[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-11-05)

[Walter Bender]

1. Mark Foster happily reports that the DCON ASIC is up and running, and
first pass silicon is fully functional. While the chip has a few bugs that
will be corrected for future builds—including higher power consumption than
planned—we will be able to exercise all the planned capabilities of the
chip on the B1 systems.

2. Mark also reports that the CAFE (Camera and Flash Enabler) FPGA is now
fully functional, with all three of the device subsystems working
flawlessly. The camera, SD card slot, and NAND Flash controllers have not
only been tested, they are fully integrated into the OLPC Linux kernel,
with complete device drivers also working perfectly. Performance on the
crucial NAND Flash controller—the laptop's primary storage device—is
already much faster than that of the Geode, and will double again when the
CAFE ASIC arrives. Many thanks to the great work by the CAFE team at
Marvell, as well as the software team who pulled off the necessary device
drivers in record time.

3. For B1 we plan to use a Linux 2.6.19 OLPC kernel with a Red Hat Fedora
Core 6 run-time environment; this is lower risk than combining our own work
with Fedora changes that might affect us that would not be of benefit.

4. Chris Blizzard reports that this was an exciting week for the software
team. On the UI front we've had a lot of progress. Marco Gritti has moved
from working on the shell and presentation bits to getting ready to start
taking community contributions. This means starting on the parts of the
code that allow anyone to build and deploy an activity that they have
built.

The B1 build will include basic support for:

Chat
Web Browser
Demo Sketching Program
Etoys
TamTam (for creating sounds)
Musical Memory Game
Xbook PDF reader

Community work going on as well: we are starting to see activity builds of
Abiword (a popular document editor and our probably route to supporting
Microsoft document types), and an RSS reader called PenguinTV.

5. Chris also reports that we made a lot of positive changes in the OS
images this week as well. We've moved from the upstream Fedora kernels to
our own builds to enable closer collaboration and faster turn around on
builds.  This won't work over the long term but it has enabled us to work
faster and smarter in our current mode of development.

6. Crossmark, OLPC's lightweight markup language, has a dual purpose: in
the strict sense, it's a markup for (collaborative) authoring environments
such as our wiki and blogs; at the same time, it serves as an actual
document format, suitable for use in the e-book reader, as well as for
conversion to other output formats. Crossmark is designed to be read and
written by humans, and only incidentally by computers, although it is
parsable unambiguously. Crossmark draft-4 has received positive feedback
from community and publishers, mostly trivial changes and clarifications
are being incorporated into what will become draft-5 next week.

-walter

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