[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-12-02)

[Walter Bender]

1. The Argentine foreign ministry organized a seminar for government and
business leaders focused on enhancing the high-technology sector in the
country. David Cavallo was invited to speak to present OLPC as a critical
element for improving education, social equity, and helping to create a
larger core of technological fluency among the population.

2. A video featuring Nicholas, Seymour Papert, and Walter talking about the
educational mission of the laptop is now on the TechnologyReview web site
(See http://www.techreview.com/video/).

3. This week we focused on improving the anti-glare properties of the
display. This is mainly a property of the surface treatment of the
polarizer; we are making that surface more diffuse in both reflection and
transmission.

4. Mary Lou keynoted the Asian Digital Libraries Conference in Kyoto this
week. As usual there was tremendous interest in the laptop and a strong
desire on the part of the libraries to contribute. The attendees expressed
a need for a bug-tracker-like interface (See http://dev.laptop.org) for
contributions from their side; evidence that the content community is
beginning to think like the open-source community.

5. Software progress is noticeably faster now we have machines; we've spun
10 new build images in the past two weeks. Jim Gettys and the entire
software team worked on an extensive set of release notes, which everyone
receiving machines should read carefully (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/BTest-1_Release_Notes).

6. Mitch Bradley, Richard Smith, and Chris Ball worked on making it simpler
to update machines to current firmware and software. With the completion of
the BTest-1 build and shipment of the machines, we need to have an easy way
to update all machines in the field—not only to enable keeping them up to
date, but to fix key bugs that were not fixed by the time we had to commit
to manufacturing. We now have a three-step update procedure that we believe
anyone should easily be able to perform using a small USB key. (This new
procedure will become available on Monday after final testing.) All the
developer systems in Cambridge will be updated and sent out quickly this
coming week, now that this is working (See:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Autoreinstallation_image).

7. Mitch released new firmware with look and feel improvements, wired-
networking support, manufacturing-data support, and a few bug fixes. The
firmware is now built from the public source tree; Mitch has started
working on scheme for storing keymaps in ROM.

8. Chis Ball started on performance work this week; first up will be
understanding the long activity-startup time, followed by establishing a
benchmark for Cairo and X- Window System performance, so we can keep track
of improvements. Performance will become an increasing focus of Chris'
time.

9. Lilian Walter has a version of memtest86 running using the open firmware
(OFW) memory property (instead of probing memory) and display driver. It is
by no means complete. It is a good proof of concept that existing
diagnostics can still run without EGA, UART, and BIOS, and with OFW at the
helm.

-walter

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