[OLPC India] (no subject)

Mon Jul 12 08:28:58 EDT 2010

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org>

Date: Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 3:01 PM

Subject: [IAEP] Announce: OLPC software strategy.

To: devel at lists.laptop.org

Cc: olpc at lists.fedoraproject.org,
 iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org,

sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org

Hi,

Now that the 10.1.1 release for XO-1.5 is out, it's a good time to

talk about OLPC's software strategy for the future.  We've got a few

announcements to make:

XO-1:

=====

OLPC wasn't planning to make a Fedora 11 release of the XO-1 OS, but

a group of volunteers including Steven Parrish, Bernie Innocenti,

Paraguay Educa and Daniel Drake stepped up and produced Fedora 11 XO-1

builds that follow the OLPC 10.1.1 work.  I'm happy to announce that

we're planning on releasing an OLPC-signed version of that work, and

that this release will happen alongside the next XO-1.5 point release

in the coming weeks.  So, OLPC release 10.1.2 will be available for

both XO-1 and XO-1.5 at the same time, and will contain Sugar 0.84,

GNOME 2.26 and Fedora 11.  We think that offering this fully

interoperable software stack between XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops will

greatly aid deployments, and we're very thankful to everyone who has

enabled us to be able to turn this XO-1 work into a supported release!

To prepare for this XO-1 release, we've started working on fixing

some of the remaining bugs in the community F11/XO-1 builds.  Paul Fox

recently solved a problem with suspend/resume and wifi in the F11/XO-1

kernel, which was the largest blocker for a supported release.  We'll

continue to work on the remaining bugs, particularly the ones that

OLPC is uniquely positioned to help with.

The first development builds for this release will be published later

this week.

XO-1.5:

=======

We'll be continuing to work on XO-1.5 improvements, incorporating

fixes to the "Known Problems" section of the 10.1.1 release notes¹

into the 10.1.2 release.

XO-1.75 and beyond:

===================

XO-1.75 software development is underway.  Today we're announcing

that we're planning on using Fedora as the base distribution for the

XO-1.75.  This wasn't an obvious decision -- ARM is not a release

architecture in Fedora, and so we're committing to help out with that

port.  Our reasons for choosing Fedora even though ARM work is needed

were that we don't want to force our deployments to learn a new

distribution and re-write any customizations they've written, we want

to reuse the packaging work that's already been done in Fedora for

OLPC and Sugar packages, and we want to continue our collaboration

with the Fedora community who we're getting to know and work with

well.

We've started to help with Fedora ARM by adding five new build

machines (lent to OLPC by Marvell; thanks!) to the Fedora ARM koji

build farm, and we have Fedora 12 and Sugar 0.86 running on early 1.75

development boards.  We'd prefer to use Fedora 13 for the XO-1.75, but

it hasn't been built for ARM yet -- if anyone's interested in helping

out with this or other Fedora ARM work, please check out the Fedora

ARM page on the Fedora Wiki².  We're also interested in hiring ARM and

Fedora developers to help with this; if you're interested in learning

more, please send an e-mail to jobs-engineering at laptop.org.

We'll also be continuing to use Open Firmware on the XO-1.75, and

Mitch Bradley has an ARM port of OFW running on our development boards

already.

EC-1.75 open source EC code:

============================

OLPC is proud to announce that the XO-1.75 embedded controller will

have an open codebase (with a small exception, see below).  After much

behind-the-scenes effort, EnE has agreed to provide us with a public

version of the KB3930 datasheet and is allowing our new code to be

made public.

The code is not available yet due to a few chunks of proprietary code

that need to be purged and some other reformatting.  A much more

detailed announcement will be provided once the new code is pushed to

a public repository.  The code will be licensed under the GPL with a

special exception for OLPC use.

The exception is because EnE has not released the low-level details on

the PS/2 interface in the KB3930, so there will be some code that is

not available -- relative to the codebase this is a very small amount

of code.  The GPL licensing exception will allow for linking against

this closed code.  We're going to investigate ways to move away from

this code in the future.  (As far as we're aware, this will make the

XO-1.75 the first laptop with open embedded controller code!)

Multi-touch Sugar:

==================

We've begun working on modifications to Sugar to enable touchscreen

and multitouch use (the XO-1.75 will have a touchscreen, as will

future OLPC tablets based on its design), and we'll continue to do so.

The first outcome from this work is Sayamindu Dasgupta's port of the

Meego Virtual Keyboard³ to Sugar -- you can see a screencast of it in

action here⁴.

It's an exciting time for software development at OLPC.  Many thanks

for all of your support and efforts!

- Chris, on behalf of the OLPC Engineering team.

Footnotes:

 ¹:  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.1

 ²:  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM

 ³:  http://gitorious.org/fvkbd

 ⁴:  http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/sugar_vkbd_multi.ogv

--

Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>

One Laptop Per Child

_______________________________________________

IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)

IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org

http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep

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Sincerely,

S Adhikari

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