[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-07-15)

[Walter Bender]

1. Ivan Krstic met with Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg to 
discuss the adoption of a machine-readable back-end format for their 
catalog and works.

2. Matthew Garrett has recently suspended and resumed our A-Test board for 
the first time. Leveraging his efforts, we will now be able to measure 
suspend/resume times to determine if we need to do any additional 
engineering to implement our power-reduction scheme. 

3. Device drivers: We have in hand: (1) a functioning frame-buffer driver 
(fbdev) for the GX2; and (2) a system-management bus (SMBus).

4. System stress tester: Imram Akbar, a summer intern at OLPC, has made 
available the first version of a system exerciser based on the open-source 
stress-kernel originally written by Bob Matthews of Red Hat. Imram has 
extended the exerciser to load audio (and other parts of our system), for 
use in testing both our base software and hardware.

5. OLPC Interns Samat Jain and Jacob Rus have spent the last week working 
on performance experiments with embedding languages into a caching proxy 
system that we might have to build to support our content-delivery 
efforts.

6. Audio server: Barry Vercoe and Simon Schampijer have built such a 
network-transparent audio server from the CSOUND system that was the basis 
of Barry's recent music demos the laptop. Barry and Simon's networked 
music demos are now up and running at the OLPC office reception area.

7. Red Hat's Marco Gritti and Dan Williams have been working hard to 
convert the Sugar code to use Matchbox (a small-footprint window manager 
for embedded devices such as the Nokia 770) and libwnck (Red Hat's window- 
navigator construction kit) to manage activities. Marco has set up testing 
inside of Xephyr (a secure-virtual-harddrive-based X server) to simulate 
the OLPC environment, instead of just running applications on the desktop. 
Simon and Chris Blizzard discovered a variety of problems with the sound 
support in the daily image builds. They fixed the images and their changes 
will hopefully end up in image builds in a few days.


-walter

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