[Community-news] OLPC News 2007-06-16

[Walter Bender]

1. Montevideo: On Friday, the Technology Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU)
released a bid for Project Ceibal (Conectividad Educativa de
Informática Básica para el Aprendizaje en Línea)—one laptop per child
in Uruguay.

2. Olin College hosted the first OLPC Game Jam (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Game_Jam) last weekend, bringing together
ten teams of game developers and some freelance artists, musicians,
and programmers, to make games for the XO. Organizers Mel Chua and SJ
Klein are working on general notes re: organizing game jams and other
local community events to develop materials for the XO. Most of the
teams chose to work in Python, though a few developed in Flash. (A
Flash developer who had rather vehemently against Python at the start
of the weekend, wouldn't stop talking about how nice Python was by
Sunday.) Teams collaborated with one another, in addition to competing
to make the best game; they shared music and artistic expertise, and
code snippets and coding advice. (The Flash developers uniformly
wanted to write things that would work in Gnash on our platform, not
standard Flash 9; they spent part of Friday and Saturday working with
the Gnash team to help improve its utility for game development.)

The two best reviewed games both used PyGame; they were a version of
3D Pong and a version of the old Crossfire game called Spray Play (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/images/c/c6/3dpong.activity.zip and
http://sprayplay.googlecode.com/svn/).

3. Taking the heat: We have decided to see how much heat XO can take.
Mary Lou Jepsen has instructed UL to test our laptop for a 50C (122F)
operating temperature. Typical laptops are only tested to 35C (95F) or
40C (104F), which is unacceptable for the children who will be using
our laptops in hot temperatures (e.g., in direct sunlight and of
course without air conditioning). Mary Lou and Tracy Price are also
running a simple bake test at the OLPC office, pictured above. The
laptop is running days at 52C (125F), and nights at 22C (72F). UL and
Quanta are doing more extensive testing, but shown is a laptop,
running the eToys demo that sits in the oven night and day. Try that
with a conventional laptop!

4. Green: Mary Lou and Robert Fadel have started the application
process for EPEAT Gold—the highest award given to laptops; one no
other laptop has yet received. Also, late last week Google's Ethan
Beard and Megan Smith, and Red Hat's Mike Evans invited OLPC to join
with Google, Intel, Quanta, Red Hat, AMD, HP and others in the IT
industry to launch Climate Savers, an organization dedicated to
lowering the power consumption of computers through better power
management systems, and more efficient AC adaptors. Climate Savers
picked lower power as the single thing on which to concentrate in
order to have the biggest positive impact on the environment. OLPC
concurs with this believe. At first those that join Climate Savers
agree to meet the Energy Star goals—OLPC is already 14× better than
Energy Star.

5. $1 video microscope: Inspired by SJ Klein and EO Smith, Mary Lou
made a 100× video microscope for her XO for $1 (three plastic lenses
in plastic housing). She made videos of the XO screen compared with a
standard LCD screen, where the details of the pixel structure can be
clearly seen. She will be compiling a video for youtube.com in the
coming days.

6. Sugar: Eben Eliason has continued to refine a series of mock-ups
for rollovers, invitations, and notifications. He has created a new
series of Activity mockups, including Browse, Read, Write, Memorize,
Calculate, Photograph/Capture/Record, and TamTam that feature tagging
and tabs. He also created a preliminary specification for keyboard
shortcut design, now open for discussion. Also he worked with Jim
Gettys to figure out some logic for the hand-held buttons in terms of
desired functionality and semantic meaning. Marco Gritti has been
making changes to the GTK theme to incorporate many of these
improvements.

7. Marc Maurer continues work on the Write activity, with his focus
mostly around collaboration. He has been working on a new algorithm to
handle collisions in documents when people are editing the same part
of a document. He also spent a lot of time fixing bugs in Abiword to
close a blocker bug in the 406 Build.

8. Muriel de Souza Godoi updated the Memory Activity to the new sugar
API; now all the memory games were unified in one activity. He also
worked Eben designed a new Memorize Game UI; the new scoreboard was
developed as a component, with methods such as: set fill color, set
stroke color, increase score, set_current_player, etc. The new card
table was also developed as a component and can be controlled using
the hand-held-mode buttons. These UI components are designed to be as
flexible as possible, focusing on reusing components.

9. Journal: Tomeu Vizoso has been working on the Journal; he has added
the ability to do screen capture by typing Alt-1; the image is saved
to the Journal. He also has been working to make it possible to launch
downloaded activities directly from the Journal. He has been updating
the web browser in order making it work with the new Journal code as
well as the new code to interface with Python. Ben Saller has been
working on how to get the Journal to support alternate media such as
USB drives. Eben created a new series of Journal mock-ups that
incorporate tabbed toolbars, address support for "sort by, then by,"
and for versioning.

10. Mesh Activities: Dan Williams made progress with Network Manager
(NM) and the mesh. NM will now automatically scan and get an address
on the mesh network. The Collabora folks continue down the path of
making the peer-to-peer presence-discovery code and tubes code work.
They also added a "Hellomesh" Activity that shows how to build a
tubes-enabled activity. (Please note that the activity will change
over time as the tubes API stabilizes.) Eben worked extensively back
and forth with Pentagram on an updated UI design for the mesh view.

11. Fedora Core 7: John Palmieri has been moving our builds to a
Fedora 7 base. Once that is done we will have a lot more opportunity
to collaborate with the community and also get more direct help from
the 1200 or so Fedora contributors. Moving to Fedora 7 also means that
many of our modified packages are rolled up into the main repository.

12. Build 406.14: Firmware and a stable kernel were released to Quanta
for the Btest-4 build, derived from Build 406. Suspend and resume are
working in a full build for the first time, including autonomous mesh
networking, a first for any system anywhere! It is almost, but not
quite stable enough for widespread use; a few remaining bugs need to
be squashed before deployment to a large audience.

13. Firmware: This week, Mitch Bradley worked on stabilizing software
and firmware for the B4 build. Mitch also merged ECC checking code
(written by Segher Boessenkool) into CAFE NAND driver and worked out a
plan for storage of the public key that secures firmware updates.

14. X Window System: Richard Smith worked with Adam Jackson of Red Hat
to figure out why his DCON mode patches to the X driver were causing
the DCON to flicker and glitch on the switch from DCON mode to GPU
mode. This will enable the window system to disable the video unit and
allow the GPU to idle when not in use.

Bernardo Innocenti has been enhancing our X keyboard definitions to
include all the missing keyboard symbols and working with upstream to
cleanup and merge our changes into the official repository. Miles
Grimshaw has designed two new keyboards for the XO: Turkish and
Ethiopic.

Daniel Stone of Nokia suggested to Jim that our slider keys be
represented in the X input extension in a better way: we're going to
have three "analog" sliders on the first row of the keyboard, which
will look like absolute axes to programs. This requires some kernel
work that Bernie has not yet started.

Generally, we are in a much better shape this week. The new input
framework in X works already, EXA rendering pretty much works too.
Next week Bernie will look into packaging issues with Adam. Jordan
Crouse has fixed many bugs in the X driver, and the he number of bugs
blocking #1604 is quickly shrinking, so we may be able to push this
upgrade just in time for the Fedora Core 7 migration.

15. Kernel: Andres Salomon merged the device-tree patch, giving access
to hardware and manufacturing information. The wireless-driver version
supporting suspend/resume was also merged. The EC protocol was
debugged, and debugged some more, and is now mostly fixed. We have a
kernel/firmware combination that suspends/resumes in about two
seconds. The delay is mostly from libertas and USB; Marcelo Tosatti
and the Cozybit team are actively working on these drivers.

Chris Ball did a lot of stable-build debugging. He found that our
camera's colormap becomes strange after resume and that the
"camera-active" LED comes on at resume even when the camera isn't
being used. Chris wrote a kernel patch to only power up the camera
when a user wants it; Jon Corbet is reviewing the patch.

16. IPV6: Scott Ananian began the week by trying to cram the entirety
of "Essential IPv6 Networking" into his head. He set up some IPv6
tunnels and IPv6-enabled his home site to: (A) make sure he knew how
things worked; and (B) serve as a testbed for the school server
environment, which will likely be behind similar NATs. He took over as
the liaison to SIXXS, which is going to be providing our IPv6
connectivity via tunnels for the short term, at least until we set up
infrastructure (and possibly write some code) to terminate
NAT-tunneling IPv6 tunnels ourselves here in Cambridge. Scott also
confirmed that private IPv4 addresses are properly assigned to the
laptops if a DHCP server cannot be found.

Scott's second network-manager-related task was to get it to
understand DNS information sent via Router Advertisement messages as
part of IPv6
autoconfiguration, so that the machines "just work" without requiring
round-trips to a DHCP server or other setup. Scott noticed that radvd
on our local (OLPC) network (tubes) was giving out "bogus"
information, and wrote a patch for radvdump and sent the patch
upstream in the process. As it turns out, radvd was still using a
stale config and just needed to be sent SIGHUP, which was simple
enough. Scott sent mail to a number of people (including the
appropriate kernel mailing list) outlining a plan to add support for
DNS-in-RA to the Linux kernel and to Network Manager. Scott hasn't
heard any objections yet, so will assume
the plan is good and code up a first-draft implementation next week.

17. Hardware: The asynchronous input/output (SPD) bus on the XOs has
problems when coming out of suspend/resume and was causing write to
the display controller (DCON) to fail. Mitch figured out the root
cause of a failure to resume that only shows up on some machines: a
DCON/system-management (SM) bus bug was found and a DCON hardware bug
discovered. Richard, Mitch, Andres, Chris, and Jordan Crouse worked
together to find and produce a fix.

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