OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. Shanghai: The first 100 B2 laptops were assembled at the end of the week at Quanta Shanghai. David Woodhouse, Jim Gettys, and Mary Lou Jepsen are in Shanghai with Quanta squashing the bugs. Mitch Bradley, Richard Smith, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon have spun several firmware releases in the past several days and provided invaluable testing data that enable the builds on this tight schedule.
2. The new laptop.org website designed by Pentagram and powered by Nurun was turned live this week. The new website is a welcome upgrade from the one that was originally hobbled together last spring. Many thanks to the teams at Pentagram and Nurun, as well as to Stephen Michaud and Richard Rowe, who wrote much of the copy under a tight deadline. Special thanks to Serge Rosilio of Nurun, who led the effort from soup to nuts.
3. São Paulo and Porto Alegre: David Cavallo and Roseli de Deus Lopes ran a workshop for teachers in São Paulo at the University of São Paulo (USP) on Tuesday and Wednesday. David and Lea Fagundes ran second workshop in Porto Alegre at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) on Thursday and Friday. José Luiz Aquino, special advisor to President Lula, and OLPC advisor Rodrigo Mesquita attended throughout. Antonio Battro spoke about the OLPC educational concept; Sylvia Gonzales and Miguel Brechner, OLPC coordinators from Uruguay, and Laura Serra and Alejandro Piscitelli, OLPC coordinators from Argentina also presented.
4. Porto Alegre: Walter Bender met with the organizers of fisl8.0, the 8th annual international forum on free and open-source software. OLPC has had a presence at the forum the last two years. We discussed the possibility running sessions for both developers and educators. Since one of the test schools for OLPC in Brazil will be in Porto Alegre, the organizers are considering to showcase the kids using the OLPC machines.
5. Last-minute B2 mods: This week was dominated by final issues running up to the Beta-2 build of machines. There were a few last-minute surprises, but the team worked through them. These included:
- Microphone problems. A new firmware update fixed problems with the microphone that were discovered with the Beta-2 build. The firmware was not properly detecting the B-2 board and hence was not setting a mode correctly on the cs5536.
- Power and charging problems. There are still a number of battery-charging problems related to code in the embedded controller (EC). A new release of the EC code fixed a number of the issues.
6. Wireless: Dan Williams attended a wireless summit in London. Lots of people from the wireless world and Linux were in attendance. Intel, Broadcom and CSR were represented, as well as Cozybit, who was represented by Javier Cardona. (Javier and his colleagues have done a lot of work for Marvell and OLPC.) Red Hat sent Dan and John Linville, who is the upstream wireless maintained for the kernel. They discussed specific issues about the code in the kernel, including how to share more code and interfaces in the drivers. In the past, the drivers have all had their own interfaces and work has been underway for quite a while to unify them so that user space utilities will work better.
7. Sugar UI: Marco Gritti has been working hard to update Sugar to support newer versions of some of our libraries. He has moved most of the Sugar interface to support Python 2.5 (including support for building Python 2.5 as part of our build process) and Gecko 1.9. Python 2.5 is important for performance and startup issues and gives more longevity to our platform. Gecko 1.9 is the underlying engine that will be used in Firefox 3 and will be important because it will give us more control over font sizes and image zooming. Our 200DPI display needs a more flexible rendering system from the browser, something they are building into Gecko 1.9.
8. Ricardo Medina and Walter Bender got Sugar opening its windows on a remote display—mostly. While still buggy, this feature will be especially useful for debugging—e.g., opening the Memphis window on another laptop—and projecting from a laptop by mapping to the display to a conventional machine. More work is needed to smoothly integrate this into Sugar, but it is a proof of principle nonetheless.
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 has No Plans to Commercialize XO Computer. |
| 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