OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2008-01-26

1. Davos, Switzerland: Nicholas reports that the World Economic Forum, usually a storm, was a hurricane this year, with gale winds of press and interest in OLPC. The Intel debacle dominated the debate far less than he anticipated. The sheer existence of OLPC was marveled. The traditional Saturday-morning breakfast debate, at which Intel and OLPC have battled fiercely in the past, was not attended by Craig Barrett.

2. OLPC and Brightstar, along with Quanta, are reviewing current inventory and the immediate production schedule to fulfill the balance of the Give One Get One program. At present their is a gap in supply, given the need for US keyboards and power supplies—most of the remaining “Get” laptops will likely ship in March.

3. School server: John Watlington reports that the school server software is moving along: a new release, including web caching and minor bug fixes, is being tested and should be ready by Monday. This release will also allow web filtering—we plan to use DansGuardian for now—to be easily enabled. Countries will be responsible for selecting and providing a list of filtered sites/content, but there are a number of commercial suppliers of suitable lists as a starting point. Upcoming development will concentrate on a short-term laptop backup solution, the activation server, packaging the multicast updater that has been so useful this week in Mongolia, and improving the ease of configuration somewhat.

We have painfully discovered the limitations of the mesh and current collaborative software in Mongolia, where the convolution of the number of laptops with bugs #5335 (more mDNS traffic than expected) and #5007 (mesh repeats multicast too much) make the perfect storm, which prevents anybody from using the network. We will continue to improve the mesh performance, but clear guidelines are needed as to what network infrastructure to deploy under what conditions. Once a certain density of students is exceeded, a wired backbone and conventional access points will be required.

4. Embedded controller: Richard Smith finished up a round of EC code changes for Update.1 and released PQ2D10, which went into system firmware Q2D10. This firmware should enable safe suspend/resume operation and it should be better at handling games key events as they wakeup the laptop from suspend. Richard won't claim the bugs (Ticket #6105: “New EC firmware in Q2D09 seems wonky”) are fixed until it has widespread testing. The keyboard handling code is quite complex. Richard also modified the firmware build scripts so that they will build a bootfw rpm package for inclusion into Joyride.

5. Batteries: Carla Gomez Monroy reports from Mongolia that the batteries are not lasting as long as expected. The extreme cold was the first suspect. Richard had Carla collect data via olpc-logbat and ran some tests of his own in the freezer (which isn’t as cold as Ulaanbaatar). These data, along with a closer examination of the GoldPeak data sheet, make it pretty obvious that batteries don't work so well in the –20 to –40C range. The extreme cold makes the output voltage drop considerably. The result is that at around the 50% capacity mark the voltage is so low that the low-voltage cutoff kicks in and shuts the laptop off. Richard does worry about when the children take their XO laptops outside while suspended; the power dissipation (and thus self-heating) is at its lowest. It may shut off. The question to work out with our battery vendors is that is it OK to de-rate the low-voltage shutoff when it’s so cold. Will this do any damage to the battery?

6. Testing: Chih-yu Chao spent most of the week on Update.1 testing and test-case development. Test cases include power management, suspend and ebook mode, activity isolation, network manager, scaling tests, and localization of content bundle. Please review and help execute these test cases (Update.1). Also the automated olpc-update feature was tested as part of the final testing for Ship.2-656.

Dennis Gilmore has released Update.1 Build 690 as the first release candidate for Update.1 (See http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/olpc/streams/update1/build690). Please give this build extensive testing. There have been some reports of WEP and WPA problems with this build—expect these issues to be addressed in a subsequent release candidate.

7. Schedule: Due to resources being diverted to help resolve some G1G1 issues; the Mongolia deployment; and the need to some bugs in OHM and security, the Update.1 release is slipping. The current schedule is reflected on the Roadmap page in the developer wiki (http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap). To help with triage, it would be great if people can look at the critical bugs that are currently assigned to this release as well as the bugs coming in from testing. Even more important: please help test! We can't say what the critical bugs are if we haven't found them yet!

8. Support: Adam Holt and his support group continue to battle the question of “when will I get my laptop.” We are working with our partners on a daily basis to get the numbers, order information, production information, shipping information, and to compose emails and set donor policies.

In Mongolia, Carla Gomez Monroy and Dave Woodhouse have been bringing up 1000 laptops, battling issues associated with RF connectivity, and the need to upgrade large numbers of laptops—because we rushed the initial order to Ulaanbaatar, we didn’t have time to update the build in the factory. We are also starting to get the first “support” issues for the laptops that have already been distributed to the children.

Adam organized another very successful Sunday conference-call for the support team. This week’s guest speakers were Anders Mogensen, who discussed his observations of OLPC from a recent visit to Nigeria, and Joshua Beal from Belkin, who discussed new power options and their potential deployment consequences. Their generosity in speaking to the support team, and answering all sorts of great questions, was exactly the refresher the team needed among the shipping madness dragging it down.

Adam restructured the support team to more efficiently deal with the scourge of billing/shipping issues flooding in from the Give One Get One program, focusing on “one basically good response” for all, which will include more detailed order tracking. Sandy Culver, Steve Holton, Greg Babbing, and Guynn Prince have been of exceptional help dealing with RMAs and “undeliverables.”

9. Satellites: Michail Bletsas will be joining Thomas Jacobson and Roland Burger for a workshop at the upcoming Satellite 2008 conference in Washington DC on February 27 entitled: “Low-cost satellite Internet infrastructure to support education in remote and developing regions.” The goals of this informal workshop will be to gather and document design requirements and their justifications; to examine how current products might be used to meet them; and to identify areas where further research and development is needed. Exhibits-only registration (free if you use VIP code BOF) is all that is needed if you would like to join in the discussion.

10. Mesh: Cramming 500 laptops under the same roof is a difficult (but tractable) engineering problem. We haven't done any testing of such deployment scenarios and Mongolia is not really the most convenient place for that testing. Despite that, common sense can still carry us a long way. We have set the limit of XO laptops to school servers to 180 (60 per channel in mesh mode)—after optimizing the laptop for “dense” deployment (which hasn't been a priority in our software development schedules). However, deploying more school servers under the same roof doesn't immediately translate to increased capacity, since school servers don't add spectrum. While a school server still costs several hundred dollars, it is more economical to install standard low-cost access points instead of multiple servers. (The OLPC mesh implementation was to maximize the “connected” time for sparse deployments (children in villages in Cambodia, rural schools in Rwanda) and to simplify and extend connectivity away from an access point.

11. OLPC infrastructure: Ivan Krstić completely overhauled the public-facing infrastructure (wiki, static web, git, trac, hosting, mail, mailing lists). We are now in much better shape and will hopefully see less downtime on key systems such as dev.laptop.org.

12. Datastore: Ivan continues to work on a new DS specification that was the outcome of the datastore summit held at the OLPC office in Cambridge last week. He plans to have something to vet with the community in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Marco Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, and Eben Eliason spent a second week in Cambridge working through a number of design changes for the Sugar user experience that are potentially targeted for Update.2. More on those proposals soon.

13. Security: Nortel’s Marcus Leech continues his work on Rainbow, the isolation shell for the Bitfrost security mechanism. He has provided invaluable testing and patches, is developing a Rainbow filesystem verification tool, and generally being incredibly helpful in moving Rainbow development forward rapidly.

Michael Stone worked with Blake Setlow, visiting from Tower Research, to rewrite the nss-rainbow module. Together, they succeeded in removing the need for Rainbow to modify /etc/passwd. Now that they understand the interface and the required debugging techniques, Michael anticipates that /etc/group will straight-forward to handle. He hopes to make a new Rainbow release early in the Update.2 cycle incorporating these improvements.

Michael also updated or rewrote lots of dated documentation:

Finally, he researched several mechanisms for controlling and monitoring network access, including SELinux, NetLabel, and a sys_disablenetwork() patch. Experimentation will soon follow.

14. Licensing: Jon Phillips, Rebecca Rojer, and a team from Creative Commons have put together an illustrated primer to “Sharing Creative Works” (See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Sharing_Creative_Works). Jon observes that “in developing for OLPC, we have had to learn much about licensing for kids and generally how to educate around the topics.” The primer will go into CC’s custom licensing activity, which allows for a disclaimer about child licensing, comics to describe the concepts, and a license chooser (See Creative Commons).

15. Activities: Arjan Sarwal completed his integration of sensor input into Turtle Art. He has created a temporary fork called “Turtle Art with sensors” that included a new palette containing sensor blocks. It will be made available for download on the Activities page this weekend.

Arjan also undertook some experiments with the Measure activity with high- school students at the Boston “Fab Lab.” Children were introduced to the sensor concept and they caught on quite well. They arranged themselves into groups worked on projects: (A) using a touch sensor switch to count the number of times people enter through a particular door and display it in the form of a bar graph in Turtle Art;(B) plotting the temperature vs time graph in the form of points by using a temperature sensor connected to the XO laptop; and (C) making a turtle draw a smiling face when a high note was played and a sad face when the note was low note was played. Thanks to Edward Baafi for his help in the session.

Manusheel Gupta, Marco Gritti, and Tomeu Vizoso modified the Read activity to support DJVU and the TIFF format. Read activity can now be easily extended to support the other common formats.

Manu also developed a framework and ideas for implementation of a spreasheet activity. With input from Jim Gettys and Eben Eliason, he has started an implementation based upon the GNumeric codebase. Manu be discussing implementation ideas with Jody Goldberg from GNumeric Team this week. Other people who are interested in working on the activity should please chime in.

16. Keyboards: Bernardo Innocenti gave a tutorial to Arjan and Manu on xkeyboard-config, xkb files and keyboard package maintenance. With Bernie’s help, Arjan made and sent three patches upstream this week. Together with Walter Bender, they make some final touches to the Devanagari and Armenian keyboards and made much progress on the Nepali keyboard layout. (In regard to the latter, we are exploring the use of Compose within the X Window System as an alternative to SCIM.) Walter also roughed out Khmer and French keyboard layouts this week (See OLPC Keyboard layouts#OLPC keyboard layouts).

17. Localization: Dr. Habib Khan reports from Islamabad that Salman Minhas and Waqas Toor are progressing on Dari localization. Dari language support is completed in XO core, XO bundle, and Update.1; Etoys and Packaging are remaining. The strings in Pootle are now 100% translated in Dari language. Translation in Pashto is 88% completed. The XO core, Update.1, and Packaging are completed; Etoys and XO bundle strings that will follow next. Undaunted by a Pootle bug that was preventing them from committing strings in Pashto, Salman and Waqas continue to work together with Afghan volunteers and hope to accomplish the localization work in the near future.

A translation of an XO laptop user manual into the Dari and Pashto languages was completed this week by our Afghan volunteers Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj.” We appreciate their commitment and hard work. Next week, the OLPC Pakistan team will give it a trial with teachers from an Afghan local school in Islamabad. Their review and feed back will help them finalize the manual.

18. Accessibility: Jutta Treviranus, from the University of Toronto, and Cynthia Waddell, executive director of the International Centre for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI) and the government services accessibility expert for the United Nations Global Alliance for Inclusive ICTs, would like to get involved in our efforts to make the OLPC accessible. Jutta will try to organize a meet up of interested parties in the coming months. In parallel, Rob Taylor, Codethink, contacted Jim Gettys in regard to an investigation of moving AT-SPI over to D-Bus (See http://live.gnome.org/GAP/AtSpiDbusInvestigation).

19. Library: SJ Klein led a review of repository and bundle use cases; topics included the metadata needed for better tracking and sharing of bundles and specific use cases from India and Nepal (Bryan Berry was present). Lauren Klein, Martin Langhoff, Moodle, and Joshua Marks, Curriki, joined a discussion of how children and teachers should upload materials to the local network and to the Web. Curriki has recently added groups features that allow for a customized OLPC portal for educators (under development). They have an 80%-localized Hindi version available that can be used off line in India.

Regarding metadata, it was recommended that bundles should include: author, license, and URL. A new .info file format is being proposed and is open for discussion. Mako Hill and Dennis Gilmore have helped define how we should link to source information and identify contributors to bundles (See Bundle metadata).

Collections that are in development and testing this week include: an updated set of books from ICDL, with Mongolian stories and higher-resolution images; a PDF version of Where There is No Doctor; three language versions of the Holocaust Encyclopedia; flash math and language materials from AJ van der Voort and the EFK foundation; and compressed high-resolution PDFs from the Internet Archive curated by Marcus Lucero.

20. Game Jams: Rut Jesus and perhaps others from OLPC Nederlands will be joining some 150 developers at the Nordic Game Jam next weekend in Copenhagen.

21. Health: Adam Holt helped Arjun Sarwal to organize a group of volunteers around the theme of OLPC and health (See Health). Together, they have developed a leadership/coordination model to drive this initiative forward. Interest in Health collections has also spiked recently, with Arjan, David Greisen, Erica Frank, Anna Bershteyn, Mika Matsuzaki, Ian Daniher, and Seth Woodworth all working on related projects. Discussions around these topics are ongoing on the Library mailing list.

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

  1. redirect OLPC:News#Press

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

Testimonials about my XO laptop

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