[Community-news] OLPC News (2006-09-02)

[Walter Bender]

1. Jim Gettys reports that on Thursday we released our first integrated
software build, bringing together the fruits of months of labor by
contributors all over the world—individuals and the teams working at AMD,
Marvell, Red Hat, and OLPC.

The release includes:

LinuxBIOS;
using Linux as a bootloader;
the GX framebuffer console device driver;
the “AMD” Enterprise X Architecture (EXA) X Window System driver with early
support for alpha blending;
native Linux support for updating the BIOS flash;
JFFS2 file system support for the internal flash;
the Marvell wireless driver; and
a very early version of the Sugar user-interface framework.

As a result, the A-Test boards can now function as a complete computer
system, without need of an external disk or flash key. Our particular
thanks to Richard Smith and Ron Minnich of the Linux BIOS project, and
Jordan Crouse of AMD for this work.

2. Another software milestone is also in sight: Mark and the team begin
working with Marvel this week on the CAFE hardware/software debug. Rapid
progress is being made: Mitch Bradley can perform DMA transfers to an SD
memory card and Dave Woodhouse has use it to successfully mounted a JFFS
file system.

3. As OLPC document format discussions proceed, Ivan Krstić spoke with
Chuck Smith at Heilbronn University. Chuck lead a session at the recent
WikiSym '06 conference that attempted to provide a standardized alternative
document format that could be implemented in all major wiki software. The
developers of eight popular wiki engines, among them the one that powers
Wikipedia, have agreed to implement support for this new format—dubbed
WikiCreole. This format overlaps significantly with the format Ivan is
designing for OLPC, so we have decided to make WikiCreole a strict subset
of the OLPC document format. Minor changes to both formats have already
been incorporated as a result of the collaboration; work continues.

4. Clotilde Fonseca, the executive director of the Omar Dengo Foundation in
Costa Rica, re-affirmed their interest and excitement to bring the 2B1
machine to the region. The Foundation in the past few years has begun
providing support throughout the region in addition to their almost 20
years of work providing world-class support for computers in schools, as
well as using computers for community development, micro-enterprise
creation, and support for democracy. Clotilde also worked with us to plan
for development of new content for schools in Spanish to take advantage of
the immersive presence of laptops.

5. David Cavallo spoke to more than 60 people from the Omar Dengo
Foundation staff and “assessores,” the people who go to schools to provide
teachers professional development and help instantiate powerful learning
environments. He presented the OLPC machine and vision and also discussed
ideas around laptops and learning, and how a 1:1 approach with connected
laptops brings new opportunities. Originally scheduled for two hours, the
session was brought to a close after four hours only so that participants
could catch their buses home.

6. Zephaniah Hull continues work on the touch pad drivers and should have
samples in the next few days. He has the Linux evdev (event-based) kernel
driver for the touch pad completed. The X Window System implementation to
support the touch pad still has bugs he is currently tracking down and
eliminating.

-walter

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