OLPC:News

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   HowTo [ID# 128783]  +/-  

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2008-04-26

Tech Team in Deployments

In Montevideo two weeks ago, team Ceibal and Martin Langhoff worked together for two days. Focus was on mapping a road to convergence with the NOC that looks after School servers, and better communication with 1CC. The Ceibal team has significant depth of experience with XOs in the field, their lessons learned and effective scripts are gold.

In Lima more than a week ago, Martin worked with the local team, fleshing out AP testing strategies, XS roadmap, and XS administration infrastructure.

John Watlington, in Peru this week, has been in discussion about school server specifications. It became clear once again that cheap, and environmentally robust school server hardware is a missing part of the OLPC system. Peru's previous experience with using traditional PC hardware in the jungle and the Andes was that the machines failed frequently, due to the heat. Listing the required environmental requirements in the specifications results in a multiplication of the price. Complicating the process is the fact that most bidders are assembling the units from whatever components they have on hand, resulting in varying quality across the entire lot.

School Server

Martin Langhoff reports lots of hacking around xs-config. He shaved all the yaks necessary to get portable xs-build actually building live CDs successfully. PyAr programmers Alejandro Cura, Lucio Torre and Ricardo Quesada worked with Martin and held 2 XS-focused Sprints, working on idmgr (security and registration lag) and CDpedia (yet another wikipedia slicer). (2 weeks ago, catching up on weekend reports)

With Tomeu Visozo's help, XO-to-XS backups are finally moving forward. The XS image is seeing some progress in minor installation bugs.

Power

A build of the Multi-Battery Charger of 50 units is in the planning stages. The final few tweaks to the tooling are happening this week. It currently looks like this will happen the 2nd or 3 week in May.

Richard Smith, Scott Ananian, Andres Salomon, & Chris Ball discussed some possibilities for enhanced power management. Ideas are brewing, more structured planning should occur soon. Andres and Richard began to lay out the plan of attack for achieving the sub-200ms resume goal. Work will begin as soon as Andres is finished with his upstream kernel merge.

Chris Ball began thinking about a user-selected low-power mode for the XO, to showcase our power management work, Trac #6935. This would be an "under the covers" mode where we prolong your battery life by any means necessary, including disabling networking (which is currently the major obstacle to pervasive power management all the time).

Software Development

Eben Eliason cleaned up and pushed Journal redesigns, now in joyride, and worked with Martin Dengler on improving/adding devices to the Frame.

Scott Ananian spent some time this week assessing the technical viability of Sugar on Windows. Please look for his Mini-conference video postings at Apr_3-4_Mini-conference. Also, he started gathering useful content from his FISL trip at http://download.laptop.org/content/conf/20080417-fisl08/

Chris Ball resurrected our Tinderbox tool, and told it all about the joyride, faster and update.1 build streams as well as how to build sugar-jhbuild regularly. Michael Stone began to outline some documentation for how volunteers can help us by running and improving it themselves at Tinderbox.

Michael Stone prepared rainbow patches allowing faster activity launching and sugarization. He submitted them for review to code review. He also reviewed backup bugs, then organized a software status meeting on datastore and backup bugs.

There was much discussion this week on the mailing lists and in forums regarding OLPC's commitment to open source, transparency, and how to improve communications. Most of the team spent time working with the community, in discussion and in writing their own thoughts on how to move forward. There will be more discussions and a meeting with Nicholas next week when he is back in town.

Sayamindu Dasgupta took the existing Pootle user's Guide presentation created by Sameer Verma and updated it to reflect the new look and feel of our Pootle installation. He also added a few more slides, highlighting some of the special cases one might encounter while working on the translations, as well as some tricks that might make the translation easier. The slides are available at https://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.odp and https://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.pdf.

Simon Schampijer has been doing stabilizing work by cleaning the sugar code using pylint.

Network/Collaboration

Guillaume Desmottes ressurected the video-chat-activity and packaged the needed bits to make it work with current Joyride. It's far from being perfect but it should be usable for simple tests (he successfully established audio/video calls between 2 XO's and between 1 XO and Empathy). See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/013227.html for details.

It appeared than some collaboration problems are due to ejabberd bugs. Need to contact Process-1 guys. Maybe we could add a "ejabberd" component to trac assigned to them?

Morgan Collett tested ejabberd installation instructions (Installing_ejabberd) with Ubuntu 8.04. He also worked on Sugar in Ubuntu 8.04. He extended the HelloMesh collaboration example to send a simple text control over the Tube, with alerts to show what is happening. He fixed a bundlebuilder problem in Sugar introduced by the pylint patches and worked on Chat UI. Please send Morgan any collaboration-related news, or add it to Collaboration_Central.

Dafydd Harries worked on introductory documentation to Telepathy framework, helped Guillaume get started on working on Gadget, and began mentoring Assim in his Summer of Code project.

Dennis Gilmore reports that we can now submit activities for review. Fedora 9 has working support in GDM/KDM to log into sugar. Draft guidelines can be found here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DennisGilmore/SugarActivityGuidelines. They will be moved to the final location very soon. This will offer a great platform for developing activities. it will also help sugar be more accessible to people. Please package and submit your activity. Please ask Dennis if you have questions.

Testing

John Watlington, in Peru this week, performed tests against different access points, while the Collaboration and Mesh Testbed in Peabody was dismantled and is in search for its new home. Two more low-cost access points (one from Linksys and one from DLink) have been tested against a classroom of fifty XOs, and seemed to perform fine.

Ricardo Carrano reports that tests with firmware 22.p10 during the week revealed that we seen to be free of #6589, but we still have issues with the multicast filter (new issues were found in the proposed path and addressed during the week). With a test kernel, we can now run firmware 22.p10 without problems in nodes were idle suspend is not active, but a suspended node still does not react as expected (it is incapable of detecting a new neighbor or shared activity). The next step is determining if there are issues in the firmware or if the driver patch is still not satisfactory.

He is attempting to build a clear view of current wireless issues and started a wiki page which focus on problems to be addressed in the libertas firmware or driver but which also lists other network-related issues like middleware, hardware, school server or applications (Wireless_Issues_Apr08) On the same note, I am trying to update the open tickets and close the fixed ones. Contributions to the page and to the tickets are more than welcome.

Support

Richard Smith helped out with the OLPC manufacturing server some more this week. Turns out some of the issues were not as bad as originally thought and we were able to work out most of the issues with the erroneous data we got from Quanta. They claim to have added some checks that will help prevent future occurrences.

Richard Smith wrote to the community to address issues with keyboard failures due to sticky keys. The manufacturers of the keyboard have worked with OLPC to make changes to the internal construction of the keyboard. We strongly believe that these changes should fix the sticky keys issue. These changes have been rolled in over the last few weeks of production.

If indeed the problem is much more widespread then OLPC needs more accurate data on the failure rate. OLPC invites the community to help. If you currently have an XO with a sticky key then please add your serial number to the following wiki page and what key(s) appear to be sticking. Stuck_keys_SN

Emily Smith reports that she and Adam Holt have successfully created a shipping order to Brightstar for 122 replacement laptops, and for spare parts for our first potential repair centers. No replacements had been going out in the last several weeks due to problems ranging from oversight of the RMA program to detailed format problems with our ship orders. Communicating shipping orders with BStar has been a problem for weeks and donors continue to be frustrated with these delays. We hope we have the ship order detail figured out by early next week with much help from Christine Myrick and Gustavo Mariotto.

Emily spoke with about 5 donors on the phone regarding G1G1 refunds and Getting Started questions. The majority of her time is spent answering emails regarding G1G1 questions ("where's my laptop?" is most common, followed by "how do I use this thing?" and "It's too difficult to use, I want my money back!"). She also sends out tax receipts for people who have re-donated their laptops back to us (about 70 in that queue).

Adam Holt reports that he continues to work on tons of escalated shipping and billing tickets. He is very hopeful that the deluge will ease by around May 1. Adam is working with 15 worldwide community repair centers' and sent out the first broken laptops to them to seed their centers. He is also collecting updates from the Support Gang for next week's G1G1 PostMortem, lessons learned, so that the extensive experience can be used in future programs.

SysAdmin

Henry Edward Hardy placed the order for three new servers to replace pedal,crank and xs-dev. We expect to receive these within a few weeks and start configuring them. Thanks to everyone who helped with the specification and ordering process!

We experienced significant downtime at 1cc this week due to an unscheduled electric power interruption. Everything at 1cc was down for several hours. Public facing services on crank and pedal such as git repositories, mailing lists and mail aliases, OLPC website and wikis, were apparently unaffected.

We are done with testing and pre-configuring the Big Sister monitoring service. This will assist in monitoring the health of our systems and give us some metrics for uptime and service accessibility and response times. We plan to deploy the Big Sister server on the xs-dev replacement.

There has been a power-related crash which has damaged the filestructure on the Chinese-deployed OLPC manufacturing data server. Richard Smith and Henry are assisting in the recovery efforts.

Other

Charles Kane has produced a wonderful Internet slideshow which is posted on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4ojFcZIqRU. He was assisted by Michail Bletsas, Darah Tappitake, Jennifer Amaya, Henry Edward Hardy and Bernie Innocenti of OLPC-Europe.

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

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

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
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.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 128783]  +/-  

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2008-04-26

Tech Team in Deployments

In Montevideo two weeks ago, team Ceibal and Martin Langhoff worked together for two days. Focus was on mapping a road to convergence with the NOC that looks after School servers, and better communication with 1CC. The Ceibal team has significant depth of experience with XOs in the field, their lessons learned and effective scripts are gold.

In Lima more than a week ago, Martin worked with the local team, fleshing out AP testing strategies, XS roadmap, and XS administration infrastructure.

John Watlington, in Peru this week, has been in discussion about school server specifications. It became clear once again that cheap, and environmentally robust school server hardware is a missing part of the OLPC system. Peru's previous experience with using traditional PC hardware in the jungle and the Andes was that the machines failed frequently, due to the heat. Listing the required environmental requirements in the specifications results in a multiplication of the price. Complicating the process is the fact that most bidders are assembling the units from whatever components they have on hand, resulting in varying quality across the entire lot.

School Server

Martin Langhoff reports lots of hacking around xs-config. He shaved all the yaks necessary to get portable xs-build actually building live CDs successfully. PyAr programmers Alejandro Cura, Lucio Torre and Ricardo Quesada worked with Martin and held 2 XS-focused Sprints, working on idmgr (security and registration lag) and CDpedia (yet another wikipedia slicer). (2 weeks ago, catching up on weekend reports)

With Tomeu Visozo's help, XO-to-XS backups are finally moving forward. The XS image is seeing some progress in minor installation bugs.

Power

A build of the Multi-Battery Charger of 50 units is in the planning stages. The final few tweaks to the tooling are happening this week. It currently looks like this will happen the 2nd or 3 week in May.

Richard Smith, Scott Ananian, Andres Salomon, & Chris Ball discussed some possibilities for enhanced power management. Ideas are brewing, more structured planning should occur soon. Andres and Richard began to lay out the plan of attack for achieving the sub-200ms resume goal. Work will begin as soon as Andres is finished with his upstream kernel merge.

Chris Ball began thinking about a user-selected low-power mode for the XO, to showcase our power management work, Trac #6935. This would be an "under the covers" mode where we prolong your battery life by any means necessary, including disabling networking (which is currently the major obstacle to pervasive power management all the time).

Software Development

Eben Eliason cleaned up and pushed Journal redesigns, now in joyride, and worked with Martin Dengler on improving/adding devices to the Frame.

Scott Ananian spent some time this week assessing the technical viability of Sugar on Windows. Please look for his Mini-conference video postings at Apr_3-4_Mini-conference. Also, he started gathering useful content from his FISL trip at http://download.laptop.org/content/conf/20080417-fisl08/

Chris Ball resurrected our Tinderbox tool, and told it all about the joyride, faster and update.1 build streams as well as how to build sugar-jhbuild regularly. Michael Stone began to outline some documentation for how volunteers can help us by running and improving it themselves at Tinderbox.

Michael Stone prepared rainbow patches allowing faster activity launching and sugarization. He submitted them for review to code review. He also reviewed backup bugs, then organized a software status meeting on datastore and backup bugs.

There was much discussion this week on the mailing lists and in forums regarding OLPC's commitment to open source, transparency, and how to improve communications. Most of the team spent time working with the community, in discussion and in writing their own thoughts on how to move forward. There will be more discussions and a meeting with Nicholas next week when he is back in town.

Sayamindu Dasgupta took the existing Pootle user's Guide presentation created by Sameer Verma and updated it to reflect the new look and feel of our Pootle installation. He also added a few more slides, highlighting some of the special cases one might encounter while working on the translations, as well as some tricks that might make the translation easier. The slides are available at https://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.odp and https://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/pootleforxo2.pdf.

Simon Schampijer has been doing stabilizing work by cleaning the sugar code using pylint.

Network/Collaboration

Guillaume Desmottes ressurected the video-chat-activity and packaged the needed bits to make it work with current Joyride. It's far from being perfect but it should be usable for simple tests (he successfully established audio/video calls between 2 XO's and between 1 XO and Empathy). See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/013227.html for details.

It appeared than some collaboration problems are due to ejabberd bugs. Need to contact Process-1 guys. Maybe we could add a "ejabberd" component to trac assigned to them?

Morgan Collett tested ejabberd installation instructions (Installing_ejabberd) with Ubuntu 8.04. He also worked on Sugar in Ubuntu 8.04. He extended the HelloMesh collaboration example to send a simple text control over the Tube, with alerts to show what is happening. He fixed a bundlebuilder problem in Sugar introduced by the pylint patches and worked on Chat UI. Please send Morgan any collaboration-related news, or add it to Collaboration_Central.

Dafydd Harries worked on introductory documentation to Telepathy framework, helped Guillaume get started on working on Gadget, and began mentoring Assim in his Summer of Code project.

Dennis Gilmore reports that we can now submit activities for review. Fedora 9 has working support in GDM/KDM to log into sugar. Draft guidelines can be found here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DennisGilmore/SugarActivityGuidelines. They will be moved to the final location very soon. This will offer a great platform for developing activities. it will also help sugar be more accessible to people. Please package and submit your activity. Please ask Dennis if you have questions.

Testing

John Watlington, in Peru this week, performed tests against different access points, while the Collaboration and Mesh Testbed in Peabody was dismantled and is in search for its new home. Two more low-cost access points (one from Linksys and one from DLink) have been tested against a classroom of fifty XOs, and seemed to perform fine.

Ricardo Carrano reports that tests with firmware 22.p10 during the week revealed that we seen to be free of #6589, but we still have issues with the multicast filter (new issues were found in the proposed path and addressed during the week). With a test kernel, we can now run firmware 22.p10 without problems in nodes were idle suspend is not active, but a suspended node still does not react as expected (it is incapable of detecting a new neighbor or shared activity). The next step is determining if there are issues in the firmware or if the driver patch is still not satisfactory.

He is attempting to build a clear view of current wireless issues and started a wiki page which focus on problems to be addressed in the libertas firmware or driver but which also lists other network-related issues like middleware, hardware, school server or applications (Wireless_Issues_Apr08) On the same note, I am trying to update the open tickets and close the fixed ones. Contributions to the page and to the tickets are more than welcome.

Support

Richard Smith helped out with the OLPC manufacturing server some more this week. Turns out some of the issues were not as bad as originally thought and we were able to work out most of the issues with the erroneous data we got from Quanta. They claim to have added some checks that will help prevent future occurrences.

Richard Smith wrote to the community to address issues with keyboard failures due to sticky keys. The manufacturers of the keyboard have worked with OLPC to make changes to the internal construction of the keyboard. We strongly believe that these changes should fix the sticky keys issue. These changes have been rolled in over the last few weeks of production.

If indeed the problem is much more widespread then OLPC needs more accurate data on the failure rate. OLPC invites the community to help. If you currently have an XO with a sticky key then please add your serial number to the following wiki page and what key(s) appear to be sticking. Stuck_keys_SN

Emily Smith reports that she and Adam Holt have successfully created a shipping order to Brightstar for 122 replacement laptops, and for spare parts for our first potential repair centers. No replacements had been going out in the last several weeks due to problems ranging from oversight of the RMA program to detailed format problems with our ship orders. Communicating shipping orders with BStar has been a problem for weeks and donors continue to be frustrated with these delays. We hope we have the ship order detail figured out by early next week with much help from Christine Myrick and Gustavo Mariotto.

Emily spoke with about 5 donors on the phone regarding G1G1 refunds and Getting Started questions. The majority of her time is spent answering emails regarding G1G1 questions ("where's my laptop?" is most common, followed by "how do I use this thing?" and "It's too difficult to use, I want my money back!"). She also sends out tax receipts for people who have re-donated their laptops back to us (about 70 in that queue).

Adam Holt reports that he continues to work on tons of escalated shipping and billing tickets. He is very hopeful that the deluge will ease by around May 1. Adam is working with 15 worldwide community repair centers' and sent out the first broken laptops to them to seed their centers. He is also collecting updates from the Support Gang for next week's G1G1 PostMortem, lessons learned, so that the extensive experience can be used in future programs.

SysAdmin

Henry Edward Hardy placed the order for three new servers to replace pedal,crank and xs-dev. We expect to receive these within a few weeks and start configuring them. Thanks to everyone who helped with the specification and ordering process!

We experienced significant downtime at 1cc this week due to an unscheduled electric power interruption. Everything at 1cc was down for several hours. Public facing services on crank and pedal such as git repositories, mailing lists and mail aliases, OLPC website and wikis, were apparently unaffected.

We are done with testing and pre-configuring the Big Sister monitoring service. This will assist in monitoring the health of our systems and give us some metrics for uptime and service accessibility and response times. We plan to deploy the Big Sister server on the xs-dev replacement.

There has been a power-related crash which has damaged the filestructure on the Chinese-deployed OLPC manufacturing data server. Richard Smith and Henry are assisting in the recovery efforts.

Other

Charles Kane has produced a wonderful Internet slideshow which is posted on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4ojFcZIqRU. He was assisted by Michail Bletsas, Darah Tappitake, Jennifer Amaya, Henry Edward Hardy and Bernie Innocenti of OLPC-Europe.

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

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

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
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.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site. Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

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