OLPC:News/Archive 2

2007-04-28

1. Cambridge: Delegations from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Libya, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Thailand, and Uruguay attended a week-long meeting at the OLPC headquarters to discuss the current status of the program, share ideas, and plan next steps.

Just seeing and hearing the diversity of faces and voices around the table was remarkable. Although the discussion was occasionally heated, every attendee was convinced that OLPC is something they should and must do for the children of their countries. Passion was infectious; and most important: there was a vibrant exchange among the attendees of their experiences and ideas about how to move forward together.

2. A pivotal moment was when Marta Voelcker showed videos from the work being done with XOs by Léa Fagundes and her colleagues at the University of Rio Grande do Sul in a school in Porto Alegre; this was followed by Irene Ficheman, who showed videos from the work she and her colleagues from University of São Paulo are doing with XOs in a school in that city. We were able to see how the teachers there worked with the XO and each other (a priceless moment was helping each other open the XO for the first time) and heard how students do not want to go home—even when dismissed early. (The children without laptops at the school in the Porto Alegre—only one in four have an XO—are emulating the landless movement in Brazil—Movimento Sem Terra—they have created a laptop-less student movement.)

3. OLPC added a new country this week: the USA. This move will engage a wider developer community, impacting and improving software and content. Please note that such a move into schools and learning in the USA is not necessarily a commercial machine.

4. One of the pleasant surprises of the week was the extent to which software development for the XO is beginning to take a life of its own. A developer in Pakistan is building a Qur'anic Studies for the laptop; a team from Uruguay surprised us with a demonstration of an activity for using USB “dongles” on the laptop; a team from Brazil has built some original “learning” games for the laptop; and a team from Argentina has been continuing to work on a wide variety of activities, including a calculator activity that “shows its work.”

5. Environmental impact: Mary Lou Jepsen has compiling data to determine the environmental impact of the XO. Of course XO is literally the greenest laptop on the planet, but it is also figuratively the greenest: having less environmental impact than any laptop ever made. Mary Lou is working with EPEAT, “a procurement tool to help institutional purchasers in the public and private sectors evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes.” EPEAT provides “a clear and consistent set of performance criteria for the design of products, and provides an opportunity for manufacturers to secure market recognition for efforts to reduce the environmental impact of their products.” Details will be available next soon.

6. Weather-proofing: XO is made for use outdoors. On a rainy day in Boston, Mary Lou decided to let the BBC film her testing the XO in a downpour. She worked with the laptop for an hour in the pouring rain while they filmed; both she and the laptop got drenched. XO worked fine; the crew were to be able to see the screen clearly outside—it was bright despite the rain.

7. B3 Hardware and Firmware: Mitch Bradley, John Watlington, and Richard Smith returned from Taipei after a successful bring-up of preB3. Together with the team from Quanta, they:

• solved a camera-noise problem that has been plaguing us for months;
• with help from Tom Sylla fixed the RAM stability problem by improved settings of RAM timing registers—10 boards with 3 different RAM vendors ran memtest overnight with no errors; and
• stabilized suspend/resume with the OFW test.

Gary made a test rig whereby one XO can force another to do repetitive suspend/resume cycles. We used it to perform 14,000 consecutive suspends of 1-second duration and 234 consecutive 2-minute suspends. Tom has been extremely helpful in debugging video and suspend problems this week.

Mitch trained some of the Quanta software people in the use of open firmware(OFW). They succeeded in doing their own OFW build, and used it to test a fix for a GPIO-related leakage issue.

Lilian Walter's OFW-based hardware test suite proved invaluable in the preB3 bring-up. It let us prove that various hardware features were working very quickly, without the “is the problem caused by hardware or software” issue that often arises when trying to use OS drivers for testing.

Quanta has implemented most of the new EC commands that Richard specified, so we can migrate away from direct access to EC GPIO ports (which was a latent security hole). Mitch have written and tested OFW interfaces to those new functions.

Jordan Crouse, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon worked on the LX graphics driver to shake it down (the LX has a significantly better graphics processor requiring significant changes and additions to the drivers). Chris and Jordan debugged an X cursor problem on the pre-B3 with Jordan Crouse. Andres worked with Jordan on lxfb and DCON drivers, and committed them. The DCON support is now broken out, and both the LX and GX frame-buffer drivers can control it.

Chris Ball took Quanta's testing spreadsheet and added missing bugs to Trac. He also wrote a kernel patch to fix an audio bug (by inverting EAPD) on B3, and submitted it to Jaya Kumar who maintains the audio driver we use.

8. System software: Andres committed initial code for calling into OFW, and changed the platform detection code to use OFW rather than dealing with GPIOs.

Chris also brought up Sugar under Python 2.5 on an XO using the Fedora 7 packages, which we'd previously thought to be impractical. He is in the middle of taking performance measurements which we can use to help decide whether and when we want to migrate the build to it.

9. Localization: Jim Gettys gave a presentation on localization at the Country Meeting. The “meat” of the presentation can be found in the wiki (See Localization). He also gave a presentation on the design of the X0-1 at MIT; a video of this presentation can be found at: http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3417. It was attended by about 100 people, and may result in a number of people contributing to the project.

10. Journal: This week Ben Saller joined the software team to work on the Sugar data store. Welcome, Ben. He's based in San Fransisco and is working remotely. Ben already has a few things working in the data store including a working query engine, a simple file-based back-end data store and full-text indexing. Marco Gritti has integrated it into jhbuild (our sugar build script) and Tomeu Vizoso has started on integrating into the Journal activity. It's great to see this work finally underway.

11. Presence: The new presence service based on the work that Dan Williams and the Collabora team have been working on has landed in jhbuild. This means we can use the XMPP/server-based bits for collaboration and move to the new “tubes” model for activities. This code is still under heavy development so expect some bumps, but this is a big step that a lot of people have been working on for a long time.

12. Sugar: This week Tomeu, Marco and Eben Eliason met in Italy to work through a number of design issues surrounding controls and look and feel. Those notes have been posted to the mailing list and a full overview is in the wiki for anyone interested.

13. Collaboration: Guillaume Desmottes from Collabora has been working on the “collaboration bits” and has a sample activity (based on Connect-4) working on top of the new tubes/collaboration API working in the sugar environment. He also spent a lot of time debugging video and VOIP problems. There turned out to be an incompatibility between gstreamer and one of the streaming libraries. Most of the UI for the video-call activity is done; the streaming issue is being fixed; once that's completed, we should have a very nice video call activity on the XO.

14. Erik Blankinship and Bakhtiar Mikhak from Media Mods demonstrated a shared camera activity this week. While it doesn't yet leverage the tubes/collaboration API, it is a harbinger of some of the new modes of interactive learning enabled by the XO/Sugar architecture.

15. Connectivity: Mesh testing continues and this time we have some nice results to report from our friends at UFF in Rio de Janeiro. In one test they placed five laptops in five different floors in their building and they measured application throughput—copying a file using the Linux SCP command. After four hops, there was 500 kilobits of real application throughput!! They also measured (in the lab) throughput via a chain of ten laptops. (A long chain of laptops can be created by means of special debugging features in the laptop's firmware.) Using the iperf benchmarking program, they got over 2 megabits over 9 hops.

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

LAPTOP NEWS 2007-04-21

1. Taiwan: John Watlington, Mitch Bradley, and Richard Smith traveled to Quanta in Taiwan to work with Victor Chao, Arnold Kao and their team on the “bring up” of the pre-B3 boards. Jordan Crouse, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon helped the team in Taiwan from afar (Colorado and Cambridge). Bottom line: it works.

2. São Paulo: Work began at a school on the periphery of the city with the XO this week. Naturally, every kid is totally excited. The only question anyone in the school, whether kid, teacher, administrator or parent, has is “When can I get one?” Teachers are staying up late to play with their machines and show the kids what they learned. Kids are teaching other kids reducing the burdens of class size and different levels. The school is transforming into a place of joy and excitement. They are beginning work on their wiki-based local-history project which they plan to collaborate with other schools.

3. New “rabbit ears” arrived in Cambridge this week for our evaluation. Notably, these ears, when attached to a laptop, survive a five-foot drop test with direct impact on the ears in their extended (out) position. We will be testing them to higher drop heights in the coming weeks.

4. Sugar: This week saw numerous small fixes in the UI to improve the zoom experience. Marco Gritti, Tomeu Vizoso, and Eben Eliason have reached a consensus about how to handle controls in the UI, which is an important part of our developer story. Some of the compromises we have made won't give us the exact experience we are looking for, but they minimize risk to the project.

5. Chat: A simple chat activity for the XO is coming together thanks to the joint efforts of Dan Williams and the Collabora team. Collabora is also putting together a video-call activity.

6. Mesh portals: Dan Williams wrote up instructions on using B2s as mesh portals. Chris Ball tested and released the instructions in the wiki (See Establishing_a_Mesh_Portal).

7. Firmware: Chris and Mitch also tested OFW's wifi driver; it works. Having a wifi driver in the firmware allows us to build a script that can update our laptops with a button-press rather than carrying USB keys around.

8. Kernel: Andres worked with the Sparc and Power PC folks (upstream) on getting a device tree API that makes everyone happy. He also had his typical weekly adventure: he synched master up w/ Linus Torvalds; we now have 2.6.21-rc7 working.

9. Libraries: Christine Madsen has been working on visualizations of how different archives and libraries can work together to form an open library exchange. Justin Thorp from the Library of Congress's World Digital Library (WDL) project came to OLPC for two days of library discussions, and met with SJ Klein, Eben, Adam Brandi, Todd Kelsey, and Mel Chua. WDL is developing the next release of their interface and collection with target of the end of the summer.

10. Wikis: The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) hosted an annual conference about collaborative production of learning materials in Vancouver, Wednesday through Friday. Attendees included Merrick Schaefer of UNICEF, Murugan Pal of CK12, Erik Moeller of Wikimedia and Open Progress, and Joel Thierstein of Connexions; who are all working towards a global collection of CC-BY and locally-developed works. We set immediate goals for sharing materials across these projects; and identifying collections. COL offered broad support across their network of teachers and volunteers, especially in Nigeria. Erik and Brion Vibber from Wikimedia discussed how MediaWiki is planning to support asynchronous and offline editing; and 'live' off-line snapshots that people can edit. The Wikipedia 0.5 static snapshot was released last week; it can be downloaded via torrent. A child-friendly selection of topics is being developed; but still written at a high language level. A proper kid's-encyclopedia is still in the future.

11. Remote display: Zvi Devir documented a second method for remote display of an XO laptop in the wiki (See Remote_display). The trick is to install RealVNC and run x0vncserver on the XO. The remote computer, which can be connected to a video projector, runs a vncviewer that clones the XO display. (Note that this method will not yet workwhen the laptops are in mesh mode—we need to enable packet-forwarding on the School Server for the vnc connection. Until then, the XO must be used in infrastructure mode.)

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

2007-04-14

1. São Paulo: Roseli de Deus Lopes and her team have been working with the teachers for a smooth introduction and work began with XOs in the school in this week. Naturally, even though there are only 100 laptops initially, word spread throughout the school and all the children and teachers are anxious to participate. David Cavallo met with the teachers for several days: the teachers and children will work in groups in inter-disciplinary projects, including a local-history project to grow and combine with all laptop schools.

2. Porto Alegre: Lea Fagundes and her team have been working with the XO in the Luciana de Abreu Elementary School for three weeks and already is having tremendous impact. The children of course are doing fantastic work and you see them moving around the school, taking pictures, working on projects, and truly engaged in their learning. Yesterday two teachers were unable to come to school due to family emergencies and the principal could not get substitutes; they dismissed the children of those classes early. For the first time in anyone's recollection, no one left when dismissed, preferring to stay and work with the laptops. The school had record attendance by parents for a meeting, with more than 10× the usual number attending. The teachers and children are ecstatic. The concrete example of chidlren, teachers, laptops and learning is changing the minds of doubters.

3. Rio de Janeiro: Michail Bletsas attended a two-day meeting organized by Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa (RNP), the organization that runs Brazil's academic network. The main theme of the meeting was digital inclusion and a people from the USP and Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) presented their first results from testing wireless connectivity on the XO laptop. Their conclusion: it works.

4. FISL8.0: Michail and Javier Cardona delivered back-to-back presentations on the various aspects of the OLPC mesh. Javier concluded with a nice audio-streaming demo via the mesh. Two XOs were streaming audio between them, their transmission power was limited to 1mW (from 60), so that the range between them was limited—about 40m with the rabbit ears down. One person went to the end of the lecture hall with one of the XOs and the audio stopped; another person went to the middle of the room with a third XO, which restored the audio flow.

John Palmieri, Tomeu Vizoso, Marcelo Tosatti, David Cavallo, and Jim Gettys also attended the conference, which is the largest free software conference in the developing world (~5000 people pre-registered for the conference). Attendance at the OLPC booth was at times a crush and was always very busy.

5. Carla Gomez-Monroy, a former student of Walter's from the MIT Media Lab, will be helping us with the test school deployments. Carla spent several years working with the Schlumberger Excellence in Educational Development (SEED) Foundation, doing constructionist projects in schools in the developing world, including Nigeria.

6. Is XO the “greenest” laptop on the planet? This seems not to be just literal but also appears figurative: Mary Lou and Robert spent some time talking to various environmental agencies last week. Our low-power design, RoHS compliance, LED backlight (rather than mercury-containing CCFL), battery with 4× the standard battery lifetime, elimination of PVCs and Brominated flame retardants, etc., may actually spur environmentalists to create a new category for our laptop. More on this in the coming weeks.

7. B3: Pre-B3 motherboards will be made today (Saturday) at Quanta. The pre-B3 bring up in Taipei will commence on April 18 in Taipei with Richard Smith, John Watlington, Mitch Bradley, and David Woodhouse present.

8. New rubber ears: 30 sets of rubber bunny ears arrived Friday at OLPC; we will use them for drop testing to new heights early next week. Current testing shows our laptops survive a five-foot drop tests on the “open” ears.

9. Firmware/kernel: Mitch and Andres Salomon have succeeded in a complete boot off an SD card using a custom kernel and a few tweaks to OS Build 385. They are working on making it require fewer custom changes, so that booting off SD can be done routinely. Mitch and Richard worked on preparations for the LX processor (B3) board bring up next week. Mitch provided a version of the firmware to Quanta for initial debug.

10. User interface: Eben Eliason has developed a new tabbed toolbar system for Sugar that he has documented in the wiki. He also made yet another significant pass over the UI controls and will be meeting Marco Gritti and Tomeu Vizoso to get an API implemented for them. He has sketched mock-ups for our core activities (Write, Browser, etc.) using the new system and the team at Abiword has already begun implementing many of the new features.

Eben also specified a more detailed interaction for the clipboard, which will be consistent with current UI expectations while providing the additional features we want. The basic interaction is a clipboard stack, with the most recently copied item on top, which also acts as a push through queue when it fills up, dropping the bottom element from the stack when new items come in. And he prepared a refined “introductory sequence” for entering name, choosing colors, and taking a photo on first boot. Marco has this design and is working on implementation.

11. School server: Web caching is configured and running on the school server in the OLPC office in Cambridge. All XOs in the area running a current build are using it for network access.

12. From the community: Marc Maurer reports that his work on adding syntax coloring to AbiWord for the purposes of the develop activity is beginning to work. John Resig has been making progress on an eBook reader (See http://ejohn.org/apps/ebook/ for a live demo). Bruno Coudoin reports that GCompris is running on the XO. (GCompris is education software targeting young children that has been translated in more than 40 languages.) While it doesn't yet follow all of the design rules of Sugar, it is fun to see working. Ignatz Heinz at Avallain Learning is working on making an open-source version of their language-learning and literacy tools available for the XO. Google has just come out with a beta API to their new translation engine. Franz Och, one of their lead researchers, thinks it can be used for IM translation for the XO and would like to see this tested.

Laptop News is archived at Laptop News.

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

2007-04-07

1. OLPC “Game Jam”—a game design and programming event designed to encourage development of open-source games for the OLPC platform (the XO)—is being held at Olin College next weekend. A group of game developers will get together over a three-day period to make as many innovative games as possible for the laptop. “Our goal is not just some great games and experimentation for the XO but also to bring the unique constraints and output of this project to next year's GDC Experimental Gameplay Workshop.” Code will be released on SourceForge under the GNU General Public License so everyone can freely experiment with the source and games.

2. Mechanicals/ID: The XO mechanical design is finally complete. The last major item—the insert molded rubber/plastic bunny ears—was approved on April 4th. The core team responsible for this milestone: Frank Lee and Victor Chau of Quanta, Yves Behar and Bret Recor of Fuse, Jacques Gagne of Gecko, and Mary Lou Jepsen of OLPC. This is the culmination of nearly two years of efforts on the ID and mechanicals. It bears mention that many contributed to the ID/ME over this time on the laptop, and in addition to the above, we would especially like to acknowledge the following who at various times shouldered large parts of this effort: Quanta: Ben Chuang, Johnson Huang, Sam Chang, Alex Chu, and Roger Huang Fuse Project: Mitch Pergola and Martin Schnitzer Design Continuum: Kenneth Jewell and Kevin Young MIT Media Lab: Ted Selker ChiLin: Albert Hsu, HT Chen and Scott Soong OLPC: Nicholas Negroponte, Rebecca Allen, Mark Foster, Walter Bender, and Michail Bletsas

3. System software: Build 385 and firmware Q2B87 form a new stable build. We do not anticipate another stable build for approximately 3–5 weeks, as we work on suspend and resume, power management, and the Geode LX bringup. Please update your systems to this build. Key changes and improvements include:

• a fix for a number of crashes in Sugar, which have been seen occasionally became much more common in Build 368 was finally traced to a bug in the fontconfig library;
• updated library content;
• improved UI for selecting networks, and further bug fixes in the network driver;
• fix for LiFePo battery problems (This is the last known battery problem.);
• memory of the WEP wireless key should be much improved;
• updated TamTam bundle (save and restore work properly);
• a new, improved calculator program from Reinier Heeres;
• a temporary workaround for a presence-service problem is in place; and
• sufficient aliases for old X11 core fonts that most applications not yet updated to the current X client-side font model should work (specifically, this fixes a crash in the Adobe Flash 9 plug-in for Linux).

We will have a automated backup script before the next stable build for backup of laptop contents to the school server; this is simply using the "rsync" command which is already included in current builds.

4. Firmware: Mitch Bradley completed preparations to cut over to fastboot/suspend/resume firmware. The Q2Cxx series will include these new features:

• suspend/resume support;
• memtest86 built in to firmware;
• keyboard diagnostic that displays key presses graphically;
• explicit probe-usb no longer needed: attempts to open the USB node automatically handle connection-status changes;
• new boot flash layout per Quanta's request, plus tools to inspect manufacturing data and save it to a disk file; and
• faster boot time.

Lilian Walters released to Mitch the keyboard self-test code and the auto reprobe for USB. Richard Smith released q2b86 and q2b87 with new EC bits that fix outstanding LiFe battery problems.

5. Power management: As mentioned above, we are cutting over to the “C” series of firmware releases as we develop our suspend/resume work. Richard worked on resume SD bug with Pierre Ossman. It seems that after a resume, the clock on the SD is not coming back up right. It starts but then goes away. Richard is still trying to hunt this down. Only SD is not resuming properly now. The resume time without SD is down to 0.23 seconds!

6. Kernel: Andres Salomon did the regular Linux tree merge, merged the libertas wireless driver into the stable tree, and worked on the open firmware (OFW) device-tree kernel patch. The device-tree implementation is going to require a lot of tender-loving-care to get it upstream, unfortunately. Dave Woodhouse diagnosed a latent bug in the JFFS2 file system caused by pretty pathological logging behavior; it will require some work to fix. Jordan Crouse worked on the Geode LX frame buffer driver (lxfb).

7. User environment: Jim Gettys figured out how the old core X font system worked, to enable applications using the obsolete X core font system (e.g., Adobe's Flash 9 plugin) to work properly on our system. Chris Ball tested fontconfig-2.4.2, which Jim correctly predicted as the fix to Sugar crashes that had become very common in Build 368. We had been about to revert the branch prediction firmware workaround instead. Both Chris Ball and Chris Blizzard have confirmed that the crash disappears as of Build 380. Chris also tracked down the Unicode scripts as the cause of our console font becoming tiny. John Palmieri came up with a fix, which is in the latest build.

8. School server: John Watlington reports that we have a school server up and running as a mesh portal in Cambridge. Up to three mesh networks are supported, with routing supplied between each other and the Internet.

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