From jg at laptop.org Mon Jan 5 09:12:48 2009 From: jg at laptop.org (Jim Gettys) Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:12:48 -0500 Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News (2008-12-28) Message-ID: <1231164768.12085.229.camel@jg-vaio> Community News A weekly update of One Laptop per Child December 29, 2008 Technology Give One Get One: 1. Tyler Langendorfer and Brianne Connolly sent out more than a hundred donation gift cards before Christmas to donors who gave one or more laptops. Laptops have arrived in the UK and started shipping to recipients. Some laptops were shipped just as they were being canceled through the automated system, so Kim Quirk has emailed those donors, requesting that they reorder. Testing: 2. Mel Chua organized a test review meeting in preparation for 8.2.1 testing. There was a good discussion about system testing as well as release criteria and reporting on quality. Mel is working with the community to encourage testing by many others. Software Development: 3. XO Camp will be held in Cambridge, January 12th through the 16th. This is an open meeting for technical design review of 9.1.0 features. Review the agenda and sign up to participate at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOCamp_2. 4. Thanks to Skierpage, all well-defined feature requests are now tracked in a single query-able table:http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#All_features. In addition, all 9.1.0 target features are here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_requirements#Top_Priority. 5. Eben Eliason took care of a wide assortment of small projects. Among them: Reviewing and tidying the Human Interface Guide, and putting out a call for suggestions and assistance in updating the document; creating an icon for wired connections; creating an icon set for object transfers; digging up some logos for trademark purposes; working on designs for activity overlay-chat; reviewing the feature roadmap and My Trac tickets; discussing the process for future laptop.org updates; readying some small changes to the site; and, finally, discussing details of the devices tray with Simon and the object transfer spec with Tomeu. XO OS Software: 6. Erik Garrison, Richard Smith, Paul Fox, Michael Stone, Chris Ball and C. Scott Ananian met with Dulmandakh Sukhbaatar, the new technical lead of the Mongolian deployment team, and with Elana Langer. Topics ranged from how to effectively communicate bug and feature requests to how to do specific kinds of machine upgrades. 7. Michael worked with Erik, Reuben Caron and Emiliano Pastorino on a variety of software items for Uruguay, including image signing, image customization tools, and testing of patches for Trac #8976. He also worked with Reuben, James Cameron and Bernie Innocenti. Michael appreciates their fine assistance in picking up old work on both Puritan and Rainbow. 8. C. Scott tackled 8.2.1 bugs this week and also set up a ?staging? branch on XS-dev for testing 8.2.1-series builds, based on the 8.2 stable repositories. Other work included dusting off the partition support in olpcrd and olpc-update (Trac Nos. 616, 4156, 3581, 6246, 8111 and 8919). C. Scott also implemented a notify-based indexing frontend for Journal2 work. He learned too much about kernel/userland race conditions in the process and forwarded those concerns upstream to the Linux-kernel mailing list. 9. Paul finished a prototype of the power button menu, and continued to assist with OLPC's email outreach campaigns for G1G1. 10. Erik published rpmXO athttp://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/erik/rpmxo;a=summary, a small build system in the style of DebXO which rests on the work of Steve Kemp on the Rinse RPM build system. The work is not yet complete, but can be used to make lightweight RPM-based XO-bootable images from Fedora 10 repositories. He provided patches to Steve Kemp to add Fedora 10 package lists to Rinse. Erik also published a small script, the OLPC Image Digestor (http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/erik/image-digestor), which can be used to create the placement control files used by OFW during the reflash process. He translated the documentation for this system into Spanish to encourage use of the system by interested deployments in Latin America. Erik discussed the porting of Socialcalc to the XO with Dan Bricklin. He is excited by the web-service-as-application model which the software suggests, and hopes the OLPC community investigates it further. 11. Deepak Saxena continued to look at resume-from-suspend timing. He also updated the status of 9.1 kernel bugs and scripts to simplify custom builds of OLPC kernels. Sugar / Activity Software: 12. Sayamindu Dasgupta attacked the problem of making SCIM work with the latest builds. He also fixed a critical commit support issue in Pootle and pushed a large number of new translations into the Git. He worked with the Sugar team and the Activity authors to ensure that the Pootle-side repositories were properly updated during the migration to git.sugarlabs.org. 13. Marco Pesenti Gritti continued testing the Jabber server that Collabora has set up at jabber.sugarlabs.org. We haven't tested scalability yet, but with a low number of users presence seems to be very reliable, unlike using the shared roster implementation. The Sugar buildbot is finally back after a couple of weeks downtime due to an infrastructure issue. Several of the Sugar modules have been moved to the gitorious instance at git.sugarlabs.org. Marco also fixed a couple of annoying regressions with palettes in 0.83. 14. Simon Schampijer landed wired interface support for NM. Meantime, he reviewed and reworked the ?device appears? logic with Eben. He also helped to get Sucrose 0.83.3 out the door. More information at http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/Release/Releases/Sucrose/0.83.3and in the upcoming release announcement. 15. Morgan Collett added a "Reconnect collaboration server" button to the Sugar control panel to enable on-the-fly switching of Jabber servers without the need to restart Sugar. He also assisted with the sucrose Git migration to git.sugarlabs.org and the Evince rebase to 2.24. XS School Server Software: 16. Martin Langhoff worked on ejabberd+Moodle services. A minor XS-0.5.1 release is taking shape, and will probably be available after the weekend to provide a few urgent bug fixes. Anna Schoolfield and others have been playing with an XS install on an XO, for lightweight School Server installations, and are reporting good progress. Networking: 17. Michail worked with Keith Jeng at Quanta to bring them up to speed with testing Windows on the XO. He has released a test image to Quanta, and showed them how to write the image on the SD card. Keith's testing is underway. He already has tested the image on older motherboards. 18. BSquare has received their test laptops for OFW qualification with Windows XP. They will finalize their test arrangements before the new year. And in Other News? Greg's user links of the week: An update on the pilot in Nicaragua, and links to two beautiful videos by the great team at Waveplace:http://waveplace.com/sm/mailing/mail.jsp?id=13&msg=1174 and a new blog for XO deployment in Colombia:http://educacionitagui.blogspot.com/. -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: December_28,_2008_Weekend.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 63716 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/attachments/20090105/e7e7253d/attachment-0001.pdf From jg at laptop.org Mon Jan 5 09:29:52 2009 From: jg at laptop.org (Jim Gettys) Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:29:52 -0500 Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News (2009-1-4) Message-ID: <1231165792.12085.239.camel@jg-vaio> Community News A weekly update of One Laptop per Child January 4, 2009 Technology Software: 1. The support, testing, and software development teams spent an otherwise quiet week keeping track of the end of our Amazon G1G1 activities, and in preparation for the upcoming 8.2.1 software release for testing. The team worked to get a test release posted and to upgrade our test bed of machines for network QA. 2. Michael Stone helped get the web team unstuck by simplifying the procedures for testing changes to the laptop.org website. He ran a couple of 8.2.1 test cases. 3. Sayamindu Dasgupta polished the specs for SCIM support and the enhanced language pack support for the 9.1 release. He also helped the Uyghur translation project get started. Many thanks to Mehmud Abliz for taking up the initiative. Hardware: 4. One of the remaining laptop problems is the inability to activate them due to failure of their real-time clocks. If the date kept by the laptop is wildly incorrect, it will not activate, or will lose activation. This problem affects some small number of laptops (< 0.3%) during initial delivery, but is also apt to occur after delivery. In order to correct this failure mode, Quanta has improved their production process to incorporate a full test of the RTC battery after assembly. They have also designed a small rubber piece which will sit on top of the battery. This piece will press against the back plate of the laptop, preventing the battery from dislodging when jolted or vibrated. Both measures will be in place on all future laptops. 5. In future design iterations (XO or Gen-2), OLPC will move away from reliance on the laptop's real-time clock for theft-deterrence. In addition to the activation problems when the clock fails, the current scheme requires either that regular Internet connectivity be provided or that users be unable to alter the laptop's clock. 6. A spare part containing the newer, tougher keyboard and the new touchpad (the upper base assembly) is now available from Quanta. Providing this as a single unit facilitates updating the touchpads on older units. It was requested by Uruguay to simplify keyboard replacement. The price is slightly more than $15 when purchased in orders of three thousand units or more direct from Quanta. Networking: 7. Thanks to last minute heroics by Clyde Rodriguez, Rebecca Gonzalez and Erik Salo at AMD, the work order for the open firmware / XP testing by bSquare was signed before the end of 2008 and work has started by bSquare. 8. Keith Tzeng and his team at Quanta are testing XP running with OFW on the XO. Their first testing results didn't uncover any serious issues or any issues that are unique to open firmware. This was another amazing performance from Mitch Bradley, who developed OFW's XP support layer with no help from Microsoft. >From the Field Afghanistan: Now that the Afghan education minister has agreed to deploy OLPC in line with our basic philosophy, things have started moving. Salim Hayran, the OLPC lead in the ministry, has informed Habib Khan that Estiqlal High School in Jalalabad (enrollment: 1020) will be the first school to deploy 500 XO donated by OLPC NPA . Sevetlana Senjova, manager for technical implementation of PAIWASTOON for OLPC in Afghanistan, will be work with Habib to make a smooth deployment. Salim has asked Habib to prepare a group of teachers as master trainers in Kabul. He has yet to finalize a date for this activity. Pakistan: As a next step following Habib?s very productive meeting with Kiramtullah Khan (Weekend, December 7th), speaker of the North-West Frontier provincial assembly, the chief planning officer for the NWFP department of education visited Habib in Islamabad to discuss deployment, localization, teacher preparation and maintenance issues. Habib reports that the CPO, an experienced educator, was very happy to discover some of the potentials of XO and was eager for early deployment and involvement of donors focused on his province to help children learn. A memorandum of understanding awaits Kiramtullah Khan?s signature. Habib also sent along the following reading activities developed by OLPC Pakistan. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Animals_in_Urdu.pdf http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Historical_Places_in_Pakistan.pdf http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Plants.pdf http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Sayings_of_Imam_Ghazali.pdf Below, the Dari version of animals and plants was translated by Sohaib who is a long time OLPC volunteer: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Animals_and_plants_in_dari.pdf -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: January 4, 2009 Community.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 56588 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/attachments/20090105/24bca1d2/attachment-0001.pdf