<div dir="ltr">Pour info<br>A NOTER POUR CODIO Et LACRETE. <b><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">Release 8.2.0 is ready</span></b><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Jim Gettys</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jg@laptop.org">jg@laptop.org</a>></span><br>
Date: Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 10:45 AM<br>Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News (2008-10-14)<br>To: Community News <<a href="mailto:community-news@laptop.org">community-news@laptop.org</a>><br><br><br>Community News<br>
A weekly update of One Laptop per Child October 14, 2008<br>
<br>
Release 8.2.0 is ready! Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard<br>
to make this release happen. The new features and upgrade instructions<br>
are available at <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0</a><br>
<br>
<br>
Technology<br>
<br>
G1G1:<br>
<br>
1. Seth Woodworth collected graphic design resources (video, images,<br>
stories, text) from our design partners, deployment teams and community<br>
members. These resources will be available to the community so they can<br>
produce their own flyers, banners, and mailings for the upcoming G1G1<br>
program. We want to make it easy for people to see that we are getting<br>
laptops to children. Daniel and Brian's blogs postings also have been<br>
extremely helpful:<br>
<a href="http://www.reactivated.net/weblog/archives/2008/10/olpc-ethiopia-updates/" target="_blank">http://www.reactivated.net/weblog/archives/2008/10/olpc-ethiopia-updates/</a><br>
<br>
Seth also made changes to the front of Laptop.org, adding an email<br>
sign-up list for people who want to be notified about G1G1. This form<br>
pushes email addresses out into our mailing list software, which we hope<br>
will scale to the 150k emails we plan on sending Nov 17th.<br>
<br>
Additionally, the XO manual that is being shipped with 8.2 is now<br>
available athttp://<a href="http://www.laptop.org/manual" target="_blank">www.laptop.org/manual</a>. A printed and bound version of<br>
the manual is also available for purchase at FLOSS Manual's Store:<br>
<a href="http://www.lulu.com/content/3865224" target="_blank">http://www.lulu.com/content/3865224</a><br>
<br>
Website Search<br>
<br>
Seth done a bit of research (via google webmaster tools) on how well<br>
Laptop.org is doing in search results (period, one week).<br>
<br>
(# of raking) ( search term)<br>
<br>
1 olpc<br>
1 one laptop per child<br>
1 xo laptop<br>
5 xo<br>
6 per<br>
6 lap top<br>
7 portable<br>
8 pc portable<br>
9 laptop<br>
9 home<br>
10 laptops<br>
10 ordinateur portable<br>
<br>
<br>
Oddly enough, the term "friends" produces 11% of the traffic from google<br>
to our site (<a href="http://laptop.org" target="_blank">laptop.org</a>), but we are only on the fifth page of results.<br>
<br>
After last week's surge from Uruguay, this month's traffic has risen to<br>
over 1 million page views (1,005,628 Sept-9 Oct-9). The actual<br>
computers/ip's visiting our site in that amount of time (Absolute Unique<br>
Visitors) is 194,511. On average, each visitor viewed 5 pages, and<br>
around 2.27 pages per visit.<br>
<br>
Some interesting characteristics:<br>
<br>
We get more hits on the wiki from the UK than from India, and more hits<br>
from China than Mongolia.<br>
<br>
The top ten languages of visitors to our wiki:<br>
<br>
10. Italian<br>
9. Spanish (Spain)<br>
8. German<br>
7. English (Great Briton)<br>
6. French<br>
5. Spanish<br>
4. English<br>
3. Portuguese (Brazil)<br>
2. English (USA)<br>
1. ...chrome://navigator/locale/navigator.properties<br>
<br>
The last comes from XO's of build 650 and above having a bug in Browse.<br>
<br>
2. Aaron Royer hosted another creative session with Nicholas and others<br>
this week to go over the TV, magazine and billboard ad campaigns for<br>
G1G1. Things are coming together well. There are still very large<br>
obstacles to the fulfillment of laptops to countries outside the U.S.<br>
Kim Quirk is investigating alternatives to an Amazon-only system, as<br>
well as working with Amazon to fully understand the limitations.<br>
<br>
Testing:<br>
<br>
3. Joe Feinstein, Frances Hopkins, Mel Chua, Reuben Caron and Kim Quirk<br>
worked on system-level testing this week. Simulating the "real school"<br>
environment, they demonstrated 62 laptops connected to one access point,<br>
registered to the school server and "chatting." We will continue this<br>
testing to measure capacity and performance with different loads<br>
simulating the real field environment. We also updated the 8.2.0 Release<br>
Notes, and verified some known bugs/issues.<br>
<br>
4. Mel (with input from Joe and others) has prepared a "user level"<br>
exploratory testing exercise to be conducted this Saturday at the MIT<br>
museum, where several XOs are on display. The goal is to observe how<br>
children (as well their parents) learn to operate XOs for the first<br>
time. Community groups who want to follow along are encouraged to try<br>
out this week's draft instructions<br>
athttp://<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Review_squad#Current_draft" target="_blank">wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Review_squad#Current_draft</a> and join the<br>
testing mailing list athttp://<a href="http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/testing" target="_blank">lists.laptop.org/listinfo/testing</a>.<br>
<br>
5. With 8.2.0 testing about finished, we're beginning to look ahead to<br>
automation and configuration scripting. We also hope to stay on top of<br>
bugs and test cases for the next release cycle. Join the testing mailing<br>
list and discuss bugs, tools, tricks, test cases, and digital entomology<br>
with us! (<a href="http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/testing" target="_blank">http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/testing</a>.)<br>
<br>
Systems Administration:<br>
<br>
6. Henry Edward Hardy reports that the OLPC Volunteer Infrastructure<br>
Group (VIG) has held its seventh regular meeting. Ben Knowles (user<br>
Adric) laid out a nice overview of the issues facing the RT ticket<br>
system and outlined a way forward.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC:Volunteer_Infrastructure_Group/RT" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC:Volunteer_Infrastructure_Group/RT</a><br>
<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC:Volunteer_Infrastructure_Group/RT/Strategy" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC:Volunteer_Infrastructure_Group/RT/Strategy</a><br>
<br>
7. Stefan Unterhauser (user Dogi) has taken on the role of VIG secretary<br>
and is contemplating a method of automating well-formatted meeting notes<br>
from the transcript of the IRC channel at irc.oftc.net:#olpc-admin.<br>
<br>
Software Development:<br>
<br>
8. No target will be set for release 8.2.1 until we identify the lead<br>
customers needing specific bug fixes. We will be focusing on future<br>
release work starting right away, aiming for a major technical planning<br>
discussion in mid-November for all interested technology contributors.<br>
Very preliminary rough draft goals and requirements definitions for<br>
future releases are coming together athttp://<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0" target="_blank">wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0</a><br>
<br>
9. Chris Ball worked on a JFFS2 patch¹ that allows us to avoid writing<br>
already-compressed data to NAND, which saves us the CPU time of having<br>
to uncompress it twice. The patch works at image creation time, and now<br>
needs to be modified to handle on-the-fly writes too.<br>
<br>
Chris also researched systems for tracking software feature proposals<br>
("blueprints"2, in Launchpad) and plans to suggest the use of one to<br>
track and review proposed 9.1 features, and to measure progress as the<br>
features are implemented.<br>
¹: <a href="http://dev.laptop.org/%7Ecjb/mkfs-compr-ratio.patch" target="_blank">http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/mkfs-compr-ratio.patch</a><br>
2: <a href="https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu" target="_blank">https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu</a><br>
<br>
XO OS Software:<br>
<br>
10. While remaining alert for possible 8.2.0 bug fixes, the team began<br>
investigation and planning for future work. Chris Ball, C. Scott Ananian<br>
and Michael Stone attended the local GNOME UI Hackfest, where they got<br>
ideas from the attendees and demonstrated a mockup of Scott's<br>
next-generation Journal ideas. Scott will give a presentation and demo<br>
his work next week in Cambridge. Chris researched better tools for<br>
tracking software feature proposals for planning and monitoring<br>
progress. Erik Garrison spent the week discussing issues with the<br>
current Journal in hopes that a future rewrite can better reflect the<br>
expressed needs of users in the field. Paul Fox has started looking at<br>
EC firmware development again, having obtained a new copy of the Keil<br>
compiler we use. He has re-synced his EC code tree with Richard's<br>
on-going work, and has (partially) succeeded in doing an EC firmware<br>
build on Linux under Wine.<br>
<br>
XS School Server Software:<br>
<br>
11. Martin Langhoff has been working on Moodle infrastructure and<br>
participating in the Moodle conferences for Australia and New Zealand.<br>
Key Moodle developers in A/NZ now have XO laptops, including Martin<br>
Dougiamas, the lead developer and founder. Several discussions took<br>
place about the road ahead for Moodle on the XS as infrastructure<br>
administration tool and as educational tool. The mid-term focus is on<br>
offline Moodle using Google Gears, which Tony Anderson is pioneering, so<br>
Martin Langhoff participated in various presentations and discussions<br>
about it.<br>
<br>
12. Douglas continued to examine ejabberd's memory use, providing<br>
valuable support for planned deployments in Birmingham and elsewhere,<br>
looked at packaging it in a more xs-config friendly way, fixed an idmgr<br>
regression, and made some headway with an OTP password package for the<br>
XS. He also helped the Wellington testing team update laptops to build<br>
767. The team now meets of its own accord, without needing Martin around<br>
to pester them. Douglas also continued with final testing of the 8.2.0<br>
release.<br>
<br>
Sugar / Activity Software:<br>
<br>
13. Tomeu Vizoso provided his DataStore rewrite, featuring improved<br>
reliability, better performance and an easier-to-maintain architecture.<br>
Also spent a considerable amount of time participating in interesting<br>
debates in the mailing lists, and was happy to notice the increased<br>
participation of teachers from Uruguay in the olpc-sur mailing list.<br>
<br>
14. Marco Pesenti Gritti went forward with work on the 0.84 release of<br>
Sugar, including an update of the 0.84 release goals. The most invasive<br>
part of the Sugar shell refactoring is now complete, dividing it into<br>
several sub-modules. The core UI components now all reside in the same<br>
process, saving memory and improving performance. In addition to bug<br>
fixing for 8.2.0, Simon Schampijer neared completion of the transition<br>
to using gconf and was able to submit the Browse activity for Fedora<br>
package review. Pyxpcom has been enabled in the F10 xulrunner thanks to<br>
Cristopher Aillon. Marco has synced the xulrunner olpc3 package and<br>
fixed the hulahop package accordingly to these changes. Morgan Collett<br>
worked on development of Chat and Read and began looking into future<br>
collaboration feature goals.<br>
<br>
15. Eben Eliason helped Seth with the new G1G1 subscription form on the<br>
main page of <a href="http://laptop.org" target="_blank">laptop.org</a>, and otherwise worked with Greg Smith and the<br>
team to begin understanding the UI goals and strategies for future<br>
release planning. Apart from this more concrete task, he spent most of<br>
his week contemplating the next iteration of designs, which included a<br>
meeting with Greg Smith to discuss goals for the UI in the roadmap to<br>
9.1, as well as a considerable amount of time in the mailing lists and<br>
IRC, observing and Apart from this more concrete task, he spent most of<br>
his week contemplating the next iteration of designs, which included a<br>
meeting with Greg Smith to discuss goals for the UI in the roadmap to<br>
9.1, as well as a considerable amount of time in the mailing lists and<br>
IRC, observing and responding to feedback provided there.<br>
<br>
On thoughtful recommendations from Michael Stone and Carol Lerche, Eben<br>
aims to refocus his efforts next week into creating some rough outlines<br>
indicating the aspects of posted designs which are complete, partially<br>
complete, scheduled, or still just ideas to provide useful reference in<br>
future mailing list discussions, to reduce the amount of reiteration<br>
needed, and to keep the conversations moving forward.<br>
<br>
16. C. Scott Ananian attended the GNOME hackfest with Chris Ball and<br>
Michael Stone, and demo'ed some next-generation Journal work and Olpcfs.<br>
A more complete report can be found in the thread at:<br>
<a href="http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020123.html" target="_blank">http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020123.html</a><br>
<br>
Scott spent most of his time this week prototyping a "next-generation"<br>
journal design for 9.1, based around desktop search. He will be giving a<br>
demo and talk next Wednesday at OLPC's Cambridge offices; it will be<br>
posted online shortly thereafter. More details:<br>
<a href="http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020097.html" target="_blank">http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020097.html</a><br>
<br>
Screenshots to whet an appetite:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://dev.laptop.org/%7Ecscott/journal-ss.png" target="_blank">http://dev.laptop.org/~cscott/journal-ss.png</a><br>
<a href="http://dev.laptop.org/%7Ecscott/journal-ss-2.png" target="_blank">http://dev.laptop.org/~cscott/journal-ss-2.png</a><br>
<br>
Finally, Scott did his part to push the 9.1.0 planning meeting forward,<br>
formally inviting sugarlabs to collaborate. During the week of Nov 17 we<br>
will have technical presentations and chart our path towards 9.1.<br>
<a href="http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020137.html" target="_blank">http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020137.html</a><br>
<br>
17. Sayamindu Dasgupta uncovered the causes behind a few<br>
translation-related bugs found by the Italian translation team. In the<br>
interest of making localization progress smoothly, he also wrote an<br>
excellent list of "i18n best practices" for Sugar activity authors, at<br>
<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Localization/i18n_Best_Practices" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Localization/i18n_Best_Practices</a>. Sayamindu is<br>
working on the next draft of the Khmer keyboard layout, based on<br>
valuable community feedback. He also contributed several tools for<br>
better PDF viewing support.<br>
<br>
18. Faisal Anwar of Media Modifications updated the Sugar almanac with<br>
entries on how to best use Stream Tubes in your activity by answering<br>
the question "How do I set up a simple stream tube that can send data<br>
one-way between two instances of an activity?" Please read, review, and<br>
contribute your own best practices to<br>
<a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar.presence" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar.presence</a><br>
<br>
19. Adam Holt working parttime from Munich & Vienna this week, staying<br>
with Christoph Derndorfer of OLPCnews.com etc. Next week his personal<br>
trip takes me to Prague to see Tomeu Visozo, Berlin to see Simon<br>
Schampijer, Hamburg to meet OLPC Germany folk if possible, Brussels to<br>
see Andriani Ferti and hopefully OLPC Europe -- and last but not least<br>
many fiercely dedicated OLPC/Sugar volunteers along the way.<br>
<br>
Huge thanks to Sean Hooley who has (yet again) helped greatly this week<br>
efficiently dealing with the Never-Ending stream of 2007 G1G1 customer<br>
service issues.<br>
<br>
20. Jim Gettys has built the X Window System from source in preparation<br>
for touchscreen development. He also spent time catching up on what has<br>
been going on in the UI field over the last three years. * On discover<br>
of unexpected uses of technology note, see<br>
<a href="http://www.cse.yorku.ca/%7Ewolfgang/facades/" target="_blank">http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~wolfgang/facades/</a> for something never<br>
anticipated.<br>
<br>
Fedora Classic Desktop:<br>
<br>
21. Greg DeKoenigsberg and James Laska did an outstanding job preparing<br>
100 volunteers to receive XO laptops for Fedora testing, with assistance<br>
from SJ Klein. Machines have been arriving this week and testers are<br>
getting started. Jeremy Katz has made several important discoveries in<br>
his early testing, and a few releases with updates will be distributed<br>
around this weekend.<br>
<br>
Hardware:<br>
<br>
22. Richard worked on investigating a report of power regression between<br>
build [70*,71*] (Stable) and the 76* (8.2 series) release. He made<br>
several enhancements to olpc-pwr-log and process-pwr_log.py. Using these<br>
tools John Watlington and Richard were able to log lots of data. The new<br>
8.2 series appear to draw .5 Watts of power more than our past builds.<br>
Where this .5W Watts is going is still unknown but from looking at the<br>
log files he sees things that he wants to investigate further. He will<br>
be further enhancing his log processing tools to produce some plots of<br>
various bits of the log files so that the trends in the data will be<br>
easier to see.<br>
<br>
Richard would like to call for help from the G1G1 and developer<br>
community. Gathering large amount of data to establish a good power<br>
baseline is a very time consuming task. Repeated power runs tests take<br>
around 6 hours to run. Richard would like to request that all the<br>
developers and G1G1 users that are active do a power testing run and<br>
send the resulting log file to Richard. If all of our developers and<br>
testers run 1 or 2 logs then Richard will have a wealth of data to<br>
process.<br>
<br>
The steps: (Please follow these steps as close as possible so the data<br>
is apples to apples)<br>
<br>
1) Download the latest olpc-pwr-log:<br>
wget <a href="http://dev.laptop.org/%7Ersmith/olpc-pwr-log" target="_blank">http://dev.laptop.org/~rsmith/olpc-pwr-log</a><br>
2) Copy this into your XO where you can run it from a VT.<br>
3) Fully charge the battery of your XO and leave the external power<br>
plugged in.<br>
4) Switch to a VT and cd to where the olpc-pwr-log script is. Running<br>
from a VT is very important. The output on the VT console will prevent<br>
the system from going into idle-suspend if you have that enabled.<br>
5) ./olpc-pwr-log<br>
6) The moment you see the first line of log ouput ie. right after it<br>
says it found a battery and a series of numbers displays pull the<br>
external power.<br>
7) Let the system run untouched until it dies. Do not switch back into<br>
sugar. If you go back into sugar the DPMS power saving will kick in in<br>
20 minutes and turn off the dcon.<br>
8) Mail the logs or any questions you have to <a href="mailto:richard@laptop.org">richard@laptop.org</a><br>
<br>
23. The NAND testing continues, with the Sandisk Extreme III SD cards<br>
approaching 1.5 TB written, the LBA-NAND devices passing 600 GB, and the<br>
JFFS2 filesystems around 300 GB. We have started seeing data errors in<br>
the SD cards, but at least some of them are transient read errors,<br>
implicating the SD bus and not the NAND device. We have also seen one<br>
error in the LBA-NAND parts. The JFFS2 machines struggle not to kernel<br>
crash every 24 - 48 hours. Deepak Saxena succeeded in providing a UbiFS<br>
kernel and image, and John has started a few laptops running the same<br>
tests, but the driver doesn't appear stable enough to obtain results<br>
yet. Up to date performance numbers, both per machine and aggregate, are<br>
available at:<a href="http://dev.laptop.org/%7Ewad/nand/" target="_blank">http://dev.laptop.org/~wad/nand/</a><br>
<br>
24. Mitch Bradley continued working on the multicast NAND FLASH updater<br>
for Open Firmware, achieving a net 3x performance gain for multicast<br>
update and a doubling of OFW's NAND FLASH write speed, which will speed<br>
up other update operations.<br>
<br>
25. John worked with Quanta trying to figure out why a problem we fixed<br>
last year cropped up again in a 1000-laptop batch. The machines refuse<br>
to resume from a suspend in Linux using the RTC alarm (#5128) if the<br>
date is later than October 1, 2008. Testing with OFW confirms that the<br>
hardware is functional. The Quanta laptop production team has changed<br>
recently, losing a lot of valuable knowledge which now must be<br>
relearned.<br>
<br>
26. Deepak, with help from Erik and Mitch, got the 8.2.0 release running<br>
on top of the UBIFS filesystem, so we can understand how to build images<br>
and start initial testing.<br>
<br>
Networking:<br>
<br>
27. Ricardo started qualification testing for wireless firmware release<br>
5.110.22.p20.<br>
<br>
There are new features introduced in this release - a new wakeup on WLAN<br>
traffic (wol) filter and the API to enable/disable the contention window<br>
adaptation that requires driver support. Cozybit is working on this. He<br>
also worked together with Marvell and Cozybit on WPA association issues.<br>
More timing issues were identified and are being worked on (#8799) along<br>
with continued updating wireless subsystem related pages in the wiki.<br>
<br>
28. In cooperation with the students at Universidad Federale Fluminense<br>
(UFF) in Niteroi, Brazil, a mesh wireless test bed was set up at UFF's<br>
engineering building where the department of telecommunications is<br>
housed. The test bed currently incorporates 12 XOs spread among 3 floors<br>
and resembles operating conditions encountered in large apartment<br>
buildings.<br>
<br>
29. Michail and Javier set up specifications and requirements for the<br>
wireless driver changes required to support the 8682 wireless chip.<br>
These changes are mandated by new firmware API required to take<br>
advantage of the additional capabilities of the 8682 compared to the<br>
current 8388 (per frame transmission power setting, modular plugin<br>
architecture and SDK for complex functionality).<br>
<br>
30. Guillaume Desmottes implemented the new Gadget API in Gabble. This<br>
more modular API will enable us to perform more flexible searches as<br>
requested by the Sugar team. He also made some modifications in the<br>
Gadget XMPP view protocol, ran tests of the new release of the VideoChat<br>
activity and investigated OLPC bug blockers (#8804, #6342, #8322.<br>
<br>
>From the Field<br>
<br>
Iraq: On October 7th, the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) for the<br>
province of Muthanna celebrated their second XO distribution. Muthanna<br>
is a remote, agricultural province on Iraq's Saudi Arabian border, very<br>
poor and sparsely-populated. Nevertheless, Dick Torborg of the PRT<br>
reports that the second deployment – which brings the total number of<br>
XOs in the province to 200 – attracted an impressively large gathering,<br>
including provincial leaders and local media. Torborg says the kids and<br>
school community were in high spirits. There are plans to locally<br>
distribute a minimum of 200 additional machines by the end of the year.<br>
<br>
The OLPC team in Iraq consists of Torborg, together with representatives<br>
of Iraq's Director of General Education and members of the Yakthah<br>
Institute, a local NGO. The U.S. embassy in Baghdad will soon be posting<br>
an Internet article on the event.<br>
<br>
Iraq is a priority country for OLPC, so it is gratifying to see our<br>
program take hold and gather strength there. Darah Tappitake, Robert and<br>
Matt will continue working with the PRTs and other potential partners,<br>
such as International Relief & Development (IRD), to bring XOs to<br>
children throughout the country.<br>
<br>
And in other news…<br>
<br>
As of this issue of Weekend, XOs have been deployed - or soon will be -<br>
in 31 countries. They are: Afghanistan, Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia,<br>
Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, India, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Mali, Mexico,<br>
Mongolia, Mozambique, Nepal, Nigeria, Niue, Pakistan, Palestine, Papua<br>
New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Senegal, Solomon Islands,<br>
South Africa, Thailand, United States and Uruguay.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
<br>
<br>
--<br>
Jim Gettys <<a href="mailto:jg@laptop.org">jg@laptop.org</a>><br>
One Laptop Per Child<br>
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