[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-10-21)

[Walter Bender]

1. Brazil: The presidency has created a new working group inside the
Ministry of Education to focus solely on laptops and learning. The group is
comprehensive, covering all the necessary departments: basic education;
teacher and content development; technology; distance support; and
integration and coordination. This group will coordinate all activities
needed for the deployment of laptops.

2. Michail Bletsas and Barry Vercoe gave a 20-minute progress report in the
Media Lab's Digital Life sponsor meeting followed by a flawless performance
of Barry's laptop ensemble. OLPC monopolized the audience's questions and
overly positive feedback.

3. Display: Acceptance-criteria testing for the LCD panels began this week.
Various display artifacts were combined to create worst-case panel
configurations. These panels were graded by Mary Lou. Most artifacts were
barely (if at all) noticeable. More detailed acceptance criteria will be
established (called fitness-of-use testing) in mid-November with materials
from the B1 build.

4. This week Marcelo Tosatti and Dan Williams continued work on the Marvell
Libertas driver, trying to get it into shape to use in B1. This requires
getting enough things working to be able to use it with NetworkManager, one
of the standard Linux utilities. The driver, as it came from Marvell, is
adequate for embedded platforms, but isn't ready for desktop use. A lot of
work has gone into getting things into shape. Dan and John Palmieri also
spent time  building a NetworkManager front end for B1.

5. Dan also worked with the Thai team to get a group of demos together to
take back with them (they returned home after a three-week stay at OLPC).

6. Marco Gritti and Dan have done a huge amount of work over the last
couple of weeks on Sugar, getting ready for the B1. The shell is working
pretty well and the browser activity has a lot of the nice style elements
that Eben Eliason and the Pentagram team have worked on. They also have
some group-browsing functions done. The Sugar frame now supports the system
tray spec, so other programs can embed icons and functionality into the
frame. We'll use this for our network and power status at some point.

7. Chris Blizzard reports that the team is generating builds at 4PM every
day. The team at Red Hat is adding their daily work, as appropriate, to
those builds. This means that we can test drivers, package updates and
changes every morning when we come in. It has also set internal deadlines
so that everyone integrates around the same time.

8. We've also started to include a newer D-Bus to our builds to fix a
number of bugs and a newer copy of HAL which saves a lot of memory and is
much faster.

9. Mitch cleaned up the SPI (system programming interface) recovery code,
merged it with the in-system re-flashing code in OFW, and tested it. In the
process of testing CAFE NAND support, Mitch solidified support in the OFW
code base and developed some diagnostics for the NAND chips themselves.

10. Chris Ball has set up a software stress-test environment and has run it
on each of the configurations of our boards, helping to expose an
unreliable RAM part, which has now been disqualified from our second-source
parts list. The tinderbox has its first performance test, tracking general
Python performance for each of our OS builds. The tinderbox will also be
used for stress testing of the B1 board in the coming week.

11. Multi-media: Scott Nelson and Greg Wright from Real Networks performed
detailed testing of an A1 board. While their findings were “a result of
only a few days research and therefore should not be considered final or
complete,” they nonetheless give an idea of the lower bound of the laptop's
capabilities, which will only improve. Their conclusion: the device is “a
capable multi-media platform for everything short of high bit-rate video
content and large frame sizes.”

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