Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:45:26 -0400 From: Jim Gettys <jg [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org> Subject: [Community-news] OLPC News - (2008-06-23) To: community-news [ at ] lists [ dot ] laptop [ dot ] org, Sugar List <sugar [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org> Message-ID: <1214239526.6764.38.camel@jg-vaio> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Tomeu Visozo implemented the Home view UI that allows the user to drag and drop activities to desired locations on the screen (freeform) rather than restricting them to the circle. Other activities move nicely out of the way if you try to drop one on top of another. Look for this in an upcoming test build soon! Marco Pesenti Gritti reviewed patches for the freeform Home view as well as and Benjamin Berg's patches to implement quick activity switching using the keyboard. He also packaged xulrunner 1.9 final and adapted the Browse activity to it. Finally he coordinated the Sugar 0.81.3 release and made big progresses on a Fedora 9 based Sugar liveCD. Note that xulrunner 1.9 final is the version used in Firefox 3, which provides much better memory use than previous versions. This should significantly help our memory usage. Less than a week after release, Firefox 3 already accounts for 4% of web browser use on the Internet. Morgan Collett released Chat-41 and Presence Service 0.81.2 with the changes required for non-Sugar Jabber clients to chat with XOs. He registered as an Afrikaans translator on Pootle and translated Sugar and some of the core activities. Faisal Anwar of Media Modifications further developed the online "Sugar Almanac" of best practices and working code snippets. This week he documented and debated with the community how to best use the datastore api, and began entries on logging and internationalization. Sayamindu Dasgupta arrived at the OLPC offices this week for a two week long visit. He made a presentation on the OLPC translation infrastructure, and had some discussions with members of the tech team on the various aspects of translation. He also had a meeting with Evelyn Eastmond, one of the co-authors of Scratch, and explained the various aspects of Pootle to her. Sayamindu also made some progress on the support for administrative messages for translation teams in Pootle during the course of the week. Chris Ball found and fixed a bug preventing suspend from working on our new 2.6.25 kernels. With that out of the way, the extreme power management mode could be tested -- a machine with wireless off, the backlight on but dimmed, and occasional wakeups to check the battery level ran for 16 hours and 15 minutes before turning off. Next steps will be to integrate this work in the UI and get it into a build. Michael Stone reviewed code for the Datastore, XS Backup, Gadget, and NetworkManager-0.7 projects. He produced and signed a "708 + G1G1 activity pack" image which he delivered to QA. Finally, he pushed for more contributions in the weekly public Software Status meeting, in personal conversations with Emiliano Pastorino, Sjoerd Simons, Bill Mccormick, and in conversations with several key Fedora and RedHat developers present at FUDCON Boston 2008. Bert Freudenberg reports a new etoys release: fresh from the press: http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys/etoys-3.0.2029.tar.gz http://dev.laptop.org/pub/sugar/sources/etoys-activity/etoys-activity-83.tar.gz bundled: http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/etoys-3.0.2007-1.noarch.rpm http://etoys.laptop.org/rpms/Etoys-83.xo Improvements include: Pango fixes (tested with Nepalese), new DBus bindings, updated QuickGuides, a few more strings made translatable. Pango's importance is that it forms the basis for fully international text layout. Paul Fox made good progress on the sdcc-based EC firmware -- the code now fits, but the data segment needs work. Paul is looking forward to actually running this code soon. Ankur Verma continued his work on Internet connectivity using modems from Sprint and AT&T and updated http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_%2B_Modem page with the steps. Daniel Drake worked on various problems with the Fedora 9 (OLPC-3) stream including USB automount issues, inability to shutdown/reboot, sound nodes not accessible to user, and camera functionality. Faisal Anwar of Media Modifications further developed the online "Sugar Almanac" of best practices and working code snippets. This week he documented and debated with the community how to best use the datastore api, and began entries on logging and internationalization. Walter Bender's sugar digest from last week is available here: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2008-June/006546.html Testing: Joe Feinstein (with Kim Quirk and Michael Stone) worked on setting up the community testing project ( http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Friends_in_testing ). He also has been testing the proposed back-up build for G1G1 (8.1.1, or build 708). A critical bug associated with attaching an external USB mouse was found in Joyride 2026, where suspend and resume is turned on more aggressively than the Update.1 builds. Charlie Murphy set up 15 XOs for Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos' multi-hop network/cerebro testing project, which involved installing the most recent 708 build, git and cerebro. Pol kicked of the testing of the first 10 laptops for this campus testing. Support: It finally feels like the Give One Get One demands are starting to decrease. Thanks to all the help from Frances Hopkins, Sean Hooley and Emily Smith. Emily, who is leaving us next week to start a job as an Information Sciences Specialist, spent a lot of time this week documenting and training on all the tools, tips, and databases for refunds, RMA dispositions, Give Another donations, tax receipt letters, and much more. Best of luck to her! Product Management: ?Please welcome Greg Smith, who is starting today as OLPC's Product Manager. Greg will focus on SW releases including prioritization of bugs and feature requests, help improve our processes. He will also ensure that we get end user input and involvement in the development cycle, gathering feedback from students, teachers, administrators, government organizations, and G1G1 participants. He will work with management and 'sales' people to set expectations on what is achievable. Gnome on an XO: ?On a more interesting note, Andres Salomon's conventional laptop display died this week, so he worked on putting gnome on an XO. It runs surprisingly well, despite claims that memory and disk usage would be a problem. Jffs2's compression actually helps a _lot_ here: mtd0 1.0G 750M 275M 74% / Here's what 'du' reports (ie, the amount of space he'd be using _without_ compression): 1.6G / This is a Debian system with gnome-core + random applications installed (claws-mail, epiphany, vlc, pidgin, evince....). Andres' had issues with flash (adobe's flash plugin displays youtube videos in high quality, but it is incredibly choppy, and gnash displays lower quality videos). Vorbis/mp3 play just fine in vlc without skipping, claws is able to handle his imap folder w/ 15000 messages, and epiphany without flash doesn't use very much memory. The main item that doesn't work (aside from power management, which he haven't even tried yet) is the touchpad; but a USB mouse will suffice for now. -- Jim Gettys <jg [ at ] laptop [ dot ] org> One Laptop Per Child ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ 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 27, Issue 3 ********************************************* -- http://olpc.ellak.gr/