[Community-news] OLPC News (2007-03-31)

[Walter Bender]

1. We are very happy to announce the availability of a new stable
build. It is composed of Build 368 and the Q2B85 firmware. The
highlights of this build:

a working mesh network;
a user interface to the mesh network;
a working battery charging;
a battery indicator in Sugar;
an greatly improved web browser;
many other activity improvements;
a substantially improved boot time;
availability of Helix Media Player (Real Networks);
instructions for customizing your own image.

There is also a content library included in a separate package.

2. laptop.org: We are using the wiki as our content management system
and the infrastructure for translation is now in place. Thanks to the
tireless efforts of Xavier Alvarez, the first translation of the new
website is on line (See http://www.laptop.org/es).

3. Wireless: This week was marked by five releases of wireless
firmware, setting a new record. Today, we are at Firmware 5.220.10.p5,
which fixes or addresses all known issues. Many thanks to  Dan
Williams and Marcelo Tosatti from Red Hat, the Cozybit team, the
Marvell team, and Michail Bletsas.

Dan and Chris Ball helped John Watlington build a kernel with the
Libertas driver for his school server machines with Marvell USB
dongles plugged in; the school servers now function on the mesh.

Michail expanded the OLPC mesh testbed to 22 nodes, which allows for
more conclusive scalability tests (and starts to become a full-time
sysadmin job). Dan hooked up the UI for the mesh view to make it
possible to join the wireless mesh easily. Thus, this week was the
first time that we have really been able toget a sense of how the mesh
will work as an end-user experience, and it has to be said: it is
really good. Boot a system for the first time, and if the machine sees
a mesh, "poof," you're on the network. Really quite remarkable.

4. Sugar: Marco Gritti spent a lot of time cleaning up and finishing
last minute issues in the build. Some of the new fixes in Sugar are
based on feedback from the field. This includes avoiding multiple
launches of an activity; immediate feedback for launch; much improved
frame behavior; and better overall performance. Marco also fixed bugs
in the web browser that were preventing Google talk and some other
sites from working. The dots-per-inch (DPI) scaling code in Mozilla
still has issues; we will continue to work through them as we find
them.

5. Tomeu Vizoso and Marco also added support for localization for
Sugar (and some of the activities). Although we won't have any
languages other than English in our first build, we should have the
ability to start translating: the infrastructure in the programs in
now place; next we need to set up a place for people who want to
localize to participate. SJ Klein has set up a list on laptop.org for
people who want to translate, which is a good start.

6. Battery: We know battery problems have been a great pain and
concern and we are relieved that they have finally been resolved. For
those of you with dead batteries with B2 systems, most, but not all of
the dead batteries can be recovered with the systems you now have with
the new firmware. Recovering batteries in the field with B1 systems is
harder; thankfully there are far fewer B1 systems deployed. Please
follow the directions in http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Battery_Charging.
We would like to thank all those who helped in the resolution of this
problem, in reports from the field, and at Quanta and OLPC. Special
thanks to Richard Smith, who was relentless in his efforts to chase
down numerous bugs in the embedded-controller code.

7. Please update your systems to the new firmware as this firmware
also fixes a battery overcharge problem.

8. New activities as of Build 368:
Calculadora, A simple calculator activity (Mauro Torres et al. of the
Tuquito Linux project in Argentina);
Blockparty (AKA Tetris) (Vadim Gerasimov and John Palmieri);
Slideshow (Erik Blankinship, Bahktiar Mikhak, and Marco Gritti);
xbook (PDF viewer) as an activity.

9. Multimedia: Real Networks and the team at the Open Software Lab at
Oregon State University have been working on a multimedia platform for
the laptop.
(See Helix Media Activity
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Helix_Media_Activity). This is able to
handle most common audio/video datatypes, as Real Networks has codecs
for almost anything you can think of. The commercial version is better
known as "Real Player" (Justin Gallardo (OSU), Greg Wright, Jeff
Dutchman, Martin Schwartz (Real Networks))

10. Library activity: SJ has been leading a large community effort to
build a content library for the laptop. (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Library_Release_Notes  for a description
formats we are using to display directories of books and other
materials.) Next up is a focus
on the school library, figuring out how it communicates with the XO and
what processes need to run on each to provide updated indices and views.

11. Chris Ball created a procedure for customizing NAND images. Mitch
Bradley has created a "save-nand" Open Firmware command to do this
easily, but the
command will only be available in firmware versions Q2B84 or higher
(See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Customizing_NAND_images).

12. Trent LLoyd of the Avahi Project was instrumental in helping
resolve with Dan Williams, Chris Blizzard, and Andres Salomon a
boot-time Sugar crashing problems we have seen for a long time. Avahi
is the basis of discovering other people and services on the network.
This is another great example of the value of the community; we would
not have working "presence" in this stable build had this bug not been
found and resolved, but would have had to disable Avahi in favor of
stability.

13. Christina Xu took some photos of XOs in action and produced two neat
visual instructions for powering on and opening the laptop:
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=439184985&size=l
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=439204328&context=photostream&size=l

14. Power management: Jordan Crouse (AMD) reports suspend to RAM (STR)
support is proceeding very well.  After successfully resuming the
system two weeks ago, this past week was spent diagnosing  problems
with the core drivers (namely, the framebuffer, the DCON, and the
timer tick). Andres Salomon and Jordan discovered some serious DCON
issues with source switching (from CPU to DCON source); those were
traced back to firmware (after spending lots of time debugging the
kernel) and Mitch fixed them there. We can now successfully freeze the
frame on the DCON, and suspend and resume the system without losing
the display. The timer tick was also fixed, which now means we don't
need any special changes to the kernel command line to work around
issues on the resume.

Attention now focuses on handling the secondary drivers (such as the
audio, camera and USB), and improving overall stability. Our target
for power-management stability is 1000 consecutive suspend/resume
cycles without a glitch.

Marcelo spent time working on power management issues and USB resume.
USB resume is now working, which is another notch in the belt to getting
to a full suspend/resume story.

All of the code we are using is now in the "powermgmt" branch of our
kernel GIT tree.

15. System software: Andres also made the touch-pad driver much more
tolerant of version numbers and merged more fixes into the Libertas
driver. He also worked on preparing mfgpt/dcon/geode code for
inclusion upstream.

16. School server: The school server development continues.  We now
have wireless mesh interfaces enclosed with an antenna and 3 meters of
USB cable. Thanks to Chris Ball and Dan Williams, the server now
recognizes them. Internet-router functionality is up and running (on
the wired school LAN) and applications and content for the Library are
starting to be installed. A school server specification—really more of
an introduction—has been written and posted on the wiki.

N. Firmware:  We are planning to cut all developers over to the
fastboot/suspend/resume firmware next week. Lilian Walter released a
few self-tests this week, including: nand-flash;
spi-flash; display; and camera (a new driver). Our goal is to aid
field diagnosis and repair.

Lilian has also released code to reprobe the usb bus to remove
obsolete device nodes and to create new device nodes as usb devices
are removed, added or replaced. Next, Lilian shall look at keyboard
self test and Quanta's request for modification to the NAND flash self
test.

Mitch added the following features were added to that firmware this week:
* ability to do fast display save/restore in the low-level resume path
(This feature is turned off by default, in favor of similar code in
the kernel, but serves as a working model for how to interact with the
hardware to accomplish the purpose);
* USB power state restoration after resume;
* self-test diagnostics (from Lilian) for several devices, including
camera and display (The self-test suite is nearly complete now);
* save-nand command for creating restorable images of modified JFFS2
filesystems;
* a fix for an infrequent problem with reflashing the firmware; and
* a fix for a problem booting.

The OFW port to the LX development board is working, so OFW is on
track for the switchover to LX.

-walter

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