OLPC:News
LAPTOP NEWS
1. B2 machines began arriving in Cambridge at the end of the week. We've begun shipping several hundred machines to developers and partners.
2. David Cavallo reports that the Uruguayan government and IDRC hosted a two-day meeting in Montevideo for countries in the region intending to implement one-laptop-per-child initiatives. Attending were representatives from Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica. Countries presented their plans and discussed pragmatics of deployment. Significantly all of the countries know 1:1 must be achieved.
3. Barcelona: Michail Bletsas demonstrated the laptop at the Brightstar booth at 3GSM World Congress.
4. Performance: Red Hat's Marcelo Tosatti was in Cambridge this week. He spent time looking at Geode-specific speedups of core functions of the operating system. Although they did not offer the improvements promised, he will continue to look at them for inclusion as they might have a larger impact on other Geode hardware. He also explored the Psyco Python compiler. It speeds up some benchmarks by as much of 3×, but it is not yet clear how it affects our real- world applications. We have to do more measurements.
5. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso has joined the Sugar team. This week he started work on some re-usable UI controls for use in activities and spent some time on the front end of the journal. Marco Gritti spent time working on the journal design and looking at animation performance on the machine. Parts of the front end of the journal are starting to come together and are included in the latest builds.
6. Sugar Tutorial: Between working on builds and fixing memory leaks in some of our Python binding, John Palmieri “Sugarized” a Tetris-like activity for the laptop written by Vadim Gerasimov. John plans to will use this a as the basis for a tutorial on how to create a Python-based activity for the laptop.
7. School server: John Watlington is joining OLPC to head our School Server project; he will also be helping out on completing the Generation-1 system until a hardware architect can be found.
8. Firmware: Richard Smith released Q2B73, which includes improved battery-charging embedded contoller (EC) code from Quanta and many Open Firmware (OFW) improvements. Since Mitch Bradley was in Cambridge all week, he and Richard spent much time working on firmware improvements; notably some OFW code that lets us look at all the public EC battery RAM variables. (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_Q2B73)
Mitch found the residual MSR problems with the fast-boot startup. The EHCI (enhanced host-controller interface) works, B2 works, and DCON (display controller) works: all systems go for resume from RAM testing. Mitch also found and fixed a DMA boundary-crossing problem in the OFW SD driver. The same problem also exists in the Linux SD driver. Andres Salomon is fixing it there. Lilian Walter continues work on the WPA/WPA2 (Wi-Fi protected access) supplicant functionality; the firmware wireless driver is ready for preliminary integration, but it has not yet appeared in a firmware build.
10. Kernel and base system work: Andres also worked this week with Mitch and Jordan Crouse debugging kernel support for the virtual socket architecture (VSA)-less firmware. Andres also merged Marcelo's cleaned-up libertas driver into an experimental kernel. Linus Torvalds has merged dynticks into the kernel, so Andres started merging in 2.6.20-rc1.
11. Python: Chris Blizzard, John, and Marco exploring a non-fPIC Python 2.5 to use in our build; the current plan is to wait for a new stable image next week, and then move to the Fedora 7 versions of the Python tools, compiled with our compiler flags, but Fedora's source code. This would mean we do not have to maintain a set of Python sources ourselves. We expect that Python 2.5, compiled with correct compiler flags, will speed up our application startup time, perhaps by as much as a factor or two.
12. Media: Erik Blankinship reports that he has the mplayer plugin working in the XO browser playing back ogg-theora successfully.
13. Keyboard: Walter Bender has been working with Ted Selker, Bret Recor, and Eben Eliason on some fine-tuning of the keyboard for B3. We are exploring enlarged keycaps, tapering of the keycaps, and some slight modifications of the keycap legends. Eben and Bret have also reworked the graphics for the game-controller buttons.
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.
Press requests: please send email to press@laptop.org
MILESTONES
| 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. |
| 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
