[Community-news] OLPC News 2007-07-14

[Walter Bender]

Congratulations to Chris Blizzard who welcomed home his new daughter,
Samantha Snow Blizzard.

1. Intel became the newest member of OLPC this week.

2. Michail Bletsas attended Cisco's ConnectFest event at their Bay
Area campus. It was organized by a group within Cisco with a strong
interest towards the development of low cost, robust networking
solutions for the developing world and was attended by a variety of
people active in the area (Intel TIER lab, Meraki, Inveneo, Green
WiFi, et al.).

3. Trial-2: This week completes integration of major features for
Trial-2. Kernels in our Fedora-Core-7-based builds include a new X
driver, our power management work, and VServer. Code freeze will begin
on Monday; we will triage all bugs to minimize the change to the code
base; we aim for a final Release Candidate at the end of this upcoming
week. The goal for next week is to reach stability and to be able to
demonstrate: collaboration, Journal, activation, mesh connectivity,
and suspend/resume.

4. Testing: Each new build is now subject to much testing. (Please
refer to the test-group release notes when deciding to download a
build that isn't stable yet:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Group_Release_Notes.)

5. Sugar: Red Hat's Dan Winship also joins the Sugar team this week.
He'll be working on builds while John Palmieri is on vacation; Dan has
been working on Sugar bug-fixes.

Tomeu Vizoso refactored removable devices support in the Journal for
robustness to support manual mount and unmount and physical removal of
devices before unmount. He test the performance of the data store
inside Sugar (the new one is much faster); the new data store now only
indexes meta data, not file contents while Ben Saller gets the
asynchronous content-indexing working again. Ben refactored large
pieces of the data store and the data store's dependencies for
performance improvements. This work has resulted in much needed
performance improvements to the Journal.

Marco Gritti packaged various Sugar pieces for builds and continued to
hunt down and fix Sugar bugs. He also wrote new introductory screen
for Sugar.

6. Presence: Simon McVittie worked on medium- and long-term
improvements to the dbus Python language bindings and made some
short-term fixes. He also fixed a problem with Presence Service
slowness (#1874 and #1927) and missing XO buddy names (#1967).

Sjoerd Simons has been testing and bug fixing in Salut (XMPP Link
Local)—XMPP is the extensible messaging and presence protocol used in
Sugar activity communication. He has hunted down some problems with
Avahi service discovery and helped Guillaume Desmottes in designing
some XMPP stream-manager improvements in Salut (for supporting
streaming in tubes).

Morgan Collett finished the "buddy-left" code in the Sugar Mesh View.
and reviewed and merged some of Simon's Presence Service patches. He
updated the Connect and Chat Activity releases for builds and he made
a fix to Gabble to stop it trying to use IRC. He is looking into
Presence Service performance and Salut issues.

Dan Williams made many NetworkManager testing and fixes for mesh
beacons, DHCP, link-local presence support. He also tested a fix for
the camera-driver delay and pulled in a new gstreamer release.

7. Content distribution and updates: H.T. Kung's group at Harvard is
working on a content distribution system for ad-hoc networks that
utilizes network coding. The practical benefit of their approach is
that distributing a large file among a number of laptops in a mesh
network always completes within a determined amount of time, something
not possible without network coding due to the inherent limitations of
the wireless medium. They used 29 XOs to test their approach in
Harvard's Soldier's Field during the hottest day of the summer. The
XOs performed flawlessly!

Alexander Larsson has been working on restructuring the "Updationator"
repository format so that manifests are also stored as blobs. He
created a repository at http://olpc.download.redhat.com and tested
various upgrades of laptops from that. Updatinator 0.1 is in builds
for testing.

8. Sugar activities: Marc Maurer has made numerous fixes to the
collision handling in "AbiCollab", the collaboration extensions to
Abiword, AKA "Write" on the XO. It seems to now be quite robust, even
on high-latency networks. Please test it. In the Write Activity
itself, Marc has fix a problem with the font name/size combo-boxes;
implemented a color-selection button that follows the cursor context;
fix the insert-table button; and added a total page count to the View
menu.

Bert Freudenberg has been keeping pace with the changes in Sugar and
has been producing a series of working .xo bundles of Etoys. Takashi
Yamamiya and Ted Kaehler are working on the keyboard shortcuts that
match with Sugar's conventions. Copy and paste also works due to
Takashi's effort. Takashi also brought his ODE binding of Squeak up to
date and made it compatible with the OLPC Etoys.  Adjustment of
buttons and menus are being made by Yoshiki Ohshima and Scott Wallace.
Ian Piumarta, Bert, and Yoshiki are working on resolving a low-memory
situation (that occurs on the B2-1 machines, which have only 28MB of
DRAM). Ted, Kim Rose, Rebecca Cannara and Alan Kay continue on making
more examples and demonstrations.

Arjun Sarwal has made further improvements to the Measure Activity,
which utilizes the microphone and analog data ports of the XO as input
to a graphing program. He has added buttons for three frequency
ranges; features for logging data and writing it onto a file and
drawing a graph based on the logged data have been tested in emulation
and will be soon tested on an XO. In testing the Activity, Arjun
discovered that one can use the built-in microphone to directly
measure one's pulse.

Eben Eliason and Manusheel Gutpa have been working with Irene Ficheman
and the team from NATE-LSI (Integrated Systems Laboratory), in the
Polytechnical School at University of São Paulo on a new Draw Activity
for the XO that utilizes the new Sugar tabs and styles.

Miguel Álvarez did more work on the shared-state implementation and
the Calculate activity, which now supports algebraic variables to do
calculations such as: apples = 18; bananas = 12; price = 3×apples +
4×bananas.

Eben and Muriel de Souza Godol have been integrating the memory
game(s) into the new Sugar collaboration schema to allow for single-
and multi-player gaming over the mesh. Next is adding a "view source"
mode that lets the children design their own variants to the games.

9. X Window System: Chris Ball took benchmarks for the fix to a
long-standing font-corruption bug, which Bernardo Innocenti found and
patched this week. Jordan Crouse and Adam Jackson are working out the
right long-term fix for a very nasty class of bugs that affected a
number of X drivers, not just the AMD driver. The benchmarks are
inconclusive so far; more work needed to check that our fix is not
causing a slowdown. Jordan also fixed some serious bugs in the X
Server. Bernie resurrected our input driver: by the end of this week,
the window system was again behaving properly, with the way paved for
better performance in the long term.

10. Kernel: Linus Torvalds released 2.6.22 on Sunday, so this week
started with more pushing of kernel changes upstream, including Dave
Woodhouse's new battery-class driver, which is now in Linus' tree.
During the week, Andres Salomon branched a few new stable kernel that
included 2.6.22 final, a large libertas update, audio and camera LED
fixes, and a number of DCON and LXFB fixes. The DCON freezing feature
should be a lot more reliable now that we've switched to using a
work-queue, and included a bunch of Adam Jackson's timing fixes.

In the process of testing, Andres discovered a bunch of fun new bugs:
JFFS2 corruption that ate the filesystem on a B4, libertas failing to
associate, and not-yet-isolated USB-storage corruption issues. Dave
Woodhouse is looking at "wireless in initrd" to enable boot,
installation, and testing via the wireless network, without having to
rely on the NAND flash.

Richard Smith and Andres are investigating missing keypresses after
resume. The kernel is losing some of the PS2 interrupts. More work is
needed to determine where the keypress is going.

11. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti merged the USB and libertas
suspend/resume code to master kernel tree; he also conducted more
suspend/resume tests. He wrote code to support new rtc-cmos driver
(configurable wakeup) and added platform devices for the power button
and the lid-closed detector. He investigated individual device
power-down and determined that we cannot use Libertas power-save mode
when mesh is active. He wrote patches to turn off more parts of the
cs5535 audio and USB Host Controller. Finally, he wrote some
parallel-driver resume code; we can clearly see the culprits of slow
resume time.

12. Power: John Watlington, Richard Smith Jim Gettys, Chris Ball and
with Joel Stanley and Richard Smith on further power tests, trying to
accurately determine which devices are responsible for our current
power draw, and verify our design before the schematics are frozen for
production. Joel, John and Richard took many power measurements with
an instrumented XO attempting to verify all the power domains prior to
the C Build.  They took reading; added more channels; took more
readings; and then added even more channels. The measurement system is
now up to 22 channels. Things mostly look OK, but there is still some
power draws that are not accounted for and are being investigated.

Kim Quirk and John Fuhrer have been conducting more battery-life tests
this week. We are gathering baseline lifetime numbers to compare
against as we make improvements and changes in power management.
Battery life on B4 is substantially improved from B2 builds on B2
hardware while running; battery lifetime when running mesh only are
currently less than expected: Michail says the Marvell wireless
firmware power consumption can be significantly improved over our
first measurements.

Richard Hughes continued work on the open hardware manager (OHM); OHM,
which is our power-policy daemon, has landed in the builds. Richard is
working on integrating OHM with the XO hardware. OHM handles suspend
on power button press, configurable backlight dimming after idle time
when on battery, and will soon handle going into suspend based on
whether we're idle.

13. Security: Nelson Elhage and Michael Stone stress tested Vserver
patch in preparation to its merger on Friday. Mitch Bradley, Ivan
Krstić, and Scott Ananian hammered out a firmware security
specification describing the interaction of Open Firmware and the
kernel/ramdisk for activation, upgrades, and booting from a backup
(See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Firmware_Security).

Ivan wrote some basic activation code, which Scott hacked a bit (See
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/krstic/leases and
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/cscott-leases-tmp).

Scott created an initramfs for early-boot, which does activation and
some upgrade and boot tasks (See
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/d-i and
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/rootskel-olpc).

Finally, Scott adopted the OLPC reinstallation script and is working on
adding support to have it generate a temporary-format of activation
lease during installation, so that we can put activation in our builds
and exercise it without "bricking" all our developers' machines.

Noah Kantrowitz and Michael Stone are continuing Bitfrost
implementation work; Nelson Elhage ran stress tests on the VServer
kernel (no problems) and verified it has undisturbed IPv6
connectivity; SecOps will provide a set of RPMs that allow for any
machine running the Trial-2 build to experimentally enable Bitfrost by
virtue of a simple 'yum install olpc-security'.

14. Embedded controller: Richard Smith submitted a patch to back to
Wuanta that fixes the on-board temperature sensor. It showed up in
PQ2C19 which Quanta released on Friday.

15. Laptop hardware: John Watlington worked on last-minute tweaks to
the laptop electronics; these were tested this week, with the deadline
for changes before mass production looming. These included adding an
anti-aliasing filter to the microphone input, eliminating the speaker
pop when suspending/resuming, and making sure that the EC is capable
of waking up on all relevant events (WLAN packet received, lid
opened/closed, etc.)

16. School Server: Daniel Margo gathered data about the modified
packages and configuration files for the School Server and put the
configuration files into a data repository (See
http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=users/danmargo/livecd-data;a=summary).
Dan made packages of these configuration files and put them in the
repository (See http://fedora.laptop.org/olpc-local/i386). However, he
could not get them to build into a working live CD. As an interim
workaround, he had made a live CD with the packages that were on
schoolserver (but not the configuration, so it is not particularly
interesting yet).

17. Games: Kent Quirk reports much progress:
* Roberto Fagá continued work on ISIS, the adventure game engine. It
now supports variable phrase order for different languages in its text
system; he is building out the object hierarchy for the datatypes and
classes of game objects.
* Patrick DeJarnette has almost finished the Side-scroller game
engine. The engine now has the ability to finish a level and display
between-level and game-over screens, and it features multiple lives,
multiple levels, and coin-collection. The Side-scroller system is
complete enough to play and create levels. It could use help from a
good artist, and it still needs to be packaged and to have some sample
levels.
* Lincoln Quirk has been maintaining the PyGame wrapper and the OLPC
wiki pages describing it ([[Game development HOWTO]] and [[Pygame
wrapper]]). He addressed and fixed the problem with event-queue
overflow and has implemented a Pango wrapper to render fonts onto SDL
surfaces. It is not yet an ideal solution because some libraries are
still lacking Python support. He has also been helping to support
various people who are trying to use PyGame and the wrapper.

18. Content workshops: Mel Chua, Wayne Mackintosh (Commonwealth of
Learning), and SJ Klein are looking for mentors and sponsoring groups
at
companies and universities to support a trial season of a Summer of
Content effort, running from August 10 to September 23. This would be
a way to support some of the authors and creators working to make
materials for trial schools.

Summer of Content will run two summers a year (one each in the
Northern and Southern Hemispheres); plans for a full summer starting
in December will be in place by August 15. We are looking currently
for mentors that speak Arabic, Portuguese, and Thai (See
http://www.wikieducator.org/Summer_Of_Content_Proposal). We are aiming
to have 50 small-stipend internships for 6–8 weeks this summer.

COL has committed to sponsoring and mentoring five interns from the
Commonwealth states. COL is looking for supporting organizations in
India and their network in the South. Name.org out of Denver (the
non-profit branch of name.com) has committed to sponsoring interns
(from anywhere); the EGAP public policy school at Tecnologico de
Monterrey are also on board and have space and mentors for
Spanish-speaking interns.

Please send interest or potential contacts for mentorship/sponsorship to
SJ and to Mel <mel at melchua.com>.

19. Creative Jams: A Guide to Jams will be published to the OLPC wiki
soon. The general idea behind a jam is to: bring people together;
provide food and feedback and good cheer; in less than three days,
create and test a series of [activities, texts, videos, games]
designed for children and for use with XOs.

20. Content bundles: After some discussion about how to define
non-activity bundles, there is now a working spec for people who want
to provide non-executable bundles that can be browsed or launched from
a browser (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Creating_a_content_bundle).

21. Music: The Free Music Project is now synchronizing with Jamendo,
which has an efficient way of verifying that submitters are the
authors of the works they suggest is freely licensed, and have
hundreds of CC-BY pieces. Jamendo is working on an OLPC portal of
sorts; there is no spec yet. The Free Music folks have new DJs and
modern musicians recording for the XO, including The Juan Maclean,
Maga Bo, and DJ C (See http://www.thejuanmaclean.com/).


-walter

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