OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-11-10

1. Cambridge: The first of the monthly learning workshops was held at OLPC this week. More than 60 people from 14 countries (and one US city) attended. The focus of this workshop was to build a stronger understanding of laptops and learning; to make plans for deployment in the countries; and to build a strong community among the participants for ongoing support and collaboration. The energy, ideas, and excitement among the group was fantastic and gave everyone more hope about the learning potential about to be unleashed as laptops begin arriving in large numbers in countries shortly. Many thanks to David Cavallo, Lindsay Petrillose, and the OLPC learning team for all of their efforts.

2. Cyberspace: Larry Weber’s dream of a digital PSA has been realized: Hilary Meserole reports that our first Give One Get One public service announcement, which features Heroes star Masi Oka, is online (See [1]). The team is working with YouTube on ways to feature this on their home page during the fortnight that the campaign is running. We will be adding more content next week—outtakes from the PSA shoot, etc.

Masi has joined OLPC as our media spokesperson.

3. Give One Get One launches at 6AM EST on Monday (See laptopgiving.org). While we have no idea what the response will be, Hilary and the “volunteer army” that includes Pentagram, Nurun, W2, Racepoint, Digital Influence Group, Eleven, Inc., and Len Fink did a fantastic job raising the public awareness of the campaign. Examples include the beautiful full-page ad that was donated by the Economist (See Image:GiveOneGetOne.pdf). We will be able to reach many more children due to their efforts.

4. Mass production started this week this week in Quanta's new factory in Changshu. We would like to take this time to thank the team at Quanta for there support over the last two years. Major contributors to the effort include: Victor Chao, Gary Chiang, Arnold Kao, Matt Huang, Dandy Hsu, Agnes Huang, Johnson Huang, Frank Lee, Roger Huang, Elvis Wu, S.F. Chen, Ken Lin, Jacky Mu, Paying Liu, Terry Su, Alfred Lin, Gary Chiang, Alice Wang, Alan Lio, Jeff Tarng, Tim Huang, Jeffrey Huang, Rita Chen, Joe Lin, Jeff Yu, Ben Chuang, Sam Yeh, Johnnie Lui, Eric Tasi, Bruce Lu, Jeff Huang, Mikko Hsu, Vance Ke, Luna Huang, David Lin, Bryan Ma, Devin Lui, Arvin Lui, John Lin, Tess Yu, Chia Ying Lin, Gary Su, C.H. Yang, Ray Tseng, Sam Chang, Gary Liu, Lori Yang, Frank Feng, Cooper Zhou, Kaiser Feng, Neptune Zhan, Xiang Wei, Zihaw Zhang, Min Xia, Eagle Liang, Peter Huang, Pillar Hou, Yaya Zhang, Crystal Sun, Nana Pei, Bob Zhang, Yengeng Cen, Ian Huang, Chie-Hung Li, Sunny Cheng, Cancer Zha, Fly Chen, Javin Hu, Grubby Wei, Polin Chang, Anna Zhou, Tim Huang, Jim Chang, Eric Wang, Kenny Chung, Zenith Zhu, Rock Chien, Sunny Hsiung, Kiki Peng, Sunny Huang, Barry Lam, Michael Wang, Morse Chen, and Eddy Chao.

There are many other people—from companies such as Marvel, ChiLin, Himax, CMO, AMD, ENE, QMI, Fuse Project, Gecko, Pentagram, Design Continuum, Foxconn, ALPS, and MIT, and many individuals as well—who have contributed to the hardware and mechanicals over the past three years. (Mary Lou Jepsen is pulling together a list of everyone to thank.) Collectively we have achieved something that just three years ago many believed that was an impossible dream.

5. Safety Certification: Behind the scenes another team (from UL, Quanta, and OLPC) has been quietly working for nearly two years on XO safety certification. The XO laptop is now fully compliant with UL safety requirements and has been thus certified. We have also been awarded radio, power, and system certification at national levels in several countries. We can now legally ship in US, Canada, Uruguay, and Peru, as well as many other countries. EU-wide approval is due in approximately a week. We are still in the process of applying for certification in countries on each continent with the most stringent safety standards.

Among many tests, we have passed Ul/IEC 60950-1 (notebook computer), ASTM F693 (electronic toys for children), UL 1301 (mechanical assembly requirements, including larger face dimension requirements for child safety) and UL 2054 (batteries), as well as a passing UL on-site inspection of the Quanta's factory. We have formal RoHS (low toxicity) certification from Quanta, and independent testing of RoHS compliance by UL. Also, we have been safety approved for lap use—XO is the first “laptop” approved for usage on one's lap in many years. (The reason that most laptops are now called “notebook computers” is that they run too hot for safe lap use.)

Many thanks to the core XO safety teams from UL, Quanta, and OLPC: Katherine Sims, Bob Delisi, Nicole Tatum, Kevin Ravi, Stacy Yu, Tom Burke, Derek Chen, Edgar Wolff-klammer, Tammi Gengegbacher, Greg Monty, Alfred Fung, Nicholas Boten, Seth Carlton, Bruce Lu, Kenny Chung, Victor Chao, Rita Chen, Arnold Kao, Mary Lou Jepsen, and Lindsay Petrillose.

6. Richard Smith has been setting up a suspend/resume manufacturing test and getting the process flow set up so that Quanta can do final quality analysis (FQA). Activation of laptops (part of the anti-theft system) presented a problem since the FQA process pulls laptops after the final shipping image has been installed and security has been enabled. We decided that the best way to deal with FQA is to pull FQA machines prior to enabling security and then enable it as the final part of FQA.

7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D04 as a candidate for Update.1. It has wireless-networking improvements and bug fixes and can be used to update the NAND Flash ROM over the wireless network (from the school server).

Working with Javier Cardona, Mitch discovered the root cause on a wireless firmware problem that was breaking wireless support in Q2D03. There was a time window during which the module reported the wrong MAC address. This was not affecting the Linux driver because it had an arbitrary delay to block access during that gap. Marvell promises a proper fix in the next few days.

8. Wireless: Javier Cardona and Ricardo Carrano's efforts in debugging the open issues with the wireless subsystem are producing results. We now know the mechanism by which the driver fails (mishandling of a BUSY result returned from the firmware to a scan request); efforts are now focusing on finding the reason as to why that mishandling has such severe impact in the overall subsystem operation.

Marvell released wireless firmware version 5.110.20.p0 which incorporates many enhancements requested by OLPC, including mesh running-state control, mesh beacon control, and throughput optimizations. After resolving the existing issues, the Marvell team is going to mainly focus on power optimization for the firmware.

James Cameron tested the developer version of the active antennae (See [2]). The antennae performed easily over the range, no doubt aided by being held at between 3m and 4m above ground. James reports that they hit the length limit of the test range before any significant bandwidth reduction was felt. We received the first 30 active antennae preproduction boards from QMI in Cambridge this week and completed a first round of testing without any issues.

9. Schedule update: There are only three weeks left to get the Update.1 release out the door. This week we focused on testing and some bug fixing; but not as many “Joyride” builds as lately—C. Scott Ananian has been concentrating on assembling the pieces for the first Update.1 builds. He expects that we will have this done over the weekend. The overarching goal for the Update.1 release is stability of the Trial-3 functionality; we are also folding in many new frameworks—such as security and the new tubes system; the goal is to have these frameworks in place without their causing regressions. One new feature we are are adding is robust upgrades, preferably via wireless network.

10. Testing: Ricardo has been detailing Ticket #4470—infrastructure mode failing over time—and assembling meaningful logs for the team to work with. Javier is going through these logs. Ricardo also finished installing network “sniffing” devices for our network testbed as part of the debug process. Ricardo and Yani Galanis tested the range of two laptops that were brought back from field-testing at the Khairat school in Munbai, India. Their tests revealed normal behavior. (In the field, they exhibited unusually poor WiFi range.) Ricardo and Yani have also been testing different antenna designs to establish long-distance wireless links.

Alex Latham has been testing Joyride, filing bug reports and uncovering the many regressions expected as we pull so many new bits together. He hasn’t yet completed a full “1-hour smoke test” with an of the Joyride builds—Scott’s Update.1 build series is expected to be more stable. Alex has also begun testing with security enabled. He also helped John Watlington set up a testbed for our mass-production hardware.

Manny Castillo has been testing the Browser activity with specific URLs chosen to exercise various plugins—such as Gnash—on Build 623; he will be testing with Joyride next week.

11. Sugar: Marco Gritti, Michael Stone, and Tomeu Vizoso worked on the integration of the Rainbow security system with Sugar and the DataStore (and Journal). They enabled activity isolation on Tuesday and solved all the known road blockers in the following days: access to audio and video resources; communication with the DataStore; activity-space directories and their permission; and out-of-container activities. Next week we will need a new round of testing; Marco is confident that we will be able to solve the remaining problems quickly.

Marco rewrote the preview code to be much more efficient; it blocks for only the minimal required time. Switching between views and closing activities is now much faster and the previews are saved reliably. Marco temporarily disabled the startup sound in sugar to avoid blocking the sound device and tracked down the problem with muted audio at startup. Sound is expected to be finally back working fully in the next build.

Tomeu implement a basic search in the mesh view, which greatly facilitates finding people on a crowded network; he exposed files from the DataStore to activities using hard links instead of doing a copy; and he made the DataStore's use of the temporary file space more efficient.

Reinier Heeres added a way to switch between activities using ALT-Tab; fixed some issues with left-right inversion for Arabic; disabled closing the Journal with CTRL-Q; and implemented a short-term solution to the problem of the “donut” on the home page not accurately reflecting activity memory usage. Reinier is working currently fixing some palette issues.

12. Activities: The Etoys team continues to make adjustments to the Sugar and Rainbow (security) system changes being introduced for Update.1; Bert Freudenberg is leading this effort. Yoshiki Ohshima and Bert have provided an improved version of Sugar menu bar; Yoshiki, Bert, and Scott Wallace put together the necessary bits to provide better “view source” experience—all of the code for Etoys can now be viewed without any degradation. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness have been improving the help system for Etoys. Takashi Yamamiya and korakurider have stabilized the localization mechanism. Takashi also experimented a different UI for controlling choices in tiles.

Simon Schampijer and Mark Maurer collaborated on getting “view source” working fluidly between the Browse and Write activities. By typing FN-Space (or CTRL+U) in Browse, the HTML source of the current page is opened in Write. The HTML can be edited in Write and when resumed from the Journal the modified page gets interpreted and displayed. While doing this work, they tracked down and fixed a new issue with the DataStore: it had been losing metadata between reboots.

13. Builds: C. Scott Ananian continued to work on forking the new stable Update.1 branch and stabilizing our build process. He setup download.laptop.org, mock.laptop.org, and pilgrim.laptop.org, which you should see being pressed into use in the next week. Scott also updated the Libertas firmware in the builds and refreshed the mesh testbed, with an eye towards testing the new firmware in a realistic network upgrade scenario. He should be able to run that test on Monday.

This week Andres Salomon cleaned up the kernel build scripts, made them auto-generate change logs, and dealt with getting updated kernels into joyride. Joyride builds now include sane kernels. Andres also did minor Libertas testing, and is in the process of debugging USB issues.

14. Power management: James Cameron and Chris Ball worked on some OHM (power manager) bugs. Once those were out of the way, Chris went on to implement some of our power management features: “suspend on idle” is in place; there is now a distinction between “suspend” (screen and wireless still on, wake up on network traffic or key press) and “sleep” (screen off, only wake up on a power-button press). There are a few more OHM bugs to fight before this is ready to land in Joyride/Update.1, which should happen sometime early next week.

15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta and Xavier Alvarez have successfully completed the first phase of the Pootle installation. All of the translation files are in place. A number of users have signed up and have already started to submit translations in the form of suggestions. A discussion in the #olpc-pootle channel on how to best integrate an external project's translation-related files into our Pootle setup has let to an improved workflow for external projects that want to take advantage of our translation infrastructure.

Currently, we have translators for the following languages signed up: Amharic, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (traditional), French, German, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish. Additional translators and languages are needed, particularly for the Indic languages, Quechua, and Aymara.

The next stage of the Pootle deployment will consist of making the GIT integration work—we are waiting for GIT write access to dev.laptop.org to go forward on that. A set of frequently asked questions (FAQ) has been created in the wiki (See Pootle/FAQ).

Sayamindu has been looking at an issue where fontconfig seems to treat the font cache invalid if the mtime of the cache is greater than the system time. This is documented in Ticket #1525 (and in upstream Freedesktop bug #12107). Sayamindu had backported the relevant changes to the fontconfig used in Fedora 7; he will be testing out the package in the XO over the weekend.

16. Security: Michael Stone announced a new release of Rainbow (See [3]) to the devel and sugar lists today. The release incorporates a number of resolutions to the current crop of 'rainbow-integration' bugs that the community has worked so hard over the last three days to document for us.

Changes include:

  • relaxed multimedia-device permissions that should make it possible for activities to use the camera, microphone, and speakers;
  • availability of the user's public key;
  • activities are now started in $SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH instead of $SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT;
  • activities can run under “strace” by defining the environment variable RAINBOW_STRACE_LOG (in the dictionary passed to Rainbow in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sugar/activity/activityfactory.py);
  • tracebacks of your activity's log file can be viewed with “less -R” (e.g., less -R /home/olpc/.sugar/default/logs/org.laptop.Record-1.log);

Special thanks Marco, Tomeu, and Alex L. for their extraordinary efforts.

17. Community reporting: Dan Sutera and the team working on the Report activity made it to the next round of the Knight News Challenge. Pablo Flores is working on something similar in Uruguay, and has found some federal support to develop local blogs from children, stored at the local schools. We discussed how the projects could work together; Pablo is focusing on the web activity that would help editors arrange blog feeds into beautiful editions, and the Report team is working on an XO activity that would let children read and write blog and news feeds. Meanwhile, Jack Driscoll, former editor of the Boston Globe—who has been leading community journalism projects around the world for over ten years—has put some journalism guidelines in the wiki (See Learning_activities/Journalism).

18. SimCity: SimCity is now available under the GPL, thanks to the generosity of EA and the hard work of Steve Seabolt and Chuck Normann, John Gilmore, and Don Hopkins (See SimCity). The game is in the process of being “sugarized”, but is already playable on the XO. This is one of the first times that a major publisher has open sourced the original of a popular title (See [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Commercial_video_games_with_freely_available_source-code]). EA should be congratulated.

19. Game Jams: A competitive game jam is under way this weekend in São Carlos, Brazil, with the support of a number of local universities and sponsors. Any who are interested in their progress are welcome to follow along in #olpc-content on IRC; they are looking for outside help with art and music for the developed games (See Game_Jam_Brazil). In advance of the CMU game jam next weekend, the ETC team at Carnegie Mellon university has finished a draft of its first game, a peg solitaire affair (See [4]).

20. Community: A discussion with Greg DeKoenigsberg about how to involve more Fedora developers in OLPC work led to some work on improving test and review processes for activities and bundles (See Activity_Testing_Project).

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.

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More articles can be found here.

Video

Miscellaneous videos of the laptop can be found here.

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