OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-08-25

1. Ethiopia: Nicholas gave the keynote at UN hosted World Information Technology Forum at which 52 countries were present, virtually all African nations.

2. Breaza: As part of our on-going outreach in Romania, OLPC intern Joel Stanley gave a presentation to Forum IT, an annual five-day computer summer camp for young people in Romania, run by Catalin Grosu (See http://tabara.forumit.ro/2007/arhiva.php).

3. Microscope: TB, malaria, and HIV/AIDS kill about 6M people a year in resource-poor areas. Simple, afford diagnostic methods for these diseases could save many lives. Our video-microscope add-on to the XO may help with the diagnostics efforts: HIV/AIDS can diagnosed through video microscopicy with signal processing: an automating method to count T-Cells. TB (including drug-resistant TB) and malaria can be diagnosed in similar ways. We are discussing the best way to proceed with Dr. Howard Shapiro, who runs the Center of Microbial Cytometry and wrote the widely used textbook, Practical Flow Cytometry, which can be read online free of charge (See http://probes.invitrogen.com/products/flowcytometry/practicalflowcytometry.html). Howard has already developed low-cost cytometers for this purpose.

4. Pippy: Chris Ball released a Python-programming activity called Pippy, which is in the base image as of Build 553. It is a simple programming console in the style of the consoles for basic interpreted languages that many of us grew up with, and comes with a selection of introductory Python code. The next goal is to make it easy for children to distribute activities that consist of the code they've written.

5. Wireless resume: Chris Ball spent most of the week working on the wireless-resume problem. Javier Cardona and USB experts at Marvell have been coming up with firmware patches. They are making progress—the number of successful resumes we get per cycle is increasing.

6. Kernel: Andres Salomon fixed some build failures due to kernel config and sent the patch upstream. Our build scripts needed to be updated as well, so that was done. With that out of the way, Andres took the opportunity to do a large update of our kernel config. This included enabling network and sound drivers used by VMware and Virtualbox, dropping some unused NAND drivers (including ATest NAND support), fixing IPv6, and building some drivers statically. Andres also reviewed a number of vserver updates and committed some of them.

7. School server: John Watlington announced a build (125) for testing. It is missing a number of crucial services, but verifies the build and installation process and supports laptops on the mesh. It should install on most x86 platforms, requiring only an Active Antenna to provide the mesh interface. More information is available from the wiki (See XS_Server_Software). You can also obtain the Live CD image (from http://xs-dev.laptop.org/xs/OLPC_XS_LATEST.iso). Release notes and installation instructions are also in the wiki (See XS_Installing_Software). Over the next week, we hope to include all required services in this build. Thanks go to Holger Levsen, Dan Margo, Scott Ananian, and RedHat team.

8. Updates and security: Scott Ananian—with help from Ivan Krstić, Michael Stone, Noah Kantrowitz, and Mitch Bradley—wrote or edited the following specifications in the wiki:

Scott also made good progress towards getting boot-from-multiple-images support into the initial ramdisk, a component of our improved upgrade code. Scott worked on the auto-reinstallation image, hand-holding users through the new auto-reinstallation process and debugging some genuine problems.

9. Firmware: Lilian Walter got the router to advertise a DNS IPv6 address and the code to use those data. For completeness, she is working on setting up DHCP6s to do the same. Mitch Bradley released Q2C25; he is focusing on security support in the firmware

10. Schedules: Monday is feature freeze for Trial-3. We will be following up on all unfinished features to see how to close them down or move them out. We will start attacking the blocking and high-priority bugs starting next week.

11. Testing: There was regression over the past week, especially in activities, but by the end of the week, many fixes had been checked in. Check this weekend's build (557). Please write up your notes in the wiki (See Test_Group_Release_Notes).

12. MaMaMedia: The MaMaMedia team has a new release for Build 542 that includes seven activities, including a Jigsaw Puzzle, Poll Builder, and Slider Puzzle feature mesh-based creative and collaborative sharing; and a Learning Center as a place for teachers and students to share learning tips. All of activities are now using the (almost) stabilized Sugar features: journal, clipboard, and tubes for sharing. Many thanks to Carla Gomez Monroy, SJ Klein, and Lauren Klein for their feedback and to Lincoln Quirk, Eben Eliason, and Marco Gritti for their collaboration with Morgan Collett, Carlos Neves, Terrence Grannum, Ed Stoner, Rich Goehl, and Shannon Sullivan (See http://www.worldwideworkshop.org/olpcwiki/index.php?title=MaMaMedia_Activity_Center and http://www.worldwideworkshop.org/olpcwiki/index.php?title=Teacher_Center).

13. Map creation: Christopher Schmidt, Schuyler Erle, and SJ Klein worked out a process for turning existing map-layer tools and public data into a lightweight browsable atlas, whose most detailed layer links out to text or image content. This should be able to run on an XO, with tiles generated by libraries on a server. Early versions are working online as a browsable page. Christopher is working on an activity version that clones Browse.

14. Games: Roberto Faga got a lightweight NES emulator to work on the XO, with a set of bundles or ROMs. We need a copyright release on the ROMs and source code from Nintendo (or the original publishers) before we could ship them. Patrick Dejarnette got his Side-Scroller engine working, and is now developing images and some levels over the weekend (See wiki.laptop.org/go/Side-scroller).

15. Content Jams: Brendan Ballou in NYC is organizing a content jam for September 21-23 around news and journalism; they have their organizational team and a test group set up. Roberto Faga is also preparing a Game Jam in Brazil for the end of September; he is looking for interested Portuguese-speakers to help out.

16. Misc. activities: Lauren Klein and Charles Smith are continuing to work on a Bug Blitz activity and plan to have something to test next week. Some biologists from Argentina have offered to help with the project by reviewing photographs to help identify bugs and other life that children photograph in their vicinity.

An activity that need support and work: a simple video editor for splicing together images and video and matching them with spoken sentences (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/ColingoXO).

17. Grassroots: OLPC Philippines is gathering local interest; a Manila content jam is planned for the start of October, and they are filing papers to set up their own local nonprofit. OLPC Indonesia is starting to take shape as well; they have recruited a number of interested people and set up their own Indonesian-language mailing list (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Indonesia and http://groups.google.com/group/olpc-indonesia).

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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