Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 16:08:12 -0400 From: "Kim Quirk" <kim [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org> Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News (2008-05-17) - Tech Team To: community-news [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org Message-ID: <9073bf100805171308o9eef18cvb0ca1d5098243dcc [ at ] mail [ dot ] gmail [ dot ] com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" *Schedules/Releases*: Many of the Tech team members were involved in discussions, reviews, and recommendations as to the messaging and Q&A around the Microsoft announcement this week. Dennis Gilmore worked on rebasing our builds to fedora 9 which was released this week. He has ported NetworkManager from OLPC-2 to OLPC-3 and now needs someone to work on moving to NetworkManager-0.7. He has started customizing initscripts for olpc. By the end of the weekend he should have a build that can be tested. At this point many activities will need some work. Michael Stone published planning draft with help from Mitch Bradley and has volunteered to drive our releases through August. He worked with Sayamindu Dasgupta and Dennis Gilmore to kick off the USR (unscheduled software release), 8.1.1, to include keyboard fixes for Ethiopia & Haiti: ( http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_SW-ECO_5). Discussed the PenTablet changes with Blake as possible feature for an upcoming release. Worked on process for new Sugar releases with Marco Gritti and stubbed out a Telepathy-Cerebro connection manager with Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos. Michael also reviewed Gadget and discussed results with Dafydd Harries, John Watlington, and Scott Ananian. *Sugar and Internationlization:* Tomeu Visozo proposed patches for all the remaining known regressions in the shell redesign. He started investigations into problems with links in browse (gmail, specifically) and into activity startup speed. Sayamindu Dasgupta and Arjun Sarwal investigated and fixed two important keyboard layout issues which has been plaguing us recently, trac items 6945 and 6943. Ethopian keyboards were not able to switch to English. The problem was caused by the Amharic GTK Input Module being selected automatically, overriding our XKB setup. Haitian keyboards had many incorrect key mappings, which was caused by a type on the "ca" xkb symbols file. These are scheduled to be fixed in the upcoming bug fix release, 8.1.1. Simon Schampijer has added a control panel option to set a delay for the frame activation or 'Hot Corners'. He also added an option to toggle a 'warm edge' at the top of the screen. The packages needs to be applied to a recent joyride or the faster branch. The control panel can be found in the palette of the XO in the home view. Simon also reports on some good work done by Dan Krejsa, who fixed a bug that prevented downloads from being invoked in Browse, and 'ffm' (prefers his irc name) contributed a patch to fix sugar-install-bundle when no parameters are passed. *Network/Collaboration:* Dafydd Harries and Guillaume Desmottes worked on Gadget, a Jabber-based activity/person searching service, to add support for the mesh view.Dafydd worked with Michael Stone on a web interface for builds, packages, and sources. He worked with Jim Gettys on collaboration APIs. Morgan Collett pushed another bit of boilerplate code required for collaboration, from activity code to sugar.presence, Sugar's client for the Presence Service D-Bus API - to convert from Telepathy handles to Buddy objects (#6473). He patched Connect and HelloMesh to take advantage of this and will provide patches to other activities and will update the Tubes Tutorial next. Morgan reviewed the previous approach for converting between buddies and handles which maintained a cache of the handle <-> Buddy mapping. It had the problem of not removing the mapping when buddies left (or removing the mapping but not being able to report who left as they had already left). This could be removed, but it requires reverting changes to the PS API (which probably haven't been used) - some discussion needed here by all involved with PS and its API. He discussed collaboration documentation with Marco, with the aim of producing API documentation for activity authors as the current documentation is targeted more at developers of the whole stack. *School Server:* Martin Langhoff continued work on XO backups and a few XS configuration issues. *Activities*: Chris Ball worked with a number of people on the Wikiserver project, containing a snapshot of the Spanish Wikipedia's popular articles and images. New developments this week include links that redirect to the schoolserver or Internet. Ben Schwartz was involved in the addition of a large selection of images rendered in low quality to the snapshot. Madeleine Ball created a portal page with links to main articles. Wade Brainerd contributed many parser and server improvements. A first release of the activity is planned during the next week. *Power:* This week Richard Smith continued to work with the Mulit-Battery prototype. Testing results reveal some weak points in the charging electronics that fail at high temperatures. He is working with the rest of the hardware team to explore solutions. A decision was made on how to mil the plastic parts to make it easier to get the batteries in and out of the charger. This allows the first build of mechanical components to continue. We will reopen and fix the tooling at a future date before production starts. *Support:* Emily Smith, Sandy Culver and Adam Holt have shipped about 400 XOs in the last month between the laptops that were never delivered, replacement units, and miscellaneous other problems. Michael Taylar and Sara Lesko have started answering the emails and at this point OLPC is directly answering all emails from donors. We expect to get all the phone calls directly into OLPC by next week. Adam worked with Kim Quirk and John Watlington on support planning and discussions for country deployments. We would like to provide help and advice for countries to pull together their own FAQ and problem tracking database. We also talked about the escalation path of our own help [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org for concerns that can't be answered in country. One of our needs will be to build the volunteer base with multiple language capabilities. Caryl Bigenho and Nikki Lee are two Spanish speaking volunteers who are already helping out in the Support-Gang. *IT:* Henry Hardy is still waiting for the delivery of the three servers to replace pedal, crank, and xs-dev as well as the IBM server for replicating the mfg server in China. He reports 100% uptime for all servers that are being monitored, except 'sawzall', which had 9 hours of unexplained downtime (being investigated). We have reorganized a number of mailing lists for greater efficiency; but in the process we need to ensure people can sign up or be signed up for the right ones. - Kim _______________________________________________ Community-news mailing list Community-news [ at ] lists [ dot ] laptop [ dot ] org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/community-news End of Community-news Digest, Vol 26, Issue 3 ******************************************************** -- http://karounos.gr/blog/