[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-08-19)

[Walter Bender]

1. OLPC's Mary Lou Jepsen was married to John Ryan today at a sea-side
ceremony in New London, Conn.

2. We are close to converting over to LinuxBIOS/Linux as bootloader, a new
X graphics driver, a new display kernel driver, easy installation path onto
internal flash and disk, and the ability to run off of internal flash; some
last minute bugs have delayed this conversion until sometime next week.

3. Mitch Bradley has learned his way around LinuxBIOS, and has brought up a
Forth implementation on it. Forth is a very productive environment for test
and debugging of hardware, and will come in very handy for easier debug,
testing, and exercise of the CAFE chip. A Forth environment allows for
immediate turn around of tests on hardware without a compile, link, reboot
step that a conventional device driver requires.

4. Zephaniah Hull has been working on the X Input Extension support for the
new dual-mode touchpad, along with work on the X configuration extension
needed for better calibration support for the device. It looks likely we
will base our first release on the upcoming X.org 7.2 release, due to its
support for hotplug of input devices, being implemented by Daniel Stone of
Nokia.

5. Jonathan Corbet is contracting with OLPC to develop the camera driver
for CAFE. Jonathan is well known in the Linux community, operates the
“Linux Weekly News” web site that is a vital communications point of the
developer community and literally wrote “the book” on Linux device drivers,
now in its third edition.

6. Jim Gettys met with Adam Jackson of Red Hat to discuss how to best
modify the X Window System in support of our power-saving schemes. These
include: (1) dropping the refresh rate when updates slow; and (2) driving
the display from the display controller, allowing us to disable the Geode's
video drivers.

-walter

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