OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS 2007-03-31
1. We are very happy to announce the availability of a new stable build. It is composed of Build 368 and the Q2B85 firmware. The highlights of this build:
- a working mesh network;
- a user interface to the mesh network;
- a working battery charging;
- a battery indicator in Sugar;
- a greatly improved web browser;
- many other activity improvements;
- a substantially improved boot time;
- availability of Helix Media Player (Real Networks);
- instructions for customizing your own image.
There is also a content library included in a separate package.
2. laptop.org: We are using the wiki as our content management system and the infrastructure for translation is now in place. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Xavier Alvarez, the first translation of the new website is on line (See http://www.laptop.org/es).
3. Wireless: This week was marked by five releases of wireless firmware, setting a new record. Today, we are at Firmware 5.220.10.p5, which fixes or addresses all known issues. Many thanks to Dan Williams and Marcelo Tosatti from Red Hat, the Cozybit team, the Marvell team, and Michail Bletsas.
Dan and Chris Ball helped John Watlington build a kernel with the Libertas driver for his school server machines with Marvell USB dongles plugged in; the school servers now function on the mesh.
Michail expanded the OLPC mesh testbed to 22 nodes, which allows for more conclusive scalability tests (and starts to become a full-time sysadmin job). Dan hooked up the UI for the mesh view to make it possible to join the wireless mesh easily. Thus, this week was the first time that we have really been able to get a sense of how the mesh will work as an end-user experience, and it has to be said: it is really good. Boot a system for the first time, and if the machine sees a mesh, “poof,” you're on the network! Really quite remarkable.
4. Sugar: Marco Gritti spent a lot of time cleaning up and finishing last minute issues in the build. Some of the new fixes in Sugar are based on feedback from the field. This includes avoiding multiple launches of an activity; immediate feedback for launch; much improved frame behavior; and better overall performance. Marco also fixed bugs in the web browser that were preventing Google talk and some other sites from working. The dots-per-inch (DPI) scaling code in Mozilla still has issues; we will continue to work through them as we find them.
5. Tomeu Vizoso and Marco also added support for localization for Sugar (and some of the activities). Although we won't have any languages other than English in our first build, we should have the ability to start translating: the infrastructure in the programs in now place; next we need to set up a place where people who want to localize can participate. SJ Klein has set up a list on laptop.org for people who want to translate, which is a good start.
6. Battery: We know battery problems have been a great pain and concern and we are relieved that they have finally been resolved. For those of you with dead batteries with B2 systems, most, but not all of the dead batteries can be recovered with the systems you now have with the new firmware. Recovering batteries in the field with B1 systems is harder; thankfully there are far fewer B1 systems deployed. Please follow the directions in Battery Charging. We would like to thank all those who helped in the resolution of this problem, in reports from the field, and at Quanta and OLPC. Special thanks to Richard Smith, who was relentless in his efforts to chase down numerous bugs in the embedded-controller code.
7. Please update your systems to the new firmware as this firmware also fixes a battery overcharge problem.
8. New activities as of Build 368: Calculadora, A simple calculator activity (Mauro Torres et al. of the Tuquito Linux project in Argentina); Blockparty (AKA Tetris) (Vadim Gerasimov and John Palmieri); Slideshow (Erik Blankinship, Bahktiar Mikhak, and Marco Gritti); xbook (PDF viewer) as an activity.
9. Multimedia: Real Networks and the team at the Open Software Lab at Oregon State University have been working on a multimedia platform for the laptop. (See Helix Media Activity). This is able to handle most common audio/video datatypes, as Real Networks has codecs for almost anything you can think of. The commercial version is better known as “Real Player” (Justin Gallardo (OSU), Greg Wright, Jeff Dutchman, Martin Schwartz (Real Networks))
10. Library activity: SJ has been leading a large community effort to build a content library for the laptop. (See Library Release Notes for a description formats we are using to display directories of books and other materials.) Next up is a focus on the school library, figuring out how it communicates with the XO and what processes need to run on each to provide updated indices and views.
11. Chris Ball created a procedure for customizing NAND images. Mitch Bradley has created a “save-nand” Open Firmware command to do this easily, but the command will only be available in firmware versions Q2B84 or higher (See Customizing NAND images).
12. Trent LLoyd of the Avahi Project was instrumental in helping resolve with Dan Williams, Chris Blizzard, and Andres Salomon a boot-time Sugar crashing problems we have seen for a long time. Avahi is the basis of discovering other people and services on the network. This is another great example of the value of the community; we would not have working “presence” in this stable build had this bug not been found and resolved, but would have had to disable Avahi in favor of stability.
13. Christina Xu took some photos of XOs in action and produced two neat visual instructions for powering on and opening the laptop:
- http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=439184985&size=l
- http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=439204328&context=photostream&size=l
14. Power management: Jordan Crouse (AMD) reports suspend to RAM (STR) support is proceeding very well. After successfully resuming the system two weeks ago, this past week was spent diagnosing problems with the core drivers (namely, the framebuffer, the DCON, and the timer tick). Andres Salomon and Jordan discovered some serious DCON issues with source switching (from CPU to DCON source); those were traced back to firmware (after spending lots of time debugging the kernel) and Mitch fixed them there. We can now successfully freeze the frame on the DCON, and suspend and resume the system without losing the display. The timer tick was also fixed, which now means we don't need any special changes to the kernel command line to work around issues on the resume.
Attention now focuses on handling the secondary drivers (such as the audio, camera and USB), and improving overall stability. Our target for power-management stability is 1000 consecutive suspend/resume cycles without a glitch.
Marcelo spent time working on power management issues and USB resume. USB resume is now working, which is another notch in the belt to getting to a full suspend/resume story.
All of the code we are using is now in the “powermgmt” branch of our kernel GIT tree.
15. System software: Andres also made the touch-pad driver much more tolerant of version numbers and merged more fixes into the Libertas driver. He also worked on preparing mfgpt/dcon/geode code for inclusion upstream.
16. School server: The school server development continues. We now have wireless mesh interfaces enclosed with an antenna and 3 meters of USB cable. Thanks to Chris Ball and Dan Williams, the server now recognizes them. Internet-router functionality is up and running (on the wired school LAN) and applications and content for the Library are starting to be installed. A school server specification—really more of an introduction—has been written and posted on the wiki.
N. Firmware: We are planning to cut all developers over to the fastboot/suspend/resume firmware next week. Lilian Walter released a few self-tests this week, including: nand-flash; spi-flash; display; and camera (a new driver). Our goal is to aid field diagnosis and repair.
Lilian has also released code to reprobe the usb bus to remove obsolete device nodes and to create new device nodes as usb devices are removed, added or replaced. Next, Lilian shall look at keyboard self test and Quanta's request for modification to the NAND flash self test.
Mitch added the following features were added to that firmware this week:
- ability to do fast display save/restore in the low-level resume path (This feature is turned off by default, in favor of similar code in the kernel, but serves as a working model for how to interact with the hardware to accomplish the purpose);
- USB power state restoration after resume;
- self-test diagnostics (from Lilian) for several devices, including camera and display (The self-test suite is nearly complete now);
- save-nand command for creating restorable images of modified JFFS2 filesystems;
- a fix for an infrequent problem with reflashing the firmware; and
- a fix for a problem booting.
The OFW port to the LX development board is working, so OFW is on track for the switchover to LX.
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.
Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com
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