OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-07-14

Congratulations to Chris Blizzard who welcomed home his new daughter, Samantha Snow Blizzard.

1. Intel became the newest member of OLPC this week.

2. Michail Bletsas attended Cisco's ConnectFest event at their Bay Area campus. It was organized by a group within Cisco with a strong interest towards the development of low cost, robust networking solutions for the developing world and was attended by a variety of people active in the area (Intel TIER lab, Meraki, Inveneo, Green WiFi, et al.).

3. Trial-2: This week completes integration of major features for Trial-2. Kernels in our Fedora-Core-7-based builds include a new X driver, our power management work, and VServer. Code freeze will begin on Monday; we will triage all bugs to minimize the change to the code base; we aim for a final Release Candidate at the end of this upcoming week. The goal for next week is to reach stability and to be able to demonstrate: collaboration, Journal, activation, mesh connectivity, and suspend/resume.

4. Testing: Each new build is now subject to much testing. (Please refer to the test-group release notes when deciding to download a build that isn't stable yet: Test_Group_Release_Notes.)

5. Sugar: Red Hat’s Dan Winship also joins the Sugar team this week. He'll be working on builds while John Palmieri is on vacation; Dan has been working on Sugar bug-fixes.

Tomeu Vizoso refactored removable devices support in the Journal for robustness to support manual mount and unmount and physical removal of devices before unmount. He test the performance of the data store inside Sugar (the new one is much faster); the new data store now only indexes meta data, not file contents while Ben Saller gets the asynchronous content-indexing working again. Ben refactored large pieces of the data store and the data store's dependencies for performance improvements. This work has resulted in much needed performance improvements to the Journal.

Marco Gritti packaged various Sugar pieces for builds and continued to hunt down and fix Sugar bugs. He also wrote new introductory screen for Sugar.

6. Presence: Simon McVittie worked on medium- and long-term improvements to the dbus Python language bindings and made some short-term fixes. He also fixed a problem with Presence Service slowness (#1874 and #1927) and missing XO buddy names (#1967).

Sjoerd Simons has been testing and bug fixing in Salut (XMPP Link Local)—XMPP is the extensible messaging and presence protocol used in Sugar activity communication. He has hunted down some problems with Avahi service discovery and helped Guillaume Desmottes in designing some XMPP stream-manager improvements in Salut (for supporting streaming in tubes).

Morgan Collett finished the “buddy-left” code in the Sugar Mesh View. and reviewed and merged some of Simon's Presence Service patches. He updated the Connect and Chat Activity releases for builds and he made a fix to Gabble to stop it trying to use IRC. He is looking into Presence Service performance and Salut issues.

Dan Williams made many NetworkManager testing and fixes for mesh beacons, DHCP, link-local presence support. He also tested a fix for the camera-driver delay and pulled in a new gstreamer release.

7. Content distribution and updates: H.T. Kung's group at Harvard is working on a content distribution system for ad-hoc networks that utilizes network coding. The practical benefit of their approach is that distributing a large file among a number of laptops in a mesh network always completes within a determined amount of time, something not possible without network coding due to the inherent limitations of the wireless medium. They used 29 XOs to test their approach in Harvard's Soldier's Field during the hottest day of the summer. The XOs performed flawlessly!

Alexander Larsson has been working on restructuring the “Updationator” repository format so that manifests are also stored as blobs. He created a repository at http://olpc.download.redhat.com and tested various upgrades of laptops from that. Updatinator 0.1 is in builds for testing.

8. Sugar activities: Marc Maurer has made numerous fixes to the collision handling in “AbiCollab”, the collaboration extensions to Abiword, AKA “Write” on the XO. It seems to now be quite robust, even on high-latency networks. Please test it. In the Write Activity itself, Marc has fix a problem with the font name/size combo-boxes; implemented a color-selection button that follows the cursor context; fix the insert-table button; and added a total page count to the View menu.

Bert Freudenberg has been keeping pace with the changes in Sugar and has been producing a series of working .xo bundles of Etoys. Takashi Yamamiya and Ted Kaehler are working on the keyboard shortcuts that match with Sugar's conventions. Copy and paste also works due to Takashi's effort. Takashi also brought his ODE binding of Squeak up to date and made it compatible with the OLPC Etoys. Adjustment of buttons and menus are being made by Yoshiki Ohshima and Scott Wallace. Ian Piumarta, Bert, and Yoshiki are working on resolving a low-memory situation (that occurs on the B2-1 machines, which have only 28MB of DRAM). Ted, Kim Rose, Rebecca Cannara and Alan Kay continue on making more examples and demonstrations.

Arjun Sarwal has made further improvements to the Measure Activity, which utilizes the microphone and analog data ports of the XO as input to a graphing program. He has added buttons for three frequency ranges; features for logging data and writing it onto a file and drawing a graph based on the logged data have been tested in emulation and will be soon tested on an XO. In testing the Activity, Arjun discovered that one can use the built-in microphone to directly measure one’s pulse.

Eben Eliason and Manusheel Gupta have been working with Irene Ficheman and the team from NATE-LSI (Integrated Systems Laboratory), in the Polytechnical School at University of São Paulo on a new Draw Activity for the XO that utilizes the new Sugar tabs and styles.

Miguel Álvarez did more work on the shared-state implementation and the Calculate activity, which now supports algebraic variables to do calculations such as: apples = 18; bananas = 12; price = 3×apples + 4×bananas.

Eben and Muriel de Souza Godol have been integrating the memory game(s) into the new Sugar collaboration schema to allow for single- and multi-player gaming over the mesh. Next is adding a “view source” mode that lets the children design their own variants to the games.

9. X Window System: Chris Ball took benchmarks for the fix to a long-standing font-corruption bug, which Bernardo Innocenti found and patched this week. Jordan Crouse and Adam Jackson are working out the right long-term fix for a very nasty class of bugs that affected a number of X drivers, not just the AMD driver. The benchmarks are inconclusive so far; more work needed to check that our fix is not causing a slowdown. Jordan also fixed some serious bugs in the X Server. Bernie resurrected our input driver: by the end of this week, the window system was again behaving properly, with the way paved for better performance in the long term.

10. Kernel: Linus Torvalds released 2.6.22 on Sunday, so this week started with more pushing of kernel changes upstream, including Dave Woodhouse's new battery-class driver, which is now in Linus' tree. During the week, Andres Salomon branched a few new stable kernel that included 2.6.22 final, a large libertas update, audio and camera LED fixes, and a number of DCON and LXFB fixes. The DCON freezing feature should be a lot more reliable now that we've switched to using a work-queue, and included a bunch of Adam Jackson's timing fixes.

In the process of testing, Andres discovered a bunch of fun new bugs: JFFS2 corruption that ate the filesystem on a B4, libertas failing to associate, and not-yet-isolated USB-storage corruption issues. Dave Woodhouse is looking at “wireless in initrd” to enable boot, installation, and testing via the wireless network, without having to rely on the NAND flash.

Richard Smith and Andres are investigating missing keypresses after resume. The kernel is losing some of the PS2 interrupts. More work is needed to determine where the keypress is going.

11. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti merged the USB and libertas suspend/resume code to master kernel tree; he also conducted more suspend/resume tests. He wrote code to support new rtc-cmos driver (configurable wakeup) and added platform devices for the power button and the lid-closed detector. He investigated individual device power-down and determined that we cannot use Libertas power-save mode when mesh is active. He wrote patches to turn off more parts of the cs5535 audio and USB Host Controller. Finally, he wrote some parallel-driver resume code; we can clearly see the culprits of slow resume time.

12. Power: John Watlington, Richard Smith Jim Gettys, Chris Ball and Joel Stanley on further power tests, trying to accurately determine which devices are responsible for our current power draw, and verify our design before the schematics are frozen for production. Joel, John and Richard took many power measurements with an instrumented XO attempting to verify all the power domains prior to the C Build. They took reading; added more channels; took more readings; and then added even more channels. The measurement system is now up to 22 channels. Things mostly look OK, but there is still some power draws that are not accounted for and are being investigated.

Kim Quirk and John Fuhrer have been conducting more battery-life tests this week. We are gathering baseline lifetime numbers to compare against as we make improvements and changes in power management. Battery life on B4 is substantially improved from B2 builds on B2 hardware while running; battery lifetime when running mesh only are currently less than expected: Michail says the Marvell wireless firmware power consumption can be significantly improved over our first measurements.

Richard Hughes continued work on the open hardware manager (OHM); OHM, which is our power-policy daemon, has landed in the builds. Richard is working on integrating OHM with the XO hardware. OHM handles suspend on power button press, configurable backlight dimming after idle time when on battery, and will soon handle going into suspend based on whether we're idle.

13. Security: Nelson Elhage and Michael Stone stress tested Vserver patch in preparation to its merger on Friday. Mitch Bradley, Ivan Krstić, and Scott Ananian hammered out a firmware security specification describing the interaction of Open Firmware and the kernel/ramdisk for activation, upgrades, and booting from a backup (See Firmware_Security).

Ivan wrote some basic activation code, which Scott hacked a bit (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/krstic/leases and http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/cscott-leases-tmp).

Scott created an initramfs for early-boot, which does activation and some upgrade and boot tasks (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/d-i and http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/rootskel-olpc).

Finally, Scott adopted the OLPC reinstallation script and is working on adding support to have it generate a temporary-format of activation lease during installation, so that we can put activation in our builds and exercise it without “bricking” all our developers' machines.

Noah Kantrowitz and Michael Stone are continuing Bitfrost implementation work; Nelson Elhage ran stress tests on the VServer kernel (no problems) and verified it has undisturbed IPv6 connectivity; SecOps will provide a set of RPMs that allow for any machine running the Trial-2 build to experimentally enable Bitfrost by virtue of a simple 'yum install olpc-security'.

14. Embedded controller: Richard Smith submitted a patch to back to Quanta that fixes the on-board temperature sensor. It showed up in PQ2C19 which Quanta released on Friday.

15. Laptop hardware: John Watlington worked on last-minute tweaks to the laptop electronics; these were tested this week, with the deadline for changes before mass production looming. These included adding an anti-aliasing filter to the microphone input, eliminating the speaker pop when suspending/resuming, and making sure that the EC is capable of waking up on all relevant events (WLAN packet received, lid opened/closed, etc.)

16. School Server: Daniel Margo gathered data about the modified packages and configuration files for the School Server and put the configuration files into a data repository (See http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=users/danmargo/livecd-data;a=summary). Dan made packages of these configuration files and put them in the repository (See http://fedora.laptop.org/olpc-local/i386). However, he could not get them to build into a working live CD. As an interim workaround, he had made a live CD with the packages that were on schoolserver (but not the configuration, so it is not particularly interesting yet).

17. Games: Kent Quirk reports much progress:

  • Roberto Fagá continued work on ISIS, the adventure game engine. It now supports variable phrase order for different languages in its text system; he is building out the object hierarchy for the datatypes and classes of game objects.
  • Patrick DeJarnette has almost finished the Side-scroller game engine. The engine now has the ability to finish a level and display between-level and game-over screens, and it features multiple lives, multiple levels, and coin-collection. The Side-scroller system is complete enough to play and create levels. It could use help from a good artist, and it still needs to be packaged and to have some sample levels.
  • Lincoln Quirk has been maintaining the PyGame wrapper and the OLPC wiki pages describing it (Game development HOWTO and Pygame wrapper). He addressed and fixed the problem with event-queue overflow and has implemented a Pango wrapper to render fonts onto SDL surfaces. It is not yet an ideal solution because some libraries are still lacking Python support. He has also been helping to support various people who are trying to use PyGame and the wrapper.

18. Content workshops: Mel Chua, Wayne Mackintosh (Commonwealth of Learning), and SJ Klein are looking for mentors and sponsoring groups at companies and universities to support a trial season of a Summer of Content effort, running from August 10 to September 23. This would be a way to support some of the authors and creators working to make materials for trial schools.

Summer of Content will run two summers a year (one each in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres); plans for a full summer starting in December will be in place by August 15. We are looking currently for mentors that speak Arabic, Portuguese, and Thai (See [[1]]). We are aiming to have 50 small-stipend internships for 6–8 weeks this summer.

COL has committed to sponsoring and mentoring five interns from the Commonwealth states. COL is looking for supporting organizations in India and their network in the South. Name.org out of Denver (the non-profit branch of name.com) has committed to sponsoring interns (from anywhere); the EGAP public policy school at Tecnologico de Monterrey are also on board and have space and mentors for Spanish-speaking interns.

Please send interest or potential contacts for mentorship/sponsorship to SJ and to Mel <mel@melchua.com>.

19. Creative Jams: A Guide to Jams will be published to the OLPC wiki soon. The general idea behind a jam is to: bring people together; provide food and feedback and good cheer; in less than three days, create and test a series of [activities, texts, videos, games] designed for children and for use with XOs.

20. Content bundles: After some discussion about how to define non-activity bundles, there is now a working spec for people who want to provide non-executable bundles that can be browsed or launched from a browser (See Creating_a_content_bundle).

21. Music: The Free Music Project is now synchronizing with Jamendo, which has an efficient way of verifying that submitters are the authors of the works they suggest is freely licensed, and have hundreds of CC-BY pieces. Jamendo is working on an OLPC portal of sorts; there is no spec yet. The Free Music folks have new DJs and modern musicians recording for the XO, including The Juan Maclean, Maga Bo, and DJ C (See http://www.thejuanmaclean.com/).

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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