OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-08-18

1. Cambridge: Ivan Krstić has been named to Technology Review's prestigious TR35 List of Top Young Innovators. Ivan has been recognized by TR as one of the world's top innovators under the age of 35 for his work on OLPC’s innovative computer-security platform, Bitfrost.

2. CTest-1: 300 CTest-1 laptops were built this week in Shanghai; 150 of them are on their way to Cambridge, 10 of which will be immediately diverted to UL for final certification, along with full complements of batteries and AC adapters.

3. Microscope: Barrett Comiskey of the Nicobar group (and former Eink co-founder) has begun work on a low-cost microscope and a low-cost periscope. He is working on developing optical and other peripherals for the laptop, such a plug-in membrane that can act as an audio drumming machine. Pierre Lena, who runs the primary school science program “la main a la pate” (LAMAP) is also working on a microscope for the XO; efforts can be coordinated between the two efforts.

4. Activation: Scott Ananian updated the initial ramdisk to better handle activation from unpartitioned USB keys and SD cards; he tuned the activation graphical user interface (GUI), and he refactored the code to support activation via a separate anti-theft client. Scott tracked recent JFFS2 cleanmarker changes by Mitch Bradley and Dave Woodhouse and to he added support for backup and restore from unpartitioned USB keys/SD cards. Scott updated the autoreinstallation script: we now turn on “preserve user data” by default. Also, the script preserves the activation lease contents on activated machines and some changes have been made to make activating never-before-activated machines a bit easier. Scott also updated the autoreinstallation instructions on the wiki (See Autoreinstallation_image).

5. “Pretty boot”: Holding down the left directional pad during boot of the latest builds freezes the DCON—the first iteration of “pretty boot.” Scott used the minimal framebuffer support he wrote for the activation GUI to make a tiny proof-of-concept boot animation (which rotates the XO man).

6. Software updates: Scott also wrote a manifest specification (See Manifest_Specification) for activity/library/base os bundle manifests. The manifest will allow us to do inter-bundle sharing, incremental download, and security system authentication of bundle contents. It uses canonical JSON as an interchange format, in the minimal spirit of LISP S-expressions (See Canonical_JSON).

7. Wireless: In response to mesh throughput fluctuations observed by the team at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Rio de Janeiro, Marvell implemented and tested and new rate-adaptation algorithm. The new scheme continuously adjusts the transmission rate using transmission-frame error rates as its input. In the existing scheme the rate for a specific link was fixed during path discovery. The new scheme results in more constant mesh throughput at the expense of peak observed (instantaneous) throughput.

8. Firmware: Mitch Bradly released Q2C24 firmware with various improvements, including: faster scrolling; graphical display of copy-nand progress; the firmware resume path leaves USB alone; WLAN driver supports promiscuous mode; an Easter egg (press rocker key to the right after power-on); and a change to the cleanmarker format for consistency with kernels after Aug 10. He also made progress, albeit slow, on crypto. Lilian Walter worked on DNS this week. The code can now issue DNS AAAA query to both IPv4 and IPv6 DNS servers to resolve hostname into Ipv6 address. The next phase to get her router or DHCPv6 server to advertise the IPv6 DNS server IPv6 address.

9. School server: Due to an increase in the volume of discussion, we now have a separate chat (#schoolserver on irc.oftc.net) for the school server. Holger Levsen has setup a conventional laptop with an “active antenna” (a Marvel USB wlan device) as a school server (at least the internet gateway part of it) based on a installation image from http://xs-dev.laptop.org/xs/, while taking notes on every installation/configuration step. He plans to automate the procedure next week. Using the server, XOs can now access the interweb over the mesh automatically.

10. Kernel: This week Andres Salomon continued pushing patches upstream (the never-ending story), discovered a serious flaw in the way that we're handling our kernel configs that broke IPv6 support (and will most likely require an upstream patch to get right), merged some USB patches from upstream that should help with suspend/resume issues, synched the master and stable branches up, merged a bunch of vserver updates (including ipv6 support), and fixed some audio driver problems.

11. X Window System: The packaging part of X 1.4 is complete; in retrospect it wasn't that problematic. The server starts and runs Sugar with no visible rendering issues, but there are no yet any input devices. Bernardo Innocenti is trying to get HAL (the hardware abstraction layer) to properly configure them. The old mechanism based on dbus and “respeclaration” no longer works, but we do not care, because it was only for debugging purposes.

Sergey Udaltsov has made a first pass at XKB support for Amharic. The new keyboard standard that has recently been formalized in Ethiopia includes a basic keyboard layout and a series of overlays for composing more than 200 characters.

12. Etoys: Most of the Etoys team members, Yoshiki Ohshima, Scott Wallace, Takashi Yamamiya, Kim Rose, and Alan Kay spent a week with Kathleen Harness to discuss the documentation issue. (Kathleen has been managing the squeakcmi.org site at UIUC.) Kathleen's “SqueakCard” will be bundled as a quick help materials for Etoys. Concurrently, various bug fixes and enhancements were published. Most notably, Takashi's and Korakurider's gettext interoperability is reaching to a point where almost all needed phrases in the system can be exported for translation.

13. Build 542: Jim Gettys has pulled together extensive release notes for our new stable build (See OLPC_Trial-2_Software_Release_Notes). There are also extensive notes geared towards a less technical audience in the wiki (See 542_Demo_Notes).

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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