OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Urugwiro Village: Rwanda committed to the one laptop per child initiative this week. "In recognition of children being Rwanda’s most precious natural resource, the government of Rwanda has committed to provide one laptop per child to all primary school children within five years."--H.E. President Paul Kagame
2. Mountain View: Chris Blizzard at spent time with Vladimir Vukicevic from Mozilla Corporation, who has done much of the Cairo (Linux graphics library) integration work with Gecko (Mozilla rendering engine). They talked about particular OLPC needs: support for 200DPI, arbitrary zooming of content, better performance and smaller size. Vladimir's claim was “you're about a year too early.” Support for arbitrary zooming is now just landing on the Mozilla trunk and will be stabilizing with the Gecko 1.9 branch and Firefox 3. The trunk already has better memory characteristics and performance improvements. Over time the engine will get a lot better, probably really landing some time in mid to late 2007, somewhat late for us. There's already support for flushing memory caches and it is just a question of finding the right knobs in the engine to turn when we encounter low-memory conditions.
3. Richard Smith, John Palmeri, Mitch Bradley, Chris Ball collaborated to build a new stable image (Build 212) to correct a serious battery overcharging problem using updated EC firmware from Quanta's team, and an image (Build 213) produced for testing BTest-2 itself. We are asking everyone to upgrade to Build 212 (See http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/build212/).
4. Mitch Bradley, using a tight Forth loop doing raw reads from the new CAFE NAND, was able to achieve our target of 20 Mbytes/second transfers. This is roughly 3 times the best performance we were able to get out of the FPGA version.
5. Quanta got one of the pre-B2 boards working Friday night. (Ted Juan used the word “booting” but didn't specify exactly what he meant.) Mitch has showed Quanta how to boot over the net, and got their USB Ethernet dongle working from the firmware.
6. Power management work is starting to pick up. Several people, including Lillian Walter, Jordan Crouse, Matthew Garrett, Marcelo Tosatti, and Jim Gettys are looking into various aspects of it. Lilian has begun compiling a list of devices for which to provide power-management code: codec, CAFE, SD, camera, NAND flash, keyboard, and touchpad.
7. Walter Bender has cleaned up all of the keyboard maps, along with building a new keyboard map for Urdu. The “language key”—a feature unique to the OLPC keyboard—is now enabled.
8. Chris Ball made improvements to two of the upstream performance-measuring tools we use—Sysprof and Systemtap—and worked on integrating Systemtap directly into the Tinderbox. Now that we have a wide set of baseline measurements for performance, Chris will concentrate on finding improvements.
9. Erik Blankinship, with help from the Red Hat team, has got the camera activity taking pictures much, much faster now (<1sec). Redesign of the activity is just about complete and the new version will be part of the upcoming B2 build.
10. Ivan Krstić has set up Planet OLPC (See http://planet.laptop.org/). The Atom feed is http://planet.laptop.org/atom.xml and Ivan will be upgrading our MediaWiki installations in order to provide us with per-page RSS feeds on the wiki. He'll then create a protected page called “Community News,” and repost all community-news that to that page, whose RSS feed will be syndicated on planet.
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
| Jan. 2007 | Rwanda announced its participation in the project. |
| Dec. 2006 | Uruguay announced its participation in the project. |
| Nov. 2006 | First B1 machines are built; IDB and OLPC formalize an agreement regarding Latin American and Caribbean education. |
| Oct. 2006 | B-test boards become available; Libya announces plans for one laptop for every child |
| Sep. 2006 | UI designs presented; integrated software build released; SES-Astra joins OLPC |
| Aug. 2006 | Working prototype of the dual-mode display |
| Jun. 2006 | 500 developer boards are shipped worldwide; WiFi operational; Csound demonstrated over the mesh network First video with working prototype [1] |
| May 2006 | eBay joins OLPC; display specs set; A-test boards become available; $100 Server is announced |
| Apr. 2006 | Pre-A test board boots; Squid and FreePlay present first human-power systems |
| Mar. 2006 | Yves Behar and FuseProject are selected as industry designers |
| Feb. 2006 | Marvell joins OLPC and continues to partner on network hardware |
| Jan. 2006 | World Economic Forum, Switzerland UNDP and OLPC Sign Partnership Agreement news release |
| Dec. 2005 | Quanta Computer Inc. to Manufacture Laptop (html)(pdf) |
| Nov. 2005 | WSIS, Tunisia Prototype Unveiled by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan; Nortel joins OLPC Photos: (Image 1)
(Image 2) (Image 3) |
| Aug. 2005 | Design Continuum starts design of first laptop |
| Jul. 2005 | Formal signing of original members of OLPC |
| Mar. 2005 | Brightstar and Red Hat come on board |
| Jan. 2005 | Laptop initiative officially announced at World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland; AMD, News Corp. and Google agree to join OLPC |
PRESS
PRESS RELEASES
| Jan. 2007 | OLPC Announces First-of-Its-Kind User Interface for XO Laptop Computer. |
| Jan. 2007 | Rwanda Commits to One Laptop per Child Initiative. |
| Dec. 2006 | Low Cost Laptop Could Tranform Learning. |
Video
(Misc. videos of the laptop can be found.)
http://video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM607884-7823-CRIANCAS+TESTAM+COMPUTADOR+PORTATIL,00.html | Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop, GLOBO- BRASIL
http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/061004-ee380-300.asx | Mark Foster delivers presentation to Standford University
http://www.technologyreview.com/ | Technology Review Mini-Documentary