OLPC:News

From OLPC
Revision as of 09:02, 16 January 2008 by LeeSI (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search
  This page is monitored by the OLPC team.
   HowTo [ID# 97590]  +/-  

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2008-01-12

1. Mongolia is the first beneficiary of the Give One Get One program. Laptops have begun to arrive and a team from OLPC, including Carla Gomez Monroy, Jan Jungclaus, and Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin are on the ground to help with the initial deployment. Dave Woodhouse will be heading to Ulan Bator to help with the School Server later this month.

2. Las Vegas: Nicholas Negroponte gave the keynote at CES' new program entitled, “Technology and Emerging Countries: Advancing Development through Technology Investments.” He spoke about learning, constructionism, and the long history of thinking about thinking, drawing heavily on Seymour Papert's life work.

3. Cambridge: Walter also met with the X-Prize Foundation Founder and Chairman Peter Diamandis. They discussed two competitions that are in the planning stages: (1) development of a low-cost rural water/power/communications station; and (2) development of a high-impact global learning intervention. The incentive in both competitions is a US $10M prize. OLPC has offered to help define the goals and metrics for the prizes, as there is obvious synergy with our mission in both cases.

4. Las Vegas: Michail Bletsas delivered the keynote address at the 5th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC); his talk was about the XO's networking architecture.

5. In the news: Two topics dominated the press coverage of OLPC this week: the Intel departure; and the Microsoft plans for the XO. The Intel departure, which ultimately boiled down to a lack of trust, as been discussed ad nauseum; Ivan Krstić blog provides a good overview of the Microsoft plans from the OLPC perspective (Please visit http://radian.org/notebook/paradox-of-choice).

6. Embedded controller: Richard Smith spent time working on the SCI mask corruption problem (Ticket #5467). This was a critical bug because the root cause was problems with the EC command implementation. Richard thinks he has finally bested the gremlins: The original implementation depended on interrupts that were being lost; as a result, the EC would at best fail to process the data correctly and at worst completely stop processing commands. The solution in this case is to eliminate these interrupts altogether, as they are unnecessary. Richard implemented a polling scheme instead; the code is passing all his tests and is faster even in its currently unoptimized state. Faster is good because the host issues lots of EC commands on the way into and out of suspend, where every millisecond is critical. Richard is asking that anyone interested in helping us test his solution to upgrade to a firmware release Q2D08A (or higher).

7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2D08 firmware with a long list of “fit and finish” improvements and minor bug fixes. Details can be found in the wiki (See OLPC Firmware q2d08).

8. SD Card support: One nagging problem has been the performance of the SD card on resume. Mitch took time this week to study the problem. He determined that resume can be done in 25 to 200 mS, depending on the card used. The mean value from a sample of seven different cards was 70 mS.

9. Batteries: Some reports of batteries not charging are coming in from the field. The bulk of the data reports (from olpc-logbat) are almost identical: the XO declares the battery fully charged and quits charging when it's really not. Subsequently, when you use your laptop on battery power, it shuts off with no warning, because the voltage dips below the critical level but the capacity is still >15%. In some cases, the shutdown is very quick (seconds) and in others the battery gets enough charge to last between 10 and 20 minutes.

Richard made some additions to batman.fth that allow the user to reset the percent-full field to back to “low”, thus causing the EC code try to recharge. One person with battery-charge problems has used this utility: the data show the voltage on the battery jumping from low (5V to 6V ) to >= 7.4V (the “full” threshold) in the span of 10 seconds. Repeating the test three times showed one span where the battery actually began to charge normally for a while, but then jumped to full. The EC code seems to be operating properly, but something is causing the battery resistance to suddenly rise. This could be either a battery problem or a manufacturing defect in the XO. Something as simple as a bad connection in the charge path could cause this behavior.

10. School Server: The school-server software platform is currently being extended by John Watlington to support multiple servers, each providing internet access to the mesh on all three wireless mesh channels. A two-server system was manually configured at 1CC (and in John's home, a much quieter wireless environment) and largely worked. Its configuration has been automated; a new school-server build is in early testing and will be released in the next few days.

The rush on this is the desire to provide access to a common library to a trial of two schools in Mongolia this January, with upcoming deployments elsewhere following as soon as we have Active Antennas in volume. Each school of 500 children will have three servers providing backup storage and access to a large (700 GB) local content library. We shipped off six servers (the lowest end SOHO server from a leading PC manufacturer) to the trials this week after reconfiguring them in Cambridge. Additional machines are being acquired locally and will be tested.

The latest version of ejabberd (2.0) has been successfully packaged by Collabora, configured and integrated into a school server build, and is now being tested. The configuration still requires manual intervention and scalability and stability are serious-enough concerns that we continue to explore alternatives.

11. Testing: Chih-yu Chao worked on testing various builds (Joyride 1489 and 1520, and Update.1 681). This included some localization testing, one-hour smoke tests, and content bundles (both activities and library). She also spent some time becoming familiar with school server and created test cases for suspend/resume. Kim Quirk spent some time in localization, keyboard testing, and upgrade testing for the Ship2.2 Build 656. Remember to keep an eye on Test Group Release Notes page in the wiki for information on the latest releases (Test Group Release Notes).

12. Wireless testing: We are currently testing Build 674 with wireless firmware 5.110.22.p1. Build 674 has all the latest wireless driver modifications from David Woodhouse, which seems to improve stability and performance. The only obvious issue with Build 674 is the inability to associate with WEP-encrypted access points in the Sugar user interface (we can make connections from the command line). Wireless firmware 5.110.22.p1 fixes a rare wireless hang that happens when a link loss condition occurs while the radio is scanning and also rearranges the relative priorities of the internal firmware threads. Thanks to the team at Marvell Pune and Ricardo Carrano for all the hard work.

13. Support: Adam Holt and the team of many support volunteers continue to improve systems and documentation. And they continue to make progress with the phone bank system. There are regular Sunday afternoon 4PM (EST) calls—if you are interested in joining, please get in touch with Adam for the details (holt at laptop.org).

Adam organized another very successful support meeting last Sunday; 24 people showed up (See Support meetings).

Participation by guest developers drive the enthusiasm at the meetings. Thanks to Kim Quirk, Arjun Sarwal, and Bernie Innocenti for their participation. By the end of week, our Support list now contains 51 subscribers. Support volunteer Frank Barcenas, who is based in Lima, Peru started only four days ago and is doing a great job, even without an XO!

Adam also recruited likely volunteers for documentation and QA. Felice Gardner and SJ Klein have been helping here. Professor Lee Tesdell at Minnesota State Univ will likely work with us and his entire class improving documentation of particular topics. Similarly, Adam helped Arjun engage with science teachers and curriculum developers to develop further interest in the Measure activity.

Adam also resolved troubling tickets by phone, calling donors directly—he focused on especially confused donors who either require RMAs or were accidentally blocking our incoming emails.

Adam has been helping to navigate through our parts/repair story, towards setting up perhaps 10 volunteer-driven repair centers around the USA and Canada—a model that could be replicated elsewhere.

Finally, Adam continues to work with Matthew O’Gorman and Joe Phigan on a phone server. Matthew should have the voice prompts recorded ASAP, so we can begin training volunteers.

14. Sugar medley: Tomeu Vizoso worked on fixing bugs this week in anticipation of the Update.1 release. He focused on the Sugar shell, the Journal, the datastore, and Read activity. Almost all of his patches have already been tested in the Joyride builds and will pushed into an Update.1 build soon.

Reinier Heeres has written a patch to improve the palette positioning logic so that palettes don't end up outside the visible screen (Ticket #5944) and he has included support for ellipsis ('...') in long lines (Ticket #4562). Finally a new version of evince was built to reduce the memory usage for pdf files with images, and a patch by Tomeu was included to make the fit-to-width button work.

Marco Pesenti Gritti tracked down the problem with the Turkish locale that was causing crashes at system startup. He's pushed a workaround in the builds. A numpy hacker helped to track down the real cause; it looks like problem in pygtk or Python. Marco worked with Reinier on the palette positioning problem and together they landed multiple fixes. Marco built xulrunner 1.9 beta2. We are going to test it and see if it's stable enough to go in Update.1. He reviewed numerous patches from Simon Schampijer, Reinier, and Tomeu. [These guys rock.] There was lots of bug triaging to ensure that fixes for the most urgent problems land in the build as soon as possible. We’ve been testing all the changes in Joyride to avoid regressions. Altogether, we have managed to cut down the list of Sugar core bugs, especially the blockers. And in the spirit of “if you want something done, find a busy person”, Marco took over gtkmozembed maintenance upstream, to ensure we will have a sane API to migrate to when xpcom is deprecated in Mozilla 3.0.

15. Software Medley: Chris Ball is working on the last power management feature for Update.1—a logfile to record information about how often and why we suspend/resume, together with battery status information. Getting this log back from the field will help turn the current set of timeouts into something more principled, and will give Richard Smith useful power data as well.

Andres Salomon worked on the touchpad driver and Debian packaging of some OLPC packages.

Bernie Innocenti mostly worked on bug squashing for Update.1. Specifically, the pen-tablet not working, permission problems in /home/olpc, and providing automatic login in the console so that we can finally disable the root and olpc passwords. Bernie also helped SJ with the hard drive images for Mongolia, and Arjun with the Measure activity redesign. He and Walter debugged console keymaps for Spanish and Portuguese and Albert Cahalan contributed a nice console font that we may try to integrate.

As a pet project, Bernie started to port an “oldskool” activity called SoundTracker to the laptop. He is in touch with the original authors for help.

David Woodhouse looked at the unionfs patches which are making their way upstream and likely to land in 2.6.25. Will probably land these in the Fedora kernel sometime soon and play with them some more. They work without any changes to the underlying file systems, which means that whiteouts (where the “upper” layers of the filesystem actively remove an object that exists in a “lower” layer) are a bit of a hack. But that can be fixed. The design goal of requiring nothing special from the filesystem makes sense and we can do it nicely; it just hasn't been done yet.

Dave reluctantly reduced the log level at which the (mostly harmless) CRC failure messages are printed by JFFS2. Need to introduce a new “root-only” write threshold and expose all the thresholds through sysfs.

The short-term fix Dave made for SD seems like it might be helpful, according to Tomeu's comment in Ticket #4013. The device goes away and then a 'new' device comes back on suspend/resume. It doesn't help if you're running with your rootfs on the device, or if you have an open file on it while you suspend, but it looks like it does help a lot of use cases. We'll need to work with Marvell to figure out the delays in card detection on resume. They claim it doesn't take as long as our measurements show.

16. Build system: Reinier has been working on a new build announcer script in Python (http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer). As an improvement over Bert Freudenberg's script, it can collect ChangeLog entries from package versions that have not appeared in a build, and gets ChangeLogs for rpms directly from Koji. Dennis Gilmore spent most the week syncing Joyride and Update.1, trying to chase up missing SRPMS and make sure things are getting better. He also spent time talking to people at Fudcon about OLPC; there were quite a few Give-One-Get-One participants showing real interest in the XO. Dennis will be doing a session on the XO over the weekend.

Early in the week, Jim Gettys was spooked by some build problems we were having: we had later packages in Update.1 than Joyride, something that should never occur. Dennis tracked this down to a mistagging. We are now getting very close to having a build together, built consistently and reproducibly, that is close enough to Update.1 to start serious testing.

17. Presence service: Guillaume Desmottes designed a proposal of Jingle protocol for transport re-negotation, needed for OOB support in Gabble (See http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Jingle-renegotiation). He started to implement hyperactivity, a collaboration stress-testing tool (Ticket #5817).

Morgan Collett landed the fix for the presence service bug that prevented buddies from clustering around their shared activity due to signals firing in the wrong order (Ticket #5368); the patch exposed a UI issue in Sugar “snowflake” layout where the first buddy moved into the activity appears next to it, but subsequent buddies simply vanish off mesh view; they reappear when they leave the activity (Ticket #5904). Morgan also worked on a couple of other presence-server issues: blank names in mesh view and hex-key names in mesh view.

18. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta set up a Pootle project for Etoys, so that volunteers translators working on the various activities and Sugar can also work on Etoys as well. He added the memorize activity in Pootle, so that it can be translated by the volunteers. He fixed a problem which was preventing the Spanish translations from showing up in Pippy. (ticket #5504) And he helped set up translation teams for Bengali (India), Catalan, and Polish.

Localization into Pashto and Dari languages continues to advance. Dr. Habib Khan reports that his team has engaged Afghan graduate students of International Islamic University in the localization endeavors. They have initiated this project with great enthusiasm but their end-of-semester examinations have started and will end on January 20, so our hopes for early completion does not seem to be on schedule.

Arjun Sarwal and Bernie tested the Devanagari keyboard with the Lohit Hindi fonts. The keyboard and font rendering both seem to be working well. The Lohit Hindi Fonts package is expected to go into Update.1.

19. Wireless driver: Dave Woodhouse did some more work on the libertas driver, but he is letting the earlier batch of patches land and the dust settle before he starts again on that in earnest. It is mostly cleanups to be done now—the real fixes and the “dangerous” stuff are mostly behind us. Dave wants to investigate the suspend/resume behavior—that was working OK in his testing but we’ve seen two bug reports that cause him to suspect the driver might be getting it wrong.

Dave is also trying to get up to speed on school server stuff to fully understand what to expect when he gets to Mongolia next week (other than -20°C).

20. Rainbow: Michael Stone closed many bugs and contributed many patches. Along with Bernie, Phil, Simon, and Marco, we have now provided or improved proposed fixes or work-arounds for all of the known serious issues with Rainbow for Update.1 including:

  • the 'rainbow spool persistence bug' (Ticket #5033);
  • the 'SSL failure bug' (Ticket #5489);
  • the 'orphaned files bug' (Ticket #5637);
  • the 'uid reclamation bug' (Ticket #2527);
  • the '/home/olpc permissions bug' (Ticket #5320); and
  • the 'sudo vs. su bug' (Ticket #5537).

Michael also assisted Phil Bordelon with the 'orphaned previews bug' (Ticket #5929) and he offered Daniel and Chih-yu an overview of our implementation of activity isolation so that we can begin to construct a test plan for the isolation features scheduled for Update.1. Finally, Michael assisted Sjoerd, Ben, and Erik in their debugging efforts.

Marcus Leech’s (Nortel) contributions to our efforts have also been invaluable.

21. Activities: Joshua Minor made a new activity called Speak. It is a “talking face” for the XO laptop. Anything you type will be spoken aloud using the XO's speech synthesizer, espeak. You can adjust the accent, rate, and pitch of the voice as well as the shape of the eyes and mouth. This is a fun way to experiment with the speech synthesizer, learn to type, or just have fun making a funny face for your XO. Please see Speak for details. (Josh sends thanks to Arjun Sarwal, Hemant Goyal and Bernardo Innocenti for their help.)

Arjun Sarwal continues to improve the Measure activity. He is working towards making the code scalable (so that it is easy to add more graphs, more views, etc.). The mix of having a large drawing area and a lot of real-time processing of data, combined with the goal of a fast response time is a challenging (and interesting) balance of experimentation and optimization.

The Measure page in the wiki (Measure) now incorporates easy to follow instructions to build one's own low cost probe for connecting sensors to the XO. The “flavor of the month” of Measure Learning activities is “Temperature.” Arjun encourages educators / teachers / enthusiasts to try building their own low-cost temperature sensing probe by following the directions given on the page and get in touch (arjun AT laptop.org) in case of any problems.

In a related effort, Arjun is interested in organizing an OLPC-Health interest group. All interested in participating towards developing medical and health applications around the XO should join the “Library” mailing list and add their names to the volunteers section of the Health wiki page (Health). Participation is invited from all: hardware developers, programmers, doctors, biologists, etc. A conference call is planned for the last week of January.

22. E-books: Dr. Khan reports progress on converting all the text books written on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad into e-books. The following text books of Federal Ministry of Education for Grade I for use in English and Urdu mediums of instruction are complete:

  • My English Reader for Grade I
  • Islamic Studies (Shaoor-e-Islamyat) Grade I
  • Social Studies for Grade I
  • Science for Grade I

These text books are now waiting a review by the Department of Education, IIU. After incorporating the suggestion we will make them available on XO library.

23. Curriki: Lauren Klein and SJ Klein started working with Joshua Marks and the group-development team at Curriki to design a space and interfaces for OLPC collections on their site. Joshua is rolling out a “groups” feature that will allow custom design of individual portals within the next week that will make implementing a “compile for XO” button and an OLPC start page easier.

More News

Laptop News is archived 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.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.laptop.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=OLPC:News&oldid=97590"