[Community-news] OLPC News - (2008-6-30)

[Jim Gettys]

Marco Pesenti Gritti spent a couple of days triaging the over 500
tickets assigned to Glucose (the Sugar core packages). We have now a
pretty decent list of things that we should target for 8.2.0. He
discussed with Greg Smith and Michael Stone the release process and
contributed to the document which has been posted to the public
development mailing on Friday. He tracked down and found an easy
solution for the problems with ConsoleKit in the Fedora 9 based
builds, which was causing USB devices and system shutdown to not work.
Finally he revised the code review process to make easier to track
patches and ensure they are looked at, which is very important to
keep the community motivated. In the process he added QA test cases to
the process and wrote scripts to automatically generate list of
changes and testcases for each release and to send a daily report
about patch reviews status to the sugar list.

Tomeu Vizoso also triaged and started fixing bugs as Sugar reached
feature freeze: packaged an updated version of Gnash to 
fix a Browse crash, set the correct icon when dragging an activity icon,
correctly align icons in the frame, etc.

Hemant Goyal reports that Fedora and OLPC developers can now download
the speech-dispatcher RPM packages for testing/development of speech
enabled activities.
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-June/006685.html

Walter Bender's Sugar digest can be found at:
http://lists.lo-res.org/pipermail/its.an.education.project/2008-June/001150.html
There is the Sugar Labs meeting taking place in Milan today
(Monday, 30 June 2008). We'll be reporting on the meeting on the
#sugar-meeting channel of irc.freenode.net beginning at approximately
9:00 UTC+2. Please join in (Also, feel free to send any questions or
comments beforehand to walter at sugarlabs.org).


------------
Guillaume Desmottes reviewed all Dafydd Harries' gadget branches and
implemented persistent buddy views support. He also improved Gabble's
Gadget tests and view code (see
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Gadget_integration_TODO#Gabble for all the
Gabble action items)

In the last two weeks, Elliot Fairweather has been working with
telepathy-python and started writing telepathy-synapse, a connection
manager for Cerebro. So far he has code to generate and maintain a
contact list for nodes on the network. 

Sjoerd Simons has been working on making Network Manager 0.7 work with
the OLPC mesh devices. At this point he can join mesh networks standard
IP configuration. Support for dhcp using anycast and being able to act
as a mesh portal MPP should follow next week.
--------------

SW Development / Release:

Greg Smith joined OLPC this week as our Product Manager. He will help
focus and prioritize features for our releases based on input from
deployments, support, sales, and development. He will also provide
information to our sales team on product capabilities and usage. 

Greg worked with Michael Stone this week on the first draft of the full
release process: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Process_Home.
Comments and suggestions are welcome!

Dennis changed the Joyride build stream to be based onF-9. He also
worked on communicating how to push patches upstream and why this is in
the best interest of OLPC. We should have really good reasons to fork a
patch; many times there is another way to fix a package so that it fits
both OLPC and Fedora's best interest. Another option might be to add run
time options to enable functionality that OLPC wants when its really
unsuitable for general Fedora use.  Please get help from Dennis whenever
you need help figuring out make something more suitable for upstream.

Daniel Drake continued working on Fedora 9 bug-fixing efforts, following
up on the fixes produced last week and solving a bug in the new gnash
browser plugin. Significant Fedora 9 regressions are being tracked here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC-3

Paul Fox succeeded in building a version of the EC (embedded controller)
firmware, helped out with the touchpad issues, and posted a timestamped
log of system boot, as an example of how it might be useful in guiding
speedup work.

Sayamindu Dasgupta worked on completing the internationalization support
in sugar-toolkit and sugar-base, and added them to Pootle once
they had been made translatable. He also removed the old terminology
section in Pootle, and replaced it with a new glossary for sugar, taking
in UI terms which occur more than once in Sugar and the activities. He
used the poterminology script to generate the glossary, thanks to
Alexander Dupuy for the work on the script.

Martin Langhoff has traffic control and time-based snapshots done on the
datastore-backup project. Next we now need a simple UI listing available
activities, and the rpm packaging scripts. He also ran a highly
entertaining seminar on the School Server (XS). 

Community/Activities:

Greg Smith is helping the EduBlog project moving forward. See the
requirements, project timeline and design proposal at:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Blog_Educativo_Plan_del_Proyecto Try the Alpha
version out at: http://olpc.betarun.com/dev/ui/student_sp.php

Martin Langhoff and Michael Stone joined FUDCon's (Fedora User and
Developer's Conference) Barcamp on Saturday, gave a talk on the wonders
of the school server; there was an outpouring of help with our current
questions, and offers of help with some packages.

The Record activity is broken on F9's new gstreamer libraries. A
gstreamer developer suggested that Record's gstreamer pipeline is
invalid and was surprised that it worked on previous releases. Daniel is
reworking and improving the pipeline to fix the activity.

Testing:
Joe Feinstein and Kim Quirk prepared and delivered a presentation
"QA/Testing at OLPC" to the TechTeam, Slides can be found at
http://wiki.laptop.org/images/a/a6/QA_at_OLPC.pdf

Joe Feinstein continued testing the 8.1.1 build-candidate (708) in the
stand-alone and collaboration (without school server) environment. He
assisted Greg Smith in creating some "use cases" and set up a testbed to
verify the limits of the "under the tree" collaboration environment. We
haven't had a large testbed of laptops in many weeks, so this will be a
focus over the next few weeks when we begin testing builds for the 8.2.0
release.

Support/Sysadmin:
Henry Hardy reports that automated daily backups via rsync are in place
for our three big mission-critical servers: crank (dev), pedal (mail),
and solar (vservers). We are starting to discuss planning for upgrades
and extensions to the rt and trac ticket systems.

Adam Holt and Kim Quirk set up a meeting with5 repair centers who are
getting off the ground. Adam has sent each of them some broken laptops
to seed their spare parts bins and give them some experience in
repairing laptops. We are also working with a few e-commerce sites who
would be interested in providing the spare parts to G1G1 people and
small deployments in the US and Canada. There are many things these
repair centers need to start their business (non-profit or for-profit).
We are trying to help them.

Sean Hooley and Frances Hopkins continue to work with Adam on the end of
the first G1G1 issues. The quantity of laptops that need reshipment each
week is finally starting to decrease. We posted a notice that June 30th
is the last day that people can activate their T-Mobile accounts. 

Adam and group of volunteers from the Chicago ILXO office
(http://ILXO.org) analyzed 775 laptops from the Chicago warehouse,
mostly returns, to determine the status. Most of them were reflashed
with software and can be part of the developer's and testing programs
(used, but otherwise good). Only 200 of them were broken.



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