[Community-news] OLPC News (2008-09-08)

[Jim Gettys]

Community News
A weekly update of One Laptop per Child September 8, 2008

As reported in the press, Amazon will distribute the laptops for us.
Contrary to published speculation, XP will not be offered as a dual
boot.

Learning 

Rwanda: It was a sunny Friday, September 5that the Kagugu Primary School
in Kigali where the national government officially launched OLPC in
Rwanda. Many national officials, the press and various international
organizations attended. The ceremony included more than three thousands
students who received their XO laptops.

The impressive event included traditional music and dance, performed
both by the children and by professional dancers – living reminders of
Rwanda’s proud past and abundant future promise. The school was fully
prepared for the occasion. The electrical infrastructure had been
expanded. Wireless connectivity via Vsat was installed. Decorations were
in place.

Education Minister Théoneste Mutsindashyaka and Prof. Romain Murenzi, a
senior science and technology official in President Kagame’s office,
both spoke to the gathering of their shared vision of how OLPC can
improve education in Rwanda, as well as the country’s economy. They also
announced that the government will create a fund to support a full XO
deployment to all of Rwanda’s two million primary school students within
five years.

Jerome Gasana, Director of the Regional ICT Training and Research
Center, is providing full support for the national core team as they
work in the schools. They have learned that their approach to teacher
development is much more important than content. What they do is much
more important than what they say. One small strategy that works well is
to discuss and reflect together with the teachers after each practice.

Terms like projects, learning by doing and hard fun are becoming a part
of the teachers’ vocabulary. It is also important to note how much the
local core team is starting to own the project, a positive development
reflected in the way they defend the XO against criticisms and advocate
the importance of the project for primary education and President
Kagame’s program of national goals, called Vision 2020

Haiti: Between hurricanes, the recruitment and qualification of
potential pedagogical and IT staff at each regional school center
(EFACAP) continued. The Haitian OLPC core team visited two of the five
regions scheduled to receive laptops. The good news is that one region
(the "plateau central") has more electricity than expected. The bad news
is that after Fay, Gustav and Hanna, the start of school will be delayed
in some regions.

The Haitian team continued to work on designing activities and putting
them on the Haitian OLPC initiative wiki. Three XOs were upgraded to
Joyride 2388 and to the latest Kreyol translation. These machines will
go to professional translators, along with instructions how to test the
translation and report errors and suggestions. The team also is
designing new materials for training EFACAP technical staff.

At week’s end there came more good news with the installation of Michèle
Pierre-Louis as Haiti’s new prime minister. The previous government was
dismissed in April after food riots erupted around the country.
Pierre-Louis has been head of the Knowledge and Freedom Foundation
(FOKAL), which is supported by George Soros.

Mongolia:The school year started September 1st. In two separate
televised speeches, President Nambaryn Enkhbayar reaffirmed his
commitment to OLPC in Mongolia, heralding “the year of the success of
OLPC.” The minister of education and the director of primary and
secondary education were both shown using their XOs in televised
ceremonies at schools.

The new government is in the process of being assembled. The prime
minister will remain the same. Other ministers are expected to be chosen
before the end of the month. Schools and districts have begun to pick up
the laptops. 

A Dutch couple purchased three servers, three switches and 15 access
points. They are being donated to help support three schools in the
capital.

The director of Project READ is preparing to buy 2000 computers. Their
rollout will begin in December.

Cambridge: OLPC will hold a learning workshop on September 17 through 19
at the OLPC offices in Cambridge. This is in addition to the regional
workshop to be held in Kigali, Rwanda on September 29 through October 2.
Please invite key people involved in learning and project development to
both workshops.

Technology

1. Javier Cardona and Ricardo Carrano tested fixes for various wireless
radio control "knobs" that were removed or disabled in the driver during
the past months of development. Ricardo's contract was renewed. He will
be working for us from Brazil where he returned at the end of the week. 

2. Mitch Bradley got the LBA-NAND Linux driver working well enough to do
some preliminary performance benchmarks with a conventional filesystem.
The read/write speeds now are similar to what we currently get with raw
NAND + jffs2. The LBA-NAND driver uses much less CPU time than the
current status quo (one percent versus 100 percent) and the in-kernel
memory footprint is much smaller. Mount operations are instantaneous.
This technology is being strongly considered for future hardware. The
concern is that these chips perform a crucial wear balancing algorithm
in hardware (instead of in the JFFS2 software). If there are any
problems with it we will not be able to fix it with a software upgrade. 

Future Hardware:

3. We are aggressively working toward a refresh of the existing XO
hardware to appear as early as possible in 2009. The refresh will
include larger NAND, improved support for anti-theft measures and power
conservation and other features. If you have a particular problem with
the XO, this is the time to send your suggestions to John Watlington.

Software Development:

4. The triage team has reviewed all incoming bugs for 8.2 for whether
they should be fixed, documented or pushed into the next release. As of
this writing there are only nine left with the next action of Diagnose,
Design or Code! The triage team continues to meet daily to review all
new, incoming or re-review bugs. We are down to a manageable set of
blocking bugs which must be fixed. See:http://dev.laptop.org/report/28.

5. C. Scott Ananian shepherded the builds this week, putting together
8.2-758 and 8.2-759 and updating the Joyride builds to match our new
"Fedora-like" koji configuration. He also fixed bugs in the Paint,
Scratch, and Bounce activities, as well as in OLPC-update,
OLPC-contents, and Sugar-update-control.

6. Brian Jordan, Adam Holt, Seth Woodward, Cynthia Solomon, Michael
Stone, Tom Boyle, Faisal Anwar and many volunteers have continued the
effort from the doc sprint last week to finalize a manual that we can
deliver on the XO as part of 8.2 release. Please contactholt at laptop.org
and seth at laptop.org if you can help in any way. Also if possible join
our mailing list discussion: http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/library.
Brian also followed up with Physics Jam participants
http://physicsjam.blogspot.com/.

7. Morgan Collett started asking for activity authors' comments and
questions and is responding to feedback from his survey
(http://tinyurl.com/olpcsurvey). He worked on documentation and
docstrings, as well as testing 8.2 builds.

8. Michael Stone spent some time documenting procedures such as the Trac
ticket workflow. He also restored an XO to factory-default and released
new versions of Rainbow and OLPC-utilswith severalsmall improvements and
publicized 8.2-759 as the weekly testing build for 8.2.

9. Greg Smith has been collecting features and design ideas for 9.1
release, which will be the first major release of 2009. He is getting
help and ideas from deployments as well as the development, test, and
learning teams. Before the end of the year there will also be a minor
release - 8.2.1 - to pick up a number of bug fixes, translations, and
polish for the 8.2.0 release. 

10. Erik Garrison worked from the PLAN CEIBAL headquarters at LATU in
Montevideo, Uruguay. There he acquired information about the current
needs of the deployment and also discussed possible plans for a
deployment-wide upgrade to a future 8.2.x release. Additionally, Erik
worked on Sugar performance issues and prepared for an overhaul of the
Sugar - NetworkManager interface to be completed with volunteers at this
weekend's CEIBAL Jam:http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ceibal_Jam.

11. Sayamindu Dasgupta is the champion for OLPC SW-ECO 7, Release 8.1.3,
with fixes for the Amharic keyboard layout. He has also looked into SCIM
and started a discussion on the localization mailing list of a possible
migration from XKB in future releases. He also completed the addition of
plural-forms related information to all the 8.2 translations. There are
new projects for Danish and Swahili in Pootle. Those interested in
helping out should get in touch with Sayamindu at laptop.org.

12. Faisal Anwar of Media Modifications researched the presence service
and tubes so that he can better document Sugar networking. Please
contribute your expertise and best practices to the Sugar Almanac
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Almanac).Faisal also contributed tot he
Sugar Booksprint, focusing on user guides for Building CustomActivities
(http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar/CreatingActivities).

13. Jim Gettys and Sebastian Dziallas worked on a Fedora spin for XO. It
currently is 470MB. Join the Fedora-OLPC mailing list at
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-olpc-list to get your two
cents in on the contents of the spin. 

14. Jeremy Katz has fixed a number of bugs in the live CD tools. A
tentative decision to go with Fedora 10 for support and development
reasons has been taken. A spin for more serious testing should be
available this week.

School Server:

15. Martin Langhoff reports that the new Fedora 9-based school server
build installs and upgrades following the same defaults as the previous
versions. There are a few minor issues still to resolve, but the F9 port
is pretty much done. Next week is going to be focused on feature work
for XS-0.5. Martin worked on F9 - the new Fedora 9 based School Server
build installs and upgrades following the same defaults as the previous
versions. There are few minor issues still to resolve, but the F9 port
is pretty much done.- Lots of help from Jerremy Katz, Robin Norwood and
others from the Fedora side


16. Douglas Bagnall mostly worked on enabling the laptops to update
activities from their local school server, but he also had time to
refactor the registration server and work on the XS-activation package.


17. Martin Langhoff is trying really hard to wrap up remaining F9
issues. Thisweek is going to be focused on feature work for xs-0.5!
(Wooohoo!),and we have until the end of the month to work on xs-0.5 .
The roadmaplooks roughly like this:
https://dev.laptop.org/query?group=status&milestone=xs-0.5, which is an
optimistic roadmap. We'll put a ton of work in, and yetquite a few
things will not make it. If you care about the XS, nowis the time to
show your hand and help a bit...

Support:

18. Adam Holt has continued working on the spare parts and repair
centers processes. We have established a relationship with two
e-commerce vendors, XOexplosion.com and iLoveMyXO.com to provide spare
parts to people in the US and Canada. 

Adam has also announced this Sunday's community meeting (Sept 7th 4PM
EDT) will be a Panel on Repairs & Spare Parts Successes. Contact
holt at laptop.org in advance if you would like to join the public
conference call, or participate in person. Also consider backchannel
#olpc-help on irc.freenode.net if you can join us over live IRC chat!

19. Daniel Drake continued working on bug fixing for the upcoming
8.2.0release, including fixing some bugs relating to the X display
server and the issue where wireless networks appear twice on the
neighbourhood view. He also spent time testing Amharic and working with
the Ethiopia team on their technical issues as they prepare to roll out
laptops. He is preparing to join the team in Ethiopia starting the week
of the 15th to help with this roll out over the next several weeks. 

20. The sugar team has been working on the 0.82.1 Sucrose stable release
[1] which has been released today. Owners of an xo can test it in in
latest joyride or the stable 8.2 branch >= 758. 

21. Walter Bender's Sugar digest can be found at:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-September/001621.html

22. Guillaume Desmottes tested Gadget with hyperactivity, found, debug
and fixed various bugs in the Gadget component and the presence-service.
Buddy views should now be pretty usable. By debugging activity views, he
noticed a weird behaviour of ejabberd's muc service and reported it as a
bug [1].

Testing:

23. Joe Feinstein and Frances Hopkins ran smoke and mesh tests on the
latest 8.2 candidate build (757). Bugs are being logged and reviewed
every day. Joe reports that Sugar’s stability has improved
substantially, but running the Write activity both in mesh and school
server networks caused some machines to suddenly restart Sugar. Also,
the sudden disappearance of Write was observed in some of the
collaborating laptops. We also see an increased participation of
community testers in the test effort. 

The Wellington volunteer test team, in particular, has done a fantastic
test run to check that off-the-beaten-track activities work correctly on
8.2 - find a detailed report at - thanks to Tabitha, Grant, and
Alastair! If you want to help test, click here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Friends_in_testing. 

Community:

24. SJ Klein is working with Paul Frields of Fedora to co-host a
FUD/OLPCcon over the first or second weekend in December. We expect to
draw more than 100 people from outside our core teams, from a number of
countries.

25. OLPC is sponsoring travel for a few attendees to support the Perú
Game Jam/tech conference. Hernan Pachas is coordinating the event, being
held at Universidad de San Martín de Porres in Lima, October 23-25. We
also will sponsor some local travel for developers in Perú.

26. Some of the European Sugar team met at FUDCon in Brno, Czech
Republic, this week. It is great to be able to work with the Fedora
community to make Sugar available as an alternate desktop on Fedora and
to get input on outstanding issues:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConBrno2008.

27. Seth Woodworth worked on the organization structure of a final XO
+Sugar manual from materials produced at the recent Documentation
Sprint. Several people have been making substantial contributions to the
information content and structure, including Adam Holt and Cynthia
Solomon. Many other remote and external contributors have participated
as well, including many people from SugarLabs and the OLPC Boston group.
Seth made substantial edits to the [[Participate]] sections of the wiki
in advance of the DailyMotion press release.

>From the Field

Uruguay: CEIBAL is starting an ambitious program on disabilities,
tentatively named CEIBAL ESPECIAL, that will target children with
sensory, motor, mental and learning disabilities. Uruguay is of course
unique because every child and teacher will receive an XO, and CEIBAL
offers a common digital environment for everybody, including the
disabled. As a result, from an early age these kids share the same
resources as other children, a key factor in promoting proper
rehabilitation, socialization and education.

Edith Morais, the highest education official in CEIBAL, explained last
week to Antonio Battro that CEIBAL ESPECIAL aims to provide the best
possible OLPC training to teachers of pupils with disabilities. They
will receive some 8,000 XOs in the next months. The initial focus will
be on the 400 deaf children who attend Uruguayan public schools.

Another focus will be on motor disabilities. Antonio and Miguel
Mariatti, the CEO of LATU/CEIBAL, met in Montevideo with José E.
Zeballos, the general manager of TELETON, Rehabilitación infantil,
(www.teleton.uy) and his staff to start a joint program. The first
objective is to use the XO to control the engine of a wheel chair. A
team of CEIBAL and TELETON engineers will work to complete what they
hope will be a working prototype by November, when it would be unveiled
on national television. 

Ben Petrazzini, Regional Director of the International Development
Center (IDRC), has also pledged his support. The Canadian NGO has
already financially supported CEIBAL in the first stages of the XO
deployment. IDRC has a large world network and can help CEIBAL ESPECIAL
in many ways, to be established case by case.

Antonio envisions CEIBAL ESPECIAL as a node from which to grow an
informal, international OLPC network for disabled children and their
teachers. As part of that effort, he is arranging for a series of
international experts to visit Uruguay. For example, two PhD. candidates
from Milano-Bicocca University in Italy will arrive next year to
collaborate with CEIBAL. Others will follow from Argentina, Brazil,
France and the United States.

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