[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-08-12)

[Walter Bender]

Major events of the week:

1. Thailand: Prime Minister Taksin Shinawatra used an extraordinarily long
segment of his Saturday morning, weekly, one-hour broadcast to describe
OLPC, its purpose and its timing.

2. Taipei: Taiwan's President Chen publicly shared his pride that his
country is assisting One Laptop per Child: “I am glad that Taiwan is
contributing to this project to build a digital bridge for the kids around
the world.”

3. Ivan Krstić had another discussion with Project Gutenberg founder
Michael Hart and CTO Greg Newby about bringing their eBook content to the
laptop.

4. Mark Foster and David Woodhouse worked with the core LinuxBIOS
developers to move LinuxBIOS onto the DCON debugging platforms. With this
transition, the A-Test motherboards are capable of self-booting from the
internal serial-boot Flash device, as well as utilizing the internal NAND
Flash device for mass storage. Until now, most developers have been using
external USB devices, but these setups are reliably supporting fully
stand-alone operation. Practically speaking, this not only simplifies
debugging, it also will greatly simplify future distribution and bring-up
efforts for OLPC software developers. Special kudos to David, whose
exceptional efforts were appreciated by the entire team!

5. Software: Many additional key software pieces fell into place this week.
David Zeuthen (Red Hat) reports that the udev-based initial ram file system
now works and waits for USB devices to be ready, so full integration of
OLPC installation into the Red Hat Fedora distribution is now feasible.
Zephaniah Hull and Ron Minnich (LANL) report that the PS/2 ports are
working on LinuxBIOS, allowing testing of the dual-mode touchpad on the
OLPC hardware. Ron, along with on Richard Smith and Jordan Crouse (AMD)
report that the programming of LinuxBIOS is in place on PLCC flash chips on
A-Test boards. Jordan also reports that the X Window System graphics and
console driver no longer depend on VESA graphics or conventional INT 10
initialization. This EXA X driver has early support for alpha blending on
the Geode processor. The fbdev driver for the Geode has beginnings of
support for the DCON and the X Window System has been run on the OLPC
display.

6. Tosatti appeared on IRC on Friday.  He's come home from the hospital,
but he will be in a wheel chair for quite some time.

-walter

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Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org