OLPC:News
Laptop News 2007-06-02
1. NYC: OLPC, Quanta, Fuse, Gecko, and Pentagram met at the Pentagram office to do the final mechanical design review for B4. B4 build is scheduled for June 22. At least 2000 units will be built over a one-to-two week period; we are trying to find a way to build more units if possible.
2. Washington DC: Nicholas Negroponte and Walter Bender spent Thursday at the World Bank. Our host was Ruth Kagia, Education Director. A presentation to ~50 staffers and a hour-long Q&A session both dispelled much misinformation about OLPC and generated enthusiasm for the OLPC mission.
3. Power adaptors: Mary Lou Jepsen’s investigation of burn temperatures for children’s skin resulted in UL lowering their maximum temperature allowed for the OLPC AC adaptor from 85C to 75C. (When was the last time that a company seeking certification helped make the specifications tougher?)
4. Certification: 10 B3 laptops have been sent to UL for certification testing. They will be tested for UL60950. Uruguay has asked for our water-resistance certification. Mary Lou is investigating testing: we will likely be able to achieve IP42 and perhaps better. IP42 means that a test wire 1mm in diameter shall not penetrate the housing and water that is dripped at a rainfall rate for 2.5 minutes in each of 4 different positions shall also not penetrate the housing. We may be able achieve something better, such as IP54, which tests if a suspension of talcum powder ends up in the housing (unlikely due to our fanless operation) and water is sprayed for 10 minutes from a series of nozzles (might be possible in the closed tote-mode of the laptop).
5. Server: Fuse presented a new concept design for the server that allows fans outside the housing of the server to cool it down continuously in a chimney type.
6. Batteries: MIT Materials Science Professor Sadoway visited OLPC this week to discuss battery chemistry Mary Lou, Richard Smith, and John Watlington. As a result of his visit we are investigating our own tests of charging LiFeP at higher ambient temperature, as well as sampling, lifetime recycling.
7. Mesh: Marcelo Tosatti, who celebrated his birthday this week, working with Dan Williams, Javier Cardona (Cozybit), and Ronak Chokshi's team at Marvell, reached a milestone: working autonomous mesh operation while the XO is suspended. Richard Smith worked with Marcelo, CozyBit and Mitch Bradley to verify that the WLAN wake up is working. (Signals from the WLAN are causing the EC to generate system call interrupts, but the kernel is yet not waking up correctly.)
Mesh testing also continues. In certain cases, having an environment without other radio sources is necessary in order to strongly correlate cause and effect. Michail Bletsas joined H.T. Kung's group at Harvard Univesity's Soldier's Field for testing a setup where the school gateway enforces fair internet access among a group of dispersed laptops.
8. Network: Dan also continued to chase the libertas patches and has been driving the changes upstream into the kernel. He has also been spending time on NetworkManager upstream, trying to get the next release into shape for use in OLPC. There are a lot of features in the next planned release (0.7) that he's already back-ported into our build that will be picked up when we upgrade. Dan and the Collabora team continue work on the Presence Service; it is nearly feature completed with a stable API.
9. Sugar: Ben Saller worked on text indexing in the data store, which should make it easy to search in the Journal. Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti have both been working on the browser and on the cleaning up the data store and Sugar interactions. They have also been refactoring code in preparation of putting it into new build images. John Palmieri spent time on the totem video player browser plugin. He also spent some time looking into what it will take to move to Fedora 7. (Fedora 7 was released on May 31st.) Chris Ball hooked up our ebook flip sensor to rotate the screen automatically, which involved patches to the kernel, the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and Sugar. Chris also established a Sugar tinderbox (See http://dev.laptop.org/sugar-tinder/). Upcoming features include runtime testing of activities and RSS and e-mail notification of new/failed builds. Muriel de Souza Godoi will be working Eben Eliason on refining the UI in many of our standard Sugar activities.
10. X Window System: The Geode LX has a significantly more capable graphics engine than the GX, which makes investing in optimizing its driver more important. Further, it is time to complete work on the input issues relating to screen rotation; this requires working on the “master” branch of X.org. Bernie Innocenti and Jordan Crouse worked on updating the Geode driver to the current X.org master branch, and fought and fixed a number of rendering bugs. There are some more bugs to be chased and squashed exposed by testing, though it again functions adequately for Sugar's current use. Jim Gettys refreshed his knowledge of xkb in preparation to adding keysyms now that the keyboard is finalized and our UI needs more clearly understood.
11. Power management: Adam Jackson worked on display-controller (DCON) power management. The Geode has “compression buffers” that can greatly reduce bandwidth use for graphics by compressing pixels on their way to the screen. But even better is to be able to turn off the video output entirely: the DCON makes it possible for the Geode to entirely power down parts of the screen. A discovery by Mitch that enables us to restart the video unit on the Geode with almost no latency means that we can use DCON mode much more aggressively than we had expected, and may find it unnecessary to deal with compression buffers. We also want to dynamically control the frame rate; we can save 60mw (significant in ebook mode) by driving the panel at 25hz rather than 50hz. Adam has started on this work.
12. Kernel: Andres Salomon synced the kernel up with 2.6.22-rc1. Unfortunately, this seemed rather broken; this week, Andres synced with 2.6.22-rc3, and it behaved much better. Andres also pulled in a new libertas driver. Marcelo discovered a bug in our suspend/resume code that was triggered by the updated kernel code; with that fixed, suspend/resume works in master again. (There is still some remaining console corruption that needs to be worked out.) Andres started digging into the vserver capabilities, which is key to the deployment of BitFrost.
13. Firmware: Mitch worked on stabilizing the firmware for B4: he fixed minor bugs 1580, 1577, 498 and serious bug 1609. He reverted the automatic “freeze screen” (quiet boot) behavior due to the OS support not being ready for it. You can still use it by adding a “freeze” line in olpc.fth, and changed the startup sound so that you have to press a game key to hear it.
Note: Q2C14 is not recommended for general use; a new release will be issued as soon as Mitch get official EC bits from Quanta.
14. Embedded controller: Mitch added support for a new embedded controller (EC) command protocol to Open Firmware (OFW). Richard Smith worked on implementing the protocol. The protocol is mostly complete and partially tested. Its currently working well enough to switch the kernel over to using these commands. The next firmware release will have this new protocol enabled. Richard also tested an EC code drop from Quanta which worked on resolving some of our blocker bugs.
15. Hardware: John Watlington spent most of the week rewriting and updating the XO Hardware Design Specification. This is the document that describes the basic hardware features of the XO in detail. The electrical design of the B4 is completed. There are very few changes from the B3 design, just fixes for remaining small problems. The motherboard was released by Quanta for circuit board fabrication.
16. From the community: Rob Savoye reports that since ffmpeg isn't (and probably will never be) included in the OLPC builds, he built a binary tarball of Gnash with full audio and video support. (The Gnash build for 406 has no video support enable for Flash codecs.) You can download this snapshot of the upcoming Gnash release from ttp://gnashdev.org/olpc/download.html. The tarball gets installed in /usr/local, and the plugin gets installed in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. The embedded video performance is adequate, streaming performance is around 3-5 fps max. (This was on a B1. B3 results will be reported soon.)
More News
Laptop News is archived at Laptop News. Also on community-news.
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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.
Press
- redirect OLPC:News#Press
More articles can be found here.
Video
Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.
- A collection of several videos can found at OLPC.TV
- 60 Minutes, What if Every Child had a Laptop [1]
- CNN, Should Intel Fear $100 Laptop? [2]
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode Two
- Red Hat Magazine: Inside One Laptop per Child, Episode One
- OLPC Video from Switzerland, 26.01.2007
- Interview with Nicholas Negroponte on the &100 Laptop
- Presentation by Jim Gettys at FOSDEM 2007
- GLOBO- BRASIL: Crianças testam computador portátil/ Students test the laptop
- Mark Foster delivers presentation to Standford University
- Technology Review Mini-Documentary
- A Brief Demo
