[Community-news] OLPC News (2008-08-05)

Thu Aug 7 00:12:45 EDT 2008

Development:
Paraguay: Antonio Battro and Cecilia Alacalá met with President-elect  
Fernando
Lugo. He informed them that as part of his “obligation" to provide the  
best
possible education to Paraguayan schoolchildren, he intends to  
distribute one
million XOs, enough for all elementary school children and teachers in  
Paraguay.
In September, President Lugo plans to meet with Nicholas in New York,  
where
he has been invited to attend the Clinton Global Initiative.

Antonio, Cecilia, Raul Gutiérrez and Sebastián Codas gave several  
interviews to
the media. Afterward, TV Canal 9 offered to buy 2,500 XOs for the  
national
distribution.

Thailand: Nicholas met individually with the Minister of Science &  
Technology, Minister of Information & Communications Technology, and  
the Minister of Education. We recommended 50,000 laptops, but they are  
likely to start with 15,000.

Mongolia: Nicholas and Elana Langer completed a marathon round of  
individual
meetings with the president, prime minister, minister of education and  
the former
foreign minister - now head of the party. Two issues dominated  
discussions: Getting the 5000 XOs on hand into schools by September  
1st, and planning to equip all primary school children in two years.

Mexico: Carla Gómez Monroy, Enrique Chavero, and Paola Rivera met with  
the
education secretary’s representatives for primary education, content
development, educational technology, and indigenous education (who was
accompanied by a Nahuatl language expert) to demo the XO.

Jorge Castañeda, Manuel Rodriguez, Enrique, Paola, and Carla met with  
the
representatives of the Iztapalapa delegation, the governor of the  
Rotary Club and
some of its members, seeking partnerships and support.

Belgium: Michael Lake, accompanied by Carla, met once again with Dilip  
Mehta,
CEO of the Rosy Blue Group, along with Chikashi Miyamoto, an advisor  
to Mehta
and Pranay Narvekar a vice president. Carla presented deployment  
highlights for
the Rosy Blue executives. A proposal for fully supporting Botswana  
will be jointly
developed. Dilip, Chikashi and Pranay were very enthusiastic about  
deploying
OLPC at South Africa.

Turkey: Political disruptions continue to complicate completion of the  
XO
deployment budget. Multiple jurisdictions are involved, and timing is  
an obstacle.
The team, however, remains quite enthusiastic and is eager to get  
things started.

Learning Team:
Thailand: OLPC held a five-day regional workshop in Bangkok, with more  
than
50 participants from six countries.

The workshop went extremely well. Special highlights included sharing  
of work in
the rural areas in Thailand as exemplars of high-quality work, and  
integration of
school and community; storytelling with the XO by Barbara Barry;  
computational
uses of the XO by Roger Sipitakiat; Nicholas’s talk on Thursday  
evening; and the
Ban Samkha children’s orchestra using their XOs to play traditional  
Thai music in
TamTam.

Mongolia: The team returned on Monday afternoon from a two-week tour in
northern Mongolia, where they ran workshops for local teachers, kids and
parents. Together with the Mongolian core team, we worked in one city  
center
and two small villages, introducing the XO and constructionist learning
methodologies. The core team teachers designed and ran the last  
workshop on
their own. They came up with some wonderful and surprising ideas,  
including a
physical activity to teach angles and degrees to students, which they  
then try in
turtle art and etoys.

The new head of ICTA was inspired by the XO’s open source environment.  
He wants the students in Mongolia to learn Linux and is working to get  
all government agencies and higher institutes to cross over to a Linux  
platform.

Rwanda: The 20-member core team is ready to initiate teacher  
development.
The team discussed ways of introducing generative themes for children  
to use for
developing projects. There also was considerable discussion on the  
issues of
working with schools and communities.

Haiti: The team is currently wrapping up the pre-pilot Camp XO 2008 at  
Ecole
Nationale Republique du Chili. As we entered this final full week we  
began to
look at E-toys.

Tech Team:

Testing:
Greg Smith provided the instructions for downloading and testing pre- 
release 8.2.0 images at:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Friends_in_testing. Help test the pre- 
release candidate builds! We need >50 people to briefly test and  
report any issues with the latest image, every week for the next 3 - 6  
weeks. If the community steps up to do that, we will have a rock solid  
release.

Greg also wrote collaboration requirements for 9.1.0 priorities page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0

The QA Team worked on the first 8.2.0 builds (2200, 2230) and 8.1.1  
(708, in Chicago) builds. Early test results on a build are posted at  
the Test Group Release Notes page:  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Group_Release_Notes 
. More detailed test results are now being posted here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/TestResults_8.2.0 
.

Francesca Slade, Seth Woodworth, and Charlie Murphy have created a  
test case framework allowing test cases to be posted directly into the  
wiki, and some summary reporting is available at the TestResults page.

Joe Feinstein organized the 8.2.0 Release Criteria meeting and  
creating a first pass of the 8.2.0 test areas and features (based on  
work of Michael Stone and Greg Smith) which will be translated into  
the set of test cases. Joe also started working with Sayamindu  
Dasgupta on helping with Russian translations.

Software/Firmware:
Mitch Bradley made further progress on the Windows dual-boot, resolving
issues with ACPI support for lid switch handling and battery/AC status
reporting. The only remaining issue at this point is chopped-up text  
during
pre-OS chkdsk and blue screen of death displays.

Deepak Saxena worked with Luis Cabo Cobo at Cozybit to find a way to  
get the Libertas thinmac/host mode driver packaged and built it into  
our released kernel RPMs. The driver is now working with our joyride  
kernels. He has also reimplemented the lid-detect logic in the kernel  
and added proper handling of the lid when we are suspended.

Ricardo Carrano worked on active antenna repogramming documentation,  
and Bill
McCormick from Nortel looked into one of the most persistent UI/Network
Manager bugs, which often prevents XOs from re-associating with  
encrypted
wireless networks.

Chris Ball finalized the "failsafe" code for booting with a full NAND.  
As of build update.1-709, the laptop will interrupt boot when the NAND
is full, will display a warning in English and Spanish telling the  
user that they will lose data and should first back up their laptop,  
and will
(after confirmation) free up enough space to boot by deleting large  
datastore objects or activities.

Sayamindu Dasgupta worked on the keyboard issues, fixing the Mongolian  
keyboard layout problems, and made some progress on the Dari keyboard  
issue, and the Amharic Compose key problems. In order to handle  
complex scripts like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, he has started to  
evaluate a possible switch to SCIM (Smart Common Input Method: http://www.scim-im.org/) 
  for the next major OLPC release.

Sayamindu created a new getting started page for Pootle  
administrators: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle/AdministrationQuickStart 
. He also released new versions of Terminal activity and Read activity  
for the latest Sucrose release.

Morgan Collett fixed some Chat bugs in release Chat-44. He assisted  
with the Sucrose 0.81.6 release and packaging. He proposed a separate
mailing list for activity authors, and volunteered to improve  
communication with them about current and upcoming process changes.

Faisal Anwar added new sections to the Sugar Almanac about the  
clipboard, and is engaging the community to finalize new sections on  
the presence service.  We encourage you to peruse and contribute to  
the almanac, available at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Almanac

Guillaume Desmottes tracked memory leaks and corruptions bugs in the  
Gadget Gabble branches. He found and fixed some nasty ones making the  
gadget branch more robust. He also improved gadget integration in  
sugar by implementing a simple wrapper around views objects making  
them easier to use by sugar and he improved presence management in  
Gabble and Gadget aiming to handle more gracefully Gadget component  
restarts.

Daniel Drake fixed the Read activity, worked with Victor Lazzarini to  
fix a csound bug that was breaking TamTam, and worked with TamTam  
developers to produce new releases. Daniel also worked with QA to test  
installation of the latest school server build XS164.

Erik Garrison worked with David Woodhouse to verify that test failures  
encountered while LZO-compressing partition images were spurious and
non-fatal, and conversed with Mitch Bradley about the process of  
building and installing a partitioned OS image on the XO.   
Additionally, he assisted in communication with deployments in Uruguay  
and Perú.

Bobby Powers got rainbow to start after X, so that it could properly  
preload GTK again. He is looking into getting a more standard Linux
distribution on an SD card as an alternative to Windows.

Sucrose 0.81.6, Release Candidate 2 was released this week. This cycle  
was again about stabilizing the release. Thanks to all the translators  
we were able to get many new translations in. All the Fructose modules  
have been released containing the new strings.

For more detailed release notes see:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.6

School server:
Martin Langhoff released build OLPC_XS_165, which is our xs-0.3  
"release candidate". Thanks to Bryan Berry and David van Assche, who  
have been providing excellent notes on installation steps and  
shortcomings. The livecd approach we use on the XS images is brittle  
and not suitable for upgrades; we need to move to traditional  
installer CDs using either pungi or revisor.

Martin also started putting together an "xs-rsync" package to publish  
content via rsync on the XS, with utilities that allow it to serve XO  
builds mimicking update-server's behaviour.

Community:
Wikimania 2008:  The event was held at the [new] Library of  
Alexandria.  SJ presented recent offline wiki efforts on the XO,  
including an offline version of the Arabic Wikipedia which was being  
finished that week with help from Bassem Jarkas and moulin.org .  Many  
groups in attendance wanted to start OLPC-related projects,  
particularly to extend access to wiki-repositories to offline  
communities.
    Bibalex : Sohair Wastawy, chief librarian of Alexandria, and Lamia  
Fattah, head of their children's library, proposed a small  
installation for the children's section -- a set of 5 rooms that are  
restricted to children under 12 (there is a small waiting area for  
parents) and library staff. They have 60 to 100 children in the  
library during most days in summertime, for eight hours each day.
    WikiBrowse : Tim Starling, a core MediaWiki developer, has offered  
to generate regular static snapshots of all language wikipedias in a  
format suitable for our WikiBrowse activity.  These snapshots are  
produced for Wikipedia every other month; a dedicated machine is  
available mose weeks to make further snapshots.
     Semantic MediaWiki : Francesca Slade is helping organize  
structured information on our wiki with this extension, particularly  
relating to countries and test reports.  The creators of the extension  
at Wikimania offered to help implement some of our recent feature  
requests.

Community
At Wikimania 2008 SJ Klein presented recent offline wiki efforts on  
the XO, including a version of the Arabic Wikipedia which was being  
finished that week with help from Bassem Jarkas and moulin.org. Many  
groups in attendance wanted to start OLPC-related projects,  
particularly to extend access to wiki-repositories to offline  
communities.

Adam Hyde and Anne Gentle are organizing a Sugar documentation sprint  
for the last week in August, with details to be finalized soon.
Seth Woodworth wrote up an overview of the current docs projects.
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/2008-July/000655.html
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/2008-July/000660.html

Activities
Mohit Taneja and Deepank Gupta now have a working game for Food Force  
2, suitable for an alpha; it is being repackaged as an .xo bundle: http://code.google.com/p/foodforce/

Juliana Lipková, working with Thomas Breuel,has mockups and code for  
her handwriting recognition activity.
http://olpc-dhw.blogspot.com/
http://code.google.com/p/olpc-dhw/

Geography: Rajan Vaish finished v2 of his Atlas America activity,  
working with Nestor Guerrero in Monterrey, and is back in school.  The  
activity needs testing.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Vaish.rajan/Weekly_Updates

VideoEdit: Michael Lew has taken an interest in the video project, and  
in helping the existing collaboration.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:VideoEdit

Support
Adam Holt reports that the 100th volunteer for the Support-gang joined  
this week! The tickets associated with last year's Give One Get One  
are tailing off as we begin planning for the 2009 G1G1. Going forward,  
the focus for the support-gang is on technical issues and helping  
people use their laptops rather than fulfillment questions.

Some of the support gang are helping out with the upcoming  
documentation sprint. Adam has identified wifi access points that have  
been reported as problems. We will purchase these to add to our test  
environment. He and Kim are working on the details and systems to put  
in place to help repair centers get spare parts and track their  
problem reports.

OLPC France hosted a Paris repair jam a week ago,  where 6 people  
practiced repairing XOs and they worked on 8 broken machines.

SJ Klein and Henry Edward Hardy have updated teamwiki to v. 1.13 and  
enabled semantic mediawiki. This will facilitate tagging and other  
"Web 2.0" features.

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