[Community-news] OLPC News 2007-06-24

[Walter Bender]

1. Shanghai: Mary Lou Jepsen, John Watlington, Richard Smith, and
David Woodhouse joined the extensive team from Quanta in Shanghai for
the B4 build. 2000 laptops are scheduled to be built by the end of
Monday, more than half are already built. Things went so well that the
build was started early, leaving the OLPC team ample time to work
other components of the OLPC ecosystem: school server, multi-battery
charger, active antennae, and WiFi repeaters. The B4 yield (so far) is
approximately 99%—up substantially from previous builds. Improvements
in B4 include: texture on the upper handle bar; increased hinge tilt;
elimination of the hinge "squeak"; rabbit ears that click into place
when put into the down position; elimination of a slight camera
vignetting by the bezel; minor modifications to the motherboard; etc.

2. EC: Richard Smith and David Woodhouse have moved the kernel battery
driver over to new embedded controller (EC) protocol. In the process,
David had some some suggestions that Richard will be folding back into
the EC code. Meanwhile, Richard has flushed out a few minor EC bugs
and submitted fixes back to Quanta.

3. School server: Scott Ananian, John Watlington, and Dan Margo worked
on school-server configuration management. The process—a combination
of  RedHat's RPM system and a version-control system—will allow system
updates of OLPC specific configuration files while preserving local
configuration modifications.

4. Firmware: Mitch Bradley started work on school-server firmware and
integrated the cryptographic code into Open Firmware needed for our
Bitfrost security system. Lilian Walter modified the TCP layer to
support IPv6. She can successfully "finger" and "telnet" to her Fedora
Core 7 PC.

5. System: Chris Ball wrote a script to backup and restore user data
from a USB disk during OS build upgrades, so that laptops can be
upgraded to newer builds without losing data. The script is still
being tested, since there are some "corner cases" to deal with—for
example, some old Sugar configuration files causes newer versions of
Sugar to crash at startup.

Andres Salomon did some merging (we are up to 2.6.22-rc5 on master)
and created a vserver branch and added the vserver patch (See
http://dev.laptop.org/~dilinger/vserver). He also did some bug
triaging and worked on merging in the persistence-USB code from Andrew
Morton's -mm tree.

Scott Ananian spend the week writing kernel patches for DNS
autoconfiguration over Ipv6. The kernel functionality is now working;
Scott still has to patch this into "userland" properly (glibc and/or
network manager), and get the patches shipped and accepted upstream.
In the process, Scott fixed another bug in the router advertisement
daemon (radvd) this week, added some kernel documentation, and found a
few minor bugs in the kernel to fix.

Bernardo Innocenti has been looking into Geode optimizations of
glibc—Rob Savoye had developed some optimizations working from code
originally written by John Zulauf.

John Palmieri has been working on the Fedora 7 move. Most of the
packages we need to worry about now in place. We will be pulling our
builds together from three different repository: the F7/OLPC
repository, dilinger's (Andres's) kernel repository, and a temporary
repository that exists until we have emergency builds and until Etoys
can be put into the Fedora repositories.

Alex Larsson, who is on loan from the Red Hat desktop team, has been
working on a new live-update system for the XO. He posted comments for
review to the devel mailing list earlier this week and has since then
been working on an implementation. He now has code that can update
between image versions, including reverting back to older versions of
an image. He also has working code that can detect an update that is
available from another laptop on the mesh, and can download it locally
instead of going to a central server over a potentially slow,
high-latency, high-cost network. Finally, he has code that will host
an update on a laptop and publish it on the mesh.

6. X11: The X11 update is only missing a few package rebuilds and a
few new RPMs. The new keyboard descriptions are ready to go. Bernardo,
Miles Grimshaw, and Walter Bender have been collecting more localized
keyboards (Turkish, Ethiopic) and modularizing our changes to make
them acceptable for upstream. Bernardo has gotten a positive response
from Sergey Udaltsov regarding our changes and is waiting for final
approval.

7. USB: Marcelo Tosatti, working with Cozybit and Marvell in
California, made great progress in debugging our USB suspend/resume
issues. Javier Cardona and Marcelo were able to acquire accurate
traces of the activity on the USB bus. Those traces showed that the
USB host controller is entering an invalid state during resume if the
wireless device detaches after getting the host_sleep_active
notification from the host. Their workaround is to have the wireless
device idle for 3mS on the USB bus before detaching; they implemented
that in wireless firmware version 5.110.16.p0. This is great progress
towards fully working suspend/resume.

8. Wireless: Marvell's team in India released wireless firmware that
incorporates the new mesh frame format as well as mesh beacon frames
(5.110.15.p1). Their release was followed by the release of
5.110.16.p0, which incorporates the support for host sleep and the
aforementioned workaround for the USB suspend/resume. Cozybit has also
released patches for ethereal/wireshark that decode the new frame
format. With this release, we are moving closer to the emerging
802.11s standard and we are also averting problems with existing
access points that support lazy-WDS. Note that this firmware version
is not interoperable with any previous released versions. Nodes
running the new firmware will disrupt and be disrupted by nodes
running older versions of the firmware. Q&A testing will be proceeding
this week with the goal of incorporating the new frame format in the
upcoming stable build. From a network-manager perspective this release
greatly simplifies sensing for the presence of mesh nodes. Dan
Williams continued work on the Libertas wireless driver. He also spent
time getting Avahi ready for the network-manager auto-mesh code.

9. Sugar: Ben Saller continues work on the data store for the Journal.
He has been working on support so that one can store Journal entries
on pluggable media (such as USB keys) and access entries over the
network. He also fixed several bugs that Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Gritti
needed.

Guillaume Desmottes spent the week working on peer-to-peer tubes
support so that more than two people can join an activity (instead of
activities being strictly peer to peer). Large parts of this code are
working today. There will be more progress next week.

Marco spent much of the week working on the Fedora 7 port. He also
made a number of fixes in the Journal, the theme, and Sugar in
general.
He is largely concentrating on Trial-2 bug fixes. He wrote a simple
activity to demonstrate how to integrate with the Journal (See
http://dev.laptop.org/~marco/edit-activity).

Marco and Chris Blizzard worked with the Fedora Translation team to
set up an easy-to-use interface for translators to be able to help
translate Fedora. A Google Summer of Code student has been working on
a web
interface that makes it easy for the several hundred Fedora translators
to interact with upstream projects like OLPC (As and example, see
http://translate.fedoraproject.org/module/olpc-journal-activity). We
do not have all of the work flow completed, but this is an important
first step to closing the loop with translators.

Tomeu spent the week doing a lot of bug fixing in the web activity, the
Journal and the Sugar shell. He also did a lot of testing of the data
store and worked with Ben to fix bugs that he found. In addition he
added a lot of new stuff for Trial 2, including:
* implement of modal dialogs for the web browser;
* in the Journal:
** you can now change an entry title;
** install and execute activities you have downloaded (but are not on
the main toolbar);
** take a screenshot of the activity's canvas and use it as a preview
for an entry;
** add a save-in-journal button to the default activity toolbar to
** explicitly save something to the journal;
** drag entries from the journal into the clipboard; and
** use the object-type registry;
* in the sugar shell:
** add an option to save objects in the clipboard to the Journal;
** make the clipboard also use the object-type registry.

10. Sugar Activities in the community: Marc Maurer has been working on
collision detection for multiple-document editing. He and the rest of
the Abiword team have an algorithm they are happy with. The really
adventurous can look at the document (See
http://uwog.net/~uwog/abiword/abicollab.pdf).

Ian Piumarta and Michael Rueger implemented the IPv6 support for
Squeak and ready for the testing. This will enable various
collaborative tools in Etoys work over the IPv6 mesh network.  Scott
Wallace published the FunctionTile feature to the public image; this
enables the Etoys user to write scripts with mathematical functions.
Bert Freudenberg's recent work encompasses: patching Sugar; X Windows
System display support code for the Squeak virtual machine; and an
Etoys hook to enables smoother integration of Etoys to the Sugar
environment. Ted Kaehler and Alan Kay are working on the kids version
of text editor written in Etoys, as well as the simulation of
colliding billiard balls. Takashi Yamamiya is now looking at the final
integration of
a drag-and-drop mechanism. Yoshiki Ohshima helped the code generation
part of FunctionTile, as well as the documentation of
projects.

Jean Piché and the core TamTam team spent the first half of the week
at the OLPC office in Cambridge working closely with Eben Eliason on
reworking the TamTam interface in light of Sugar "tabs" and some new
functional and structural ideas that the team has been exploring. The
result will be a recasting of MiniTamTam into TamTamJam, which will
enable the explorations and improvisations we enjoy in TamTam to
extend across multiple machines on the mesh; and a cleaner integration
of the rich and varied functionality of TamTamEdit, making this
powerful composition tool more accessible. They also did some
preliminary exploration of Barry Vercoe's fixed-point C-Sound
implementation; evaluated TamTam on the B3 hardware; and discussed
details of Journal integration with Tomeu.

Kent Quirk reports from the XO game-development front that Patrick
DeJarnette has created the beginnings of a generic side-scroller
game toolkit and has a demonstration game that is beginning to feel a
lot "a-like a-Mario." It hasn't yet been turned into an activity or tested
on the XO, but the approach is sound and we should see it running
next week. This toolkit is intended to allow children to easily create
arcade-like games on the XO.

Lincoln Quirk has been working on integrating PyGame with Sugar. He
has taken Noah Kantrowitz's wrapper code and extended it, but there
are problems integrating properly with GTK. For the last few days, he
has been working on a Cairo-based implementation of PyGame, which is
starting to work, but is so far quite a bit slower than the existing
PyGame code. It may be fast enough to use for some games, it looks
beautiful, and we hope it will get faster over time.

Roberto Fagá has been building an adventure game toolkit called ISIS
intended to build text-based adventures with graphical illustrations.
The longterm goal is to build a drag-and-drop storytelling game
toolkit that kids can use. He just got his hands on an XO and is
working on getting the graphics portion of the toolkit functional.

As a team, the gamers now have a git repository and have checked in
all of their work, as well as other games from the OLPC game jam.
There are several games that they hope to build on over the next few
weeks, including a Mancala/Owari stone game that will support play
either on a single machine or across the mesh.

Kuku Anakula, a flashcard-style game, has been polished for Trial 2;
it can share configuration files and tile sets with the Memonumber
game.

MaMaMedia has finished three activities: a slider puzzle, an e-poll
generator, and a teacher center, the latter being a place for teachers
to learn and contribute to how they can use activities to integrate XO
programs (Paint, Camera, Write) into their teaching. In the teacher
center, there are lesson ideas for exploring the XO and the
activities, a glossary, some background on Constructionism, etc.

11. Content: SJ Klein and Mel Chua, who organized the Game jam, are
working on a generalized notion of "jam," for a broader community
audience. The FHSST group in South Africa is running a jam out of
Berkeley to make high school curricula and polish their texts. The
Polish Free Texts project has their own variant on the theme for
teachers. In progress: defining a space for collating links to such
initiatives; developing a framework that allows for broad intake of
all kinds of material, and for a refinement step that converts scans
or documents into final formats for printing, storing in specialized
repositories, storing on wikis and other collaboration sites.
Meanwhile, SJ has been working on style guidelines for content
contributions.

The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is planning some content jams for
educators and authors towards the end of the summer and early fall.
They are expanding their collaboration on free textbooks starting with
wikieducator, where public domain texts are being added to the "XXI
texts" project, a project to find textbooks that have entered the
public domain. They are working with educators to get primary texts
online and developing an OLPC project on the site. A new mailing list
for free texts has been set up, with COL, an Arabic texts project, the
Polish Free Textbook project, Free Culture's college texts project,
and OLPC. The Open Society Institute is looking into ways to fund a
specific short-term effort to bootstrap these groups and bring their
efforts together.

There was an entire track at the third annual iCommons summit
dedicated to open education. OLPC and growing rural networks were
highlighted as an example of the most revolutionary target audience.
Over the course of a year or so, there are many projects aiming to
develop free materials and interested n focusing on developing-world
primary school; beginning with the Shuttleworth Foundation and FHSST
and Schoolnet projects in southern Africa.

Google's OurStories continues apace and is looking for active contacts
in each country to help coordinate story gathering via activities.

-walter

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