OLPC:News

From OLPC
Revision as of 02:54, 11 March 2008 by Gnu (talk | contribs) (typo)
Jump to: navigation, search
  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 115906]  +/-  

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

Laptop News 2008-03-08

1. John Watlington, Walter Bender, and Edgar Ceballos (Brightstar) spent this past week in Huampani (Lima) participating in Peru's first train-the-trainers workshop. (143 of the participants will be staffing regional support centrals scatter throughout every corner of the country.)

Using a custom image prepared by Chris Ball and Michael Stone, the teachers made great progress throughout the course of the week. They are all completely comfortable with the UI, the Journal, and the pedagogy. They readily navigated the various issues associated with an overloaded network and as was made clear in a Q&A session towards the end of the week, they really appreciate that everything on the laptop is open (and free as in speech); and they appreciate the mandate to take both ownership and the responsibility that comes with it.

They got deep into programming—for most, their first such experience—developing projects with Turtle Art, Scratch, and Etoys. (No Pippy hackers yet, but there was certainly interest expressed.) The workshop culminated with a Media-Lab-style open house, where each teacher demonstrated something they did with the laptop during a week of Constructionist learning.

Meanwhile, the Peru support volunteers met again Wednesday night and decided among other things that they will contact local universities to organize an event of their own around developing networks of educators and creators working with OLPC schools.

2. Antonio Battro was a keynote speaker at the Las Vegas International Conference of SITE, the Society of Information Technology and Teacher Education. Some 1,300 teachers and educators from many countries attended the Conference. Antonio's talk "OLPC: the cognitive challenges" had one of the largest audiences and was followed by an engaging discussion. The interest and the will to participate at OLPC was significant among the participants.

3. EC: The saga of the Embedded Controller continues. The code that handles shuttling bytes from the touchpad and keyboard up to the host has problems if the host does not read the data fast enough. This might be at the root of some of our touchpad problems. Fixing this will require a significant rewrite. Richard Smith feels he now understand things enough to do the rework, but it will not be available for Update.1.

4. Multi-battery charger: Bitwork's has assembled a new PCB in and it is functioning as expected. Richard and Lilian Walter added some hardware debugging routines to the firmware to assist Bitworks in their testing. We are still awaiting the larger parts back from the reworked tooling.

5. Q2D14 firmware release: Richard pulled a few new fixes from Mitch Bradley into the current release tree of the system firmware and is preparing to release a Q2D14. The primary reason is to fix an issue with forced upgrades. Once an upgrade has been downloaded, it will be installed on the next reboot. But if the firmware is being upgraded, that reboot will hang unless an external source of power is available (Ticket #6245). The suggestion is to either defer the firmware upgrade until power is available. This will hopefully help in places such as Peru, where many laptops will be off the power grid, when they mass upgrade machines.

6. Battery failures: Richard finished his analysis on the six batteries that were provided to him from laptops returned with charging problems. He's satisfied that its not a charging problem with the laptop circuitry and will be returning the batteries back the the manufacturer for deeper failure analysis.

7. School server: John Watlington reports that after last weeks testing, the current advice to trials and early deployments about wireless interconnection in the schools is the following:

  • Up to 10 (hopefully 20) laptops will work fine without any infrastructure; Groups of children away from school can share and collaborate;
  • Up to 40 laptops are supported either by using a single access point, or a school server with one Active Antenna;
  • Between 40 and 80 laptops are best served by a school server with two active antennas;
  • Between 80 and 120 laptops can be served by a school server with three active antennas;
  • Over 120 students, the schools need to move to more traditional access points to support the network loading.

We will be setting up a longer term (and larger) mesh testbed in a location near Boston where the RF environment is less variable than 1CC, to continue testing improvements to the software. We hope to improve the above numbers! (Chris Ball and Dafydd Harries tested laptops in mesh mode against a school server running a Jabber server—with 32 laptops connected to the school server, the laptops were all able to share a Chat session and a PDF file between themselves without any failures.)

8. Peru connectivity: As mentioned above, John accompanied Walter to Peru in order to set up servers and network access for participants in their regionals leader training sessions. The sessions were held at Huampani, a small resort area about 25 km from Lima up the Rimac river valley. Four VSAT connections were set up to provide internet connectivity to the sessions. While John arrived expecting problems with the presence service and wireless network congestion, the real problems had were due to strange DNS interactions with the VSAT modem's transparent DNS proxy and the Peruvian Ministry of Education DNS service. A fix is being tested.

9. EJabberd: We continue to have problems with obtaining a working ejabberd build with the latest fixes. Collabora is working on this, and as soon as it is available a new build will be announced on the server-devel mailing list.

Meanwhile, Morgan Collett has added improved documentation for setting up ejabberd from source for community jabber servers to the wiki (Installing ejabberd); so far one community server (for Chicago) has been successfully set up using these instructions, with more in progress (Community Jabber Servers).

10. Active Antennas are now available for developers, and will be shipped out soon to people who have already requested them. (See the OLPC wiki for further details.)

11. Activities: Chris Ball made Pippy collaborative, such that joining a shared Pippy activity now gets you a copy of the source-code buffer of the host at the time you joined.

One of the newest activities developed for the XO laptop is called StarChart. It was created by hobbyist, David Wallace. Dave received his XO via the Give One Get One program at the end of 2007 (See StarChart).

Qirat Activity Version 1.0 is complete and runs as sugar Activity. Waqas Toor is working on making the Surahs (chapters) more presentable when drawn on the Sugar UI canvas.

12. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes implemented and tested flow control in Salut stream tubes (Ticket #6647). As discussed with Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos last week, Salut should be able to use different backends to announce and discover services. Then we could switch from Avahi to Cerebro. That's a lot easier than writing a new Cerebro connection manager as we can reuse the muc and tubes codes (and all the Telepathy interfaces). So Guillame started to design an abstraction layer that will be implemented by Salut and Cerebro (Ticket #6658).

Guillaime also did a few tests and reconsidered Ticket #6585 (PS must reconnect server_plugin when NM changes IP addresses). We agreed with Morgan and Sjoerd this was not a problem and closed the ticket.

Morgan worked on Ticket #6572 (Replace key with hash to reduce Avahi TXT size) as it currently breaks "friending". The #6572 issue is not as straightforward as it seemed. We derive participants' JIDs from their keys, and friend them using the key as the identifier. So the current patch is for testing the impact on network congestion of a shorter value there but the solution would be more intrusive. (If the current approach doesn't actually improve network performance, it is not worth rearchitecting how PS identifies buddies—which is done using their keys—so testing would be helpful.)

Dennis Gilmore and Dafydd Harries spent time this week trying to get ejabberd running with updated patches from Process One. They had trouble with compilation problems, patches not applying, etc.; also with reproducing the builds that we are currently running. It turns out that the problems were due to newer builds being done with a newer version of Erlang. Dafydd may finally have a version that works, but it needs testing to be sure.

13. Sugar UI: Eben Eliason made some new designs for Journal, Home, and Frame, which he posted to the wiki. New designs for toolbars and bulletin boards are in progress.

The most recent designs have been posted as "slide shows" on the wiki for review and feedback. The first three available discuss plans for future activity management, including a repurposing of the Home circle, a completely reorganized Frame with clearer intent and support for notifications, and a brand new Journal which introduces action- and object- centric views, improves support for visual browsing, and offers a friendlier interface into ones interactions with the laptops.

We are in the process of generating new designs for toolbars as well as beginning to consider future designs for the bulletin boards (and, more near term, designs for standard file transfer). All of these designs are or will be posted to wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs. We encourage those interested to review the images and descriptions posted, and to provide feedback within the discussion pages or on the mailing lists, as appropriate. Thanks!

Tomeu Visozo has been working implementing on the home view redesign. The main changes have been completed and the code is being reviewed. Next step is to discuss the work done so far with the design team and agree on the several details left to work through.

14. Kernel: Andres Salomon did further work in the lxfb/gxfb drivers. He got suspend/resume working properly, prepared more patches, etc.

15. Update.1: Scott Ananian reports on the current "state of update.1" including a discussion of the "core activity" changes at: [1] and [2] (devel archive seems to be broken? split his message in two.)

16. Localization: Scott prepared translations for the activation server (including translations for the developer key request form) (See https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/act_server/).

Sayamindu Dasgupta has started the migration process to a newer version of Pootle and fixed a few bugs in some of the helper scripts that he uses to manage Pootle.

Tomeu has been doing more work on keyboard bindings for the shell and activities in light of localization.

Waqas Toor reports that the Tahoma font seems most suitable for Urdu on the XO laptop, as Nafees font has some problems when it comes to binding Urdu characters in smaller font size. For Pashto and Dari, we have found Pashto Pasarlai font suitable yet, but it has some problems. Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj” are looking for other font options that contain the complete Pashto and Dari character set on Linux platform.

Mako Hill finished a localization patch for the library, implementing a check for localized start-pages when viewing library collections. The next update of library-core should have at least English and Spanish locales. (While he was in Lima, Walter finished building the Getting Started Guide bundle for Peru. Many thanks to Edgar for the help with the Spanish translation.)

Oz Wilder and Alon Carmeli of Babylon Dictionaries started work two weeks ago on 16 language translations of a basic 2500-word dictionary, to expand our current collection. They are now 99% complete, pending final proofreading, and can be seen on the wiki (Dictionary). Zdenek Broz is working to include these in our multilingual dictionary bundle.

17. Sugar-control-panel: Simon Schampijer is working on the GUI for the sugar control panel.

18. Support: Adam Holt reports progress on a new "Projects DB" Developers Program with Aaron Kaplan et al. in Vienna. (Jim Gettys has been a huge help laying this out.) Usability and features are improving towards release, hopefully later this month.

Alan Claver helped with countless HW / pre-RMA support tickets. Volunteers are doing so much great work behind the scenes we cannot even keep track of it all. Adam shared Scott's deployment maps (with disclaimer) (See http://dev.laptop.org/~cscott/stats-20080201.html).

Adam organized another Sunday Support meeting (Sunday's at 4PM EST) with Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin from Mongolia, who spoke about their ongoing deployment; several new volunteers participated. Yani Galanis will be our guest speaker this coming Sunday; topic: our wireless/mesh testing's results/outlook!

19. Help wanted:

  • A request has come in from Cambodia for help in setting up mysql in Khmer;
  • We are looking for someone to "Sugarize" the GCompris icons;
  • Girlstart is looking for graphic artists and designers to make their games attractive through professional graphics (Please see the project website http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Project_IT_Girl).

20. CeBIT/OLPC Deutschland: Holger Levsen and Christoph Derndorfer both reported on the OLPC presense at CeBIT, the largest IT show in Europe.

Holger reports that "OLPC Deutschland" had its first "real life" meeting at the meeting (See http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/104668), just after having decided by voting via mailinglist (http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-de) on the final name of the project three days earlier. The group is planning to have a workshop weekend in Berlin this spring, to develope its visions and structures. A longer workshop which children and teachers called summer camp is also in its early planning stages.

Christoph reports that the feedback at CeBIT has simply "blown us away". They had hundreds of people at their booth: the main reaction always along the lines of "I've read about the OLPC project for two years, it's great to finally have the chance to actually look at and use one". The most common questions "where can I get one?", "are they already being produced and used somewhere?" and, of course, "where is the crank?" (See http://olpcaustria.soup.io/).

21: Debian: Holger also reports that sugar 0.79 has been uploaded by Jonas Smedegaard to Debian today, fixing Debian bug #444021. The packaging consists of three source packages: sugar-base, sugar and sugar-artwork.

22. Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan reports that they had two very educative events this week as part of our awareness campaign: The first one was introducing OLPC to street children in Islamabad’s vicinity. The aim was to observe the reaction of children who have never been to a school. Habib and his team spend half a day with these children and this generated enough curiosity in the community–mostly Afghan refugees. Though out of school, these children were quite smart and quickly learned to operate the camera and play around with music.

The second event was an announced Open Air workshop for graduate students of IIU. Twenty students had registered to participate in this event and more than 50 students showed up and remained throughout. Salman Minhas, Waqas and Sohaib gave demonstrations and assisted students with in understanding the 20 XO laptops that we had readied for the workshop. We expect volunteers from this lot to come forward and help us in the localization and software projects.

23. IDCL: Ben Bederson, Tim Browne, and SJ Klein reviewed what they need to integrate the International Digital Children's Library (IDCL) server infrastructure (Tomcat, mysql, and some custom scripts) into our builds.

24. GSoC: Our Google Summer of Code organization application has been sent in. Now we need more mentors and mre project ideas. Please add ideas to the Summer of Code/Ideas page in the wiki and contact either Michael Stone or SJ if you are interested in being a mentor. Also, please start spreading the word that we are looking for SoC students this summer—students are welcome to add their own ideas to our 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

Retrieved from "http://wiki.laptop.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=OLPC:News&oldid=115906"