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LAPTOP NEWS

1. Stable build: After a final few bugs that had hidden in corners were driven into the light, we issued Stable Build 303 along with Q2B76 firmware this week. Highlights of this stable build include:

• a working mesh network;
• an updated web browser that scales on our high-resolution screen, making for improved web experience;
• Gnash—the FOSS Flash player (still somewhat unstable)—pre-installed; Adobe's Flash 9 is also known to work, but not packaged or installed as part of the build;
• a touch-pad driver fix for jumping cursor: the touch pad should be more usable, and the tablet is enabled on B2 systems; and
• boot time has improved due to a scheduler fix.

Please read the release notes.

2. Activities: There are some new activities in the new build:

• Blockparty (aka Tetris) was written by Vadim Gerasimov and John Palmieri;
• Slideshow was written by Erik Blankinship and Marco Gritti; and
• Journal "Preview" (a first pass at the journal activity) was written by Marco and Tomeu Vizoso.

3. Community: Mauro Torres and the team from the Tuquito Project in Argentina have put together a calculator activity that will appear soon in our builds. They are working on a extensions that will let the children explore their calculations in notational form as well as get the "answer."

4. Kernel: While Andres Salomon was working on the new stable release, he found (and fixed) a build-system bug/interaction that was keeping fixes from hitting the stable kernel builds.

5. Richard Smith and John Watlington modified some B2 machines to ship out to suspend/resume developers; these mods fix some known hardware problems that only affect suspend/resume.

6. Q2B76: This firmware release should have a temporary work-around for the problem that has been costing us about 1/3 of our system's performance whenever a network interface was alive on USB (either our wireless or ethernet).

7. Mitch Bradley continued improvements to the suspend/resume code:

• time-to-resume is now down to 12 mS, except for the CAFE;
• reinit is working well; he can suspend/resume reliably without a serial port;
• suspend/resume is now working on B1 in addition to B2;
• the suspend routine is now independent of the virtual address from which it is called.

Mitch also integrated Lilian Walter's first cut at self-test diagnostics into the experimental firmware.

8. Community II: William Cohen reported a major coup: he got the system-level performance tool "oprofile" running on the Geode, and immediately started posting very helpful performance data. We have wanted this tool for quite a while, and have not had the time to do it ourselves. Our great thanks to Will.

9. Trac: The bug-tracking system has passed several milestones: more than 1000 bugs reported and more than 250 people registered. Our community is growing quickly (See http://dev.laptop.org).

10. Mesh status: Michail Bletsas and teams from Cozybit and Marvell spent the past week doing intense debugging on the mesh firmware. There were two serious bugs uncovered: mesh routing was erratic in noisy environments (e.g., OLPC's Cambridge office) and there was data corruption observed during large file transfers. The first problem was solved by allowing route request and reply frames to be sent at rates as low as 1Mbps. The data corruption issue was tracked to MTUs (frame sizes) larger than 1494 bytes. Firmware addressing the first issue was released early this week and a fix for the second will be incorporated in next week's firmware build. (In the meantime, people should set the MTU of msh0 to 1494 if they want to utilize the mesh interface). In parallel a variety of driver issues were addressed and should be pulled into the XO build next week, at which point the mesh substrate will be fully functional.

11. Fun and games: Chris "sugarized" a game called Kye (http://games.moria.org.uk/kye/pygtk) and posted the bundle to the Sugar mailing list.

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

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