OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-12-01

1. Montevideo: We’ve only just begun!! The first deployment machines were handed out in Escuela No. 109 in Florida, a rural department of Uruguay. The second batch was handed out in Escuela No. 24 in Villa Cardal, which has been a pilot site since May of this year. In Cardal, we gave children production XOs and collecting their old Beta-2 units. The OLPC deployment in Uruguay is being run by Miguel Brechner as part of Proyecto Ceibal (Ceibo is the national flower of Uruguay), a presidential initiative to equip each child with a laptop. The Ceibal offices are housed in a Montevideo complex called LATU, or Laboratorio Tecnológico del Uruguay, which is a public/private sector cooperative technical lab now responsible for much of Uruguay’s technical certification and quality control programs, as well as serving an incubator role for various engineering and technical projects. The OLPC team has put all of their blood, sweat and code into the project over the past three years because of the unshaken belief that it is the right thing to do. Now it is real. You can read more about our first deployment on Ivan Krstić’s blog (See http://radian.org/notebook/first-deployment). At the day the most of the schools in Florida are visited by the volunteers from DESEM and other ONG's thtat deliver the XO to all the children in the region.

2. Changshu: Mass Production is now very stable. We are using our line at 100% capacity. Congratulations to Quanta for stabilizing production just three weeks after MP start.

3. G1G1: Every “Day 1” Give One Get One participant (those that donated on November 12, the first day of our campaign) received email on Wednesday informing them to expect their “Get” laptops between December 14 and 24. Delivery windows for other G1G1 participants were calculated and posted: “Get” laptops ordered thus far will be arriving, at the latest, by mid-January 2008. Brightstar and OLPC have been working closely to determine when the complicated logistics of laptop delivery can be promised.

4. AC adapters: There has been a request for AC adapters that are rotated ninety degrees from the current configuration. In order to rotate the orientation of the prongs, the width of the adapter must be extended (to satisfy the safety requirement). As a result, six reoriented AC adapters will not fit abreast in the standard spacing of a six-plug power strip. Mary Lou Jepsen and Fuse are investigating further; if we can not resolve the issue, we will not make AC adapters with a rotated prong orientation.

5. Schedules: This was the week to release “Ship.2”, a build to improve upon network upgrades, wireless problems, and our ability to connect to T-mobile services. Although the week had its ups and downs, it ended with successes on all of these fronts and we have Release 649 as the candidate, barring any last-minute problems in testing this weekend. The Ship.2 Build connects successfully to many different access points; we believe we have fixed the “lazyWDS” issue (which could have potentially caused problems in multi-access-point environments with other 802.11b/g laptops and XOs); and we are successfully connecting to T-mobile services after setting an appropriate configuration for the browser. The Roadmap has been updated (http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap); please send Kim Quirk any new feature/product ideas so they can be scheduled into upcoming releases.

The release candidate for the G1G1 program is Build 649 and will be called Ship.2. Final testing is underway, specifically for network issues that have been reported. The wireless team of Ricardo Carrano, Michail Bletsas, Javiar Cardona, Ashish Shukla, David Woodhouse, Marcelo Tosatti, Ronak Chokshi of OLPC, Marvell, RedHat, and Cozybit worked hard on these issues of both the Linux driver and the Marvell wireless firmware and worked out a solution, which is now in final test, under great pressure. Ship.2 has most of the user visible features of the planned Update.1 release, but has Bitfrost security turned off and lacking the advanced OHM-based power management with aggressive suspend and resume and ebook mode. Both of these major features are now operating in our Joyride test builds, but there were too many open issues to enable Bitfrost or to ship OHM power management.

6. Testing: This weekend Michail Bletsas and Ricardo Carrano are testing 40+ XOs with a number of access points and traditional 802.11b/g laptops to “prove” the fix for the WDS problems that have been plaguing us for a while. Thanks to Marvell for their debugging and test builds to find a good work around; and special thanks to the volunteers in the office who activated and upgraded all the laptops in preparation for this testing: Andriani Ferti, Danny Clark, Adam Holt, Alex Latham, and Eben Eliason.

7. Support: Adam Holt joined OLPC this week as our Support Engineer focused on tracking, debugging and follow up of customer problems from the field. He is an MIT graduate who has worked in software development, support, and systems integration. Most recently he comes from Jenzabar in Boston. He was a great help in his first week as we were testing and configuring laptops for Ship.2 Release.

8. Wireless: Michail Bletsas reports great progress was made this week in circumventing a problem that we had with access points that were misinterpreting our mesh frames as wireless backbone frames, resulting in the creation of erratic ad-hoc wireless network topologies. These were access points (APs) utilizing wireless adapters from Broadcom as the ubiquitous Linksys WRT54. We have alerted Broadcom to the issue (if the standard doesn't change, 802.11s devices will be rendering these APs useless unless they address that behavior) and we have worked around it by changing our broadcast and multicast mesh frames to use 3-address frames instead of the 4-address WDS frames that the Broadcom APs are already using. Thanks to Javier Cardona, a dedicated team at Marvell, and Ricardo Carrano for implementing and testing this in time for our Ship.2 Release. Javier will be submitting this change for consideration in the next standards committee meeting. This change requires no driver/software changes on the XOs and is implemented completely in firmware. The important point to note is that all XOs in a mesh have to be running the new firmware (5.110.20.p42) for them to be able to collaborate via the mesh.

Michail et al. had great fun at OLPC in the later half of this week. Somebody was using a wireless device that was acting as a jammer for the center part of the 2.4Ghz band. Despite all the troubles that it caused us by preventing us from doing any serious testing of the laptops, we should be thanking him/her since the extremely difficult environment helped expose a serious issue with wireless operation in congested environments which has probably bitten us in the past and which we had never had the opportunity to properly diagnose and debug. The problem has been pinpointed to the scan routines in the firmware and is being currently addressed. Testing with a jammer present is now a requirement (not your usual WiFi test ;-).

9. Sugar: Simon Schampijer fixed memorize again to release the sound device and put the drumgit game back in the distribution which is the only demo game we have which includes sound (in current joyride). He added an “About this XO” entry to the menu you get when hovering over the XO icon in the home view: this brings up a window with information about the current build, firmware and serial number of this XO. With Mako Hill, SJ Klein and Marco Pesenti Gritti, Simon worked on the library fixes for Ship.2 which included a fix for Sugar (Ticket #2856). Marco and Simon added as well support for the OLPC Root CA into the browser. You can test this by pointing your browser to https://activation.laptop.org in the current Ship.2 build.

Marco reviewed several patches with small UI improvements (to the interaction with palettes in particular) and bug fixes for Update.1 and packaged them in joyride for testing. Marco also tracked down two different issues with the datastore which was causing activities to not start. Fixes for both of them landed into Joyride. Finally, he changed the default Jabber server for Ship.2.

Reinier Herres worked working with Marco to build a new evince version for the Read activity, which will probably be available early next week. He also released a new Calculate with some bug-fixes.

Morgan Collett worked on Chat to fix scrolling issues—he made it not automatically scroll on new messages if you scrolled up to read the log and worked on copying URLs to the clipboard (#5080); he found some issues with clipboard handling in Sugar. We will land the Chat and Sugar changes when the Ship.2 dust settles. He also worked on the Presence Service: preforming lots of testing on Ship.2 and Joyride builds, testing recent fixes.

Memorize: Muriel Godoi reports that Memorize was launching under Rainbow, but wasn’t saving games in datastore; after some chats with Michael Stone, they realize that Memorize is creating new sub-folders inside their instance folder using tempfile library under permission 700 denying the access when trying to write into it. Changing the folder permission fixed that problem. Muriel also fixed the mime-type icon file location and added ogg support.

Muriel also reports that Food Force had some UI improvements, such as a message bar where contextualized educational messages to the player will be displayed. The code will be posted to his public_git next week.

10. Etoys: For Ship.2 release, Etoys team packaged a new version that has the progress made since Ship.1. Bert Freudenberg has been carefully working to adapt changes in Sugar while keeping the compatibility with old Sugar so that the latest work can be back ported. In this week, Yoshiki Ohshima and Bert improved the sharing experience and Takashi Yamamiya fixed a bug in script editing interface to make the version for Ship.2 be very comfortable. In the meantime, Scott Wallace took a pass on making an IDE for a traditional text file based programming system on Squeak, which may be useful for making an IDE for XO.

11. Localization: Xavi Alvarez and Sayamindu Dasgupta have finally put the GIT integration of the Translation Infrastructure (Pootle) in place in a fully working form. Translators can directly commit to GIT now via the Pootle web interface. We also have a new project in Pootle, called Update 1 (Core), which tracks the update-1 branch for a few core modules of the Sugar environment. From an average translation coverage of 23% at the beginning of the week, we have 33% average coverage now. Languages with more than 80% of Update 1 (Core) translated are:

French (100%)

Chinese (Taiwan) (100%)

German (96%)

Arabic (90%)

Polish (85%)

Spanish (84%)

Quite a few of the other languages are catching up quickly. A number of Indic language translation teams started work this week: Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, and Tamil. A Japanese project was also started this week. Waqas Toor and Salman Minhasreport that more than 85% of Urdu localization is completed.

Xavi and Sayamindu also managed to fix a few build breakages introduced by some issues in Pootle's PO generation code. Things should be running smoothly now (Sayamindu has also put in a logging framework in place that monitors the interaction between Pootle and GIT so that we can investigate potential problems easily later).

12. OLPC Pakistan: Waqas and Salman have initiated developing two e-Books and are busy working on an English to Urdu Glossary Project for OLPC. A community list for support in Pakistan is up and running (Please see http://groups.google.com/group/olpc-pakistan and visit the #olpc-pakistan IRC channel on irc.freenode.net).

13. System programming: Chris Ball worked on OHM early in the week, Ship.2 testing towards the end. Bernie Innocenti has been squashing the last few input, localization and configuration bugs. Mostly in olpc-utils and xkeyboard-config and finished moving the rest of the Xorg packages to Fedora's repository and now has no packages built locally. He also helped SJ Klein apply blanket changes all over the dictionary to fixlinks and encoding errors. And he did some transformations for the start pages. Bernie also finished building a geode-optimized package of glibc 2.7 that looks very promising, but still needs testing and started packaging X 1.4.99 from Fedora development, which seems interesting for the various EXA improvements. There is some PCI rework needed in amd_drv before we can start doing some benchmarking. He is hoping to offload the rest of this work to Stefano “aleph” Fedrigo, who in the past has been doing some neat X performance analysis for us.

Dennis Gilmore spent some time helping John Watlington and Michael Stone with some issues with the school server live image. He submitted a patch to upstream yum adding geode support and worked on a patch for rpm adding geode support should be done today or tomorrow. Dennis worked on some code to enable subscriptions to koji. This will let us import new builds into our own koji when we get it.

Andres Salomon worked on the xorg evdev driver (*cry*), setting up general geode testing infrastructure, some participation in the libertas nonsense (*cry*^2), and some dcon debugging.

14. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes tested, modified and improve Dafydd Harries' patches for #4965; he did more ejbbard/Erlang investigations; reviewed Sjoerd Simons's Salut fixes; started to evaluate Openfire as alternative Jabber server; debugged and fixed a PEP problem in Gabble breaking sharing with Openfire (#5223); improved friends roster synchronization (#4965); fixed a Gabble bug when requestion lists channels (#5164); debugged and fixed a muc properties bug in Gabble breaking sharing with Openfire (#5224); and modified telepathy-python tubes examples to work with latest Salut.

Dafydd Harries worked on a more scalable XMPP protocol for activity management. Sjoerd Simons tested Salut for Ship.2 and fixed all outstanding Ship.2 issues it had.

15. Multiple-battery charger: Tooling has been ordered; first prototypes will be available at the end of December or early January. The PCB for the production system is done. The question is how many to build for our first run. The current plan is to build twenty-five, but this may be increased if there is more interest from trials.

Lilian Walter is progressing nicely on the battery charger firmware. She has been working on implementing a LiFePO battery charging algorithm this week. She has charged a battery, and so far only damaged a single battery.

16. Firmware: Mitch Bradley and Richard Smith have released Q2D05 with miscellaneous bug fixes for Ship.2. This contains EC firmware with the software workaround for most of the suspend/resume problems and the now controversial (?) blink-power-LED-on-suspend. Since suspend/resume is disabled for Ship.2, these changes will not be apparent to the user.

Wireless support from within OFW is still not totally robust. Mitch is unsure whether it is the WLAN firmware, the 1CC RF jamming, or an OFW driver problem. (Over the past week we have been unable to use WiFi channel 6 at 1CC due to constant, high level non-WiFi signal from an unknown source, the aforementioned jammer.)

17. Touchpad: Richard Smith is now pretty convinced that our touchpad problems are caused by the auto-calibration feature of the touchpad. The two problems—undersensitivity and jitteriness—are opposite results of a bad recalibrate. By forcing a calibrate to happen with the touchpad in various conditions he can recreate our touchpad problems.

“Go to a corner” and stay is caused by under-sensitivity. Duplicating this is fairly easy. Do the recalibrate (the “four-finger salute”) with as much of your thumb on the touchpad as you can, pressing quite hard.

“Jumpiness” is caused by over sensitivity. Duplicating this is bit harder. The best Richard has found is placing a large chunk of thick rubber on the touchpad while the unit is on battery power and then recalibrate.

A recalibration while the touchpad is in use causes under-sensitivity but we’re not sure how over-sensitivity happens the field. Nor do we yet understand why some laptops are so much worse than others. We are arranging a conference call with ALPS to discuss the issue. The only “fix” Richard proposes is to disable auto-calibration. It seems that auto-calibration can't ever be made safe without some method of insuring that the touchpad is free and clear for the recalibration. It is unclear whether we still need to auto-calibrate, or if this was only needed for the problems seen with the B2 build.

18. School Server: School server development has restarted. It was discovered that previously distributed installers will no longer work due to a reliance on a now missing Fedora server. The build system also needed repair but seems to be behaving again. A new build is being tested and will be released over the weekend. This build will have no new features but will contain the latest wireless mesh firmware and drivers.

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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