OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Khaled Hassounah worked this week on identifying the issues facing Arabic support in Sugar and then coordinated with Marco Gritti to apply the required fixes. As of Build 131, it is possible to use Arabic not just in the browser, but the whole sugar interface; it looks beautiful.
2. All eyes on Taiwan: The primary focus of the team this week has been on the last-minute debugging of the hardware and software in preparation for the production of B1 machines. Engineers from Quanta, Marvell, AMD, Red Hat, Himax, and OLPC are working around the clock to meet the goal of an early November run of 1000 machines.
3. Nicholas Nicholas was the keynote for Forrester's annual Consumer Forum, the theme of which for this year was: “Using Technology to Empower the Masses.” Offers of corporate help have poured in since.
4. Mary Lou keynoted the mLearn mobile learning conference in Banff. This is the crowd that thinks cellphones, PDAs and the ilk are the way to cross the digital divide. Their response to the presentation: they'd like to ditch their cell phones and start writing and working with the laptop.
5. Chris Blizzard presented at the Seneca Free Software and Open Source Symposium. His talk was taped and will be made available on the web.
6. Wireless: Marcelo Tosatti has been working with Ronak Chokshi and others of Marvell to update Marvell's driver development environment to that we use for development, and to integrate code from Marvell into the wireless driver for reprogramming the Marvell chip wireless firmware. As of late Friday, this code was seen to work in the Libertas wireless driver we are using.
7. Embedded Controller code: Ray Tseng of Quanta has provided several new versions of the EC code this week to help fix problems with power on and with battery charging.
8. Camera: The CAFE FPGA implementation of the camera is now working. Jon Corbet has restructured the driver to meet the requirements of the V4L2 maintainer. QVGA mode is working (which, among other things, means that XawTV, an X application for watching television, now works); CIF and QCIF require some register “magic” that we don't yet understand, which Jon has asked Omnivision to clarify. Some new controls are wired up, including horizontal and vertical flip. Nobody had yet noticed that the image was mirrored, including Jon, until adding the flip option showed it was wrong all this time.
9. NAND flash: Dave Woodhouse's NAND flash driver is complete now, and has uncovered several problems in the CAFE implementation which have been fixed. It now works well enough that the BTest systems are able to boot from CAFE NAND flash, and ECC has been implemented.
10. BIOS: Wednesday, we had no fully functioning BIOS for use with CAFE. We had intended to use LinuxBIOS with Linux as bootloader for B1 with a transition to Open Firmware (OFW) as bootloader before B2. We continued with both possibilities in parallel, such that by Friday we had both working. Testing of OFW's new USB stack has succeeded, so we have decided to use OFW immediately. Our efforts will now focus on the LinuxBIOS/OFW combination.
11. Battery driver: A preliminary version of a battery driver was checked in by Dave Woodhouse; what is remaining is interrupt-driven detection of state changes in the battery, to avoid polling. Dave is working in the Linux community to define a new battery interface, as battery kernel interface(s) in Linux is a mess and people are looking for a better design to standardize around.
12. Sugar UI: Dan Williams has made progress with getting NetworkManager working on the laptop and fitting it to the designs that Eben Eliason and Marco Gritti have been working on to control networking. Marco is adding a new build nearly every day to the image snapshots, reflecting the fast pace of work.
13. We've had some additions to our builds which will make the out-of-the-box experience for the beta builds a lot better. eToys is now part of the image builds and Dan has been doing a lot of work trying to get Barry Vercoe's Csound package into the build as well. (Barry was successful in getting real-time pitch tracking through the microphone input working on the laptop this week!)
14. We are working hard to create a rich-text editor based on the code from a popular free-software program called Abiword. There's also work being done to finish the Sugar port of the PDF reader Evince by Marco, Tomeu Vizoso, and Manusheel Gupa (a summer intern). It feels like we've reached a tipping point with the user interface.
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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.)