OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-11-24

1. Testing: The latest wireless firmware and associated patches to fix the WLAN hang bug (Ticket #4470) were the focus of much of our testing efforts this week. We are also very busy testing the candidate for Ship.2, using a 1-hour “smoke test” with some additional concentration on the browser.

2. Schedules: We have slipped Update1, but only for stabilization purposes, not for new features.

3. Sugar: Marco Pesenti Gritti fixed a few regressions: a memory leak when switching between activities (2 MB per switch), screen rotation, compatibility of the Sugar shell with “raw” X applications and a few other smaller bugs. He spent time reviewing patches and triaging tickets. Tomeu Vizoso also worked on bug fixing in Sugar, the Journal and the DataStore. Simon Schampijer spent the week testing and detecting regressions, mainly with the clipboard (Ticket #5089). Simon also worked on a schema for activities that process data that originates in another activity (Ticket #4909).

Reinier Herres landed numerous bug fixes in Joyride. These are mostly bugs related to the palette (Tickets #4515 and #4887) and the search field in the Mesh View and Journal (Ticket #4311). The “unfull-screen” button that was implemented for the Browse activity is moving to sugar.graphics.Window, making this a standard behavior for all activities. Reinier made a temporary patch to remove activities from the donut again if they fail to launch (Ticket #4612); he is working on improving the feedback to the user while unmounting volumes (Ticket #2630). Reinier implemented support for rational numbers in Calculate.

4. Browse: Thanks to all the people who helped fix a bug in the browser that prevented access to T-Mobile hotspots (Ticket #4280): Marco Presenti Gritti, Simon Schampijer, Chris Ball, Jim Gettys, and the Firefox developer team at Mozilla, including Chris Blizzard, Mike Schroepfer, Kai Engert, Mike Beltzner, Johnathan Nightingale, and Dave Camp. The Mozilla guys have been awesome; consequently we have an easy workaround for the issue.

5. Translation: Sayamindu Dasgupta and Xavi Alvarez have Pootle is fully open for translation and they have git integration almost working (translators will be able to directly commit their work to the master repository at http://dev.laptop.org). We have seen some intense activity for quite a few languages; for example, the Hindi team has completed nearly 100% of XO Core, Terminology, and Packaging in the past week. We also saw a number of new languages getting added, including Bengali, Dzongkha, and Persian.

Sayamindu fixed a bug in Sugar that caused PO files to be merged when “setup.py genpot” is called (Ticket #4995). Separating the updating of the POT files from PO files will presumably cause less confusion among translators. Sayamindu helped setup support for localization for the Watch and Listen activity. Reinier tokenized internationalization of the help descriptions in Calculate.

6. Updater: C. Scott Ananian continued work on making olpc-update more robust and user-friendly—the Libertas wireless improvements integrating have helped in regard to robustness. A new wrapper around olpc-update, called olpc-update-query, asks a central server what build a laptop should be running, and runs an update if necessary (olpc-update-query is being run in a cron job in joyride builds; stay tuned to devel@ for instructions on how to subscribe to one of the streams at https://activation.laptop.org/streams/).

7. Scott also wrote a patch to olpc-utils to make requesting a developer key easy (Ticket #4271). This patch still requires some help from to make it into the builds in a useful fashion (Please see [1]).

Marco wrote some scripts to automatically build git snapshots for Joyride (using mock). Tomeu Vizoso wrote test cases so we detect more easily when we break compatibility with the current release.

8. X Window System: Bernardo Innocenti tried to improve upon his fix for the the “double mouse click” bug, but eventually gave up and rolled an updated kernel containing only the one liner workaround. He will investigate this further after the frenzy around Ship.2. Bernie made numerous improvements to olpc-utils, including support for determining the XKB settings from the new mfg-data tags. He migrated the xkeyboard-config RPM in Koji; Dennis Gilmore helped with the merging some more X11 packages. As a result, the number of rogue packages has been reduced considerably. Bernie iterated over his bug list and closed a number of internationalization- and keyboard-related tickets that he had been deferring because the higher priority bugs were always taking precedence.

9. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes fixed a regression in the Presence Service (PS) involving a timeout waiting for the roster to be sent over the network (Ticket #4896); he fixed a bug in Salut regarding bad handles (Ticket #5015); he modified the PS to accept subscriptions coming only from trusted servers (Ticket #4993); and he checked the status of PS patches in Update.1, enabling him to close out a number of tickets. He implemented Activity.ListChannels in the PS and wrote a Sugar patch using this new API (Ticket #5079). Guillaume also began chasing down activities that still are using the old sharing API and that don't catch TypeError when calling get_preferred_connection; he is filling in more “could you use new sugar sharing API” tickets. Finally, he began an investigation into ejabberd's external component system.

Sjoerd Simons performed simulations and tests with Salut and worked on some fixes for problems that those turned up there.

Morgan Collett is testing sharing within Rainbow; he chased down issues with Buddy Handle tracking in the PS (Ticket #4920). He worked with Simon and Guillaume on Chat's handling of URLs (within Rainbow we cannot launch Browse directly—the workaround is to use the clipboard (Ticket #5080).

10. Power management: Chris Ball continued to improve our power manager: it now checks to see whether the Linux tty console is active before deciding to suspend; it turns off wake-on-wireless when in “sleep” mode; and has better alarm handling. Next up is inhibiting suspend-on-idle when the CPU is extremely busy.

More News

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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

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Video

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