OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-08-11

1. C-Test: C-Test is underway. These XOs are fully textured (the flat exterior plastic has beaded surface); the keyboard is improved and included a beveled space bar. The most significant electrical change is the new ENE 3700B embedded controller (EC), which includes hardware support for the single-wire protocol used to communicate with the batteries.

2. Kathmandu: Shankar Pokharel, from the self-organized OLPC Nepal, organized a curriculum workshop in coordination with Nepalese department of education. Forty-eight educationists and developers participated in the workshop which was inaugurated by Minister of Education Pradip Nepal. The participants outlined the steps needed for local content creation and digitization.

3. Builds: Dan Winship, who joined the Red Hat team a month ago, had a busy week: he has branched x11-xorg-utils package so that we don't have to pull in libGL; made fallback X logins work; fixed some startup issues; and removed some packages to save some disk space. John Palmieri has been cleaning up start-up scripts—for both the machine itself and the graphical environment. Startup speed has improved and we are saving a significant amount of memory (and complexity). John is taking advantage the work that Red Hat's Richard Hughes has done around D-Bus system activation.

4. Sugar: Dan modified the wedges in the “activity ring” on the home screen reflect memory usage. He also made added rollovers to the activity widgets for “resume” and “stop.” He ported our web activity to WebKit, the rendering engine used in both Apple's Safari and the KDE desktop. He found that memory usage was greatly reduced and performance much better. (The WebKit project is not quite ready for production use yet, but it shows real promise.) Finally, Dan got installation of activities from USB working.

Marco Gritti was (mostly) on vacation this week, but managed to rework the palette implementation to enable proper packaging of widgets; he made some API improvements and fix some bugs in the process; and he reviewed some patches and did some bug triage.

Ben Saller spent most of the week fixing bugs and also working on a version of the data store that supports versioning.

Tomeu Vizoso moved the activity-registration service from the shell to a shell-service process. This service will contain the clipboard and the object-type registry. He moved Sugar, Journal and the Browse Activity to the new activity register.

The Collabora team refined the definition of buddy and activity properties in anticipation of the first release of the software; once these properties are in the field, the are difficult to change.

Simon Schamijer has been working on the sharing feature in the Browse Activity; a web page to be “shared” appears as a thumbnail in a tray at the bottom of the page. From there you can select which page you want to view. Most of the parts are working and Simon hopes to have something ready for testing soon. Simon has also been adding a simple opcode to Csound that enables the reading of ogg vorbis files. The reason to use Csound rather than gstreamer is that is uses less then half of the CPU power and due to the concept of instruments you can playback different files at the same time easily. John Fitch and Eric de Castro Lopo are currently working on getting the ogg playback upstream into libsndfile, which is normally used in Csound5 to handle I/O of sound files.

5. Repair: After Mitch Bradley asserted that a 10-year old could replace an XO motherboard, Joel Stanley was tasked with overseeing just that. On Tuesday, 10-year old Philip and his 8-year old sister Sophie were given an XO; using the instructions on the OLPC wiki they disassembled and reassembled it (for the most part independently). It didn't work the first time, so they proceeded to disassemble, troubleshoot a loose wire, and reassemble the XO. This second pass, when they were on their own, was successful (See http://dev.laptop.org/~joel/xo-video/).

6. Firmware: IPv6 in the firmware is basically working. Lilian Walter has succeeded in downloading files via HTTP from the IPv6 internet. In other words, she has implemented code to support router solicitation and advertisement. Lilian is currently working on DNS AAAA support via an IPv4 DNS server and then she will see if she can get to an IPv6 DNS server. Mitch Bradley still needs to do application testing with the school server. In coordination with with Ivan Krstić and Michael Stone, Mitch Bradley has defined the format for firmware security keys.

7. Manufacturing software installation: Dave Woodhouse and Mitch Bradley build a manufacturing software installation system using multicast. Rafael Ortiz and Chris Ball worked on testing it with them. Wireless installation of OS images to the NAND flash is looking promising—we now have a simple tool that sends NAND flash blocks in UDP packets (by IPv4 or IPv6, multicast or unicast), with one parity packet per erase block (to allow for a small amount of packet loss). We also have a corresponding client that listens for these packets, checks a simple CRC32 on each one, and reassembles the erase blocks, writing them to a file or to a flash device. Mitch is implementing the client side for OpenFirmware.

The interesting part turns out to be 802.11 multicast. First, the access point (AP) will retransmit any multicast packets generated by clients—so to avoid wasting bandwidth we actually want the AP itself to generate them in the first place (perhaps bridged from its wired interface). Second, and more importantly, most equipment sends multicasts at the lowest “basic rate”—rates which are mandatory for all clients to support—which tends to be 1Mb/s, and is not fast enough to be useful. One way to fix this is to configure the AP not to include the lower rates in its basic set. This approach has been successfully tested in QSMC, but only by using a Broadcom 4306 wireless device in a laptop as the AP, using the “hostapd” software. Unfortunately, the Broadcom drivers are not reliable at rates above 11Mb/s, so testing at higher rates has not been possible. We need to find a standalone access point where the basic rate can be tuned or, perhaps, find a way to use the Marvell “libertas” devices for this purpose. (There is a possibility that we could use mesh mode for this purpose, but we may have issues with nodes retransmitting multicast packets to each other.) Further testing of this aspect of the distribution system is required.

8. Testing infrastructure: Chris Ball worked on Tinderbox additions. Dan Williams gave Chris a recipe for measuring activity startup time; the tinderbox will soon to be able to measure whether each activity in a build starts up okay, and exactly how long each one takes to do so.

9. Wireless resume: Richard Smith, Ronak Chokshi, Marcelo Tosatti, Javier Cardona, Jordan Crouse and others did a full-court press on the wireless-resume problems. While several bugs were found that improved suspend/resume behavior greatly, there is still uncertainty to the cause of the remaining problem(s).

10. NAND data-corruption: Bug #1905, which has been seen in two XOs (one B2 and one B4) has gotten the attention of Mitch Bradley, Dave Woodhouse, Luna Huang, Brian Ma, and others.

11. Google Books: Luke Hutchison's team has metadata and cross-linkage for most of Google's scanned PD books and can readily share images, OCR text, and metadata for 100,000 volumes, given selection criteria. Luke's summer work has been creating a way to run queries on the existing metadata to make such selections. There are still issues with copyright, surprisingly, as “public domain” in the US does not mean public everywhere; their current stance is to avoid worrying about international copyright law by only providing works through US-based servers, but making a quick selection will soon be possible.

12. Our Stories: The Our Stories team is preparing interfaces for online browsing and uploading stories and have a localization team on reserve to localize interfaces and other materials the last week in August. John Huang, who is maintaining the client Activity for the project that records and uploads stories expects to publish some recording code by the end of August.

13. Wikireader: Renaud Gaudin of Mali has been working on Moulin, an off-line wikireader, and is working on making it display well on the XO (See http://moulinwiki.org/). He is also developing ways to let people pass edits upstream through a moderated proxy server.

14. Maps: Schuyler Erle and UNICEF are working on an implementation of OpenLayers and the related FeatureServer to support children creating local maps of their villages, and on building lightweight regional map packs from public data. OpenLayers runs smoothly on a B4 without modification, providing another format for creators: a map layer and associated data.

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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