Release notes/8.1.0
DRAFT
Pending successful completion of the Release Checklist, we will release build candidate-703 as official-703.
Breaking Changes from official-656
Activities must be installed separately.
Motivation: OLPC cannot presently afford to maintain more than one stable build. Therefore, we have decided to provide a "blank slate" which must be customized with activities and content bundles at installation time. (Some people have asked OLPC to provide a single step upgrade/customization path but no resources have been allocated to this task).
Finding Activities
OLPC hosts many Activities and several activity packs including:
- G1G1 Activity Pack or G1G1 activity pack.
- Peru activity pack
- Here is a list of the customizations OLE Nepal has made as of March 27th for build 702.
To use an activity pack:
- Download it.
- Unzip it onto the root of a USB key.
- Insert the USB key into your XO and reboot. (Hold the X game key while booting if your machine's firmware is unlocked.)
Linux will boot and unpack each of the bundles into place.
- Another future option for installing 'activity pack' bundles, from console use xo-get.
What's the recommended way to upgrade?
The recommended method is to run Olpc-update to the new build, and then to reboot with a G1G1 Activity Pack key inserted.
Improvements from official-656
See OLPC_SW-ECO_4 for a more precise list of the changes, indexed by ticket, that lead from candidate-699 to candidate-703. To summarize, we added:
- OFW version Q2D14 which will delay firmware updates until power is available.
- Newer library indexing software which fixes a recently introduced typo.
- Better Spanish localization of the library and of the X and console keymaps.
- A new telepathy-salut which should lead to more reliable long-running Chat sessions and that may avoid the "Christmas tree" effect ([1]).
- A new libabiword that fixes a Write sharing crasher.
Notable Current Bugs
- #6773 TamTamJam: Recorded microphone slots don't playback
- #6777 Library bundles cannot use non-ascii characters in their file names
- #6729 Read doesn't save the PDFs it opens (when sharing)
- #6532 SD Card Corruption: partition table gets corrupted on ext3-formatted SD cards on suspend/resume
Customization
- Customization key wont install if the activities or library directories had already been created as root.
Activity Issues
- Couldnt add feed to news reader. Clicking "+"/dropdown on the feeds tab didnt do anything
- The contents of a USB key didnt show in the journal. So couldnt install activity bundles from the USB through the journal.
- Could copy images to the clipboard through record+browse+paint. They were successfully opened in paint and pasted in write!
(Almost) full activity testing results for Update.1 RC-2, all results are from build 702
Collaboration Issues
- Activities were reliably sharing between 2 XOs in the same School server mesh, and also in simple mesh. This was tested with write/distance/chat/memorize
- Some XOs were connected to APs, while still running salut in channel 6.
These could very reliably exchange presence info(XOs showed in meshview/received activity invitations/joined public activities) with each other and also with the ones connected to the SS in channel 6. However, no application traffic was able to be shared. This was tested in many activites including write/chat/pippy/connect and others. These XOs had different msh0 ip subnets(one was SS,msh0=172.18.x.x, other was AP,msh0=169.254.x.x). Perhaps this explains why the traffic data wasnt sent? But again, presence traffic was shared fine.
- Some times when joining a Chat the activity wasnt responding. Keystrokes were shown int he edit box.
The log displayed : "groupadd: group 10019 exists Creating mailbox file: File exists". The bug wasnt consistent though Seemed identical to 6499
- We couldn't manage to make read share. Perhaps this is still related to 6483. More testing was done subsequently and bugs have been filed.
Network
- WEP and WPA initially worked fine and were tested several times; however, after some time, no XOs could connect to the WPA access point. The icon also disappeared in one of the XOs.
- Disabling salut(6299) was working fine. Salut + Avahi traffic were successfully disabled for some minutes when receiving a public ip.
- One telepathy-salut crash was seen but it was probably not [2]. More testing needed.
- Last but not least: The inhibit-idle-suspend flag stops the XO from suspending automatically.
I was under the impression that a suspended XO will wake with MDNS packets. However, I removed the inhibit-idle-suspend flag and suspended for 15min. When resumed, all the XOs were failed in avahi. It seems that MDNS packets didnt wake it. Are there different rules for resuming from automatic suspend vs resuming from manual suspend? This needs to be further looked into.
