[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-10-14)

[Walter Bender]

1. Libya and OLPC signed an MOU in which they agreed to work together
towards the deployment of one OLPC laptop for every school-age child in
Libya and contributing laptops to poor African nations. OLPC will provide
the support needed by Libya to plan and carry out such a deployment. The
signing took place during a visit by Nicholas, Walter Bender, and Khaled
Hassounah, where they met with members of the newly formed OLPC4Libya
steering committee. The committee was presented with the outline of a
comprehensive plan to distribute the laptops, create connectivity and
server infrastructure, and prepare teachers and students. Libya will send a
team to the OLPC office in Cambridge to focus on software (Linux),
infrastructure, and education content.

2. Nicholas spoke to the International Federation of University Presidents
in Seoul on Thursday. Most Asian and many other universities were present.
The appeal of OLPC was obvious and the talk deeply appreciated.

3. Michail attended the WiMax World conference in Boston. Nortel made big
news in the show announcing their strong commitment to WiMax.

4. Display: The new dual-mode panels—with double the reflectance—were
hand-carried back by Mary Lou were installed successfully into the
motherboard-daughter card test-sets at OLPC. With work by Jim Gettys and
Walter Bender, preliminary optimal font size tests were started.  A 9-point
font (25 pixels) seems ideal for readability as a guideline for
development.

5. Taipei: Mark Foster has been working with the teams at Quanta, Marvell,
and the OLPC software team to bring up a new version of the CAFE chip on
the first OLPC “pre-B Test” motherboards. The boards are up and running, so
the teams are now concentrating on general debugging. The motherboards are
all running Linux, and all three of the CAFE subsystems (camera interface,
SD Card controller, and the NAND Flash controller), are available for
further driver development.

6. Additionally, samples of the latest Alps touchpad are also on their way
to the software team.  These samples include a newer touchpad controller
ASIC that is intended for final production, as well as containing the
unique OLPC keyboard code functionality.  This keyboard code, essentially a
superset of that used by conventional PCs, provides direct support for the
Sugar user interface, adds convenient shortcut keys, and enables OLPC's
unique "analog slider" function keys.

7. The OLPC document format spec rev2 has support for block macros,
granular tables of contents, and layout hinting. The format is named
“Crossmark,” and is believed to be highly suitable for (collaborative) book
writing and editing and use as an e-book format.

8. One month ago, without warning, Sun released Open Firmware under a BSD
license. After much deliberation, we reached the decision that rather than
continuing to use Linux itself as boot loader, we will transition to Open
Firmware (OFW), while retaining LinuxBIOS. The date for a transition has
not yet been set. Open Firmware has been in use on both Sun and PPC
hardware (e.g. Apple) for approaching a decade, and has shipped in quantity
millions. Mitch Bradley, currently working for OLPC is its original author.

9. Our firmware development process and strategy has crystallized, and is a
major relief to us all. Chris Ball has worked on our internal BIOS build
system and procedures, setting up a Xen virtual machine containing a stable
system for building the OLPC BIOS.  The build system has successfully built
LinuxBIOS with both Linux and Open Firmware as bootloaders. A release
process has been proposed and is being reviewed.

10. Chris has also established a tinderbox to enable continuous build
testing and performance testing of the OLPC system, from installing
firmware, booting, installation onto flash and ensuring the user interface
has started. We intend to add performance tests in the future (See
http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2006-October/002565.html).

11. Jon Corbet has RGB565 mode (or native mode) working in the camera
driver now. Jon will submit a new patch to the OLPC tree today. The camera
driver is getting close to completion. The remaining items are support for
image sizes other than VGA (which should be easy) and wiring up more
controls.

-walter

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