OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-10-27

1. New York City: United Nations Under-Secretary-General/High Representative for Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Countries and Island States, Mr. Cheick Sidi Diarra of Mali, hosted a two-hour meeting exclusively devoted to OLPC. Miguel Brechner and Oscar Becerra presented, respectively, the experiences and decision-making process in Uruguay and Peru. Questions and demos lasted for an additional forty five minutes. About 50 countries were represented.

2. Netherlands: Ivan Krstić keynoted GOVCERT.NL, the invitation-only security conference organized by the Dutch computer emergency response team (CERT). He made a number of contacts with international CERTs, whose assistance might be critical after we deploy.

3. Adapter prong orientation: Demands from the field for one or the other orientation of adapter prongs have led us to request more adapter orientation options. Quanta has been responsive and UL will assist with safety testing. It will be several months before these AC adapters will be available, but work has begun.

4. Resistance tests: Summarized below is the current status of resistance testing of the XO laptop. Mary Lou Jepsen will write a complete report in early November, after all testing data is available. (This report will be available on http://wiki.laptop.org.)

  • Drop: XO passes 10-point drop test from a height of 150cm onto carpet- covered steel (other drop-test details available)
  • Operating temperature: 0C to 45C (50C pending certification)
  • Storage temperature : –25C to 60C
  • Operational altitude: 0 to 5000m
  • Dust/water: Testing to Ingress Protocol 54 and 42 (in process)
  • Toxicity: RoHS certified (UL report due in early November)
  • Safety:
    • IEC 60950-1(write up in process)
    • EN 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • CSA/UL 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • ASTM F 963 – Electronic Toy Safety (write up in process)
  • AC adapter
    • Wide input range: 90v(–10%) ~ 240v(+25%), 35Hz to 70Hz
    • IEC 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • EN 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • CSA/UL 60950-1 (write up in process)
    • Extra transient and burst immunity: IEC 61000-4-4 (passed)
    • Extra surge immunity: IEC 61000-4-5 (passed)
  • Keyboard
    • Tested to 500,000 cycles
    • Rubber: water and dust resistant
  • Buttons (power, display rotate, gamepads): Tested to 500,000 cycles

5. Mass-production build (Trial 3): The stable build for mass production start is Build 622 (Firmware Q2D02). Please test these builds extensively. John Palmieri and Scott Ananian produced a number of builds in support of mass production, incorporating final changes for C2 systems and fixes from Javier Cardona and Andres Salomon for USB and wireless related suspend/resume problems. James Cameron helped Chris Ball, Bernie Innocenti, and Jim Gettys diagnose why X would not start while testing the C2 boards.

Scott has been supporting the Joyride build system. He, Michael Stone, and Bernardo Innocenti had a fruitful discussion with the Fedora build maintainer community about how to integrate our build system with koji going forward. Greg DeKoenigsberg at RedHat has offered his significant help in coordinating our needs with members of the Fedora community who would like to get involved.

6. Localization: We have issued a call for translators, coordinators, and volunteers (See http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/localization/2007-October/000052.html). If you have good language skills (even if you have minimal computer skills), you can make an important contribution to the project. Please help us localize to as many languages as possible (See the localization mailing-list subscription page at http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/localization).

Xavier Alvarez, Alfonso de la Guarda, and Danny Clark have built a Pootle installation—a web based tool to help in language localization (See the OLPC Pootle at its temporary site by visiting http://solar.laptop.org:5080/). Sayamindu Dasgupta, a student from India working part-time on the project is helping them.

Sumit Chowdhury reports that Nandu Pradhan, president of RedHat India, is working with a team next week to help provide localization support in eleven Indian languages. Sarmad Hussein of the PAN Localization project and the CRULP research center has offered help with Pashto, Urdu, and Nepali keyboards and localization.

7. Network upgrades/activation: Scott Ananian has completed a bring up of our “meshtest” testbed; he has verified automated network upgrades with security enabled, and activation from school server. (Some tweaks required to make this more robust went into Build 619.) He also discovered that about half of the meshtest machines were using compact Linksys external USB ethernet dongles that would overheat and crash if left on overnight. He also made some database-model changes to activation.laptop.org which will help us better manage groups of laptops. And he imported manufacturing data for all of our existing B2-C1 machines and generated activation and developer leases for them to ease testing.

8. Backups: Tomeu Vizoso, Ivan Krstić, and Marco Gritti discussed and implemented Journal backups to the server and individual file restore. Datastore performance will also be good enough to do full restores. Along the way, a number of bugs were fixed. Ivan wrote the corresponding school-server backup system (#4100) with Tomeu assisting on the datastore side and Marco on the Journal-activity side. It should be ready to land in builds early this week.

9. Screenshots: Tomeu and Marco are working on an improved way of taking screenshots of running activities for the Journal preview. (Typing Alt+1 will still cause a screenshot to be placed in the Journal.)

10. Read activity and Sugar documentation: Tomeu gave some support to Pascal Scheffers for his work in Read (which now saves its state in the Journal and has numerous improvements to the UI) and documentation of the Sugar API. He is doing an awesome job!

11. UI polish: Simon Schampier added (Ctrl+Q, Ctrl+Escape) for closing the activities and the keybinding (Alt+Space) to the activity window to hide/show the tray. The browse activity was adopted accordingly to these API changes. He is now finishing up work on a control panel.

12. Battery-life testing: Richard Smith repeated a number of tests on power consumption and battery life. These tests were gratifyingly consistent with other direct power measurements Joel Stanley had performed in late summer. There are remaining power savings to be had by better use of the DCON hardware and optimization of the wireless firmware when running in mesh mode, which have just begun.

Scott found a battery-charging bug with NiMH batteries, which Richard is working on.

13. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Firmware Q2D02:

  • turned off indexed I/O before early interaction to close a security hole;
  • added rtc-wackup command for suspend-resume testing;
  • enabled reboot using the new EC command that resets the EC too, thus re-enabling indexed I/O, thus making auto-firmware-update possible;
  • fixed bug in signature parsing for developer keys;
  • increased countdown to five seconds because its harder to catch it with security activated;
  • when searching for a signature string, look for one whose key signature matches the trailing portion of our pubkey, instead of just taking the first line with a "sig01:" format;
  • disabled “X” button toggle between secure and non-secure modes (The “X” button now forces secure mode when in non-secure mode, instead of going in either direction.);
  • disabled indexed I/O when entering the kernel in secure mode;
  • disabled PSCLK in low state to fix the PS2 flow control bug from a cold boot;
  • added feature to send battery-status SCIs on low_bat change;
  • fixed the bug that caused a failure to recognize the C2 board revision number;
  • implemented command 0xDB to auto restart with indexed IO enabled.

14. Schedule: The upcoming releases have been renamed and re-purposed:

Oct. 26: “Trial-3” (Build 622) are the bits being loaded for mass production. This was completed this week.

Nov. 16: “Reload” are bits that could possibly be loaded before shipping laptops to individuals. We will hand pick blocking bug fixes only if we need to.

Dec. 07: “Killjoy” (V1.0, previously referred to as FRS or First Deployment) is a release based on the “Joyride” builds. This will include bug fixes/minor features that are in Joyride today; and we are actively moving some trac items to this release based on what we know about in the next week. Feature freeze for this is next week; code freeze the week after.

Q1 2008: “Future Release” (V1.1) is the release after Killjoy. Not well defined. Right now it is where we moved all the features that didn't make it into Killjoy.

(See https://dev.laptop.org/roadmap for more info.)

As we do the triage for these builds, we’d very much appreciate community feedback as to what you think is important. Feel free to send email to Walter Bender, Kim Quirk, or Jim Gettys in regard to priorities.

15. Testing: Alex Latham kept the suspend/resume testbed running with the same OS, OFW, kernel, and wireless firmware release as the test team in China, who are bringing up 42 boards with new PCB. He also worked on connectivity testing and upgrade testing. Next week he will be working creating a more comprehensive smoke/regression test to provide the basis for our final release testing. Yani Galanis has put together a detailed wiki page on testing network connectivity (See Test_Network_Configuration). There is information on how things work today and where to find information about your connectivity; he has also created a connectivity-status script that will send all this info to standard output. Ricardo Carrano has been working our RF sniffer to provide debug and analysis help on some of the difficult wireless hangs and access-point association problems we have been seeing.

16. EC code: Three new EC bugs seemed to have surfaced this week:

  • The EC code and kernel have a mismatch in meaning of data sent between them for power-status events. Therefore its true external- power status events are not detected by the kernel. David Woodhouse and Richard have a workaround.
  • EC commands too close to suspend leave the EC in a state where

it won't respond to commands anymore. Andres Salomon and Richard have a kernel workaround.

  • Something in the “Secure Boot” sequence seems to make the EC reset the capacity percentage of a full NiMH battery to 7% and sometimes this gets written back into the battery. This results in what was a fully charged battery now marked as empty. Bad things then happen. It only happens in secure boot and only with a fully charged NiMH. Testing in secure boot mode has made for slow goings. The current suspect is when we disable Indexed IO to the EC to prevent flashing.

17. Squeak/Etoys: Marta Voelcker reports that the children at the Luciana de Abreu school in Porto Alegre, Brazil are making great progress with Etoys. “The 11-year olds are using it very frequently, 12-to-14-year olds also increasing it, and first graders (age 7) are starting to use it. They use squeak in the classroom and after school they meet in the garden to talk about and share things made with squeak, it is becoming a culture!” Squeak has been very popular in Ethiopia as well.

18. Measure activity: Arjun Sarwal explored color schemes for displaying multiple logs from multiple people. He also spent this past week reviewing UI of the Activity with Eben Eliason, reviewing Journal integration with Tomeu and Marco, refining DSP aspects with Mitch, V. Michael Bove, Albert Cahalan, and Benjamin Schwartz, and optimizing drawing code with Bernie Innocenti and Cody Lodrige.

19. Documentation: Todd Kelsey has build “PHPMyFaq” in order to take some of the support heat off of developers. PHPMyFaq is scalable, multilingual, RSS, XML; it allows people to post questions, other people to answer, print out, save to PDF, XML, etc. Its coolest feature is ranking—most relevant/popular items float to top (See http://aaa.opensourcehost.com/~thoughts/faq/). Todd could use one or more people’s help on:

  • defining categories of questions that developers get asked;
  • some pre-made questions and answers to seed page;
  • someone to moderate instances.

Meanwhile, Felice Gardner has been doing some cleaning up of the FAQ on the wiki, putting “new” questions into categories and consolidating multiple pages of questions on the same topic (See Ask OLPC a Question).

Todd and Ann Gentle are spending part of today writing up how they have worked on documentation so far, and what tools could help improve the process. Christoph Derndofer and Eduardo Silva have shared their drafts of an activity handbook as well. The results will be posted to the OLPC wiki's Documentation page.

20. Library: Jamendo now has an OLPC music portal up, with help from Free Culture and the Antenna Alliance (See http://www.jamendo.com/en/olpc for the first posted bands and albums of freely licensed music). They are also gathering signed copyright statements from all authors for the collections.

The Internet Archive is working to turn their feeds of new book-metapages into a feed of PDFs. Alexis Rossi is helping produce improved collections of their children's library (See http://dev.laptop.org/~arael/preview/childrens-library/).

Anil Hemrajani at Big Universe has 14 children's picturebooks whose authors have agreed for them to be distributed as demo books. These are the first children’s books in our collections that were not scanned, but were created in digital format. This is a temporary collection while working to get authors and publishers to agree to a suitable CC license.

Andrew Whitworth at Wikijunior is working on making stable versions of their newer books, with a focus on an offline interface that is simple and allows people to read static books while linking to places for them to comment and edit them.

Curriki is working on their tool to package collections as XO bundles. Some of our curators have gone to them to store their collections. The EGAP alumni from Monterrey's Tech working on a summer of content mapping project have started a blog. They are posting their works to Curriki, and learning how to integrate with our feature server (See http://olpclatam.blogspot.com/). Curriki is working with Nortel to convert their LearnIT video and text materials to Curriki collections; and to make sure they are bundled for the XO.

Kevin Driscoll is working with a few students in India on a Hackety-Hack series. They have eight problems and solutions written so far; the whole needs to be Sugarized.

Marilyn Mosley, coordinator of the Laurel Springs school, is offering her online ecology courses to OLPC students, and working on new health courses

Peter Kaufman, our open video coordinator, and Ahrash Bissell of ccLearn are helping plan a video creation and remix challenge for the science video and documentary community. The challenge will have two stages, one to provide free material suitable for teaching science, and the second to make the best short educational video for children from available sources.

21. Community/Games: Mike Fletcher is being flown to Taipei for a few days this week for a free-software and open-source conference there. He is talking in a session along with the lead Asus Eee developers, who are eager to involve the open source community. Mike Fletcher is also helping organize a small sibling game sprint in Toronto, November 16–18, at the same time as the CMU Game Jam (See Games/Productive).

Nov. 10–11 : Game Jam Brasil (in São Carlos)

Nov. 16–18 : Game Jam Pittsburgh (at the CMU ETC center)

Nov. 16–18 : Toronto Game Sprint

Don Hopkins' version of SimCity is almost complete; it needs to go through final testing by the EA developers before it can be released under the GPL, but should be ready for child testing.

22. Rowen and Tim of OLPCPH talked with Graham Prosser for their plans on testing laptops in Toronto, USA and in Makati/Manila/Bulacan, Philippines. =]

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

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

  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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