OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-12-15

1. Kuala Lumpur: Matt Keller attended the Global Knowledge Conference this past week; the conference brought together over 2000 people from around the world. Matt was part of a BBC World debate on technology and the developing world generally, and the XO specifically. While most of the panelists were somewhat critical of olpc and OLPC, the audience was very much in favor. The debate will be broadcast on BBC World on five different occasions in January.

2. Montevideo: Michail Bletsas attended a technical meeting organized by LATU to discuss the technical requirements for the connectivity infrastructure of the schools in the Colonia and Durazno districts: the next (after Florida) to get XO laptops after school commences again in March. The main purpose of the meeting was to discuss the main requirements of the RFP that is going to be issued in the next few days. Michail also spent several hours at LATU discussing connectivity details with the Ceibal team and left Uruguay impressed with both the enthusiasm of the people involved in the project as well as their accomplishments.

3. Cambridge: The learning team (Carla Gomez Munroy, Ed Baafi, Julian Daily, Mel King, and David Cavallo) conducted the second monthly workshop for countries. Attending were teams from Mongolia, Panama, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, the US State Department for schools in Iraq, and Calestus Juma as both a contributor and looking towards Kenya and East Africa. The week went extremely well and most encouraging is how participants are turning themselves into a strong network for advancing learning in their countries. Special thanks also to Erik Blankinship, Bakhtiar Mikhak, Ben Schwartz, and Shannon Sullivan for demoing their activities on the XO during an afternoon open house. The youth from the Learn to Teach: Teach to Learn program working with Ed and Mel once again presented their work and convincingly demonstrated the tremendous benefits for both the “teachers” and “learners” when kids teach other kids.

4. Schedules: We did not quite get to code freeze today and will need a few more days to get the most important bugs fixed for the Update1 release. (As Jim Gettys pointed out, the Update.1 release is driven by completion of content, rather than driven by necessity of hardware schedules.) We will start creating candidate releases next week. Please see http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap for the list of bugs being addressed and to look ahead to what we would like to go into Update.2. Testing should be on-going on the Update.1 (stabilizing for release in mid-January) and Joyride streams (mainline, features/fixes for Update.2).

There is a discussion on the devel list about how to improve the build process. Please feel free to make additional suggestions: we want to the process to be more efficient for everyone.

5. Support Issues: A problem was found in Uruguay where where laptops were losing the ability to display their Journal contents and launch activities. Ivan Krstić did some heroic emergency debugging, created a patch, and helped them to distribute a fix to all the students before they were released for their summer vacation. There was also a problem found in manufacturing where Spanish language laptops were booting up in English. These two fixes, along with support for WPA were combined into a patch release, Ship2-653, that should be available for manufacturing early next week and to the general public soon thereafter. People interested in testing this patch can download the signed version (See http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/653/).

The first G1G1 recipients have started receiving laptops this week. That means the calls, emails, IRC questions, and new community members are beginning to show up all over. This week Adam Holt set up these two Support wiki pages: Support and Support FAQ, which is a good launching point for FAQs, as well as community-supported email, portals, and IRC. He also set up help@laptop.org and has begun the task of answering many emails.

6. Documentation: We have a number of new pages on laptop.org geared towards helping introduce the laptop to new users (Please see http://laptop.org/start). These pages will evolve (and hopefully improve) over the next few weeks as we get a better sense of the types of questions people are asking from the field—we’ve deployed more laptops in the past few weeks than in the entirety of our beta programs, so we expect a lot of valuable feedback in the coming days. Your feedback on these pages would also be greatly appreciated: please send email to walter AT laptop.org. The plan is to make these “getting started” pages available for translation in Pootle over the next week or so. Note that the page devoted to describing the activities (http://laptop.org/en/laptop/start/activities.shtml) directs people to the individual activity pages in the wiki, e.g., Journal. Please help us tidy up those pages as well.

7. Testing: Yani Galanis updated versions of olpc-netstatus to provide information on build versions, firmware, net status, etc. and olpc-netlog to capture all possible logs, such as dmesg, messages, .sugar/default/logs (and the output of several commands). These debugging utilities should get into Update1. Yani also spent time investigating a bug in Avahi that results in XOs coming and going in the mesh neighborhood view (flashing in and out). Ricardo Carrano, Yani Galanis, and Adam Holt also joined SJ Klein for some collaborative activity testing with a group of students.

This was Alex Latham's last day as an intern at OLPC. He spent the week documenting everything he could, as well as testing joyride, Update1 and Ship2 builds. Much of his work can be found in the wiki (Please see Test Config Notes and Upgrade Paths) as well as many contributions to test plans, including our One Hour Smoke Test. Many thanks for all your contributions, Alex!

8. Sugar: Tomeu Vizoso profiled activity startup time and memory usage. He is optimistic that we can improve significantly what we have today with small risk and effort.

Simon Schampijer became a Fedora developer this week and build with Marco's help his first xulrunner package this week. We are considering this for Update.1. The ticket which references this is #5041. This can be tested in Joyride > 1421.

This new package contains a reworked theme patch from Marco which fixes the “hatched browser scroll bar” bug (Ticket #5397) and the “not highlighted entries in drop down menus” bug (Ticket #5398). He applied a patch that came from upstream as well against a Pango error; the patch fixes the crashing of Browse by accessing the BofA page (Ticket #5410). Simon is quite confident due to testing that the “missing cursor in browser rich-text fields” bug (Ticket #5340) is fixed with the latest xulrunner version as well. Simon, Marco and Michael had some deeper discussions about how to solve the permissions problem of the browser profile (Ticket #5476). Another little fix was the correct advertising of the browser (Ticket #5269).

Reinier Heeres landed the new Evince version in Joyride and updated Read to work with that version. Beside that there was more work on Sugar: a patch to upgrade activities, a patch to scale emblems, some minor layout bugs and a way to request the Journal to pop-up with a Datastore object. This could lead to a way for applications to start other applications or view source—through the trusted Journal.

Scott Ananian worked on numerous Pippy enhancements, the most intriguing being that Pippy can now create activity bundles, so you can run your pippy programs as stand-alone applications. Scott improved the built-in “Thanks” example so that it runs quite nicely stand-alone. Also, Scott reports that Pippy is now a Pippy application! That's right, you can load the pippy source code in Pippy, edit it, and create the Pippy application within Pippy.

In progress: proper support for the “view source” key. This stalled a little bit pending resolution of Ticket #4909, but Scott thinks we've got a workable solution in hand. View source on an activity generated by Pippy should launch Pippy with the activity's source code; pressing view source again will land you in Pippy editing Pippy's source code!

In anticipation, Scott has a very simple ten-line rewrite of our Terminal activity; using this would have the benefit of making “view source”in Terminal do something reasonable. Any existing activity that can reasonably be represented in a single source file is a candidate for Pippy-ization! Let Scott or Chris Ball know if you've got suitable candidates.

Scott also created a library of Pippy examples suitable for learning Python programming (See http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/pippy-examples;a=tree). These are based on the BASIC examples in the Commodore 64 manual (http://www.lemon64.com/manual/). Help is wanted with sound examples: we should be able to write a Pippy “standard library” that makes it easy to write simple “play a song” examples using the csound engine (see Chapter 8 in the C64 manual).

9. Presence: Robert McQueen spent some time making patches to ejabberd to reduce the server load as the developers suggested over-long rosters (the 7000-strong “Everyone”) were causing the out of memory crashes we were experiencing (causes of Ticket #5313). The first patch made a “Recent” group, which took the last seven-days worth of users (roughly 1500), and the second made an “Online" group, which just tracks those users who were online (100–150 or so), reducing server load significantly, and paving the way for the desired “Nearby” and “Random” groups as outlined in Ticket #5311.

Both patches seemed to significantly aid stability, such that it is now better than ever before: we reached 150 online users on the server. We managed to hit some file-descriptor limits that needed tweaking upwards and we seem to sporadically hit out-of-memory errors that have as yet no explanation. This load is still short of the “large school” scalability target we have in mind for Update.1.

We are going to try Openfire on jabber.laptop.org this weekend as an alternative to ejabberd.

Dafydd Harries worked on Jabber server component and made RPM builds and herded bugs.

Guillaume Desmottes reported ejabberd bug about default PEP node policy (See https://support.process-one.net/browse/EJAB-453); he report edOpenFire and Ejabberd bugs about publishing options not implemented (http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/thread/30566) and (https://support.process-one.net/browse/EJAB-458); he tracked “stream tube broken because of Rainbow” (Tickets #5442, #5445, and #5446); he continued to implement new XMPP protocol in Gabble; and he updated sugar-jhbuild moduleset to use exactly the same Salut/Gabble code as in Joyride, including patches (needed to fix a jhbuild upstream bug—thanks to Frédéric Peters for his patch).

Sjoerd Simons helped Morgan Collett analyze an issue with activities not working on Salut caused by a problem which causes the wireless card to stops sending out multicast traffic (Ticket #5432). The root cause is still unknown. Sjoerd cleaned up his patch to dissect the Clique RM protocol in Wireshark and sent it upstream. With some luck the next version of Wireshark will thus be able to dissect our reliable multicast protocol.

Morgan Collet has been extending the (See Tubes Tutorial) by documenting the D-Bus Tubes example in HelloMesh and will continue to work on it. He has started documentation for Presence Service which he will update on the wiki soon. All the outstanding Presence Service patches have been approved and landed in Update.1. Morgan has also continued to educate G1G1 recipients on the lack of a single Jabber server that can handle 100s of thousands of them: we are hoping that people will point to local Jabber servers that are set up for communities and special interest groups (See Ejabberd Configuration).

10. Pootle: Sayamindo Dasgupta created an Update.1 project in Pootle to track modules for new Update.1 branch. The older Update.1 (Core) project has been renamed to Ship.2 (following the GIT branch renaming). Developers who have a Update.1 branch in GIT can inform us (via filing a ticket or by mailing localization@lists.laptop.org), so that we can add their module in the Update.1 project. The following modules are covered by the Update.1 project at the moment:

• Sugar • Journal activity • Record Activity • Browse Activity

The following languages have more than 90% of these module translated:

• Urdu (100%) • Portuguese (100%) • Chinese (Taiwan) (100%) • French (97%) • Dutch (96%) • German (95%) • Greek (91%)

(These statistics are available online from https://dev.laptop.org/translate/projects/update1/).

11. Kernel: Andres Salomon synced up the master and stable kernel trees, which, as a side effect, fixed the debian kernel autobuilder that had been broken for the past six months (See http://queued.mit.edu/~dilinger/builds-master/). Andres also pulled Dave Woodhouse's latest libertas work into stable. The Libertas code is in a lot of flux right now (and is by no means finished), so reports of regressions are highly appreciated.

Andres poked at LXFB code, worked on and discussed EC issues (Ticket-#1835 related) with Richard Smith. There is also talk of EC SCI mask read corruption, so he made a few changes that should both work around it, and report a warning/backtrace when it is seen (and hey, if you see it, report it!) Finally, there was work on a sysfs knob to dump battery EEPROM contents, and reworking the upstream battery API.

12. Open hardware manager: Chris Ball turned on idleness detection in OHM and also allowed OHM to suspend automatically while an AC adapter is plugged in. If DC input to the laptop is a solar panel, a battery, or other off grid source, conserving power is as important as when the laptop is running from its internal battery. Conservation is generally a good idea under all circumstances.

13. Libertas: Dave Woodhouse worked on the Libertas wireless driver: 25 files changed, 3143 insertions(+), 3288 deletions(–). 107 commits so far, of which 11 have 'kill' in the title. The Libertas driver upstream is a whole lot saner, and has been backported into our stable tree too.

14. Build system: Dennis Gilmore spent the week working on Update.1 builds and yesterday on a Ship.2 build. He got libertas-usb8388-firmware into Fedora and added a sanity check in the build process that verifies the md5sum of the firmware image.

Dennis worked on pyevent, gave Ivan Krstić RPMS to enable him to do his work, and patched it to be built on all platforms; the next step is to reopen the Fedora review on pyevent and get it into Fedora.

Scott finally installed pilgrim.laptop.org, starting the long and arduous process of moving our builds off xs-dev.laptop.org.

Bernie Innocenti worked with Dennis on consolidating our Xorg packages for Joyride and Update.1, including the drivers for QEMU and VMware. Moreover, they analyzed a failure in our build system that seems to be triggered by recent olpc-utils packages, but so far we found nothing conclusive.

Bernie has been working on fixing a nasty localization bug that would make Ship.2 machines autoconfigure in English regardless of what the manufacturing data said. They had it working in Joyride for some time, but the fix did not make it to Ship.2, and his first attempt at a backport caused even more breakage.

On the R&D front, Bernie and Dennis started looking at how we could improve our boot time, or at least bring some useful interface up while the user is waiting. Some eyebrows may rise hearing that we can easily start the X server in a few seconds, with absolutely no prerequisites other than mounted /proc and /sys and a few device nodes in /dev. So we are confident we can enhance our pretty boot graphics with a fluid Cairo animation that Carl Worth contributed.

Additionally, we could try to start Sugar very early, before NetworkManager and other services are up and running. It may require some bug fixing around, so it's not material for an upcoming release.

15. Updates: Scott Ananian released olpc-update 1.9, which avoids wasting work if it is interrupted and resumed later, and also properly warns the user if they try to update to an unsigned build on a locked machine. He properly fixed Ticket #5197, which could cause machines to crash if interrupted during first boot (olpcrd-0.37). He pestered Dave Woodhouse enough that he gave him a new mkjffs2 for a better fix for 5197 (Ticket #5174). And he worked out more details of an automated test framework for XO builds with Michael Stone and others.

16. Security: Michael Stone learned (and reported) many things about encryption export control (Ticket #5346)—community coordination on this issue is a must; he discussed the Mozilla permissions stuff with Marco and Simon (Ticket #5489); he helped Erik Blankinship correct Record's permissions-violations (Ticket #5448); he verified that causing rainbow-daemon to request utf8-encoded strings fixes the bug that prevented us from launching activities whose names contained non-ASCII characters (Ticket #5013); and he suggested implementation proposals for the “view-source” feature (Tickets #4909 and #5475).

17. Etoys: Scott Wallace and Yoshiki Ohshima fixed dozens of isolated bugs reported on trac. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness experimented with a static web version of Etoys Quick Guides (Please see http://tinlizzie.org/olpc/QG-web/). Takashi Yamamiya fixed a bug in OggPlugin for Squeak. Yoshiki wrote up a “little wiki page” for Smalltalk programming on XO (Please see Smalltalk Development on XO).

Bert Freudenberg is in Kathmanzu give some local Nepali groups a deeper understanding of Squeak and Etoys. They are using Squeak to develop learning activities for the XO even before they have machines. Bert is participating in an Etoys Workshop today at Kathmandu Prime College. Students and adults are having great fun implementing a car racing game in Etoys. Bert is also experimenting with the new Devanagari rendering engine (with a Squeak-Cairo-Pango interface) that he and Yoshiki developed.

18. Mplayer: Reynaldo Verdejo and Eduardo Silva have been working on getting full screen decoding of video/audio with MPlayer on the XO; so far they have succeeded using the most used codecs/formats as a test case. They are working on an activity bundle to let anyone try this out.

More News

Laptop News is archived here and here.

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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

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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