Additional community news that didn't make it into Walter's email:<br><b><br>Software Development:</b><br>Guillaume Desmottes reports that this Salut branch <a href="http://monkey.collabora.co.uk/telepathy-salut-cerebro2/" target="_blank">http://monkey.collabora.co.uk/telepathy-salut-cerebro2/</a> now abstracts all the Avahi code. So we could have a Cerebro backend re-implementing the needed bits and use it instead of Avahi.<br>
<br>
A nice side effect of upgrading loudmouth to latest release was to fix a crash when Gabble connects through a proxy (#6452).<br><br>Guillaume has fixed latest know bugs/leaks in the Salut refactoring branch. It is now waiting review from Sjoerd. He released Salut 0.3.2, upgraded Telepathy stack in Jhbuild and filed tickets to do the same in Joyride (#6858, #6859, #6860, #6862, #6861, #6873). He also continued to investigate Jingle protocol and its implementation in Gabble to prepare futur p2p stream tubes (#4047).<br>
<br>Morgan Collette has been working on the Chat UI per Eben's mockups; he deployed the latest Telepathy releases in joyride; and he has been working on Chat interoperability with non-Sugar Jabber clients, to handle incoming chat connections and launch Chat or display an invitation to launch it.<br>
<br>Simon Schampijer has updated sugar-jhbuild to use the xulrunner beta 5 sources<br>
<a href="http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2008/04/02/firefox-3-beta-5-now-available-for-download/" target="_blank">http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2008/04/02/firefox-3-beta-5-now-available-for-download/</a> He was hoping it would fix bugs like #6825, but it did not.<br>
<br>Andres Salomon worked on absorbing design docs on jffs2, ubi(fs), and logfs; pushing more stuff upstream, meetings, and interviews.<br><br>Michael Stone worked with Scott, Chris, Marco, Tomeu, and Simon on preparations to draft a convincing release plan describing our goals, resources, intended use of those resources, and fallback plans for the next development cycle.<br>
<br>Michael also discussed sugar architecture with Jameson Quinn, interviewed two candidates, followed up on an internship proposal, and prepared a new Rainbow pre-release snapshot [<a href="http://teach.laptop.org/%7Emstone/rainbow.rpm" target="_blank">http://teach.laptop.org/~mstone/rainbow.rpm</a>] which should be substantially more compatible with legacy software. (It makes $HOME == $SAR/instance; thus restoring function to software which naively expects $HOME to be writable.)<a href="http://teach.laptop.org/%7Emstone/rainbow.rpm" target="_blank"></a><br>
<br>Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that the website translation project is up
and running. We have decided to use Git and Pootle together to manage
the website translations, to ensure easy reversal to older versions if
required. I will be also migrating the other non Git hosted
translations (eg: those for Record activity, activation server, etc) to
this new system, as adding version control makes the overall workflow
more foolproof and stable. Apart from the new Sindhi translation
project, I'm glad to report that after a long period of inactivity, the
Hindi (hi) translation efforts have picked up steam and they have
almost completed the translation of XO Core (<a href="https://dev.laptop.org/translate/hi/xo_core/" target="_blank">https://dev.laptop.org/translate/hi/xo_core/</a>). Same goes for Marathi (mr), and XO Core for Marathi is 62% complete now (<a href="https://dev.laptop.org/translate/mr/xo_core/" target="_blank">https://dev.laptop.org/translate/mr/xo_core/</a>).<br>
<br><b>Testing:</b><br>
John Watlington and Giannis Galanis spent more time testing our network performance with a number of laptops attached to a school server through conventional WiFi. Their results were promising, as the collaboration reliability problems seen when laptops collaborate directly,<br>
or connect to a school server over a mesh were minimal (specifics at <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Collaboration_Network_Testbed">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Collaboration_Network_Testbed</a>). The results vary widely depending on the model of access point used. A collaboration with Nortel on the problems we are encountering with mesh networking is in the process of beginning, with a second meeting on Monday to discuss possibilities.<br>
<br>
While the collaboration and networking testbed in Peabody has been essential, its usefulness has been hampered by a dearth of public transportation. We are currently looking for a small space in the Boston area, accessible via the subway, which will provide a longer term home for the testbed. Kim Quirk did preliminary wifi measurements at three possible sites this week with good results at one in Davis Square. A more detailed review for that site will be conducted next week and the search will continue. <br>
<br>Ricardo Carrano reports that firmware release 22.p6 passed initial tests and will be included in joyride for continued testing. It gives us better control over probe requests with the ultimate goal of improving scalability by freeing air time. This firmware also addresses bugs #6600, #3733 and #6528.<br>
<br>Firmware release 22.p8 introduces dynamic mac contention window adaptation, that will improve reliability in dense mesh scenarios (like a<br>
school) by reducing probability of collision. It also addresses important bugs like #4927 and #6709 (confirmed) and #4616 (yet to confirm). This<br>
release is under test right now.<br><br>We are very close to fixing the blocker #6589. Initial tests indicate that we did. Two causes were identified and fixed both in driver and in<br>
firmware.<br><br><b>Multi-Battery Charger:</b><br>
Lilian and Richard worked on improving/debugging the firmware for the multi-battery charger. Richard is seeing some sporadic cases where the firmware seems to hang. Lilian is unable to reproduce the problem.<br><br><b>Conferences/Other:</b><br>
International Development Night, MIT <span class="nfakPe">Museum</span>, 20080404 - Henry was the OLPC representative at this event. He set up the display with the backdrops that OLPC had AMD make for World
Economic Forum. He took his G1G1 (703 with Mexican activities) and two
Spanish keyboards. Thanks SJ for pointing out the
volunteer-made handouts from our wiki and Nia and Tracy for helping me
get the backdrops.<br>
<br>Response was very good. Topics ranged from general plans for the
future and philosophical issues about education and development to
specific questions about G1G1 order fulfillment, plans for Windows
compatibility and questions about the hand crank and why isn't it
really $100. Several people stressed that they felt that Windows compatibility was
essential for encouraging adoption in the Third World and China, while
others referred to XP as "bloatware" and questioned whether XP would
fit into our 1 GB of system RAM.<br><br>We plan to donate a MP XO to the MIT Museum for their permanent collection.<br><br><b>Sysadmin:</b><br>Henry Hardy reports that our wireless link from 1cc to internet to be upgraded April 17. There
will be a "short" network downtime associated with this activity. This
should not effect our mail, web, wiki, and development services on
crank and pedal at the colo. Other services on machines such as update,
activation, download, xs-dev, teach, thinker, will be off the net
during this downtime. Local internet services will be interrupted.<br><br>Henry is ready to move forward with the procurement of the pedal, crank, xs-dev replacements. He has begun backing up the data on the coraid 1521 filer. Once the system
is backed up and the new disks are installed we will have another 7 TB
of space for local backups, file services etc. This will probably fill
up very fast so we should think about scheduling procurement of another
(I believe this was budgeted).<br>
<br>Scott Ananian reports that <a href="http://download.laptop.org/" target="_blank">download.laptop.org</a> now has a 1TB disk, and plenty of space. Working on grabbing historic builds from <a href="http://olpc.download.redhat.com/" target="_blank">olpc.download.redhat.com</a>, replacing archived recent builds which had to be moved for lack of space, etc. We now have plenty of space for activity packs, school server builds, etc. Let me know if you want to move stuff to d.l.o.<br>
<br>
<b>Support</b>:<br>Adam Holt, Emily Smith and Sandy Culver continue to plow through the donor services questions. Now that all the laptops have been shipped for the G1G1 program, the next 2 months will be focused on laptops that were non-deliverable, dead-on-arrival, or 'other' problems. It is usually these 'other' problems that take so long to investigate. We had a good discussion with out partners to understand what processes were broken and thoughts on how to fix them.<br>
<br>We continue to work on issues holding up our ability to ship out for
the developer's program and for the spares and repairs program. Hopefully the blocking issues will be resolved early next week.<br><br>