OLPC:News

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LAPTOP NEWS 2007-04-21

1. Taiwan: John Watlington, Mitch Bradley, and Richard Smith traveled to Quanta in Taiwan to work with Victor Chao, Arnold Kao and their team on the “bring up” of the pre-B3 boards. Jordan Crouse, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon helped the team in Taiwan from afar (Colorado and Cambridge). Bottom line: it works.

2. São Paulo: Work began at a school on the periphery of the city with the XO this week. Naturally, every kid is totally excited. The only question anyone in the school, whether kid, teacher, administrator or parent, has is “When can I get one?” Teachers are staying up late to play with their machines and show the kids what they learned. Kids are teaching other kids reducing the burdens of class size and different levels. The school is transforming into a place of joy and excitement. They are beginning work on their wiki-based local-history project which they plan to collaborate with other schools.

3. New “rabbit ears” arrived in Cambridge this week for our evaluation. Notably, these ears, when attached to a laptop, survive a five-foot drop test with direct impact on the ears in their extended (out) position. We will be testing them to higher drop heights in the coming weeks.

4. Sugar: This week saw numerous small fixes in the UI to improve the zoom experience. Marco Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, and Eben Eliason have reached a consensus about how to handle controls in the UI, which is an important part of our developer story. Some of the compromises we have made won't give us the exact experience we are looking for, but they minimize risk to the project.

5. Chat: A simple chat activity for the XO is coming together thanks to the joint efforts of Dan Williams and the Collabora team. Collabora is also putting together a video-call activity.

6. Mesh portals: Dan Williams wrote up instructions on using B2s as mesh portals. Chris Ball tested and released the instructions in the wiki (See Establishing_a_Mesh_Portal).

7. Firmware: Chris and Mitch also tested OFW's wifi driver; it works. Having a wifi driver in the firmware allows us to build a script that can update our laptops with a button-press rather than carrying USB keys around.

8. Kernel: Andres worked with the Sparc and Power PC folks (upstream) on getting a device tree API that makes everyone happy. He also had his typical weekly adventure: he synched master up w/ Linus Torvalds; we now have 2.6.21-rc7 working.

9. Libraries: Christine Madsen has been working on visualizations of how different archives and libraries can work together to form an open library exchange. Justin Thorp from the Library of Congress's World Digital Library (WDL) project came to OLPC for two days of library discussions, and met with SJ Klein, Eben, Adam Brandi, Todd Kelsey, and Mel Chua. WDL is developing the next release of their interface and collection with target of the end of the summer.

10. Wikis: The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) hosted an annual conference about collaborative production of learning materials in Vancouver, Wednesday through Friday. Attendees included Merrick Schaefer of UNICEF, Murugan Pal of CK12, Erik Moeller of Wikimedia and Open Progress, and Joel Thierstein of Connexions; who are all working towards a global collection of CC-BY and locally-developed works. We set immediate goals for sharing materials across these projects; and identifying collections. COL offered broad support across their network of teachers and volunteers, especially in Nigeria. Erik and Brion Vibber from Wikimedia discussed how MediaWiki is planning to support asynchronous and offline editing; and 'live' off-line snapshots that people can edit. The Wikipedia 0.5 static snapshot was released last week; it can be downloaded via torrent. A child-friendly selection of topics is being developed; but still written at a high language level. A proper kid's-encyclopedia is still in the future.

11. Remote display: Zvi Devir documented a second method for remote display of an XO laptop in the wiki (See Remote_display). The trick is to install RealVNC and run x0vncserver on the XO. The remote computer, which can be connected to a video projector, runs a vncviewer that clones the XO display. (Note that this method will not yet workwhen the laptops are in mesh mode—we need to enable packet-forwarding on the School Server for the vnc connection. Until then, the XO must be used in infrastructure mode.)

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:

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.

OLPC PRESS RELEASES

Jan. 2007 OLPC has No Plans (broken link) 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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