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Laptop News 2007-06-09

1. Montevideo: On Friday, the Technology Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU) released a bid for Project Ceibal (Conectividad Educativa de Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea)—one laptop per child in Uruguay.

2. Olin College hosted the first OLPC Game Jam (See Game_Jam) last weekend, bringing together ten teams of game developers and some freelance artists, musicians, and programmers, to make games for the XO. Organizers Mel Chua and SJ Klein are working on general notes re: organizing game jams and other local community events to develop materials for the XO. Most of the teams chose to work in Python, though a few developed in Flash. (A Flash developer who had rather vehemently against Python at the start of the weekend, wouldn't stop talking about how nice Python was by Sunday.) Teams collaborated with one another, in addition to competing to make the best game; they shared music and artistic expertise, and code snippets and coding advice. (The Flash developers uniformly wanted to write things that would work in Gnash on our platform, not standard Flash 9; they spent part of Friday and Saturday working with the Gnash team to help improve its utility for game development.)

The two best reviewed games both used PyGame; they were a version of 3D Pong and a version of the old Crossfire game called Spray Play (See 3dpong.activity.zip and http://sprayplay.googlecode.com/svn/).

3. Taking the heat: We have decided to see how much heat XO can take. Mary Lou Jepsen has instructed UL to test our laptop for a 50C (122F) operating temperature. Typical laptops are only tested to 35C (95F) or 40C (104F), which is unacceptable for the children who will be using our laptops in hot temperatures (e.g., in direct sunlight and of course without air conditioning). Mary Lou and Tracy Price are also running a simple bake test at the OLPC office. The laptop is running days at 52C (125F), and nights at 22C (72F). UL and Quanta are doing more extensive testing, but shown is a laptop, running the eToys demo that sits in the oven night and day. Try that with a conventional laptop!

4. Green: Mary Lou and Robert Fadel have started the application process for EPEAT Gold—the highest award given to laptops; one no other laptop has yet received. Also, late last week Google's Ethan Beard and Megan Smith, and Red Hat's Mike Evans invited OLPC to join with Google, Intel, Quanta, Red Hat, AMD, HP and others in the IT industry to launch Climate Savers, an organization dedicated to lowering the power consumption of computers through better power management systems, and more efficient AC adaptors. Climate Savers picked lower power as the single thing on which to concentrate in order to have the biggest positive impact on the environment. OLPC concurs with this believe. At first those that join Climate Savers agree to meet the Energy Star goals—OLPC is already 14× better than Energy Star.

5. $1 video microscope: Inspired by SJ Klein and EO Smith, Mary Lou made a 100× video microscope for her XO for $1 (three plastic lenses in plastic housing). She made videos of the XO screen compared with a standard LCD screen, where the details of the pixel structure can be clearly seen. She will be compiling a video for youtube.com in the coming days.

6. Sugar: Eben Eliason has continued to refine a series of mock-ups for rollovers, invitations, and notifications. He has created a new series of Activity mockups, including Browse, Read, Write, Memorize, Calculate, Photograph/Capture/Record, and TamTam that feature tagging and tabs. He also created a preliminary specification for keyboard shortcut design, now open for discussion. Also he worked with Jim Gettys to figure out some logic for the hand-held buttons in terms of desired functionality and semantic meaning. Marco Gritti has been making changes to the GTK theme to incorporate many of these improvements.

7. Marc Maurer continues work on the Write activity, with his focus mostly around collaboration. He has been working on a new algorithm to handle collisions in documents when people are editing the same part of a document. He also spent a lot of time fixing bugs in Abiword to close a blocker bug in the 406 Build.

8. Muriel de Souza Godoi updated the Memory Activity to the new sugar API; now all the memory games were unified in one activity. He also worked Eben designed a new Memorize Game UI; the new scoreboard was developed as a component, with methods such as: set fill color, set stroke color, increase score, set_current_player, etc. The new card table was also developed as a component and can be controlled using the hand-held-mode buttons. These UI components are designed to be as flexible as possible, focusing on reusing components.

9. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso has been working on the Journal; he has added the ability to do screen capture by typing Alt-1; the image is saved to the Journal. He also has been working to make it possible to launch downloaded activities directly from the Journal. He has been updating the web browser in order making it work with the new Journal code as well as the new code to interface with Python. Ben Saller has been working on how to get the Journal to support alternate media such as USB drives. Eben created a new series of Journal mock-ups that incorporate tabbed toolbars, address support for "sort by, then by," and for versioning.

10. Mesh Activities: Dan Williams made progress with Network Manager (NM) and the mesh. NM will now automatically scan and get an address on the mesh network. The Collabora folks continue down the path of making the peer-to-peer presence-discovery code and tubes code work. They also added a "Hellomesh" Activity that shows how to build a tubes-enabled activity. (Please note that the activity will change over time as the tubes API stabilizes.) Eben worked extensively back and forth with Pentagram on an updated UI design for the mesh view.

11. Fedora Core 7: John Palmieri has been moving our builds to a Fedora 7 base. Once that is done we will have a lot more opportunity to collaborate with the community and also get more direct help from the 1200 or so Fedora contributors. Moving to Fedora 7 also means that many of our modified packages are rolled up into the main repository.

12. Build 406.14: Firmware and a stable kernel were released to Quanta for the Btest-4 build, derived from Build 406. Suspend and resume are working in a full build for the first time, including autonomous mesh networking, a first for any system anywhere! It is almost, but not quite stable enough for widespread use; a few remaining bugs need to be squashed before deployment to a large audience.

13. Firmware: This week, Mitch Bradley worked on stabilizing software and firmware for the B4 build. Mitch also merged ECC checking code (written by Segher Boessenkool) into CAFE NAND driver and worked out a plan for storage of the public key that secures firmware updates.

14. X Window System: Richard Smith worked with Adam Jackson of Red Hat to figure out why his DCON mode patches to the X driver were causing the DCON to flicker and glitch on the switch from DCON mode to GPU mode. This will enable the window system to disable the video unit and allow the GPU to idle when not in use.

Bernardo Innocenti has been enhancing our X keyboard definitions to include all the missing keyboard symbols and working with upstream to cleanup and merge our changes into the official repository. Miles Grimshaw has designed two new keyboards for the XO: Turkish and Ethiopic.

Daniel Stone of Nokia suggested to Jim that our slider keys be represented in the X input extension in a better way: we're going to have three "analog" sliders on the first row of the keyboard, which will look like absolute axes to programs. This requires some kernel work that Bernie has not yet started.

Generally, we are in a much better shape this week. The new input framework in X works already, EXA rendering pretty much works too. Next week Bernie will look into packaging issues with Adam. Jordan Crouse has fixed many bugs in the X driver, and the he number of bugs blocking #1604 is quickly shrinking, so we may be able to push this upgrade just in time for the Fedora Core 7 migration.

15. Kernel: Andres Salomon merged the device-tree patch, giving access to hardware and manufacturing information. The wireless-driver version supporting suspend/resume was also merged. The EC protocol was debugged, and debugged some more, and is now mostly fixed. We have a kernel/firmware combination that suspends/resumes in about two seconds. The delay is mostly from libertas and USB; Marcelo Tosatti and the Cozybit team are actively working on these drivers.

Chris Ball did a lot of stable-build debugging. He found that our camera's colormap becomes strange after resume and that the "camera-active" LED comes on at resume even when the camera isn't being used. Chris wrote a kernel patch to only power up the camera when a user wants it; Jon Corbet is reviewing the patch.

16. IPV6: Scott Ananian began the week by trying to cram the entirety of "Essential IPv6 Networking" into his head. He set up some IPv6 tunnels and IPv6-enabled his home site to: (A) make sure he knew how things worked; and (B) serve as a testbed for the school server environment, which will likely be behind similar NATs. He took over as the liaison to SIXXS, which is going to be providing our IPv6 connectivity via tunnels for the short term, at least until we set up infrastructure (and possibly write some code) to terminate NAT-tunneling IPv6 tunnels ourselves here in Cambridge. Scott also confirmed that private IPv4 addresses are properly assigned to the laptops if a DHCP server cannot be found.

Scott's second network-manager-related task was to get it to understand DNS information sent via Router Advertisement messages as part of IPv6 autoconfiguration, so that the machines "just work" without requiring round-trips to a DHCP server or other setup. Scott noticed that radvd on our local (OLPC) network (tubes) was giving out "bogus" information, and wrote a patch for radvdump and sent the patch upstream in the process. As it turns out, radvd was still using a stale config and just needed to be sent SIGHUP, which was simple enough. Scott sent mail to a number of people (including the appropriate kernel mailing list) outlining a plan to add support for DNS-in-RA to the Linux kernel and to Network Manager. Scott hasn't heard any objections yet, so will assume the plan is good and code up a first-draft implementation next week.

17. Hardware: The asynchronous input/output (SPD) bus on the XOs has problems when coming out of suspend/resume and was causing write to the display controller (DCON) to fail. Mitch figured out the root cause of a failure to resume that only shows up on some machines: a DCON/system-management (SM) bus bug was found and a DCON hardware bug discovered. Richard, Mitch, Andres, Chris, and Jordan Crouse worked together to find and produce a fix.

More News

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News. Also on community-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.


Press

  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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