[Community-news] OLPC News 2007-06-09

[Walter Bender]

1. Heiligendamm, Germany: UNICEF's Christopher Fabian and Merrick
Schaefer organized a youth summit (called the "J8"), around the G8
Summit. The summit consists of 10 youth from each G8 country and 10
from the developing world, taking place before and during the G8;
preparing position papers on the issues facing the world's youth,
which they will present to the G8. They are using 90 XOs to capture
images and video for interviews (of one another and other attendees)
and to collaborate on their reports. They are also testing a
distributed/off-line wiki for the XO designed by Mako Hill. For much
of the week they have had no Internet connectivity, but they are
collaborating over the mesh. Bert Freudenberg, a member of the Etoys
team, helped to mentor the delegates.

2. Needham, MA: Mel Chua, Kent Quirk, and SJ Klein are hosting the
first OLPC Game Jam this weekend a Olin College; the event is designed
to encourage experimentation and innovation in the game industry and
kick off development of open-source games for the XO. 40 game
developers were off to a good start last night (with others
participating remotely). Roberto Faga, a summer of code student
working on game libraries, is planning another for Brazil, likely in
October.

3. Scott Ananian will be starting at OLPC on Monday as a software
engineer. Scott will be jumping right in after receiving his Ph.D.
from EECS at MIT yesterday. He will bring to us an 10 years of
experience hacking and debugging kernel patches and drivers. Besides
the technical skills, Scott is deeply committed to the OLPC project.

4. Product line up: We are shipping five products this fall: (1) the
XO laptop; (2) a school server; (3) a multi-battery charger; an active
antenna; and (5) a solar-powered WiFi repeater. Much of the emphasis
has been on the laptop, but a push from Quanta this week has resulted
in firmer plans for the other products.

5. Active antennas: Thanks to John Watlington and the team from
Cozybit, we have out first working "active antenna" prototypes.
Attaching them to an XO lets you optimize the placement of the
antenna: use with a mesh portal will double the network throughput.
They can be used on the school servers or attached a 5V power supply
to build a stand-alone WiFI repeater.

6. AC Adaptor: Our thoroughness had led UL to lower the acceptable
temperature for AC adaptors by 10C, down to 75C. This week Arnold Kao
of Quanta reports testing on an improved AC adaptor—within our current
form-factor—that now achieves delta-t of 15C at 50C ambient (65C
maximum temperature), down from the 30C delta-t. In addition, if we
limit input from the AC adaptor when the thermometer in the battery
indicates it is over 45C ambient and the battery is in charge state,
our AC adaptors will operate within acceptable range.

7. C build: Rubber feet, removable antennae, a better LCD shock mount,
small adjustments to the keyboard, and an improvement of six-degree
tilt on the hinge are all underway as the C-build design freeze
occurred on Friday. Both "bunny ears" will be replaceable by removing
just 8 screws—previously it took 20 screws and the display had to be
removed.

8. Weigh in: Mary Lou Jepsen conducted a weigh in for the B3 units
this week.  B3 with NiMH is 1.5Kg, and B3 with LiFeP is 1.4Kg. These
are up slightly from B2 which weighed in at 1.4Kg and 1.3 Kg
respectively; although we reduced the battery size slightly, we added
a steel plate to the base for stability and better touch-pad
operation.

9. Suspend/resume: Marcelo Tosatti found and fixed couple of bugs:
suspend/resume is now working on USB and wireless. The XO can now
suspend and resume while leaving the wireless functional, and the
wireless can now wake up the processor. Thanks to Javier Cardona who
also helped with the wireless firmware.

10. Fedora: This week OLPC became an official Fedora project. We will
be doing our development directly on the Fedora project's hardware and
in their repositories. In the past we always had to do our builds on
Red Hat's infrastructure. This means that anyone can contribute to the
project directly, including Red Hat people, community members, and the
OLPC team.

11. Activities: Work continues on the Journal and its underlying
datastore.  There were stabilization and performance changes this
week, including fixing some problems with the clipboard that had
prevented cut and paste across activities. Infrastructure work in
support of the presence has also been a focus: it has been broken out
into its own module and will support the local mesh network instead of
just server mode.

12. School server: Holger Levsen continued work on the school server
installation. The mirror is now updated from the user mirror, via a
cronjob at 6am BST daily. It carries Fedora Core 6 and Core 7 and
updates Power PC, i386, and source. The live-installer CD is build
daily at 8am BST by a cronjob running as builder user (See
http://xs-dev.laptop.org/xs-live-installer/ and
git://dev.laptop.org/projects/fai-config/fedora/mirror and
.../live-installer).

13. Test environment: Chris Ball rewrote the tinderbox web site
(http://dev.laptop.org/tinderbox/) and added activity support to the
Sugar tinderbox. Every day, Sugar is built on two machines (one running
Fedora, one running Ubuntu) using sugar-jhbuild; each activity is
tested to see whether it starts up successfully. If an activity fails,
an e-mail
is sent to the Sugar mailing list.

14. Linux kernel: This week was about stabilizing the kernel for B4.
Richard Smith has been rewriting the EC protocol that the kernel uses
for poking the EC and hardware; Chris updated the kernel code for
that. Debugging the firmware/EC/hardware is ongoing.

There was a massive libertas merge into stable as well; it appears to be
working without too many problems. Dan Williams did some nice work:
between the last stable (kernel) release and the upcoming stable
release, some 3000 lines of code were deleted from the libertas
driver. The device-tree code has been committed to stable, providing a
way for
programs to easily access the hardware configuration and data (e.g.
serial number, UUID, etc.).

15. X Window System: Adam Jackson has made progress toward what is
being called "DCON mode," not to be confused with "ebook mode." This
is using the DCON to take over the display from the Geode so that the
video drivers, video subsystem, the fetches from RAM for the video,
and the GPU can all be off when the screen is not changing, all to
save power, even while the CPU is still powered.

Our Xorg 1.3 porting effort is progressing; it is semi-usable now on
Bernardo Innocenti 's desktop. Input rotation has also been seen to
work, but only for a brief lucky moment. We still have bugs to fix,
but Adam Jackson is already starting to package things for us so that
we'll be able to move to 1.3 consistently with the F7 upgrade.

Bernardo is also worked on "beautifying" our startup sequence, but
this work didn't make it for B4 unfortunately. There are also concerns
that
upstream will never accept a patch for making the Linux console
black-on-white. Jim Gettys wandered through the X keyboard
configuration maze to figure out how to map our keyboard, game buttons
and game pad properly.

16. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released the B4 firmware, and is beginning
to look at firmware for school server. Lilian Walters had a week of
one step forward and two steps back. She was all set to test the new
nfs/rpc/udp stack using IPv6. Then she found out that her old linux
setup just did not cut it.  Fortunately, Fedora 7 was released last
week claiming to support nfs IPv6. So, she installed F7 on a PC, which
also has Windows Vista. She's getting geared up to test again.

17. Etoys: Yoshiki Ohshima continues to work on the Pango support; it
is almost ready for the internal testing. Scott Wallace wrote a fix
the UI of extending expressions. Takashi Yamamiya's copy-and-paste is
coming along: a text in Etoys can now be dragged out to other
activities.

18. Gaming: In preparation for the Game Jam we have made a few updates
to the game-key mappings (the left and right controllers now map to
different things) and PyGameCanvas (to make it work better in a game
environment).

-walter

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