Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:57:30 -0500
From: "Walter Bender" <walter [ dot ] bender [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com>
Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News 2007-11-10
To: community-news [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org
Cc: devel <devel [ at ] lists [ dot ] laptop [ dot ] org>, Sugar Mailing List
<sugar [ at ] lists [ dot ] laptop [ dot ] org>
1. Cambridge: The first of the monthly learning workshops was held at
OLPC this week. More than 60 people from 14 countries (and one US
city) attended. The focus of this workshop was to build a stronger
understanding of laptops and learning; to make plans for deployment in
the countries; and to build a strong community among the participants
for ongoing support and collaboration. The energy, ideas, and
excitement among the group was fantastic and gave everyone more hope
about the learning potential about to be unleashed as laptops begin
arriving in large numbers in countries shortly. Many thanks to David
Cavallo, Lindsay Petrillose, and the OLPC learning team for all of
their efforts.
2. Cyberspace: Larry Weber's dream of a digital PSA has been realized:
Hilary Meserole reports that our first Give One Get One public service
announcement, which features Heroes star Masi Oka, is online (See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQbtebeftyA). The team is working with
YouTube on ways to feature this on their home page during the
fortnight that the campaign is running. We will be adding more content
next week?outtakes from the PSA shoot, etc.
Masi has joined OLPC as our media spokesperson, however, an ill-timed
writers' strike precludes Nicholas and Masi doing some of the
talk-show appearances that had been envisioned.
3. Give One Get One launches at 6AM EST on Monday (See
laptopgiving.org). While we have no idea what the response will be,
Hilary and the "volunteer army" that includes Pentagram, Nurun, W2,
Racepoint, Digital Influence Group, Eleven, Inc., and Len Fink did a
fantastic job raising the public awareness of the campaign. Examples
include the beautiful full-page ad that was donated by the Economist
(See http://wiki.laptop.org/images/a/ab/GiveOneGetOne.pdf). We will be
able to reach many more children due to their efforts.
4. Mass production started this week this week in Quanta's new factory
in Changshu. We would like to take this time to thank the team at
Quanta for there support over the last two years. Major contributors
to the effort include: Victor Chao, Gary Chiang, Arnold Kao, Matt
Huang, Dandy Hsu, Agnes Huang, Johnson Huang, Frank Lee, Roger Huang,
Elvis Wu, S.F. Chen, Ken Lin, Jacky Mu, Paying Liu, Terry Su, Alfred
Lin, Gary Chiang, Alice Wang, Alan Lio, Jeff Tarng, Tim Huang, Jeffrey
Huang, Rita Chen, Joe Lin, Jeff Yu, Ben Chuang, Sam Yeh, Johnnie Lui,
Eric Tasi, Bruce Lu, Jeff Huang, Mikko Hsu, Vance Ke, Luna Huang,
David Lin, Bryan Ma, Devin Lui, Arvin Lui, John Lin, Tess Yu, Chia
Ying Lin, Gary Su, C.H. Yang, Ray Tseng, Sam Chang, Gary Liu, Lori
Yang, Frank Feng, Cooper Zhou, Kaiser Feng, Neptune Zhan, Xiang Wei,
Zihaw Zhang, Min Xia, Eagle Liang, Peter Huang, Pillar Hou, Yaya
Zhang, Crystal Sun, Nana Pei, Bob Zhang, Yengeng Cen, Ian Huang,
Chie-Hung Li, Sunny Cheng, Cancer Zha, Fly Chen, Javin Hu, Grubby Wei,
Polin Chang, Anna Zhou, Tim Huang, Jim Chang, Eric Wang, Kenny Chung,
Zenith Zhu, Rock Chien, Sunny Hsiung, Kiki Peng, Sunny Huang, Barry
Lam, Michael Wang, Morse Chen, and Eddy Chao.
There are many other people?from companies such as Marvel, ChiLin,
Himax, CMO, AMD, ENE, QMI, Fuse Project, Gecko, Pentagram, Design
Continuum, Foxconn, ALPS, and MIT, and many individuals as well?who
have contributed to the hardware and mechanicals over the past three
years. (Mary Lou Jepsen is pulling together a list of everyone to
thank.) Collectively we have achieved something that just three years
ago many believed that was an impossible dream.
5. Safety Certification: Behind the scenes another team (from UL,
Quanta, and OLPC) has been quietly working for nearly two years on XO
safety certification. The XO laptop is now fully compliant with UL
safety requirements and has been thus certified. We have also been
awarded radio, power, and system certification at national levels in
several countries. We can now legally ship in US, Canada, Uruguay, and
Peru, as well as many other countries. EU-wide approval is due in
approximately a week. We are still in the process of applying for
certification in countries on each continent with the most stringent
safety standards.
Among many tests, we have passed Ul/IEC 60950-1 (notebook computer),
ASTM F693 (electronic toys for children), UL 1301 (mechanical assembly
requirements, including larger face dimension requirements for child
safety) and UL 2054 (batteries), as well as a passing UL on-site
inspection of the Quanta's factory. We have formal RoHS (low toxicity)
certification from Quanta, and independent testing of RoHS compliance
by UL. Also, we have been safety approved for lap use?XO is the first
"laptop" approved for usage on one's lap in many years. (The reason
that most laptops are now called "notebook computers" is that they run
too hot for safe lap use.)
Many thanks to the core XO safety teams from UL, Quanta, and OLPC:
Katherine Sims, Bob Delisi, Nicole Tatum, Kevin Ravi, Stacy Yu, Tom
Burke, Derek Chen, Edgar Wolff-klammer, Tammi Gengegbacher, Greg
Monty, Alfred Fung, Nicholas Boten, Seth Carlton, Bruce Lu, Kenny
Chung, Victor Chao, Rita Chen, Arnold Kao, Mary Lou Jepsen, and
Lindsay Petrillose.
6. Richard Smith has been setting up a suspend/resume manufacturing
test and getting the process flow set up so that Quanta can do final
quality analysis (FQA). Activation of laptops (part of the anti-theft
system) presented a problem since the FQA process pulls laptops after
the final shipping image has been installed and security has been
enabled. We decided that the best way to deal with FQA is to pull FQA
machines prior to enabling security and then enable it as the final
part of FQA.
7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D04 as a candidate for
Update.1. It has wireless-networking improvements and bug fixes and
can be used to update the NAND Flash ROM over the wireless network
(from the school server).
Working with Javier Cardona, Mitch discovered the root cause on a
wireless firmware problem that was breaking wireless support in Q2D03.
There was a time window during which the module reported the wrong MAC
address. This was not affecting the Linux driver because it had an
arbitrary delay to block access during that gap. Marvell promises a
proper fix in the next few days.
8. Wireless: Javier Cardona and Ricardo Carrano's efforts in debugging
the open issues with the wireless subsystem are producing results. We
now know the mechanism by which the driver fails (mishandling of a
BUSY result returned from the firmware to a scan request); efforts are
now focusing on finding the reason as to why that mishandling has such
severe impact in the overall subsystem operation.
Marvell released wireless firmware version 5.110.20.p0 which
incorporates many enhancements requested by OLPC, including mesh
running-state control, mesh beacon control, and throughput
optimizations. After resolving the existing issues, the Marvell team
is going to mainly focus on power optimization for the firmware.
James Cameron tested the developer version of the active antennae (See
http://dev.laptop.org/~quozl/2007-11-10-active-antenna/). The antennae
performed easily over the range, no doubt aided by being
held at between 3m and 4m above ground. James reports that they hit
the length limit of the test range before any significant bandwidth
reduction was felt. We received the first 30 active antennae
preproduction boards from QMI in Cambridge this week and completed a
first round of testing without any issues.
9. Schedule update: There are only three weeks left to get the
Update.1 release out the door. This week we focused on testing and
some bug fixing; but not as many "Joyride" builds as lately?C. Scott
Ananian has been concentrating on assembling the pieces for the first
Update.1 builds. He expects that we will have this done over the
weekend. The overarching goal for the Update.1 release is stability of
the Trial-3 functionality; we are also folding in many new
frameworks?such as security and the new tubes system; the goal is to
have these frameworks in place without their causing regressions. One
new feature we are are adding is robust upgrades, preferably via
wireless network.
10. Testing: Ricardo has been detailing Ticket #4470?infrastructure
mode failing over time?and assembling meaningful logs for the team to
work with. Javier is going through these logs. Ricardo also finished
installing network "sniffing" devices for our network testbed as part
of the debug process. Ricardo and Yani Galanis tested the range of two
laptops that were brought back from field-testing at the Khairat
school in Munbai, India. Their tests revealed normal behavior. (In the
field, they exhibited unusually poor WiFi range.) Ricardo and Yani
have also been testing different antenna designs to establish
long-distance wireless links.
Alex Latham has been testing Joyride, filing bug reports and
uncovering the many regressions expected as we pull so many new bits
together. He hasn't yet completed a full "1-hour smoke test" with an
of the Joyride builds?Scott's Update.1 build series is expected to be
more stable. Alex has also begun testing with security enabled. He
also helped John Watlington set up a testbed for our mass-production
hardware.
Manny Castillo has been testing the Browser activity with specific
URLs chosen to exercise various plugins?such as Gnash?on Build 623; he
will be testing with Joyride next week.
11. Sugar: Marco Gritti, Michael Stone, and Tomeu Vizoso worked on the
integration of the Rainbow security system with Sugar and the
DataStore (and Journal). They enabled activity isolation on Tuesday
and solved all the known road blockers in the following days: access
to
audio and video resources; communication with the DataStore;
activity-space directories and their permission; and out-of-container
activities. Next week we will need a new round of testing; Marco is
confident that we will be able to solve the remaining problems
quickly.
Marco rewrote the preview code to be much more efficient; it blocks
for only the minimal required time. Switching between views and
closing
activities is now much faster and the previews are saved reliably.
Marco temporarily disabled the startup sound in sugar to avoid
blocking the sound device and tracked down the problem with muted
audio at startup. Sound is expected to be finally back working fully
in the next build.
Tomeu implement a basic search in the mesh view, which greatly
facilitates finding people on a crowded network; he exposed files from
the DataStore to activities using hard links instead of doing a copy;
and he made the DataStore's use of the temporary file space more
efficient.
Reinier Heeres added a way to switch between activities using ALT-Tab;
fixed some issues with left-right inversion for Arabic; disabled
closing the Journal with CTRL-Q; and implemented a short-term
solution to the problem of the "donut" on the home page not accurately
reflecting activity memory usage. Reinier is working currently fixing
some palette issues.
12. Activities: The Etoys team continues to make adjustments to the
Sugar and Rainbow (security) system changes being introduced for
Update.1; Bert Freudenberg is leading this effort. Yoshiki Ohshima and
Bert have provided an improved version of Sugar menu bar; Yoshiki,
Bert, and Scott Wallace put together the necessary bits to provide
better "view source" experience?all of the code for Etoys can now be
viewed without any degradation. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness have
been improving the help system for Etoys. Takashi Yamamiya and
korakurider have stabilized the localization mechanism. Takashi also
experimented a different UI for controlling choices in tiles.
Simon Schampijer and Mark Maurer collaborated on getting "view source"
working fluidly between the Browse and Write activities. By typing
FN-Space (or CTRL+U) in Browse, the HTML source of the current page is
opened in Write. The HTML can be edited in Write and when resumed from
the Journal the modified page gets interpreted and displayed. While
doing this work, they tracked down and fixed a new issue with the
DataStore: it had been losing metadata between reboots.
13. Builds: C. Scott Ananian continued to work on forking the new
stable Update.1 branch and stabilizing our build process. He setup
download.laptop.org, mock.laptop.org, and pilgrim.laptop.org, which
you should see being pressed into use in the next week. Scott also
updated the Libertas firmware in the builds and refreshed the mesh
testbed, with an eye towards testing the new firmware in a realistic
network upgrade scenario. He should be able to run that test on
Monday.
This week Andres Salomon cleaned up the kernel build scripts, made
them auto-generate change logs, and dealt with getting updated kernels
into joyride. Joyride builds now include sane kernels. Andres also did
minor Libertas testing, and is in the process of debugging USB issues.
14. Power management: James Cameron and Chris Ball worked on some OHM
(power manager) bugs. Once those were out of the way, Chris went on to
implement some of our power management features: "suspend on idle" is
in place; there is now a distinction between "suspend" (screen and
wireless still on, wake up on network traffic or key press) and
"sleep" (screen off, only wake up on a power-button press). There are
a few more OHM bugs to fight before this is ready to land in
Joyride/Update.1, which should happen sometime early next week.
15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta and Xavier Alvarez have
successfully completed the first phase of the Pootle installation. All
of the translation files are in place. A number of users have signed
up and have already started to submit translations in the form of
suggestions. A discussion in the #olpc-pootle channel on how to best
integrate an external project's translation-related files into our
Pootle setup has let to an improved workflow for external projects
that want to take
advantage of our translation infrastructure.
Currently, we have translators for the following languages signed up:
Amharic, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (traditional), French,
German, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish. Additional
translators and languages are needed, particularly for the Indic
languages, Quechua, and Aymara.
The next stage of the Pootle deployment will consist of making the GIT
integration work?we are waiting for GIT write access to dev.laptop.org
to go forward on that. A set of frequently asked questions (FAQ) has
been created in the wiki (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Pootle/FAQ).
Sayamindu has been looking at an issue where fontconfig seems to treat
the font cache invalid if the mtime of the cache is greater than the
system time. This is documented in Ticket #1525 (and in upstream
Freedesktop bug #12107). Sayamindu had backported the relevant changes
to the fontconfig used in Fedora 7; he will be testing out the package
in the XO over the weekend.
16. Security: Michael Stone announced a new release of Rainbow (See
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=234221) to the
devel and sugar lists today. The release incorporates a number of
resolutions to the current crop of 'rainbow-integration' bugs that the
community has worked so hard over the last three days to document for
us.
Changes include:
? relaxed multimedia-device permissions that should make it possible
for activities to use the camera, microphone, and speakers;
? availability of the user's public key;
? activities are now started in $SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH instead of
$SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT;
? activities can run under "strace" by defining the environment
variable RAINBOW_STRACE_LOG (in the dictionary passed to Rainbow in
/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sugar/activity/activityfactory.py);
? tracebacks of your activity's log file can be viewed with "less -R"
(e.g., less -R /home/olpc/.sugar/default/logs/org.laptop.Record-1.log);
Special thanks Marco, Tomeu, and Alex L. for their extraordinary efforts.
17. Community reporting: Dan Sutera and the team working on the Report
activity made it to the next round of the Knight News Challenge.
Pablo Flores is working on something similar in Uruguay, and has found
some federal support to develop local blogs from children, stored at
the local schools. We discussed how the projects could work together;
Pablo is focusing on the web activity that would help editors arrange
blog feeds into beautiful editions, and the Report team is working on
an XO activity that would let children read and write blog and news
feeds. Meanwhile, Jack Driscoll, former editor of the Boston Globe?who
has been leading community journalism projects around the world for
over ten years?has put some journalism guidelines in the wiki (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Learning_activities/Journalism).
18. SimCity: SimCity is now available under the GPL, thanks to the
generosity of EA and the hard work of Steve Seabolt and Chuck Normann,
John Gilmore, and Don Hopkins (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/SimCity).
The game is in the process of being "sugarized", but is already
playable on the XO. This is the first time that a major publisher has
open sourced the original of a popular title. EA should be
congratulated.
19. Game Jams: A competitive game jam is under way this weekend in S?o
Carlos, Brazil, with the support of a number of local universities and
sponsors. Any who are interested in their progress are welcome to
follow along in #olpc-content on IRC; they are looking for outside
help with art and music for the developed games (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Game_Jam_Brazil). In advance of the CMU
game jam next weekend, the ETC team at Carnegie Mellon university has
finished a draft of its first game, a peg solitaire affair (See
http://www.olpcgames.org/).
20. Community: A discussion with Greg DeKoenigsberg about how to
involve more Fedora developers in OLPC work led to some work on
improving test and review processes for activities and bundles (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_Testing_Project).
-walter
--
Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2007 15:44:29 -0500
From: "Walter Bender" <walter [ dot ] bender [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com>
Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News 2007-11-17
To: community-news [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org
Cc: devel <devel [ at ] lists [ dot ] laptop [ dot ] org>, Sugar Mailing List
<sugar [ at ] lists [ dot ] laptop [ dot ] org>
1. Nationwide: This week we launched Give One Get One (See
laptopgiving.org). eBay reports the fastest ramp-up they have ever
seen.
2. Changshu: Richard Smith and Gary Chiang found the root cause of
many if not all of our "hardware" suspend/resume problems. They were
caused unexpected interrupts being generated by the embedded
controller (EC) just as the laptop was going to sleep; the problem can
be corrected with a firmware upgrade. We will continue to test to
ensure that we can suspend and resume for a million cycles. This
development ends a four-month struggle to identify and fix major
problems associated with suspend and resume.
3. Mass Production: We had a glorious end to a near sleepless few
weeks for many. On Friday, we made a firmware fix to arguably our most
troublesome blocker bug. This suspend/resume bug could have limited
our battery life (between charges) when using collaborative
applications and mesh (details below). Thanks to all who helped from
OLPC, Quanta, Red Hat, AMD, plus many individual contributors; special
thanks to Richard Smith, John Watlington, Gary Chaing, and Mary Lou
Jepsen.
The Pentagram designed OLPC boxes, both the five-pack and single-pack
look great, and are in stark contrast to all the other boxes in the
factory.
4. Firmware: Mitch Bradley fixed some bugs in the OFW JFFS2 driver.
They impact olpc-update, so we will need a new firmware
release?Q2D05?for the update. Mitch also installed the school-server
software and did some OFW network update testing. There is an issue
with the way that OFW associates with the mesh?currently OFW-based
updates only work with infrastructure mode. He sorted out some issues
surrounding keyboard tags in manufacturing data and specified a new SK
manufacturing data tag to report the SKU number. This will let us
identify G1G1 machines in the data we get back from Quanta, so we can
generate developer keys for those machines.
5. Schedules: Many thanks to C. Scott Ananian who has led the team to
get to build a new in-house build system; as a result, we have a
better handle on the process, repeatability, and tracing to source
files. Some issues such as security and mesh sharing are taking longer
than expected to stabilize, so we are evaluating the impact on the
"Update.1" release schedule.
6. Testing: Dafydd Harries and Robert McQueen from Collabra visited
OLPC's Cambridge office for a week of "larger-scale" mesh testing and
debugging; lots of good progress was made. David Woodhouse was also in
town, working with Marvell, CozyBit, Ricardo Carrano, Marcelo Tosatti,
and Michail Bletsas to help debug Ticket 4470 (WLAN hang). We have a
much better understanding of this bug (See below) and hope to begin
testing a work around soon.
Simon Schampijer spent a number of hours at the local Starbuck's
testing various browser versions and settings with T-Mobile service.
He has narrowed down some slow response issues to a specific version
of our browser and is working with both Mozilla and T-Mobile to get to
the root cause.
Alex Latham spent another week in suspend/resume testing as well as
latest-build tests and various combinations of OS and kernel to help
identify problem areas. Ricardo is working on a test bed to recreate
Ticket 1863 (the LazyWDS bug) and help understand association problems
with various access points (Linksys mostly). He has also provided data
related to the amount of beaconing traffic from XOs.
7. Suspend/resume: As mentioned above, Richard Smith and Gary Chaing
solved the mystery of our suspend and resume problems (Ticket 1835)
that were bedeviling us in the factory. A well placed SCI just before
MAIN_ON goes low (i.e., during the suspend code) hangs the system. The
(primary) source of this SCI is from an wake up event generated by
traffic from one of the PS2 devices. The wonderful news is that this
is a firmware problem with the embedded controller, so our hardware
manufactured to date will work correctly once the firmware is
upgraded. A test bed of 41 laptops executed over 20,000 cycles without
a single 1835 error.
8. Sugar/activities: Simon Schampijer worked with Michael Stone on
Rainbow integration for the Browse activity and with Bernie Innocenti
on a change in the X11 symbol tables that caused the View Source key
to stop working. Bernie has requested to revert this change upstream.
Another bug was fixed in the full-screen mode.
Tomeu Vizoso fixed some bugs in the DataStore related to security, USB
sticks, and activity custom metadata properties. He also helped to
track down some bugs in Browse related to downloads and bugs in the
Journal in regard to bundle installation, updating of relative dates
in the list view and usability of the search entry.
Reinier Herres has been working on the Calculate activity. It can now
parse Unicode, thus its internationalization is somewhat improved.
Reinier also wrote a patch to enable "exit from full-screen" in the
the Browse activity. He also wrote a patch to display those activities
where a friend is participating in the Friends/Group view.
Sayamindu Dasgupta fixed a problem with font caching (Ticket 1525) by
backporting some changes from fontconfig 2.4.92 to 2.4.2 (the version
being used in the builds). This leads to more robust font caching, and
hopefully will resolve the issue of Activities taking up 100% of the
CPU due to an incorrectly set real-time clock and the issue of newly
added fonts not beng recognized by the system. Sayamindu has also been
helping with the final phase of our Pootle deployment: GIT integration
has begun and http://dev.laptop.org/translate should be fully open for
translation very soon.
Gabriel Burt posted a Pippy library to the Sugar list: the library
allows access to the camera from Pippy and can easily be used to
create
time-lapse photography?thanks, Gabriel! An intuitive extension would
be to add a slide-show image viewer to Pippy for viewing these images.
There is a initial pass at a "Thanks" program in the Pippy library.
Please add any names we have inadvertently overlooked?in addition to
demonstrating table use, we are also using it to acknowledge community
contributions to the project.
Muriel Godoi release Memorize Version 20, which uses the new tubes
interface and has some fixes to collaboration mode. However, he has
some problems due to Rainbow issues (Ticket 4872) regarding loading
journal objects using objectchooser. Muriel is also making progress on
Food Force. He has the main interface coded in pgu, the GUI library
for pygame; there is a Sugar skin to widgets in pgu; and the first
version of the three basic classes that compose the game
model?resource, facility, and indicator?are running.
Bernie has integrated a few more keyboard changes and sent them
upstream. There are still a few pending keyboard changes unmerged,
e.g., Walter Bender has finished Dari and Uzbek keyboard layouts that
need merging. Bernie also released an updated version of olpc-utils
with bug fixes and simplifications. He is backporting it to our old
builds to enable localization on the stable builds too. He has
integrated more of his packages upstream and built them with Koji.
9. Power management: Chris Ball added more features to the power
manager, including a way to disable automatic suspend (run "touch
/etc/ohm/inhibit-suspend"), a shortening of the automatic timeouts (25
seconds until screen dim; a further 5 seconds until suspend), and
disabling these features when plugged into AC (or on an early-model XO
without reliable suspend support).
10. Builds: Dennis Gilmore joined OLPC this week to become our
"buildmeister." Dennis has been a mainstay in the Fedora build
community and with his joining the team, we hope to make integration
easier for community contributors. This week Dennis has been working
on automating conversion of .xo to .rpm?useful for when we build our
images. He also spent some time teaching SJ Klein and and Mako Hill
how to write spec files. And he has been working on getting those
pieces we have outside of Fedora back into Fedora; Dennis has branched
all the X packages Bernie has had separated for OLPC-2 and generally
trying to work out what is where, how, and why.
As noted above, C. Scott Ananian has continued work on build
maintenance. He also rewrote olpc-update, which is back in the builds
for those of you who'd prefer to update over the network. He also has
made a preliminary auto-update/theft-deterrence server implementation.
11. Kernel: Andres Salomon attempted to fix the double mouse-click
bug, which led him to attempt to build the xorg evdev driver, which in
turn required him to find all the appropriate RPMs?which were not all
that easy to find?and required him to set up an FC7+OLPC build
machine, which led to him to upgrading the kernel build machine (from
FC6) to FC7+OLPC, which has reaffirmed his great dislike of yum (and
rpm), caused kernel builds no longer worked, which thus required a
bunch of changes to the kernel spec file. He then decided that because
some of his sanity was still intact and because he could not get his
XO online to actually test the freshly built evdev driver, he would
start fixing Libertas (wireless driver) problems. He is now looking
for a brick wall to pound his head against.
12. Wireless: Dave Woodhouse spent the week working on the critical
wireless bug (Ticket 4470). Although the driver was misbehaving, we
have improved its behavior (the driver is now properly serializing
commands sent to the 8388's firmware) and we have fairly much
eliminated the possibility that the problem is caused by driver
misbehavior. Thanks also to Marcelo Tossati and Asish Shukla.
Marvell's team in Pune discovered that a wireless scan command would
occasionally timeout without a response, triggering a halt in further
command processing by the firmware. This seems to explain the behavior
noticed by David. There are plenty of issues with the driver?which may
well be causing less frequent problems?and the whole of the command
queuing needs to be rewritten. But not this week.
13. Presence: Robert McQueen and Dafydd Harries resolved a number of
issues this week: they learned how to make RPMs and became a Fedora
committer on the relevant packages; they found and fixed a very
reproducible bug where telepathy-gabble crashed due to buggy resolver
result retry code in loudmouth; they tested the benefits of and then
enabled SSL-level DEFLATE compression with appropriate patches to
loudmouth and presence service; they tested and pushed fixes for
telepathy-gabble and telepathy-salut into Joyride to make activity
sharing work when Rainbow is enabled; they perpetrated a nasty Network
Manager hack to disable scanning while connected, to try and help
avoid the perils of #4470 when testing collaboration stuff (thanks
dcbw); they discussed various UI strategies regarding scaling with
Eben Eliason, and they set up a cron job to remind them to file these
weekly reports :).
Rob also made a wiki page documenting how to set up ejabberd in the
way that jabber.laptop.org is configured (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ejabberd_Configuration). This will allow
anyone to create separate (or local servers) for experimentation
purposes, collaborating without network access, or just easing load on
jabber.laptop.org. Rob is also working on a page to document the
server extensions we currently rely on, and our plans to replace them
with an OLPC-specific Jabber component which should be more scalable
and can be attached to any unmodified Jabber server (See
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XMPP_Extensions).
Guillaume Desmottes engaged in on-going testing of activity sharing.
He tested the Salut fragmentation fix and fixed a Presence Service
regression regarding the Share property (Ticket 4660); he reported and
started to investigate a Gabble problem with sharing (Ticket 4809); he
fixed two sources of Salut crashing (Tickets 4885 and 4903); he
changed the Salut debug-flag behavior to make it consistent with
Gabble (Ticket 4886); he created a wiki page explaining how to enable
Telepathy log files (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Telepathy-debug);
he found and fixed a Presence Service bug: it didn't try to reconnect
Gabble when the initial connect attempt failed (Ticket 4907); he added
an exponential backoff in retrying Gabble connection (Ticket 2522);
and he wrote a workaround for D-Bus tubes within Rainbow (Tickets 4947
and 4948).
Morgan Collett fixed in Sugar regarding handling non-OLPC buddies;
buddies are tracked by key in Sugar but non-OLPC buddies have no key
(Ticket 4656). However, the fix is deemed too invasive for Update.1.
Morgan also assisted some activity authors with Tubes stuff, did some
Presense Service testing on Joyride; he reverted the HelloMesh
activity tutorial to previous method of getting buddies from handles
and Worked on Tubes tutorial.
Simon McVittie has also been doing a bit of bug herding and build
support. Also he has been doing upstream work on the development
version of telepathy-glib. Sjoerd Simons fixed and helped fixing some
of the bugs that were discovered during testing of Salut.
-walter
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Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org
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http://olpc.ellak.gr