[Community-news] OLPC News (2007-01-06)

[Walter Bender]

1. Urugwiro Village: Rwanda committed to the one laptop per child
initiative this week. "In recognition of children being Rwanda’s most
precious natural resource, the government of Rwanda has committed to
provide one laptop per child to all primary school children within five
years."--H.E. President Paul Kagame

2. Mountain View: Chris Blizzard at spent time with Vladimir Vukicevic from
Mozilla Corporation, who has done much of the Cairo (Linux graphics
library) integration work with Gecko (Mozilla rendering engine). They
talked about particular OLPC needs: support for 200DPI, arbitrary zooming
of content, better performance and smaller size. Vladimir's claim was
“you're about a year too early.” Support for arbitrary zooming is now just
landing on the Mozilla trunk and will be stabilizing with the Gecko 1.9
branch and Firefox 3. The trunk already has better memory characteristics
and performance improvements.  Over time the engine will get a lot better,
probably really landing some time in mid to late 2007, somewhat late for
us. There's already support for flushing memory caches and it is just a
question of finding the right knobs in the engine to turn when we encounter
low-memory conditions.

3. Richard Smith, John Palmeri, Mitch Bradley, Chris Ball collaborated to
build a new stable image (Build 212) to correct a serious battery
overcharging problem using updated EC firmware from Quanta's team, and an
image (Build 213) produced for testing BTest-2 itself.  We are asking
everyone to upgrade to Build 212 (See
http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/build212/).

4. Mitch Bradley, using a tight Forth loop doing raw reads from the new
CAFE NAND, was able to achieve our target of 20 Mbytes/second transfers.
This is roughly 3 times the best performance we were able to get out of the
FPGA version.

5. Quanta got one of the pre-B2 boards working Friday night. (Ted Juan used
the word “booting” but didn't specify exactly what he meant.) Mitch has
showed Quanta how to boot over the net, and got their USB Ethernet dongle
working from the firmware.

6. Power management work is starting to pick up. Several people, including
Lillian Walter, Jordan Crouse, Matthew Garrett, Marcelo Tosatti, and Jim
Gettys are looking into various aspects of it. Lilian has begun compiling a
list of devices for which to provide power-management code: codec, CAFE,
SD, camera, NAND flash, keyboard, and touchpad.

7. Walter Bender has cleaned up all of the keyboard maps, along with
building a new keyboard map for Urdu. The “language key”—a feature unique
to the OLPC keyboard—is now enabled.

8. Chris Ball made improvements to two of the upstream
performance-measuring tools we use—Sysprof and Systemtap—and worked on
integrating Systemtap directly into the Tinderbox. Now that we have a wide
set of baseline measurements for performance, Chris will concentrate on
finding improvements.

9. Erik Blankinship, with help from the Red Hat team, has got the camera
activity taking pictures much, much faster now (<1sec). Redesign of the
activity is just about complete and the new version will be part of the
upcoming B2 build.

10. Ivan Kristić has set up Planet OLPC (See http://planet.laptop.org/).
The Atom feed is http://planet.laptop.org/atom.xml and Ivan will be
upgrading our MediaWiki installations in order to provide us with per-page
RSS feeds on the wiki. He'll then create a protected page called “Community
News,” and repost all community-news that to that page, whose RSS feed will
be syndicated on planet.

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