spent the last year traveling in Asia and the Pacific and is excited join a project that aims to help the developing world. She holds a BA in Communication Studies from University of California at Santa Barbara.
4. Mark Foster reports that the CAFE ASIC debugging has proceeded well beyond expectations. To begin with, all three subsystems (NAND Flash, SD card slot, and camera controller) were already functional, with full DMA capability, by the time of the scheduled CAFE FPGA debugging /start/ date. Following the very successful debugging sessions by the software team, the CAFE is being enhanced to improve its capabilities and to simplify software development and robustness. As one example, the SD card controller is being modified to strictly match the public SDHCI specification. To the best of our knowledge, this should be the first truly Open Source SD implementation, with no need to obtain an SDI license or sign NDAs to create SD drivers or applications.
5. Mark also reports that the team has decided to extend support for USB 2.0. Initially, the Laptop was designed to offer support for limited power consumption USB devices in order to ensure sufficient battery life. After real-world experience with the prototype systems, it has been decided to remove this artificial power limitation and support full 2.5W power consumption on each of the three USB ports simultaneously, or even higher power consumption per port when all three ports are not being used (in fact, going beyond the power limits of the USB specification). These changes should significantly expand the universe of supported USB devices and peripherals.
6. Jim Gettys reports that Carl-Daniel Hailfinger and the LinuxBIOS team have implemented the LZMA compression system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZMA) for the BIOS ROM, resulting in a substantial savings in size.
7. Zephaniah Hull got the X driver for the touchpad functioning last weekend. Andres Salomon started contracting with OLPC this week and worked with Jim on setting up an X Window System build environment for debugging the touchpad. Next: experimentation on how to use the novel capabilities of the device.
8. John Zulauf, formerly of AMD's Geode team, has worked with AMD to free the optimization work—100–200% improvement—he did on many basic library functions: memcmp; memcpy; memset; strcmp; strcpy; and strlen. We look forward to integrating these performance improvements.
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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.)