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Laptop News 2008-03-16

Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan announced the launching of an OLPC pilot project at the Atlas Public School, located in the slums between Rawalpind and Islamabad. (Many thanks to our Afghan volunteers, Usman Mansoor “Ansari” and Sohaib Obaidi “Ebtihaj”, who discovered the school and will be mentoring students and their teacher. The area is economically poor and lacks security measures and basic facilities. There are about 100 children (Grades 1–6), mostly Afghan refugees—many of them work during the first part of the day to support their families and attend school in the afternoon. We distributed 39 XO localized in Dari and Pashto, official languages of Afghanistan.

1. UA Birmingham: Walter Bender met with the dean of the school of education at the University of Alabama. He and his colleagues are enthusiastic about the laptop program in the Birmingham schools and plan to engage at every level: teacher preparation, accessibility, curriculum development, support, and evaluation.


2. Learning Workshop: David Cavallo and the Learning Team ran a Learning workshop this week. Attendees included delegations from Thailand, Haiti, and Illinois.


3. Laptop activation: Scott Ananian finished documenting the process for activation key generation. This is a critical issue for deployment as it enables the in-country teams to distribute the activation process to a more manageable level of granularity. “Trusted” individuals now have the ability to generate activation keys through a simple web interface by simply uploading a list of XO laptop serial numbers.


4. Deployment Guide: With input from the Tech Team, the Learning Team, Brightstar, and the Deployment Team, we now have a Deployment Guide. The guide covers planning, execution, and support, along with some tips based upon our experience in trial deployments around the world; a sample deployment schedule; a sample workshop schedule; a check list to guide you through the deployment process; and a glossary of OLPC terms.


5. On display: The Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art is acquiring two XO laptops for their permanent collection. MOMA's Paul Galloway said, “We realize that social betterment is the goal of One Laptop Per Child, not the pursuit of design accolades. Nonetheless, we believe the design of the XO Laptop and the ideas it embodies belong in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.”


6. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we are running a new version of Pootle that is significantly faster and should make tasks such as merging of PO files against new POT files easier and less time consuming. He also introduced a patch into the Pootle server to enable translators to view translations in an intermediate language, e.g., an Aymara translator can view pre-existing Spanish translations rather than just the English-language original. We currently manage ~1600 PO files on the server and have more than 450 volunteer translators signed up. More translators are always welcome!


Prabhas Pokharel, Anjali Lohani and Tsering Lama Sherpa from Harvard University have joined the Nepali Language localization team. Now the team of 10 contributors is doing lots of progress in Nepali localization.


7. Support: Adam Holt reports that Yianni Galanis explained the latest wireless mesh testing results at last Sunday's support meeting. The Support Team has responded to an increasing number of support emails as final Give1Get1 shipments are now underway. Adam has been discussing plans for repair centers with various volunteer groups and the OLPC partners. He is also recruiting to fill a Support Specialist Position.


8. Firmware: Richard Smith and Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D14 for inclusion into Update.1. The key change is in regard to the boot process when there is a firmware update available: Currently, the laptop will not boot unless there is external power connected; with Q2D14, the laptop will boot regardless of the availability of external power, deferring the firmware upgrade to the next time that external power is present.


9. School Server: John Watlington reports that a new School Server build (160) is now available. It provides:

  • an improved ejabberd server, which might improve reliability under load;
  • web caching (not enabled by default);
  • the configuration of server domain name has been automated, making setup much easier;
  • automatic installation is now supported by the default ISO image; and
  • miscellaneous bug fixes.

Release notes and installation instruction are available (See XS_Installing_Software#OLPC_XS_160). Martin Langhoff will be starting to work on the School Server beginning next week.


10. Multi-battery charger: Richard is happy with the way that the new PCB is performing; Bitworks is building several fully loaded PCBs so that we can test all 15 channels at once. Lilian Walter has stated the adaption of the laptop NiMH charging code so that it can be used in the multi-battery charger. Richard will fold Lillian's modifications in to a test version of EC code and verify that the charging still works correctly.


11. Wireless: Ricardo Carrano's testing uncovered some problems in the wireless driver. Mesh forwarding doesn't always start and ethtool reports back bogus statistics. Ricardo wrote a python tool that reads a list of XOs from the presence service, initiates pings to them (in random order) and keeps track of the communication statistics—very useful for stressing path discovery. He also started to test the tuning of the contention window parameters in the WLAN radio. Marvell released wireless firmware 5.110.22.p6. It adds control of probe responses (including disabling them completely) and fixes warm reboot and host wakeup bugs.


12. Active Antennae: 2000 Active Antennae are en route from GoldPeak to OLPC. Marvell has released stand-alone firmware that allows operation on any channel that the user selects. We don't have the necessary patches for programming/controlling the antennae in our wireless driver yet.


13. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso continues to work on the Sugar redesign. The only task left to reach the “no regressions” point is implementation of activity-launch feedback. Tomeu helped Eben Eliason to set up sugar-jhbuild and his personal sugar trees. Eben has already sent several useful patches (See https://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/eben/sugar;a=summary). Tomeu is doing more work on speeding up activity startup—the only remaining functional issue was solved. We now need to find a way to integrate it inside the Rainbow security model (thanks Michael Stone, Chris Ball, Robert McQueen, and John Palmieri).


Simon Schampijer continues to work on the graphical user interface for the Sugar control panel. The basic design is done (See Sugar_Control_Panel#GUI_for_the_command_line_tool). Code of the work in progress can be checked out from git (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/erikos/sugar;a=summary).


Dennis Gilmore is working to make Sugar work as a desktop option; he has also started on a set of Fedora packaging guidelines for Sugar activities. For Fedora 9, we should have available the option to do a “yum groupinstall sugar-desktop” you will then be able to select Sugar from gdm/kdm with a set of activities that work. Sugar is currently available in Fedora 8 and Rawhide, although the packaging still needs some work and does not yet setup gdm/kdm.


14. Activities: Chris Ball wrote and released a new activity, “Words”, a translating dictionary with speech synthesis in English/French/German/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish. Morgan Collett has started on a post-Update.1 Chat.

Erik Blankinship reports that the MediaMods team has built a map activity—it allows children to add images and videos to maps. Erik envisions children will use it for storytelling, history, and science projects. Some features include: saving and annotating map locations; grabbing screen shots of map locations so they can be embedded into other activities; visualizing how many media are clustered in a certain area; and filtering which media are displayed on the map by searching their tags (as set in the journal or in record). Download http://mediamods.com/public-svn/map-activity/tags/xo/map-1.xo to give it a try.


15. Builds: Chris wrote a script to automatically create customization keys. It can pull down the latest version of activities for a Peru, Mexico or G1G1 build, or can include every activity it knows about. We used the script to pull together the Mexico customization key. Scott and Dennis continue to shepherd Update.1.


16. Kernel: Andres Salomon worked with Jordan Krause to find and fix some xorg amd driver bugs. He wrote patches for #6015, #6670 and reworked some framebuffer patches; and, of course, he argued with upstream.


17. Presence: Morgan implemented an alternative patch for Ticket #6572 to reduce the key size in Avahi TXT records, by replacing the public key file (which isn't used at this stage) with a shorter record. This doesn't break “friending” as did the previous patch, as the whole stack uses a consistent value for the key, for calculating the JID, etc. Morgan is awaiting testing with salut to see the impact on scalability. Morgan discovered that sync_friends wasn't working; he provided a patch (Ticket #6690). This adds friends to the Jabber-server roster, which will be used by the server-side component, Gadget. Guillaume Desmottes worked on the Avahi abstraction in Salut (Ticket #6658) and tested Read sharing with wake-on-multicast activated (Ticket #6537).


18. Rainbow: Michael Stone prototyped a network isolation primitive described by Daniel Bernstein (http://cr.yp.to/unix/disablenetwork.html), demoed an activity in which a web browser and an HTTP server work together to examine the filesystem.


19. Squeak: Robert Krahn reports that there is a new Squeak project, BlockAttack, available for download (http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/projects/olpc/).

20. OLPC Health: Dr Walter H. Curioso joins us as an adviser in our efforts. Dr Curioso is a research professor in Epidemiology, STD/HIV, and Health Informatics at the School of Public Health and Administration at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Peru. His research focus is on how to use technology to promote global health in developing countries and his latest projects involve using cell phones to collect and transmit adverse events, and using personal digital assistants to assess sexual risk and antiretroviral medication adherence among HIV patients in Lima.

The next conference call is scheduled for Sunday, 16 March. See the Health Meetings page (Health/Calls) for details.

More News

Laptop News is archived here.

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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

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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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