[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-06-11)

[Walter Bender]

1. Human power: We had a design review for human power in Cambridge this
week. We continue to pursue off-board solutions, having made the decision
to move this subssytem to the AC adapter. We are looking at multiple
offering: both crank and pulley systems.

2. Mark Foster, Mary Lou Jepsen, and Rebecca Allen met with Fuseproject to
finalize system dimensions: the enlarged LCD (7.5") was integrated with no
increase in system width and only a slight (~1/3") increase in height. We
are investigating some ABS-elastomer mixtures that should yield a more
robust system, while incorporating a “child-friendly” soft touch.

3. Walter Bender shared the stage with Leapfrog at the Association of
Educational Publishers (AEP) annual meeting in Washington, DC. A call was
made to content creators, collectors, and archivists, to suggest
educational content for inclusion with the laptops.

4. Our developer boards cleared US customs and are awaiting distribution by
Brightstar in Miami. The boards will begin to be distributed to developers
this coming week. (See http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php/Developers_Program)

5. Red Hat's David Zeuthen has the Fedora-derived OLPC distribution
building routinely from source. Chris Blizzard has set up links to the
daily images being built  for the A-Test boards. These images are
automatically generated and reflect the latest version of the core
development platform. The documentation on how to install Fedora on the
boards is available at http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php/Software.

6. A problem in the current Linux audio driver for the AD 1888 codec was
identified and fixed through the combined efforts of Red Hat's Marcelo
Tosatti, David Woodhouse, and Chris Blizzard. The fix has been rolled into
Fedora kernel so that Rawhide (the ongoing build of the next Fedora system)
packages will “just work.” Initial tests indicate that the OLPC audio is of
very high quality.

7. Jaya Kumar, the original author of the AMD CS5535/6 audio driver,
reports from Malaysia progress with the current accelerated Xorg X Window
System driver on the  hardware, including Xv video support and a variety of
codecs and audio. He is seeing good audio/video synchronization without
frame dropping at full frame rate.

8. The CSOUND audio synthesizer software is running on the A-Test boards;
Barry Vercoe and his team are busy preparing for his keynote address at
Worldcomp06. As part of a demo, they are working on various input devices:
USB MIDI devices (e.g., keyboards); and realtime analog input (for voice
processing). Miller Puckette will recreate a conducting system using a
photo diode plugged into the laptop's direct analog input (a sub-$1 baton).

9. Red Hat's Diana Fong has created some UI mockups, including a new GTK
theme (See http://people.redhat.com/dfong/olpc/). Marco Gritti and Dan
Williams are currently working on some elements of these designs, including
a floating “presence” window. Our software focus remains: a sense of
presence, document creation, and expression. More information can be found
at http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php/SugarDesignReview2.

-walter

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