Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 10:03:34 -0400 From: "Kim Quirk" <kim [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org> Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News (2008-06-08) - Tech Team To: community-news [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org Message-ID: <9073bf100806090703g54e867e0vfedec70928a25bc6 [ at ] mail [ dot ] gmail [ dot ] com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Highlights of the week include: * The release of PER703-6 to production, and 8.1.1 into testing (Releases section) * Review and discussions on the new Sugar UI * Feedback from Peru and Uruguay (Support section) We've also started discussions on a better way to produce community-news to make it more relevant and inclusive. If you have suggestions on improvements, please post them on the discussion page of News: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_talk:News. * Sugar UI:* Nicholas asked for a review of the new Sugar User Interface. "Changing the graphical user interface cannot be done lightly," he noted in a memo. "It is akin to changing a national flag." He observed that current design is "inconsistent in its use of the frame and awkward about showing a large number of activities," and asked the review team to "revisit" the circle in light of other modifications to the UI. Lisa Strausfeld, Christian Marc Schmidt and Takaki Okada from Pentagra, together with Eben Eliason, Jim Gettys, Marco Presenti Gritti and Kim Quirk participated in the discussions. New options are being explored using the whole screen, where possible keeping the XO figure in the center, as a fiducial for zooming. Eben and Christian showed some mock ups of a few different Home screen views based on lifting the restriction of the circle. They will add them to the wiki "Designs" page as they are completed. *Software:* After reviews and discussions among many people it was decided that we want to rebase the 8.2.0 (August) release on Fedora 9. Among other things this should provide us with a better network manager upon which to improve the connectivity and collaboration experience. To help improve our development efforts, Chris Ball and Sayamindu Dasgupta are putting together a code review process for OLPC based on 'Review Board', http://www.review-board.org/. Sayamindu Dasgupta made modifications to the Metacity window manager so that it is more suited for Sugar. He enabled the new compositing manager in Metacity (results of his experiments: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-June/006214.html). He also did some basic memory usage measurements with metacity (results: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-June/006282.html). Pootle's Scratch translation project is now out of the "experimental" phase, which means that people can start working on it without having to worry about losing their translations. Thanks to David Leeming, there are three new languages in Pootle: Solomon Islands Pidgin (Pijin), Marovo (Solomon Islands), Tok Pisin (PNG). Faisal Anwar of Media Modifications has started working on a "Sugar Almanac" of code snippets and best practices. He has started to write documentation for activity package (toolbars) and the graphics package. Dafydd Harries and Guillaume Desmottes continue with Gadget development to improve the collaboration experience. It is pretty close to being feature-complete, and testing can begin in earnest soon. Guillaume is also working on refactoring Search/View Gabble API. *Hardware / Embedded Controller: * Richard Smith is working on a problem found in production where the battery sensor chip behaves in a way that the management code doesn't understand and it reports incorrect charging status. He is also working with both Quanta and Gold Peak on problems charging the NiMH batteries at the factory. We expect to have a resolution soon, but in the short term all batteries being shipped will be LiFE. RCAL and Gecko, our development partners for the Multi-Battery Charger will continue detailed testing and analysis on the thermal problems we are seeing in this product. We will be slipping the prototype build dates until we have a solution for overheating. Paul Fox has made great progress this week on porting the current EC codebase to the sdcc compiler. This will enhance the EC development workflow and remove the dependency on a closed source compiler that has to be run under Windows XP in a vmware session. *Releases/Testing:* This week we released the Peru 703 build (8.1.0) to production, which means that about half of the laptops in the current production run (of 100k) will have the latest build on them coming out of the factory. This is the first production image we are releasing that has country specific activities and content, so we needed to create tools, and define and document processes in order to get this right. Up until now, a country was required to customize their build at the point of deployment. For very large deployments, we can now provide the tools and process to get this customization done at the point of production. The country is responsible for testing the builds and the final image; and is responsible for keeping to the production schedule. There was also a good amount of testing on the 8.1.1, a bug fix release scheduled for final test next week. This is an important release for Ethiopia and Haiti keyboard mappings, and also provides a fix to the resistive pentablet mode. The Sugar team has released Sucrose[1] 0.81.2. You can find the release notes here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/CurrentRelease/Sucrose. Welcome to OLPC's new QA Lead, Joseph Feinstein! As well as contributing to the test effort itself, he will also work with Kim Quirk to create test case management tools, help with modifications of the bug tracking work flow, process, and getting the 100 laptop testbed back up and running. We said goodbye to Giannis Galanis (Yanni) this week, who has been a long term volunteer testing network connectivity, collaboration, and wireless issues. He hopes to stay involved (and we hope he does too), but is moving to London where he expects to start a full time job soon. Thanks for all your help, Yanni! *Support:* Uruguay ---------- John Watlington visited Uruguay at the beginning of the week in order to help them set up a repair center, and talk to their server and network teams. Uruguay has a centralized repair system. When a child's laptop fails, they take it to the nearest Post Office, which is equipped with shipping boxes. The laptops are shipped to a central repair facility in Montevideo, where they are triaged, repaired or replaced, and sent back to the child's school through the mail. About half of the returned machines simply need the software reinstalled. The other half are dominated by laptops whose RTC battery has come loose while running old firmware. OLPC shipped the serial adapters needed to repair these this week to Uruguay. The two most serious hardware problems they are seeing outside of this are broken screens (dropped laptops) and keyboards with keys torn off. The hardware team has been working on a "Troubleshooting Guide for the XO", which will be made available to these repair centers. This will be used by the Uruguay team, and has also been requested by the Peru team as they start to plan a repair and spare parts strategy. The visit served to illustrate how much we don't know about the software that Uruguay is deploying. In particular, their server software doesn't include the presence service we now know is crucial to collaboration in dense environments. They also have their laptops automatically turning into mesh portals upon connecting to the school WiFi networks, which results in most of the laptops in a school trying to use the mesh to communicate, despite all being in range of the well-planned WiFi deployments done by Uruguay. A member of Plan Ceibal's technical staff will be in Boston for the next two weeks to further improve communication with them. Peru ---------- Martin Langhoff and John Watlington have been in Peru for the latter part of this week, working with the Ministry of Education team on server issues. On Friday, they had planned to deploy a school server in a nearby school (less than three hours from Lima), but ended up travelling to Arahuay to diagnose and fix a server problem there. They discovered that it was an unexciting motherboard hardware failure instead of any problem with the current XS software. What this does illustrate is the importance of a "Server Manual" which includes simple troubleshooting and repair instructions, analogous to the "Laptop User's Manual" written by Peru. A new version of that Manual was released this week and will be installed on Peru's laptops, with future versions already in planning. Carla Gomez-Monroy joined Martin and John in Peru on Friday, and will be working with the next round of teacher training next week. Emily Smith, Adam Holt, Sandy Culver, Christine Myrick, and some contractors continue to respond to all the emails and phone calls about the first G1G1 program, and we have started discussions on the second one. Kim Quirk, Mel Chua and Nikki Lee discussed and outlined ideas for non-profit repair center that doesn't require monetary exchange. One of the difficulties that a volunteer repair center has to face is that the parts and shipping cost money even if the labor is free. Legal and tax implications need to be taken into account as well as how to transfer funds. We also need to encourage or find someone to provide a repairs business for all the laptops that are going to individuals (G1G1) and small groups (less than 10,000). These groups will all need to be able to get spare parts, repairs or replacements. Number of emails into the help queue this week: 299, 137 are donor services G1G1 and 162 are tech support. *Other:* Martin Langhoff gave a keynote at AIS Conference in Sydney (Australian school IT managers). There was lots of interest in volunteering in OLPC efforts in AU and the Pacific. He also spoke at Sydney OLPC Techfest with Joel Stanley, Pia Waugh, Jeff Waugh. Jeff and Pia are coordinating volunteer efforts for the Pacific. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... 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