[Community-news] OLPC News (2007-02-17)

[Walter Bender]

1. B2 machines began arriving in Cambridge at the end of the week.
We've begun shipping several hundred machines to developers and
partners.

2. David Cavallo reports that the Uruguayan government and IDRC hosted
a two-day meeting in Montevideo for countries in the region intending
to implement one-laptop-per-child initiatives. Attending were
representatives from Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and
Costa Rica. Countries presented their plans and discussed pragmatics
of deployment. Significantly all of the countries know 1:1 must be
achieved.

3. Barcelona: Michail Bletsas demonstrated the laptop at the
Brightstar booth at 3GSM World Congress.

4. Performance: Red Hat's Marcelo Tosatti was in Cambridge this week.
He spent time looking at Geode-specific speedups of core functions of
the operating system. Although they did not offer the improvements
promised, he will continue to look at them for inclusion as they might
have a larger impact on other Geode hardware. He also explored the
Psyco Python compiler. It speeds up some benchmarks by as much of 3×,
but it is not yet clear how it affects our real- world applications.
We have to do more measurements.

5. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso has joined the Sugar team. This week he
started work on some re-usable UI controls for use in activities and
spent some time on the front end of the journal. Marco Gritti spent
time working on the journal design and looking at animation
performance on the machine. Parts of the front end of the journal are
starting to come together and are included in the latest builds.

6. Sugar Tutorial: Between working on builds and fixing memory leaks
in some of our Python binding, John Palmieri "Sugarized" a Tetris-like
activity for the laptop written by Vadim Gerasimov. John plans to will
use this a as the basis for a tutorial on how to create a Python-based
activity for the laptop.

7. School server: John Watlington is joining OLPC to head our School
Server project; he will also be helping out on completing the
Generation-1 system until a hardware architect can be found.

8. Firmware: Richard Smith released Q2B73, which includes improved
battery-charging embedded contoller (EC) code from Quanta and many
Open Firmware (OFW) improvements. Since Mitch Bradley was in Cambridge
all week, he and Richard spent much time working on firmware
improvements; notably some OFW code that lets us look at all the
public EC battery RAM variables. (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_Q2B73)

Mitch found the residual MSR problems with the fast-boot startup. The
EHCI (enhanced host-controller interface) works, B2 works, and DCON
(display controller) works: all systems go for resume from RAM
testing. Mitch also found and fixed a DMA boundary-crossing problem in
the OFW SD driver. The same problem also exists in the Linux SD
driver. Andres Salomon is fixing it there. Lilian Walter continues
work on the WPA/WPA2 (Wi-Fi protected access) supplicant
functionality; the firmware wireless driver is ready for preliminary
integration, but it has not yet appeared in a firmware build.

10. Kernel and base system work: Andres also worked this week with
Mitch and Jordan Crouse debugging kernel support for the virtual
socket architecture (VSA)-less firmware. Andres also merged Marcelo's
cleaned-up libertas driver into an experimental kernel. Linus Torvalds
has merged dynticks into the kernel, so Andres started merging in
2.6.20-rc1.

11. Python: Chris Blizzard, John, and Marco exploring a non-fPIC
Python 2.5 to use in our build; the current plan is to wait for a new
stable image next week, and then move to the Fedora 7 versions of the
Python tools, compiled with our compiler flags, but Fedora's source
code. This would mean we do not have to maintain a set of Python
sources ourselves. We expect that Python 2.5, compiled with correct
compiler flags, will speed up our application startup time, perhaps by
as much as a factor or two.

12. Media: Erik Blankinship reports that he has the mplayer plugin
working in the XO browser playing back ogg-theora successfully.

12. Keyboard: Walter Bender has been working with Ted Selker, Bret
Recor, and Eben Eliason on some fine-tuning of the keyboard for B3. We
are exploring enlarged keycaps, tapering of the keycaps, and some
slight modifications of the keycap legends. Eben and Bret have also
reworked the graphics for the game-controller buttons.

-walter

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