[Community-news] OLPC News (2008-09-29)

[Jim Gettys]

Community News
A weekly update of One Laptop per Child September 29, 2008

Technology

Release: 

1. Michael Stone and Greg Smith report that Release 8.2 is in final
regression test now. It is scheduled to go to Quanta for manufacturing
as early as the end of next week. Please test the hell out of it and
watch for updates. We've got one minor problem, #7932, scheduled for
8.2-766, along with some small activity updates [Record, Help, ...].)
More announcement mail will follow shortly.

In parallel, we're also experimenting with some riskier memory-related
changes in hopes of finding something that we could ship as an OS update
six weeks or so hence.

8.2 features major enhancements, including:
      * A flexible Home view and Journal with several options for
        searching and organizing activities.
      * An enhanced Frame for accessing other XOs and peripherals, and
        for
    switching among running activities.
      * A Graphical Control Panel for setting language, network, power
        and
    other defaults.
      * An automated Software Update tool which finds the latest version
        of
    activities and updates them over the Internet.
      * The capability to backup XOs to a school server and to restore
        files to the Journal as needed.
      * A new manual shipped with the XO as an activity.
      * Many other bug fixes and enhancements.
For more details, see the final draft of the Release Notes
at:http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.0 .

A lot of people have worked very hard for many months to make this
release happen. We are working on a way to acknowledge and recognize
these contributions.

Community:

2. SJ Klein has led discussions about upcoming events on the grassroots
mailing list, including the Game Jam Peru in late October and a joint
OLPC/Fedora conference in December or January (co-organized with
Fedora's FUDCon11). An additional 1-2 days around the community-focused
event will address specific technical goals and brainstorming for 9.1.

Library : Seth and SJ updated and reviewed the help activity and all
book and image collections for format, licenses, and presentation in the
latest build; and drafted a thank-you email to the many contributors who
collaborated on those works.

Music : Natalia Tsarkova of i-concerts.com is preparing a set of music
video bundles from African musicians, with help and contributions from
Youssou N'Dour, the superstar Senegalese singer, to be available for
download to XOs by November.

Our wiki continues to get over a third of its traffic from XOs in
Uruguay, with the rest split between the US and the rest of the world.
We should recognize the CEIBAL project for what it is – a radical
transformation of education in a networked country -- and find ways to
acknowledge that prominently and often.

Sayamindu and SJ are working on setting up a spanish-language wiki this
weekend (connected by interwiki links). This would provide a more
comfortable atmosphere for Spanish children and communities to
contribute, along with a fully spanish-language recentchanges and
community portal. OLPC Paraguay has developed their own wiki, with much
good information which they are considering merging into such a site :
http://wiki-olpc.uca.edu.py/index.php/Portada

3. This week Seth Woodworth released several revisions of the Help
activity / Manual for release 8.2.0 (g1g1) The Help activity is in a
fairly stable position but will require several documentation
improvements as well as updating several images that have changed os760
> os765.

In Marketing Seth registered for Google AdWord Grants, and is working
with Adam Sj and Aaron on a PR/Ad gang for community created media. The
slides from all of the Cambridge Learning Workshop are now at the OLPC
account at http://Slideshare.net/onelaptopperchild. And lastly the
Flickr stream now has photos from the newly formed OLPC Jamaica, and
Daniel Drake's travels in Ethiopia (Brian Jordan's from Rwanda are
coming this weekend).

On a more personal note: Seth is also starting a part-time internship at
Harvards Berkman Center, researching Peer-production and Networked
collaboration. The results of the reseach should, in time, have positive
effect on our own peer-production volunteering and should help us engage
children directly, such as the 8,000 children from Uraguay who visit our
wiki each day.

Support:

4. Reuben Caron confirmed the save-nand copy-nand process works on
activated write protect machines on both 8.1 and 8.2 builds. He setup a
school server with SSID OLPCOFW and confirmed that reflash over wireless
and wired works from OFW, albeit slowly. Reuben spent some time with
Elana who just returned from Mongolia and discussed the status of the
deployment and made recommendations on how they can proceed. Reuben
Caron also had discussions and provided support to deployments and
potential deployments in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Birmingham, Paraguay, and
Puerto Rico.

5. Kim Quirk provided updates to the country agreements to help set
expectations on software support such as security features, language,
keyboard, Activity and content requirements, and software updates. She
is prepping manufacturing for the new software release and stuffer
sheets to go with the G1G1 laptops.

6. Henry Hardy and Seth made several small improvements to the
laptop.org site, including updates to the People page. They added a Give
One Get One banner, removed several ancient pages from 2006, and now are
working with Sayamindu to refresh translations. 

7. Adam Holt is leading the effort with our volunteer repair centers -
Ian Daniher (OLPCinci), Luke Faraone (DC Repair), and Neal Scogin (TX) -
helping them to find sustainable models and to increase their presence
for the next G1G1 program.

Give One Get One:

8. Kim Quirk, Adam Holt, Aaron Royer and SJ met with Alisson Walsh and
Laurie Petrycki of O'Reilly's Missing Manuals to discuss creation of a
freely-licensed Missing Manual for the XO over the coming year, working
with the community of editors that produced our current manual. We are
thinking about a pocket guide that could be available in time for G1G1
donors. Kim is also working with third parties to find a partner who can
provide SD cards with Fedora desktop to interested donors.

9. We've had good discussions with Amazon and Brightstar on G1G1
production, delivery, costs, databases, refunds and returns. Adam is
working with the support gang on strategies for support and repairs as
well as for providing help on the stuffer sheets and communications to
the community. Seth registered for Google AdWord Grants, and is working
with Adam, SJ, and Aaron on a PR/Ad gang for community created media. 

XO OS Software:

10. Paul Fox, C. Scott Ananian, Michael Stone, Erik Garrison and Chris
Ball devoted substantial efforts to testing, organization, diagnosis,
and bug-fixing work for the 8.2 release. At this point the need to
maintain a stable release with careful bug fixes demands substantial
discussion and attention to detail on each new bug and fix. Considerable
time and effort was spent in that regard, led by Michael as Release
Manager. Scott also reports substantial improvements in addressing
licensing issues to improve our level of GPL license compliance in the
8.2 release.

11. Michael Stone reviewed and approved the changes taking us from
8.2-760 to 8.2-765. Particular thanks are due to cscott, cjb, and
marcopg for efforts above and beyond the call of duty; see
http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/76x_changelog for an awe-inspiring (to me)
depiction of what we have achieved. Michael assisted with several fixes,
most notably #8307, for gnu & wadeb.,got the kernel team involved in the
thrashing/OOM diagnosis problem and for kicks, pushed olpc-update a bit
on fedora-devel-list at . Micahel wrote up
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Mstone/Tricks to describe some of the
programming idioms I have found helpful in recent months. (Perhaps you
have tricks to share as well?). Michael started thinking about how to
teach programmers associated w/ OLPC more about graphics programming,
systems programming, computer architecture, and programming idioms in
hopes of training them to write better code.

12. This week C. Scott Ananian shepherded 8.2 builds 761, 762, 763, 764,
and 765 (our best yet!). He also fixed a number of blockers and polish
bugs for these releases, and beat up on his friends until they fixed the
rest. Great progress was made on licensing issues, to increase our
"letter of the law" compliance with the GPL and other licenses in our
next shipping release (trac #4265, #8411). He also dabbled with next-gen
Journal design; see
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Experiments_with_unordered_paths and the
mailing list links therein.

13. Erik Garrison tested X composition for Sugar and discussed Sugar
navigation design options. He additionally worked on polish issues for
the 8.2 release, and helped diagnose and fix a bug with Record which his
screenshot patches uncovered on the newest 8.2 release candidates.

14.Jim Gettys met with Mike Bove to discuss novel input devices, to
explore the input design space further. and attempted to install Linux
on the Latitude XT, having spent time to make the Vista environment
usable to be able to experiment with the existing vendor software. It is
an interesting device, supporting both a pen(with buttons *and*
proximity) and touch. The touch support on Windows Vista has a long way
to go to be interesting and usable. Of course, thisis just as/more true
for Linux; but it is easier for us to make changes where they will be
needed.

15. The entire software development team was focused on the completion
of the 8.2 release effort. The majority of the software effort this week
consisted of testing, evaluating bugs, investigating fixes, and
evaluating the impact of proposed fixes. At the end of any software
release cycle there is considerable risk of regression as things that
used to work break again. With that in mind, the team is moving
carefully toward a complete and stable release. The brevity of this
week’s report reflects the very large amount of time the team spent
working on finding and fixing bugs. Everyone is eagerly looking forward
to the 8.2 release and the G1G1 launch.

XS School Server Software:

16. Martin Langhoff continued work on installation and configuration of
Moodle on the XS School Server. 
      * SoftwareFreedomDay last Saturday had a was a big event for the
        Wellington Test team - we could not do much focused testing,
        however,we have lots of new recruits. 
      * SFD was followed by NZ Open Source Awards last night in which
        several OLPC-related efforts were celebrated. Douglas Bagnall's
        Te Tihu game was nominated for Best Education Project, Brenda
        Wallace (one of our testers/organisers) was nominated for
        Fantastic Open Source Contributor, and the FOSSManuals project
        won an award for Open Source in Community Organizations. 
Douglas Bagnall spent quite a bit of the week trying to work out what
resources ejabberd uses in various circumstances. He fixed some
remaining issues related to the leap from Fedoras 7 to 9, and in spare
moments he worked on bug #8610 ("Theme music for the XS") which might be
opened as a competition once 8.2 is out of the way. On Friday he helped
the Wellington testers update the XO pool to build 764, which had
handily been announced just a few minutes before.

Sugar / Activity Software:

17. Sayamindu continued his work with SCIM and now SCIM can make use of
the "switch layout" key on the XO keyboard to switch layouts. He also
made some changes in the XKB data to SCIM table migration tool, which is
much faster as a result. One of the major problems that Sayamindu was
facing with SCIM was the generation of third level symbols (the
characters generated with the Alt-Gr key), and he found a partial fixto
resolve it this week. In the localization department, Sayamindu helped
the super active Turkish team test their translations. The Turkish team
has achieved 100% coverage in _all_ the project in Pootle, including
Etoys and Scratch - congratulations to all the members of the team for
the feat.

Sayamindu also helped find the cause of #8636, where the Journal was not
picking up any translations in newer builds. He also resolved a few long
standing issues in Pootle where a translators were being unable to
commit their work for a few modules.

In the Sugar department, Sayamindu did some work on making the activity
list in the frame show the correct icons for desktop applications like
Gedit and Firefox (#8661). A screenshot is available at
http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/standard_icons.png

18. Morgan Collett assisted Greg Smith in contacting authors of
activities which were candidates for G1G1 inclusion, to check on the
status of their activities and get the license field included. He made
releases of Ruler (for G1G1), Poll Builder, Slider Puzzle and Jigsaw
Puzzle (for the library) with the license and GPL headers added. He
released Write-60 with Guillaume Desmottes' fix for a crash. He assisted
several authors with testing and other issues.

Morgan also used the new pydocweb tool to work on docstrings for
sugar.network and sugar.presence.

19.Simon Schampijer worked on control panel startup performance and
localization support, as well as setting up a more organized QA effort
for Sugarlabs.

20. Tomeu Vizoso and Marco Pesenti Gritti assisted with the 8.2 release
effort with bug fixes and testing, and in investigating alternative data
storage designs. Marco’s efforts for the G1G1 release were especially
appreciated. Marco fixed the crashes in the activities updater, tracked
down the Record crash on exit, helped tracking down the pygame sound
issues, reviewed and landed several Sugar patches for 8.2. He also
started investigating xulrunner memory usage issues and probably found a
solution for the BadAlloc crashes. On the next release front, he revised
the Sugar 0.84 planning according to Gregorio feedback and started
nailing down implementation plans for the higher priority and more
invasive items.

21. Tomeu Vizoso presented this week an alternative to the current
DataStore, the data storage component underlying to the Journal. The
main goals of this alternative implementation are improvements in
reliability, performance and maintainability. More details at
http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/DatastoreRewrite.

Testing:

22. The QA team (Joe Feinstein, Frances Hopkins and Mel Chua) has tested
builds 8.2-762 and 8.2-763, and is now moving to start testing 8.2-765
-hopefully our last build in the course of the 8.2.0 effort.

The builds 762 and 763 introduced some new bugs, causing overlapping
icons in the Neighborhood view, as well as the periodically changing
"network picture" in the same view (Kim named this a "Christmas Tree"
view, due to quickly appearing/disappearing icons on the screen).

Joe, Frances and S.J. Klein ventured outside 1cc with 10+ laptops to
experiment with the mesh network behavior in the different RF
environment. We set up a "testing shop" on two tables in the square in
front of the Marriott hotel nearby, and spent several hours doing our
testing. The RF environment was indeed different (from 1cc), but that
didn't seriously affect test result, comparing to what we usually
observe in 1cc.

Our appearance outside the Marriott attracted a lot of people to out
tables; some of them were as far as from Finland; many of them knew
about "those laptops for children" and were asking about the ways to
acquire the laptops (we even got questions: are you selling the
machines?). So, in addition to conducting our scheduled testing, we also
served as "unofficial" OLPC marketing representatives, steering people
to the Nov 17 opening of the G1G1 event through amazon.com. The time we
were outside wasn't even the peak lunch time for people to fill that
square; just imagine the level of attention, if we were there at the
lunch time!

23. Mel Chua worked with developers to write test cases for remaining
blockers and has started reaching out to community members to aid
ongoing testing efforts at 1cc. In support of this, a number of test
procedure/tool tutorials have been written or expanded so that
volunteers can tackle even complex tests in the absence of developer
guidance. Thanks to Frances, Matt Jadud, and Yifan Sun for being part of
the first wave of test-case-testers! Stay tuned for more news about QA
volunteer recruitment next week as conversations, infrastructures, and
tools from this week begin rolling out.

24. The local test team took a trip outside of the 1CC offices to get
some testing done in a “clean” RF environment. This didn't seriously
affect the test results but drew a lot of attention from the people in
the street! We'll have to provide a sign that says, "Give One, Get One,
Change the World, coming Nov. 17," as many people wanted to know how to
get an XO.

Fedora Classic Desktop:

25. Jeremy Katz integrated his XO boot changes into the Fedora 10
mainline, and we expect to see them appear in a beta release next week.
The entire Fedora-XO team worked on updating the XO software strategy to
communicate our goals for this release. The development team also worked
with the testing and support team to prepare for widespread testing from
the Fedora community when we are ready for it.

26. Greg DeKoenigsberg rallied the Fedora group to help find and fix
bugs with the Fedora desktop on XO. In less than 24 hours he had signed
up nearly 100 people to help test! 

Firmware:

27. For 8.2.1, Open Firmware is being extended in order to support the
rapid update of a large number of machines, such as in a warehouse
before distribution. Mitch Bradley ported David Woodhouse's multicast OS
updater program to run in the Open Firmware environment this week, and
is starting to test it.

Touchpad Change:

28. As the touchpad changes, the keyboard controller board (hidden under
the touchpad) will no longer be produced by ALPS, and now uses a more
standard ENE keyboard controller. Quanta manufactured prototypes of the
new board, which arrived at 1CC this week. Richard Smith has them hooked
up to a test XO and is working on the EC code modifications to support
the new keyboard controller. We expect to release test EC firmware to
Quanta by the end of next week, and should receive pre-production
laptops for testing about two weeks later, or in mid-October.

Gen 1.5 Hardware:

29. John Watlington reports that with Mitch Bradley's help the NAND
device testing is running well, but we are still waiting on more
devices/alternatives to add to the test bed (such as UBIFS, the most
promising contender to replace the JFFS2 filesystem currently used.)
Eight laptops with Toshiba's LBA-NAND are running continuously, and each
one has had more than 120 GB of writes performed so far, with no errors.
Five laptops are running JFFS2 for comparison. They quickly triggered a
kernel crash (Trac #8615). Most are now running a debugging kernel and
are harnessed up to have their serial consoles logged. Ongoing
information about the tests is available at:
http://www.laptop.org/teamwiki/index.php/Tech:NAND_Testing .

Multi-Battery Charger:

30. Richard continued to work with Lilian Walter on the firmware for the
multi-battery charger. There's still one outstanding issue where the
over-voltage condition occurs. Richard thinks this is not specifically a
software issue. He believes that tweaking one of the voltage set points
on the charger board might fix the problem.

Wireless:

31. Ricardo and Javier spent time this week in further testing WPA
access point associations. At this juncture, WPA works (often after a
few retries) with every Access Point that we have tested. 

We are still experiencing some general (non WPA-specific) association
failures that become more noticeable in challenging wireless
environments like OLPC's office (or a school with several hundred XOs).
After a lot of digging, we have pinpointed one culprit in excessive scan
requests generated by WPA_supplicant (the userspace daemon that handles
associations on command from Network Manager). We are also looking into
ways to decouple firmware response times to time-critical association
requests from wireless traffic volumes, something that has also
reportedly caused association failures. 

32. Deepak Saxena started looking at UBIFS as a possible replacement to
JFFS2 as the file system to use on gen1.x devices. Deepak also spent
some time trying to build proper kernel packages for use by developers.
Deepak also looked at the issue of system sluggishness in low memory
conditions. 

33. Guillaume Desmottes investigated Write issues and wrote a simple fix
for #8492. He also audited and cleaned Write sharing code [#8680). It
should result to a smaller and more robust code.

He started to design the integration of journal objects transfer and how
that could be implemented using the current file transfer Telepathy
specification.

In order to be able to stress test ejabberd, he found and debugged some
nasty Gabble issues making it aborting when used too long using
hyperactivity.

Finally, he synced Gabble's Gadget with current master and started to
fix Daf's review complaints. Hopefully, the (huge) Gadget branch should
be merged to master pretty soon.

>From the Field

Daniel Drake has sent his first photos of the 5,000-XO deployment in
Ethiopia. “This week,” Daniel writes, “we completed teacher training at
two schools and launched our first deployment at one of them, the
Mulosayoo School. About 400 laptops have been handed out, and there is
plenty of excitement in the air. Next week, we plan to train teachers at
another local school and deploy 800 laptops to the children.”

Daniel also managed to fit in some team training, including translations
and language packs, plus an introduction to the 8.2 software update.
More photos:

http://flickr.com/photos/olpc/sets/72157607436386087/


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