OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Michail Bletsas worked with Professor George Sergiadis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, on novel broadband antenna designs for the $100 Server. These antennas can be constructed with adhesive copper foil and glass at a very low cost and can support operation on both the 2.4 and 5.7 Ghz bands.
2. Alan Kay reports that Steve Jobs has agreed to relicense Squeak under the Apache License so we can include it with the base software in the laptop.
3. Mechanical design: Mark Foster reports a significant milestone: The first release of the system's mechanical design is now completed; all of the enclosure's component designs have been released for the creation of system tooling. These tools are hardened-steel molds that will be used to form the actual enclosure components from different blends of PC/ABS plastic. Many thanks to the team at Quanta for their incredibly hard work to complete the mechanical design on-time for the upcoming B-Test build.
4. Electrical design: Mark also reports good progress on electrical design. With successful completion of the debugging of the initial version of the CAFE (Camera and Flash Enabler) prototype chip, the team at Marvell has produced a second version of the CAFE design. The electrical team has also made great progress on the system's motherboard. This new “B-Test” motherboard is designed to work with the CAFE chip, as well as the DCON (Display CONtroller) ASIC. The first batch of B-Test motherboards has been fabricated and assembled.
C. Touch pad: The first full prototype of the system's touch pad, created by Alps, is scheduled to arrive early next week. Using an earlier prototype, Andres Salomon has the dual-mode touch pad working on our machines.
5. Chris Blizzard reports that we've made some more progress in shrinking the size of the OS. We've been able to remove some package dependencies in the gnome stack and work is underway to finally break the dependency on the old X font server, bitmap fonts and perl.
6. UI: The Sugar team has also been investigating a library called “HippoCanvas” that Havoc Pennington has been writing as part of his mugshot work. It's a canvas that fits very well with our model—as opposed to the other GNOME canvas libraries. Marco Gritti has been working hard on getting the canvas building in our environment and has started on python bindings for it.
7. Camera: Jon Corbet reported that the CAFE camera is working at about 15FPS (VGA resolution) using the PCI FPGA CAFE development board, which is about half of the ultimate hardware specification. A CAFE board was also sent to Pierre Ossman for SDhci driver testing. A third board arrived in Cambridge for additional driver testing.
8. VSA: Jordan reports that AMD has released the Virtual System Architecture (VSA) code under an open license; this is a major transition in how Geodes are treated and will be beneficial to AMD customers in general.
9. Test framework: AMD also released into open source a performance-test framework and some specific implementations of high-use routines implemented by John Zulauf. John did most of this work on a Geode LX, but the GX and LX are similar in most areas.
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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.)