OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Many put in Herculean efforts and as scheduled the first build of X0 was begun on Tuesday afternoon November 14th. About 35 operators assembled the laptops with the over-site of the entire technical team from Quanta and Mark Foster and Mary Lou Jepsen from OLPC and David Woodhouse from Red Hat on hand. The first laptop was started with its motherboard, and ran most of the way through the line alone —with every operator idle except for the one, each operator successively doing his or her job. After Laptop #1 had made it through about 20 operators, Laptop #2 was started. 221 laptops were built on Tuesday and an additional 600 units on Thursday; many are still in run-in and final test.
2. As part of the follow up of last week's meeting, the IADB and OLPC issued a press release regarding strategic areas of common interest: (a) regional and national policy dialog regarding adopting a new approach to the use of computers in education; (b) technical assistance; (c) design and support for evaluation activities; (d) content development tailor-made to the 1-to-1 learning environment; (e) design of effective strategies to integrate individual computer devices in the daily lives of children, both at home and in school; and (f) design of effective approaches to supporting schools and teachers implementing 1-to-1 computing programs.
2. New York: Nicholas delivered a presentation at the closing session of the United Nations' International Forum on the Eradication of Poverty on Thursday. The session included Prof. Iqbal Quadir, Founder of Grameen phone and currently the Director, Program in Developmental Entrepreneurship at MIT.
3. Santa Clara: Walter Bender gave a talk at the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit and demonstrated the laptop to the public—its first public showing.
4. Cambridge: OLPC held an all-hands meeting to review B1 status and organize our selves for the next phase of development, initial testing, and deployment. All aspects of the system were given a thorough review and critique.
5. The arrival of the machines has accelerated the software. We can finally see the fonts, test the keyboard, and feel the performance. We've already fixed a number of small bugs this week and will be able to make an update BIOS and OS image release for people to use on the B1 machines.
In short: we shipped a BIOS, a bootloader, embedded-controller code, a working Linux system with support for all devices, a new user-interface environment, along with a web browser, music programs, network manager, chat program, and word processor.
In thanking all of those who have contributed to this effort, we undoubted missed someone; our apologies for those whom we fail to mention below.
The BIOS, EC code, and bootloader were brought to you by Mitch Bradley, Ted Juan, Vance Ke, Arvin Liu, Ron Minnich, Richard Smith, Lilian Walter, Tom Sylla, Terry Su, Ray Tseng, and the LinuxBIOS team.
The base system was brought to you by the team of Chris Ball, Michail Bletsas, Chris Blizzard, Javier Cardona, Brian Cavagnolo, Ronak Chokshi, John Corbett, Alan Cunningham, Jordan Crouse, Marco Gritti, Jim Gettys, Zephaniah Hull, Ivan Krstić, Adam Jackson, Jaya Kumar, Pierre Ossman, John Palmieri, Luis Carlos Cobo Rus, Andres Salomon, Marcelo Tosatti, Dan Williams, Dave Woodhouse, David Zeuthen and the Linux and free and open software community as a whole.
The window system and user interface toolkit brought to you by Jordan Crouse, Zephaniah Hull, Adam Jackson, Jim Gettys, the X Window System, GTK+, Gstreamer, and Cairo communities, along with Manu Cornet, and Matthew Allum.
Abiword for kids brought to you by Erik Blankinship, Justin Gallardo, J.M. Maurer, Martin Sevior and the Abiword community.
CSound brought to you by Barry Vercoe, Rick Boulanger, Simon Schampijer, and the CSound community.
EToys brought to you on OLPC by Bert Freudenberg, Alan Kay, Yoshiki Ohshima, Andreas Raab, Kim Rose, and the entire EToys and Squeak community. Our thanks to Steve Jobs for relicensing Squeak.
PenguinTV brought to you by Owen Williams and the Gecko rendering engine of Mozilla.
Sugar brought to you by Walter Bender, Chris Blizzard, Eben Eliason, Marco Pesenti Gritti, and Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Schmidt, and the team from Pentagram.
Sugar's web browser is based on the Gecko rendering engine of the Mozilla foundation.
TamTam and Memosono brought to you by Douglas Ec, Nathanaël Lécaudé, Bélanger Olivier, and Jean Piché.
Xbook broght to you by Tomeu Vizoso, Manusheel Gupta, and the Popplar team.
Orchestration by Walter Bender, Jim Gettys, and Chris Blizzard.
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.
Press requests: please send email to press@laptop.org
MILESTONES
| 10 Nov. 2006 | First B1 boards are built |
| 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.)
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx | Mark Foster delivers presentation to Standford University