[Community-news] OLPC News (27-05-2006)

[Walter Bender]

27 May 2006

1. Mark Foster and the Quanta team unveiled the first functional prototype
of the  laptop this week. Pictures of the prototype, taken by Pete
Barr-Watson, were posted on Flickr; (http://www.flickr.com/photos/pete/).
The response was electric, setting off a new wave of blogger and mainstream
press coverage. Note that the display used in the prototype is 25% smaller
and of much lower resolution—800 x480 rather than 1200x900—than the display
that will be actual machine!

2. A two-day meeting was held at OLPC for representatives from the launch
countries. This was the first meeting held in the new OLPC office space in
Cambridge. The first day's agenda was focused on “learning learning.” Day
Two's agenda targeted issues of deployment. In attendance were
representatives from Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, and Nigeria.
Guests included Clotilde Fonesca from the Omar Dengo Foundation in Costa
Rica, Bette Manchester from the Maine Laptop Program, Hal Abelson and Pete
Barr-Watson from Creative Commons, and Andres Chisco from Brightstar.

We conveyed a sense of convey a sense of excitement about how this is
project is totally different from than anything that has come before;
fostered an understanding of how the laptop can be transformative to
society in many ways, not just to school; and shared deployment strategies
and experiences to maximize everyone's opportunities for success. One
concrete outcome is to explore the possibility of developing a new Creative
Commons license that gives children unrestricted rights to content.

3. Brightstar and Quanta have completed most of the preparations for
distribution of A-Test developer boards, which have already been
manufactured and are currently in “debug.” These will be distributed to
developers over the next few weeks.

4. Jim Gettys attended Debconf, the Debian Linux developer's conference
outside Mexico City last week. (Debian Linux is community developed and
particularly popular in many parts of the developing world.) He gave a
presentation on OLPC and he also exposed some of the challenges we face to
the Internationalization BOF gathering, hoping it might spur some serious
rethinking of the issues of scale that a world-wide OLPC deployment will
force.

5. Red Hat's David Woodhouse reports that mount times for flash have
dropped to a flat 7 seconds. He has also been iterating back and forth with
a contributor to add xattr (extended file sytem) support to JFFS2. This
will give us the capability of supporting security-enhanced Linux (SELinux)
on the filesystem, which will give us much greater flexibility for a
security architecture, if we should choose to use it.

6. Marcelo Tosatti has been working on getting kexec working with upstream
kernels, which will allow a kernel from the BIOS to boot directly into
another  kernel loaded from the on-board flash. (kexec is a set of systems
call that allows the loading of another kernel from the currently executing
Linux kernel.) Marcelo has gotten a kexec to work with an on-flash kernel.

7. David Zeuthen has images building on the Red Hat external build server.
We're hoping that beginning some time next week we'll be able to publish
daily builds. The images will be needed to test the boards that the
task-force teams just took home.

8. Peter Jones, lead engineer on the installer at Red Hat, spent a day at
the OLPC office investigating problems with the Fedora Core installer on
the A-Test board. He fixed a number of serious bugs and, as of twenty-four
hours ago the installer appears to work without modifications.

9. The rest of the Red Hat desktop team spent most of the week getting
demos ready for meetings; they added working “buddy icons” and drawing to
the chat interface. The team did a superb job of pulling together a
demonstration of the “Sugar” environment together on the A-Test boards.

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