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Laptop News 2007-09-01

1. Schedules/testing: This week was “feature freeze” and by the end of the week we were very close to finalizing the feature set for the Trial-3 software release. Since there were a lot of new features getting checked in, we saw numerous builds and wrote up and fixed many, many blocking and regression bugs. Over the next week we will be focused on stability, through bug fixing and testing. There was some good progress on some of the biggest (and loudest) bugs related to suspend and resume, which is great to see. No more features for Trial-3. If you think there is an exception to this rule, please contact Jim Gettys and Kim Quirk.

2. Sugar: The Collabora team continued to work on final items before the upcoming software release. This included adding support for mutable activity properties (name, tags, colors, etc), invitation support, porting of many of the activities over to the new tubes specification and cleaning up a lot of the base system elements. Morgan Collett updated the Connect and Chat activities to the new interfaces.

If no school server is chosen, a presence server in the MIT collocation center is being used to enable individual developers to share.

A new version of TamTam from Jean Piché's team is included in the new builds.

Pango (to enable support for languages like Amharic) and Cairo were updated to their latest versions.

Chris Ball updated Pippy to add journal integration, sound support from Nathanaël Lécaudé and the TamTam team, and new examples from Madeleine Ball, Mel Chua, and Rafael Ortiz.

Simon Schamijer updated the Memorize activity for the new tubes API.

Simon also has been working on a the web browser (See the new visual design at Web_Browser). He added a sharable link tray and fixed bugs in the shared browser session.

Marc Maurer worked on the Abiword (Write Activity) collaboration backend. He also added a new format toolbar to Write and added some additional style options (headings, numbering, bullets, etc.) He also added the ability to insert images into Write directly from the Journal.

3. Upgrades and multi-boot: Scott Ananian installed Debian Linux alongside Fedora Sugar on an XO as a demonstration of the new upgrade mechanism, which allows you to keep the old version around and boot into if the upgrade goes awry; and the P_SF_RUN Bitfrost security mechanism, which allows a child to poke around the root filesystem and muck with things, while still being able to revert to the “pristine” OS image if things go wrong (See preliminary instructions at Installing_Debian_as_an_upgrade. This will get much easier next week as the rest of the upgrade infrastructure is rolled out: you will be able to just subscribe to the “debian” stream to get Debian installed (for example). There will be “stable” and “devel” streams for Sugar releases—the real point of this work.

4. X Window System: Bernardo Innocenti merged more xkb changes for our existing keymaps, defined a few missing keysyms and updated the olpc patch in response to Sergey Udaltsov 's reviews. He is currently testing new RPMs. A new patch submission is due soon.

Bernie and Walter Bender have also been finalizing the keyboard layouts for mass production (By way of example, see Image:Keyboard_english.png).

5. Embedded controller: Richard worked on the “battery-always-charging” bug. It does not appear to be just an EC problem as Open Firmware shows the correct status but the kernel does not. They both use the same EC commands. It is still unclear what is wrong.

6. The Wireless Bug (Trac #1835): Richard is also working on this bug. The more he gets into it, the more it smells like hardware. On a resume, after some number of cycles, the machine will hang. It is likely that we are not getting good data from the reset-vector fetch. The next step is to decode the LPC (low pin-count) bus and see what data is coming back in the fail case.

Javier Cardona and Chris Ball also continued work on the wireless-resume bug. Javier added debugging code that is providing useful information on each crash, and is continuing to try to iron out the bugs as we find them.

Richard and Chris found a bug where the CPU occasionally on resume appears to be stalling instead of executing instructions. Since this happens during our extreme-traffic wireless-resume testing, the problem could be as simple as us not giving the power rails enough time to quiesce. Richard is working on it.

7. School server: The school server software continues to improve; a new release with several bug fixes and the laptop registration service is expected by the beginning of next week. To aid in server development in crowded work areas (such as Cambridge), John Watlington tested and documented the mesh blinding tables (See Mesh_Debug). Several new school servers came online this week: one for a trial in India, one for content development, and several for testing in Cambridge.

8. Kernel: This week Andres Salomon worked on vserver patches and fixing sound bugs. The screeching-upon-resume bug has been fixed, along with a number of other sound bugs. The patches been pushed upstream. A few bugs still remain, but no known major ones.

Marcelo Tosatti added code to our kernels that makes it possible to trace how long suspend/resume cycles take. This should allow us to pinpoint where we spend a lot of our time. Currently, the largest consumer of time turns out to be writing to the serial console during resume.

9. Firmware: Mitch Bradley Released Q2C26 firmware with OS security and activation support, some bug fixes, improved NAND FLASH bad-block management, and created a kit for creating signed OS images and leases. Lilian Walter put into place the code to solicit stateless DHCPv6 information. She is finishing up IPv6 fragmentation and reassembly.

10. Wireless: Michail borrowed an Anritsu Network analyzer and did some antenna performance measurements on the C- and B- Build laptops. He is happy to report that the C Build units are the first ones with completely functioning antennas. Quanta has implemented grounding of the antenna cable's shield in the C-Build machine and that seems to have made the right antenna perform properly. Michail’s only comment is that the insulation on the left antenna's wire is being stripped too short: the braid deforms from the mechanical stress imposed on it during the antenna's rotation. The insulation has to be left intact all the way to the grounding sticker as it the case with the right antenna.

Note: the C-Build laptops have metalization all around the plastic parts. Because of that, when the antennas are closed, the plastic below them acts as a ground plane and diminishes the antenna's performance completely compared to the previous builds. The antennas work much better when in the up position on the C-Build laptops.

11. Build 542.3: John (J5) Palmieri reports that a new spin of the stable build fixes a bug in Sugar that had prevented the installation of translation files; it also fixes a Journal bug for the Spanish locale.

http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/build542.3/

When installing this image, it should be named 'os5423.img' (along with the corresponding 'os5423.crc'). The FAT file system would otherwise be unhappy with the double dots in the names and the auto-reinstallation script would thus refuse to install them.

12. OLPC Philippines has registered a name. It is named as OLPCPH. OLPC_Philippines

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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