OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-09-29

1. Mumbai: Carla Gomez Monroy has been working with a team from Reliance to launch a new trial at the Khairat School.

2. Sugar: Simon Schamijer, Tomeu Vizoso, and Marco Pesenti Gritti spent most of the week sorting through trac entries to determine what needs to be done for our first release (FRS). Simon fixed a bug with “set title”; activities now have the same title on the home screen and in the Journal. Tomeu worked on the key dialog in the neighborhood view so it accepts ASCII pass-phrases in WEP networks. He discussed with Marco and Benjamin Berg possibilities of improving the preview support in the Journal. And he improved Journal's tolerance to malformed entries. There has been a good discussion on the Sugar mailing list about integration of the datastore in the security framework; progress is being made.

3. Kernel: Andres Salomon merged bugfixes into the vserver branch of the kernel; updated the playground branch; and fixed the “green boxes” bug (the DCON driver was restoring bogus register states). He is also fixing the “smbus is unstable on resume” bug. In the process the “VMEM being funky” bug was discovered and fixed (via ECO). The DCON kernel code has slowly drifted away from the Open Firmware DCON code, so Andres is synchronizing the two.

Chris Ball found some time to work on our power manager, OHM. It now knows which power state we're in when deciding which action to take; the first behavior change is that we no longer suspend when the lid closes if we're on AC power. This and more power changes will be in FRS.

4. Laptop Suspend/Resume Hunt: The hardware team was consumed with the continuing search for suspend/resume problems. We have been identifying the source of glitches on the laptop power rails, and fixing them one by one. We are still seeing a mix of bug manifestations, although the frequency of crashes has been reduced. At this time, modified laptops typically run for ten- to twenty-thousand suspend/resume cycles, being woken each time by the arrival of a network packet.

We are reaching the point where testing to see the effect of a hardware change is time consuming; we have a testbed of eight machines cycling continuously whose serial consoles are being logged to allow us to qualify where in the cycle a crash occurred. If woken by a timer instead of the arrival of a network packet, modified laptops have not been seen to crash, but we have not yet run one for more than 50-thousand cycles.

5. Firmware: Mitch Bradley implemented a full firmware secure-boot sequence including firmware updates and developer-key checks. The secure-boot sequence will doubtless undergo some revisions as we shake it out. Mitch also implemented the firmware end of pretty-boot, including the XO-man background and graphical depiction of the secure update/boot sequence He also defined and began implementing NAND boot speedups, using existing upstream kernel features for making a small boot partition on NAND.

6. Schedules: First candidate release of Trial-3 code was dropped to Quanta, build 608. Next week we will do final testing on the OFW security features, finalize on EC and kernel fixes needed for suspend and resume, and create Candidate 2. We will also focus on prioritization of the first deployment (FRS) bug/task list.

7. Testing: There was a big push this week to get to a lot of functional testing, document the open issues and find work-arounds whenever possible for the Trial-3 release. Alex Latham tested: transfer of files using USB; human-readable file names in the Journal; clipboard objects; and Gstreamer (the browser media player) and Watch and Listen. He also compiled group of test files of all supported mime types. Alex tested upgrades (from Build 542 to current builds) and noted that some activities that have changed greatly cannot resume old journal entries. And he tested upgrading from web. Zack Cerza and Yani Galanis focused their efforts on wireless and collaboration. Collaboration is not as reliable as we’d like it to be; for example, one is not notified when one’s buddies leave a session. Wi-Fi WPA will not be supported in Trial 3.

8. Journalism Jam New York: Last weekend's journalism jam included presentations by Eben Moglen and Susan Crawford; with coordination from Brendan Ballou and help from Lauren Klein, Danny Clark, and a team of high school testers, it came off smoothly. The result was a working prototype activity for recording and blogging articles, and some guidelines for how to write a good article and how to present it to an audience (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Report). Dan Sutera, who worked on the project, has offered to maintain it and turn it into something that will scale to thousands of schools.

9. Libraries: The Boston Public Library has offered to curate a collection similar to the school libraries their librarians help develop for local schools, for international use. Bernie Margolis, the BPL's president, and Maura Manx, heading their digital collections, got general approval for the idea from their board and have Brewster Kahle's explicit support. They would like to make some of their first collections for children and specifically for schools, and would like to showcase the results on laptops in their main library; including in a display indicating the lifecycle of a digitized work.

10. Curriculum Jam: The Manila Jam will have a new venue, please check the wiki OLPC Philippines We are still expecting Mel Chua and some to attend the Jam. October 5 - 7, 2007 and the schedule is being cleaned up. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Curriculum_Jam_Manila

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

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More articles can be found here.

Video

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