OLPC:News

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LAPTOP NEWS 2007-04-14

1. São Paulo: Roseli de Deus Lopes and her team have been working with the teachers for a smooth introduction and work began with XOs in the school in this week. Naturally, even though there are only 100 laptops initially, word spread throughout the school and all the children and teachers are anxious to participate. David Cavallo met with the teachers for several days: the teachers and children will work in groups in inter-disciplinary projects, including a local-history project to grow and combine with all laptop schools.

2. Porto Alegre: Lea Fagundes and her team have been working with the XO in the Luciana de Abreu Elementary School for three weeks and already is having tremendous impact. The children of course are doing fantastic work and you see them moving around the school, taking pictures, working on projects, and truly engaged in their learning. Yesterday two teachers were unable to come to school due to family emergencies and the principal could not get substitutes; they dismissed the children of those classes early. For the first time in anyone's recollection, no one left when dismissed, preferring to stay and work with the laptops. The school had record attendance by parents for a meeting, with more than 10× the usual number attending. The teachers and children are ecstatic. The concrete example of chidlren, teachers, laptops and learning is changing the minds of doubters.

3. Rio de Janeiro: Michail Bletsas attended a two-day meeting organized by Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP), the organization that runs Brazil's academic network. The main theme of the meeting was digital inclusion and a people from the USP and Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) presented their first results from testing wireless connectivity on the XO laptop. Their conclusion: it works.

4. FISL8.0: Michail and Javier Cardona delivered back-to-back presentations on the various aspects of the OLPC mesh. Javier concluded with a nice audio-streaming demo via the mesh. Two XOs were streaming audio between them, their transmission power was limited to 1mW (from 60), so that the range between them was limited—about 40m with the rabbit ears down. One person went to the end of the lecture hall with one of the XOs and the audio stopped; another person went to the middle of the room with a third XO, which restored the audio flow.

John Palmieri, Tomeu Vizoso, Marcelo Tosatti, David Cavallo, and Jim Gettys also attended the conference, which is the largest free software conference in the developing world (~5000 people pre-registered for the conference). Attendance at the OLPC booth was at times a crush and was always very busy.

5. Carla Gomez-Monroy, a former student of Walter's from the MIT Media Lab, will be helping us with the test school deployments. Carla spent several years working with the Schlumberger Excellence in Educational Development (SEED) Foundation, doing constructionist projects in schools in the developing world, including Nigeria.

6. Is XO the “greenest” laptop on the planet? This seems not to be just literal but also appears figurative: Mary Lou and Robert spent some time talking to various environmental agencies last week. Our low-power design, RoHS compliance, LED backlight (rather than mercury-containing CCFL), battery with 4× the standard battery lifetime, elimination of PVCs and Brominated flame retardants, etc., may actually spur environmentalists to create a new category for our laptop. More on this in the coming weeks.

7. B3: Pre-B3 motherboards will be made today (Saturday) at Quanta. The pre-B3 bring up in Taipei will commence on April 18 in Taipei with Richard Smith, John Watlington, Mitch Bradley, and David Woodhouse present.

8. New rubber ears: 30 sets of rubber bunny ears arrived Friday at OLPC; we will use them for drop testing to new heights early next week. Current testing shows our laptops survive a five-foot drop tests on the “open” ears.

9. Firmware/kernel: Mitch and Andres Salomon have succeeded in a complete boot off an SD card using a custom kernel and a few tweaks to OS Build 385. They are working on making it require fewer custom changes, so that booting off SD can be done routinely. Mitch and Richard worked on preparations for the LX processor (B3) board bring up next week. Mitch provided a version of the firmware to Quanta for initial debug.

10. User interface: Eben Eliason has developed a new tabbed toolbar system for Sugar that he has documented in the wiki. He also made yet another significant pass over the UI controls and will be meeting Marco Gritti and Tomeu Vizoso to get an API implemented for them. He has sketched mock-ups for our core activities (Write, Browser, etc.) using the new system and the team at Abiword has already begun implementing many of the new features.

Eben also specified a more detailed interaction for the clipboard, which will be consistent with current UI expectations while providing the additional features we want. The basic interaction is a clipboard stack, with the most recently copied item on top, which also acts as a push through queue when it fills up, dropping the bottom element from the stack when new items come in. And he prepared a refined “introductory sequence” for entering name, choosing colors, and taking a photo on first boot. Marco has this design and is working on implementation.

11. School server: Web caching is configured and running on the school server in the OLPC office in Cambridge. All XOs in the area running a current build are using it for network access.

12. From the community: Marc Maurer reports that his work on adding syntax coloring to AbiWord for the purposes of the develop activity is beginning to work. John Resig has been making progress on an eBook reader (See http://ejohn.org/apps/ebook/ for a live demo). Bruno Coudoin reports that GCompris is running on the XO. (GCompris is education software targeting young children that has been translated in more than 40 languages.) While it doesn't yet follow all of the design rules of Sugar, it is fun to see working. Ignatz Heinz at Avallain Learning is working on making an open-source version of their language-learning and literacy tools available for the XO. Google has just come out with a beta API to their new translation engine. Franz Och, one of their lead researchers, thinks it can be used for IM translation for the XO and would like to see this tested.

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@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

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.
Dec. 2006 Uruguay announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.

OLPC 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 Transform Learning.

Articles

More articles can be found here.

12 Apr. 2007 EYF Times| Meet the Scientist: Nicholas Negroponte
11 Apr. 2007 CNET News| Photos: Nigerian students power up their laptops
11 Apr. 2007 The News| Poor rural Thai students to get 100-dollar laptops
29 Mar. 2007 ComputerWorld| OLPC eyes experimental battery for $100 laptop

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

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