OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-09-08

1. Schedule/features: As mentioned, there were Sugar, network, and security reviews this week resulting in the reporting of some new bugs and future features. One outcome was the identification of some last-minute features, so we will not be ready for code freeze on Monday—we are probably off by about a week. Next week, we will have a major push to get all remaining blocking bugs addressed.

2. Testing/Support: Alex Latham joined OLPC for a fall internship and has already contributed to the testing efforts, finding and reporting bugs. Over the next few weeks we need to concentrate effort towards both more “random” testing and our more formal test procedures (See User_Stories_Testing). Anyone who has time and a laptop can help by loading the latest release and going through some of the test plans. Please report your bugs to trac (http://dev.laptop.org) and your high-level thoughts to the Test Group Release Notes page in the wiki (See Test_Group_Release_Notes).

3. Update to Trial-2 software: A change in our build system caused several languages to not be properly included in our Trial-2 build. A new build, 542.3, was released to fix this. There remain some problems with the Spanish and Portuguese versions of TamTam that are still being worked on.

4. Updates: Scott Ananian spend this week working on upgrades. He got an rsync-based upgrade server now running at http://updates.laptop.org under a fakeroot; and he modified the manifest format and code to make it easier to read incrementally (so we don't need to keep the entire filesystem manifest in memory during sync and validation).

5. Activities: This week there were updates to the Write Activity, TamTam, Memorize, Chat, Etoys, Record, and Calculate. Also, XoIRC—an Internet-relay chat client activity written by Eduardo Silva and dedicated to the #olpc-help channel—made its first appearance. Chris Ball released a new version of Pippy that allows you to access a fully interactive Python interpreter, as well as the example programs. Muriel de Souza Godoi fixed some Memorize bugs (and released v16).

6. Kernel: Andres Salomon has been been working with Arjun Sarwal, author of the Measure Activity, to determine what we actually want the laptop sound driver to do. As a result, Andres reworked the way that the sound driver handles high-pass filter/analog input and V_REFOUT. Andres synced his sound driver with master—they are slowly working their way through upstream's ALSA tree. Andres also synced the master branch up with the stable branch's EC code, making debugging cleaner in the process. He also made the EC-delay timeout configurable (olpc_ec_timeout=<ms>). Richard Smith also supplied a fix for the always-charging bug in the battery driver.

7. Universal serial converter: Joel Stanley finished up his last week of his OLPC internship with work on testing the new XO universal serial converter, which is used for breaking out a serial-port and debricking capability on the laptop. Thanks to Joel for some great work.

8. Firmware: Lilian Walter started research on IP security (IPsec) for IPv6. Internet key exchange (IKE) v1 can be readily tested using racoon—an IKE daemon for automatically keying IPsec connections that is distributed with FC7. IKE v2 can be tested with racoon2 after building it. That will be the next phase.

Mitch Bradley made a stripped-down OFW that will fit in 128K, including SD and (probably) USB mass storage drivers, but without networking, to enable us to have a backup recovery path in case of boot ROM reflash problems. He is waiting for testing on the OS signing and activation features that are in the firmware was released last Friday.

Mitch is also working with Quanta and David Woodhouse to track down some more instances of NAND FLASH corruption (possibly manifestations of Trac #1905, but it is perhaps a new problem).

9. X Window System: Stefano Fedrigo (a volunteer from Italy) profiled our graphics performance at 16-bit and 24-bit color depth; this will help us decide which depth to use, since there are trade-offs involved. Stefano, Bernardo Innocenti, and Chris Ball are working on further analysis.

Bernardo Innocenti has been working on merging all recent changes to keyboard definitions from Walter Bender, Sergey Udaltsov, and Jim Gettys into an OLPC patch for our xkeyboard-config package. The RPM is in the builds and looks fine so far. Bernie is planning to send the patch upstream and maybe propose this package for F8.

Sergey, Walter, Lidet Tilahun, and Mako Hill have provided additional bits and suggestions for comprehensive Ethiopian support. Bernie has been able to assemble the various pieces, but for moment, they are only adequate for demonstration purposes. Next week, Bernie will work on packaging these bits for the builds.

10. Games: MIT's GAMBIT program started operating this summer out of 5 Cambridge Center, under the direction of Philip Tan. They run a practical design course in the fall and will have a group working on game development for XOs.

11. Jams: Game Jam Brasil is scheduled for the last week in September. Mel Chua expects to be in Manila for their Jam the first weekend in October. OLPCPH's Rowen Iral and Timothy Martinez are preparing for the Jam and some new stuff for the Curriculum Jam. Chris Torstenson and Kevin Driscoll are planning a Boston Content Jam for the same time.

12. University chapters: Olin College started a university chapter on Wednesday, and are drafting a model for other universities to follow. People from other universities are encouraged to help define the model (See University_program).

13. Translations: Todd Kelsey and Lingotech are working on translations of demo notes for the laptop, as an example of short-turnaround localization of specific useful documents. Draft documents in Spanish, Amharic, Portuguese, Thai, Arabic and other languages are in the wiki (See 542_Demo_Notes). These are being reintegrated with the on-wiki translation system. To get a document translated, post it to the wiki and note the need for translation (See Translating for a more detailed description of how wiki pages get translated).

14. Cartoons and Comics: The Avallain comic maker had an alpha release this week: you can make your own layered comics with custom backgrounds and resizable characters in Javascript; and save your creations. At the moment, these simply work through the browser; exporting to a flat image and sharing are coming next (See Comic_Maker).

15. Our Stories: Asabe Yabani is working on a detailed implementation plan for OurStories in Nigeria. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Queen Rania of Jordan, and former child-soldier Ishmael Beah are recording audio clips about Our Stories over the coming weeks, in preparation for a site launch (coordinated by Google) on October 15. XOs remain a focus for recording of stories.

16. Report from OLPCPH: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Philippines:Report Activities made in the OLPC Philippines are kept in this sub-page.


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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