[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-10-28)

[Walter Bender]

1. Khaled Hassounah worked this week on identifying the issues facing
Arabic support in Sugar and then coordinated with Marco Gritti to apply the
required fixes. As of Build 131, it is possible to use Arabic not just in
the browser, but the whole sugar interface; it looks beautiful.

2. All eyes on Taiwan: The primary focus of the team this week has been on
the last-minute debugging of the hardware and software in preparation for
the production of B1 machines. Engineers from Quanta, Marvell, AMD, Red
Hat, Himax, and OLPC are working around the clock to meet the goal of an
early November run of 1000 machines.

3. Nicholas Nicholas was the keynote for Forrester's annual Consumer Forum,
the theme of which for this year was: “Using Technology to Empower the
Masses.” Offers of corporate help have poured in since.

4. Mary Lou keynoted the mLearn mobile learning conference in Banff. This
is the crowd that thinks cellphones, PDAs and the ilk are the way to cross
the digital divide. Their response to the presentation: they'd like to
ditch their cell phones and start writing and working with the laptop.

5. Chris Blizzard presented at the Seneca Free Software and Open Source
Symposium. His talk was taped and will be made available on the web.

6. Wireless: Marcelo Tosatti has been working with Ronak Chokshi and others
of Marvell to update Marvell's driver development environment to that we
use for development, and to integrate code from Marvell into the wireless
driver for reprogramming the Marvell chip wireless firmware. As of late
Friday, this code was seen to work in the Libertas wireless driver we are
using.

7. Embedded Controller code: Ray Tseng of Quanta has provided several new
versions of the EC code this week to help fix problems with power on and
with battery charging.

8. Camera: The CAFE FPGA implementation of the camera is now working. Jon
Corbet has restructured the driver to meet the requirements of the V4L2
maintainer. QVGA mode is working (which, among other things, means that
XawTV, an X application for watching television, now works); CIF and QCIF
require some register “magic” that we don't yet understand, which Jon has
asked Omnivision to clarify. Some new controls are wired up, including
horizontal and vertical flip. Nobody had yet noticed that the image was
mirrored, including Jon, until adding the flip option showed it was wrong
all this time.

9. NAND flash: Dave Woodhouse's NAND flash driver is complete now, and has
uncovered several problems in the CAFE implementation which have been
fixed. It now works well enough that the BTest systems are able to boot
from CAFE NAND flash, and ECC has been implemented.

10. BIOS: Wednesday, we had no fully functioning BIOS for use with CAFE. We
had intended to use LinuxBIOS with Linux as bootloader for B1 with a
transition to Open Firmware (OFW) as bootloader before B2. We continued
with both possibilities in parallel, such that by Friday we had both
working. Testing of OFW's new USB stack has succeeded, so we have decided
to use OFW immediately. Our efforts will now focus on the LinuxBIOS/OFW
combination.

11. Battery driver: A preliminary version of a battery driver was checked
in by Dave Woodhouse; what is remaining is interrupt-driven detection of
state changes in the battery, to avoid polling. Dave is working in the
Linux community to define a new battery interface, as battery kernel
interface(s) in Linux is a mess and people are looking for a better design
to standardize around.

12. Sugar UI: Dan Williams has made progress with getting NetworkManager
working on the laptop and fitting it to the designs that Eben Eliason and
Marco Gritti have been working on to control networking.  Marco is adding a
new build nearly every day to the image snapshots, reflecting the fast pace
of work.

13. We've had some additions to our builds which will make the
out-of-the-box experience for the beta builds a lot better. eToys is now
part of the image builds and Dan has been doing a lot of work trying to get
Barry Vercoe's Csound package into the build as well. (Barry was successful
in getting real-time pitch tracking through the microphone input working on
the laptop this week!)

14. We are working hard to create a rich-text editor based on the code from
a popular free-software program called Abiword. There's also work being
done to finish the Sugar port of the PDF reader Evince by Marco and
Manusheel Gupa (a summer intern). It feels like we've reached a tipping
point with the user interface.

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