[Olpc-france] Fwd: Community-news Digest, Vol 29, Issue 1

Thu Aug 7 05:47:57 EDT 2008

On parle d'OLPC France :) ! Bravo.

A+

Sébastien

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Date: Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 6:12 AM
Subject: Community-news Digest, Vol 29, Issue 1
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Today's Topics:

  1. OLPC News (2008-08-05) (Kimberley Quirk)

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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:12:45 -0400
From: Kimberley Quirk <kim at laptop.org>
Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News (2008-08-05)
To: community-news at lists.laptop.org
Message-ID: <A384A61A-FDC1-41E9-B1E1-4358DF01B88D at laptop.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"

Development:
Paraguay: Antonio Battro and Cecilia Alacal? met with President-elect
Fernando
Lugo. He informed them that as part of his ?obligation" to provide the
best
possible education to Paraguayan schoolchildren, he intends to
distribute one
million XOs, enough for all elementary school children and teachers in
Paraguay.
In September, President Lugo plans to meet with Nicholas in New York,
where
he has been invited to attend the Clinton Global Initiative.

Antonio, Cecilia, Raul Guti?rrez and Sebasti?n Codas gave several
interviews to
the media. Afterward, TV Canal 9 offered to buy 2,500 XOs for the
national
distribution.

Thailand: Nicholas met individually with the Minister of Science &
Technology, Minister of Information & Communications Technology, and
the Minister of Education. We recommended 50,000 laptops, but they are
likely to start with 15,000.

Mongolia: Nicholas and Elana Langer completed a marathon round of
individual
meetings with the president, prime minister, minister of education and
the former
foreign minister - now head of the party. Two issues dominated
discussions: Getting the 5000 XOs on hand into schools by September
1st, and planning to equip all primary school children in two years.

Mexico: Carla G?mez Monroy, Enrique Chavero, and Paola Rivera met with
the
education secretary?s representatives for primary education, content
development, educational technology, and indigenous education (who was
accompanied by a Nahuatl language expert) to demo the XO.

Jorge Casta?eda, Manuel Rodriguez, Enrique, Paola, and Carla met with
the
representatives of the Iztapalapa delegation, the governor of the
Rotary Club and
some of its members, seeking partnerships and support.

Belgium: Michael Lake, accompanied by Carla, met once again with Dilip
Mehta,
CEO of the Rosy Blue Group, along with Chikashi Miyamoto, an advisor
to Mehta
and Pranay Narvekar a vice president. Carla presented deployment
highlights for
the Rosy Blue executives. A proposal for fully supporting Botswana
will be jointly
developed. Dilip, Chikashi and Pranay were very enthusiastic about
deploying
OLPC at South Africa.

Turkey: Political disruptions continue to complicate completion of the
XO
deployment budget. Multiple jurisdictions are involved, and timing is
an obstacle.
The team, however, remains quite enthusiastic and is eager to get
things started.

Learning Team:
Thailand: OLPC held a five-day regional workshop in Bangkok, with more
than
50 participants from six countries.

The workshop went extremely well. Special highlights included sharing
of work in
the rural areas in Thailand as exemplars of high-quality work, and
integration of
school and community; storytelling with the XO by Barbara Barry;
computational
uses of the XO by Roger Sipitakiat; Nicholas?s talk on Thursday
evening; and the
Ban Samkha children?s orchestra using their XOs to play traditional
Thai music in
TamTam.

Mongolia: The team returned on Monday afternoon from a two-week tour in
northern Mongolia, where they ran workshops for local teachers, kids and
parents. Together with the Mongolian core team, we worked in one city
center
and two small villages, introducing the XO and constructionist learning
methodologies. The core team teachers designed and ran the last
workshop on
their own. They came up with some wonderful and surprising ideas,
including a
physical activity to teach angles and degrees to students, which they
then try in
turtle art and etoys.

The new head of ICTA was inspired by the XO?s open source environment.
He wants the students in Mongolia to learn Linux and is working to get
all government agencies and higher institutes to cross over to a Linux
platform.

Rwanda: The 20-member core team is ready to initiate teacher
development.
The team discussed ways of introducing generative themes for children
to use for
developing projects. There also was considerable discussion on the
issues of
working with schools and communities.

Haiti: The team is currently wrapping up the pre-pilot Camp XO 2008 at
Ecole
Nationale Republique du Chili. As we entered this final full week we
began to
look at E-toys.

Tech Team:

Testing:
Greg Smith provided the instructions for downloading and testing pre-
release 8.2.0 images at:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Friends_in_testing. Help test the pre-
release candidate builds! We need >50 people to briefly test and
report any issues with the latest image, every week for the next 3 - 6
weeks. If the community steps up to do that, we will have a rock solid
release.

Greg also wrote collaboration requirements for 9.1.0 priorities page:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0

The QA Team worked on the first 8.2.0 builds (2200, 2230) and 8.1.1
(708, in Chicago) builds. Early test results on a build are posted at
the Test Group Release Notes page:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Group_Release_Notes
. More detailed test results are now being posted here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/TestResults_8.2.0
.

Francesca Slade, Seth Woodworth, and Charlie Murphy have created a
test case framework allowing test cases to be posted directly into the
wiki, and some summary reporting is available at the TestResults page.

Joe Feinstein organized the 8.2.0 Release Criteria meeting and
creating a first pass of the 8.2.0 test areas and features (based on
work of Michael Stone and Greg Smith) which will be translated into
the set of test cases. Joe also started working with Sayamindu
Dasgupta on helping with Russian translations.

Software/Firmware:
Mitch Bradley made further progress on the Windows dual-boot, resolving
issues with ACPI support for lid switch handling and battery/AC status
reporting. The only remaining issue at this point is chopped-up text
during
pre-OS chkdsk and blue screen of death displays.

Deepak Saxena worked with Luis Cabo Cobo at Cozybit to find a way to
get the Libertas thinmac/host mode driver packaged and built it into
our released kernel RPMs. The driver is now working with our joyride
kernels. He has also reimplemented the lid-detect logic in the kernel
and added proper handling of the lid when we are suspended.

Ricardo Carrano worked on active antenna repogramming documentation,
and Bill
McCormick from Nortel looked into one of the most persistent UI/Network
Manager bugs, which often prevents XOs from re-associating with
encrypted
wireless networks.

Chris Ball finalized the "failsafe" code for booting with a full NAND.
As of build update.1-709, the laptop will interrupt boot when the NAND
is full, will display a warning in English and Spanish telling the
user that they will lose data and should first back up their laptop,
and will
(after confirmation) free up enough space to boot by deleting large
datastore objects or activities.

Sayamindu Dasgupta worked on the keyboard issues, fixing the Mongolian
keyboard layout problems, and made some progress on the Dari keyboard
issue, and the Amharic Compose key problems. In order to handle
complex scripts like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, he has started to
evaluate a possible switch to SCIM (Smart Common Input Method:
http://www.scim-im.org/)
 for the next major OLPC release.

Sayamindu created a new getting started page for Pootle
administrators: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle/AdministrationQuickStart
. He also released new versions of Terminal activity and Read activity
for the latest Sucrose release.

Morgan Collett fixed some Chat bugs in release Chat-44. He assisted
with the Sucrose 0.81.6 release and packaging. He proposed a separate
mailing list for activity authors, and volunteered to improve
communication with them about current and upcoming process changes.

Faisal Anwar added new sections to the Sugar Almanac about the
clipboard, and is engaging the community to finalize new sections on
the presence service.  We encourage you to peruse and contribute to
the almanac, available at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Almanac

Guillaume Desmottes tracked memory leaks and corruptions bugs in the
Gadget Gabble branches. He found and fixed some nasty ones making the
gadget branch more robust. He also improved gadget integration in
sugar by implementing a simple wrapper around views objects making
them easier to use by sugar and he improved presence management in
Gabble and Gadget aiming to handle more gracefully Gadget component
restarts.

Daniel Drake fixed the Read activity, worked with Victor Lazzarini to
fix a csound bug that was breaking TamTam, and worked with TamTam
developers to produce new releases. Daniel also worked with QA to test
installation of the latest school server build XS164.

Erik Garrison worked with David Woodhouse to verify that test failures
encountered while LZO-compressing partition images were spurious and
non-fatal, and conversed with Mitch Bradley about the process of
building and installing a partitioned OS image on the XO.
Additionally, he assisted in communication with deployments in Uruguay
and Per?.

Bobby Powers got rainbow to start after X, so that it could properly
preload GTK again. He is looking into getting a more standard Linux
distribution on an SD card as an alternative to Windows.

Sucrose 0.81.6, Release Candidate 2 was released this week. This cycle
was again about stabilizing the release. Thanks to all the translators
we were able to get many new translations in. All the Fructose modules
have been released containing the new strings.

For more detailed release notes see:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.6

School server:
Martin Langhoff released build OLPC_XS_165, which is our xs-0.3
"release candidate". Thanks to Bryan Berry and David van Assche, who
have been providing excellent notes on installation steps and
shortcomings. The livecd approach we use on the XS images is brittle
and not suitable for upgrades; we need to move to traditional
installer CDs using either pungi or revisor.

Martin also started putting together an "xs-rsync" package to publish
content via rsync on the XS, with utilities that allow it to serve XO
builds mimicking update-server's behaviour.

Community:
Wikimania 2008:  The event was held at the [new] Library of
Alexandria.  SJ presented recent offline wiki efforts on the XO,
including an offline version of the Arabic Wikipedia which was being
finished that week with help from Bassem Jarkas and moulin.org .  Many
groups in attendance wanted to start OLPC-related projects,
particularly to extend access to wiki-repositories to offline
communities.
   Bibalex : Sohair Wastawy, chief librarian of Alexandria, and Lamia
Fattah, head of their children's library, proposed a small
installation for the children's section -- a set of 5 rooms that are
restricted to children under 12 (there is a small waiting area for
parents) and library staff. They have 60 to 100 children in the
library during most days in summertime, for eight hours each day.
   WikiBrowse : Tim Starling, a core MediaWiki developer, has offered
to generate regular static snapshots of all language wikipedias in a
format suitable for our WikiBrowse activity.  These snapshots are
produced for Wikipedia every other month; a dedicated machine is
available mose weeks to make further snapshots.
    Semantic MediaWiki : Francesca Slade is helping organize
structured information on our wiki with this extension, particularly
relating to countries and test reports.  The creators of the extension
at Wikimania offered to help implement some of our recent feature
requests.

Community
At Wikimania 2008 SJ Klein presented recent offline wiki efforts on
the XO, including a version of the Arabic Wikipedia which was being
finished that week with help from Bassem Jarkas and moulin.org. Many
groups in attendance wanted to start OLPC-related projects,
particularly to extend access to wiki-repositories to offline
communities.

Adam Hyde and Anne Gentle are organizing a Sugar documentation sprint
for the last week in August, with details to be finalized soon.
Seth Woodworth wrote up an overview of the current docs projects.
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/2008-July/000655.html
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/library/2008-July/000660.html

Activities
Mohit Taneja and Deepank Gupta now have a working game for Food Force
2, suitable for an alpha; it is being repackaged as an .xo bundle:
http://code.google.com/p/foodforce/

Juliana Lipkov?, working with Thomas Breuel,has mockups and code for
her handwriting recognition activity.
http://olpc-dhw.blogspot.com/
http://code.google.com/p/olpc-dhw/

Geography: Rajan Vaish finished v2 of his Atlas America activity,
working with Nestor Guerrero in Monterrey, and is back in school.  The
activity needs testing.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Vaish.rajan/Weekly_Updates

VideoEdit: Michael Lew has taken an interest in the video project, and
in helping the existing collaboration.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:VideoEdit

Support
Adam Holt reports that the 100th volunteer for the Support-gang joined
this week! The tickets associated with last year's Give One Get One
are tailing off as we begin planning for the 2009 G1G1. Going forward,
the focus for the support-gang is on technical issues and helping
people use their laptops rather than fulfillment questions.

Some of the support gang are helping out with the upcoming
documentation sprint. Adam has identified wifi access points that have
been reported as problems. We will purchase these to add to our test
environment. He and Kim are working on the details and systems to put
in place to help repair centers get spare parts and track their
problem reports.

OLPC France hosted a Paris repair jam a week ago,  where 6 people
practiced repairing XOs and they worked on 8 broken machines.

SJ Klein and Henry Edward Hardy have updated teamwiki to v. 1.13 and
enabled semantic mediawiki. This will facilitate tagging and other
"Web 2.0" features.

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