[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-11-18)

[Walter Bender]

1. Many put in Herculean efforts and as scheduled the first build of X0 was
begun on Tuesday afternoon November 14th. About 35 operators assembled the
laptops with the over-site of the entire technical team from Quanta and
Mark Foster and Mary Lou Jepsen from OLPC and David Woodhouse from Red Hat
on hand. The first laptop was started with its motherboard, and ran most of
the way through the line alone —with every operator idle except for the
one, each operator successively doing his or her job. After Laptop #1 had
made it through about 20 operators, Laptop #2 was started. 221 laptops were
built on Tuesday and an additional 600 units on Thursday; many are still in
run-in and final test.

2. As part of the follow up of last week's meeting, the IADB and OLPC
issued a press release regarding strategic areas of common interest: (a)
regional and national policy dialog regarding adopting a new approach to
the use of computers in education; (b) technical assistance; (c) design and
support for evaluation activities; (d) content development tailor-made to
the 1-to-1 learning environment; (e) design of effective strategies to
integrate individual computer devices in the daily lives of children, both
at home and in school; and (f) design of effective approaches to supporting
schools and teachers implementing 1-to-1 computing programs.

2. New York: Nicholas delivered a presentation at the closing session of
the United Nations' International Forum on the Eradication of Poverty on
Thursday. The session included Prof. Iqbal Quadir, Founder of Grameen phone
and currently the Director, Program in Developmental Entrepreneurship at
MIT.

3. Santa Clara: Walter Bender gave a talk at the Silicon Valley Challenge
Summit and demonstrated the laptop to the public—its first public showing.

4. Cambridge: OLPC held an all-hands meeting to review B1 status and
organize our selves for the next phase of development, initial testing, and
deployment. All aspects of the system were given a thorough review and
critique.

5. The arrival of the machines has accelerated the software.  We can
finally see the fonts, test the keyboard, and feel the performance. We've
already fixed a number of small bugs this week and will be able to make an
update BIOS and OS image release for people to use on the B1 machines.

In short: we shipped a BIOS, a bootloader, embedded-controller code, a
working Linux system with support for all devices, a new user-interface
environment, along with a web browser, music programs, network manager,
chat program, and word processor.

In thanking all of those who have contributed to this effort, we undoubted
missed someone; our apologies for those whom we fail to mention below.

The BIOS, EC code, and bootloader were brought to you by Mitch Bradley, Ted
Juan, Vance Ke, Arvin Liu, Ron Minnich, Richard Smith, Lilian Walter, Tom
Sylla, Terry Su, Ray Tseng, and the LinuxBIOS team.

The base system was brought to you by the team of Chris Ball, Michail
Bletsas, Chris Blizzard, Javier Cardona, Brian Cavagnolo, Ronak Chokshi,
John Corbett, Alan Cunningham, Jordan Crouse, Marco Gritti, Jim Gettys,
Zephaniah Hull, Ivan Krstić, Adam Jackson, Jaya Kumar, Pierre Ossman, John
Palmieri, Luis Carlos Cobo Rus, Andres Salomon, Marcelo Tosatti, Dan
Williams, Dave Woodhouse, David Zeuthen and the Linux and free and open
software community as a whole.

The window system and user interface toolkit brought to you by Jordan
Crouse, Zephaniah Hull, Adam Jackson, Jim Gettys, the X Window System,
GTK+, Gstreamer, and Cairo communities, along with Manu Cornet, and Matthew
Allum.

Abiword for kids brought to you by Erik Blankinship, Justin Gallardo, J.M.
Maurer, Martin Sevior and the Abiword community.

CSound brought to you by Barry Vercoe, Rick Boulanger, Simon Schampijer,
and the CSound community.

EToys brought to you on OLPC by Bert Freudenberg, Alan Kay, Yoshiki
Ohshima,  Andreas Raab, Kim Rose, and the entire EToys and Squeak
community. Our thanks to Steve Jobs for relicensing Squeak.

PenguinTV brought to you by Owen Williams and the Gecko rendering engine of
Mozilla.

Sugar brought to you by Walter Bender, Chris Blizzard, Eben Eliason, Marco
Pesenti Gritti, and Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Schmidt, and the team from
Pentagram.

Sugar's web browser is based on the Gecko rendering engine of the Mozilla
foundation.

TamTam and Memosono brought to you by Douglas Ec, Nathanaël Lécaudé,
Bélanger Olivier, and Jean Piché.

Xbook broght to you by Tomeu Vizoso, Manusheel Gupta, and the Popplar team.

Orchestration by Walter Bender, Jim Gettys, and Chris Blizzard.

-walter

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