OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Libya and OLPC signed an MOU in which they agreed to work together towards the deployment of one OLPC laptop for every school-age child in Libya and contributing laptops to poor African nations. OLPC will provide the support needed by Libya to plan and carry out such a deployment. The signing took place during a visit by Nicholas, Walter Bender, and Khaled Hassounah, where they met with members of the newly formed OLPC4Libya steering committee. The committee was presented with the outline of a comprehensive plan to distribute the laptops, create connectivity and server infrastructure, and prepare teachers and students. Libya will send a team to the OLPC office in Cambridge to focus on software (Linux), infrastructure, and education content.
2. Nicholas spoke to the International Federation of University Presidents in Seoul on Thursday. Most Asian and many other universities were present. The appeal of OLPC was obvious and the talk deeply appreciated.
3. Michail attended the WiMax World conference in Boston. Nortel made big news in the show announcing their strong commitment to WiMax.
4. Display: The new dual-mode panels—with double the reflectance—were hand-carried back by Mary Lou were installed successfully into the motherboard-daughter card test-sets at OLPC. With work by Jim Gettys and Walter Bender, preliminary optimal font size tests were started. A 9-point font (25 pixels) seems ideal for readability as a guideline for development.
5. Taipei: Mark Foster has been working with the teams at Quanta, Marvell, and the OLPC software team to bring up a new version of the CAFE chip on the first OLPC “pre-B Test” motherboards. The boards are up and running, so the teams are now concentrating on general debugging. The motherboards are all running Linux, and all three of the CAFE subsystems (camera interface, SD Card controller, and the NAND Flash controller), are available for further driver development.
6. Additionally, samples of the latest Alps touchpad are also on their way to the software team. These samples include a newer touchpad controller ASIC that is intended for final production, as well as containing the unique OLPC keyboard code functionality. This keyboard code, essentially a superset of that used by conventional PCs, provides direct support for the Sugar user interface, adds convenient shortcut keys, and enables OLPC's unique "analog slider" function keys.
7. The OLPC document format spec rev2 has support for block macros, granular tables of contents, and layout hinting. The format is named “Crossmark,” and is believed to be highly suitable for (collaborative) book writing and editing and use as an e-book format.
8. One month ago, without warning, Sun released Open Firmware under a BSD license. After much deliberation, we reached the decision that rather than continuing to use Linux itself as boot loader, we will transition to Open Firmware (OFW), while retaining LinuxBIOS. The date for a transition has not yet been set. Open Firmware has been in use on both Sun and PPC hardware (e.g. Apple) for approaching a decade, and has shipped in quantity millions. Mitch Bradley, currently working for OLPC is its original author.
9. Our firmware development process and strategy has crystallized, and is a major relief to us all. Chris Ball has worked on our internal BIOS build system and procedures, setting up a Xen virtual machine containing a stable system for building the OLPC BIOS. The build system has successfully built LinuxBIOS with both Linux and Open Firmware as bootloaders. A release process has been proposed and is being reviewed.
10. Chris has also established a tinderbox to enable continuous build testing and performance testing of the OLPC system, from installing firmware, booting, installation onto flash and ensuring the user interface has started. We intend to add performance tests in the future (See http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2006-October/002565.html).
11. Jon Corbet has RGB565 mode (or native mode) working in the camera driver now. Jon will submit a new patch to the OLPC tree today. The camera driver is getting close to completion. The remaining items are support for image sizes other than VGA (which should be easy) and wiring up more controls.
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MILESTONES
| Oct. 2006 | B-test boards become available |
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| 06 Jun. 2006 | First video with working prototype [1] |
| May 2006 | A-test boards become available |
| 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.)