OLPC:News

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Laptop News 2007-12-22

1. Arahuay, Peru: If you haven't yet seen it, please take the time to read this AP article about the XO in remote Peruvian village ([1]). The lead paragraph says it all: "Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago."

2. Hinge: Jacques Gagne has been investigating the laptop hinge—the "clearance" between the two rotating parts should be tighter and this would reduce wobble. Mary Lou Jepsen and Quanta are investigating a possible run-in change at the earliest possible date.

3. Hardware certifications and testing data: Mary Lou has created a compilation of certification and testing data that is available on the wiki (Please see Hardware Testing); it will be expanded over time.

4. Green: EMPA at the Swiss National Labs is continuing its work on life cycle analysis of the XO laptops by comparing the cost, lifetime, power consumption, and overall environmental impact with the refurbished desktops in Columbia. Mary Lou teleconferenced with the team this week and will assure that they get all the data they need to complete their analysis. The final report is due in mid-February. Columbia is widely acknowledged to have one of the most successful re-furbished desktop programs in Latin America.

5. Water: Anna Bershteyn, an MIT Ph.D. candidate, has been helping OLPC follow up on some questions from Ban Samhka, Thailand about the best way to test and improve water quality; water quality is an area of interest that is expanding in the OLPC community. Anna and Mary Lou met with Susan Murcott to discuss possible simple hands-on games on the XOs that will encourage children to test and/or filter their water. SJ Klein has put Anna in touch with groups from UNICEF and the Hesperian Foundation who are also working on water safety. To learn more about Anna, please visit the wiki User:Anna B).

6. Power measurements: John Watlington instrumented a production machine for power measurements this week to allow continued verification of the laptop power-saving measures. This allows Chris Ball (and the rest of the software team) to continuously measure the power consumption at ten different places around the laptop, and also automatically simulate user input to wake up the laptop (power button, lid switch, etc.). We have already have a B3 unit with over twenty power measurement points, but it cannot aggressively suspend/resume, and doesn't have any of the more recent power-savings-related engineering changes.

7. Embedded controller: Richard Smith spent time studying oscilloscope traces looking for a possible cause of the reopening of Ticket 1835 (unable to resume); recent software builds were failing on the suspend/resume testbed. He has been unable to reproduce the problem with bare-board tests and he now feels that he fully understand the software causes of 1835 (three distinct causes). Running the latest EC code with Joyride kernels doesn't seem to have the problem. Richard and John will continue to run tests on the suspend/resume testbed to insure that we won't have the problem with Update.1

A second bonus was discovery and verification of EC issues that Chris Ball and Jim Gettys have run into. Andres helped Richard find an EC bug where the SCI mask was getting corrupted. The most frequent manifestation of that was the loss of AC events or battery-charge level. Richard still don't know the root cause of the corruption, but has a good test case and kernel debug logs. There appears to be a case where EC communication fails and error recover is not working. Fixing it is going to involve more oscilloscope time, because turning on serial- port debugging appears to make the problem go away. There is already a workaround in the kernel to fix the mask when it becomes corrupted, so it's not a show-stopper.

Richard is also writing some cron scripts that will take a snapshot of the battery ACR while the laptop is running on battery power and then then send us the data. Richard wants to use these data to build power usage profiles. The ACR gives us a very accurate reading on the amount of mA/h drawn from the battery. Plotting it over time will begin to give us insight on our dynamic power draw.

8. School server We found a serious problem with the mesh networking in the build of School-server software released last week (Build 137), which brings down an active antenna if a large file transfer is attempted. A new build of the software with the new libertas driver (thanks David Woodhouse) greatly improves the situation. A new build is being tested and tuned and will be released in the next few days. The school-server-software build problems have returned, but this time we identified one of the problems: it turns out that the livecd build process fails if you have upgraded the kernel. Providing a single choice for the kernel is the workaround for this problem.

We have encountered scaling problem with the XMPP service on the server. The eJabber software runs out of memory over time as the number of active users exceeds a hundred. Collabra is looking into alternative server implementations. We had thought eJabber has used by large instant-messaging services, but probably not with all the bells and whistles we use. The XMPP service is crucial to the efficient provision of presence information to laptops in a school through a centralized method. The alternative, used when no server is found, is for each laptop to send multicast announcements, which spread through our mesh network at a low rate and using an algorithm best described as a "flood fill".

In order to support a trial in Mongolia, the server software will start supporting multiple servers per school in January. Each server in a school acts as an additional internet portal in a school's wireless mesh; together they redundantly provide services to all of the laptops in a school.

9. Active antenna update: We are awaiting a utility from Marvell for reflashing the firmware on the active antennas we now have, to allow their use with school servers; presently, they have to be plugged in after a server has booted. When this arrives, it will be included in a school server software release. Users in the field should be able to automatically upgrade any antenna simply by plugging it into a server.

10. Testing: We released a patch to Ship.2, Build 653 to fix a problem with Spanish laptops coming up in English, as well as a problem (discovered in Uruguary) with the Journal items going away.

There was a discussion this week that focused on how volunteers could get started on testing activities by editing the current wiki pages that describe activities: many of these wiki pages are old and thus they do not accurately reflect how the activity works. Please watch the Test Issues page in the coming weeks to see how you can help!

11. Schedule: We are at code freeze for the Update1 release. We will spend the next couple of weeks testing and documenting. Thanks for everyone's patience for bearing with us during the usual chaos associated with of the start of shipping that has gotten in the way of a smooth release cycle. We expect to spend some time on improving process issues before we move on to serious work in Update2.

12. Support: Adam Holt has done a heroic job this week in answering emails sent to help@laptop.org, creating and updating the Support pages (See Support), the Support FAQ, helping with the Getting Started Guild (See [2]) and coordinating volunteers to help answer emails, IRC, and forum. This weekend he is holding a volunteer training session in preparation for a phone bank that could go live as early as next week; look on the olpc-support IRC channel for info.

We'd like to be able to provide RMA numbers for returns to help offload the Patriot Donor Services and we would like to put a process in place where we can get some of the returns sent to OLPC for analysis.

13. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta helped some language teams troubleshoot their problems with Pootle. All throughout the week, he was also testing the system to keep the POT files up to date. The system seems to be working fine and will be rolling it out (along with the documentation) during this weekend.

Sayamindu also gained access to build fontconfig for the OLPC in Koji (thanks Dennis Gilmore), and created a build which should hopefully fix Ticket #1525 (a long-standing bug due to the interaction between the font cache and the system time).

Waqas Toor and Salman Minhas have lead a team in Pakistan to the successful completion of an Urdu translation in Pootle ([3]); all the strings are successfully committed and are ready to be included in Update.1. They have also commenced working on making Zekr a Sugar activity (initially in two languages: Urdu and Persian (Dari)).

They are also making poems for children by Pakistani national poets Illama Iqbal and Faraz Ahmad Faraz available in the form of e-books; and they are writing a teacher "training manual" for Afghanistan, which includes activity tutorials; they are working on materials for teachers that address their needs in the Constructionist methodology of education and learning.

14. Kernel: Andres Salomon and Bernie Innocenti finally were able to reproduce Ticket #2804 (the jumpy touchpad problem) and get enough useful debug information out of it to deduce a working theory of what's causing it and how we can workaround it in the kernel. Bernie has built an experimental kernel with a candidate fix and is eager to receive feedback from some of the jumpy mouse victims to see if our helps.

15. Updates and builds: Scott Ananian gave olpc-update the ability to upgrade from a USB key (Ticket #3881) (See Olpc-update); olpc-update also now warns you if you try to upgrade to a joyride build without a developer key (Ticket #5309) and is more efficient if it is interrupted in the middle of an update. OFW will now upgrade you to the latest firmware even if you have a developer key (Ticket #5371); ntpdate is run on the XOs when we get network connectivity (Ticket #3359); rtcwake is in the build to enable timed wakeups from suspend (Tickets #5434 and #5435); our builds now use sudo to get root—there has been some discussion of configuring su instead (Ticekt #5537).

Dennis Gilmore has been working on builds and some tools to help make them faster to turn around; he has also been tagging packages for Update.1.

16. View source: The view-source key now works in Chat, Web, Pippy, and any activities generated by Pippy (Tickets #4909, #5541, #5542). Next up for Scott: Terminal (Ticket #5543), Gmail (Ticket #5544), and Clock (Ticket #5545). Any application that can reasonable be written as a single python source file is a good candidate for Pippy-ization, which lets children view and customize the activity. This will undoubtedly stress our handling of activity bundles in the Journal, which arguably is a good spur in the side!

17. Wireless driver: Dave Woodhouse worked again on the libertas wireless driver, a certain amount of sleeping and some frustration that although he's fixed most of the known bugs in the driver, people are still using some ancient kernel in their OS builds which is entirely useless for testing purposes.

18. Etoys: Bert Freudenberg spent the first half of week in Kathmandu. 

He observed and helped the very active OLPC and Etoys communities in

Nepal. Yoshiki Ohshima continued on fixing bugs on trac. These patches will show up in the Update.1 stream at some point. Yoshiki also is working on the packaging for non-OLPC environment. Takashi Yamamiya started prototyping a simple presentation tool. Ted Kaehler and Korakurider are looking at the translation of QuickGuide contents. Scott Wallace and Yoshiki worked together to provide a better way to report runtime errors.

19. Scratch: Brian Silverman (by phone), John Maloney,and Mitchel Resnick came by the OLPC office this week to demonstrate Scratch running on an XO (See [4]). While it hasn't been wholy "Sugarized" yet, it is already quite usable. John will be posting a bundle on the wiki for those who'd like to explore it (and provide feedback) at this stage.

20. Open hardware management: Chris Ball is working on a particularly entrenched yet subtle bug in OHM's timing code at the moment. (Richard Hughes confirms that he's been seeing it on non-OLPC platforms too, all the way back to the beginning of OHM.)

21. Presence/sharing: Morgan Collett helped with testing the sugar-shell-consumes-all-memory issue (Ticket #5532). (Thanks to Sjoerd Simons for providing the avahi invocations to fake buddies on the mesh.) Morgan helped some community people with Jabber questions on the forums. There has been confusion about why the ship2.jabber.laptop.org server doesn't work: Robert McQueen spoke with people on IRC who were interested in trying ejabberd and helping us work out why it was failing so badly. (There is now a server at xochat.org that can be used instead of the default at ship2.jabber.laptop.org. See the Sugar control panel page in the wiki for instructions on how to configure your Jabber server.) Robert has updated the Ejabberd configuration pages on the wiki with some updated patches and clearer instructions.

Dafydd Harries spent most of the week trying to set up OpenFire on jabber.laptop.org. He managed to export the user database from Ejabberd and import it to OpenFire, but laptops don't seem to be able to connect to the server successfully. He'll be investigating why this is the case and suspect some sort of problem with our client code. OpenFire developers have been keen to help, however.

Morgan looked into the HippoCanvas bug (Ticket #2351) that is affecting scrolling of multiline Chat messages; he hasn't found a fix for it yet. XO users who are annoyed with this bug have resorted to sharing Write as a primitive chat tool instead.

Morgan also cleaned up some wiki documentation referring to Tubes and Presence Service; while more documentation is needed, most of the existing documentation was out of date (predating Salut for instance).

All the bits for Chat copying URLs to the clipboard (Ticket #5080) to launch in Browse finally landed and work fine, although now it seems we may be able to do it more directly after all with the Rainbow work done to address Ticket #4909.

And Morgan has been working on the unreliability of buddy icons clustering around their shared activity (Ticket #5368); it is still unclear whether the best place to make a fix is in Sugar or Presence Service. The problem arises when CurrentActivityChanged occurs before ActivitiesChanged, so the buddy icon moves before the activity is known about.

Sjoerd Simons investigated why avahi under some circumstances marks records as failed a bit too easily, causing the "contacts flashing" bug. He discovered that the passive-observation-of-failures implementation was a bit too sensitive and created a patch to make it less sensitive. The patch needs further testing in a crowded RF environment like the OLPC headquarters to see if it solves the issue.

Guillaume Desmottes continue to investigate the stream-tubes problem with Rainbow. The Telepathy side should be fixed in Update.1. He start to implement/design peer-to-peer connections for stream tubes in Gabble (Ticket #4047) and improved Gabble-tubes test coverage.

22. Sugar: Reinier Heeres worked on fixing a Read sharing issue (Ticket #5365), a Calculate internationalization issue (Ticket #5319) and adding ellipsis to long texts in palettes (Ticket #4562). He also wrote a simple script to copy a regular file to the datastore/journal that got extended with quite a bit more functionality by Phil Bordelon. He tested previous fixes in Joyride and Update-1 and tried to understand the memory leaks the sugar shell was showing.

Simon Schampijer focused on the browser, testing and implemented a "solution" for the browser permission issue described here (See Concurrent activity instances). Actually we don't think anymore that copying the profile around is a good thing to do; we think we should run the browser outside the container for Update.1 (Ticket #5489). Michael Stone send an email to the mozilla devs to start discussion with them about a long term solution.

23. Trac: Noah Kantrowitz visited Friday and helped improve our trac system, adding bug dependencies and sketching out better workflow features that can now be implemented in it. He also made some great suggestions for the Support/Help pages.

24. Documentation: Mako Hill and SJ Klein packaged together a new version of the Getting Started Guide for inclusion in the library on the laptop itself. (Walter Bender wrote a new stylesheet to fit the pages in the XO.)

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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