[Community-news] OLPC News - (2008-06-23)

[Jim Gettys]


Tomeu Visozo implemented the Home view UI that allows the user to drag
and drop activities to desired locations on the screen (freeform)
rather than restricting them to the circle. Other activities move
nicely out of the way if you try to drop one on top of another. Look
for this in an upcoming test build soon!

Marco Pesenti Gritti reviewed patches for the freeform Home view as
well as and Benjamin Berg's patches to implement quick activity
switching using the keyboard. He also packaged xulrunner 1.9 final and
adapted the Browse activity to it. Finally he coordinated the Sugar
0.81.3 release and made big progresses on a Fedora 9 based Sugar liveCD.
Note that xulrunner 1.9 final is the version used in Firefox 3, which
provides much better memory use than previous versions.  This should
significantly help our memory usage.  Less than a week after release,
Firefox 3 already accounts for 4% of web browser use on the Internet.

Morgan Collett released Chat-41 and Presence Service 0.81.2 with the
changes required for non-Sugar Jabber clients to chat with XOs. He
registered as an Afrikaans translator on Pootle and translated Sugar
and some of the core activities.

Faisal Anwar of Media Modifications further developed the online
"Sugar Almanac" of best practices and working code snippets.  This
week he documented and debated with the community how to best use the
datastore api, and began entries on logging and internationalization.

Sayamindu Dasgupta arrived at the OLPC offices this week for a two
week long visit. He made a presentation on the OLPC translation
infrastructure, and had some discussions with members of the tech team
on the various aspects of translation. He also had a meeting with
Evelyn Eastmond, one of the co-authors of Scratch, and explained the
various aspects of Pootle to her. Sayamindu also made some progress on
the support for administrative messages for translation teams in Pootle
during the course of the week.

Chris Ball found and fixed a bug preventing suspend from working on
our new 2.6.25 kernels.  With that out of the way, the extreme power
management mode could be tested -- a machine with wireless off, the
backlight on but dimmed, and occasional wakeups to check the battery
level ran for 16 hours and 15 minutes before turning off.  Next steps
will be to integrate this work in the UI and get it into a build.

Michael Stone reviewed code for the Datastore, XS Backup, Gadget, and
NetworkManager-0.7 projects. He produced and signed a "708 + G1G1
activity pack" image which he delivered to QA. Finally, he pushed for
more contributions in the weekly public Software Status meeting, in
personal conversations with Emiliano Pastorino, Sjoerd Simons, Bill
Mccormick, and in conversations with several key Fedora and RedHat
developers present at FUDCON Boston 2008.

Bert Freudenberg reports a new etoys release: fresh from the press:

http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys/etoys-3.0.2029.tar.gz
http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-83.tar.gz

bundled:

http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm
http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-83.xo

Improvements include: Pango fixes (tested with Nepalese), new DBus
bindings, updated QuickGuides, a few more strings made translatable.
Pango's importance is that it forms the basis for fully international
text layout.

Paul Fox made good progress on the sdcc-based EC firmware -- the code
now fits, but the data segment needs work.  Paul is looking forward to
actually running this code soon.

Ankur Verma continued his work on Internet connectivity using modems
from Sprint and AT&T and updated
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_%2B_Modem page with the steps.

Daniel Drake worked on various problems with the Fedora 9 (OLPC-3)
stream including USB automount issues, inability to shutdown/reboot,
sound nodes not accessible to user, and camera functionality.

Faisal Anwar of Media Modifications further developed the online
"Sugar Almanac" of best practices and working code snippets.  This
week he documented and debated with the community how to best use the
datastore api, and began entries on logging and internationalization.

Walter Bender's sugar digest from last week is available here:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-June/006546.html


Testing:
Joe Feinstein (with Kim Quirk and Michael Stone) worked on setting up
the community testing project
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Friends_in_testing). He also has been
testing the proposed back-up build for G1G1 (8.1.1, or build 708). A
critical bug associated with attaching an external USB mouse was found
in Joyride 2026, where suspend and resume is turned on more
aggressively than the Update.1 builds.

Charlie Murphy set up 15 XOs for Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos'
multi-hop network/cerebro testing project, which involved installing
the most recent 708 build, git and cerebro. Pol kicked of the testing
of the first 10 laptops for this campus testing.

Support:
It finally feels like the Give One Get One demands are starting to
decrease. Thanks to all the help from Frances Hopkins, Sean Hooley and
Emily Smith. Emily, who is leaving us next week to start a job as an
Information Sciences Specialist, spent a lot of time this week
documenting and training on all the tools, tips, and databases for
refunds, RMA dispositions, Give Another donations, tax receipt
letters, and much more. Best of luck to her!

Product Management:
Please welcome Greg Smith, who is starting today as OLPC's Product
Manager.

Greg will focus on SW releases including prioritization of bugs and
feature requests, help improve our processes. He will also ensure that
we get end user input and involvement in the development cycle,
gathering feedback from students, teachers, administrators, government
organizations, and G1G1 participants. He will work with management and
'sales' people to set expectations on what is achievable.

Gnome on an XO:
On a more interesting note, Andres Salomon's conventional laptop
display died this week, so he worked on putting gnome on an XO.  It runs
surprisingly well, despite claims that memory and disk usage would be a
problem.  Jffs2's compression actually helps a _lot_ here:

	mtd0                  1.0G  750M  275M  74% /

Here's what 'du' reports (ie, the amount of space he'd be using
_without_ compression):

	1.6G    /

This is a Debian system with gnome-core + random applications installed
(claws-mail, epiphany, vlc, pidgin, evince....).  Andres' had issues
with flash (adobe's flash plugin displays youtube videos in high
quality, but it is incredibly choppy, and gnash displays lower quality
videos).  Vorbis/mp3 play just fine in vlc without skipping, claws is
able to handle his imap folder w/ 15000 messages, and epiphany without
flash doesn't use very much memory.  The main item that doesn't work
(aside from power management, which he haven't even tried yet) is the
touchpad; but a USB mouse will suffice for now.

-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child