BTest-1 Release Notes
Introductions and Expectations Setting
There is a major difference between the OLPC system and a conventional laptop of approximately five years ago; that is, our base system software is much more capable than it was then. The Linux environment now supports internationalization capability for scripts that were out of our reach then, and much higher quality rendering and, best of all, a much wider range of applications.
This has come somewhat at a cost, however: Moore's "Law" has allowed us to become sloppy, both in memory usage and CPU usage; this tends to force us to make some tough choices to keep the "footprint" of the software acceptable. The OLPC laptop have only 512 MB of storage (Flash), probably the most serious limitation, 128 MB of RAM, and a single-core processor. Over the last year or so, the community has become much more sensitive to these issues, and work is well underway toward reigning in this "bloat".
Our base technology choices have been predicated on the ability of the software to achieve the best overall worldwide "user experience". This drove our choice of GTK+ and Pango (with Cairo as the graphical underpinnings), since Pango's abilities in complex scripts are currently most advanced of free software technologies. Other toolkits can be used: but they come at a cost in memory and flash footprint, and today, in the ability of software based on them to be localized to many of the scripts we face immediately, which include both Thai and Arabic. Including other toolkits as a standard part of our base system is therefore problematic, and experience on embedded systems show that including multiple toolkits would almost certainly cause the overall experience to suffer.
The Meaning of BTest
This is the beta test of fully functional hardware; however, the software is really in "alpha test". Most of our effort to date has been consumed by basic device support as well as putting together the basic user interface framework for children. Major components are as yet not complete: power management and the wiki editing system to name two large components. Enough is now present to begin to sketch the outline of where we believe the children's software should go: enabling the construction of software in which children and teachers can easily collaborate is central to our vision. Children should not be passive recievers of "content" but creators as well.
Hardware
User's guide to the hardware
Pictures/features
Hardware specification
Hardware release notes
texturing
whatever else turns up.
keyboards
Software
Installation
How to install/upgrade OLPC Fedora
How to upgrade BIOS firmware
How to upgrade Marvell firmware
User Interface
Sugar
intent and goals
presence
collaboration
navigation
personal
friends
mesh
world
search
Journal (someday)
Programming Sugar
Sugar interfaces
goocanvas
GTK+
Cairo
Pango/ATK
Activities
Web Browsing
chat
EToys
The EToys learning environment has been integrated into the Sugar environment, and you are encouraged both to visit the Squeakland site. Sugar EToys has information specific to EToys in our Sugar environment.
tamtam???
Temporary placeholders
video/camera player
Abiword
logo???
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
Other software known to work
Flash
Helix player
...
How to Contribute
dev.laptop.org
git
general hosting offer
olpc-2.6 repository
fedora kernel image
trac
wiki
mailing lists
who is who
pointers to key technology organizations
gnome, X.org, Cairo, gtk+, kernel.org,
mozilla,etc.
content
public
contacts at OLPC
Contacts
contacts at OLPC