[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-05-20)

[Walter Bender]

20 May 2006

1. The first 15 A-Test boards were successfully assembled and tested, and
are en route to OLPC's facility in Cambridge. 500 developer boards are
being assembled in Shanghai and will be shipped as they are tested. Several
enhancements have been made to these boards to make them more
“developer-friendly,” including the elimination of all known errata, the
addition of a reset switch, the inclusion of stand-offs for ESD prevention,
and individual packaging for simplified distribution. Wide-scale
distribution of the developer boards is expected by mid-June.

2. Chris Blizzard and the Red Hat team continued their work on the
distribution:

* The distribution continues to get smaller; it is now down to about 250MB
uncompressed (from 400MB last week). (With JFFS2 compression, we can expect
this to go down another 50%!) There is still low-hanging fruit left to pull
out of the image, including bitmap fonts we don't use (7MB), the X font
server (1MB) and Perl (30MB). Removing the fat out of other system
resources will require more effort. We'll continue to report on the
ever-shrinking distribution in the coming weeks.

* Work continued on the UI framework: Dan Williams made the local-network
multicast code more robust for demo purposes; Dan also added a simple
drawing mode to chat that lets you draw and share over the chat; Marco
Gritti implemented a web-sharing and -following demo, which highlights some
of the collaboration possibilities the chat and web interfaces.

* David Zeuthen spent time converting the image system to work with current
Raw Hide snapshots (Red Hat development versions that are released between
official versions of the OS). Some changes need to be made to create
working boot images with the current pre-A-Test boards. Most of these
changes have been wrapped up and are available in the Red Hat public
repository.

* David also modified the boot images so that they launch directly into the
UI framework, bypassing the login shell. This allows us to remove much of
the unused desktop framework from the images.

* Marcelo Tosatti and Peter Jones have been working on the Libertas driver
from Marvell, attempting to get it in shape for an upstream merge. This
includes style cleanups in order to match “upstream” style, removing unused
code, and the identification of a few potential bugs.

* David Woodhouse continues his work on the JFFS2 driver and the flash
driver. Good progress has been made on mount times of the filesystem, which
started at 20 seconds and has now dropped to about 10 seconds. David will
be merging a lot of this code into the upstream kernel over the next few
weeks.

3. Robert Fadel, Nia Lewis, Lindsay Petrillose, and Jill Clarke did an
outstanding job of bringing the new office space on line.

-walter

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