[Community-news] OLPC News (2008-08-18)

[Jim Gettys]

Community News
A weekly update of One Laptop per Child, August 17, 2008


It was a proud moment for OLPC as tiny Uruguay rolled out its 100,000th
computer - almost all of which are Internet enabled. The scene was the
Villa García Elementary School near Montevideo. With more than a
thousand pupils, it is one of the country’s largest primary schools.
Chuck Kane, Claudia Urrea and Antonio Battro all looked on as President
Tabaré Vázquez presented the 100,000thXO to a six-year-old student.
Miguel Blechner of CEIBAL spoke briefly, too. The news media were
everywhere. Many of the children captured the moment by turning their
XOs around to take their own still pictures or video.

In the afternoon, Claudia and Antonio accompanied Mónica Baez and
Graciela Rabajoli of CEIBAL on a visit to a school near Colonia. Over
the next few days, CEIBAL presented several anti-smoking school
initiatives, showing the work done by students and teachers with their
laptops in their communities. The children discussed their work in a
workshop. David Cavallo arrived from a long trip to Asia and Africa to
participate in these meetings. 

OLPC looks forward to the next wave of rollouts in Uruguay, which
continues as a great example of a successful deployment. Sincere
congratulations to the people of Uruguay from everyone at OLPC.

CEIBAL maintains an excellent Spanish-language website
at:http://www.ladiaria.com.uy/files/ladiaria_20080814web.pdf. Also Carla
Gómez Monroy has documented the Uruguay deployment
at:http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Uruguay/Ceibal

Learning

Haiti: The team was busy with teacher reports, the operations manual and
Kreyol translation. They also worked on their practical guide for
trainers and on some hand-outs for trainees, as well as designs for a
few pedagogical activities and projects with and around the XO, trying
to integrate existing curriculum when it makes sense.

All translations are complete, except eToys (65 percent) and Scratch (15
percent), which require special care. Next step is a linguistic review.

Mongolia: Teachers continue to create curriculum material online. Work
continues to solidify local partnerships with both NGOs and governmental
agencies.

The XO was featured in Mongolian Computer Timesmagazine this month. The
article was generally positive although the writer questioned how
Mongolia could afford to support the initiative. Elana Langer was
interviewed on Eagle TV, a popular TV station. The questions reflected a
concern from the Mongolian people about the criteria and process by
which the government will choose to distribute the laptops.

Lastly, a Mongolian athlete has just won the country’s very first
Olympic gold medal, in judo. There were street celebrations in UB. Many
hope this sudden boost to national pride might galvanize the government
into a functional organization.

Rwanda: The team is refining their strategic plan, looking past the
initial rollout of 5000 laptops to create both a vision and a plan for a
national laptops project. 

Monday and Tuesday they participated in a series of meetings with
Richard Niyonkuru, the project coordinator, and representatives of
several other governmental agencies. During the rest of the week, a team
formed by representatives of the main governmental agencies visited the
three schools selected to receive the first 5000 machines in the
provinces of Rwamagana, Gasabo and Kycukyro. 

The visit was received enthusiastically by the students and teachers.
The team did a basic site survey to isolate the main initial challenges.
One will be the size of the schools and classrooms. The average Rwandan
school is large, with 1500 students, and so are classrooms, which range
to 70 students or more. 

The Kagugu school in Gasabo province has 3105 students, and some classes
with more than 100 children. Usually the classrooms have only one power
outlet, which will make laptop charging a challenge. The sheer size of
the schools and classes will also make for networking issues. Kagugu
staff also raised interesting questions over how to define and implement
the project policies, and ownership of the Xos.

Birmingham: This week the team worked with the instructional technology
staff member who will be in charge of this project everyday to try to
prepare documents requested by the executive director of IT. This
included a learning manual that is briefer than the online version, and
will help with the Just In Time Learning sessions to begin before
teachers get the laptops. The team also worked with headquarters staff
from the music, PE and Special Ed departments to introduce the laptops.
The music department LOVED Tam Tam.


An XO eXpO is scheduled for August 23. There will be attendees from many
stakeholders in the community, so it should be an exciting event.

Technology

Software Development for 8.2 Release:
1. Many people have joined the daily effort to triage “must fix” bugs
for 8.2. Formal testing has begun as well. If you are interested in
helping, please go to http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Friends_in_testing

2. Chris Ball improved the failsafe "disk full" recovery script by
adding an option to continue booting without attempting recovery. The
script is now present in Joyride builds.

3. Simon Schampijer is polishing the latest Sugar release. He reviewed
patches and fixed a bug to correctly set the time zone from the control
panel, show an alert if software updates are available, as well as an
alert when available space is below 50MB. The fix also encourages the
user to remove journal entries to free up space.

4. Morgan Collett adopted the Read activity and started on its blocker
and high priority bugs, reviewing existing patches. Morgan continued
surveying activity authors on improving communication for them, asking
which mailing lists they are subscribed to, when lastthey tested their
activities and asking for suggestions. He will posta report as soon as
he has a significant number of responses.

5. Daniel Drake continued fixing bugs in audio performance, Gstreamer
and the Record activity, automated school server backup. He also
addressed a networking issue with the activity updater. 

6. Faisal Anwar further documented the best software development
practices for Sugar, focusing this week on the presence service. Testing
and documentation of the presence service requires multiple XO laptops.
Information on how you can develop your own activities with this API are
available athttp://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Almanac 

7. Deepak Saxena continued to focus on the 8.2 release, trying to
reproduce and root out bugs. Deepak also is looking into new build
infrastructure for the kernel. Chris Ball and Deepak had a talk on OLPC
Power Management accepted into the Linux Plumbers Conference.

Software Development, Future Release:

8. Daniel and Bobby Powers started investigating the procedure needed to
install regular Linux distributions on SD cards and the modifications
necessary to boot them on the XO. Bobby has been working on all fronts
of his activity Model. He didwork on reliability, error reporting,
performance and UI.

9. Guillaume Desmottes rebased the XS ejabberd package on top of the F-9
one in order to use ejabberd 2.0.1. That involved manual re-application
of most of the shared roster patch as some pieces of it were merged
upstream. Guillaume also improved his Gadget branches and fixed review
comments from Daf.

10. Elliot Fairweather worked on the Cerebro activities API, filing bugs
and writing patches to fix those problems blocking his progress. He also
made further progress with telepathy-synapse's activity interfaces.
Elliot believes he will complete this part of the task next week.

11. Sayamindu Dasgupta spent most of the week rearranging and
reconfiguring Pootle according the conventions of the Sugar release
process. This will make it easier for translators to follow the Sugar
release schedule, and prioritize their work. He also landed a patch in
olpc-utils which should fix all the keyboard layout related regressions
from the 8.1 release. Sayamindu also started work in defining a keyboard
for Dzongkha (ticket #7899). This week also saw the start of two new
language projects in Pootle, one for Nauruan and the other for Bislama.

12. Seth Woodworth worked on various open wiki-issues. Google Analytics
is now installed on the wiki, providing large amounts of very useful
data (expect a report early next week). The wiki also now has support
for TeX math. Semantic aggregation of activities for various pages is
progressing.

School Server:

13. Martin Langhoff held the 2nd school server meeting over IRC - with
the Nepal pilot team as the main participants. They covered a lot around
upcoming XS-0.4 and XS-0.5 releases, F9 rebase and how the Nepal team
can work ahead and feed back into the main XS efforts. Thanks to all
involved. Agenda, minutes, and IRC logs
athttp://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Conf_08_AUG_07_Meeting

14. Douglas Bagnall worked on password schemes for the XS, and testing
DS-backup. Douglas and Martin are doing a lot of work to fix how we deal
with configurations on the school server. The current configuration
scheme breaks upgrades and blocks the path to a Fedora 9 rebase. 

Support and Testing:

15. Welcome Reuben Caron as our Country Support Engineer. This week,
Reuben set up an RT Queue to allow country technical contacts and
learning team members to report escalated technical issues that arise
from the field. He will be helping out with some testing while learning
the XO and XS as well as attending tech and learning team meetings to
see where he can help out.

16. Joe Feinstein and Charlie Murphy have tested two Joyride builds –
2294 and 2301 - in the last week, and requested turning off automatic
suspend and resume as it seemed to be causing some crash or WLAN crash
problems. In build 2301 this is off so we should be able to isolate the
problem more carefully. 

17. Twenty-one XOs are now connected to a school server at 1CC, always
difficult to do in a very noisy RF environment. We await word on when we
will be able to rebuild the 100 laptop testbed in the low noise Cameron
Ave facility. Joe, Michael Stone, and Kim Quirk are also working on
ideas and plans for getting the community more involved with testing.


18. Mitch Bradley is investigating LBA-NAND as a possible technology for
boosting XO's storage. LBA-NAND is a NAND FLASH device that is
pin-compatible with our current raw NAND chip, but it comes in larger
sizes and has an internal microcontroller that handles error correction,
bad-block management and wear-leveling. LBA-NAND would let us use a
conventional filesystem instead of a NAND-specific one. Mitch added
LBA-NAND support to the Open Firmware CaFe NAND driver and tested it on
an XO board that Quanta's Gary Chiang fitted with a 4GB LBA-NAND,
verifying that it works with a conventional disk filesystem. He is
starting work on a Linux LBA-NAND "block" driver to evaluate the overall
system performance.


The Watlington Report:

19. Perú has received the first shipment of the next purchase of 100,000
laptops, and is preparing for the process of upgrading, distributing,
and activating them. Erik Garrison, with the help of SJ Klein, Scott
Ananian, and John Watlington, spent a few days rebuilding the library
content bundle for Perú to include the new and improved user's guide and
almost double the number of texts. This was integrated with the latest
8.1.1 build (711) to produce the final image. Erik will be improving the
scripts and documentation of this process, as we expect countries to
prepare these themselves. 

A new release, incorporating q2e13 or later firmware (needed as some of
Perú's shipment will be C3 mother boards) will be made after q2e13 has
passed QA testing. The activation server will require changes to
minimize the effort required by OLPC to support each shipment, as we
currently duplicate the inventory system maintained by Peru. Scott
Ananian manually performed the database update required to activate this
shipment.

Erik Garrison will spend the next week in Perú to help with any further
problems arising as they start the upgrading and activation. More
importantly, he will teach developers from the education ministry how to
create their own library bundles and to build images. Erik will also
work with a local developer to improve the software used with optical
scanning for inventory of the laptops and batteries. Changes are
required to improve the success rate of the activation process.

Embedded Controller:

21. Richard spent most of the week back porting what he felt were the
most useful fixes from his master EC code branch into the release tree.
A nasty bug in how the EC determines the motherboard version was found
and fixed before causing problems in production (it only affects the
upcoming C3 motherboards). Richard released firmware q2e13 containing
those fixes. The proposed firmware for the 8.2.0 release is q2e13.

22. Paul Fox worked further on the SDCC port of the EC code. Some
unexpected compiler bugs have been found which may explain some of the
current issues.


Progress on the New Touch pad:

23. Quanta has begun the tooling change to support the migration to a
new, capacitive-only touch pad from the current resistive/capacitive
one. This migration could happen as early as the end of October, but
might be pushed out farther due to supply chain inertia. Quanta has sent
in some preliminary documentation for the new touch pad (from Synaptics)
and keyboard controller (EnE) for replacement of the ALPS device.

Richard and John reviewed the documentation and requested further info.
They specifically want to see information on what type of testing has
been done in humid environments and with children's fingers. So far,
Richard is quite pleased with the quality of the documentation from
Synaptics. OLPC will be receiving samples in Cambridge shortly for
testing and software integration.

The new EnE keyboard matrix controller appears to handle many of the
keyboard commands more directly, instead of relying on the EC. New EC
firmware will be required to accompany the new touchpad/controller,
although there is still some question as to the magnitude of the changes
required.

24. [REMOVED from archive on 20080916 per written request from wad@laptop.org and Rebecca.Gonzales@amd.com] --HH.

25. Reuben Caron is new at OLPC and has spent the week meeting with
people, testing, and learning as much about the different aspects of the
project as possible. Reuben has setup an RT Queue to allow country
technical contacts and learning team members to report escalated
technical issues that arise from the field.


Support


25. Adam Holt:discussed extensive RT improvements beginning soon, with
Adric and FSF's Josh Gay (RT14244 etc); approved bulk XO parts sales to
finally ship out next week to http://xoexplosion.com and
http://ilovemyxo.com (from Brightstar/Miami); trained several new
volunteers, including Hironori Mitsuishi working towards establishing a
new Miami repair center: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sunshine_Repair;began
extensive cleanup of the support FAQ and support gang pages, welcomed
Rachel Kropa, who presented a fantastic talk on her 200-XO Mozambique
pilot deployment:
http://flickr.com/photos/12312003@N07/sets/72157606618160452/ recruited
Daniel Drake to speak to our Support Gang 4PM SUN AUG 17, discussing
8.2.0 and Fedora/Ubuntu on XO.
        
26. Sean Hooly processed refunds, submitted RMAs for shipping and
updated excel files accordingly; took new tickets, followed up to
replies to existing ones; updated xls stats file and gathered statistics
on donations, refunds, reships and replacements for last week with
Frances 

27. Greg Smith read all major open bugs in the 8.2.0 pre-release image
and triaged them to find the must fix list.

28. Walter Bender's Sugar Digest can be found at:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-August/001525.html


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