OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-05-19

1. Taiwan: Mary Lou Jepsen gave a keynote address at inauguration of the Taiwan ICT Alliance, where she featured a fact that many in Taiwan didn’t know: by part count the XO hardware is 92% Taiwanese. Ambassadors from Paraguay, Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Panama, Burkino Faso, Malawi, Sao Tome and Principe, Swaziland, Gambia, Palau, Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands and Nauru, and representatives from Brazil, Fiji, Indonesia, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand, Mongolia, as well as 40 CEOs from Taiwanese IT companies attended. The ambassadors showed strong enthusiasm for XO and strong desire to become launch countries.

2. Villa Cardal, Uruguay: Walter Bender visited with the Ceibal Project team at their test site in a small country town about 80K from Montevideo. What was most impressive about the deployment is how comfortable the children and teachers seem with their Xos after only one week. The children are making extensive use of the video camera and word-processor to create multimedia documents. The teachers are comfortable with letting the children explore and then present their findings to the class. The school deployment team, led by Fiorella Haim, has been focusing on the mesh network—making sure that the children and their families will have Internet access both at school and home. The XO's sunlight-readable display came in handy—both for the children, who spend time with their XOs outdoors and for the towns people, who have some lovely parks for sitting, surfing, and reading.

3. Buenos Aires: Walter gave a demonstration of the XO to the Argentine ministry of education. Vice Minister Juan Carlos Tedesco was the senior member of a group about 15 people, including Gustavo Peyrano, Chief of Advisors, Olga Cavalli and Adrian Carvallo of the Foreign Offices Ministry (technology experts), Susana Montaldo, Minister of Education of Tucuman, and Adriana Canal, Advisor for Minister of Education of Buenos Aires. (Tucuman and Buenos Aires have been selected to be the sites of test schools.) The demo was mesh-centric; it highlighted the Layer 2 routing—browsing through a mesh point portal (MPP) was enabled by the presence of a relay mesh point—and mesh-enabled applications, including video conferencing, Connect-4, sharing of ebooks, and automatic backup and restore to and from a school server. Other demos included a demonstration of the journal, a test of extended battery-lifetime (more than 12 hours in ebook-mode), full-screen video, web browsing, eToys (including World Stethoscope—a means of sending data into eToys from the XO's microphone input), Turtle Art (a simple graphical environment for programming in Logo), and a serverless (mesh-enabled) listserv for posting community notices. The discussion that followed highlighted the unique features of the XO hardware, including the advantages of the display, low power, robustness, low environmental impact; software, including the collaboration features of the Sugar user interface and the Bitfrost security system; and the laptop ecosystem, including gang-chargers, solar-powered mesh repeaters, etc. Also discussed were observations from how children and teachers are using the XOs in Brazil, Nigeria, and Thailand.

Many thanks to everyone who worked so hard to make the demonstration a success, including Richard Smith, Chris Ball, Michail Bletsas, John Watlington, Dan Williams, John Palmieri, Marco Gritti, Chris Blizzard, Tomeu Vizoszo, the Collabora team, the eToys team, Erik Blankinship, Bahktiar Mikhak, Don Hopkins, Mitch Bradley, Andres Salomon, SJ Klein, Felice Gardner, and Jim Gettys.

4. Google’s Stephen Cho organized a day of discussions around an “Our Stories” project, including Sharad Sapra, head of UNICEF's Communications division, Dave Isay of StoryCorps, and Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling. The goal was to refine milestones and support for both on-line and XO activities to help children interview people in their community and share those stories, to encourage teachers to work this into a class/community exercise, and to visualize the results on a world map. A public presentation was well received; around a dozen Googlers signed up to help make the project happen. The initial focus is on having a simple prototype ready by early June; Stephen hopes to host five-million stories from OLPC countries after three years. Similar works underway such as Brazil's Million Stories of Youth could use the same interfaces.

5. Taipei: Michail Bletsas spoke at the annual Taipei Summit conference, whose theme this year was WiMax. Michail expressed the opinion that WiMax is drifting away from relevance by focusing on licensed spectrum in the developed world. (OLPC's interest of course is unlicensed spectrum in the developing world.)

Prof. H.T. Kung of Harvard University showed up a demo of his collaboration with OLPC running on six XO laptops. These laptops—in the official Taipei booth—were accessing the Internet via a WiFi/WiMax gateway router. One of the XO's was running a traffic-management module, refereeing traffic for the other five and enforcing fairness in downloads over TCP.

6. Environmental: Several environmental groups have been in contact with Mary Lou Jepsen about our “greenness” and are duly impressed at how we go above and beyond EPEAT environmental specifications. Notably:

  • XO batteries last 4× longer than standard rechargeable batteries; long lifetime of batteries is not an EPEAT requirement.
  • Idle power consumption: Energy-Star compliance is mandated by EPEAT, but the idle power consumption of the XO laptop is 14× better.
  • 5-year laptop lifetime; long lifetime of laptop before obsolescence is not an EPEAT requirement.
  • Half the size and weight of a typical laptop; energy and resources used to make an XO are less; also not an EPEAT requirement and relevant for recycling

These groups are helping with the various aspects of our environmental statements and policies. In particular they are helping us craft the best “take-back” system we can, to assure XO laptops don’t end up in landfills, ever.

7. Human power: Pedal Power Haiti wants to try our laptops with the pedal power system they are using from Dissigno (a San Francisco-based human-power startup). This system is big, but folds up, and is in test already in Nepal and Haiti. The output is between 12–14.6 volts at 50–70 Watts. The system was designed to charge a car battery, and can work with our gang charger systems as well.

8. Power management: This week we passed a major milestone: working ebook mode using the read activity as vehicle. Suspend and resume are working on both GX and LX--although we have a few bugs left on the LX. Walter Bender demonstrated the fruits of many people's labor in Argentina, Peru, and Uruguay. In one test--with the caveat that the the WiFi was off, an XO ran for 23 hours on a 92% battery charge. Even with the backlight on, we have seen ebook mode run for more than 13 hours. Thanks go to Don Hopkins, Chris Ball, Mitch Bradley, and Andres Salomon.

The last major functional piece of resume is working; Marcelo Tosatti reports that it appears that basic functionality (detection of device insertion) is now working, even though he has no idea why (perhaps some change in mainline). All we need to do is to power up the USB ports after resume. Once this is done, we should have completed basic suspend and resume work, and move on to performance (both speed of resume, and power management in general. This will also allow us to have the mesh alive in ebook mode as soon as we have completely autonomous mesh firmware.

9. Suspend/resume: Chris Ball has prepared a jffs2 image that Quanta can use for testing LX suspend/resume. Resume is stable when done from the console, but not yet from inside X. Bernardo Innocenti found and helped to diagnose a problem with the serial port on LX after resume, and Dave Woodhouse came up with a fix.

We also looked at optimizations: with our standard kernel, resume takes 2–3 seconds from when the kernel starts up to when it finishes initializing. After disabling USB, we are down to about 1 second. Since the touchpad and keyboard remain powered up during suspend, we can skip the suspend/resume code for them—an additional savings of 0.5 seconds.

10. Kernel: At Dave Woodhouse's behest, Andres Salomon started looking at LOGFS, a potential successor to JFFS2. We won't ship it with Gen1, but it is something we are exploring for use after our initial release and an eventual Gen-2 system. Greg Kroah-Hartman is working on binding multiple PCI drivers to a single PCI device by way of a “piggy” bus driver: the piggy driver binds to all PCI devices; then other drivers can go through the piggy layer. It's still in active development: the code can be found in the -mm tree. Andres is finishing up the open firmware device-tree work. Bernardo also extended the kernel debugger (kdb) to be able to read and write model-specific registers (MSRs). Pierre Ossman tells us that an 8GB SD card worked on his XO, so now we know that we support 8G+ cards. Pierre also has a patch to significantly increase the speed of SD on our hardware.

11. X Window System: Bernardo is chasing X crashing on XVideo and RANDR; he has had a hard time reproducing the bug: he only sees it on a B2 machine with his own kernel—not with the stock 406 kernel. Jim Gettys is investigating the current state of X Window System as it pertains to the XO. We need to deal properly with ebook mode (the game buttons and the touchpad need to rotate along with the screen); the new input system hasn't landed in X.org head yet. We also have power-related work in both the X Window System and kernel driver teed up. Jordon Crouse implemented the X DPMS extension (screen saver) this week as well, completing another piece of what is needed for power management.

12. Firmware: Mitch Bradley has been busy. He

  • discovered a way to eliminate 64 mS from the resume time, using a barely-documented AMD test register;
  • discovered a problem with the microphone LED blinking at suspend/resume (John Watlington has a proposed fix);
  • improved firmware audio self-test for frequency response and distortion measurements;
  • analyzed speaker audio quality and proposed a zero-cost hardware mod to reduce distortion;
  • reduced the memory use of the firmware JFFS2 driver by a factor of ~8;
  • incorporated lovely new boot progress icons designed by Eben Eliason;
  • specified in great detail a new protocol for CPU/EC command interactions, to improve speed and reliability;
  • revised, corrected, and documented the interrupt routing for the B3 systems;
  • determined the correct software fix for the camera-light-left-on problem;
  • corrected network boot problems that were holding up manufacturing;
  • added manufacturing data strings to the device tree in support of school server interactions;
  • added MSR, DCON, display registers, and manufacturing data support to the Linux-hosted Forth debug tool;
  • added SD high-capacity support to the firmware SD driver;
  • provided support and training for new Quanta software engineers; and
  • provided technical support for country evaluators late at night on IRC.

Lilian Walter read up on IPv6, came up with a plan and started some coding. That stopped in order to get the power management code working on the B3.

13. School server: John Watlington reports that the school server is on track, with schematic-level design starting. A batch of Active Antennas is back from assembly. Holger Levson reports:

  • Automatic livecd is almost working. He found three bugs in livecd-installer in textmode: two of them are fixed; the remaining problem is trivial to workaround. The installed system boots fine.
  • Fully automatic installation (FAI) is working. We need to put the server applications in FAI to have them automatically installed. (A how-to for using FAI needs to be written.)

14. Multicast: Miguel Álvarez finished implementing and debugging a new version of Dan William's “MostlyReliablePipe.” This one is based on the scalable reliable multicast (SRM) protocol, and so far the results seem interesting: in his first test-bed with four nodes—all transmitting at a rate of one message/s and with an induced continuous error-rate of 30% (which I hope is far worse than any situation the mesh will face), no packets get lost, and the overhead in terms of traffic oscillates between 1-5% of the total data transmitted. He will be conducting a much larger test and will upload the code to git for everyone to use, critique, comment and modify.

15. Sugar design: Eben Eliason:

  • uploaded a number of new screen shots to the Activities section of the wiki;
  • created a series of find/replace dialog mock ups that employ some new approaches to the problem;
  • created an extensive section in the human interface guidelines about the new toolbar design;
  • created a series of icons for status indication during the boot process which integrate neatly with the OLPC logo graphic style;
  • worked with Marco Gritti to spec the visual style for “inactive” controls and buttons in the UI;
  • began working on a series of mock ups specifying the various invitation methods, receiving invitations, and the notification system;
  • continue working back and forth with Manusheel Gupta to “Sugarize” the Paint activity;
  • worked with Pentagram on the mesh UI design; and
  • continue working back and forth with the Abiword team to Sugarize the Write activity.

16. TamTam: Jean Piché reports that the TamTam team is making its summer plans:

  • solidify TamTam on the B4 and C machines: better keyboard response; a possible move to a 22k sampling rate (This would improve audio quality famously, specially where headphones or external speakers are used.); reinstate microphone and keyboard recording; and solve all pop-up window issues.
  • merge TamTam Jam and miniTamTam into one integrated activity; the TamTam suite would revert to a three-prong affair: Play, Compose, Make sounds.
  • Sugar conformity and integration: the Sugar controller toolkit is almost complete enough for all of the TamTam purposes.
  • TamTam tunes outside TamTam: a simple embeddable TamTam player so children can put their compositions into documents. (AbiWord would be the first target.)
  • tutorials and field trials: text-free tutorials to show children how to use the applications;
  • The sound bank will be fully overhauled (hopefully at a 22k sampling rate).

17. Ebook: Josh Gay and Ian Bicking spent two days at OLPC working through our infrastructure for recording and aggregating comments. Josh is currently finishing a port of Stet, the 'heat map'-style commenting system used for the GPLv3 draft, which will be usable for commenting on any web page(See http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gplv3-draft-3.html). Ian is looking into a simple reader interface that renders any HTML page, not only those that have been preprocessed, as a way of integrating our current book-reader concept more neatly with the browser. Marco Gritti and Ian suggested pyxpcom might be the right way to proceed, with some success (See http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2007-May/002396.html).

18. In the community: Bernardo Innocenti has started volunteering his time at OLPC working on kernel and other low level software. Hal Murray is helping out Lilian Walter testing that our power management hardware controls are all correct and understood.

19. Etoys. Works continue to match the Etoys' Look better with the Sugar environment. Takashi Yamamiya has been working on copy and paste multimedia objects between EToys and other sugar activities. Bert Freudenberg built a new VM with preliminary D-Bus support for Etoys with Takashi's clipboard support. Andreas Raab's "virtual display" code is incorporated so that people can make a content for XO's 1200x900 pixel screen regardless the actual size of display. A Sugar-like menu bar is added by Yoshiki Ohshima. Scott Wallace's enhancement of "property sheet" provides better interface to manipulates the graphical properties of user objects. Alan Kay and Ted Kaehler continue on making more educational examples and documents in and for Etoys.

More News

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.


Articles

  1. redirect OLPC:News#Press

More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

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