[Community-news] OLPC News (2007-01-27)

[Walter Bender]

1. Shanghai: The first 100 B2 laptops were assembled at the end of the
week at Quanta Shanghai. David Woodhouse, Jim Gettys, and Mary Lou
Jepsen are in Shanghai with Quanta squashing the bugs. Mitch Bradley,
Richard Smith, Chris Ball, and Andres Salomon have spun several
firmware releases in the past several days and provided invaluable
testing data that enable the builds on this tight schedule.

2. The new laptop.org website designed by Pentagram and powered by
Nurun was turned live this week. The new website is a welcome upgrade
from the one that was originally hobbled together last spring. Many
thanks to the teams at Pentagram and Nurun, as well as to Stephen
Michaud and Richard Rowe, who wrote much of the copy under a tight
deadline. Special thanks to Serge Rosilio of Nurun, who led the effort
from soup to nuts.

3. São Paulo and Porto Alegre: David Cavallo and Roseli de Deus Lopes
ran a workshop for teachers in São Paulo at the University of São
Paulo (USP) on Tuesday and Wednesday. David and Lea Fagundes ran
second workshop in Porto Alegre at the Federal University of Rio
Grande do Sul (UFRGS) on Thursday and Friday. José Luiz Aquino,
special advisor to President Lula, and OLPC advisor Rodrigo Mesquita
attended throughout. Antonio Battro spoke about the OLPC educational
concept; Sylvia Gonzales and Miguel Brechner, OLPC coordinators from
Uruguay, and Laura Serra and Alejandro Piscitelli, OLPC coordinators
from Argentina also presented.

4. Porto Alegre: Walter Bender met with the organizers of fisl8.0, the
8th annual international forum on free and open-source software. OLPC
has had a presence at the forum the last two years. We discussed the
possibility running sessions for both developers and educators. Since
one of the test schools for OLPC in Brazil will be in Porto Alegre,
the organizers are considering to showcase the kids using the OLPC
machines.

5. Last-minute B2 mods: This week was dominated by final issues
running up to the Beta-2 build of machines. There were a few
last-minute surprises, but the team worked through them. These
included:

Microphone problems. A new firmware update fixed problems with the
microphone 	that were discovered with the Beta-2 build. The firmware
was not properly detecting the B-2 board and hence was not setting a
mode correctly on the cs5536.

Power and charging problems. There are still a number of
battery-charging problems related to code in the embedded controller
(EC). A new release of the EC code fixed a number of the issues.

6. Wireless: Dan Williams attended a wireless summit in London. Lots
of people from the wireless world and Linux were in attendance. Intel,
Broadcom and CSR were represented, as well as Cozybit, who was
represented by Javier Cardona. (Javier and his colleagues have done a
lot of work for Marvell and OLPC.) Red Hat sent Dan and John Linville,
who is the upstream wireless maintained for the kernel. They discussed
specific issues about the code in the kernel, including how to share
more code and interfaces in the drivers. In the past, the drivers have
all had their own interfaces and work has been underway for quite a
while to unify them so that user space utilities will work better.

7. Sugar UI: Marco Gritti has been working hard to update Sugar to
support newer versions of some of our libraries. He has moved most of
the Sugar interface to support Python 2.5 (including support for
building Python 2.5 as part of our build process) and Gecko 1.9.
Python 2.5 is important for performance and startup issues and gives
more longevity to our platform. Gecko 1.9 is the underlying engine
that will be used in Firefox 3 and will be important because it will
give us more control over font sizes and image zooming. Our 200DPI
display needs a more flexible rendering system from the browser,
something they are building into Gecko 1.9.

8. Ricardo Medina and Walter Bender got Sugar opening its windows on a
remote display—mostly. While still buggy, this feature will be
especially useful for debugging—e.g., opening the Memphis window on
another laptop—and  projecting from a laptop by mapping to the display
to a conventional machine. More work is needed to smoothly integrate
this into Sugar, but it is a proof of principle nonetheless.

-walter

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