OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-10-20

1. Lima: Carla Gomez Monroy's hard work at Arahuay—the town which hosted the first OLPC pilot in Perú—came to fruition with news that the Budget Commission of the Peruvian Congress has unanimously approved of the first allocation of laptops for children. The announcement was made just as Jim Gettys, Hernán Pachas, and Carla Palomino Guerrero arrived in Arahuay for a visit. Hernán and Carla are working with Oscar Becerra, General Director of Educational Technology, Ministry of Education of Peru, who is in charge of the OLPC program in Peru. (Jim gave the keynote address at the Vision 2007 Conference in Lima, Peru, having worked with Hernán and Carla earlier in the week.)

2. Miami: Nicholas spoke at the Latin American Society for Information and Publishers, which drew all the major news media from Latin America. The audience carried stories throughout Latin America the rest of the week, widely naming Uruguay the first country to boldly proceed.

3. Accra: Matt Keller, Juliano Bittencourt (who is one of the leads at the Porto Alegre OLPC trial school), and David Cavallo ran a Laptops and Learning workshop as part of the build up towards Ghana's deployment of One Laptop per Child. The workshop was held at the Kofi Annan Center and was organized by the Ministry of Finance, who is championing the initiative. Participants came from a broad array of Ghanaian society, including various ministries, universities, NGOs, and the private sector. The goals of the workshop were to familiarize the participants with the ideas behind OLPC; to learn about learning and laptops; to learn about experiences in other countries to date; and to plan next steps towards a broad deployment.

4. Springfield, Illinois: Cavallo gave a keynote address to the Rural Telecom Conference in Springfield. There were participants from many states as well as tribal reservations; there was tremendous enthusiasm for deployment of OLPC in US rural areas and twinning them with deployments in other countries.

5. Cambridge: SES-Americom has given us a two-way satellite terminal. The installation was completed this week at the roof of the Media Lab and the terminal is now connected to the OLPC offices via a Motorola canopy base station that sits on the top of MIT’s Eastgate building. In this manner we are now able to setup a simulation of a complete rural school network at the OLPC Cambridge office and test network connectivity via satellite. The system that SES has given us is an iDirect series 5000, which is towards the high-end of the spectrum as far as VSAT routers go and is able to sustain 500Kbps symmetric with download bursts up to 6Mbps.

6. Laptop on your lap: XO is the first “laptop” that can safely be used on one's lap. Most laptops are officially called notebook computers, because use on a lap is unsafe—you risk burning your skin. Not so with the XO; it is so low power that the electronics don't get hot; and further, the electronics are next to the screen, not the lap. The plastic in the keyboard area stays cool all the time.

7. Mesh: Ronak Chokshi from Marvell and Javier Cardona from Cozybit made an “emergency” visit to OLPC. The visit resulted in some useful discussions that brought everybody up to speed with the status and the development of XO’s wireless stack. Marvell released firmware 5.110.19.p0 on Thursday; we reached consensus that we need to incorporated into our builds as soon as possible for testing.

8. Wireless driver: The effort to push the wireless driver upstream has left the driver on our builds with a limited “control knobs.” Of the 79 documented iwpriv controls, only 28 are exposed in the current builds. Of the 51 that don't work, some are rarely used but some are essential, e.g., radioff. Given that many of the enhancements that we have requested Marvell to implement depend on driver support, in the interim, Michail Bletsas recommends that we use the original libertas-2.6 tree for our builds—where Marvell and Cozybit are contributing—not the tree that we are using for pushing patches upstream.

9. New intern: Ricardo Carrano from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Niterói, Brazil has joined OLPC as an intern for the next two months. He will be working on various wireless issues with Michail. Ricardo has been instrumental in performing a variety of tests since the beginning of the year in Brazil.

10. Bulk charger: The industrial design for the multi-battery charger has been approved. A full mechanicals package has been created and is off to tooling vendors to get some quotes. Gecko had a stereolithographic (SLA) model of the front panel build with five battery slots in order to test the battery retention system, which is designed to allow battery removal with one hand. We should have a mechanical model in Cambridge soon for evaluation. Flextronics finished up the thermal simulation of the inside of the charger. We are looking at a 15-degree C rise over ambient temperature. Simulations are showing that we are well within the operating range of the components while operating at our target of 50-degree C ambient temperature.

Bitworks and Richard Smith brought up the CPU board for the bulk charger: Forth is running and all the I/O paths have been exercised. Both Richard and Lilian Walter have prototype CPU boards for software development. The first draft of the software specification along with the relevant EC code that currently runs as part of the laptop charging system were delivered to Lilian last week. She has ported the USB code and has written a software pulse-width modulator (PWM), which will be used to drive the charge voltage for each battery. She is now working on increasing the PWM interrupt priority. Next week Richard hopes to charge some batteries.

11. Cow power: In a related effort, Richard has been working with Arjun Sarwal, helping him refine his plan for charging the XOs using cow power.

12. Firmware: Mitch Bradley has been putting together a firmware build for mass production. Q2D01 was officially released, but we may decide to bump to Q2D02 to address some issue with security migration. Q2D01 has several important bug fixes: wireless association, JFFS2, and support for non-US keyboard layouts, as well as a secure OS image update.

13. Embedded controller: An agreement between EnE and OLPC on use of the EC source code has been finalized—now it just needs signatures. Richard, Mitch, and Scott Ananian worked up a method for automatic firmware updates in the face of our full security mode. It needs an EC patch that might not make it into MP. In other news, a small “buglet” with the Read Power Rail command (0x2B)—it always reported the DCON as powered up—has been fixed.

14. Laptop hardware: John Watlington spent the week working on improving our test setup and chasing the occasional “reboot on resume on ping” bug. This is our most significant remaining hardware problem—it occurs rarely enough that, while we will hunt it down and fix it, we will not stop initial production. An update will be provided next week, after John and Chris Ball have tested a statistically more significant number of C2 pre-build machines at the factory in China. We are releasing the modified B4 and C1 laptops from the Cambridge test bed to software developers (four had already been sent out). Kim Quirk is distributing these. Two will be kept running in the testbed in a continually ongoing attempt to break the one-million suspend/resume-cycle mark.

We have gotten to the point in fixing the suspend/resume problems where we are once again finding subtle problems with our test setup. Javier and Ronak helped us debug some remaining wireless-mesh problems: we started testing with a new build of the WLAN firmware and consequently started seeing more instances of the problem loosely identified by Trac ticket #1752 (USB wireless suspend/resume failure at setup phase). This is the ticket that gets blamed for problems with networking after a large number of suspend/resume cycles (over time, a collection of bugs have been corrected by multiple changes in WLAN firmware, EC firmware, and the motherboard itself). We hadn't seen the bug in modified machines; we will be testing an even newer WLAN firmware, which might correct the problem.

15. Javier and Ronak also looked at some problems we have been having with the active antenna (it occasionally stops working, even though to system software it appears to be OK). As this problem only happens after weeks of operation, they weren't lucky enough to see the behavior. What they did realize was that the test setup Marvell had been using in India was completely different from the one in which we were seeing the problem. They will now run the school-server software in their testbed. Again, Marvell's latest firmware might fix this problem.

16. Peripherals ideas: Joshua Seal has created a new discussion space for peripheral ideas. It combines all previous ideas posted on the OLPC wiki regarding power, connectivity, sensors, and input and output devices. By going to [1] you will see all of the peripheral ideas and are welcome to post any new ideas you may have. Alternatively please email your ideas to josh<at>laptop<dot>org with your suggestions.

17. Sugar: Simon Schampijer worked on Sugar refinements to the standard alerts and added a timeout alert. He also added full-screen support to Sugar—hides the toolbar and tray—and add tray support in activity windows. This is implemented and works for all the Python activities, since we handle this in the base activity window. (He has also added support of trays to the base activity, which is why both the toolbar and the tray are affected by full-screen mode.) The Browse activity is a good place to see and test this new feature. Alt+enter is bound to this feature. (Note that currently you have to use Alt+shift+enter due to a misbehavior in the Matchbox window manager. This has been filed and will hopefully be fixed upstream early next week.) Simon also added alerts for “Download started” and “Download completed” and feedback for downloads in progress when closing a session.

Internationalization support has been integrated into Measure Activity and with help from volunteers Spanish and Portuguese translations have already been done. Arjun Sarwal has been working on displaying multiple logs at the same time to enable comparison amongst logs.

Bert Freudenberg spear-headed the effort to adapt Squeak to the API changes and security container change after Trial-3. Takashi Yamamiya also take the charge of DnD fixes. Yoshiki Ohshima worked on the fixes on accented character input and support for the DC-mode input. Scott Wallace gathers numerous fixes from community and merge them to the Etoys.

Hilaire Fernandes has led an effort to port Dr. Geo, a GTK interactive geometry software to the laptop. It allows one to create geometric figure plus the interactive manipulation of such figure in respect with their geometric constraints. It runs inside of Etoys; a great example of “hard fun.” (See DrGeo for details.)

Muriel Godoi continues to make improvements to the Memorize Game activity. He has reduced the memory footprint; added new icons to the “create” mode (which lets children create their own games); integrated the datastore; enabled importing of pictures and audio from the Journal (for building cards for new games); added an icon and tool tip for a “reset game” button; and incorporated the new protocol for sending files over tubes in order to share a child-created game. A new release will be available soon.

Manusheel Gupta has been working with the team from LSI at the University of São Paulo (including Alexandre Martinazzo, Irene Karaguilla Ficheman, Nathalia Sautchuk Patrício, Roseli de Deus Lopes, André Mossinato, Rafael Barbolo Lopes, and Pedro Kayatt) on the Paint activity. They have some new ideas for implementing sharing and fixing bugs. One important enhancement is Journal integration for image imports. (Try downloading www.lsi.usp.br/nate/documentation/Paint-12.xo).

18. Keyboards: Manusheel, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Roshan Kamat, Tushar Sayankar, Jens Peterson, and Walter Bender have finished the layout for a Deva keyboard (See Devanagari_Keyboard). We hope to finish the Nepali and Pashto keyboards in the coming weeks. Manu is leading a discussion on an OLPC keyboard for the blind. Please send your ideas/feedback to manu<at>laptop<dot>org).

19. Schedules/testing: We have done what we hope is the final OFW and Trial-3 builds for the mass production start at Quanta. The focus of the development and test teams starting this week has been mostly on first deployment (FRS) bug fixing and testing. Yani Galanis, Ricardo Carrno joined Ronak and Javier to help sort out issues with wireless connectivity. Alex Latham continued to help out on suspend/resume testing as well as updating and executing test plans from the wiki test area (User_Stories_Testing).

20. Test sprint: Michael Stone ran a “Test” sprint at OLPC to brainstorm ideas for improving our QA and test process. Thanks to community members who contributed (on IRC) including Titus Brown and Grig Gheorghiu (two testing/QA experts from the Python community), Mitchell Charity, Ricardo Carrno, Chris Ball, Danny Clark, Reynaldo Verdejo, Marco Gritti, Alex Latham, Yani Galanis, and others. Accomplishments include: specific work towards an improved tinderbox; the creation of a vision for the test activity; an attack of the problem of uploading a log set from the laptop to a central server; some updating of our current set of test plans; and discussions on the Trac extension for test-case management. We will follow up over the next few weeks (See wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_process_sprint). Weekly test meetings are held on Mondays at 1pm EDT. Please send email to kim<at>laptop<dot>org if you want to be on the testing mail list.

21. System updates: Chris Ball modified the tinderbox to run on Joyride builds and to launch every installed activity; recording how long each launch took. Chris is also working on having open hardware manager (OHM) interpret the wakeup reason newly reported by the kernel: if the wakeup reason suggests it, we will go immediately to sleep after waking up. We can also start treating “suspend” differently from “sleep”—if the power button is pressed, the assumption is that user wants us to stay asleep until we get another power-button press to wake us up.

This week Andres Salomon worked on bugs, including the infamous JFFS2 corruption bug that appears to be a race in some VServer or VFS code and has proven difficult to grasp. Another bug was the inclusion of the DCON smbus init recipe, which (we believe) makes the DCON finally behave as we intended. Andres also updated the kernel's geode GPIO API and wrote a patch that allows you to see what event has woken the machine up via /sys/power/wakeup-source. He sent more patches upstream and helped massage outstanding patches into 2.6.24-rc1. Andres merged a few of Mitch Bradley's patches, as well: power off via cs5536 rather than the EC (which allows us to drop indexed I/O from the EC, unfreeze the DCON when (not if) the kernel panics, etc. SELinux was disabled in the kernel; it was originally enabled so that people could use it as the starting point to come up with something comparable to Vserver. No one ever did and one of the bugs Andres worked on (that appears to be caused by hardware memory corruption) has SELinux stuff in the backtrace, so it was time to remove it.

22. Security: Ivan Krstić worked on the system of capturing manufacturing information from the production line for the security/theft system—a server will be set up at the factory. As a fall-back option, we will utilize a parallel posting of manufacturing data directly upstream to Cambridge. We have requested the source code to Quanta's manufacturing data submitter program to verify it can handle error conditions correctly. Ivan also spent several hours with Mitch Bradley debugging a kernel filename corruption bug triggered by VServer's copy-on-write functionality; we didn't succeed in specifically tracking down the bug, but we identified locking problems in a VServer routine that are being fixed.

23. Backups: Ivan is working with Marco Gritti and Tomeu Vizoso on the school server components needed to provide a human-readable index of Journal. Ivan wrote a detailed specification and has iterated with Marco and Tomeu, who will be working on the “XO side” of backup, to meet all the requirements (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_backup_restore).

24. Activation/updates: Michael Stone spend time this week making some architectural changes to the mechanism we use for selecting packages to be built by pilgrim; Scott Ananian implemented part of one of the requests, namely, to require that detailed change-entries be supplied describing what each package in a fragment of a build-branch is intended to accomplish.

Mitch Bradley, Kim Quirk, and ScottI tried to nail down the bits that are going into the MP machines. We will shortly have a Q2D02 firmware and Build 618, which we hope is ready for MP. Many of Scott’s fixes for early-boot code landed in Build 617, including better activation-failure messages—more translations needed—and activation from a school server.

Scott set up updates.laptop.org on its own (virtual) machine; he built and installed activation.laptop.org, which allows deployment teams to generate activation leases and developer keys. He also installed a “recent” build on all 25 meshtest machines hanging from the ceiling of the OLPC office, reclaiming some machines that had left the mesh for other testing. There is now an infrastructure in place for doing automatic upgrades of the entire meshtest, which will let us easily put tests in place and execute them, as well as load testing our upgrade mechanism.

25. Text to speech: Hemant Goyal and Asiem Deodia are working on getting a text-to-speech synthesizer integrated into xbook (and perhaps into Sugar). Arjun Sarwal is mentoring them as part of Summer of Content. They have an initial design working, involving a dbus service that will capture highlighted text and play it with espeak. A global “play” button is planned for the Sugar activity toolbar so that this is accessible from all activities. Paulo Condado, a programmer from Portugal introduced by Antonio Battro, works on accessibility software for the disabled. He is working to make a version of his “easyvoice” tool work on the XO; he is also beginning with text-to-speech services (See [2]).

26. How-tos/documentation: A few groups have independently developed their own “how-tos” about using Sugar and the XOs. Christoph Derndofer and Eduardo Silva each took a stab at how-tos for using activities and Todd Kelsey and Val Scarlatta worked on updating the 542 Demo Notes with more detailed information from the wiki and updates for recent builds. John Gilmore wrote in with his own ideas for help files. There is a group discussion planned for next Saturday to bring these similar works together.

27. Localization: Our pootle instance is running, thanks to Xavi Alvarez and Rafael Ortiz, and will be used this weekend, though integration between pootle and git has been harder than expected; much is not yet automated.

28. Design: Aza Raskin of the Humanized design team and David Huynh of CSAIL's Simile project are coming to OLPC late next week to discuss some of their design ideas and to see how their teams can help with interfaces to display content and personal history.

29. Community: Manusheel Gupta and Arjun Sarwal finished work on a community and partners database for India, to be integrated with the OLPC wikis and made available to others.

30. Copyright: Pam Samuelson from Berkeley Law School has offered to help evaluate copyright concerns for media and content we distribute. A meeting is being scheduled for the end of the month at Harvard Law School.

31. SimCity: Don Hopkins is done with most of the SimCity port, but is still working on sound and font issues. He is working on the project again this coming week, with help from Julius Lucks.

32. Creators/curators: Roberto Faga has started working with Marcelo Bursztein and the ePals team to finish their simple activity for school-to-school collaboration. Elizabeth Stark and the Free Culture Foundation have found a PR group in New York interested in promoting “music for OLPC.” (This needs to be coordinated with W2.) They are adding one or two new collections a week to the “olpc” category at Jamendo. ([3] should be up sometime this week with the OLPC music lists.) Colingo has new Spanish- and Portuguese-language videos out (See ColingoXO). Wikihow and howtopedia are working together to coordinate their efforts in English, Spanish, and French. The OLiVER project, working on publishing curricula across Africa, is working with wikieducator to share their materials.

33. Java: Adam Bouhenguel has started working on a CDC port to the XO. Stefano Mazzochi has a plan for how to cut down the Harmony implementation for comparison, and is trying this out in emulation.

More News

Laptop News is archived here and here.

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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  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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