OLPC Trial-2 Software Release Notes
Software Release Notes
Please set a "watch" (the little tab on top of the wiki page) on this page to be notified when the release notes change.
Note: at this time, we do not recommend installing the Trial-2 software on B2-1 systems (128 meg of RAM), due to insufficient RAM usage. We are working on fixing the increased memory consumption.
These are exciting days for the OLPC software (late alpha test); there is much you can do with the laptop out of the box (See Demo Notes), which are very useful to understand the system and some of what is available. There are also some general instructions on how to use the Sugar interface here, though these have not been updated yet.
Please read these release notes for particularly important software issues you should be aware of. Please also read the BTest-1 Release Notes, BTest-2 Release Notes and BTest-4 Release Notes for hardware problems applying to particular versions of the hardware. The Library Release Notes has information about the early stages of our sample content library.
The software is late alpha test. Please refer to the OLPC Human Interface Guidelines for the vision of where we would like the software to lead, only partially reflected in our current software.
Most of the first generation vision for our system is now present and working:
- The Journal
- Presence service
- Easy real time collaboration in many of our activities including:
- Read, Write, Read, Chat, Record, EToys, TamTam Jam, Memorize, Connect4
- Mesh networking
- Automatic configuration of Mesh Portal Points (MPP)
- Automatic configuration of ad-hoc meshes, allowing collaboration without any infrastructure or Internet access
- Anti-theft activation on installation
- Registration with a school server
- Backup to the school server
The software has been rebased onto Fedora Core 7, and Python 2.5.
Remaining Tasks:
- Finish building out collaboration in our other activities
- Anti-theft leases
- Execution of activities in containers
- In-place robust updates
- Download and installation of activities
The software is just maturing to the point where we can embark upon later-stage trials for feedback and polish. Please work with us on these trials so that we can learn as much as possible from your experience.
Stable Builds
The release notes here apply to this release. The Autoreinstallation image enables easy updates of systems. We recommend this method of reinstallation, as it handles activation of the laptop.
Release note information for non-stable builds can be found here: Test_Group_Release_Notes
Base System Notes
- Suspend/Resume
- Suspend and resume using the power button should function on B2, B3 and B4 systems. Only B3 and B4 systems can resume on a keystroke, touchpad touch, or button press. Resume is not yet reliable due to several bugs, including the following:
- USB wireless suspend/resume failure at setup phase
- The Marvell firmware does not always wakeup properly.
- Coming out of DPMS on resume seems to be failing in OHM
- if the screen has been turned off due to the display power management system, the screen may not be turned back on on resume.
- Wakeup event is repeated continuously
- This bug in the embedded controller code, now understood and soon repaired, causes repeated button/gamepad events on wakeup, getting in the way of ebook reading with aggressive power savings by causing constant scrolling. This support is already present in the book reader (touch /home/olpc/ebook-enable-sleep and restart the reader will turn this on).
- Laptop wakes up and doesn't sleep again when it should
- The laptop suspends when you close the lid (currently leaving wireless on, which may or may not be wrong); but if you insert or remove power to the laptop, it wakes up again despite being closed.
- Display driver needs to enable/disable the dcon power control line.
- This is consuming significant power in suspend even when the screen is off.
- Field Return: flash corruption - OpenFirmware complaining of 'unknown node type
- If you see this, please add your serial number information to this trac ticket.
- Activity sharing
- will only work correctly when all XOs that wish to participate are using the same connection method. I.e., all must be either only link-local, or only server-connected.
- Customizing NAND images
- It is easy to customize a build for your own environment, as outlined here.
- Python Performance
- Python 2.5 has much better heap performance. The Geode LX processor in BTest-3/4 has again greatly increased performance due to its larger cache..
- Network Autoconfiguration
- an XO will now autoconfigure the network. If no Internet access can be found, an ad-hoc mesh will be formed using private networks. If an XO is either associated with a conventional access point or preferably interfaced via a ethernet USB interface, it will automatically become a mesh portal point (MPP), and gateway the mesh network to the Internet. It will also associate with conventional access points using WEP or WPA. If it associates via WEP or WPA, the mesh portal functions cannot work, however.
- WPA support
- has been implemented in the most recent builds, to allow association with WPA enabled access points. If you have problems, please use the developer's console and execute the command touch /etc/NetworkManager/log-supplicant and try again. Please attach the resulting log files /var/log/messages and /var/log/wpa_supplicant.log to a trac ticket, along with the exact manufacturer and model of the access point.
- Booting time continues to improve
- A fix for jffs2 garbage collection scheduling is new to Build 303, and significantly decreases boot time. We understand where much of the rest of the boot time is currently going, as you can see by checking the bugs referred to in 623. Boot time, however, is not our highest priority; suspend/resume is clearly more important.
- Battery problems
- (including failure to charge, overcharge, incorrect capacity reporting, battery draining quickly when turned off) A raft of problems with batteries has been fixed by EC firmware patches up through Q2B83. Most, but not all, dead batteries can be recovered in the field with existing BTest-2 systems (See Battery Charging for more details). LiFe batteries incorrectly flash red light was fixed in firmware Q2B87. All known battery charging problems have been resolved. Note that for long term storage, removing the battery pack after a full charge is best practice; this is true for all battery powered devices. On BTest-2 systems, average NiMH lifetime in a test of multiple machines (Screen on, backlight fully on, wireless associated, all functional units including GPU on, but processor idle) was tested to be approximately 2h40m, LiFePo batteries were approximately 3h 10m, using BTest-2 systems. This will improve as our power management improves and unused devices are powered down when not in use. Early tests with BTest-4 systems show an idle system lifetime (no suspend) between four and five hours, depending on circumstances and battery type. The LiFePo batteries have significantly higher lifetime.
- RestrictedFormats
- In some jurisdictions, patents on algorithms apply, and royalty payments may be required. Examples include MP3, and MPEG-4. This is a particular nuisance for media players, for which many of the common codecs algorithms are patented. In other jurisdictions, software patents do not apply and there are usually freely available implementations for these algorithms available. Sometimes, as in Adobe Flash, or the Real Helix player there are free (as in beer) implementations available, where those corporations have paid these patent royalties and made usually (binary) versions of codecs available. This has direct consequences as OLPC does not want to burden all machines with what may be unnecessary duplicate patent royalties: OLPC must therefore leave the customization of the distribution for these formats for "in country". For jurisdictions in which such patent laws apply, there are now solutions such as those sold by Fluendo to these issues. The Flash format (whether Adobe's Flash 9 or Gnash) illustrates this problem well; even though we can include gnash, as built it does not have support for MP3 or MPEG-4, which should work correctly if Gnash is rebuilt.
- JFFS file system pathological use.
- Writing log files (or similar files) one short piece at a time (unbuffered) and then flushing them to stable storage is bad for the flash, as it causes many unnecessary writes to the flash; much better would be to defer such writing until some amount of time has passed, and then flush, so that multiple small writes can be merged into a single write. Do not build applications with such behavior.
- Network adapter causes slowdown
- Fixed in Q2B81 firmware and later. Any network adapter, if configured, (including the built in Marvell wireless) would cause the system to slow as much as 33%.
- Flash and system installs off SD
- You can install the flash and system image off an SD card. Rather than using the "disk:" in the instructions for reflashing, you can install using the name "sd:". The auto updater does not work off of SD, however, at this time.
- fontconfig cache is invalidated too easily on mtime check
- Applications can take a very long time to start, due to a fontconfig caching bug provoked by the time being set incorrectly (which can happen easily if the battery is replaced or the time gets set badly). To work around this problem, use the "date" command from a console to set the current time and date.
X Window System
Much performance optimization work is possible, and awaits our time or volunteers to work on. Some work has been done and performance is substantially better than initially.
[[1]] If a console application manages to somehow modify the colormap, the system won't recover without rebooting the machine.
- Alpha-blended animation is very slow
- The X server now uses MMX optimized routines for many operations and has improved greatly. We're still not hitting the hardware fast paths very much in the driver; LX's help here. We will be doing more profiling and work in the future.
- Rotate and resize
- The X Window System does support the RandR extension, (rotation of the screen) and a button on the front face of the brick controls rotation. Rotation has been disabled on B2 and B1 systems as it is not a priority to us; if you'd like to fix this problem, let us know.
- B1 Touchpads
- The BTest-1 touchpad worked particularly badly: much of this is caused by capacitive issues; a mylar sheet increased the capacitance and BTest-2's touchpad now functions pretty well. The writing (stylus) mode of the touchpad is enabled and works correctly in BTest-2, although additional software work is needed. When taking a unit off of power supply onto battery (or vice versa), the touch pad may need recalibration: simultaneously press the four keys in the extreme corners of the keyboard.
It may be possible to implement "tap" on the capacitive touch pad; we'd be interested in hearing opinions whether this is desirable for a child or not.
Keyboard autorepeat has been "tuned". Most keys do not autorepeat, except for the arrow keys, erase key, space bar, and game pad and buttons by the screen.
- Camera activity provokes X to screw up colormap on B2's.
- The X Window System Xvideo extension is supported in the X server; note that a slightly different colormap is loaded while video is playing to improve video quality; other colors in use may become slightly strange during this period. Note that there is a miswiring from the Geode to the DCON chip, fixed in BTest-3 and BTest4, that complicates this problem. The LX processor won't have this problem at all; the RGB-YUV conversion is correct on that video unit. Right now, on B2 and B1 systems using the camera at all screws up the colormap.
- The keymaps for our initial set of keyboards are only installed when Build 185 is installed
- There are known issues with the keyboard descriptions.
The language switching key is still not working. So no English language input is possible on the default image targeted at non-Latin-based languages (e.g. Arabic and Thai). To enable English input on those machines, follow the following steps:
- After the system has booted, press ctrl+alt+f1
- Login in as root (no password required)
- Open the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf for editing (use vi or any editor you are comfortable with)
- In the first InputDevice section do the following modifications:
- Modify XkbLayout setting from "us" to "us,ara" (for Arabic—use other symbol files for other languages)
- Add an XkbOptions option with the value "grp:ctrl_shift_toggle"
- Save and close the file
- Either reboot the machine or restart X by issueing a "/sbin/telinit 3" command and then "/sbin/telinit 5"
After you make the modifications, the two lines in xorg.conf should be similar to the following
Option "XkbLayout" "us,ara" Option "XkbOptions" "grp:ctrl_shift_toggle"
After X is restarted, the default language will be english (that can be changed by swapping us and ara above), and you will be able to switch between languages using the ctrl+shift key combination.
User Interface: Sugar
The Sugar user interface environment for children is in place. The OLPC Human Interface Guidelines should be observed when building or repackaging applications. Conventional human interface guidelines have been designed for first world office workers, and are totally unsuitable for children who are just learning to read in any part of the world. As young children are the many/most of the intended audience of our system, their needs are being met first.
Conversion of applications to function under Sugar is very straightforward and most applications can work with little change.
If you are building applications, note that future models of the laptop may have touch screens or tablets, which enables almost any application to be useful in ebook mode, so take the fact your screen size may change aspect ratio seriously when designing your user interface.
Intent and Goals
The core ideas: Activities, Not Applications; Presence is Always Present; Tools of Expression; and Journaling are detailed here.
Navigation, including the Zoom Metaphor and The Frame, is detailed here.
Sugar Release Notes
The Sugar activity launch has performance problems caused by Python's cache footprint.
Many of the user interface issues we intend to fix. Among the most notable issues are:
- New networking UI needs documentation
- To choose a network, push the first of the four circular "mesh view" keyboard buttons (or "F1" in an emulator), hover over each triangle until you find the access point you want to associate with, and then click on it. (Note that the access points are color-coded based upon a hash of the AP SSID. Therefore, once you learn the color of your desired access point, you can subsequently find it quickly.) The mesh, rather than being a triangle, is represented by a circular icon. You may be prompted for an access point's password.
Programming Sugar
Sugar Activity Bundles are explained in detail here.
Sugar interfaces
goocanvas
GTK+
Cairo
Pango/ATK
Also check the Human Interface Guidelines and the API.
Activities
Web Browsing
The Xulrunner based brower users the scaling engine from Firefox 1.9. Starting in build 303, this greatly improves browser behavior and font and image sizes more likely to be acceptable. Later builds improve yet further. With our high resolution screen, we have had to go "first" in innovation in web browser technology. Performance work still needs to be done, particularly to speed scaling of images. Google Maps and Google Talk now both work well. Please let us know when you find web sites with clear formatting problems.
Plug-ins should be installed in the directory /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.
The current version ship with an free version of Flash, called gnash; it has improved substantially from Trial-1. Adobe's Flash plug in works fine, which many may find preferable until gnash matures further. Video will likely work in Gnash in its next version.
- Problems with flash plugin with the web activity
- Resolved in build 385. Sufficient font aliases have been added for old X11 core fonts that most applications not yet updated to the current X client-side font model should work: specifically, the menus in Adobe Flash 9 for Linux would crash the plug in and browser despite more than 4 years of deployment of the new font system. Note that proper internationalization is impossible using the old X Window System font system. We see use of these fonts as a crutch that must be removed to meet OLPC's worldwide mission. The "xset -fp /usr/share/fonts/dejavu-lgc" can be used to remove these aliases.
The web browser does not ship with Java plug-in. Sun's Java and web browser plug-in work fine.
Download and identification of media types (audio/video) and their hand off to the proper media type player has not been implemented: we hope this will make BTest-3. We were not expecting the availability of the Helix player or of a gstreamer based media player at this date.
The web browser has no tabs, no zoom (yet), no provision for ebook mode (yet).
User experience has problems with pop windows, Frame interfering with scrolling.
xbook
File viewer through the browser, or as a sugar activity. The PDF format view is brought to you by the poppler library and Cairo graphics library.
The xbook application has no provision for ebook mode (yet).
Chat
We're unhappy enough about the jabber based chat program's state (which needs lots of tender loving care), that we temporarily pulled it from the build for our first trials. We suggest Google Talk, or similar web chat services, as a temporary measure.
Etoys
The Etoys learning environment has been integrated into the Sugar environment, and you are encouraged to visit the Squeakland site. Sugar Etoys has information specific to Etoys in our Sugar environment.
TamTam
| Included page TamTam Release Notes | [edit] |
B4/Trial-2 Release Notes for TamTam activities
- Notes
- TamTam includes four activities: miniTamTam, TamTamJam, TamTam Edit, and synthLab.
- Microphone recording fully functional in TamTamJam
- WARNINGS:
- Do NOT suspend the XO while using TamTam. A very unpleasant sound will result when you resume. This problem will be fixed in Trial-3.
- Occasionally TamTam will not restart when you have just quit it. Allow up to 20 seconds between launches.
- General recommendations
- What follows is a series of considerations and suggestions about TamTam.
- Do play around with the properties window. It allows to change individual sounds, full tracks or full pages.
- Do play with the Generation window. Its a little obscure presently but it can generate quite extraordinary music.
- Do try a lot of different instruments.
- Do experiment with synthLab. Its a little complicated for kids presently and needs to have complete sound design tutorials but an adult should be able to figure it out. The keyboard works the same way it does in miniTamTam.
- There is a quantizing sequence recorder in miniTamTam. Left-click on the record button will start recording on the next down beat and keep going until the drumloop has completed a full cycle. Right click allows you to record on top with another track. Note: the drum has to be playing for the sequencer to work.
Write
The Write activity is based on AbiWord. This activity is fully integrated in the Sugar environment, and provides an efficient, light weight text editor. It has support for reading various documents formats, such as Microsoft Word (.doc, .rtf), OpenDocument (.odt), (X)HTML (.html), and plain text (.txt). The core of this activity might be used for editing text in the wiki as well.
Since BTest-2 quite a number of bugs have been fixed and a few features have been added.
- Collaboration
Terminal
The terminal window (Memphis) is launched by typing Alt-=
Paint
A simple paint program is now in the distribution. It is considered just a beginning.
The application is fully written in Python, using only GTK features. It is being developed at LSI-USP in Brazil.
Blockparty
A famous, simple game of falling blocks, often known as Tetris. Contributed by Vadim Gerasimov.
Slideshow
An image viewer that will display images taken earlier by the camera application.
Newsreader
Based on PenguinTV. A few RSS feeds of educational interest have been preprogrammed as examples:
- Astronomy Picture of the Day
- BBC News
- EPOD - Earth Science Picture of the Day
- Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
- Planet OLPC
Other feeds can easily be added/substituted.
Calc
A simple calculator activity contributed by Mauro Torres et al. of the Tuquito Linux project in Argentina was replaced by a completely unexpected, more functional Calc activity written by Reinier Heeres at Harvard in build 385. Our thanks to both Mauro and Reinier for their efforts.
Temporary placeholders and Missing Pieces
There is no user interface for controlling the audio input and mixing. The workaround right now is to use "alsamixer" in a terminal window. Speaker volume is controllable by the slider. There is currently no visual feedback for changing the volume.
Our plans include a web server and wiki system and journal, with a simple WYSIWYG editor based on the write activity (currently Abiword). This has a collaborative write capability we will be exploiting.
Backlight control
The backlight button on the bezel does not work yet, but the backlight can be controlled using F6 (dimmer) and F7 (brighter); F8 turns on color; F9 turns off color.
Video/Camera Player
The controls (brightness, hue, saturation) are not hooked up in the device driver or video player application in BTest-1 (build 185). The driver adding these controls to Alsa (the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) will be merged in a build soon.
The camera is exhibiting more noise than expected in assembled units. On BTest-1 systems, one of the multiple source vendor's camera exhibits much higher exhibits much higher noise than on others.
We have used mplayer on the machine, but as it pulls in many dependencies, we put together a simple gstreamer based application for demonstration of the camera and video playing.
The BTest-2 system does not have a LED to indicate if the camera or microphone is enabled. Such a LED will be present on a later system.
A more evolved camera application, which records video and can find it and play it back, is under development.
The eToys activity includes support for the Webcam and a lot of experimentation can be done using the eToys scripting system.
Real's Helix Player Activity
Others have successfully played back videos and DVD's on the system, including RealNetwork formats. A Sugar version of Real's Helix player is available, though not in the base install. Please see the Helix Media Activity release notes for further detail. A browser plug-in version of this is expected soon.
Base system
OLPC Platform
Inventory of "permanent" packages
Inventory of "debug" packages
Inventory of "optional" packages (?)
Development environment
Languages - Logo, javascript, Python
Libraries
Where to find source
Internationalization/Localization (see Category:Language support & Category:Languages (international))
Other Multimedia Software
Other software that has been tested on the OLPC systems includes Adobe Flash, and Real's RealPlayer® and Helix player.
Finding the Latest Test Builds
Development and stable builds can be downloaded. Boot firmware is kept in this wiki. The latest stable firmware and system image combined into an easy to use package with a script to automate installation of the firmware and base image makes upgrades to the latest stable software extremely easy.