[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-06-17)

[Walter Bender]

1. Jean Piché and two of his students from Université de Montréal, Olivier
Bélanger and Sean Wood, came to OLPC to demonstrate Tam Tam, an environment
for making music and sound intended for deployment on CM-1.
Tam Tam promises to provide an audio/music experience that is instantly
rewarding for a musically naïve user; turns the laptop into a playable
musical instrument with its own “sound”; provide a dynamically adaptable
learning environment that welcomes complexity; makes use of mesh networking
to encourage collaborative music making; and introduce notions of audio and
music programming.

2. The developer's program has been kicked off. 485 boards were shipped by
Quanta to Brightstar, and distribution of boards started this week in
earnest. Our thanks to Brightstar for their help in shipping, and Quanta
for moving so quickly on the antennae. A wide range of developers have
requested boards. Most of the boards that have already been requested
should be in developer's hands by sometime next week. Volunteers come from
Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, China, India, U.S., Finland, Norway, Canada,
Germany, U.K., Australia, Romania, Chile, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Hungary,
and Malaysia. Brazil is second only to the U.S. in numbers of requests.

3. Sugar development continues by the Red Hat team, working towards a demo
at GUADEC—a week-long conference that draws together most of the industry's
GNOME developers. About 100 people will discuss the future of the Free
Desktop in Barcelona. We are basing a very large percentage of our platform
on GNOME technologies, and there has been a huge amount of interest from
that community in OLPC. Chris Blizzard and Jim Gettys will distribute
boards to key contributors while everyone is together.

4. Keyboard Illumination: We have decided to add two LEDs to the laptop to
illuminate the keyboard. This is important for non-touch typists. In
Cambodia the laptops are not just figuratively the brightest light source
in the house, they are also literally that and the LEDs may prove useful in
this way as well.

5. Walter Bender and SJ Klein, a physicist turned Wikipedian, are working
on an RFP for Content. The gist of the call to content creators,
collectors, and archivists is to solicit educational content for inclusion
with the laptops. We are, of course, particularly interested in material
produced for children, in multiple languages, and available under a
free-content license. The goal is both to shake more content loose from
publishers and to provide some structure for the variety of material being
offered to us for use on the laptop.

6. Ivan Krstic reports we are now able to host software projects. Our
preferred source code management tool is Git, originally developed by Linus
Torvalds and used by both the Linux kernel and X Window System communities.
We also track bug reports in the Trac system.

-walter

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