OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-10-13

[It has been suggested that I CC @devel with this weekly update. Feedback from the list members would be appreciated.]

1. Indianapolis: Benjamin Mako Hill and David Cavallo gave keynote talks and led a session on the laptop at the OpenMinds conference in Indianapolis this week. Indiana is in the vanguard in the US on laptops for learning (over 110,000 already deployed) and in using free and open-source software (FOSS) for learning. The conference brought together educators and developers to discuss issues and share experiences. OLPC was highlighted for making laptops more affordable everywhere and for our commitment to FOSS. In attendance were various governmental entities about to begin 1:1 laptop initiatives.

2. Suspend/resume: John Watlington has written a long description of the B3/B4/C1 suspend/resume problems, along with what it takes to modify a B4 to correct the problems can be found at in the wiki (See B4_Suspend_ECR). A small pre-build will be assembled next week to test the circuit changes introduced since the C1 build.

3. Schedules: The Trial-3 Open Firmware (OFW) first code-drop is scheduled for Monday. Testing of the Q2C28i is happening this weekend, and a final drop will be available for Quanta next Wednesday. Trial-3 is essentially complete, but we do not need to drop it to Quanta for another week or two, so we will consider critical bug fixes—if there is adequate time for testing. Everyone should please be focusing on First Deployment bug fixes, minor features, and, most especially, testing.

4. Test: Alex Latham spent most of the week performing suspend/resume testing. We now have a setup that is pretty easy to get running and keep running. Yani Galanis has spent the week documenting and testing various network configurations. There were a number of bugs/enhancements found this week that will help people who have recently been experiencing problems connecting to their home access points; for example, now that we support multiple key types, it is necessary to type $: in front of a hex key for a WEP connection.

Michael Stone is spear-heading a “Test Sprint” day to review test plans, automation, and finding ways to make it easy others community to help out. Next Wednesday will the the test sprint day. Please join in. (Details will be sent to devel, sugar, and testing mailing lists.) SJ Klein will be getting the wiki to produce inline diffs of watched pages in response to changes to those pages so that we can more efficiently track the progress of the sprint.

5. Mesh view: Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos has developed a new activity, “Space,” which displays an alternative mesh network neighborhood; it offers a sense of space by placing you in the center and everyone else in the mesh network at a distance proportional to link quality between you and the node that is being displayed (See http://web.media.mit.edu/~ypod/mesh/).

6. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent much of the week debugging suspend/resume patches related to the display controller (DCON). He also worked with upstream, massaging patches in, getting more patches ready, and helping others with their patches.

7. Sugar activities: Simon Schampijer set up a page in the wiki for the activity template (See Activity_Template) in order to set a standard by which activity developers communicate about their projects. (Now that loading new activities is as easy as clicking on an .xo bundle from the browser, there is certain to be more activity-related traffic in the wiki.) Simon also implemented the standard control for providing in-activity alerts (See https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2822); these can be used in the activities and can be placed at the top or bottom of the window. He has also begun work on a Sugar control-panel window.

8. X Window System: Bernardo Innocenti has gotten Xorg 1.4 fully packaged and available for general testing; while we haven’t done any benchmarking yet, it seems to be quite a bit faster. There is still need for a “kludge” in the kernel to help the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and evdev_drv see the glide sensor as a normal mouse, but that will soon be fixed.

Bernie also reports that we have a fix for the glibc problems affecting Ethiopian, but it requires upgrading to the F8 version of the library. Replacing glibc at this later stage isn't as destabilizing as it may seem: the only fallout Bernie can see is the exposure of a latent memory allocation bug in the olpc-dm program, which he has already fixed. Of course, we have more testing to do. Rob Savoye may be helping us with the Geode specific optimizations in glibc, for the benefit of Gnash and all other applications that rely heavily on memcpy() and similar functions.

Walter Bender has been working with Bernie, Tushar Sayankar, Jens Petersen, Parag Nemade, Manusheel Gupta, and Rosh Kamath on a Devanagari keyboard for the laptop that will be deployed in Mumbai (See Devanagari_keyboard).

9. Build system: Scott Ananian has made significant progress on our internal build system. We had our first “joyride” builds this week and hope to open it up to the rest of the developers next week. Scott also continued to work on the new hourly build system, creating “Joyride,” “Meshtest,” “Rainbow,” and “Xtest” branches of the main build. Joyride is the current unstable build; Meshtest is a fork for network testing; Rainbow is a fork for testing security-related patches; and Xtest is a fork for testing the Xorg 1.4 bits. (The Meshtest branch contains configuration and testing code to run on the OLPC mesh testbed; Scott has not quite gotten to the point where he can manage the build installed on the entire mesh at once, but he is getting very close.) Michael Stone has begun the process of cloning our build-system onto teach.laptop.org so that he can fully duplicate Scott's knowledge and so that he can document the process of constructing a build machine as he goes. Scott, Michael, and Chris Ball also have made plans for automated changelog collection that they hope to help implement next week.

10. Incremental updates: Michael worked closely with James Cameron and Reynaldo Verdejo to implement several small enhancements to our present incremental update strategy that user-testing suggested would be particularly valuable. These enhancements include: 

• better documentation of available update options;
• the ability to list all available builds;
• better generic error-reporting;
• retargetable updates, which give us XO-to-XO updates (See SoftwareBinaryDifferentialUpdates);
• updates that are more robust in the face of intermittent network connectivity (diagnosed and implemented by Reynaldo).

11. Activiation/leases: Scott also finalized MP security requirements with Mitch Bradley; they ensure that we can seamlessly upgrade to new signing keys even after machines are in the field. Scott also prototyped a “manufacturing-server-less” activation process, to reduce our deployment risk; and he began to prototype a simple lease-creation server.

12. Activity Containerization: Michael Stone reports that you can now update to Rainbow (security-enabled) builds by running 

# olpc-update rainbow-7

Build rainbow-7 comes almost ready to use; you just need to 

# touch /etc/olpc-security

and reboot. The resulting system will demonstrate the current state of activity containerization.

This state can be inspected in two places: 

/var/log/rainbow/stdout
/var/rainbow/debrief/<id>/stdout
                         /stderr
                         /strace

The Rainbow stdout log records a running commentary on Rainbow's actions as the system runs. The per-activity-invocation stdout and stderr files record data printed by activities (including exception traces printed by failing Python activities). The strace log contains a detailed log of all actions performed by activities that can be used to diagnose the causes of activity failure.

13. Language: Ben Lowenstein of Colingo has released Spanish 1-2-3 and Portuguese 1-2-3 and is looking for feedback (See http://dev.colingo.org/media/123/).

14. Music: The music curation team had a listening jam last week, pulling together works from individual artists and DJs, from the Beatpick and the Free Music Project. This is being coordinated by Romain Becker and Sylvain Zimmer of Jamendo, and by Elizabeth Stark, who are processing the faxed copyright releases and attribution needs of the artists. Artists and bands on-board since last week include DJ C, DJ Spooky, Tripwire (tripwire.in), Rainvan, and Split. All have contributed songs under an attribution license and at least one collection under a non-commercial license (for school libraries).

15. Books: Arjun Sarwal is working with Hemant Goyal and Assim Deodia on a text-to-speech synthesizer for the Read activity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/E-Book_Reader). Biguniverse has 12 authors who have offered OLPC use of their stories.

16. Wikitext: Zdenek Broz has been improving the format of topical bundles of articles (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arael/preview/wikislice-physics-en/wikislice-physics-en.xol/index.html). The newer templates now need to be ported to other languages. The Fudia team developing the “Ksana” multilingual wiki reader are close to releasing a version of their reader/search platform that supports editing. Fudia wants to sponsor 8G “wikisticks” or SD cards for our partner schools.

The MindTouch team, developers of DekiWiki—a popular derivative of MediaWiki with a “more friendly” editing interface—are working with Mako Hill to make their platform one of the backends that MikMik supports.

17. Community journalism: The Report activity has been updated (See Report); Dan Sutera and his team have put together a Knight Foundation grant to support making it a scalable platform for local and regional news. They now have the site xotimes.org set up as the global overview of news reported with the activity.

18. Games: A group blog has been set up for OLPC games by the group at the Education and Technology Center at CMU working on a soccer game for the laptop (See http://www.olpcgames.org/). They are running a Pittsburgh Game Jam Nov 16–18 (See http://www.olpcgames.org/?p=16 and http://www.olpcgames.org/?p=18).

Game Jam Brasil was moved to November 10–11, and looks as though it may be larger than previously expected (See Game_Jam_Brasil/Organização).

GAMBIT at MIT are developing a card-game platform on which one could define and share new card games.

Mind Candy software is turning out a new global puzzle game that they'd love to have as a channel connecting children in the developing world with their core audience in the US. Michael Smith there is planning to turn a developer or two onto making an XO web interface (e.g., no Flash) as soon as their site goes live next month.

19. Other content actvities: Hemant Goyal and a small team is working with Arjun Sarwal in India to develop digital signal processing tools to work with measure. They are going to implement the filters in CSound this coming week.

20. Java: Adam Bouhenguel has an interest in evaluating and benchmarking light-weight versions of Java for the laptop. He would appreciate input from others who have considered the same questions.

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

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

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More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

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