[Community-news] OLPC News (2007-01-13)

[Walter Bender]

1. Real Networks has funded a program at the Oregon State University's Open
Source Lab to be used for development of open-source multimedia capture,
editing, encoding  and playback software integrated with the OLPC platform.

2. Michail Bletsas reports that the XO was a major attraction in both the
AMD and Marvell booths at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). At the show
Marvell officially released its wireless firmware with full mesh
functionality. Many improvements will follow, however OLPC's mesh is the
first implementation of the emerging 802.11s standard.

3. This week has been a busy week finishing up work on the build for the B2
Test.  John Palmieri coordinated more than a dozen new releases (219-231).
Build 231 is the new stable release. The firmware version for B2 is going
to be Q2B20, barring surprises.  That version supports the new CAFE and
DCON chips, and has been tested with network booting for manufacturing
diagnostics. Please refer to
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Autoreinstallation_image for instructions on
reimaging the machine.

4. UI: This week we saw a lot of activity on the UI and in the builds. Some
of the more relevant UI fixes from this week include: (1) the Power Button
is now the way to shut the machine now—no more confusing power icon in the
frame; (2) mousing over launch icons in the frame now gives visual feedback
that they are buttons; (3) some activity startup blocking problems have
been fixed that make activity startup feel faster; and (4) some startup
feedback for activities—when you click on an icon, something happens
instead of a long pause that was causing people to repeatedly click,
launching multiple instances of an activity.

5. Geode multimedia extensions: Marco Gritti and Dan Williams discovered
that Cairo, the X Window System, and Mozilla were all failing to properly
detect MMX support in the Geode. Chris Ball enabled MMX support in those
libraries and are seeing some speedups as a result—graphics are faster (up
to 30% in some cases) and incur less CPU overhead.

6. X Window System: Adam Jackson and Jordan Crouse pushed out a few fixes
for the X server.  These include fixes in Xv (video support) RANDR
(rotation support) and a couple of minor crash fixes. We will be
associating rotation with a button on the bezel so that it can be enabled
from “ebook” mode.

6. Power budget: Richard Smith started to look at the power budget and
began to work out a plan for setting up a tinderbox that will be able to
measure all of the power rails on the new B2 boards in order to have an
automated test for power regressions. Lilian Walter worked on the exact
sequences required for controlling power on SD, camera, and several other
peripherals, and measured their power consumption.

7. Power management: Jordon Crouse using got the machine to successfully
suspend and turn off the VCORE_CPU rail. He also got it to wake up by
pressing the power button, which is more impressive then it sounds because
it means that the embedded controller (EC) is not getting confused by the
power state either.

8. Erik Blankinship and Bakhtiar Mikhak of MediaMods have nearly completed
the main camera activity for the OLPC system. It is being integrated into
the B2 software build. Dan and John have been assisting. In developing the
application Erik has uncovered a color-map problem that probably resides in
gstreamer. Jordan is adding RGB-source support to the X Video extension,
which may make the camera activity “happier”, but the gstreamer problem
needs to be fixed.

9. Keyboard LED: Andres completed the keyboard LED driver; after additional
cleanups, Andres merged the driver into our kernels.  We have working
keyboard LEDs in the latest builds.

10. Analog in: Andres has started testing the analog-input patches.

11. Sugar Activities: Thanks to everyone in the community who has been
contributing to the B2 build: new versions of TamTam, AbiWord, Etoys,
PenguinTV, are in B2 Test, along with a new camera activity.

12. James Cameron has continued rural (outback Australia) wireless testing
with impressive results.  As expected, the Laptop's antenna design makes a
significant difference in range (> 50%); Cameron has had two laptops
streaming audio in ad-hoc mode over a distance of 1.3km (See
http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2007-January/003616.html).

13. Journal: Ivan Krstić spent the week chasing out bugs in journal
compression and sparse storage and dealing with performance issues. One
challenge is that we want to store semi-structured information, but there
is no fast semi-structured database, let alone a free one. And while you
can generally wing it on fast servers by implementing a semi-structured
store backed by a standard relational database, the performance would kill
us on the laptops. Ivan's approach is to use a probabilistic filter that
continuously looks at what metadata the user is commonly using for all
files on the system. A nice thing about this approach is that it is
self-maintaining; the potential down side is that it could sometimes
misfire, so we have to be careful about choosing coefficients. The really
nice thing about this is that it enables us to do a resource description
framework (RDF) export of much of the journal.

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