OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-06-24

1. Shanghai: Mary Lou Jepsen, John Watlington, Richard Smith, and David Woodhouse joined the extensive team from Quanta in Shanghai for the B4 build. 2000 laptops are scheduled to be built by the end of Monday, more than half are already built. Things went so well that the build was started early, leaving the OLPC team ample time to work other components of the OLPC ecosystem: school server, multi-battery charger, active antennae, and WiFi repeaters. The B4 yield (so far) is approximately 99%—up substantially from previous builds. Improvements in B4 include: texture on the upper handle bar; increased hinge tilt; elimination of the hinge “squeak”; rabbit ears that click into place when put into the down position; elimination of a slight camera vignetting by the bezel; minor modifications to the motherboard; etc.

2. EC: Richard Smith and David Woodhouse have moved the kernel battery driver over to new embedded controller (EC) protocol. In the process, David had some some suggestions that Richard will be folding back into the EC code. Meanwhile, Richard has flushed out a few minor EC bugs and submitted fixes back to Quanta.

3. School server: Scott Ananian, John Watlington, and Dan Margo worked on school-server configuration management. The process—a combination of RedHat's RPM system and a version-control system—will allow system updates of OLPC specific configuration files while preserving local configuration modifications.

4. Firmware: Mitch Bradley started work on school-server firmware and integrated the cryptographic code into Open Firmware needed for our Bitfrost security system. Lilian Walter modified the TCP layer to support IPv6. She can successfully “finger” and “telnet” to her Fedora Core 7 PC.

5. System: Chris Ball wrote a script to backup and restore user data from a USB disk during OS build upgrades, so that laptops can be upgraded to newer builds without losing data. The script is still being tested, since there are some “corner cases” to deal with—for example, some old Sugar configuration files causes newer versions of Sugar to crash at startup.

Andres Salomon did some merging (we are up to 2.6.22-rc5 on master) and created a vserver branch and added the vserver patch (See http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/vserver). He also did some bug triaging and worked on merging in the persistence-USB code from Andrew Morton's -mm tree.

Scott Ananian spend the week writing kernel patches for DNS autoconfiguration over Ipv6. The kernel functionality is now working; Scott still has to patch this into “userland” properly (glibc and/or network manager), and get the patches shipped and accepted upstream. In the process, Scott fixed another bug in the router advertisement daemon (radvd) this week, added some kernel documentation, and found a few minor bugs in the kernel to fix.

Bernardo Innocenti has been looking into Geode optimizations of glibc—Rob Savoye had developed some optimizations working from code originally written by John Zulauf.

John Palmieri has been working on the Fedora 7 move. Most of the packages we need to worry about now in place. We will be pulling our builds together from three different repository: the F7/OLPC repository, dilinger's (Andres’s) kernel repository, and a temporary repository that exists until we have emergency builds and until Etoys can be put into the Fedora repositories.

Alex Larsson, who is on loan from the Red Hat desktop team, has been working on a new live-update system for the XO. He posted comments for review to the devel mailing list earlier this week and has since then been working on an implementation. He now has code that can update between image versions, including reverting back to older versions of an image. He also has working code that can detect an update that is available from another laptop on the mesh, and can download it locally instead of going to a central server over a potentially slow, high-latency, high-cost network. Finally, he has code that will host an update on a laptop and publish it on the mesh.

6. X11: The X11 update is only missing a few package rebuilds and a few new RPMs. The new keyboard descriptions are ready to go. Bernardo, Miles Grimshaw, and Walter Bender have been collecting more localized keyboards (Turkish, Ethiopic) and modularizing our changes to make them acceptable for upstream. Bernardo has gotten a positive response from Sergey Udaltsov regarding our changes and is waiting for final approval.

7. USB: Marcelo Tosatti, working with Cozybit and Marvell in California, made great progress in debugging our USB suspend/resume issues. Javier Cardona and Marcelo were able to acquire accurate traces of the activity on the USB bus. Those traces showed that the USB host controller is entering an invalid state during resume if the wireless device detaches after getting the host_sleep_active notification from the host. Their workaround is to have the wireless device idle for 3mS on the USB bus before detaching; they implemented that in wireless firmware version 5.110.16.p0. This is great progress towards fully working suspend/resume.

8. Wireless: Marvell's team in India released wireless firmware that incorporates the new mesh frame format as well as mesh beacon frames (5.110.15.p1). Their release was followed by the release of 5.110.16.p0, which incorporates the support for host sleep and the aforementioned workaround for the USB suspend/resume. Cozybit has also released patches for ethereal/wireshark that decode the new frame format. With this release, we are moving closer to the emerging 802.11s standard and we are also averting problems with existing access points that support lazy-WDS. Note that this firmware version is not interoperable with any previous released versions. Nodes running the new firmware will disrupt and be disrupted by nodes running older versions of the firmware. Q&A testing will be proceeding this week with the goal of incorporating the new frame format in the upcoming stable build. From a network-manager perspective this release greatly simplifies sensing for the presence of mesh nodes. Dan Williams continued work on the Libertas wireless driver. He also spent time getting Avahi ready for the network-manager auto-mesh code.

9. Sugar: Ben Saller continues work on the data store for the Journal. He has been working on support so that one can store Journal entries on pluggable media (such as USB keys) and access entries over the network. He also fixed several bugs that Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti needed.

Guillaume Desmottes spent the week working on peer-to-peer tubes support so that more than two people can join an activity (instead of activities being strictly peer to peer). Large parts of this code are working today. There will be more progress next week.

Marco spent much of the week working on the Fedora 7 port. He also made a number of fixes in the Journal, the theme, and Sugar in general. He is largely concentrating on Trial-2 bug fixes. He wrote a simple activity to demonstrate how to integrate with the Journal (See http://dev.laptop.org/~marco/edit-activity).

Marco and Chris Blizzard worked with the Fedora Translation team to set up an easy-to-use interface for translators to be able to help translate Fedora. A Google Summer of Code student has been working on a web interface that makes it easy for the several hundred Fedora translators to interact with upstream projects like OLPC (As and example, see http://translate.fedoraproject.org/module/olpc-journal-activity). We do not have all of the work flow completed, but this is an important first step to closing the loop with translators.

Tomeu spent the week doing a lot of bug fixing in the web activity, the Journal and the Sugar shell. He also did a lot of testing of the data store and worked with Ben to fix bugs that he found. In addition he added a lot of new stuff for Trial 2, including:

  • implement of modal dialogs for the web browser;
  • in the Journal:
    • you can now change an entry title;
    • install and execute activities you have downloaded (but are not on the main toolbar);
    • take a screenshot of the activity's canvas and use it as a preview for an entry;
    • add a save-in-journal button to the default activity toolbar to
    • explicitly save something to the journal;
    • drag entries from the journal into the clipboard; and
    • use the object-type registry;
  • in the sugar shell:
    • add an option to save objects in the clipboard to the Journal;
    • make the clipboard also use the object-type registry.

10. Sugar Activities in the community: Marc Maurer has been working on collision detection for multiple-document editing. He and the rest of the Abiword team have an algorithm they are happy with. The really adventurous can look at the document (See http://uwog.net/~uwog/abiword/abicollab.pdf).

Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger implemented the IPv6 support for Squeak and ready for the testing. This will enable various collaborative tools in Etoys work over the IPv6 mesh network. Scott Wallace published the FunctionTile feature to the public image; this enables the Etoys user to write scripts with mathematical functions. Bert Freudenberg's recent work encompasses: patching Sugar; X Windows System display support code for the Squeak virtual machine; and an Etoys hook to enables smoother integration of Etoys to the Sugar environment. Ted Kaehler and Alan Kay are working on the kids version of text editor written in Etoys, as well as the simulation of colliding billiard balls. Takashi Yamamiya is now looking at the final integration of a drag-and-drop mechanism. Yoshiki Ohshima helped the code generation part of FunctionTile, as well as the documentation of projects.

Jean Piché and the core TamTam team spent the first half of the week at the OLPC office in Cambridge working closely with Eben Eliason on reworking the TamTam interface in light of Sugar “tabs” and some new functional and structural ideas that the team has been exploring. The result will be a recasting of MiniTamTam into TamTamJam, which will enable the explorations and improvisations we enjoy in TamTam to extend across multiple machines on the mesh; and a cleaner integration of the rich and varied functionality of TamTamEdit, making this powerful composition tool more accessible. They also did some preliminary exploration of Barry Vercoe’s fixed-point C-Sound implementation; evaluated TamTam on the B3 hardware; and discussed details of Journal integration with Tomeu.

Kent Quirk reports from the XO game-development front that Patrick DeJarnette has created the beginnings of a generic side-scroller game toolkit and has a demonstration game that is beginning to feel a lot “a-like a-Mario.” It hasn't yet been turned into an activity or tested on the XO, but the approach is sound and we should see it running next week. This toolkit is intended to allow children to easily create arcade-like games on the XO.

Lincoln Quirk has been working on integrating PyGame with Sugar. He has taken Noah Kantrowitz's wrapper code and extended it, but there are problems integrating properly with GTK. For the last few days, he has been working on a Cairo-based implementation of PyGame, which is starting to work, but is so far quite a bit slower than the existing PyGame code. It may be fast enough to use for some games, it looks beautiful, and we hope it will get faster over time.

Roberto Fagá has been building an adventure game toolkit called ISIS intended to build text-based adventures with graphical illustrations. The longterm goal is to build a drag-and-drop storytelling game toolkit that kids can use. He just got his hands on an XO and is working on getting the graphics portion of the toolkit functional.

As a team, the gamers now have a git repository and have checked in all of their work, as well as other games from the OLPC game jam. There are several games that they hope to build on over the next few weeks, including a Mancala/Owari stone game that will support play either on a single machine or across the mesh.

Kuku Anakula, a flashcard-style game, has been polished for Trial 2; it can share configuration files and tile sets with the Memonumber game.

MaMaMedia has finished three activities: a slider puzzle, an e-poll generator, and a teacher center, the latter being a place for teachers to learn and contribute to how they can use activities to integrate XO programs (Paint, Camera, Write) into their teaching. In the teacher center, there are lesson ideas for exploring the XO and the activities, a glossary, some background on Constructionism, etc.

11. Content: SJ Klein and Mel Chua, who organized the Game jam, are working on a generalized notion of “jam,” for a broader community audience. The FHSST group in South Africa is running a jam out of Berkeley to make high school curricula and polish their texts. The Polish Free Texts project has their own variant on the theme for teachers. In progress: defining a space for collating links to such initiatives; developing a framework that allows for broad intake of all kinds of material, and for a refinement step that converts scans or documents into final formats for printing, storing in specialized repositories, storing on wikis and other collaboration sites. Meanwhile, SJ has been working on style guidelines for content contributions.

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is planning some content jams for educators and authors towards the end of the summer and early fall. They are expanding their collaboration on free textbooks starting with wikieducator, where public domain texts are being added to the “XXI texts” project, a project to find textbooks that have entered the public domain. They are working with educators to get primary texts online and developing an OLPC project on the site. A new mailing list for free texts has been set up, with COL, an Arabic texts project, the Polish Free Textbook project, Free Culture's college texts project, and OLPC. The Open Society Institute is looking into ways to fund a specific short-term effort to bootstrap these groups and bring their efforts together.

There was an entire track at the third annual iCommons summit dedicated to open education. OLPC and growing rural networks were highlighted as an example of the most revolutionary target audience. Over the course of a year or so, there are many projects aiming to develop free materials and interested n focusing on developing-world primary school; beginning with the Shuttleworth Foundation and FHSST and Schoolnet projects in southern Africa.

Google’s OurStories continues apace and is looking for active contacts in each country to help coordinate story gathering via activities.

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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