OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-06-30

1. Washington: Walter Bender had to dust off his tuxedo in order to receive the Bridging Nations “Bridge Builder Award: Technological Innovation for Bridging Digital Divide” on behalf of OLPC.

2. Porto Alegre: Juliano Bittencourt reports that UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) held a small conference, INOVA, to share the best research from the university with the local community. As they did at the International Free Software Conference (FISL), researchers from the university brought a group of children to conference to share their experiences with the use of the XO. The children stole the spotlight: “it was very satisfying to see how they talked with people, how they became autonomous, and were very proud of their projects. They behave like small scientists, making interviews with their laptop using the camera, taking notes in the Write Activity, and posting reports to their blogs on AMADIS.”

3. Green: Mary Lou Jepsen has completed all paper work for environmental compliance with EPEAT, the organization that implements the IEEE 1680-2006 computer environmental standard. OLPC’s EPEAT “Gold” status is now pending. Mary Lou has a draft version available of our ISO14001-compliant OLPC environmental policy, which is required for EPEAT compliance. In addition, OLPC has joined and filed for Energy Star 4.0 recognition; the XO exceeds the Energy Star compliance requirements by 14-fold.

4. Safety: OLPC, Quanta, and UL met this week to discuss progress on safety testing. Preliminary findings are excellent; further details of testing were discussed, including specific in-country requirements. The XO appears to be on track for UL certification; further testing of batteries and AC adaptors is planned. UL will help us apply for CE markings to allow us to ship in Europe.

5. Trial-2: Tuesday marked the feature-freeze date for the Trial-2 software release. We have begun testing of the software release (See Test issues); there are test plans for activities, connectivity, performance, mesh view, suspend/resume, and updates. Thanks to Zack Cerza, John Fuhrer, Cameron Meadors, and Ronak Chockshi, who have contributed to these plans.

6. Network: The Collabora team continued work on the peer-to-peer networking pieces that will allow Sugar Activity authors to readily share data between their activities; the focus has been on “tubes” and multicast support for the mesh. Dan Williams helped debug direct XO-to-XO communications and plowed through more network manager (NM) issues. Dan, along with Kim Quirk, John Watlington, Scott Ananian, and Michail Bletsas continue to refine NM as we realize more functionality and stability in our network drivers and get more feedback from internal testing and the field.

Michail tested the latest wireless firmware from Marvell (5.110.16.p0). It solves the issues with lazy-WDS access points (like the extremely popular Linksys WRT54G). This is the issue where XOs associated with a WiFi access point will stop passing traffic intermittently for which we had a temporary (ugly) workaround in place. The current firmware, besides having the latest suspend/resume code bits, uses a new mesh frame format that is closer to the latest proposals circulating in the 802.11s standard committee. Unfortunately, the new format is incompatible with the older format; we will incorporate the new firmware in the XO builds and server software ASAP to minimize confusion.

7. User interface: Marco Gritti hooked up Sugar and the core Activities into the Fedora translations system and has already integrated a community-contributed Arabic translation.

Marco and Benjamin Berg continue to refine the GTK (GIMP Toolkit) themes in conjunction with the design work being done by Eben Eliason and the Pentagram team. They also revisited the Journal core feature set that will be part of the first release software. Tomeu Vizoso continued his work on the web browser. He implemented an “object-chooser dialog” that is used in place of the standard file picker for the browser; items can now be uploaded from the Journal to the web. Tomeu also add the ability to shut down the XO from the home view (the power button will be used for suspend). In the Journal, he also implemented the latest toolbar design, added the ability to erase items, copy items onto the clipboard, and support for removable storage devices (e.g., USB sticks).

Dan, Marco, and John Palmieri also did packaging work in support of the Fedore Core 7 update. Dan also worked on some unresolved X video (Xv) bugs.

8. Power management: Richard Hughes worked on the XO’s power management interfaces. He reports that our hardware abstraction layer detects and exports proper power supply interfaces, which means Activities have an easy way of querying the battery and the AC adapter. His patches should land soon. Richard also worked on D-Bus system activation; important in order to start system services through a standardized interface. He has a policy manager (OHM) running on the laptop that will do things such as dim the backlight when the machine is idle and turn off the panel when the lid on the XO is shut.

9. Software updates: Scott Ananian, Ivan Krstić, Chris Blizzard, David Woodhouse, and Alex Larsson engaged in a (somewhat heated) discussion of the XO upgrade model; a concrete specification will be the outcome.

Meanwhile Alex spent the week working on the “Updatinator” code. His utilities that can generate manifests, generating differences between manifests, verify a directory tree against a manifest, and upgrade a directory tree from one manifest to another. He also has a tool that can generate a manifest from a set of images. His code, written in Python, knows how to download blobs and manifests from a http server, using a well-defined format and uses Avahi to automatically find local machines that have newer versions of a manifest. He also put together a small web server that an XO can run in order to export an image such that other laptops can upgrade from it.

Chris Ball has written a script that performs a backup of user data during upgrades; we can start using it next week. Scott benchmarked XO upgrades between Builds 464, 465, and 466 using rsync, “improved” rsync, and “improved” bittorrent. (He wrote code to use per-directory manifests to improve rsync and added the ability to bittorrent filesystem images, complete with user/group/mode and special file information.) He also started implementing a skeleton XO upgrade system that we can use to automate our 100+ laptop mesh-network tests in the coming weeks.

10. Microphone: Chris Ball reports that the audio driver now keeps the microphone-in-use LED off while the audio hardware is not being used. There is still a bug remaining: the LED turns on during both recording and playback (because the default state of the driver is to have the V_Ref microphone bias turned on).

11. Fun and games: Lincoln Quirk has been working on infrastructure stuff and the pygame wrapper. He has been experimenting with various techniques for integration of GTK and pygame; he also did some preliminary work with Eric Nelson to use the camera as a game input device. It still in process, but the wrapper supports the game keys properly. Lincoln also done a lot of documentation work in the OLPC wiki.

Roberto Faga has been working on an adventure game toolkit; he has been tackling the challenging problem of creating a simple generic parser that can cope with different noun/verb/object word orders in different languages. At the same time, he's trying to construct a user interface (UI) that would allow the creation of these games in a purely graphical model.

Patrick DeJarnette's side-scrolling game engine got a lot faster this week, and now has semi-intelligent moving “enemies.” It should be a lot of fun for the children to design their own game levels.

12. Analog input: Arjun Sarwal has created a basic UI for turning the XO into an oscilloscope. He has built controls for AC/DC, bias, RMS AVG, and Pk-Pk values. He is working with John Watlington to characterize the frequency characteristics of the AD1888 and they are working towards enabling the double sample rate that this chip supports. They are also studying the filter in the power supply, with the goal to reduce the noise floor. Another target is to bring down to 0V the minimum voltage that the analog input port can sample (the current minimum is 0.4V).

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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