[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-12-23)

[Walter Bender]

1. Cambridge MA and Cambridge England: Chris Ball talked with Dafydd
Harries and Robert McQueen of Collabora, exchanging smooth audio and video
(15FPS) using the XO (See
http://www.robot101.net/2006/12/12/telepathy-and-olpc/).

2. Jean Piché and the TamTam team spent much of last week at OLPC in
Cambridge. They are making steady progress toward a comprehensive
three-stage music suite: a multi-voice instrument (an early version is
already part of the current build); a composition tool; and a synthesizer.
All three activities will be mesh-enabled, allowing children to create
synchronous multi-laptop music.

3. Performance metrics: Chris Ball prepared system-wide profiling data in
the build image for several hotspots: rendering a web page; starting a
Sugar activity; starting the X Window System. This profiling work will
guild our performance efforts.

4. Kernel/drivers: Andres Salomon hand-merged various Libertas fixes
(Marvell's wireless driver). He also enabled PREEMPT in our kernels; the
goal is to hopefully give the machine a more interactive feel, even when
the system is doing lots of work. This should make the people working with
sound applications happier as well, as they've been asking for a lower
latency kernel.

5. Firmware: Mitch Bradley reports that Q2A71 BIOS and firmware were
released this week.

6. Content repository: Ian Bicking spent two productive days at OLPC.  He
and SJ discussed our internal content repository and content
representations, and three related applications: (1) a public “web app”
interface to our repository; (2) internal interfaces to the same for system
administrators and children, and (3) the Journal interface. The upshot of
this is a developing draft of a definition of content and modules, use
cases for the repository, and a description of an external community site
and portal to support content collaboration (as a way of describing what
the repository is not doing and also motivation for anyone interested in
filling that gap).

7. Matthew Garrett posted a first patch at resume code for the OLPC for
comment and review.

8. James Cameron did some initial range tests of the mesh in the Australian
outback (See
http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2006-December/003240.html).

-walter

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