Re: SarynPaint: a Java program packaged for the OLPC
Early in OLPC, we seriously wanted to go with Java: but Sun's licensing was a serious issue we could not get around, despite a number of attempts by Walter to talk with Sun and see if it could get fixed. Part of the issue caused by this licensing was the all or nothing part of it: as shipped, the tar-ball-from-hell footprint of Sun's distro: 60MB was a lot too much, along with the memory consumption feared (but Python has proved to be similarly problematic). And at the time, the non-Sun implementations weren't mature enough. Both the licensing and implementations issues now seem pretty moot. So again, part of why Java is not ubiquitous to this day has been its license history Whether it, at this late date, can ever recover from the damage done by this history, is far from clear. Sigh - Jim Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 16:56, Jeffrey Kesselmanjef...@gmail.com wrote: Honestly, I think the lack of Java on the XO has more with python defensiveness then anything else. Honestly, I don't think so. Most or all of the Sugar developers had zero python experience when joined the project. And we are way too busy to care about language wars. I draw this conclusion partly from the fact that it has been pretty crippling lack since initial inception of the XO, but one that there is great resistance to fixing nonetheless. The Sugar platform is composed by what deployers want to be there, not by what each developer would like. If that was the case, we would have to ship the runtimes for all available languages and the XO doesn't have enough room for that, nm for the student's work... If you really think that Java should be there, propose to deployers of Sugar an activity that will bring value to their students and tell them to talk to us. Regards, Tomeu On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Ben Wiley Sittler bsitt...@gmail.com wrote: I think maintaining two parallel versions of the code in two languages would be a huge waste of effort for me, but if someone else wants to they are of course welcome to. I have neither time nor inclination to port it merely to work around the historical accident of Java not having been Open Source at the time Sugar was initially developed. Also, I think the UI of this program is actually more friendly to very young children by *not* being more Sugarized — there's no confusing Frame when they (inevitably) move the pointer to the edges of the screen, and since it doesn't (yet) have save support or text input there's really no reason for a toolbar or Journal integration. Mind you, minimal save/resume support might be nice to have on all platforms someday. On 2009-08-29, Gary C Martin g...@garycmartin.com wrote: Hi Ben, On 29 Aug 2009, at 18:24, Ben Wiley Sittler wrote: I think, then, that I would rather just ship it as an activity bundle for Sugar+Java or Sugar+OpenJDK, since the versioning issues (which OpenJDK version should I use, exactly?), licensing issues (GPLv2 GPLv2+classpath-exception for OpenJDK vs. GPLv3 for SarynPaint,) packaging unknowns (how does one run OpenJDK from a subdirectory, exactly?), and bloat make bundling a JRE inside the .xo ridiculously impractical. I'm halfway tempted to try to subset OpenJDK for this (to reduce bloat), but that seems like an even bigger nightmare. Sorry if this is a controversial comment, but would you considered porting the code to Python? It looks like a nice starter chunk of code for someone interested in Python and or Sugar Activities. Regards, --Gary ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- ~~ Microsoft help desk says: reply hazy, ask again later. ~~ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] Apache proxy CRCsync mozilla gsoc project?
On Thu, 2009-04-02 at 07:17 +1300, Toby Collett wrote: So a quick question, what sort of http transfers are chunking most often used for? Dynamically generated content is the scenario for chunked transfers; since you don't know the length a-priori, some other method of indicating the message length is necessary. - Jim -- Jim Gettys j...@freedesktop.org ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
So long, and thanks for all the fish.....
I too am sad to be leaving the project; but there many, many kids who will be benefiting. I've learned a lot, and made friends all over the world. I may be involved in some form as a volunteer in the future but in the near term I also need to focus on finding employment. You know where to find me. Thank you all for your efforts; millions of kids benefit... - Jim j...@freedesktop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: No surprise on memory
On Thu, 2008-12-18 at 09:13 -1000, Mitch Bradley wrote: John Gilmore wrote: Swapping to the soldered-in NAND chips is a very bad idea. It will tend to wear them out rapidly. Even if you use load-leveling software (e.g. swapping to a file in a jfffs2 filesystem), the problem is that if you do start wearing out serious numbers of flash blocks, the laptop becomes toast; it requires a soldering iron and spare chips to fix it. John, do the math: for the current chips (single level cells), life is of order 10^5 cycles. So you have 10^5 gigabytes of writing. This takes *a long* time. Swapping is not an insane idea, once you have wear leveling. We don't do it now because JFFS2 cannot support swapping, and we don't have a wear level beneath the file system. UBI and Ubifs fix this, and it is something we can consider. Well, maybe it's not as bad as all that. When the NAND wears out, then you can buy the SD card, thus deferring that purchase and taking advantage of Moore's law in the interim. Lots of people tend to forget, however, that warm (and/or cold) salt air is a serious issue in many of the places we have to go. Any connector tends to die under these circumstances. Note that I'm not advocating in favor of soldered NAND - in fact I've been one of the leading proponents of migrating to an SD-based storage solution. I'm just pointing out that, if you're willing to buy an SD card now (which is necessary for the SD-based swap solution), then you are probably willing to buy one later. Soldered down SD, however may be an intermediate point; may fewer wires than a conventional chip. -- Jim Gettys j...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [PATCH] cafe_nand: remove busy-wait loop
On Tue, 2008-12-09 at 07:05 -1000, Mitch Bradley wrote: Where do we go with this? Who's adventurous enough to test it? Dare we put it in joyride? Any suggestions for how to measure performance difference? If Deepak likes it and it passes some tests, that would be the logical thing to do next. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: New touchpad still has some jumpyness
On Tue, 2008-11-25 at 18:54 -0500, Richard A. Smith wrote: During SJ's demo meeting today at 1cc I used my test machine with the new touchpad. The touchpad on my laptop is much deeper inset than I still experienced jumpyness. However, a much different jumpyness than what happens with the alps device. In my case it appears to happen if the tip of my thumb gets up into the active area. (Creepage from using it to click thThe touchpad on my laptop is much deeper inset than e X button) What I saw was the cursor would leap to the edge of the screen which is similar to what happens with the current pad, but unlike the current pad its does not continue to leap around. It a one shot and then returns to normal movement. This happened to me several times. So then I played with my HP laptop which also has a synaptics touchpad and I'm able to duplicate the same behavior. It's worth a gander at the upstream synaptics driver; I've seen some patches go by recently. So even with the new touchpad we still may have to have some sort of criteria for discarding packets with large deltas for the movement. By default in mouse mode the values reported by the device are relative. So some sort of edge effect must confuse the controller. I need to enable some logging and see what data the device actually sent. I've also noticed that the acceleration of the new touchpad is much less than the alps device. When you switch from new to old the you can really tell. We should reduce the acceleration of the cursor for the alps device. Its not necessary to be that fast. Yeah, the acceleration stuff in X sucks. Fixed in next release, IIRC (after something like 20 years...) Is that something we can set defaults for in the X config or do we have to detect what touchpad we are running? Unfortunately, we'll have to detect it. This whole are of X is being reworked as we speak Upstream, everything is hot plug, and you can then set things on a per detected device basis. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: x11vnc and vncviewer for classroom
On Sat, 2008-11-22 at 20:56 -0500, Ian Daniher wrote: To be honest, I've had the best luck with microsoft terminal services in so far as the thin client area goes - I use my XO day to day with my school's remote desktop server and it works flawlessly - the fonts are a bit tiny, but it works with no noticeable speed difference between it and a desktop. Why wasn't this approach considered instead of putting XP on XOs? Can't take thin clients home, so you are immediately limited to in-school use. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Sugar unusable as an e-book reader
http://live.gnome.org/Evince/SupportedDocumentFormats has evince's currently supported formats. I don't know exactly how we have it built. The basic point is it is already able to support multiple formats as plug-ins and others may be feasible. - Jim On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 11:52 -0500, James Simmons wrote: Greg, I have never worked on the core Read activity. From what I have seen of it, I would say that you would have to modify evince so that it could support more formats, notably plain text files and .cbr files (which are archive files containing sequentially named images). If it did that the need for my two Activities would vanish. I believe that evince can already support comic books in the .cbr format if you compile in optional support for it. Of course evince is not an OLPC project, and that will limit what can be done with it. Some of the problems you mention in your entry are actually issues with the Journal (not remembering page numbers and making unnecessary copies of files). I think others are working on improving the Journal datastore, which should help a lot of Activities. Document sharing is not reliable with Read (or Read Etexts either). Text to Speech in Read Etexts needs additional software to be installed on the XO to work. Someone was working on this a few months ago. As I said on my page for my Activities, I see them as only stopgaps until the XO has a better Read activity that supports more formats. I don't feel qualified to work on Read itself. James Simmons Subject: Re: Sugar unusable as an e-book reader To: devel@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Hi James and David, I want to track additions and improvements to the XOs eBook Reader on our Feature roadmap page. I created a requirement called Better eBook Reader at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Better_eBook_reader Can you update that with any additions or work we need to do? If you can separate it in to requirement (what we want to do) and specification (how we will do it) that will help. You can also put your name down as an owner if you plan to work on it in the near future. Any questions or comments welcome. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 9.1 Proposal: Power.
How well we can do that isn't clear. We have 16 brightness levels, but we didn't think about making them logarithmic in response to correspond to the eye's behavior, so there are really fewer than that that are useful. Please experiment and see if it is helpful, of course... - Jim On Thu, 2008-10-23 at 10:14 -0400, Eben Eliason wrote: I could be talking nonsense, and perhaps this would consume more power than it saves, but if you were able to slowly dim the backlight over the course of a minute or so, instead of waiting a minute and then dropping it suddenly, we could prevent the sudden change which causes a break in concentration. (As long as the screen is bright enough to be usable when dim, of course.) - Eben On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 4:21 PM, Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, When running on battery with Energy Saver set to Better Battery Life (which sets Automatically reduce the brightness of the display before display sleep) the backlight dims after 30 seconds. On AC with the equivalent setting it's 2 minutes, 30 seconds. In each case the dimming time seems to be 50% of the time until the screen is turned off. 1 minute is the minimum time before display sleep. Thanks! I was hoping someone would have numbers. Our backlight dim currently happens fifty seconds after idleness starts, so we're definitely less aggressive than OS X already.. - Chris. -- Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 9.1 Proposal: Printing support
On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 08:57 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: can's mdns/avahi help with discovery? it'd be a shame to have to manually configure a server address or name. Certainly; this is what Apple does; the HP printer I bought recently is so advertising itself this way. I haven't seen Linux using this information, however, so there *may* be work to be done in Linux. How far/well mdns scales with the mesh routing protocols, however, is another question. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 9.1 Proposal: Printing support
Note there is a client library for IPP for cups that can talk to remote servers, without having to run a spooler locally. This may be a better option - Jim On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 10:58 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote: On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 16:24 -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote: *But*, we should be able to: * Print postscript (or pdf, or whatever, just pick *one*) to school server via CUP (IPP?), cups uses IPP under the hood and IPP is definitely the route to go as it's basically The Standard in printing these days. One thing that would probably be interesting for OLPC with cups, though, would be working on making it so that the daemon can be started on-demand rather than having to start on start-up. There's some support in cupsd for this already, but it's tied to launchd on OS/X. Jeremy ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 9.1 Proposal: Printing support
This is not true; you can presume all cups/IPP printers support postscript and PDF, courtesy of ghostscript in the remote cups server. And cairo will happily produce PDF. That IPP can expose other formats to clients can be treated as a legacy capability, from where we sit. - Jim On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 10:20 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 20 Oct 2008, Jeremy Katz wrote: On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 16:24 -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote: *But*, we should be able to: * Print postscript (or pdf, or whatever, just pick *one*) to school server via CUP (IPP?), cups uses IPP under the hood and IPP is definitely the route to go as it's basically The Standard in printing these days. One thing that would probably be interesting for OLPC with cups, though, would be working on making it so that the daemon can be started on-demand rather than having to start on start-up. There's some support in cupsd for this already, but it's tied to launchd on OS/X. once concern that I have with CUPS/IPP (which may very well just be an implementation issue with the current tools) is that the setups that I have seen have wanted to have the printer driver for the specific printer on the device initiating the print job. the setup that we would want to use for the XO would be to have them all create the job using a single definition (postscript would be traditional for this sort of thing) and then have the server convert this to what the local printer needs. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 9.1 Proposal: Printing support
This worked (discovery) at one point (I tried it very early in OLPC days). But printer discovery is better done by some other mechanism than that defined in IPP anyway, which is stupid broadcast. Even MDNS is less evil (e.g. avahi). Some work is probably needed for scaling of printer discovery. Running a cups server is almost certainly not necessary, though its footprint might not be too terrible if it is stripped of all the stupid printer definitions (which are huge). I haven't tried that experiment. - Jim On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 13:57 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote: On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 09:15 -0700, Jim Gettys wrote: Note there is a client library for IPP for cups that can talk to remote servers, without having to run a spooler locally. This may be a better option It might be if it were an option that actually worked. But I tried it a month or so ago and you must have the cups daemon running to discover remote printers. That doesn't mean you have to have a local queue set up for the printer, but all of the discovery happens in the daemon and not in client apps. Jeremy ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 9.1 Proposal: Printing support
Actually, teachers are the other people who have asked for printing support (e.g. at Arahuay, when I visited). They don't have enough conventional systems to do their test sheets. Now on line tests may make some/most of that need obsolete; but that will take time for teachers to get used to. - Jim On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 16:50 -0700, John Gilmore wrote: Note that much of the demand for printing comes from G1G1 users, who won't have a School Server (and are unlikely to have another Linux machine handy). I think the answer is probably to run the CUPS daemon when we need it, and kill it off when we don't (a la inetd). As with everything else, I think we should strongly hew to what already works and what's already had tens of thousands of manhours invested in it, rather than reinventing the wheel and the GUI. CUPS is administered through a browser, we have a browser, are we almost done yet? :-) John ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora 10 for 9.1.0?
I agree with Marco, no distro-wars, pretty, please. Where I sit, Ubuntu's advantages have decreased, rather than increased over the last couple years. Even Mark Shuttleworth, when I last chatted with him early this year, said it didn't make a significant difference. The wider Sugar and software appropriate for kids is available, the better we all are. - Jim On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 13:41 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 10:57 AM, Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Am 15.10.2008 um 01:19 schrieb [EMAIL PROTECTED]: the distro landscape has changed a bit in the last few years, is it worth considering a jump to Ubuntu if it has a better fit for your release cycle? at the very least it telegraphs the long-term support versions. Ubuntu also seems a much better fit in spirit than RedHat. No distribution wars plase :) Let's stay on topic... Marco ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 5 sec boot
On Sat, 2008-10-04 at 16:32 -1000, Mitch Bradley wrote: I have considered something like that off and on. It's sort of nice to have a definite length for the images. There are ways around that, but they are a bit ugly at some level. It's sort of a tossup at some level. One difficultly with having a lot of partitions is that it makes it more likely that you will encounter the resizing issue. Ubifs is built on the Ubi layer, which handles resizing (and does so in the face of flash errors). http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubi.html#L_autoresize Then again, since ubifs mounts quickly, the largest reason for partitioning we've had (to reduce boot time) evaporates. There may be other reasons to want partitioning, given dynamic resizing a'la lvm, however. If we go to non-bare flash, of course, other solutions will have to be found. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 5 sec boot
There is a C routine available for doing the initial read from the file system. We don't have to do it from scratch... Bull. Flag. Red - Jim On Sun, 2008-10-05 at 13:00 -0400, Chris Ball wrote: Hi, Then again, since ubifs mounts quickly, the largest reason for partitioning we've had (to reduce boot time) evaporates. There may be other reasons to want partitioning, given dynamic resizing a'la lvm, however. You don't mention the fundamental reason that we need partitioning if we go to ubifs: we need OFW to be able to boot the system, and it doesn't have an ubifs driver. - Chris. -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 5 sec boot
Yes, but our biggest single component of boot time this instant is jffs2 mount (which happens twice during the boot sequence), not covered in that work. This is fixable in two ways; partially, by partitioning the flash (which would remove one mount), or even better, by using Ubifs, which may be ready for widespread use now. The rest of it is mostly stuff that we either don't do or can avoid doing, or have already prototyped (Mitch has had start up scripts in his back pocket that may also be part of the equasion). Deepak has begun work on Ubifs testing... - Jim On Fri, 2008-10-03 at 15:24 +0200, NoiseEHC wrote: If you somehow missed it, there is possible to boot Linux in 5 seconds on an EeePC. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=s7NxCM8ryF8 Here is the paper: http://www.fenrus.org/plumbers_fastboot.ppt Could somebody explain me whether these results are applicable to the XO, and how far are we from it, please? -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Walter Bender: Re: devkeys, prettyboot, and G1G1
On Fri, 2008-10-03 at 00:27 -0400, John Watlington wrote: How about providing dev. keys for G1G1 laptops with no delay ?Would you consider it an improvement ? Clearly an improvement, as is the prettyboot patch, which I think we should also do. - Jim wad On Oct 1, 2008, at 10:15 PM, John Gilmore wrote: Mitch and I have come up with a way to ship G1G1 laptops so that they will pretty-boot, but still come from the factory without any need for developer keys (in the Forth disable-security setting). This requires a small edit to /boot/olpc.fth in the OS build, to load the XO child image, freeze the screen, and put the first progress dot down just before jumping to Linux. It's detailed here: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7896 I know the support crew would be much happier if G1G1 laptops were shipped able to run test builds and patched software, if users could interact with Forth to diagnose their hardware, if they could run unsigned Forth code from USB collector keys, etc. Unfortunately, an IRC discussion with Scott today revealed that the engineering team has decided that we *must* ship G1G1 laptops with a requirement for development keys. The reason: because too many kids in the third world will be getting lockdown laptops, and we want the G1G1 recipients to be guinea pigs to debug the laptops, to be sure the laptops work even when locked down (and that they unlock properly when the kid requests a jailbreak key). I see this is utterly backwards. The countries that want DRM on their laptops should be paying the price in support problems and infrastructure. Not the donors who sponsor a G1G1 laptop, and not the free software community who donate to help push this project along. As believers in freedom, we shouldn't be defaulting EVERY laptop to being locked by its manufacturer. Yet that's the argument: because some of them are locked, all of them must be locked. Or perhaps it's slightly more nuanced: A country that orders thousands can order them without DRM, but G1G1 users can't. That sounds reasonable, but I've interacted with several country teams (Nepal and South Pacific), who had come away from OLPC with the impression that it would be incredibly dangerous to turn off the security of the laptops. In Nepal's case I was unable to disabuse them of this odd notion. So no country asks for freedom in their laptop shipments, and no G1G1 is shipped with freedom, and thus every OLPC laptop is jailed, like every iPhone. John Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2008 08:34:09 -0400 From: Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: devkeys, prettyboot, and G1G1 Cc: Mitch Bradley [EMAIL PROTECTED] If Mitch is comfortable with his fix, I cannot see any reason not to ship developer keys with G1G1 machines--it would save everyone headaches, especially on support; but of course I cannot speak for OLPC these days. -walter On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 7:26 PM, John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I recall discussing this last time but don't recall the reasons not to do it this way. We did ship them all pre-activated. I questioned people after the fateful meeting, and it seemed to me that the problem was that Nicholas wanted pretty-boot, and Mitch was unwilling to try to disentangle pretty-boot from secure-boot. Secure-boot was already a tangle of ugly Forth code, and he was sure that adding more complexity there would result in security holes or bugs. Since then, he has figured out the one-line circumvention that's documented in bug #7896. The circumvention is in the OS (since OFW keeps no state). John -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org [gnu: I also cc'd this to support-gang, but that required sending it from a different email address, due to how I am subscribed there.] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Is http://wiki.laptop.org/ down or vandalized?
Best guess is a success disaster: the server needs more RAM... Henry's scrambling to upgrade the system. - Jim On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 08:13 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is http://wiki.laptop.org/ down or vandalized? Since about 10 PM PST last night all I get is a blank page when I try to connect to the home page. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: idea for running out of RAM
Note that more current Linux kernels, such as that in 8.2, are much better at being able to account for what process is using what memory. It's probably worth a little experimentation after 8.2 ships to see if the original concept is now viable. - Jim On Mon, 2008-09-29 at 10:06 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 2:07 AM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So UI changes that help make this clearer will probably be a good idea for a 9.1 ... :-/ There was an early sketch of a mechanism similar to the old Home View circle, where there was a space allocated to each open activity proportional to the amount of memory it was consuming. In any case, it is just as easy to make a bar graph as a pie chart... Dan Winship explained the issues with this approach here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_ring . Regards, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Stability and Memory Pressure in 8.2
There are four classes of things we can/should/could do: 1) understand where our memory is being used. Individual bugs can have a large effect. Something stupid could be hurting us badly, and we won't know unless we look. What is more, we need to invest in tools that allow us to monitor this. 2) there are some band-aids that have been discussed, such as rlimits, which we can experiment with, and that *might* improve the situation without the real solutions the next two items go into. 3) the oom killer's default algorithms are pretty terrible, taking little into account in the choice of what gets killed. Between Sugar/Rainbow, and knowledge that the window manager has, one could do much better. 4) we provide no end user feedback on memory usage, either. We should investigate whether revisiting our previous attempt to give such feedback, now that Linux can provide much better information than it could when we abandoned our previous donut attempt. The users could really help, if only we let them know a bit about what was going on... In terms of priority: immediately examining what is going on with memory usage in case we have a bad leak is clearly worthwhile (1). We need to budget for tool-building to monitor the situation going forward immediately. 2) and *possibly* (a beginning on) 3 may be 8.2.1 fodder, but without feedback from more users, we won't know if this isn't just keys under the lamppost (e.g. our multiple bug reports about browse ooming because of our amazingly stupid hardware wiki page, which is one of the most egregious pages I've seen in recent memory. Doing 3) pretty well I suspect is 9.1 fodder, but only if we start very soon. My gut tells me its some man-months of work. We might get lucky and should investigate if any of the embedded folks have something we can use. Unfortunately, the Nokia folks I had thought might have something didn't, when I last checked a year ago. But we can/should check a bit first before diving in; it's a year later. http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/1995 I urge we investigate quickly whether 4) is, in fact, feasible, so that it can go on the Sugar roadmap in time to be done for 9.1. - Jim On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 13:02 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 6:10 AM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * We need to find out why the oom-killer is not killing things fast enough. Based on our results, we might consider configuring /proc/$pid/oom_adj to preferentially kill some processes (e.g., the foreground [or background?] activities.) Any reason why killing first activities' processes wouldn't solve the stability issue? AFAIK, we haven't seen OOM conditions without any activity open. Just in case, I'm not saying that isn't worth to do any of the other things on your list. Regards, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Stability and Memory Pressure in 8.2
On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 13:10 -0400, Daniel Drake wrote: On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 00:10 -0400, Michael Stone wrote: - whether we can get Browse to behave intelligently when it receives BadAlloc errors from X? I have no doubt that Browse/xulrunner has room for improvement with memory usage but this is not where you should be looking. These BadAlloc messages are true errors generated when the application requests pixmaps outside of the coordinate range accepted by X (this is well documented). This is a real bug in the code, not a memory pressure issue. Such requests should never be generated, and the application crashing is probably the behaviour we want. For the specific BadAlloc of the page in our wiki, it is not coordinate out of range, but that the images on that page are so huge as to cause X to get a allocation failure from the OS, and that gets reflected back to the client. Otherwise we'd have gotten a BadValue error. At one point, X11 was pretty carefully checked to work in the face of failures to allocate memory (dunno how true that is today). Whether Firefox should be so silly as to even be asking (the images are huge) and asking the X server to rescale them (also very questionable) is something that can/should be taken up with the Firefox folks, but not something we're going to (be able) to fix on our own. The embedded mozilla folks (there are such people at long last) are the logical people to own this headache. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Google Chrome activity?
I would not presume that Google Chrome's memory usage is worse than existing browsers (though thankfully firefox 3 has recently lowered the bar a lot); it has the advantage of throwing away entire address spaces, avoiding some of the memory fragmentation problems that have bedeviled other browsers. So I'm taking a wait and see attitude. But first, let someone else do the basic Linux port, and then we can measure - Jim On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 09:02 -0400, Ton van Overbeek wrote: Christoph Derndorfer wrote: On 9/3/08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]* [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 3 Sep 2008, Christoph Derndorfer wrote: Anyone here motivated to turn Chrome into an activity? don't we need to wait until they have a linux version out? my understanding is that the current release is windows only. Ah, I must have missed that than, thought it was multi-platform... :-( Thanks, Christoph The open source project is on http://dev.chromium.org. There are instructions for a Linux build, but it has the following warning: Note: There is /no/ working Chromium-based browser on Linux. Although many Chromium submodules build under Linux and a few unit tests pass, all that runs is a command-line all tests pass executable. Anyway, since it really targets the high-end (each tab running its own process with own virtual machine for JS etc.) I doubt it will run nicely on the XO. The renderer is based on WebKit. Ton van Overbeek ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Touchpad improvements and activities using pointer (mouse) motion....
Richard Smith has fixed some bad performance problems in the embedded controller, that talks to the touch pad, now in the latest firmware in joyride and the 8.2 stream. The consequences are that the touch pad is reporting many real mouse motion events, as you move your finger on the touch pad. These were previously getting dropped on the floor in 8.1 and before, and causing many of our touch pad behavior problems. This improved behavior, strangely, can pose performance problems for incorrectly written activities that ask for mouse motion events; paint programs are a classic example. If you can't keep up with the rate at which pointer (mouse) motion events are delivered, and you get more events, your application can fall further and further behind, causing bad laggy behavior. Having improved our touchpad, we're now exposing some of these issues due to the increased number of events. In days of yore on slower machines this was a common problem, so the window system has provisions for it. Many current developers on fast machines do not see this often on current fast desktops/laptops, so it many have forgotten about the solutions. X has what is called mouse motion compression; in the GTK toolkit, it is invoked by: The gtk.gdk.POINTER_MOTION_HINT_MASK is a special mask which is used to reduce the number of gtk.gdk.MOTION_NOTIFY events received. Normally a gtk.gdk.MOTION_NOTIFY event is received each time the mouse moves. However, if the application spends a lot of time processing the event (updating the display, for example), it can easily lag behind the position of the mouse. When using the gtk.gdk.POINTER_MOTION_HINT_MASK the server will only send a single gtk.gdk.MOTION_NOTIFY event (which is marked as a hint) until the application asks for more, by calling the gtk.gdk.Window.get_pointer() method. You can find the full description in http://www.pygtk.org/docs/pygtk/class-gdkevent.html Techniques for handling the issue: 1) by far the best approach, when possible, is to make your pointer (mouse) handler very light, then do recomputation and drawing in an idle handler 2) The get_pointer technique using the above POINTER_MOTION_HINT_MASK, to poll at the rate your application can keep up. But best is to drop the result from get_pointer() on the floor and forget that it's overloaded in the X protocol and just pretend that you called GiveMeAnotherEvent 3) Another technique, rather than doing get_pointer, is to peek in the event queue to see if the next event is also a pointer motion event, and use the later event if it is still a pointer motion event, using gdk_event_peek. My thanks to Owen Taylor for refreshing my cache and telling me the GTK idioms. Note that X also has a facility to record the full stream of mouse motion coordinates as well, if you want the precise timestamped path the pointer followed between events. The XGetMotionEvents call can be used to get that path, at whatever hardware resolution the hardware was able to provide. Note that the X server/driver may have compressed some sequential motion events together to begin with. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: CSound server questions
John, We cannot use code from Barry since he tends to work by himself, his code is unmaintainable except by him and its licensing has also been somewhat questionable at times, though the licening problems may have been addressed.. Were he to be run over by a truck (God forbid!), we'd be in a complete pickle. The community CSound, that Victor leads, is widely used and supported by a large community of people. Previous objections of CSound bloat (by things like the public csound using the TK/TCL internally to the CSound library) have been addressed by Victor, who now has (at configure time) a version of CSound5 built out of the same source pool that drops those dependencies. You can be sure that *anything* that runs on the CSound lite we run on OLPC will run on the public full CSound used in the music community; it is an *exact* subset of the full CSound used by everyone except Barry. So we are also in a very much better compatibility situation than using Barry's version. Hope this explanation helps. - Jim On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 06:42 -0400, John Maloney wrote: Thanks for the info. I had the impression that Barry Vercoe was working on a new, light- weight CsoundServer. Is that not true? -- John On Aug 27, 2008, at 5:15 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There is no CsoundServer anymore; we use Csound as a library through its API. If anyone wants some help on how to use it, to play MIDI or anything else, he/she can talk to me, privately or on this list. I'm away to ICMC at the moment, so replies might be slow. But I'll give as much help as I can. Regards Victor - Original Message - From: Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tuesday, August 26, 2008 11:35 pm Subject: Re: CSound server questions To: C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: John Maloney [EMAIL PROTECTED], devel@lists.laptop.org Hi, Did you ever get a satisfactory answer to your questions? I think Pippy contains the best examples of using csound to play sounds -- is that right, Chris? Well, I'd say that TamTam does. :) But yes, Pippy does some basic synthesis using sinewaves and music files with csound. - Chris. -- Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [OLPC Security] permissions for setting scheduler policy
A typical solution is, when you are about to start the process, invoke a different (very small, so it can be audited) process that can set what you need as root, and then drop the privileges before execing the real image that does the work. But Michael may have something else in mind for Rainbow. - Jim On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 11:21 +0100, Victor Lazzarini wrote: Hello everyone, I am working on trying to get better RT performance off csound. I have added some code to set the scheduler policy and priority, but the problem is that I can only use it as root. As user olpc, the scheduler code will not be allowed to set the policy and priority. It'd be ideal if activities using csound could take advantage of this code, because it seems to help performance. We could set up group permissions for that in /etc/security/limits.conf What are your thoughts (esp. Deepak and Daniel D)? Dr Victor Lazzarini Senior Lecturer Music Technology Laboratory, Music Department National University of Ireland, Maynooth ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Security mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/security -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: New system firmware to test
Joel, Please request an MP system via the developer's program. In fact, this is true for anyone who got prototypes from us that doesn't yet have an MP system. Having good developers testing against old hardware doesn't help testing. - Jim On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 11:55 -0400, Richard A. Smith wrote: Joel Stanley wrote: On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 4:55 PM, Richard A. Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: People who enjoy testing firmware please do so. My touchpad was unusable. B3, 703. If I was lucky, I could get the cursor to move ~5cm every minute (most of the time it didn't move). I tried rebooting, and doing the 4-finger trick, but the issue persisted. Reflashed back to q2d14 and the touchpad works fine. I haven't been keeping up with things, so there's not a known incompatibility with the old kernels? Reflash again and test several full power cycles. ie no battery no ext power. The act of reflashing forces a calibrate to happen. There are no touchpad related changes in the new EC code. All of the touchpad driver changes are via the kernel. So if you have an old kernel you have the old touchpad driver. I'm not sure that testing on a B3 is worth much. I think A different touchpad firmware was in use then. -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: OLPC Hosting Application: Fedora on XO
Robert, It isn't clear (yet) if something gnomeish or xfce is best, given the target audience (G1G1 users, rather than kids). We'll see. Hackers are a different audience than most G1G1 users we've had; certainly xfce is fine for most of us. Only experimentation will tell if a more full fledged Gnome is feasible for RAM footprint reasons or not. But most of the point of this is to make installation really easy: to do that, we'd like a customized fedora spin that can fit in flash (co-resident with our usual software), so that installation will not require external media. Most G1G1 end users who get systems can't handle a long set of instructions such as your page outlines; by making a fedora spin, we can get the installation down to olpc-update fedora or some such one line command with in place installation. Sebastian has shown that we can make a spin that is small enough. Our other goal is, until nirvana arrives (praying it does) and the OLPC distro is a proper subset of fedora without any broken dependencies, that it be a fedora spin, so that what a user gets is exactly a version of fedora, rather than something that may have brokenness if various software is installed on top of the 8.2.0 release. It's too late in that release cycle to try to get to nirvana for 8.2.0, and is probably 9.1 fodder. This is for support reasons: we don't want to have to deal with thousands of support calls The discussion of this is taking place on the fedora-olpc-list at redhat com list. In any case, thanks for all your help! Best regards, - Jim On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 11:22 -0500, Robert Myers wrote: Sebastian, 4. Longer description : we're going to provide a Fedora-based : traditional linux desktop environment : for the XO. if we can, we'd like in allow : a parallel installation of this and sugar. Sorry, but I don't understand the need for this repository. XFCE is already in common use to provide a more traditional windowing desktop for the XO. Its use is covered on the Wiki http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Xfce;. XFCE seems to be a good fit for the XO, full featured enough to support most traditional applications, conventional enough to suit the desire for a non-Sugar solution, and light enough to install easily. Gnome or KDE seem like too much, and the other lightweight environments look a little strange to me. The XFCE page suffers from some poor editing, competing solutions, and a failure of the instructions to keep up with changes on the XO, but that would seem to be able to be handled there. Bob ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Loading the OSS modules on the XO
I thought there was a library/shim/kernel option that allowed us to emulate OSS on ALSA? In any case, anything not using ALSA at this date really should get updated to ALSA - Jim On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 10:43 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: shivaprasad wrote: Its OK if I need to have root permissions only once right? I can change the yes. /etc/modules/ once during installation of the activity and need not load the module every time I run the activity. I am new programming on Linux and wasnt sure what to change to make the XO load the oss module on startup. So my plan is if I know how to make the XO load the oss modules I can do this in a script and run the script during installation of the activity so that when I launch the activity I would not need root permission.Could you please tell me how to change /etc/modules to load oss modules on startup? the file /etc/modules that erik mentioned isn't used on the XO, but there's a similar mechanism in place. create a new file /etc/sysconfig/modules, with a name that ends in .modules, like oss.modules. that file should be an executable shell script which will load the modules you want. see the existing olpc-1.modules file in that directory as an example, but probably all you need is a single modprobe snd-pcm-oss command. this should cause your module to be installed when the XO boots. paul Thanks Shivaprasad On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 6:54 PM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 06:16:58PM +0530, shivaprasad javali wrote: Hi, I am porting a application to the XO. It uses the OSS sound Api's to render sound. I found that the oss modules are not loaded on the xo by default. I was able to load the oss modules by running modprobe snd-pcm-oss which created the /dev/dsp and other device files required by the oss modules and was able to run my application on the XO. But the problem is every time I reboot the XO I will have to run the commands and load the oss modules. Is there any way I can tell the XO to always load the oss modules? Even if I have a script to run the commands on launching the application these commands would require super user privileges which I wont have when I launch the application from the activity bar. Any Ideas? Without root access, your activity will have difficulty modifying /etc/modules to enable autoloading the snd-pcm-oss module at boot. I am unsure if there is any way around this issue unless the deployment scope for your activity is a set of machines on which you have root access. Erik part 2 text/plain 129 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel =- paul fox, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: jackd on OLPC?
On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 17:42 +0100, victor wrote: Ah. Well, since it is there, then I might as well test it and then report my findings. Jack is seen as more specialised/pro than pulseaudio by the linux audio guys. Yup. But jackd is local machine only, and we want to be able to do things on OLPC exploiting network transparency (which pulseaudio is...). - Jim Regards Victor - Original Message - From: Daniel Drake [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: victor [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 5:33 PM Subject: Re: jackd on OLPC? On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 16:54 +0100, victor wrote: Noting a couple of lines for jackuser group in limits.conf made me search around and I found that libjack jackd are present in the laptop system. Can't comment on future plans, but I can explain the present: portaudio is pulled in through espeak, which we require. We don't really want or use portaudio, but that's the way it is. In F9, portaudio grew a dependency on jack, so we get that too. In other words, these things are only in our builds unintentionally. Daniel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] not up for Friday meeting about the XS
On Fri, 2008-08-08 at 08:48 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 3:48 AM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm OK with reschedule. How about next week at the same time? Hope you feel better soon. Same here. Postpone 7 days? Can Jim make it too next week? I think so. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: Evince (was Re: New joyride build 2222)
On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 18:28 -0400, Chris Marshall wrote: S Page wrote: Mikus Grinbergs wrote: Noticed that sugar-evince 2.20.1.1-3.olpc3 brought in poppler 0.6.2-5.olpc3, which is 3 MB. I think 8.1.0 and 8.1.1 have the same dependency (on poppler-0.6.2.4-olpc2). Evince needs Poppler to render PDFs. http://live.gnome.org/Evince/SupportedDocumentFormats Speaking of Evince, does Read support DjVu in 8.2.0? http://djvu.org/docs/ has some test files. http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2448 says yes, but http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6223 and http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6426 suggest no. I don't care, except that http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image_file_formats presents DjVu as OLPC's preferred e-book file format. I have to vote that I do care. DjVu is much more efficiently rendered at high resolution being designed for that purpose. In fact, DjVu format is efficient enough that often a direct scan of a document at 300dpi compressed to DjVu format is smaller and faster displayed than a PDF file of the same document. I believe some timings were reported in a previous thread around the bug ticket: #6223. A look at the ticket indicates it has been pushed back to 9.1.0. --Chris Things not in trac tend to get forgotten Is it in trac? If so, what bug? - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Remarks on the Work of Sugar
On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 12:28 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote: I wouldn't encourage http :-) I actively discourage http It conceptually mixes layering in a horrific fashion... HTTP does have some major features: in particular, that the default behavior allowing extensions is to ignore what you don't understand, which in a network environment, is the correct default (since you can't upgrade both ends of the connection at once). But it has the opposite problem (which has consequences about 1/10'th as often); no good way to require the other end understand messages that are not upward compatible... - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: For review: NAND out of space patch.
Ah, I like this idea better than the previous I've heard; if we can uninstall software or cleanup the journal with human intervention, that would be good I'm nervous about automatic cleanup schemes - Jim On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 13:20 -0400, Erik Garrison wrote: On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 12:53:37PM -0300, John Watlington wrote: On Jul 22, 2008, at 12:06 PM, Chris Ball wrote: Hi, Can you walk me through the exact steps that the user would experience if this script was installed? They wouldn't see anything different, but Journal entries corresponding to files we chose to delete wouldn't resume properly. In terms of which files, I think the oldest (or maybe LRU as they say in caches) would be better than the largest. Can we do that (e.g. delete oldest then iterate until x MBs is free)? I disagree; I don't think we're filling up with small Write or Paint documents, my intuition is that we're filling up with recent large downloads and movies. In the case where the problem is a huge download the user just made, your scheme results in deleting *everything*. Since we disagree, maybe best to wait until we have some disk-full images back from the field so that we can see what used up all the space, before deciding the algorithm. I'm getting three images right now. One of the machines booted, but wouldn't allow any activities to launch (which since you can't log in on vttys kinda locks down the machine). But I did notice a large number of non-standard activities (e.g. Doom). This sounds familiar. I think several teachers from Uruguay have mentioned on the Sur list that their students love to download software and have filled up their storage space. I'll try to find the reference. I have also heard the same from a contractor in Uruguay who has been involved in distribution (via #olpc-ayuda). Today I am going to test a solution in which we union-mount a tmpfs over top of a full root filesystem (which is effectively read-only). This should allow us to boot, but obviously any changes made to the tmpfs during the session will be lost. Provided we can boot in this scheme, we should immediately open a dialogue which asks the user to select Activities to delete. I think that such a 'recovery-mode' is ultimately the best we're going to do to help resolve this issue. We must provide students a way to manage their systems, and to do so even in a NAND-full state, or the solution to NAND-full will continue to be centralized and costly. If it is not something that we ship immediately to help resolve the issue in Uruguay, the current situation demonstrates that it is a worthwhile target for future releasese. Erik ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: For review: NAND out of space patch.
The simplest UI would be a size-sorted view of the journal. - Jim On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 14:26 -0400, Erik Garrison wrote: On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 01:58:29PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: jim wrote: Ah, I like this idea better than the previous I've heard; if we can uninstall software or cleanup the journal with human intervention, that would be good I'm nervous about automatic cleanup schemes i agree that erik's proposal sounds attractive, since we'd have most or all of the real UI available to assist in presenting the user's choices. but even if this scheme doesn't pan out, i still think we could do something interesting by inserting a hook (via a patch) into .xsession which lets us run something non-sugary (but still interactive) prior to full startup. Right. The recovery-mode ui can be anything. I'm going to work on the unionfs side of things. Is there anyone available to work on the recovery-mode ui interface? Rough plan: On registering a full system at boot, we union-mount tmpfs over top of the root filesystem (mounted read-only). We set a flag which tells olpc-session or Sugar to boot a graphical interface to a cleanup utility. We additionally mount the root fs at some location read-write so that we can delete files from it, and point the cleanup utility at this location. Erik ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: NAND out of space crash
There are two issues here that we should be sure to not intertwingle: 1) whatever behavior Sugar may have when low/out of space, during operation, or at boot time. 2) JFFS2's behavior when the file system is almost full. When it gets almost full, it can spend all its time trying to garbage collect, and you can lose completely (the system sort of gets the slows, and grinds to a halt). As to 2), there are patches done by Nokia (deployed on the N800 and similar devices) that reserve some extra space and report out of space before the system gets the slows. These are in Dave's incoming queue to merge into JFFS2 the last I heard. I don't know if he's merged them. - Jim On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 13:45 -0300, John Watlington wrote: I think this is a huge problem. Here in Uruguay they are seeing a flood of machines with this problem, and it will only get worse over time (and we will encounter this in every other deployment soon.) They desperately need a fix... wad On Jul 21, 2008, at 12:55 PM, Greg Smith wrote: Hi All, I found http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7125 which looks like a good place to track this problem. I marked it blocker for 8.2.0. Here's what I think we need: - Sugar GUI always starts, no matter how much space is free on the NAND. - If Sugar starts and you are low on space (exact size tbd) then we should alert the user to start clearing space in the journal. I think Eben will work on the second part. Can someone solve the first part? Suggested steps would be to propose a solution, get buy in, code it and check it in. I shouldn't have mentioned partitioning :-( All I meant was that we cannot solve this on upgrade by whacking all user data. Thanks, Greg S Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:39:04 -0400 From: Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: NAND out of space crash (was Display warnings in sugar (Emiliano Pastorino)) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 11:47:21AM -0400, Greg Smith wrote: Hi All, Emiliano has an elegant workaround but crashing the XO on NAND full (to un-recoverable state?) is a heinous bug that affects essentially all users. If someone has the bug ID handy can you send it out and mark it a blocker for 8.2.0 (priority = blocker and keyword includes blocks: 8.2.0)? Can I get a design proposal (no re-partitioning please!), scoping and lead engineer on it ASAP? If you have to stop working on something else to do this, let me know what will drop and I'll help weigh the consequences. My impression is that the long-term benefits of partitioning mean that it's worthwhile to devote effort to it. Are we not going to work on partitioning in the future? In addition to a more solid solution to the NAND fillup issue, we get the opportunity to improve system performance and upgrade procedures. Partitioning will allow us to test out LZO data compression for the XO's filesystems (excluding /boot and /security). We would expect a significant i/o performance boost from the use of LZO. Additionally, partitioning would improve OFW-level system updates (e.g. copy- nand) by making it far simpler for the update procedure to leave user data intact. That said there are obviously a lot of troubles with partitioning. Updating an existing system to a partitioned one without mashing user data is a major issue. Erik ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: NAND out of space crash
On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 09:51 -0700, Deepak Saxena wrote: On Jul 21 2008, at 13:39, C. Scott Ananian was caught saying: 2) JFFS2's behavior when the file system is almost full. When it gets almost full, it can spend all its time trying to garbage collect, and you can lose completely (the system sort of gets the slows, and grinds to a halt). As to 2), there are patches done by Nokia (deployed on the N800 and similar devices) that reserve some extra space and report out of space before the system gets the slows. These are in Dave's incoming queue to merge into JFFS2 the last I heard. I don't know if he's merged them. These are less critical, IMO. I have filled up NAND, and the slows are not debilitating. The issues above are. We should encourage Dave to fix this issue and the other known JFFS2 bugs (trac #6480, for instance) -- or get dsaxena to do so -- for 9.1. #6480 is fixed as of yesterday, should be in next joyride. I'll be re-doing Nokia's patches so that they go upstream if we still want them after 8.2 is out; however, I don't think the approach used by them actually helps us. We already have a very limited amount of storage space and reserving space for the root user just reduces what the end user can actually use. IIRC, the issue is the GC runs more and more often the closer to full you run. By reserving some space, you avoid the performance cliff. Since we expect to be running nearly full most of the time, it would seem to me avoiding this cliff is important. I think analyzing performance of non-JFFS2 file systems and picking a replacement should be a high-priority item for 9.1 update. No argument here - Jim ~Deepak -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: gnome-vfs2 / GConf2 / dbus
In general, gnome is moving away from Bonobo/Orbit toward dbus based messaging. - Jim On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 20:09 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 7:59 PM, Daniel Drake [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 13:28 -0400, Jim Gettys wrote: The bonobo-activation-server likes to chew up 40mb (of RAM), for doing almost nothing. ORBit doesn't appear to depend on any bonobo components. And we've successfully kicked bonobo out of the build. It's bonobo that depends on ORBit, I guess the fear here is that, as bonobo, GConf might use a lot of memory because of ORBit. It should not be hard to measure. Marco -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: gnome-vfs2 / GConf2 / dbus
On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 20:25 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 8:16 PM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In general, gnome is moving away from Bonobo/Orbit toward dbus based messaging. Yeah, there is no plan yet (that I know of) to replace GConf with something dbus based though :( Dunno current plans... There does seem to be code http://developer.imendio.com/projects/misc/gconf-dbus - Jim Marco -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Code name for 9.1.0
Absence of dissent does not mean agreement. It often means some people are just tired of the topic and will find the topic frustrating to chime in on; I know this to be true for some of us. I must say I'm tired of us changing our naming scheme again and again. We've gone from build numbers, to ship.x, to update.x, to the current numbering scheme. I'm not convinced that having a code name in addition to a numbering scheme adds much, though I have little objection to the particular scheme being proposed here. But I'd like to defer this discussion/decision until we've figured out who will be doing the release job for 9.1.0; that person's opinion should weigh more than most in the discussion. Hopefully we'll get this settled on in the next week or two. Them that does, has the most say, in my book - Jim On Tue, 2008-07-15 at 13:11 -0600, Jameson Chema Quinn wrote: Well, actually, the mango suggestion was made originally as a tree, not a fruit - as the tree Freire learned to read underneath. Obviously the concept of learning under a tree exists in many cultures around the world, and there are several trees that would work for this: apple (newton), bodhi/banyan/fig/pipal/Ashvastha (buddha), juniper (navajo), buttonwood (wall street), blossoming pear (african-american - from their eyes were watching god), mulberry (china/silk), baobab, thorn tree I definitely sympathize with the general fruit and alphabetical is nice threads here. Verbs are good too. And the above list, even if we managed to triple it, would still be a little too thin to make such wordplay easy. But even if we decide against a list like the above, I would still advocate for starting with mango, and then going alphabetical later (as Ubuntu did). The Freire story is a good one, and mango is such a fun word to say. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Help! Summarizing the xulrunner situation in OLPC
Daniel, It is quiet possible we'll want to pick up gnomevfs2 as a basic library in a future release (think about the OLPCfs method of accessing the journal). We didn't want the old gnomevfs library since that pulled in the old bonobo horror as a dependency. I'm not familiar with libgnome, and therefore have no opinion there. - Jim On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 13:00 -0400, Daniel Drake wrote: On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 12:43 -0400, Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote: 3. These dependencies will be coming back someday in the upstream, when Mozilla makes these hard dependencies instead of soft dependencies. Are you saying that, in future, it will not be possible to compile a xulrunner without printing support? What about the libgnome/gnomevfs dependencies? If this analysis is correct, it forces us to answer some key questions. 1. Space. What are the real space requirements for the xulrunner dependencies? Do we have any hard numbers that we can analyze? Is it reasonable to carry all of the dependencies along in OLPC? How were the decisions made to leave out certain pieces of the xulrunner dependency chain, and can those decisions be revisited? So far, I don't think we've been considering space footprints for specific packages. Instead, we have been considering our OS build as a whole: we want to limit it to 300mb, and our F9 builds are currently 45mb overweight. http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7353 I recently modified OLPC-3 xulrunner to remove dependencies on libgnome and gnomevfs2. Once Dennis has had a chance to review my work to remove libgnome deps from other packages too, a huge dependency chain (including metacity, icon themes, and plenty more) will fall out of the build. Therefore it is quite important that OLPC's xulrunner continues to avoid it's dependency on libgnome. Daniel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Help! Summarizing the xulrunner situation in OLPC
On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 19:48 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 7:44 PM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Daniel, It is quiet possible we'll want to pick up gnomevfs2 as a basic library in a future release (think about the OLPCfs method of accessing the journal). We didn't want the old gnomevfs library since that pulled in the old bonobo horror as a dependency. I'm not familiar with libgnome, and therefore have no opinion there. I guess you mean gvfs. (gnome-vfs2 is the old one). libgnome is gradually being deprecated too afaik. ah, ok, I was confused. - Jim Marco -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: B4 motherboard question
You should definitely get a new system. We aren't set up to handle motherboards separately. And now we are in production, people should be much less shy about asking for developer machines in general; before production started we had limited numbers of prototypes, but this is not a concern and we have more machines allocated for developers than current demand. - Jim On Mon, 2008-07-14 at 10:37 -0400, Guylhem Aznar wrote: Hello I wouldn't necessarily want another machine - just a motherboard from say a machine that has been returned with a broken screen, or whatever, would be fine A fully working XO would be best used for someone who hasn't one yet IMHO. Anyway, I'll drop a message Thanks Guylhem ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: (another) WebKit port of Browse
Let me summarize where I think we are and/or should go and try to put this into some context: 0) good rendering onto our high resolution screen is very important to us; this is why we went with a Gecko based web browser in the first place. Before we moved to the development builds of gecko/xulrunner, we had terrible issues with many web site's rendering. I don't know whether or not WebKit supports scaling at this date, but it is a question well worth asking. This new version of Gecko etc. are slated for our next release and are in current development builds. What is WebKit's current capability? 1) memory usage is a very high concern to us. The recent work on FF/Gecko's memory consumption and leak plugging (as reported all over the web) is outstanding, and they should be commended for this work. This improvement should be reflected in the current development build. And this has a major impact on our usability. 2) the lack of a certificate UI has hampered our Browse usage primarily in G1G1 developed world situations: this tells me while it is of concern, it's not as high priority as some other issues might be, certainly lower than 0) or 1). This could be satisfied by adding UI to browse, I believe. 3) Sayamindu has made good progress toward swapping out Matchbox in favor of a conventional window manager; once this is complete, we can satisfy 2) at worst, by those who need it installing a standard Firefox; one could go up from there by using a Sugar theme, to XUL chrome modifications of arbitrary ambition; or installing your favorite web browser of choice. This work to replace Matchbox won't make this release, but I expect be planned on thereafter. 4) alternative browsers are always welcome; but, to make it as our default browser, it needs to: - address our rendering concerns for our screen. - have competitive memory performance - provide sharing features for classroom work (note that providing only an unmodified conventional browser won't currently have these facilities). Additional goodness would be to have a single HTML rendering engine for everything, to save flash space, and the certificate UI we're missing. I can also anticipate Javascript performance may become an issue as its use continues to increase. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: (another) WebKit port of Browse
Oh, and as Walter points out, journal integration is also important to us, and necessary in any replacement. Sometimes brain is not engaged. If we can build the OLPCfs stuff that Scott has come up with, this will help unmodified apps interoperate with the journal, but I suspect for something like browse, we'd want pretty full integration. - Jim On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 12:32 -0400, Jim Gettys wrote: Let me summarize where I think we are and/or should go and try to put this into some context: 0) good rendering onto our high resolution screen is very important to us; this is why we went with a Gecko based web browser in the first place. Before we moved to the development builds of gecko/xulrunner, we had terrible issues with many web site's rendering. I don't know whether or not WebKit supports scaling at this date, but it is a question well worth asking. This new version of Gecko etc. are slated for our next release and are in current development builds. What is WebKit's current capability? 1) memory usage is a very high concern to us. The recent work on FF/Gecko's memory consumption and leak plugging (as reported all over the web) is outstanding, and they should be commended for this work. This improvement should be reflected in the current development build. And this has a major impact on our usability. 2) the lack of a certificate UI has hampered our Browse usage primarily in G1G1 developed world situations: this tells me while it is of concern, it's not as high priority as some other issues might be, certainly lower than 0) or 1). This could be satisfied by adding UI to browse, I believe. 3) Sayamindu has made good progress toward swapping out Matchbox in favor of a conventional window manager; once this is complete, we can satisfy 2) at worst, by those who need it installing a standard Firefox; one could go up from there by using a Sugar theme, to XUL chrome modifications of arbitrary ambition; or installing your favorite web browser of choice. This work to replace Matchbox won't make this release, but I expect be planned on thereafter. 4) alternative browsers are always welcome; but, to make it as our default browser, it needs to: - address our rendering concerns for our screen. - have competitive memory performance - provide sharing features for classroom work (note that providing only an unmodified conventional browser won't currently have these facilities). Additional goodness would be to have a single HTML rendering engine for everything, to save flash space, and the certificate UI we're missing. I can also anticipate Javascript performance may become an issue as its use continues to increase. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: (another) WebKit port of Browse
On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 00:17 -0400, Mikus Grinbergs wrote: Not everyone likes tabbed browsing. That may be true - but what if the user needs to reference two (or more) separate pages of information. If while looking at one page he can't remember *exactly* what the other page said, he may want to switch between pages. What are the alternatives to tabbed browsing? [To me, it is more logical to select a tab created under my control, than to select from the previously-seen list as presented by the Browse 'Back' button. And to open several instances of the existing Activity seems wasteful.] Patches gratefully accepted. Note that due to memory usage, even tabs have their limits (though it may be the recent improvements in Gecko obviate this problem somewhat; it frees pixmap storage unused in finite time). Note the WebKit I would hope are now similarly motivated (competition is a wonderful thing ;-)). - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 8.2 Kernel status update
The other issue it would be nice to get fixed is the jffs2 full performance falling off the wall cliff, for which there is a patch that the Nokia folks have deployed. While in development we seldom run full, running full is likely the usual state in the field. Dave, have you had a chance to look at it? - Jim On Tue, 2008-07-01 at 22:40 -0700, Deepak Saxena wrote: Hi, I'm out of town in meetings all day tommorrow so won't make it to the software status meeting. From a kernel POV, the biggest bugs in 8.2 AFAIK are touchpad issues (7341) and wireless suspend resume issues (7303). Dilinger has a patch for the former that disables pen tablet mode that will hopefuly help with a lot of the issue and I believe Richard is testing it (I would do it now if I didn't have to jump on plane in 6 hours). Andrey from Cozybits fixed up the wifi issue and build 2097 contains the appropriate bits. The one major change I was hopeing to get into kernel for 8.2 is integrating intiramfs and kernel into one RPM but I think the probability of getting that done in next few days is not too high ATM. ~Deepak -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: fonts-thai-ttf has been abandoned!
This probably dates from when Behdad was helping us with Thai rendering. Behdad, do you remember? - Jim On Tue, 2008-07-01 at 17:52 -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote: We added a package named 'fonts-thai-ttf' to our builds a while ago for thai font support. However, no one here now remembers where this font came from, or where the upstream came from. Can someone familiar with thai support help out? Ideally we'd like to confirm the licensing and then grow a maintainer for this package in fedora. Thanks! --scott -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Inappropriate use of private meetings lists. (reply to).
On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 17:47 +0200, NoiseEHC wrote: 1. olpc games sets the reply-to Sounds like it should get fixed... 2. BTW this recommendation does not make my point wrong (eg that the current setting makes harder to keep conversations on the devel list) And screws many people who use reply to to get their mail sent back to their main mailbox - Jim Jim Gettys wrote: Here's mailman's recommendation about replyto... http://lists.laptop.org/admin/devel/?VARHELP=general/reply_goes_to_list - Jim On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 09:19 +0200, NoiseEHC wrote: There are top-down decisions being made by a few people that drive the direction of OLPC. These decisions are not waiting for consensus, and they are made by a small number of people. I don't believe this is going to change (at least not in the short term). I, personally, do not care who makes decisions, as long as he is smart and makes good decisions. The problem is that usually I am not notified of such decisions. For example, the move from 32 bit to 16 bit frame buffer just happened silently. One day people debated its merits on this list without reaching any conclusions. Some months later it was 16 bit. Nobody told it. A similar thing is that I am trying to get an answer to the question whether the XO image will be moved to LZO compression or not when we will be rebased to F9. The reason is that I am currently tuning the LZO decompression code and want to know whether this effort is moot or not. Most likely this was already decided by somebody, and frankly I am not qualified enough to debate this decision, I just want to know what it is. Note that I had to reply all to this message and then delete all recipients and then replace CC devel with TO devel. The reason is that this devel list is not set up that the reply-to would be the devel list, and if I do not delete others then the conversation often slips outside devel. See, even the main mailing list is configured wrong. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Inappropriate use of private meetings lists. (reply to).
On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 09:54 -0700, Carol Lerche wrote: I don't understand the argument that forcing Reply-to to be back to the list eradicates a list participant's ability to get the reply on their preferred email address. Presumably they replied to the list via this address. This doesn't follow; some people often use multiple mail accounts. The question is now: what options should we set? I'm not saying what the answer is, just explaining why it is set the way it is... - Jim By forcing Reply-to to the list address, all subscribers should receive the reply in the way they specified when they subscribed to it. What am I missing? 2008/7/2 Dennis Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Wednesday 02 July 2008, Jim Gettys wrote: Here's mailman's recommendation about replyto... http://lists.laptop.org/admin/devel/?VARHELP=general/reply_goes_to_list - Jim I personally really dislike being CC'd on lists im subscribed to I find it extremely poor netiquette of all the mailing lists im subscribed to OLPC's are the only ones that dont set replyto the list. It and the huge amount of cross posting on OLPC lists really irritate me. its a very standard convention to keep list mail on lists. if you need to take something off list then you should go through the steps needed to do so. i personally always use the reply to list option my client gives me. When i get CC'd i dont get the mailman email only the cc'd one which goes to different folders where i might not see the mail for awhile. It outright breaks my procmail recipes, because mailman correctly doesnt send me a duplicate email. I filter my list mail based on the X-BeenThere: header -- Dennis Gilmore ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck -- George Carlin ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Olpc3 vs Joyride
Dennis: OLPC csound is an *exact* formal *subset* of full csound-5 built from the same sources as csound-5. It gets rid of tk/tcl dependency we don't want to carry in csound - Jim On Sun, 2008-06-29 at 17:25 -0500, Dennis Gilmore wrote: On Sunday 29 June 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote: Am 30.06.2008 um 00:05 schrieb Dennis Gilmore: On Sunday 29 June 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote: I reanimated my script that shows differences between the latest joyride and candidate builds: http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/olpc3-joyride.html ... and in particular added a section to easily see what packages are in olpc3 and not in joyride, and vice versa. There are not only differences in package versions, but also in which packages are in. I wondered, for example, why csound is missing from joyride ... a second copy of csound landed in fedora as olpcsound. it is built specifically for olpc and is in joyride. If it was named csound-olpc that would have been more obvious ... - Bert - Yes, first i heard of it was when i was asked to switch out csound and csound- python for olpcsound. Had i been asked before hand i could have suggested a way that the csound spec could have produced csound csound-python and csound- olpc. but what is done is done. I personally don't like anything being called olpc-foo, I think we should write code that is useful outside of OLPC, useful to the whole world. In which case the naming is really a poor choice. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Olpc3 vs Joyride
I think Victor would be very happy to have a single spec file that covers both the subset and full csound builds - Jim On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 09:53 -0500, Dennis Gilmore wrote: On Monday 30 June 2008, Jim Gettys wrote: Dennis: OLPC csound is an *exact* formal *subset* of full csound-5 built from the same sources as csound-5. It gets rid of tk/tcl dependency we don't want to carry in csound - Jim There are much better ways to achieve that goal. than what was done. but its too late now. I'm working on defining some macros in totem right now so we can always take the latest fedora spec, change some 0's to 1's and build a much more minimalistic totem that's suitable for us. What is done is done now. On Sun, 2008-06-29 at 17:25 -0500, Dennis Gilmore wrote: On Sunday 29 June 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote: Am 30.06.2008 um 00:05 schrieb Dennis Gilmore: On Sunday 29 June 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote: I reanimated my script that shows differences between the latest joyride and candidate builds: http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/olpc3-joyride.html ... and in particular added a section to easily see what packages are in olpc3 and not in joyride, and vice versa. There are not only differences in package versions, but also in which packages are in. I wondered, for example, why csound is missing from joyride ... a second copy of csound landed in fedora as olpcsound. it is built specifically for olpc and is in joyride. If it was named csound-olpc that would have been more obvious ... - Bert - Yes, first i heard of it was when i was asked to switch out csound and csound- python for olpcsound. Had i been asked before hand i could have suggested a way that the csound spec could have produced csound csound-python and csound- olpc. but what is done is done. I personally don't like anything being called olpc-foo, I think we should write code that is useful outside of OLPC, useful to the whole world. In which case the naming is really a poor choice. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository
Albert, There are many communities out there; some of which have used/use even closed source tools for developing free code. That does not make the code itself any less free. Using other tools may have other costs, in particular a higher entry cost for contributors, but it doesn't make the resulting software less free. - Jim On Thu, 2008-06-26 at 16:13 -0400, Albert Cahalan wrote: On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 1:38 PM, Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Am 26.06.2008 um 10:53 schrieb Albert Cahalan: This idea of applying patch collections is disturbing. It reminds me of the terrible mess that Minix was back in 1991, when the license permitted people to share patches but not code with the patches applied. Here you have a technical limit instead of a legal one, but I expect that the result is not much different. I got that. The fundamental problem is the patch collection. There is a problem even if you can distribute the result. Patches need to be applied. If you do that, and distribute a blob, then we're back to the blob problem. If you don't do that, then we have the Minix problem. I don't actually disagree with that. Smalltalk is an excellent personal computing environment (well, you would expect that from the guys who largely invented personal computing). It does not fare nearly as well for distributed, collaborative development (although the Squeak community has developed work-arounds, like Monticello, a nice distributed SCM). But: Why should these shortcomings in development style be a reason to not include it in a Linux distribution? It's not like if every other app is well-coded or well-maintained. The very foundation of the Linux development community (which Squeak developers are asking to be accepted by) includes an expectation that software can be handled in certain ways. Any person can browse the source, with the worst case being that one must download an archive file or perform a check-out. (better: web git/cvs/svn access) Any person can use external tools, which themselves are likewise open, to view/edit/save/create/share the source. (better: those tools are standard, like emacs/gimp/audacity) We also expect a certain degree of openness (not a lot of non-public communication) and a certain degree of modularity (parts are interchangable across similar projects and versions, allowing distributions to mix and match). ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Running regular X11 apps
There are ways we can implement different behavior for different windows (for example the maximus approach could be extended to do so). The problem is, how do we know which windows should be displayed fullscreen (say the firefox or the gedit one) and which not (the gimp)? afaik there is no window hint which could help us there... Also note that Metacity is reputed to be a decent code base to work in; a simple modification isn't unreasonable - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] Running regular X11 apps
On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 11:19 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: There are ways we can implement different behavior for different windows (for example the maximus approach could be extended to do so). The problem is, how do we know which windows should be displayed fullscreen (say the firefox or the gedit one) and which not (the gimp)? afaik there is no window hint which could help us there... There are ICCCM/EWMH hints to request full screen behavior, already implemented by window managers: e.g. totem or other video players use these routinely. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository
to the real matter at hand: Note the following: squeak is actually a several part system: The VM (virtual machine), which is compiled using a C compiler and exquisitely examined regularly for performance reasons, and recompiled with some regularity with your favorite C compiler. As I understand it, Squeak generates this C code itself. This VM interprets the image file, and so this C code of the VM can and is regularly examined, as Yoshiki points out, and for which the code can be decompiled by tools and examined. In fact, the binary image is routinely decompiled whenever debugging is done in Squeak. So as Yoshiki points out, it is actually feasible to complete this loop and verify the binary in the image file has the same result; external programs (have) exist(ed) to do so, in Yoshiki's example, in Squeak. In this case, the Thompson attack seems unlikely; having Squeak able to recognize you are compiling a program intended to decompile an image seems pretty far-fetched to me (it isn't the same as a compiler recognizing it is compiling itself). - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: How USB's are enumerated on the XO
While in theory, USB devices can/should send serial numbers, that part of the spec is honored mostly by it's absence (due to cost). As John said, unfortunately, with USB you have to go down to the device and see if they have something usable to distinguish devices. - Jim On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 14:07 -0400, John Watlington wrote: My experience is that you have to find a USB device parameter (serial number, MAC address, etc.) that is different between the two USB devices for this to ever work reliably. wad On Jun 23, 2008, at 10:37 AM, shivaprasad javali wrote: I was trying to use the port no to which the usb device is connected to differentiate between two usb devices of the same type connected in my application. For that I wanted the variant field between the two usb devices so that I can uniquely identify them. P.S: The output of lshal -m wasnt of much help for me. Thanks Shivaprasad On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 7:47 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2008/6/23 shivaprasad javali [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hi, I have a usb device to be used with my application which does not have any unique serial no. I noticed that when I connect two such devices to the XO , In the /proc/bus/usb/devices file the Bus for the two remains the same but the port no is different for the two. When I connect the same two devices to a normal machine running fedora core 7, Its the Bus that changes for the two and the port no remains the same. The XO that I have is relatively old. So I wanted to know whether this is what is expected on the XO or Is it different on the later versions of the XO. I didn't quite understood what you are trying to do, but something that may help you is to plug and unplug the usb sticks while lshal -m is running. That may tell you something interesting. Good luck, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository
My point is somewhat different: the only way out of the compilation trust trap is another compiler. Unless someone has done this for gcc, it has the identical problem, and there are many possible upstream attacks. I see no reason (probably less) to trust the chain of trust for gcc than I do Squeak, as the rewards of attacking gcc are so much higher. So to what standards should one hold squeak vs. gcc? - Jim On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 15:52 -0300, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote: Frank Ch. Eigler wrote on Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:57:52 -0400 On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 02:50:59PM -0400, Jim Gettys wrote: Plus it requires them (and users) to run the tools embedded into the possibly suspect image in order to describe itself. Do you see how there could be a trust problem there? Note this is no different than any time you use a compiler binary provided by someone else... The attack is just as complete... http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html If that's the best attempt to reassure etoys users/packagers, no wonder the debian people are balking. The Thompson Trojan is a noteworthy idea, but surely you see the wholly different degree of paranoia we're talking about when we're asked to trust a decades-old virtual machine image as compared to a bootstrappable system. I think Jim's point is valid - you have to consider very carefully every link in your web of trust and understand just how complex it is if you want a realistic notion of security. And you have to be clear about your needs. As an extreme example: most x86 processors currently have enough spare transistors to easily hide an attack similar to the one described in the cited paper. I don't think anybody here would spend even a single second worrying about Intel or AMD, right? But a person in a country that might go to war with the USA might have to think about it. Squeak, and Smalltalk in general, represents the opposite extreme in that it was mostly developed in that 1970s hacker spirit that gave us SMTP and other equally secure systems. And here we run into a common problem in the Squeak community: there are those who can (easily, even) do something and there are those who feel it is a top priority to do that something, but hardly ever there is an overlap between the two groups. In the case of security most of the development effort is happening in the form of forks rather than changes to Squeak itself, so that doesn't help the problem we are discussing at all. One way to deal with weak links in a web of trust is to have more parallel links. If you have several tools with separate origins then an attack that depends on their cooperation will be very unlikely. A tool in Python that could investigate a Squeak image file, as has been suggested, would be an example of using parallel links. About the issue of sourceless objects, this is something that varies from image to image. If you start out from some standard image and use the paint tool to make a few drawings and open new workspaces and type some notes into them then your new image will be more problematic than the original. It is likely that with some effort you could have a usable image that contained absolutely no objects like this at all. Some other Smalltalks have this, which shows it isn't a technical problem. So we have two things that should be done: a tool in a language other than Smalltalk that can inspect Squeak images and an image which can be generated from the sources using that tool. Who will do it? I can't think of a name to suggest, which is the problem I mentioned above. -- Jecel ___ Its.an.education.project mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/its.an.education.project -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: restoring ov7670/cafe_ccic to previous state
Note that the blood sprinkling and goat entrails talking to the camera chip makes CAFE look good... We had to go to omnivision N times to get new incantations of register read/writes during the development of the driver. - Jim On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 14:24 -0700, Deepak Saxena wrote: On Jun 23 2008, at 17:58, Daniel Drake was caught saying: Hi, As you may have heard, olpc3 builds occasionally hang on boot during cafe_ccic/ov7670 initialization. Erik and myself tracked down the problem to this upstream commit, which has never been shipped in an olpc stream before olpc3: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff_plain;h=6d77444 On boots where the bug appears, the do..while loop added by the patch iterates indefinitely. Jon Corbet is looking into the problem, but I feel that we should revert the driver to the update1 state for the time being. We should be starting to stabilise olpc3. I agree. I'll pull your commits into master and testing and hopefuly we'll see a more stable fix in time for 8.2 (though my experience so far with the CAFE chip makes me not very optimistic). ~Deepak -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository
On Sat, 2008-06-21 at 08:47 -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote: Plus it requires them (and users) to run the tools embedded into the possibly suspect image in order to describe itself. Do you see how there could be a trust problem there? Note this is no different than any time you use a compiler binary provided by someone else... The attack is just as complete... http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
RE: Upgrade G1G1 using autoreinstallation method
One of the AP's (or some other machine), will have to be configured to dchp. - Jim On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 07:10 +1000, David Leeming wrote: Thanks - solved. It's all there on the wiki, yes (blush). We have a lot of time pressures imposed by the political realities here, with 20+ countries each with their own government and process to go through, etc. I do appreciate your help! Do you also know about access points, it was stressed at the Countries meeting in Boston that 30+ XOs in one classroom do not collaborate very efficiently and the preferred method is to use an AP to enable collaboration/sharing in the classroom, even if there is no Internet access. We have had some D-Link DWL2100 APs sent to us for this purpose and what happens is that if there is no Internet connection the XOs do not associate themselves persistently with the APs but hang up and go looking for the mesh. Do you know anything about that? David Leeming -Original Message- From: Bert Freudenberg [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, 12 June 2008 7:28 p.m. To: David Leeming Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Upgrade G1G1 using autoreinstallation method On 12.06.2008, at 05:53, David Leeming wrote: How can I upgrade G1G1 XO-1s using the auto-reinstallation method with a flash drive? We have 100 to update here in PNG and it is impossible to use olpc-update as the connectivity is so poor. We have a flash drive with the new image 703 on it, and I successfully updated a B4. But when I try a G1G1 laptop, even with pressing the game keys it just boots normally without updating. I know I have some gaps in my knowledge regarding the keys and security for the G1G1 laptops, but unfortunately I need a quick answer. Much appreciate any help. Make sure it is the signed build (called 703 not update.1-703), and remember you need an activity pack, too. See here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Secure_Upgrade - Bert - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Need advice to upgrade
My memory is that you may have one of the two known access point types with which we have problems, due to the chip/firmware used in that access point (note the pre-N designation). Michailis will know for sure, and it's probably recorded in our Trac system. Due to the very small population of those routers, (if my memory is indeed correct) we're unlikely to explicitly try to fix it. - Jim On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 10:09 +0200, NoiseEHC wrote: Hello, I have just received my XO via the Developers Program. The machine is working nicely, but there is a problem connecting to my wireless router (Belkin Pre-N F5D8230-4) which uses WPA-PSK with AES encription. The XO just asks for the password over and over again. The strange thing that connecting did succeed several days ago so I could request a developer key but since then nothing... (Today I have switched to channel 11 from channel AUTO but no effect.) 1. So my question is: do I need to upgade to some more recent FW/build? Is it a known problem with build 656 (stream ship.2) which I have? Normally I would not spam the devel list with this support request but I have some more questions: 2. I could not find anywhere what the LEDs do on the XO. It can be that I am just stupid or blind but there is an option that it was so evident for every 1CC employee that the explanation was missed somehow. The only thing that I could find is this: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Drawing75c1.jpg I can deduce all the LEDs' meaning except the leftmost two: a. The lollipop LED is Wireless acquisition. What exactly does it mean? b. The tie-fighter LED is Wireless activity. Is it send or receive or both? Is it the wireless chip or the TCP/IP stack or what? 3. Some time ago cscott told me how to kill stuff if I want to measure speed. telinit 3 ifconfig msh0 down ifconfig eth0 down After that the lollipop and tie-figher are both blinking randomly (and I got msh0: link becomes ready message to the console). Does it still switches off things? If not what should I use? 4. How is the rebasing on FC9 is going? I am just asking because sooner or later I will finish the Geode docu and will start to develop drivers. Since I am not a Linux guru, I could not setup my FC7 VirtualPC image to compile the kernel, I was able only to write kernel modules with FC8. So if it is possible, I would avoid fighting the kernel build process on FC6 or FC7 and so I would like to know what to expect? 5. What image should I upgrade to? What is that faster build? I currently only using the text-mode console so it is not a problem for me if no activity works or something like that (if the wireless works). Thank you! ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Thin firmware + driver soft AP support development release
Cool! Great stuff... - Jim On Thu, 2008-06-05 at 16:48 -0700, Luis Carlos Cobo wrote: Hi all, We are happy to announce a new release of libertas firmware + driver that supports hostapd on the xo. The release is composed of: Firmware: http://dev.laptop.org/pub/firmware/libertas/thinfirm Driver: git clone git://dev.laptop.org/users/javier/libertastf.git HOW_TOs: - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Libertas_Thinfirmware_HOWTO - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_as_AP Please send all feedback to this list cc'ing luisca or javier AT cozybit.com Cheers, The friendly folks at cozybit -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: what about having network connections inhibit sleep?
On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 08:32 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just attempted to do an upgrade of one of my machines, and I ran into the problem that if I just kicked off the upgrade and let it sit, it went to sleep in the middle and died. This specific issue was fixed quite a while ago, IIRC. what do people think about the idea of making the existance of established TCP connections inhibit sleep? Seems brutal. unfortunantly I don't know exactly what build was on this machine (I loaned it out to a project at USC and they re-imaged it) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO-2 software plans
Bert... Part of the problem is the X driver model is pretty broken, causing much more to be done in software than should be necessary; and it isn't clear we're even using X efficiently at the moment... The driver stuff is getting fixed (in general in X: this is the EXA/DRI2 work); profiling of our entire software stack is in order to see where our real problems are at the moment. - Jim On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 19:58 +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote: On 23.05.2008, at 19:38, Jordan Crouse wrote: On 23/05/08 18:00 +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote: /me wants a graphics accelerator. Minor nitpick - you _have_ a graphics accelerator. What you really want is a 3D graphics engine. Be sure to keep the distinction seperate; lots of embedded processors have 2D accelerators, fewer have 3D capabilities. I actually didn't necessarily mean 3D. Just something that's fast enough for full-screen panning/zooming/rotating/compositing operations would do nicely. But perhaps that only comes in 3D variants nowadays ... - Bert - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Release process
for a place equivalent to 'unstable' which is less controlled: an easy place for developers to distribute their latest stuff which is expected to work but might not. I've also been pushing for new features to land first on 'experimental' equivalent branches: Dennis' FC9 is a good example here. It's known not to work yet, but we need to be able to distribute the work-in-progress in order to more efficiently help push it to completion, and to better track dependent packages (like sugar). It may be worthwhile naming our branches to make these equivalencies clear. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] [sugar] OLPC's bizarre behaviors
Note that we *cannot* share much of the information about the possible alternatives we are examining for Gen-2 hardware until decisions are final; it is the basis of serious negotiations among competing parties, under non-disclosure agreements. The best we can do is share the conceptual ideas, both because many of you may have good ideas to contribute, and that people having some idea of direction is essential; this is essential both for developers and our primary purchasers, governments and NGO's. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] [sugar] OLPC's bizarre behaviors
Martin has a good point: we're still in the phase of basic things like processor selection. And one of the really major questions is what touch technology to use; Mary Lou tells me there are many different technologies out there at the moment; we'll have to make another big decision there at some point. - Jim On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 09:49 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 2:18 AM, Alex Belits [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Then the announcement should be: Don't take it so seriously. It's a vision set of mockups, and the different technical aspects of how to get there will be fleshed out in time and discussed in [EMAIL PROTECTED] And when I say fleshed out I mean - you'll see us exploring the alternatives, and figuring out what the best path is. So keep your ears open, and be ready to jump into the fray when it gets interesting (if you are keen to help with XO-2, that is). For the time being, XO-2 is far, far away. I tend to not care about things I can't put into action right now :-) -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO-2 software plans
On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 17:17 -0700, Alex Belits wrote: Jim Gettys wrote: Bert... Part of the problem is the X driver model is pretty broken, causing much more to be done in software than should be necessary; and it isn't clear we're even using X efficiently at the moment... The driver stuff is getting fixed (in general in X: this is the EXA/DRI2 work); profiling of our entire software stack is in order to see where our real problems are at the moment. EXA? DRI2? Don't you end up using Cairo through GTK as the main layer that almost everything goes through, so everything below has any importance only as long as Cairo uses it efficiently? You can abuse Cairo, rather than use it. And we use it sometimes in ways other than strictly through GTK+: e.g. the canvas. Profiling is in order. Also, note I was replying to Bert Freudenberg, one of the Squeak/etoys folks. They don't go through the GTK/cairo stack, except for the activity decoration. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Turkish keyboard layout
On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 20:38 +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote: On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 10:25 AM, Kim Quirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We are trying to finalize the Turkish keyboard and I would like to get any last minute opinions or thoughts. A number of people have already provided their input -- THANKS! Please see the updated Q keyboard layout for Turkey: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Turkish_Keyboard If anyone can provide the xkb file, that would be great! We could also use some help with Turkish translations. Thanks Gary for catching the missing 'V' in the earlier version of the Q keyboard. Symbol file attached. The Manufacturing data page shows that for the Turkish machines, the KL tag should be set to us,tr. Do we need this ? From what I understand, the KL tag being set to tr only should do the trick. I'm not sure about the workflow for adding new keyboards - do I add the relevant changes to xkeyboard-config and start a build in Koji ? Thanks, Sayamindu I have memories of this working this way so that the layout switching works. Bernie? - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO-2
Depends on the processor selection, not yet done. I do recommend looking at Peter Hutterer's videos on YouTube (search for mpx). That shows the practicality of touch base and multi-user based interfaces in Linux. - Jim On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 11:19 +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote: What are the software plans for the second-generation XO? - Bert - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO-2 software plans
On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 19:28 -0400, Andres Salomon wrote: If they put me in charge, I'd choose whichever CPU had the best performance, lowest power consumption, and lowest price - regardless of architecture. Change the ordering: power consumption and price (closely related to integration these days), then performance. FP required... That's what drove us to the Geode. FP is essential for Linux software to just work: I lived on the StrongARM with the iPAQ, and (almost) all free software signal processing code (e.g. all multimedia code) is written presuming a floating point unit. At the time, there were many chips whose spec sheet claimed you could get FP, but when you went to the vendor, the FP unit didn't exist. It's now 3 years later, so we have a number of highly integrated chips with FP units that are pretty low power to choose from. Note that power consumption drives price through the entire chain; what kind/size of power generation you need, etc. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Microsoft
We already have the technology in place to automatically update the firmware as part of updating the laptop. We certainly don't what the support headaches of having to support multiple versions. - Jim On Thu, 2008-05-15 at 18:34 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Nick Negroponte has said : Open Firmware V2, the free and open source BIOS, is now capable of running Linux, Microsoft Windows XP and other operating systems, and was developed by Firmworks with support from OLPC. This will enable dual boot of OLPC XO laptops with Microsoft Windows XP in addition to the existing Fedora-based system and will become the standard BIOS/bootloader for all XO systems when completed. With this free BIOS, the XO-1 continues to be the most open laptop hardware currently available. This is totally different that we have been informed, the V2 version of the BIOS is able to run a double boot. Huge difference!!! Good or bad? Everyone has its own answer. Now the XOs are a more general tool, a broader range of happenings we will see. So... all the new 200,000 XOs that will come to Peru will come with this new V2 Bios. and the first 45,000 will be updated? Or we have to deal with a mixed enviroment? (no problem... just asking...) Best regards, Javier Rodriguez Lima, Peru ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Microsoft
On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 07:55 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: The price often quoted has been $7 for the SD card. Not sure where that number comes from. I recall that a $19 high-speed card was used in the original testing; at the time it was asserted that a standard-speed card was necessary. Prices keep falling for flash Seems plausible, given the difference of when; or people could be low-balling the price by looking at close-out prices on obsolete cards. If you don't have a high speed SD card, then the performance will suffer significantly; when running a high speed card, the (optimum) SD bandwidth performance approaches that of the internal NAND, but still with higher latency, and the details of file system layout make a huge difference on write performance. Some conventional file systems will crawl during write due to bad interactions with file system block sizes and the block size of the flash. - Jim I don't know that this is still the case. -walter On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 4:20 AM, John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So... all the new 200,000 XOs that will come to Peru will come with this new V2 Bios. and the first 45,000 will be updated? Or we have to deal with a mixed enviroment? (no problem... just asking...) Since the V2 firmware is only recently demo-able, not yet product quality, it's too early to tell when it will roll into the Quanta production line. Here's what I expect (which may be total fantasy). When each child's XO gets a new software update (probably the scheduled August update, suitably augmented by the in-country team), then along with the OS and Activities, they'll also get the latest OpenFirmware update. That firmware will include the capability to boot Windows, and have various other improvements. The capability to boot Windows does not include a copy of Windows itself. To find out about how and when that will be available, you'd have to talk to Microsoft. I hear each copy is $3 in some countries, and requires an SD card for more storage, that'll cost a few dollars also. So if Peru wanted it on every laptop, figure it'll cost US$1.4 million or so (200K x ($3 + $4)). Most of that cost is unavoidable hardware cost, unless MS slims down Windows to not need 1GB. It'd cost US$800K even if MS let everyone in the country pirate the OS. Doing so might well suit their purposes even better than charging $3 per copy, since they wouldn't be expected to provide any support for a stolen product, yet they would still be weaning kids away from Linux. John Gilmore (not an OLPC employee!) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Activities Portal: Proposal/suggestion
On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 23:56 +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote: Has anyone evaluated Remora (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Update:Remora) for this ? This is the software which powers addons.mozilla.org Cheers, Sayamindu It is clearly closest to what we need. Just haven't had the time to make it happen. If someone wants to go for it, please go ahead and try it; when you need access to install something (we have lots of bandwidth available), we'll be happy to help host it. - Jim On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 11:47 PM, Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please wikify this! :) There is a note about something like this at the end of the doc page which would be good to link: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Documentation http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_portal On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 5:08 PM, Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've been thinking about a better portal for downloading activities. I came up with some ideas, that I unfortunately don't have time to implement, but I would be happy to cheer someone on if they are inspired by this... It should be easy to upload an activity (specifically after the first time it has been done) - easier than uploading to the wiki. Activities should be categorised according to various properties, including: * The usual activity metadata from activity.info * Descriptions, as in http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities * Category, as in http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities * Age ranges the activity is suitable for? (Possibly a Mature category for Doom?) * Competencies required: Pre-reading, reading, writing, ... * Development maturity - like sourceforge: planning / pre-alpha / alpha / beta / stable * Collaborative? - yes / no / only (for activities like Connect or Chat that don't function as a single user activity) * Requires Internet? (e.g. Gmail) * Compatible with: Sugar / Glucose version or OLPC release or distro release... e.g. Sugar = 0.81 * Additional Dependencies (e.g. video-chat-activity needs extra RPMs not in a build) * Tags * Languages - pulled out of the .xo * Low power friendly? * Related activities (for suites or alternatives) * Screenshot Activities have Releases, which have status similar to the development maturity - Suitable for: development / QA / public release etc - and of course the downloadable bundle for that release... The site should be internationalisable using standard i18n tools. Bonus points for: * Publishing a text page like http://mock.laptop.org/repos/local.update1/XOS/index.html at predictable URLs that lists activities compatible with a given release, for easy downloading with scripts etc. * Publishing the source in public distributed revision control, to get easy contributions to code / templates * Deployment on a system that is monitored and actively sysadmined * Implementation in a Python web framework, to tap into the existing developer community :) * A catchy name... Future features: * Download statistics * Feedback to the author(s) Regards Morgan ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XP on OLPC - a contrarian view -- followup
On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 17:32 -0500, Robert Myers wrote: I just saw the Microsoft video of an XO running XP. In it the XO single boots from an 'insyde' BIOS. The MS guy says that XP doesn't fit on the flash, and is installed on an SD card. In this case, I'd guess the flash is just being used as a home for the BIOS. I can see why techs at MS did this to get a working prototype rather than having to wait for (or worse yet, contribute to) the OF V2 bootloader/BIOS. Some sources seem to say that early pilots of the XP XO will go out in this configuration. I really hope not, other than waving a few around to show that it can be done. OFW just booted XP in the last week. At a guess, Mitch has a couple months work to do to finish up, around things like ACPI. All the hard work is done, but as you know, bug hunting takes time. So ofw isn't ready in time for small initial pilots, but will be in time for large deployments. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Microsoft
On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 22:19 -0400, Albert Cahalan wrote: Windows-only is $3 extra. No, you can't fit Windows in 1 Gig of NAND. You get to pay the $7 for an SD card no matter what, to run Windows, for $10 total. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Microsoft
We could still boot Linux on a conventional BIOS, like on every other machine in the world. But then we give up fast suspend/resume, and distribution channel security. It seems to me that having Linux able to work better than Windows in fundamental ways is wise ;-). - Jim On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 12:08 +0200, Morgan Collett wrote: On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It would have been a lot simpler to have left OFW as it was, unable to support a Windows boot. But the point is now moot. No, actually that would have forced the Windows scenario to require a BIOS to be flashed in place of OFW. Then we lose the simple dual boot capability. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [support-gang] [sugar] Microsoft
On Thu, 2008-05-15 at 17:56 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's doubtful the free software community would do what Microsoft is demanding: asking the manufacturer to add 5-10% to the cost of the hardware to facilitate their efforts, nor would the free software community charge a $3.00 license fee for the use thereafter. I missed where the hardware was being changed and the cost going up to support this. what I read was that the boot firmware was being modified so that it could dual-boot into windows. please point me at the additional cost involved. Huh? We haven't changed the hardware Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] [support-gang] Microsoft
Ah, Windows needs more than 1GB to be useful; so to run Windows you need to pay extra for a SD card big enough to hold it. Doesn't add any cost for Linux, which fits nicely on the internal 1GB flash. - Jim On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 02:57 +0200, Simon Schampijer wrote: from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/technology/16laptop.html?_r=2oref=sloginoref=slogin Windows will add a bit to the price of the machines, about $3, the licensing fee Microsoft charges to some developing nations under a program called Unlimited Potential. For those nations that want dual-boot models, running both Windows and Linux, the extra hardware required will add another $7 or so to the cost of the machines, Mr. Negroponte said. Simon ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] OLPC priorities for Sugar in the August release
Has Firefox 3- B5 landed in Joyride? it is much faster starting up than the FF3B2 we had in the older systems (not to mention immensely better on memory usage). - Jim On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 14:57 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * More responsive UI - faster launch of activities Is the solution currently in joyride satisfactory for the August release? I use a recent Joyride on my G1G1. My average time to launch Browse (from the time I click in the F3 Activity Ring on the Browse icon, to the time when I can click on the entry field in Browse itself (so that I can start typing in an URL) is 25 seconds. If you could download the latest joyride, time startup and open a ticket that would be useful. 25 seconds are too much obviously. Please take both time on the very first start and after a reboot, xulrunner does component registration on the very first start which could be expensive Thanks. Marco ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: very simple datastore reimplementation
On Tue, 2008-05-13 at 18:56 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 2:15 AM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: FUSE is great, but... It means interoperability must be an explicit planned-in-advance action: Exactly. That's also my beef with the FUSE approach. The things we can do via FUSE we can do in the regular FS. So let's avoid FUSE, and use a *simple* convention on how to store things in the FS. Something roughly along the lines of: The reason for FUSE (specifically via the new Gnome replacement for the old, unloved, GnomeVFS) is to enable better interoperability with non-Sugar applications (for example, when we are able to do versioning), where relying strictly on some name munging does not get you to a good point. So a solution that only solves the debugging and interoperability to non-Sugar systems may be a step on a longer road. Please distinguish two threads here: where we need to go in the long term, and demands of the next release. Just because we can't necessarily reach our goals immediately and do something in the short term to solve the most pressing issue, doesn't mean the goals should not be defined and discussed. Often plans take time to execute and without them, you won't end up in a good end-point. And without such planning and a roadmap it is almost impossible attract contributors to the desired end-point. Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: VGA external on OLPC
Note there are USB display adapters (I have one in my hand as I write this); I'd love to see someone working on X.org drivers for it. There may even be some code kicking around that just needs TLC (though it's been long enough I'd have to dig up my contacts and check). If there is anyone interested out there, let me know. - Jim On Tue, 2008-05-13 at 08:29 +0200, Dietmar Stölting wrote: Hi all, after reading http://www.whyxo.com/2008/01/08/external-monitor-or-projector-for-the-xo/ I am sure, that it is possible to integrate a VGA external connector for the OLPC. On the Prototype-A motherboard layout there was such an external VGA connector, but on G1G1 version it is gone. I am a teacher and it would be very good for projection with a beamer or if your LCD is broken, to have such an external VGA connector. My problem is, that I have no schematic or a good photo of both sides of the Prototype-A motherboard. You can read in the Geode LX databook, that the Geode LX chip offers direct VGA support and connection. But some parts of the Prototype-A motherboard have gone in G1G1 version and so I cannot see, which direct lines from the processor has to be used for the direct VGA support. Pin 1,2,3 are used for the RGB signal on the G1G1 layout, and pin 13 seems to be Hsync and pin 14 Vsync. I do not know, what is the use of pin 4,9,12,15, because they are also wired on the G1G1 version. Pin 5, 6,7,8,10,11 are not connected on the G1G1 version and I think, that this was the same for the Prototype-A motherboard layout. But still there must be the lines direct to the Geode processor from the Prototype-A layout. They only have to be found (recogniced) via a good photo of the Prototype-A layout (both sides). Please send me your photos and rtell me, what you think about my idea, Dietmar PS: RGB lines of VGA ends on G1G1 layout direct in font of C51, C41, C86. If this is true, only Vsync and Hsync have to be found. Wikipedia says about the pins for VGA: Pin 1 RED Red video Pin 2 GREEN Green video Pin 3 BLUE Blue video Pin 4 N/C Not connected Pin 5 GND Ground (HSync) Pin 6 RED_RTN Red return Pin 7 GREEN_RTN Green return Pin 8 BLUE_RTN Blue return Pin 9 +5 V +5 V (DDC) Pin 10 GND Ground (VSync, DDC) Pin 11 N/C Not connected Pin 12 SDA I²C data Pin 13 HSync Horizontal sync Pin 14 VSync Vertical sync Pin 15 SCL I²C clock ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: very simple datastore reimplementation
On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 11:15 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 1:18 AM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The reason for FUSE (specifically via the new Gnome replacement for the old, unloved, GnomeVFS) is to enable better interoperability with non-Sugar applications (for example, when we are able to do versioning), And yet, at the exact point we start using FUSE we get in trouble with portability for Sugar apps. Sugar apps have datastore dependencies in the first place, whether on the current DS interface or a FUSE based one. So it doesn't change the situation there; apps talk to sugar, which talk to the DS, whether implemented via olpcfs and Fuse or not. Can we shift the behaviour we want to put in the FUSE layer into a Sugar-level library that just uses POSIX underneath? That's what olpcfs is doing: it exploits the POSIX interface as much as possible, and if you read Scott's document (as I was today), you'll see that - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model
On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 15:30 +0200, Bobby Powers wrote: The way I see it it is somewhat of a two way street. Personally, if I'm going to run Sugar apps in Gnome I would prefer them to integrate nicely with my other apps, just as I would prefer apps running in Sugar to be 'sugary'. In this case the burdon falls on the shoulders of the activity developers. No, not in the X architecture. Most of this can/should/will be hidden in Sugar's libraries and window managers. From what I understand (and please correct me if I'm wrong!) Abiword is a good example - the text editor canvas is encapsolated as its own widget, and both the Gnome Abiword and the sugar activity use it in their respective user interfaces. So nice modular UI code should make maintaing a Gnome and a Sugar version of a program relatively painless. Again, please correct me if I'm wrong - I've been planning out what I want to do with a new activity and this is what I seem to have arrived at, if peoples experiences are different it could save me some headache... As for the sharing stuff, I know you can download and use the telepathy libs, but would you also need a presence service running? Could this be automatically started when an app wants to collaborate, or is it something that would have to be running in the background beforehand? Either is possible. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: very simple datastore reimplementation
FUSE is great, but... It means interoperability must be an explicit planned-in-advance action: if a datastore is already on a removable device in your pocket, and you need to access something on a foreign system, you are stuck unless there is some minimal level of human interpretability of the file system... Instead, you have to dig up a system with FUSE/olpcfs installed, and then copy the files to a conventional file structure. This is the use case that's hard to get around. - Jim On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 11:50 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: FUSE helps to get files out from the DS with POSIX apps and tools, has nothing to do with USB sticks. Only files inside the internal structure are named with strange hashes. Having to have two different naming systems (one local, one removable device) seems like duplication that should be avoided (if possible). To which two different naming systems are you referring? Thanks, Tomeu -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: very simple datastore reimplementation
On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 11:42 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: If we internally store deltas, some kind of magic will need to happen so the user can access other than the last version. Last version is by far the most common thing people want to access on a casual basis - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] Sugar on the EEE PC
1:1 is really *very* important, for many reasons, not the least of which is the following: If a teacher cannot *rely* on a child having access to a computer for teaching their class and/or homework, you are, in essence, asking them to greatly *increase* their work-load, by having to prepare two curricula, one computer based, and one conventionally based (on paper, chalkboard, or in extreme cases dirt). Teaching is tough enough as it is without making the teacher's workload go up. - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: very simple datastore reimplementation
On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 20:22 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 4:22 PM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 16:06 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On 5/8/08, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 13:09 +, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: I'm having trouble understanding what you are requesting and what could be done about that. Can you please enumerate the requirements that affect the internal file layout and any other view that we may be able to provide? That there is *some* hope of finding a file by a human in a raw file system, that can be done with software already present on the system With the proposed metadata text file, there's already that hope. You think it's not enough and you may very well be right. What I'm asking is: how big an effort are we willing to devote to this and until which point we want to compromise on robustness and simplicity? Until we know what the tradeoffs really are, we need to explore in this direction. Names only as hashes has proved to be a major headache in practice in the field. That's true. But I also think the FUSE layer will make a big difference in this regard, at the point that it *might* be enough. This doesn't begin to deal with a USB stick taken to a Windows box... No FUSE on such systems. Having to have two different naming systems (one local, one removable device) seems like duplication that should be avoided (if possible). - Jim I agree anyway that more transparency at the raw file system level would be desiderable and that we should figure out what are exactly the tradeoffs there. Marco -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] Sugar on the EEE PC
On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 13:35 -0400, Albert Cahalan wrote: It would take a real effort by OLPC to stop this rotten concept, but I don't see that happening. OLPC coldly and habitually ignores the USA. Not true... several cities are doing things. But certainly we believe in child control of a laptop; not a shared device that they get a small amount of the day - Jim -- Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: very simple datastore reimplementation
Please remember of the need for file names in the on disk structure being human readable. The need for interoperability (not just with Sugar) is key. This wasn't quite clear in your discussion. - Jim -- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model
On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 09:17 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote: On Tue, 6 May 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ubuntu takes packages maintaned externally and picks what version of each of those packages to put in the main distro. the versions of these seperate packages are almost entirely independant of each other. they then do a lot of testing and some development of adminitrative tools and ship the result. unfortunantly much of the OLPC development has seemed to be against the idea of having external software run unmodified on sugar, and the resulting work to get anything running will hurt this model. David, We must fix this Help greatfully appreciated. It isn't very much work to get there from here. - Jim ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 15 computer science collegians looking for a project
I'm told the new process through the web site the OLPC Austria folks set up, referenced on the developer program page, has been made to work. (my thanks to them for their great work) Still one manual step at our end, but not the fully manual, error prone process of before. - Jim On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 17:36 +0200, NoiseEHC wrote: The keyboard does not matter since I will have to use an external keyboard anyway (I have big hands). What is important is that I have to be able to reflash the machine to use English and it has to be at least a B3 or B4 (or G1G1 or whatever with the Geode LX). Shall I apply again? Jim Gettys wrote: I checked this morning now that I'm functioning again; the developer's program should be moving again, and volumes available should be much higher than before mass production (particularly if you can tolerate the Arabic keyboard, where we have stock that can be redirected right now). Sorry to be slow to respond; I came down sick with a nasty cold bug last week on top of recovering from surgery. I'm only now wading through 1200 back unread mail messages. - Jim On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 07:04 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: I was perhaps under the mistaken impression that OLPC was dumping machines to developers like candy again after a hiatus due to a logistical snafu. Hmm. -walter 2008/4/29 NoiseEHC [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Actually it is a funny proposal since without real XO machines it is a little bit hard to profile programs and since it seems that it is quite impossible nowadays to get a machine, they are out of luck. Exactly why does not OLPC just dump machines to developers like candy? Even if only 1% of people do something about performance, it could be more cost effective than hiring 1 man for it (and the XO badly needs this work). BTW if you referring to this http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/012033.html or this http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2006-September/000439.html then these are not easy and fast things either. Walter Bender wrote: Any interest in the themes/topics Tomeu outlined in his email about Sugar performance? Lots of interesting things to explore that would be of real value to the project. -walter On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 1:38 PM, Patrick Jahenr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi there, We are a group of 15 collegians, studying 'Applied Computer Science' at the University of Applied Sciences in Iserlohn (Germany) and we are looking for a project for the OLPC within the scope of our subject Computer-Networks. Our professor (Prof. Martin Hühne) let us choose our own topic, leading us directly to our first problem: What can we do? We have to find a project fitting to this demand. We read the wiki and realised, that most of our ideas we thought we could implement are either finished software projects or simply not good enough to keep on thinking about them, because they do not fit to the OLPC- ideas. The wiki pages for Project ideas are nice, but you do not know exactly whether there is already someone working on one of the projects, or not. The Pages for Current Projects are quite nice too, but there you do not know if the people working on it actually do need help. That is why we post this little request to the readers of this mailing list. We are looking for either a project we can take part on, or a not- yet-implemented idea. It should not bee too big for us in order to be finished within time; it should not be too small to have something to do for 15 students. (Anyway, don't forget we need to sleep) It would be nice, but not all necessary if the project could involve some of the networking technologies of the XO, I mean, the subject is Computer-Networks Furthermore, there is a time limit: We will have to end the project until end of June, whereas there will be the same subject for another group of students after our free period, which will have the same, or a similar task. Probably, they will go on, on our project, if its not finished. Our Knowledge Base: We have good basic knowledge in C/C++, Java, some basic knowledge in scripting languages (Perl, PHP and bash) and some of us have good knowledge of Linux. A further subject called Software-Engineering came along with us for one and a half year. We started reading and working in Python and GTK, and saw, we can cope that. We are open for all your suggestions, you can email me directly if you have a project we can take part on, but you could also just answer here, if you have a good idea which of the project ideas we could implement. Thank you in advance
Re: 15 computer science collegians looking for a project
Specifically, the intent of the developer program is to support development: it is not a back door way to get machines for small trials. In general, it is in support of individual's needs (one or a few machines), though we'll also consider a professor's request for a class they are teaching, or a researcher wanting a (small) bunch of machines for working mesh software. What we don't want to see are front men who claim to be supporting a set of developers, and acts as a gatekeeper for access to systems. For example, if you have a set of 10 developers, I'd expect there to be 10 individual requests (for possibly significantly more than 10 machines). If someone can't be bothered to fill out that minimal information, they are unlikely to actually do anything with the machine, and we've seen instances that appear to be individuals trying to use their navigation of the developer program to further private agendas. And yes, Aaron's nice work enables a group be able to evaluate these requests (and that group be community based, not OLPC employees). - Best regards, - Jim On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 18:07 +0200, Aaron Kaplan wrote: On May 5, 2008, at 6:04 PM, Kim Quirk wrote: If you have applied to the developer's program a few months ago, please check to see if your application was transferred into the new system: http://projectdb.olpc.at/ If it is not there, I'm afraid you will have to apply again. The idea with this new system is that there is a community who will help evaluate the best uses for laptops. Please note that this program is for single or two laptop requests, not quantities, so if you request quantities of laptops, it will probably be refused. SJ, Aaron, Can you provide an overview of how the new system works? How applications get reviewed and how often ship orders will be sent out? How people get feedback on their request, etc? Sure! I will need to work more on the details about that with you and SJ of course but I can make an initial proposal about the next steps. a. -- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
Note I understand that metacity can be configured to use a dbus/gconf version, rather than bringing in the dread CORBA/bonobo dependencies we've worked so hard to avoid. So don't let ldd mislead you that it isn't worth a try; it is. So Metacity is clearly one of the contenders. This wasn't an option when Sugar was started, though with 20-20 hindsight, we probably should have used something other than matchbox from the beginning. - Jim On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 16:32 +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 4:25 PM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 10:06 -0400, Walter Bender wrote: I must have missed the post you refer to. It has never been the position of the core Sugar team--that I am aware of--to preclude the running of standard Linux apps. We even went so far as to hire a contractor to look at various ways to facilitate the running of standard X apps last summer---although that work was never completed or brought into the main branch. Matthew Allum thinks we're best off not trying to force-fit this into matchbox (the window manager we're currently using), having done the experiment last summer. He's not only the contractor, but also the original author of matchbox; so I think we should respect his opinion in this matter. We'll investigate alternative window managers, rather than flogging this horse, which is clearly dead for our purposes. Many of the modern ones honor full screen hints, and I've never seen Sugar's UI do much that isn't supported one way or the other by the ICCCM/EWMH's. It may take a bit of sugar work, but I'd be surprised it will be difficult. If someone would like to go ahead and try replacing matchbox with metacity, would be great ;) Thanks, Tomeu -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 16:47 +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 4:32 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If someone would like to go ahead and try replacing matchbox with metacity, would be great ;) And I'd be happy to help out whoever attempts it both on the Sugar and on the wm/X side... :) Note that this work (should be) the same, no matter what window manager we end up using. Window managers have been pretty interchangeable throughout X's history. That's what the ICCCM/EWMH's documents are all about. If there is something missing we need, we can/should/will work with the freedesktop mailing list to catch the oversights. I suspect we're using dbus in some places where we should just be using the normal ICCCM/EWMH conventions. - Jim -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Where is Jim?
I've had at least one email query on the topic of where I've been the last few months, as I've been scarce and very quiet. So I'll remove speculation since not everyone hears the same things through the grapevine, efficient though it may be. I've just finished up the second of two rounds of surgery for kidney stones Monday. I had *a lot* of stones. I took vacation between the two procedures (the good news is you have two kidneys; the bad news is you have two kidneys). So far, recovery from the second round is going better than the first. I should be back at work sometime next week or at worst the week after. I intend to continue to take it easy this week. - Jim -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Collaborative Activity Development
John, We really would like to get the Sugar UI components running on vanilla Linux desktops, and the apps all interoperating Help greatfully appreciated... - Jim On Mon, 2008-04-14 at 13:02 -0700, John Gilmore wrote: Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm now working for OLPC, on improving activity collaboration. This is great! The best thing OLPC could do to improve activity collaboration is to get it working for ordinary programs -- running on the X Window System, or on MacOSX, or Windows. Why doesn't AbiWord already collaborate with Write? Why doesn't Firefox collaborate with Browse? It's the same code base. Tying collaboration to Sugar is a losing strategy. Once the rest of the world figures out that *their* programs should be trivial to collaborate in too, they'll reimplement collaboration (likely in an incompatible way). Then Sugar's collaboration will be an orphan rather than the mainstream. Instead, if OLPC's collaboration code supported cross-platform collaboration, OLPC's model and its implementing code would spread throughout the whole computing infrastructure. And that would bring in a new pile of contributors, enhancing, debugging, and porting it everywhere. Easy collaboration is one of OLPC's key advantages over its competition. Making that a reality for all the kids (and adults) in the world requires a broader vision. Merely debugging what makes Sugar apps fail to collaborate under load, or getting a few more Sugar authors to add collaboration, won't suffice. John PS: If there is a simple way to install a couple of RPM's or DEB's, add a paragraph of code and a few automake macros, and add collaboration to any program written in C or C++, then please document it! (If on the other hand it only works in Python and requires sugar-jhbuild then there's some work to be done.) PPS: This review of AbiWord says: http://www.linux.com/feature/131852 The new AbiWord supposedly offers real-time document collaboration developed for the OLPC project and implemented by means of an experimental plugin. As per the AbiWord-2.6 release notes, there are three implementations of the plugin, one for the OLPC, and two (an XMPP-based one and a pure TCP/IP one) for Linux. The Linux plugins compiled without any issues, but AbiWord couldn't activate them. The plugin isn't currently available for Windows. [abiword.com says the Windows plugin is available on 2.6.2 now. But I never did find the collab plugin, nor any documentation for it. The 2.6.0 release notes imply that the three available collab plugins can't actually interoperate with each other!] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Build Debate: Followup on Build Naming
Actually, it is a bit more complicated; whether we should reflect this in numbering, is, however, less clear to me. We have network protocols in the presence service we depend on, and which fundamentally affect interoperability between applications (flag days). I also posit we're very likely to have to face at least one more flag day before we reach long term stability in these protocols. Changes to these protocols *may or may not* involve binary changes to activities; sometimes these will, and sometimes libraries may hide them and they not be visible to the activities (though very visible to the person using the aggregated system). So since this seems to be a long winded discussion, I wanted to point this out; even if I don't have a proposal for a numbering scheme. - Jim On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 14:30 -0300, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:38 AM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As far as a feature-based scheme, that will just increase the pressure to do an end-run around our renewed pledge to do time-based releases. I'm in favor of Dennis's suggestion. OLPC-1; OLPC-2, ... It is simple and, I argue, unambiguous. The hardware is XO-1, XO-2... I generally agree but rather than just incrementing numbers, we can use the opportunity to use it to communicate api, stability and feature deltas. After having worked in projects with many schemes, I find that the best communicator is a 3-part release name x.y.z where... - X is the major release name. Many projects stay in 0 until the first feature-complete/stable-api release comes out the door to claim 1. - Y is the minor feature incremental version - Z is the bugfix level So - 0.3.2 means we are on our way to feature-complete, this is the 3rd add-feature release, 2nd bugfix release - 1.0.4 is the release you want to put on machines in a country with areas so remote that you can only visit for an upgrade every 2 years - 1.5.0 means we are on a stable api, 5th feature release, just issued. Conservative people may wish to wait until 1.5.2 for example, unless something in the 1.5.0 changelog is a must have feature. - 2.0 means some APIs have changed, your Sugarized app is very likely to break. While we crank out builds and while in development we can call them anything, the important thing is the label on the release. It is the most succint means of communication with decision-makers, big and small. As such it should be a clear indication of what kind of things I'll find in the changelog, specially for those users that will not read the changelog. cheers, martin -- Jim Gettys One Laptop Per Child ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
