OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. The OLPC Board passed a resolution for the Luxembourg-based SES Global to become its newest member. SES Astra and SES Americom will serve as worldwide partners to provide satellite connectivity and smart ground solutions for broadcasting, data, and Internet connections. SES Americom CEO Ed Horowitz—a close collaborator for nearly 20 years ago—will represent SES on the Board.
2. Nicholas spoke at AMD's Global Vision Conference, Agents of Change: Driving the Power of Innovation in Pasadena. The meeting featured a blue-ribbon cast of speakers and an audience that included many old friends from the Media Lab, including Lego, Dreamworks, Sun, and many others.
3. Alan Kay, Kim Rose and the eToys team finished up a two-week visit to the OLPC office in Cambridge. They made significant progress both in porting their environment onto the Laptop and integrating the user interface into the Sugar environment. They also provided valuable feedback to the OLPC software team.
4. Display: LCD-B (with twice the reflectance of LCD-A) is still on track for a 25 September demo. The reflective-mode resolution is 1200×900; resolution in color mode (backlight on) may be higher than 800×600. A White Paper is being written to discuss the resolution of color mode.
5. Software team: David Zeuthen will be leaving the Red Hat OLPC team. He's going back to work for Red Hat's desktop team, focusing on ongoing HAL work, which will eventually filter back and benefit One Laptop per Child. He will be replaced by John Palmieri, who comes from the desktop team. John is one of the upstream maintainers of the D-Bus program, one of the fundamental components in the Laptop software. He will be focusing on general distribution issues and assisting Dan Williams and Marco Gritti with working on Sugar.
6. Audio: Csound—the core of the music system on the Laptop—is now part of Fedora Extras. The latest image builds include Csound in the distribution. There are still a few outstanding patches being prepared by Barry Vercoe and Simon Schampijer to update to the latest Csound.
7. Security: Ivan Kristić attended the HITB 2006 Security and Hacking conference in Malaysia to review the Laptop security model with the experts convening there. Meanwhile, Simson Garfinkel has been doing interviews of everyone involved in the project and based on that output (the first draft of which has just now become available) we will be able to make the changes required to the OS to support the recommendations. Chris Blizzard has also been gathering expertise inside of Red Hat to help consult on Laptop security.
8. CAFE and DCON: David Woodhouse is preparing to test the CAFE FPGA hardware. Once that is done and comments are made on the NAND driver, the changes should be ready to push upstream into the kernel. David also made a new mtd-utils (utilities for managing memory technology) release and put it into Extras, which means we are able to report information about compression savings during file-system creation. This feature will be very important when we are ready to make our push to get the size of the OS down, since we can know how much space we're saving with any particular file or package. David has also been assisting Jordan Crouse of AMD completing the kernel-level DCON code. The kernel changes required are largely complete. It is an important first step.
9. Power management: Jordan has taken very preliminary power measurements of the Laptop, with and without the DCON, with and without the color display; it is a starting point for the power management work which is now starting up. Measurement is particularly important, and we have been exploring ways to make these measurements, which will be key to making software progress and preventing regressions. Our power consumption has started to be noticed in the Linux community: http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/tag/olpc. It will only improve from here.
10. Touchpad: Jim Gettys reports that the dual-mode touch pad is now working properly on the Laptop. The pieces of the puzzle were put together across the entire team and finally nailed by Vance Ke and and Ray Tseng at Quanta, who identified some incorrectly set registers (used to enable the PS/2 ports interrupts). This has highlighted the value of the PRS tools (preferred register setting tools) of AMD, which we had not properly appreciated to audit the internal register settings of the Geode. Mitch Bradley is working his way through the settings to verify that the Geode's internal registers are all properly set.
11. BIOS: LZMA compression was added to LinuxBIOS this week; this is a much more efficient compression algorithm than we had been using and freed significant flash space, which, of course, we can (and did) immediately fill: Carl-Daniel Hailfinger added the Libertas wireless driver, its firmware, and TCP/IPv4. We'd like to be able to use wireless for installation in the field; whether all this can fit into the serial BIOS ROM—the most robust solution—or will require additional space on NAND flash, is still not known. Another issue with RAM timing was diagnosed and fixed in LinuxBIOS this week; this one was was, ironically, observed only when running the machine slower.
12. Diagnostics: Mitch has been working on a diagnostic framework for the Laptop, both for hardware failures and as a framework for testing the myriad of power domains (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_Power_Domains). Each and every domain must be properly tested before we can commit the hardware to mass production and this testing needs to be complete before we are likely to have completed all the Linux work for power management. Mitch now has drivers for NAND flash (both GX and CaFe), GX frame buffer, USB mass storage, keyboard, and ethernet. The diagnostic can run in any environment—from ROM as a LinuxBIOS payload, booted from USB via LinuxBIOS, or booted from USB via Insyde BIOS.
13. UI: Walter Bender and Chris Blizzard meet with the Pentagram team about the latest user-interface design. We discussed various issues including the journal and how the touchpad might be interfaced.
14. Sugar update: Marco Gritti has implemented the basic grid design and the zoom. In the Mesh View we are currently displaying only the activity icons, but it's possible to join activities. In the Friends View you can add and remove friends and you can invite your friends to activities by picking actions from the hovering menu. Dan has implemented the active activity logic, propagation over the network and has partially hooked it up on the friends view. Marco has also implemented the frame activation/deactivation logic and has made a first pass at the animation API. From the frame you can now launch new activities, share them on the network through the application menu, and join activities from the invitations that appears on the bottom of the Frame. On the right edge of the Frame we display the XO icons of the buddies participating to the activity. You can “make them friends” from a menu. Marco has done some testing, bug fixing, performance enhancements, and code refactoring. He has also integrated some of the icons designed by Pentagram.
15. In a related effort, Ivan has frozen Verison 1.0 of the document format used in the Journal (and wiki). The general datastore, differential storage engine, and indexing engine are also largely finished. A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor in progress, as well as a reference identity service/emergent public key infrastructure implementation.
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MILESTONES
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| 06 Jun. 2006 | First video with working prototype [1] |
| 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.)