OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2008-02-16

1. Lima: Ivan Krstić, Walter Bender, and Edgar Ceballos spent much of the week working closely with Oscar Becerra Tresierra’s team within the Peruvian ministry of education on the details of the Peru deployment.

2. The Inter-American Development Bank announced that it will finance a pilot project to test whether one-to-one computing can improve teaching and learning in schools in Haiti (the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere). The IDB will make a $3-million grant for the pilot project, which will distribute XO laptops to 13,200 students and 500 teachers in 60 Haitian primary schools. The OLPC Foundation will contribute XO laptops to the project through the Give One Get One program.

3. Laptop hardware: We have approved an engineering change to a lower-cost stainless steel for the metal components of the laptop. This was done in response to a sharp rise in cost of the particular alloy we had been using. Drop tests and corrosion tests run by Quanta show no change from the current material.

4. Power: Richard Smith has been investigating what it is going to take to provide an off-grid solar system that will be able to run a school server for eight hours a day (the Peru challenge). With SJ Klein's help, he has engaged the community, where he is finding great interest this problem; we will leverage this interest by working with some community testing sites on the long-term testing of a solar-power systems. Specifically, the OLPC chapter at the Illinois Math and Science Academy is talking to Richard about testing solar panels and other materials through a green- energy project they have underway. The same project is already collaborating with a research group at Fermilab studying new energy sources.

5. Embedded controller (EC): Exercising the EC charging system with “spiky” input power has uncovered a bug: the EC seems to get confused. Although it turns on the charge light, the charging circuit is not enabled. Richard is investigating the root cause.

6. Multi-battery charger: Lillian Walter has made excellent progress on the firmware: it now detects battery insert and removal; it enables or disables the charging channels; and it is upgradeable via the USB and serial port. When the prototype hardware is ready, the firmware will be in good shape for testing. Bitworks received the first round of plastic parts off of the tooling and some of the smaller sheet metal parts. These parts are on their way to Gecko for inspection and approval. The new PCB with the design changes for a cooler-running charger is finished and sent out for fabrication. Unless the parts have serious fit problems, the end of February still looks good for the first complete mechanical assembly using these test parts.

7. School server: John Watlington doesn’t have a new build to announce this week; however, he does reports that the build environment seems stabilized (Look for an announcement on server-devel@laptop.org soon). There are three new groups using the server software in anticipation of deployments in Nepal, Pakistan, and South Africa; thanks for all of their help testing and improving the software. We are planning for a week-long network test and debug session in Cambridge starting on 25 February. The goal is to recreate some of the scenarios we are seeing in the field in order to prioritize the bug fixes that will make the biggest (positive) difference for our deployments.

8. Firmware: Mitch Bradley implemented a change to the secure-startup process so that it will continue booting even if there is insufficient power to reflash the firmware. This is in response to reports from the field as OLPC begins mass deployments; upgrades were leaving some machines “stuck”—they would not boot without upgrading the firmware, but did not have the redundant power sources (both battery and line power) required for upgrading the flash.

9. Schedules/releases: Release Candidate (RC) 2, Build 691 went through testing this week. We are already working on RC 3 as there were some important bugs found with mesh sharing, translations that are ready to go, and activity updates that need to get in. Build 693 is available this weekend for developer-only testing—it is not signed yet. At the same time we are trying to wrap up Update 1, we have already started collecting requirements for Update 1.1 based on feedback from our first deployments (Uruguay, Mongolia and Peru).

We are looking for some help from the community for testing builds as the become available—especially as we get close to the final Update 1 release candidate. Please visit the test wiki pages (Test_issues) to get started.

10. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta spent the first part of the week testing the PO files of all languages for errors. The testing was followed up by a massive push of all translations to the master Git repository at dev.laptop.org in order to ensure that they are included in Update 1. This also required the involvement of the module maintainers, as they had to release new versions of the module or activity they maintain.

Localization is becoming a larger part of our efforts and synchronization of localization slows the release process. We need a strategy that will allow for retroactive localization so that we do not have to do software releases in order to pick up additional language support.

Sayamindu has been working on enhancing the glossary for the translators, so that they can define a standard translation for commonly used terms, and also to ensure consistency between translations done by different people on different files. This involved taking into account all terms that are repeated more than once in the set of PO files that we have, and creating a glossary PO template (POT) file. He has initialized a discussion in the localization mailing list, so that translators can provide their inputs, and once we reach a consensus, we will start utilizing the glossary in Pootle to ensure consistent translation.

Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj”, our volunteers from Afghanistan, report that Update 1, XO Bundled, XO Core are complete. 3000 strings (12%) in Etoys are also complete.

As a demonstration, electronic versions of Afghan textbooks (two Dari and two Pashto) were downloaded from the ministry of education website and successfully tested on the XO laptop. Also, an electronic picture book of traffic signs in English and Dari was prepared. The team also developed a Dari weblog of the OLPC project, which is updated daily from the laptop.org website (Please see http://www.olpc.blogsky.com).

An XO laptop user manual in the Dari language has been completed and the Pashto version is 90% done. Alas, the volunteer working on this project went to visit his family in Afghanistan and is currently stranded in a remote region due to heavy snow. We are awaiting his safe return.

11. Presence service (PS): Dafydd Harries spent this week working on Gadget, the Jabber server extension for activity indexing. It is at the point where it can be told about activities and answer queries about which activities exist. Morgan Collett released Chat-35 for Update 1 with the updated translations and a fix for the problem with copying web links (Ticket #6066).

Daf and Morgan reached agreement with Brian Pepple (who does the Telepathy packaging for Fedora) to build in the F-7/F-8/Rawhide branches with minimal side effects for Fedora users.

Guillaume Desmottes completely removed the “registered” flag from sugar's profile (#6295) and investigated and wrote a fix for Ticket #6299: “presence service should disable salut in the presence of school servers on mesh.” He also started to design and implement a PS test framework

Morgan did some preliminary testing for Guillaume's fix for #6299. It will require further testing this as soon as it is in Joyride. In a related bug (Ticket #6475), Morgan fixed a problem that was causing Pippy to crash on launch when there was no Telepathy connection.

12. Kernel: Andres Salomon dealt with the local root exploit issue; he also merged 2.6.25-rc1 into master, a “painful” process. He continued the process of pushing stuff upstream: battery driver cleanups, lxfb stuff, etc. Andres realized that we still have ancient gxfb patches in our tree; he therefore got a GX sparrow box up for testing these kernel patches.

13. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso fixed two issues, one in Sugar and the other in the Journal, that caused some translations to not appear in the UI. This got into an Update 1 build. Tomeu also released a new Paint activity with updated translations. And he has started implementing a redesign of the Home view and the Frame.

Chris Ball released a new version of Pippy.

Dan Bricklin, Luke Closs, Manusheel Guptam, and Eben Eliason have continued to make progress on the SocialCalc project (See http://www.peapodcast.com/sgi/olpc/). Recently added features include: copy/cut/paste; basic support for CSV and tab-delimited data; merge/unmerge cells; insert/delete row/column; sort. A new multiplication table sample document has also been added. The performance of operations such as sorting is quite good, making the activity useful for maintaining lists of hundreds of rows of data. Graphing support is at an initial stage of development. They are coordinating with Edward Baafi, Luke Closs, Tomeu Vizoso, Marco Gritti, and Todd Whiteman to develop a communication channel between Python and Javascript code through PyXPCOM.

The University of São Paulo LSI research team has been in discussion with Manu and Eben in regard to the Paint activity. “Smudge” and “Blur” brushes will be added soon.

Arjun Sarwal reports progress on a number of sensor-related fronts:

  • Arjun completed work on Measure Activity, writing its log files in CSV format in anticipation of integration with the spreadsheet activity (the plan is to have Measure generating a separate Journal entry for each log file it creates so that other activities can access these data);
  • he worked with the Matplotlib packages to integrate within Measure spreadsheet-like interface and graphing interface (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arjs/pass1.png);
  • he fixed a Rainbow-related bug that was preventing Measure from writing its log files and released an updated version, which also includes updated translations, for Update 1;
  • he demonstrated TurtleArt with Sensors at the the Learning workshop (A group of attendees programmed the turtle to log sensor values at a periodic interval within a set of axes—see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure#Screen_shots);
  • Edward Baafi made $2 IO/sensor board that plugs into the USB port of the XO (the board provides two 10-bit ADC inputs).

14. Power management: Chris Ball worked on an API for activities to temporarily inhibit suspend, motivated by the continuous measurement mode of Distance (which does not currently inhibit suspend but should). Chris is looking at inhibiting suspend whenever the camera or microphone is in use. Chris also released a new version of OHM.

15. Releases: Dennis Gilmore spent the week working on Update 1. He also spent some time working with Mako Hill on packaging. He also spent time moving whats on mock.laptop.org onto pilgrim.laptop.org.

16. Security: Michael Stone provided software for fixes to several bugs and changes of policy related to root shells: “become_root is broken” (Ticket #6316); “use sudo to get root; limit root to olpc” (Ticket #5537). He also fixed a problem with installing Adobe Flash (Ticket #6411). He analyzed the challenge of USB-based content autoinstallation (Tickets #6425 and #6430). He pushed Marcus Leech’s “olpc-audit” into Joyride and ran it as a means of being proactive in regard to “some dirs in /usr are not readable by the user olpc” (Ticket #5985). Michael also discussed syscalls for isolated “prototype processes” with Andres and made some small updates to the build-system wiki documentation.

17. OLPC Health: Many thanks to all the participants who made last week's conference call a success. The call covered discussions on a number of aspects ranging from the alignment of the Health initiative with OLPC's vision, to detailed discussions on the organization of content and health peripherals. The minutes and notes are posted on the Health Meetings page in the wiki (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health_meetings).

18. OLPC Pakistan: The Pakistan team has undertaken two Quranic studies activities: Quran Read activity and Qiraat activity (recitation of the Quran). Quran Read was created by modifying the Read activity. Waqas Toor has developed prototype of Qiraat Activity. The package is created using Helix media library and Evince library for PDF files.

Dr. Habib Khan reports that the Pakistan Software Export Board has sponsors two interns: we welcome Ms. Sheerehman, a graduate student of IT Management in IIU, and Mr. Asif Rehman a fresh BS from Kohat University, NWFP, Pakistan. They will be helping us in development and testing of OLPC activities over the next three months. Many thanks to PSEP for honoring our request of sponsoring these interns; we look forward for their continued support in the future.

19. Google Gears: SJ spoke to Othman Laraki and Ben Lisbakken of the Google Gears project and with Zvi Boshernitzan of Kiva, who are all working on making Gears a tool for offline mediawiki browsing. They offered help getting Gears integrated into the Browse activity and noted that a patch to make Gears work with FF3-minus-extensions has already been submitted (for use on a mobile platform) so most of the work has been done. Ben will follow up with people working on Browse, and will offer a userspace demo for Wikipedia users, as prelude to getting offline-reader hooks into MediaWiki proper.

20. In the community: Iain Davidson has started a Zine on the wiki (See Weekly_zine/0).

Jonathan Blocksom and Mike Lee have been helping organize the local DC meet-up groups.

Olin College is hosting its second OLPC jam this weekend, focusing more on local student involvement, coding, and curation for the CC LiveContent DVD (see below). Nikki Lee and the 20-person Olin chapter are organizing the event.

With help from Jamil Moledina, Executive Director Game Developers Conference, we're hoping to help connect XO groups with game developers at next week’s conference in San Francisco.

The XO laptop and Sugar interface will be featured in exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art and a Saatchi and Saatchi event in NYC this week.

Christoph Derndorfer reports that OLPC Austria will have a presence at CeBIT 2008, which takes place in Hannover during the first week in March.

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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