OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Real Networks has funded a program at the Oregon State University's Open Source Lab to be used for development of open-source multimedia capture, editing, encoding and playback software integrated with the OLPC platform.
2. Michail Bletsas reports that the XO was a major attraction in both the AMD and Marvell booths at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). At the show Marvell officially released its wireless firmware with full mesh functionality. Many improvements will follow, however OLPC's mesh is the first implementation of the emerging 802.11s standard.
3. This week has been a busy week finishing up work on the build for the B2 Test. John Palmieri coordinated more than a dozen new releases (219-231). Build 231 is the new stable release. The firmware version for B2 is going to be Q2B20, barring surprises. That version supports the new CAFE and DCON chips, and has been tested with network booting for manufacturing diagnostics. Please refer to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Autoreinstallation_image for instructions on reimaging the machine.
4. UI: This week we saw a lot of activity on the UI and in the builds. Some of the more relevant UI fixes from this week include: (1) the Power Button is now the way to shut the machine now—no more confusing power icon in the frame; (2) mousing over launch icons in the frame now gives visual feedback that they are buttons; (3) some activity startup blocking problems have been fixed that make activity startup feel faster; and (4) some startup feedback for activities—when you click on an icon, something happens instead of a long pause that was causing people to repeatedly click, launching multiple instances of an activity.
5. Geode multimedia extensions: Marco Gritti and Dan Williams discovered that Cairo, the X Window System, and Mozilla were all failing to properly detect MMX support in the Geode. Chris Ball enabled MMX support in those libraries and are seeing some speedups as a result—graphics are faster (up to 30% in some cases) and incur less CPU overhead.
6. X Window System: Adam Jackson and Jordan Crouse pushed out a few fixes for the X server. These include fixes in Xv (video support) RANDR (rotation support) and a couple of minor crash fixes. We will be associating rotation with a button on the bezel so that it can be enabled from “ebook” mode.
6. Power budget: Richard Smith started to look at the power budget and began to work out a plan for setting up a tinderbox that will be able to measure all of the power rails on the new B2 boards in order to have an automated test for power regressions. Lilian Walter worked on the exact sequences required for controlling power on SD, camera, and several other peripherals, and measured their power consumption.
7. Power management: Jordon Crouse using got the machine to successfully suspend and turn off the VCORE_CPU rail. He also got it to wake up by pressing the power button, which is more impressive then it sounds because it means that the embedded controller (EC) is not getting confused by the power state either.
8. Erik Blankinship and Bakhtiar Mikhak of MediaMods have nearly completed the main camera activity for the OLPC system. It is being integrated into the B2 software build. Dan and John have been assisting. In developing the application Erik has uncovered a color-map problem that probably resides in gstreamer. Jordan is adding RGB-source support to the X Video extension, which may make the camera activity “happier”, but the gstreamer problem needs to be fixed.
9. Keyboard LED: Andres completed the keyboard LED driver; after additional cleanups, Andres merged the driver into our kernels. We have working keyboard LEDs in the latest builds.
10. Analog in: Andres has started testing the analog-input patches.
11. Sugar Activities: Thanks to everyone in the community who has been contributing to the B2 build: new versions of TamTam, AbiWord, Etoys, PenguinTV, are in B2 Test, along with a new camera activity.
12. James Cameron has continued rural (outback Australia) wireless testing with impressive results. As expected, the Laptop's antenna design makes a significant difference in range (> 50%); Cameron has had two laptops streaming audio in ad-hoc mode over a distance of 1.3km (See http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2007-January/003616.html).
13. Journal: Ivan Krstić spent the week chasing out bugs in journal compression and sparse storage and dealing with performance issues. One challenge is that we want to store semi-structured information, but there is no fast semi-structured database, let alone a free one. And while you can generally wing it on fast servers by implementing a semi-structured store backed by a standard relational database, the performance would kill us on the laptops. Ivan's approach is to use a probabilistic filter that continuously looks at what metadata the user is commonly using for all files on the system. A nice thing about this approach is that it is self-maintaining; the potential down side is that it could sometimes misfire, so we have to be careful about choosing coefficients. The really nice thing about this is that it enables us to do a resource description framework (RDF) export of much of the journal.
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.
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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
http://www.radiofarda.com/Article/2007/01/04/f2_Interview-laptop.html | A Brief Demo