----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2007 13:53:49 -0400
From: "Walter Bender" <walter [ dot ] bender [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com>
Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News 2007-10-27
To: community-news [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org
Cc: OLPC Dev <devel [ at ] lists [ dot ] laptop [ dot ] org>, Sugar Mailing List
<sugar [ at ] lists [ dot ] laptop [ dot ] org>
1. New York City: United Nations Under-Secretary-General/High
Representative for Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Countries and
Island States, Mr. Cheick Sidi Diarra of Mali, hosted a two-hour
meeting exclusively devoted to OLPC. Miguel Brechner and Oscar Becerra
presented, respectively, the experiences and decision-making process
in Uruguay and Peru. Questions and demos lasted for an additional
forty five minutes. About 50 countries were represented.
2. Netherlands: Ivan Krsti? keynoted GOVCERT.NL, the invitation-only
security conference organized by the Dutch computer emergency response
team (CERT). He made a number of contacts with international CERTs,
whose assistance might be critical after we deploy.
3. Adapter prong orientation: Demands from the field for one or the
other orientation of adapter prongs have led us to request more
adapter orientation options. Quanta has been responsive and UL will
assist with safety testing. It will be several months before these AC
adapters will be available, but work has begun.
4. Resistance tests: Summarized below is the current status of
resistance testing of the XO laptop. Mary Lou Jepsen will write a
complete report in early November, after all testing data is
available. (This report will be available on wiki.laptop.org.)
* Drop: XO passes 10-point drop test from a height of 150cm onto
carpet- covered steel (other drop-test details available)
* Operating temperature: 0C to 45C (50C pending certification)
* Storage temperature : ?25C to 60C
* Operational altitude: 0 to 5000m
* Dust/water: Testing to Ingress Protocol 54 and 42 (in process)
* Toxicity: RoHS certified (UL report due in early November)
* Safety:
** IEC 60950-1(write up in process)
** EN 60950-1 (write up in process)
** CSA/UL 60950-1 (write up in process)
** ASTM F 963 ? Electronic Toy Safety (write up in process)
* AC adapter
** Wide input range: 90v(?10%) ~ 240v(+25%), 35Hz to 70Hz
** IEC 60950-1 (write up in process)
** EN 60950-1 (write up in process)
** CSA/UL 60950-1 (write up in process)
** Extra transient and burst immunity: IEC 61000-4-4 (passed)
** Extra surge immunity: IEC 61000-4-5 (passed)
* Keyboard
** Tested to 500,000 cycles
** Rubber: water and dust resistant
* Buttons (power, display rotate, gamepads): Tested to 500,000 cycles
5. Mass-production build (Trial 3): The stable build for mass
production start is Build 622 (Firmware version Q2D02). Please test
these builds extensively. John Palmieri and Scott Ananian produced a
number of builds in support of mass production, incorporating final
changes for C2 systems and fixes from Javier Cardona and Andres
Salomon for USB and wireless related suspend/resume problems. James
Cameron helped Chris Ball, Bernie Innocenti, and Jim Gettys diagnose
why X would not start while testing the C2 boards.
Scott has been supporting the Joyride build system. He, Michael Stone,
and Bernardo Innocenti had a fruitful discussion with the Fedora build
maintainer community about how to integrate our build system with koji
going forward. Greg DeKoenigsberg at RedHat has offered his
significant help in coordinating our needs with members of the Fedora
community who would like to get involved.
6. Localization: We have issued a call for translators, coordinators,
and volunteers (See
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/localization/2007-October/000052.html).
If you have good language skills (even if you have minimal computer
skills), you can make an important contribution to the project. Please
help us localize to as many languages as possible (See the
localization mailing-list subscription page at
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/localization).
Xavier Alvarez, Alfonso de la Guarda, and Danny Clark have built a
Pootle installation?a web based tool to help in language localization
(See the OLPC Pootle at its temporary site by visiting
http://solar.laptop.org:5080/). Sayamindu Dasgupta, a student from
India working part-time on the project is helping them.
Sumit Chowdhury reports that Nandu Pradhan, president of RedHat India,
is working with a team next week to help provide localization support
in eleven Indian languages. Sarmad Hussein of the PAN Localization
project and the CRULP research center has offered help with Pashto,
Urdu, and Nepali keyboards and localization.
7. Network upgrades/activation: Scott Ananian has completed a bring up
of our "meshtest" testbed; he has verified automated network upgrades
with security enabled, and activation from school server. (Some tweaks
required to make this more robust went into Build 619.) He also
discovered that about half of the meshtest machines were using compact
Linksys external USB ethernet dongles that would overheat and crash if
left on overnight. He also made some database-model changes to
activation.laptop.org which will help us better manage groups of
laptops. And he imported manufacturing data for all of our existing
B2-C1 machines and generated activation and developer leases for them
to ease testing.
8. Backups: Tomeu Vizoso, Ivan Krsti?, and Marco Gritti discussed and
implemented Journal backups to the server and individual file restore.
Datastore performance will also be good enough to do full restores.
Along the way, a number of bugs were fixed. Ivan wrote the
corresponding school-server backup system (#4100) with Tomeu assisting
on the datastore side and Marco on the Journal-activity side. It
should be ready to land in builds early this week.
9. Screenshots: Tomeu and Marco are working on an improved way of
taking screenshots of running activities for the Journal preview.
(Typing Alt+1 will still cause a screenshot to be placed in the
Journal.)
10. Read activity and Sugar documentation: Tomeu gave some support to
Pascal Scheffers for his work in Read (which now saves its state in
the Journal and has numerous improvements to the UI) and documentation
of the Sugar API. He is doing an awesome job!
11. UI polish: Simon Schampier added (Ctrl+Q, Ctrl+Escape) for closing
the activities and the keybinding (Alt+Space) to the activity window
to hide/show the tray. The browse activity was adopted accordingly to
these API changes. He is now finishing up work on a control panel.
12. Battery-life testing: Richard Smith repeated a number of tests on
power consumption and battery life. These tests were gratifyingly
consistent with other direct power measurements Joel Stanley had
performed in late summer. There are remaining power savings to be had
by better use of the DCON hardware and optimization of the wireless
firmware when running in mesh mode, which have just begun.
Scott found a battery-charging bug with NiMH batteries, which Richard
is working on.
13. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2D02 firmware:
* turned off indexed I/O before early interaction to close a security hole;
* added rtc-wackup command for suspend-resume testing;
* enabled reboot using the new EC command that resets the EC too, thus
re-enabling indexed I/O, thus making auto-firmware-update possible;
* fixed bug in signature parsing for developer keys;
* increased countdown to five seconds because its harder to catch it
with security activated;
* when searching for a signature string, look for one whose key
signature matches the trailing portion of our pubkey, instead of just
taking the first line with a "sig01:" format;
* disabled "X" button toggle between secure and non-secure modes (The
"X" button now forces secure mode when in non-secure mode, instead of
going in either direction.);
* disabled indexed I/O when entering the kernel in secure mode;
* disabled PSCLK in low state to fix the PS2 flow control bug from a cold boot;
* added feature to send battery-status SCIs on low_bat change;
* fixed the bug that caused a failure to recognize the C2 board revision number;
* implemented command 0xDB to auto restart with indexed IO enabled.
14. Schedule: The upcoming releases have been renamed and re-purposed:
Oct. 26: "Trial-3" (Build 622) are the bits being loaded for mass
production. This was completed this week.
Nov. 16: "Reload" are bits that could possibly be loaded before
shipping laptops to individuals. We will hand pick blocking bug fixes
only if we need to.
Dec. 07: "Killjoy" (V1.0, previously referred to as FRS or First
Deployment) is a release based on the "Joyride" builds. This will
include bug fixes/minor features that are in Joyride today; and we are
actively moving some trac items to this release based on what we know
about in the next week. Feature freeze for this is next week; code
freeze the week after.
Q1 2008: "Future Release" (V1.1) is the release after Killjoy. Not
well defined. Right now it is where we moved all the features that
didn't make it into Killjoy.
(See https://dev.laptop.org/roadmap for more info.)
As we do the triage for these builds, we'd very much appreciate
community feedback as to what you think is important. Feel free to
send email to Walter Bender, Kim Quirk, or Jim Gettys in regard to
priorities.
15. Testing: Alex Latham kept the suspend/resume testbed running with
the same OS, OFW, kernel, and wireless firmware release as the test
team in China, who are bringing up 42 boards with new PCB. He also
worked on connectivity testing and upgrade testing. Next week he will
be working creating a more comprehensive smoke/regression test to
provide the basis for our final release testing. Yani Galanis has put
together a detailed wiki page on testing network connectivity (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Network_Configuration). There is
information on how things work today and where to find information
about your connectivity; he has also created a connectivity-status
script that will send all this info to standard output. Ricardo
Carrano has been working our RF sniffer to provide debug and analysis
help on some of the difficult wireless hangs and access-point
association problems we have been seeing.
16. EC code: Three new EC bugs seemed to have surfaced this week:
* The EC code and kernel have a mismatch in meaning of data sent
between them for power-status events. Therefore its true external-
power status events are not detected by the kernel. David Woodhouse
and Richard have a workaround.
* EC commands too close to suspend leave the EC in a state where
it won't respond to commands anymore. Andres Salomon and Richard have
a kernel workaround.
* Something in the "Secure Boot" sequence seems to make the EC reset
the capacity percentage of a full NiMH battery to 7% and sometimes
this gets written back into the battery. This results in what was a
fully charged battery now marked as empty. Bad things then happen. It
only happens in secure boot and only with a fully charged NiMH.
Testing in secure boot mode has made for slow goings. The current
suspect is when we disable Indexed IO to the EC to prevent flashing.
17. Squeak/Etoys: Marta Voelcker reports that the children at the
Luciana de Abreu school in Porto Alegre, Brazil are making great
progress with Etoys. "The 11-year olds are using it very frequently,
12-to-14-year olds also increasing it, and first graders (age 7) are
starting to use it. They use squeak in the classroom and after school
they meet in the garden to talk about and share things made with
squeak, it is becoming a culture!" Squeak has been very popular in
Ethiopia as well.
18. Measure activity: Arjun Sarwal explored color schemes for
displaying multiple logs from multiple people. He also spent this past
week reviewing UI of the Activity with Eben Eliason, reviewing Journal
integration with Tomeu and Marco, refining DSP aspects with Mitch, V.
Michael Bove, Albert Cahalan, and Benjamin Schwartz, and optimizing
drawing code with Bernie Innocenti and Cody Lodrige.
19. Documentation: Todd Kelsey has build "PHPMyFaq" in order to take
some of the support heat off of developers. PHPMyFaq is scalable,
multilingual, RSS, XML; it allows people to post questions, other
people to answer, print out, save to PDF, XML, etc. Its coolest
feature is ranking?most relevant/popular items float to top (See
http://aaa.opensourcehost.com/~thoughts/faq/). Todd could use one or
more people's help on:
* defining categories of questions that developers get asked;
* some pre-made questions and answers to seed page;
* someone to moderate instances.
Meanwhile, Felice Gardner has been doing some cleaning up of the FAQ
on the wiki, putting "new" questions into categories and consolidating
multiple pages of questions on the same topic (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question).
Todd and Ann Gentle are spending part of today writing up how they
have worked on documentation so far, and what tools could help improve
the process. Christoph Derndofer and Eduardo Silva have shared their
drafts of an activity handbook as well. The results will be posted to
the OLPC wiki's [[Documentation]] page (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Documentation).
20. Library: Jamendo now has an OLPC music portal up, with help from
Free Culture and the Antenna Alliance (See
http://www.jamendo.com/en/olpc for the first posted bands and albums
of freely licensed music). They are also gathering signed copyright
statements from all authors for the collections.
The Internet Archive is working to turn their feeds of new
book-metapages into a feed of PDFs. Alexis Rossi is helping produce
improved collections of their children's library (See
http://dev.laptop.org/~arael/preview/childrens-library/).
Anil Hemrajani at Big Universe has 14 children's picturebooks whose
authors have agreed for them to be distributed as demo books. These
are the first children's books in our collections that were not
scanned, but were created in digital format. This is a temporary
collection while working to get authors and publishers to agree to a
suitable CC license.
Andrew Whitworth at Wikijunior is working on making stable versions of
their newer books, with a focus on an offline interface that is simple
and allows people to read static books while linking to places for
them to comment and edit them.
Curriki is working on their tool to package collections as XO bundles.
Some of our curators have gone to them to store their collections.
The EGAP alumni from Monterrey's Tech working on a summer of content
mapping project have started a blog. They are posting their works to
Curriki, and learning how to integrate with our feature server (See
http://olpclatam.blogspot.com/). Curriki is working with Nortel to
convert their LearnIT video and text materials to Curriki collections;
and to make sure they are bundled for the XO.
Kevin Driscoll is working with a few students in India on a
Hackety-Hack series. They have eight problems and solutions written so
far; the whole needs to be Sugarized.
Marilyn Mosley, coordinator of the Laurel Springs school, is offering
her online ecology courses to OLPC students, and working on new health
courses
Peter Kaufman, our open video coordinator, and Ahrash Bissell of
ccLearn are helping plan a video creation and remix challenge for the
science video and documentary community. The challenge will have two
stages, one to provide free material suitable for teaching science,
and the second to make the best short educational video for children
from available sources.
21. Community/Games: Mike Fletcher is being flown to Taipei for a few
days this week for a free-software and open-source conference there.
He is talking in a session along with the lead Asus Eee developers,
who are eager to involve the open source community. Mike Fletcher is
also helping organize a small sibling game sprint in Toronto, November
16?18, at the same time as the CMU Game Jam (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Games/Productive).
Nov. 10?11 : Game Jam Brasil (in S?o Carlos)
Nov. 16?18 : Game Jam Pittsburgh (at the CMU ETC center)
Nov. 16?18 : Toronto Game Sprint
Don Hopkins' version of SimCity is almost complete; it needs to go
through final testing by the EA developers before it can be released
under the GPL, but should be ready for child testing.
-walter
--
Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 12:38:18 -0400
From: "Walter Bender" <walter [ dot ] bender [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com>
Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News 2007-11-03
To: community-news [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org
Cc: OLPC Dev <devel [ at ] lists [ dot ] laptop [ dot ] org>, Sugar Mailing List
<sugar [ at ] lists [ dot ] laptop [ dot ] org>
Message-ID:
<fd535e260711030938vc27fdf6o67a8a690d145bc66 [ at ] mail [ dot ] gmail [ dot ] com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
1. Reggio Emilia: Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi reconfirmed his
commitment of 50,000 laptops for Ethiopia while at a town meeting of
over 600 people where Nicholas presented OLPC. The importance of the
funding is its exemplary nature?it is model for other European
countries and the EU itself to follow. The clarity with which both the
press and the audience understood children as our mission, versus a
market, was refreshing.
2. Rome: Nicholas joined Antonio Battro and Matt Keller for a
whirlwind one-day tour of the Eternal City. The day started with an
interview on Radio Vatican, followed by an address to the Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, a speech received by over
200 UN staffers. After meeting with members of the City of Florence
Council, Nicholas addressed over 300 members of Catholic Orders at the
Vatican. (The Catholic Orders educate 50-million children in schools
worldwide, many in the poorest countries.) The event, organized by
Matt and Tom Rocheford of the Jesuit order included a presentation by
Cardinal Poupard on the Encyclica "Populorum Progressio" as a mission
towards education in developing countries and Antonio introduced the
fundamental principles of OLPC. Throughout the day, they were shadowed
by a Time Magazine reporter (See
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1678273,00.html).
3. New York City: Nicholas gave the keynote address at the 10th
anniversary of Mouse.org, accompanied by Chancellor Joel Klein of the
NYC public school system. Mouse is working with OLPC and, among other
things, will help document the XO. Mouse is an organization that has
students who helps other students (and teachers and schools) run their
computer systems.
4. Cambridge: The first of what will become monthly learning workshops
will be held this coming week; attendees are coming from the countries
expecting to launch in the coming weeks and months. Lindsay Petrillose
has done a fantastic job organizing all aspects of the meeting.
5. Mass production (MP): John Watlington continued to chase down our
remaining suspend/resume problems. Many tests were tried, with most of
them failing to cause any laptop crashes. (We now only see very rare
crashes upon resume.) A production-line test for suspend/resume was
developed and tested. The kernel and firmware teams have been
invaluable in supporting this testing process.
Richard Smith has arrived in Changshu to continue testing the C2
motherboard and provide support the first days of production while
John returns to Cambridge with a batch of motherboards for more
intensive hardware analysis. Another batch is going to Terry Su
(Quanta) in Taiwan for parallel debugging. Mary Lou Jepsen, Richard,
Arnold Kao, Gary Chiang, and Matt Huang are in Changshu right now.
Chris Ball is already back.
This unusual level of testing is due to our quest for an
extraordinarily robust laptop with extraordinary low power
consumption.
Regarding mechanical, this weekend, among other things, we are fixing
a cosmetic blemish on the left and right hand side keyboard-base green
"bumpers." The tooling is being modified presently. Other work
includes online manufacturer-server setup and testing plans,
fulfillment reporting, logistics, etc.
6. Embedded controller (EC): Richard finally figured out what was
going on with the NiMH batteries in secure-boot mode. API differences
between the EC commands and Open Firmware. This was fixed in Q2D03.
7. Schedule: Friday was Feature Freeze Day for "Update.1." At this
point it is recommended that activity developers branch their
builds?only high-priority fixes should be made to this branch?they can
continue in development for future features on their mainline branch.
In order to stabilize the Update.1 branch, we are asking that
developers make recommendations about blocking or very-high-priority
bugs; but no more code check-ins until they are confirmed with Jim
Gettys or Kim Quirk.
8. Testing: Ricardo Carrano and Yani Galanis have been tracking down
some issues associated with Access Point association, network manager,
wireless drivers, and presence service. They continue to add to the
knowledge base of how to debug and test in these areas (Please see
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Network_Configuration and
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Config_Notes).
Alex Latham has developed a one-hour smoke/regression test that anyone
can run as we begin testing of Update.1, which is scheduled to be out
at the end of the month (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/1_Hour_Smoke_Test). Please review and make
comments (and start using it next week).
9. Sugar: Marco Pesenti Gritti spent most of the week on Update1 bug
fixes. He fixed several regressions from Ship.1 (Trial-3); as a
result, the Sugar core is getting back to a state of stability: the
Totem video player is working again and mime-type handling is much
improved. Journal previews are now generated reliably, but they are
still too slow. Bernardo Innocenti is working on improved performance.
Marco started looking into rainbow with Michael Stone to plan proper
integration with Sugar for Update.1. Marco and Chris Ball started
looking into the sound issues that crept into the Joyride builds?there
was a race in the gstreamer code that prevents the device from being
freed; a fix is in the build.
Reinier Heeres has joined the Sugar team as a 3-month intern. He is
the author of the Calculate activity in current builds. Marco helped
Reinier to integrate with the team.
Tomeu Vizoso fixed some issues with special characters when copying
entries to USB sticks (tickets #3498 and #4558: Mount removable
devices as UTF8). He also implemented "expanding" of bundled journal
entries. This will allow restoring individual entries from the backup
in the school server and, in a future milestone, sharing entries
between XOs (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Journal_entry_bundles for
more details).
Tomeau also removed an active loop in the DataStore that had caused it
to wake up every 2.5ms; eliminating this wake-up will help keep power
consumption low. Tomeu improved the flushing strategy in the
DataStore. We now flush either every 20 changes or one minute after
the last unflushed change. This should prevent data loss in most
cases, such as when the power goes off completely.
Simon Schampijer continued to work on the Sugar control panel, which
is now included in the latest builds (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Control_Panel for details.)
Some improvements have been made to the browser as well. The browser
can now scale its contents. Simon introduced a view toolbar with
buttons for zoom in and zoom out, full-screen, and and to hide or show
the tray. Key bindings for zoom in (CTRL+) and zoom out (CTRL?) have
been added as well. Walter Bender and Eben Eliason made a new activity
as a derivative of the browser that launches Gmail directly from the
taskbar. Other Google Apps may follow.
Chris Ball released a new version of Pippy, which has new examples,
including Guess (from Pilar Saenz).
Muriel de Souza Godoi released a new version of the Memorize activity.
This version allows children to create their own games, using text,
pictures and audio from the Record activity, which are then saved in
the Journal. When someone joins the activity, these data are copied
into the Journal of the other XO using the author's colors.
Arjun Sarwal worked on the Measure activity with Cody Lodridge; they
optimized the rendering code: the frame-rate and response time has
improved significantly. This has largely been possible due to reduced
calls to X for re-drawing the background in each frame update. Arjun
also reintroduced the show values option, which displays the RMS and
average values of the signal; and he fixed a bug that prevented
Measure and Record from working together.
Scott Ananian added AcousticMeasure, Wikibrowse, and Gmail activities
to Joyride.
10. Presence service: Sjoerd Simons has been working on stabilizing
(and freezing) the telepathy-salut chatroom/activity protocol, now
officially named "Clique" (previously it didn't really have a name),
for Update.1.
Simon McVittie made some related changes that will deliberately break
compatibility with the multicast DNS announcements used in Ship.1
(Trial-3), so that Update.1 XOs will not be able to see Ship.1
activities, and Ship.1 XOs will not be able to see Update.1
activities. This is actually a a good thing: if you put an Update.1 XO
and a Ship.1 XO in the same activity, the Ship.1 telepathy-salut would
abort with an assertion failure whenever the Update.1 version sent
messages, and the Update.1 telepathy-salut would be unable to
understand messages sent by the Ship.1 version.
Simon synchronized with Sjoerd's latest changes and it seems to work,
so he has pushed it into Koji for Joyride inclusion. There are likely
to be some issues to sort out early next week, but he thinks we're
done with major changes?we do not plan to change the wire protocol
again for the foreseeable future.
Morgan Collett has been working on Presence Service reliability
improvements, which track activities and Telepathy connection managers
and recover from them crashing. Morgan also updated HelloMesh, the
Tubes demo activity, incorporating Simon's Sugar API improvements,
which reduce the code necessary to set up Tubes. Activity authors
should look at the changes in Connect and HelloMesh to see how they
can reduce the existing code. (The old method will still work, so
there is no urgency to update.)
Simon and Guillaume Desmottes worked on Stream Tubes, which implement
TCP/IP over XMPP; Simon implemented this for the Read activity. Stream
Tubes provide one-to-one connections that are much better for data
transfer or streaming as opposed to the signal and method calls
provided by D-Bus Tubes; Stream Tubes can be used in conjunction with
D-Bus Tubes in an activity which needs both.
11. X Window System: Bernie Innocenti has been restructuring our i18n
(internationalization) and keyboard configuration scripts, along with
the OLPC Display Manager (olpc-dm). There's still some work to do, but
the resulting scheme is simpler, writes less to system files and,
hopefully, also speeds up boot a little. Bernie has also been chasing
a performance regression in taking screen shots for the Journal that
slows us down when switching between activities. Walter Bender sent
the Nepali keyboard out for review from the manufacturer; a Pashto
keyboard is being reviewed by the community; the West African keyboard
is also getting extensive review by Don Osborn, Paa Kwesi Imbeah,
Dwayne Bailey, Adel El Zaim, and Albert Cahalan.
12. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent Sunday through Tuesday hunting down a
bizarre bug that turned out to be something in the kernel scheduler.
He ran out of time for debugging, but signs were pointing to it being
a vserver bug. The instability of the VServer kernel patches has made
us remove this from our builds for Update.1. We will likely revisit
use of light-weight containerization for security in future releases.
We are pursuing alternate approaches to activity isolation for our
first releases.
Andres also did some debugging of USB and DCON (display controller)
code and attempted to reliably reproduce a Libertas transmit timeout
bug. Chris Ball worked on OHM (Open Hardware Manager) to implement
power management: results to follow.
13. New build system: We have established an independent build system
for OLPC, that allows greater flexibility for testing builds. Scott
Ananian spent time on Koji/mock integration work and discussions with
the Fedora koji team. Scott created new Kernel/Xtest/Sugar/Rainbow
branches for stabilization and testing of Joyride. Scott and John
Palmieri released stable builds 623, and 624 to Quanta. for mass
production. They pplied pilgrim patches to close or address numerous
trac tickets: #4600, 4259, 4473, 3937, 4063, 2661, 4032, 3643, 3977,
2840, 4457, and 4400, among others. Scott also patched olpcrd with
initial partition support.
Scott also helped Red Sox win the World Series by wearing clothing
with appropriate logos and dressing his dog in same as well.
14. Wireless: We spent most of the week trying to consistently
reproduce the wireless loss of functionality issue described in ticket
#4470. The only consistent pattern that emerged is that newer builds
expose the behavior more quickly and that there is a strong
correlation with traffic volume (Michail Bletsas hasn't been able to
reproduce the bug at home for the entire week). Given that the
wireless firmware keeps running, the most probable cause is data-flow
management in the Libertas driver. There was one patch submitted this
week that fixes silent discard of frames by the driver that could also
have an effect on the behavior seen in #4470. The other major blocking
bug (#3341) is addressed by that fix and some firmware changes
implemented in a private release to Scott, so that he can move on with
his wireless update development.
QMI produced the first Active Antenna board samples and send them to
OLPC for testing this week. Marvell is working on the firmware update
tool on them that will be released the last week of November.
15. Suspend on idle CPU: John Gilmore has been exploring automatic
suspend-on-idle; these issues have become a lot clearer in his mind,
but it is still easy to get confused. You can join the discussion in
the wiki (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Suspend_and_resume).
16. Localization: Xavier Alverez and Alfonso de la Guarda have
established a Pootle server for localization of Sugar, activities, and
other OLPC-related localization needs. Sayamindu Dasgupta is working
with them. They are making good progress, but could use as much help
as they can get (See http://solar.laptop.org:5080/projects/xo_core/).
Support your favorite language now!
17. Security: Ivan Krsti? and Michael Stone gave a heads up to
activity developers that we will be landing portions of our security
system for Update.1. We will be requiring: (1) file-path compliance;
(2) a cryptographic signature; and (3) a permissions declaration.
File-path compliance means that you must ensure your activity does not
write to any path outside of that contained in the environment
variable SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT; specifically subdirectories called
"data," "conf," and "tmp" within the SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT directory.
(We are working with the Sugar team to provide helper functions for
easily getting those three directory paths for those of you using
Python. Until then, please depend on the environment variable
directly.)
Please note that if you are using the DataStore for your file I/O, you
still must write the file somewhere before asking the DataStore to
check it in; if you choose a temporary filename that's outside of
SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT, you will be non-compliant.
File path compliance is a requirement for inclusion in Update.1.
Please do your best to make sure you are not writing to paths outside
of SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT; we'll try to help you catch any such writes
that you miss.
We will be posting more details regarding cryptographic signatures and
permissions declarations?these will be required in near future. As a
summary, when we say signatures, we mean that you as the activity
authors will use a set of tools we provide to make your own keys and
sign your activities; the purpose of this is simply to allow secure
activity upgrades once they are on the machines. Permission
declarations will enumerate which special permissions (camera access?
microphone access? non-Tubes network access? etc.) your activity may
need for its normal operation.
-walter
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Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org
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http://olpc.ellak.gr