OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-05-26

1. 80 B3 machines arrived at the OLPC offices in Cambridge on Friday. These machines, which are close to final, feature the Geode LX processor, improved keyboard and touch pad, many electrical and mechanical enhancements, and a brightly colored XO logo on the back. First impression: Wow!!

2. Dorchester: Walter Bender paid a brief visit to the Lilla G. Fredrick Pilot Middle School, one of three one-to-one computing programs funded by the State of Massachusetts. Although they are not (yet) using XOs, Principal Debra Socia has observed all things we have come to expect: more teacher and student engagement, more parent and community involvement, a higher level of discourse around learning, more writing, etc.

3. UL: Quanta and OLPC met with UL this week to determine the exact strategy for certification of the laptops. Nearly all testing will be done by UL Taiwan, close to the Quanta offices to allow close communication. The B3 units will undergo test starting end of next week. The main areas of test are thermal, electro-magnetic interference, and radio-frequency noise (from WiFi). We will test at 40C, 45C and 50C to determine our maximum sustained ambient operating temperature.

4. Green: Mary Lou Jepsen met with John Bullock, the author of the Basel Convention take-back protocol for mobile telephones. The Basel Convention was started in 1987 as a way to globally address toxic dumping through recycling and take-back programs. It has been ratified by almost all countries, a notable exception in the USA. John, a recycling expert, said “OLPC has set a new environmental standard with XO” and wants to find a way to both help us continue, and to get the story out to other CE manufacturers. He offered many suggestions for improving our environmental position.

5. Sugar: Over the last couple of weeks we have seen great advances in the Sugar user-interface and the underlying systems that support it. A particular ficus has been on the mechanisms for collaboration:

  • Marc Maurer has the Abiword-based Write activity hooked up to the Presence Service and Tubes API so it can find other people on the network. He is the first person who has tried to do it from C/C++; we are interested in seeing that experience documented.
  • The Collabora team has been making a lot of fixes to the Presence Service. They have also been working on patches to dbus to fix some issues and are pushing for a new dbus release. John Palmieri is integrating those patches and working on a new release.
  • The Collabora team has also been working on a stream API that will make it very easy for activities that want to talk directly with each other to do so from the Presence Service. And they have started work on integrating the peer-to-peer (called salut) XMPP code into the Presence Service.
  • Marco Gritti and Tomeu Vizoso have been very busy working on new web activity features. They have a new feature that makes if very easy to embed the browser directory into a python program and makes it possible to access the DOM directly from python instead of having to do it from C++. As a result, they were able to implement session restoration and saving of data to the Journal.
  • Marco also hooked up the xdg mime system into Sugar. This is one of the pieces required to let activities say which mime types they handle and how to associate them in the Journal.
  • Tomeu has also been working with Ben Saller to implement new features in the data store that are needed by the Journal.
  • Chris Ball began work setting up a tinderbox for Sugar, so that our activity and Sugar developers can see whether a Sugar build will succeed before trying it themselves. This should save them a lot of time as the Sugar build pulls in many external modules and often fails.
  • Chris also came up with a kernel patch to expose our ebook-mode “flip” kernel events to the input layer, which is where HAL listens for them. Once that's tested, we can have rotate on ebook-flip happening through Sugar, on a per-activity basis.

6. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg continues on dbus support in Etoys; bypassing the launcher program written in Python, the start up time of Etoys will be much shorter. Takashi Yamamiya's work on clipboard is also continuing: he is experimenting with the X protocol to copy objects from Etoys to Sugar, where they can be accessed by other activities, including the Journal. Yoshiki Ohshima is working on the integration with Pango. which will allow more and better language support in Etoys. Scott Wallace has been experimenting expression tiles and Ted Kaehler continues work on an Etoy example of physics simulation.

7. School server: Dave Woodhouse worked with John Watlington on the configuration of IPv6 and the school server. Holger Levsen has built a local mirror that now carries the Fedore Core 6 and 7 source for i386, PowerPC. Building the livecd now only takes 33 minutes compared to 45 minutes against a remote mirror. The mirror is located at http://fedora.laptop.org. Holger reports that last week’s issues in Anaconda were fixed by upstream, but he found a new bug, which prevents using a kickstart-file and thus automated installations at the moment. Luckily this error happens in textmode and graphical mode, so I expect it to be fixed soon. (The manual workaround for the moment is to not use a kickstart file and answer the questions about partitioning and networking manually.) Builds are available at http://xs-dev.laptop.org/holger/ and documentation is found at User:Holger.

8. Power management: Chris Ball talked with David Zeuthen (HAL maintainer) and Richard Hughes (gnome-power-manager maintainer) about the best way to design our power manager. Chris upgraded to the latest version of HAL and tested that it can expose our lid open/close events over dbus. Adding functionality to go to sleep with the backlight off when the lid is closed is only a few lines of code away now.

9. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti has been working on USB suspend/resume. He also has been working with Cozybit on trying to track down some suspend/resume issues with the wireless firmware. And he has been verifying another fix related to suspend with a starvation problem for the gc thread for the jffs2 filesystem; it sounds like this is fixed. Bernardo Innocenti and Dave Woodhouse also fixed a bug in the kernel serial driver on LX resume.

10. Systems infrastructure: Mitch Bradley investigated redoing the startup scripts in our system, which will end up being about 1/6th the previous size, understandable by mere mortals, and speed boot time. Chris Ball took a tcpdump of the web browser rendering over Ethernet for analysis with netplot. Rob Savoye has been working with Bernardo Innocenti on integrating Geode specific GLibc functions, which will improve performance in a number of areas. Bernardo is also worked on setting up to do the X Window System build environment for power management and for better handling of our input devices.

11. Kernel: Jon Corbet has a patch to turn off the camera LED when it is not in use. Andres Salomon worked on a DCON bug that appeared in some B3 hardware; after a resume, some of the GPIOs were in an inconsistent state, resulting in problems with DCON interrupt handling. The real cause is still unknown, but open firmware (OFW) has been changed to ensure that the necessary GPIO bits become unset after resume. Richard Smith is investigating further. Andres also worked on branching a new stable kernel, syncing the libertas tree up with master, and also syncing master up with Linux 2.6.22-rc1.

12. Firmware: Lilian Walter been making sure that power on/off audio, SD and the camera work on B3. Lilian is also working on the IPv6 and ping6. She has some very simple code for the IP layer (no extra headers for now). Next is to work on the address resolution bit (maybe hard code it just to test the Ipv6 layer so far with ping6).

Mitch Bradley released released new firmware Q2C14 with several bug fixes, a first pass at “quiet” boot screen support, wireless LAN auto-boot support for manufacturing, microphone LED blink reduction code (reduces the cost of the hardware workaround. Mitch also showed Quanta how to make an initrd image for manufacturing diagnostics and rrticulated a scheme for the mechanics of quiet boot across the firmware, kernel, userspace, and X transitions.

13. Hardware testing: Richard Smith worked on the B3 hardware checkout. Helped John Watlington test all parts of the system, including the firmware protect circuitry. Further testing (separate from the tens of functional tests that each XO is subjected to as part of the manufacturing process) includes such favorites as:

  • Thermal shock: spending twenty minutes at –20C, then jumping to 60C in less than two minutes; staying at 60C for 20 minutes, then dropping back to –20C in less than two minutes (the whole process is repeated 50 times);
  • Thermal profile: taking the temperature of most chips on the motherboard, while running a suite of applications at 50C;
  • Altitude testing: operation tested for 8 hrs at 5.5 Km;
  • Free-drop steel-ball test (onto LCD);
  • Free-throw test: simulating a child free throwing an XO, its battery, and power brick onto the floor.

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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