What's left for Update.1

[Jim Gettys]

For comment and discussion, here are the showstoppers I know of for
getting Update.1 finished.  If you think there are others, please speak
up now (and modify the subject line to start another thread).

Activity developers: note we'll be asking you to upload updated
activities to pick up all the recent flurry of translation work very
soon.

 1 - wireless firmware and driver support 
		(to fix problems with WEP and WPA)
 2 - q2d11 OFW - to fix battery problems
 3 - update activities to pick up translation work, Spanish 
	in particular, but not missing other languages we may need.
 4 - UI fix for registration with the school server.
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6136
 5 - switch to gabble from salut at school.
 6 -testing and fixing anything critical!

If we don't want to hold up an RC2 to pick up translation, then we
should anticipate an RC4 might be necessary (as we may have issues that
come up with updated activities).

4 - we previously (without Dave Woodhouse being available to add to the
discussion) thought we could/should punt #6135 and release note.
However, talking with him about what we should really fix given his
experience in Mongolia, the lack of positive confirmation that the
laptop actually was registered is a real issue.  The teachers are not
familiar with English (or computers), and the subtlety of a menu entry
going away isn't good enough.

I think we need to seriously discuss about possibly/probably being
update.1 fodder is the "kids arrive at school in the morning" problem.

5 - Use of mesh in large, crowded environments
If everyone arrives at school running local link and resumed quickly,
the network might melt from mdns mesh traffic's interaction with the
mesh's implementation of mutlicast.  We've upped the multicast bitrate
for multicast as a band aid, until we can dynamically adjust the
bitrate.  But the fundamental issue comes that in large, dense school
environments, can't expect multicast to scale far enough, and should be
using unicast to a presence server (jabber in our current case) to
handle this problem.

Dave Woodhouse has suggested may be to try to get a response to the
school server's anycast address, and if we get a response from a school
server, switch from Salut to Gabble for presence service automatically.

This is also somewhat mitigated by having working power management, as
machines that have suspended due to idle stop sending mdns packets, and
the kids presumably will want internet access and switch over when they
arrive.  But I'm not very confident that this will always work in large
environment.

Another temporary solution would be to have Ohm ask NM to reconnect if
the machine is suspended for more than some interval, say, 30 minutes.

-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child