[Community-news] OLPC News (2008-05-04), Tech Team

[Kim Quirk]

A note from the editor:

I have been reading the discussions this past week on the mission and
direction of OLPC and OLPC's outreach to the community. I'd like to
reiterate that we at OLPC are committed to create Sugar as an open source
project, as it provides a great opportunity for both learners and for
contributors. Sugar in combination with the XO hardware extends this
opportunity even further through the mesh, power management, and robustness
features of the hardware required for many of the environments where we want
to provide help.  We have sold or given away hundreds of thousands of
laptops running Sugar on GNU/Linux on the XO. We plan to continue to do
that. This year's Tech Team budget allows us to almost double our personnel
in development, test, and support. We are very excited about being able to
hire at this level over the next few months.

OLPC has had an amazing amount of contributions from volunteers in the
community in all areas including development, test, support, translations,
documentation, marketing/messaging, and even business expertise. We truly
value these contributions. What we haven't done well (at least recently) is
to support people who are trying to help us. We need to fix our
communications with volunteers and community groups. We need to be open and
transparent without compromising the confidentiality of others that we might
do business with. This is difficult but it is not rocket science. I think we
can do it. Sometimes when everyone is overworked, it is much easier to focus
on the details of the day than to see the bigger problems. I intend to make
some specific recommendations towards better communications in the next few
weeks. Your comments, thoughts, and ideas are welcome.

- Kim Quirk
Dir of Tech Team

*Power and Hardware:*
The first Multi-Battery Charger sample parts off of the tooling made it to
1cc this week. Richard has been spending most of his time purchasing,
scrounging up, and assembling all the other parts in order to create a
working prototype.  Once assembled it will start to get used at 1cc.

Richard has modified his power logging script to try and do battery life
estimation calculations as a first try for something that can be used
for the battery monitor in sugar.  Its available here:
http://dev.laptop.org/~rsmith/olpc-bat_ttl<http://dev.laptop.org/%7Ersmith/olpc-bat_ttl>

*Tech Team in Deployments*:
While in Peru over the past week, John Watlington queried individuals in the
MED to prioritize software improvements being considered.
Speeding up the user interface was high on everybody's list of improvements,
with the proposed Sugar UI changes a close second. He showed them Joyride
1892 to illustrate the proposed changes, and discussed changes to the
activity menu bar.   Some of the technical team got excited and started
downloading it to play with.

A close third was improving the power management of the laptop to extend the
life of a single battery charge.   Following were improvements to the group
model (specifically, they are looking at support of multiple groups,
possibly defined and shared between users --- e.g. the teacher makes a group
that is "first grade", so it is easy to invite only the first graders to
join an activity.

Improvements in the network association algorithm (the laptop needs to
automatically identify school servers, irrespective of the connection
method, mesh or AP, #6855) were assumed.   We also need to continue the work
on improving the reliability of the collaboration middleware under lossy
network conditions.  Several new patches have arrived from Collabora to test
in the (in limbo) mesh testbed! Re-enabling support for automatic mesh
portal is a topic of increasing importance. A very strong requirement is
that further machines arrive in Peru from manufacturing with build 703 and
the Peru activity bundle installed.

Backup to the school server wasn't highly rated, perhaps not surprising
given the sample set.  Unfortunately, deployments haven't gotten to the
point of obtaining feedback directly from the field on Update.1.   (Arahuay
just upgraded from B2 machines to mass production XOs and Update.1 two weeks
ago.).

*Hardware:*
A meeting was held at 1CC this week to kick-off the second generation of
OLPC laptop hardware. The overall goals of this generation have been
established for some time:  1) Much Lower Power, 2) Lower Cost, 3) More
robust and easier to repair, and 4) Increased performance without
sacrificing any more important goal.   A surprising amount of consensus was
reached on the overall form factor and look and feel, and more information
will be publicly announced soon.

*Software:*
Scott Ananian:
* Most of my time was spent on networking issues.  I wrote up a set of
networking principles to guide deployment networking assumptions:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Network_principles. This document is still a
work-in-progress; I'm working on integrating comments and prototyping some
ideas to firm up proposals.
* Towards the end of the week, I investigated the skype, Ubuntu Mobile, and
Edubuntu ports to the XO.

Chris Ball:
* Working on a manual "extreme low-power" mode.  Came up against obstacles
one and two:  the EC commands for turning off the wireles device by putting
it into reset are not implemented in the driver,  and we'll need to be able
to create per-kernel initrds before we  can make the USB controller modular.
 Started work on both of these.

* Once these are done, we can add a manual UI switch that turns off the
wireless chip and unloads the host controller (which will give us about
300ms resume time and large power saving) before enabling OHM's idle suspend
mode and backlight dimming.

* Realized that the "wikipedia-iphone" open-source project (which stores
compressed wikipedia snapshots on the iPhone and allows browsing of the
snapshot by decompressing articles on-the-fly) is a great fit for us.
 Worked with Mel Chua to document what the steps to port it to an XO
activity would be. Please see Mel's write up:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wiki_server. The full text of the Spanish
Wikipedia is 400M  compressed; by selecting only popular, well-linked,
regularly-edited articles, this could drop to a size where it makes sense to
put it on XOs directly. 400M is already appropriate for putting on a school
server.

Javier Cardona on the thin firmware project or soft AP:
- 8388 mac80211 driver and firmware are functional for infra and monitor
mode.
- device can scan, associate and transfer data (for now with no security and
at fixed rate).
- b43 (broadcom) + mac80211 + hostapd AP solution has been tested with
latest hostapd and wireless kernel + necessary patches.  This will be the
golden system that we'll compare our libertas based solution with.
- build and testing procedures have been documented.
- we should be able to make a first development release in two weeks (it
will not include AP functionality yet).

Morgan Collett:
* worked on http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Tubes_Tutorial to get it in line with
changes to HelloMesh
* worked on a proof of concept to launch Chat when a non-Sugar Jabber client
initiates a connection (testing, almost ready for review)

Guillaume Desmottes:
- Investigated few presence related bugs
- Continue to implement Gadget client. Most of it is done now.

Ricardo Carrano:
* Finished testing firmware release 22.p10. It fixes many bugs (#4616,
#6709, #4927, #6589) and it will be released to joyride as soon as Javier
Cardona rewrites/approves the necessary driver patches.
* Summarized a list of current wireless issues in
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wireless_Issues_Apr08 and started the
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Network_Issues_May08 to collect contributions for
a new list with the more ambitious goal of concentrating all network-related
issues. Please contribute!

Andres Salomon:
- worked on getting more stuff upstream.
- merged master up w/ 2.6.25, discussed branching a new stable from it
- created and merged newmaster up w/ linus
- fixed a number of bugs in master and newmaster
Linus's 2.6.26 will be the first upstream kernel capable of booting on an
XO.

Michael Stone:
This week, I reviewed touchpad bugs and prepared some straw-man text around
which to organize further development. I also helped Dennis
experiment with Sugar-on-F-9-on-XO with Dennis, critiqued several patches by
Martin Dengler, critiqued Eben's Journal redesign work
with Ben Schwartz and Jameson Quinn, and reviewed parts of Scott's "Network
Principles" document with Daf.

*Support:
*Kim Quirk and Adam Holt held a G1G1 post mortem review to capture the
important things that were done right and done wrong. We will deliver a
summary of this to all interested people at OLPC in another week. Attending
the meeting were representatives from all our partners. Some highlights: It
is critical to appoint someone with oversight and accountability for the
entire program as too many things fell into holes with no owner. Also most
people felt that they 'pulled out all the stops' for this program to the
point of burning bridges and burning out. Every partner ended up getting
involved in the time-consuming and stressful job of supporting people who
were very upset.

Emily Smith:
- sent out 50+ tax receipts for donated XOs
- continued to work on shipping problems for G1G1
- continued to send out replacement machines for RMAs
- Began manually notifying RMA recipients of their FedEx tracking numbers
 - Found that about 10% of RMAs reshipped have problems with delivery
(address change, requested refund not reshipment, etc)

*SysAdmin*:
Henry Hardy:
* All monitored systems had 100% uptime.
* Crank (dev, trac, git) continues to be slow. On April 28, a small problem
caused by an apparent hash collision between 2 tickets which contributed to
added slowness of trac occured and was resolved.
* Upgrade of grinch filer is scheduled for this upcoming weekend. We plan to
add nine 1 terabyte disks to the coraid 1521 filer. Grinch will be
unavailable from Saturday at noon EDT Saturday May 3 to Monday May 5 at
09:00 EDT.
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