OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Mark Foster happily reports that the DCON ASIC is up and running, and first pass silicon is fully functional. While the chip has a few bugs that will be corrected for future builds—including higher power consumption than planned—we will be able to exercise all the planned capabilities of the chip on the B1 systems.
2. Mark also reports that the CAFE (Camera and Flash Enabler) FPGA is now fully functional, with all three of the device subsystems working flawlessly. The camera, SD card slot, and NAND Flash controllers have not only been tested, they are fully integrated into the OLPC Linux kernel, with complete device drivers also working perfectly. Performance on the crucial NAND Flash controller—the laptop's primary storage device—is already much faster than that of the Geode, and will double again when the CAFE ASIC arrives. Many thanks to the great work by the CAFE team at Marvell, as well as the software team who pulled off the necessary device drivers in record time.
3. For B1 we plan to use a Linux 2.6.19 OLPC kernel with a Red Hat Fedora Core 6 run-time environment; this is lower risk than combining our own work with Fedora changes that might affect us that would not be of benefit.
4. Chris Blizzard reports that this was an exciting week for the software team. On the UI front we've had a lot of progress. Marco Gritti has moved from working on the shell and presentation bits to getting ready to start taking community contributions. This means starting on the parts of the code that allow anyone to build and deploy an activity that they have built.
The B1 build will include basic support for:
- Chat
- Web Browser
- Demo Sketching Program
- Etoys
- TamTam (for creating sounds)
- Musical Memory Game
- Xbook PDF reader
Community work going on as well: we are starting to see activity builds of Abiword (a popular document editor and our probably route to supporting Microsoft document types), and an RSS reader called PenguinTV.
5. Chris also reports that we made a lot of positive changes in the OS images this week as well. We've moved from the upstream Fedora kernels to our own builds to enable closer collaboration and faster turn around on builds. This won't work over the long term but it has enabled us to work faster and smarter in our current mode of development.
6. Crossmark, OLPC's lightweight markup language, has a dual purpose: in the strict sense, it's a markup for (collaborative) authoring environments such as our wiki and blogs; at the same time, it serves as an actual document format, suitable for use in the e-book reader, as well as for conversion to other output formats. Crossmark is designed to be read and written by humans, and only incidentally by computers, although it is parsable unambiguously. Crossmark draft-4 has received positive feedback from community and publishers, mostly trivial changes and clarifications are being incorporated into what will become draft-5 next week.
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.
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MILESTONES
| Oct. 2006 | B-test boards become available |
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| 06 Jun. 2006 | First video with working prototype [1] |
| May 2006 | A-test boards become available |
| 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.)