re: XO Gen 1.5
Hi Ed, Wad, Chris et al, Awesome new hardware! That's one thing I loved about working at HW companies, the longer you survive the more hurdles you cross. IMHO 3D/2D is better than 2D only, if you can get it to work. I see bigger value in the video acceleration and input. The video capture is the most used thing by my kids and probably true for all XOs. The only down side is that the Record app over compresses and there's no option to adjust it. I poked around in the code briefly and there is a hard coded quality variable in a check-in months old. Aside from that app level challenge, the new chipset plus greater storage could allow super video capture! It even has a couple of video outputs which may need solder and a little logic not to mention power. TV out option would rock. However, none of the video looks like RS 170a and I doubt many people have HD in the target market. I wonder what connects to LVDS/TTL... The video decompression acceleration will be a huge value. The primary test is of course YouTube which I think means Flash flv. I would put that on an early test list and I hope there's no driver incompatible BS like with Geode. The H. codecs could pay off in better video conferencing. A live chat with Niue would have really warmed up my winter :-) The top value and the chance to break new ground is power. Software hooks to toggle on/off radio and throttle CPU could be break throughs but need lots of work. I hope you can entice GNU and others to work on that again. Some history on it here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Improved_battery_life Nice call on fully backward compatible SW. The installed base is big and there's easily 2 - 3 years more SW work to get the most out of them. Also glad to see plans for an 8.2 line but get the drivers upstream ASAP if not sooner. I can't wait to see if crashes and OOM kill screw ups disappear with 8.2 on new HW. I believe Michael and team's position was that the same kernel worked better/fine on systems with more RAM. Cost us 2+ weeks slip on the 8.2 release to try and fix it, no we can test with double the RAM. Glad to see a UART on there. I just hope its a 16550 or later so I can use my high baud modem :-) Nice work. Good luck in the final integration and test. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Greg Smith Over and Out
Hi All, My time on this project is over for now! I was laid off yesterday and tomorrow is my last day at OLPC. So many things to follow up on, its hard to know where to begin handing off. I can say that XO Camp is on for next week as planned. SJ is now coordinating it. Aside from that, contact Ed McNierney ed at laptop dot org for any development questions or anything else on my plate. I'm sorry to drop the ball, but I need to find a new job ASAP. Perhaps I can participate again in the future but I'm unsubscribing from all lists as of tomorrow. If I can pass along some history or other work, don't hesitate to contact me. My new e-mail address: gregsmit...@gmail.com. To come to OLPC, I left a safe and lucrative job making some of the most advanced computers in the world. I took a big risk to work on what I think is important and I gave it everything I could. I have no regrets. I'm proud of what I accomplished and honored to have been a member of this great community. Its time to go back and take care of my own family again. Let me know if anyone has leads on Product Manager openings in Massachusetts or tele-commuting. My technical specialties have been high-end routers and networking, distributed server architectures, image and video processing, and online marketing including data analysis. Now I'll add open source development, social networking/Web 2.0, educational software, low cost computing and wireless networking to that list ;-) As a product manager, I write the business case and technical requirements and manage all aspects of the project to get a quality product built and shipped on time. Give me n engineers to work with and I'll give you n Million $s in revenue in the first year and double that every 6 months after. That's my new pitch :-) Send me an e-mail with any leads or for a copy of my resume. Good luck! Please keep at it if you can. There are hundreds of thousands of kids using the XO now. Regardless of organizational priorities, they deserve the very best software available. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
XO Camp on next week
Hi All, Just a reminder that the XO Camp conference is on for next week, January 12 - 16 at OLPC head quarters in Cambridge. Its an open meeting technical meeting and you are all invited. See the agenda here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 Please put your name on the attendee list if you are coming. I have lined up a special guest to present on Friday, 1/16 10AM to Noon. Ron Canuel is the Director General of the Eastern Townships Board in Quebec. They have been running a 1 - 1 computer program (Mac based) in their schools for several years. See: http://www.etsb.qc.ca/en/EnhancedLearningStrategy/default.shtm They are also advising Uruguay on their implementation. Ron will present on their experience and lessons learned. He will bring his technical and project leads to the meeting as well. Let me know if anyone has specific questions or areas they would like Ron to cover. Questions and comments welcome. I hope to see you next week! Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
9.1.0 Meeting Wed. 2PM US ET
Hi All, We are on for the weekly 9.1.0 meeting tomorrow Wed, January 16 at 2PM US ET on IRC (freenode.net #olpc-meeting). Here's the agenda. Let me know if you have any chances or additions. 10 minutes - XO Camp status. Assign more people to help present. 25 minutes - 9.1.0 feature status. Briefly review next steps on the top four areas: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_requirements#Top_Priority 15 minutes - 9.1.0 bug scrub plan. Pick start date and times for intensive bug scrub. 10 minutes - set action items and agenda for next week Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora Desktop on XO
Hi Michael, No problem being blunt. I don't know yet how far behind we are or what it will take to catch up. We are close if we create a target bug list in the next two weeks then start daily triage and weekly test blitzes. Quality is my primary concern, especially if you throw in a lot of new code and potential process changes with Sugar. Once we get building and testing, it will be a matter of code quality and how quickly can we fix important bugs. On the feature front, my main concern is security/activation/lease management features. Point #2 here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Top_Priority Good progress on signing delegation and faster imaging. However, lease management and image customization need some love. They are critical for Ethiopia and Peru and others. In short, we have a good chance to release with major new features in March. We just need to pick up the pace and keep people focused. In terms of the thread, Deepak said that a replacement for JFFS2 is not in the plan for 9.1.0. I agree. It needs more work from a test/design perspective and it needs better definition of the ROI (work effort vs benefit). The choice of file system isn't a deal breaker for the Fedora Desktop feature. The hard part will be picking the right desktop (more on that soon, I already love the dancing benchmark bears :-), making it fit on the NAND, and testing it enough to prove its usable. Thanks, Greg S Michael Stone wrote: Greg, I don't mean to be nasty, but I do feel the need to be blunt: On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 04:28:36PM -0500, Greg Smith wrote: Hi Michael, We are definitely behind where I would like to be at this stage. How far behind? However, we'll only move the date when we must and we'll only do it to improve quality What exactly did you think Deepak and Chris were discussing doing? Michael ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
9.1.0 meeting - 2PM US ET Today 12/31
Hi All, I'll be on IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting at 2PM US ET today. Minutes of last weeks meeting and this weeks agenda are here: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-December/022085.html We can table the agenda and call it a year unless there are updates or other comments. Happy New Year everyone. We are a phenomenal engineering team and community network of experts in every aspect of life and learning. What a great year! Let's do it again next year. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: performance work
Hi All, Answering two e-mails on one pass. I agree, its hard work. Wade, I believe this thread is about optimizing the XO OS and GUI. That's why I call the requirement General_UI_sluggishness. Optimizing applications is yet another challenge. I'm all for people doing that hard work and documenting it so the next person doesn't have to re-invent the wheel. Your performance URL is already posted to the page in the tools section. Let me know if you have any other links (GIT URLs?) or e-mails I should make easily accessible. Michael, The performance goal I worked out with Eben is on the page already. It could be better but its a start. Lots of people have noticed. Neil and Jordan analyzed which Cairo calls are causing the most trouble and how long they take. I also broke John's suggestions in to general areas: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/General_UI_sluggishness Could use more editing (e.g. swap suggestions may belong in memory, file read/write caching should be added etc.). You're just scratcing the surface with BW, latency and messages. CPU cycles, process priority, caching, bottleneck definition, instruction sets and compilers, word/block/sector size usage, and if you're really hard core rows and columns are all optimizable. If you have an algorithm improvement to offer, I'm all ears. When we have a critical mass of time from professional engineers we can improve performance. Until then it waits and the users wait too. Let's build on what we have, we're making progress. Thanks, Greg S On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 09:20:27AM -0700, Jordan Crouse wrote: The solution to the performance problems is good old fashioned elbow grease These are the sorts of things that we need to find and squash - and yes, it will be very time consuming and a little boring. Several anecdotes for your amusement and reflection: * When was the last time someone posted to devel asking: what is the right algorithm or datastructure for task ? * When was the last time someone publicly analyzed the upper or lower bounds on the bandwidth, latency, or quantity of messages necessary to accomplish task ? * When was the last time that you published a performance goal for your software? Did you hit it? Did anyone notice? Michael P.S. - Charles Leiserson once remarked that performance is like a currency which programmers trade for (all) other worthwhile things like schedule targets, scope of features, other resource consumption, various kinds of security, etc [1]. This suggests that one would do better to ask for performance or but not both. Think of Blizzard. [1] http://www.catonmat.net/blog/mit-introduction-to-algorithms-part-one/ Wade Brainerd wrote: I agree with Jordan. You just have to sit down and do the work to optimize the code, either finding the fastest path through hardware and software stack. I've rewritten Bounce twice now for performance just to hold on to 20fps on the XO. Colors! has been through many performance iterations as well (compare v1 and v13 with large brushes). I've just had my hat handed to me by Cairo for Typing Turtle as well (with the hand display enabled, you can type about 1WPM). So I'm looking forward to rewriting my keyboard rendering to deal with that. If you have an issue with the performance of the XO, just spend the time by yourself to analyze it and fix it, talking about it accomplishes nothing. If you find a solution that would help others, post it. -Wade ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
re: anonymous gray activity circles
Hi Chris, Unless someone else has seen this, I think we need more detail on how to reproduce it. Can you write down the steps it takes to get a gray activity circle? Include the version of XO software you are running: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/What_release_am_I_running%3F It may be that you are double clicking to start an activity. That can cause a second activity instance to try and start then fail and leave an icon in the frame. That's the only thing that comes to mind without more detail. Thanks, Greg S * From: jns-cmarsh...@comcast.net Subject: anonymous gray activity circles To: devel@lists.laptop.org Is there a way to prevent the anonymous gray activity circles in the frame? Some X apps seem to accumulate circles with no way i have been able to determine to remove dead ones. I tried to google the list but was not able to generate useful links. --Chris ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XOs with no sound
Hi James et al, That's great debugging and repair info. I especially like the use of the stack trace command! That's a great trick for hunting down which process is calling what files. Do we know how this gets in a failed state to begin with? I read the headlines of them most recent 100 bugs with sound in them and I didn't see anything that would cause this. I only saw 3 old, closed bugs with alsactl in them. If we have an ideas on why or how this happens, let's file a bug and I can track it for 9.1. Thanks, Greg S * Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:46:39 +1100 From: qu...@laptop.org Subject: Re: XOs with no sound To: Philipp Kocher philipp.koc...@gmx.net Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: 20081230094639.ga12...@us.netrek.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii How to fix no sound caused by operating system. 1. obtain the root prompt, e.g. by starting the Terminal activity and clicking on become root button, 2. if you wish to find out in which way the settings have been corrupted, copy the file /etc/asound.state before proceeding, cp /etc/asound.state /home/olpc/asound.state.orig 3. obtain a copy of /etc/asound.state from a working XO, or from a reinstalled XO, and place it in /etc/asound.state on the failed XO, 4. restore the settings from the file, alsactl restore 5. test that sound now works. Note: there is a possibility that the build 767 ALSA saved state file is in some other place. I've not checked. I found out where the file was on Joyride 2612 using a command: strace -e open alsactl restore -- James Cameron mailto:qu...@us.netrek.org http://quozl.netrek.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Fedora Desktop on XO
Hi Peter et al, I'm still looking for help resolving the dependencies Chris found when he tried to install Gnome. The issue and thread are documented in the specifications section here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Run_Fedora_applications_on_XO What do we do next when we get a list of dependency errors? Paul, I believe that you got XFCE running. Can you add the description of what you did to make that happen to this page? http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Run_Fedora_applications_on_XO I may have a little time tomorrow to try it out if its not too complicated. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Auto-suspend and Presence Service
Hi John, Thanks for the comments and early catch on this. Robert and wireless/collaboration experts, Can you comment on this? There are a couple of relevant requirements and known issues documented here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Improved_battery_life It sounds like we need a solid design proposal which defines exactly how/when the wireless uses power and how/when the XO wakes up. Any links or suggestions welcome. Thanks, Greg S John Gilmore wrote: In 9.1.0, auto-suspend is going to be on by default, which we estimate will roughly triple our battery life. We're working on fixing all the bugs that would prevent that. One of them is not strictly a bug -- it's a performance issue. The Presence Service sends packets frequently, for tracking the presence of your friends and any shared activities. Many of these are multicast packets (some are probably unicast jabber packets, too). In 8.2.0, with auto-suspend enabled, you have to run a specific command to enable suspended laptops to awaken when multicast packets arrive; see bug #6818 and run ethtool -s msh0 wol um. This will become the default in 9.1.0. The problem I can foresee is that the Presence Service will send packets so frequently that everyone's laptop will always be waking up, negating the power-stretching abilities of auto-suspend. This seems to occur with only a few laptops around (in my tests at home); yet we need to make it work with dozens of laptops within range, for our deployments. I hope that the Collabora team is running in this mode now, and working out ways to reduce packet traffic to let sleeping laptops lie. The cellular phone industry went through several cycles of design improvements like this, enabling today's remarkable phone battery life, without impact on our ability to rapidly communicate whenever desired. OLPC hasn't yet done the first round of such improvements, and I hope it WILL do so before 9.1.0. We could all use those long battery lives -- especially the kids in the rural deployments. We don't want to tell them to turn off collaboration if they want their laptop to last all day; it's one of our key features. John ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Touchpad/tablet problem
Hi Guoling, Unfortunately we do not support Tablet mode and it is not planned for the near future either. Hopefully one of the touchpad/firmware experts can give you a link to how you can capture and use raw data generated by the touchpad. Thanks, Greg s. * Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 13:41:06 +0800 From: Guoling Gao gguol...@gmail.com Subject: Touchpad/tablet problem To: devel@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: a5b628610812282141m58ffb478q5b7bf21a38b38...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Hi all, Does the OLPC touchpad support tablet mode? I read the driver (hgpk.c) only support mouse mode, how can I get the raw data generated by the touchpad? How can I changed the touchpad to tablet mode ? Thank you very much. Best regards. Guoling Gao ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Scratch on XO is frozen after standby
Hi Chris et al, I added this bug ID to the specification for power saving in 9.1 at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Improved_battery_life Can you make sure to address that in the work on power save modes? I also updated the ticket with John's steps to reproduce. Thanks, Greg S Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2008 12:36:04 +0100 From: Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de Subject: Re: Scratch on XO is frozen after standby To: Philipp Kocher philipp.koc...@gmx.net Cc: John Maloney jmalo...@media.mit.edu,channeang ken fionashre...@gmail.com, OLPC Development devel@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: 365f8fd3-def3-44bc-88c3-3f66db40d...@freudenbergs.de Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes This is a long-standing kernel bug. Sleep/resume is supposed to be transparent to user-space processes. Could you add your findings to the ticket, please? http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6201 - Bert - On 24.12.2008, at 07:43, Philipp Kocher wrote: Hi John Etoys has exactly the same problem (etoys is frozen and the line snd_pcm_writei returned -86 gets written endlessly into the etoys logfile). Sorry, I don't know anything about DBus. To reproduce with Etoys: 1. Open etoys on the Xo 2. Click on make A Project 3. Click on Supplies 4. Drag and drop the Sound recorder 5. Record a sound 6. Play the recording 7. Press XO power button (just short so the XO goes in standby mode with dark screen) 8. Press XO power button (again just short) 9. Etoys is frozen Scratch: We have the frozen Scratch problem very often at the moment because we are using Scratch and record sounds (about 3-5 students of 30 per lesson). It really bad since saving the project is not possible anymore. First I thought it is because we switched on experimental Power Management. But now it is switched off and the problem is still here. It is just Scratch that freezes, Sugar is still working fine. I don't remember having seen this problem on older sugar builds e.g. 656 or 708 and we used Scratch intensively on this builds. Regards, Philipp John Maloney wrote: Wow, first I've heard about this problem. I wonder if Etoys has the same problem? The problem appears to be have something to do with having the ALSA sound output port open when the XO goes to sleep. This may actually be an ALSA/sleep issue but it may be easier to work around it than to fix ALSA. Is there a DBus message or event that says when the machine is about to go to sleep? -- John On Dec 23, 2008, at 9:56 PM, Philipp Kocher wrote: Hi John We have a big problem with Scratch version 11 and 12 on the XO (build 767). After not using the XO for some minutes Scratch freezes completely (no drag and drop and no buttons can be pressed anymore). The following line gets written in the scratch logfile in an endless loop (if scratch doesn't get killed, the logfile uses multiple MB): snd_pcm_writei returned -86 The problem can be reproduced easily: 1. Start Scratch 2. Record sound and play the sound 3. Press XO power button (just short so the XO goes in standby mode with dark screen) 4. Press XO power button (again just short) 5. Scratch is frozen Regards, Philipp Pepyride School Cambodia PS: Are you using the bug tracking page on dev.laptop.org for XO related bugs of Scratch? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Weekly report and meeting reminder
Hi All, I am on for a 9.1.0 meeting at 2PM US ET today (wed. 12/24). IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting. Minutes from last week and agenda for today are here: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-December/021947.html Here's my weekly report for week ending 12/19 is below. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! ** XO Camp will be held at OLPC Headquarters, January 12 - 16, 2009. This is an open meeting for technical design review of 9.1.0 features. See the agenda and sign up to participate here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOCamp_2 9.1.0 target features are here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_requirements#Top_Priority Greg's user links of the week: English: Update on pilot in Nicaragua and links to two beautiful videos by the great team at Waveplace: http://waveplace.com/sm/mailing/mail.jsp?id=13msg=1174 Spanish: New blog for XO deployment in Colombia: http://educacionitagui.blogspot.com/ Detailed deployment wiki for Paraguay including training materials, educational strategy, active e-mail lists and more: http://wiki.paraguayeduca.org/index.php/Portada ** New feature of the weekly report: Open source contributor of the week This week its: S (sometimes called Skierpage) S built queryable and sortable pages using Semantic wiki for Activities, Tests, Releases, and now Features. He also documented it and created todo lists so other people can make their own or extend his work. That's what I call first class software engineering! See his work at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Semantic_MediaWiki * Status of progress towards last weeks goals: 1 - Finish collection of all main features on Feature Roadmap page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap. Stretch goal to make that a Semantic query with each feature having its own page. GS - Done! All major feature requests have a page and show in the Semantic query. I cleaned up all notes left by engineers and recorded my changes on the discussion page. Please add any more feature requests as described here: 2 - Update 9.1.0 page a detailed list of sub-requirements. Add detail to the schedule and get sign off on it from engineering and QA. Engage engineers to get specifications and plans documented for each feature. GS - Done! Top four categories breaks out in to ~13 Top priority features: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_requirements#Top_Priority. See them all on one page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Page_of_all_features_that_target_9.1.0 Next up is tracking secondary priorities which are also target for 9.1. 3 - Start triage of full feature roadmap to flag 9.1.0 items and prioritize all items. GS - Done! I chose the priorities myself so send me a note if anyone who has suggestions or differences of opinion based on the release goals. 4 - Create basic presentation on plans for 9.1.0 and run it by main customers and other stakeholders. GS - Partially done. Created second draft but haven't presented it yet. 5 - Update School Server documentation with links to Readme file for each main feature. Comment on XS roadmap and Moodle plan. GS - Not done. ** Goals for next week: 1 - Move technical discussion forward on all Top Priority 9.1. items. Update feature pages as needed. Choose second level 9.1.0 priorities. 2 - Finish setting detailed schedule for technical section of XO Camp and promote the event. 3 - Update School Server documentation with links to Readme file for each main feature. Comment on XS roadmap and Moodle plan. 4 - Add detail to 9.1.0 schedule and improve activities section. 5 - Add School server feature requests to Trac Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
9.1.0 meeting minutes
Sayamindu, Michael, Paul, Brian, CJL and maybe others met on Xmas eve! We scrapped the agenda and did QA with Michael doing the Q. Concerns that people aren't working on the release. Review power and languages and they are both doing well. Sayamindu said he will update localization feature pages this week: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Page_of_all_features_that_target_9.1.0 Paul said he will share his power button menu design more widely. Comments on design welcome: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Shutdown_menu Code and demo version coming. Michael asked about testing joyride. Discussed the plan to fire up the Friends in testing/weekly build strategy. Brian is ready. We will start with a dry run of the test process on an 8.2.1 release. Michael kicked that off via this e-mail: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-December/022083.html We're on for next week Wed. December 31, 2PM US ET IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting channel. Back to the regular agenda: 5 minutes - review last weeks action items. 10 minutes XO Camp status 25 minutes - 9.1.0 page and feature development status. Also activity compatibility and activity set selection. Lastly, Trac conventions and scrub status. 10 minutes - Synchronizing with Sugar release cycle 10 minutes - set action items and agenda for next week. Have a great Christmas! Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Deployment image customization
Hi Dan, Thanks for the comments on the image customization feature: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Image_customization I moved them from the requirements to the specification section because I think you are proposing a possible solution. Your suggestion that we allow addition of RPMs and get those built into a signed image via pilgrim or puritan is certainly valuable and part of the requirement. However, it doesn't cover a few added things (language settings was specifically requested by Mongolia and others): - Updated language packs (I believe we are trying to make this an RPM which may solve it) - Starting language - Date, time and timezone - Network settings Essentially the things in the control panel, but other settings may be relevant too and even more important to pre-configure if they are only accessible via CLI. The biggest challenge I see is to find those things which you do not want to clone from the source XO. The only things that come to mind are Name and Color. We could even pre-fill them as long as those dialog boxes come up at start up. In short, I like your proposal but I still want a little more :-) Let me know what you think. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: performance work
Jordan and Neil, That's great work, thanks! Eben, Neil and Sugar people, Can you tell from the test descriptions below which of these operations we are most likely to encounter in the XO GUI? I think we can use the Cairo trace utility S found: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Performance_tuning#Other Turn that on with logging then use the XO as normal (or as a kid would) and generate the log file to see which are most common Cairo calls. I know Jordan gets way over scheduled. Let's help him prove that fixing a driver bug or two would benefit the UI performance, before he has to move on... Thanks, Greg S Jordan Crouse wrote: Greg Smith wrote: Hi Jordan, Looks like we made a little more progress on graphics benchmarking. See Neil's results below. I updated the feature page with the test results so far: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/General_UI_sluggishness What's next? Do we know enough now to target a particular section of the code for optimization? I ran the raw data through a script, and came up with a nice little summary of where we stand. My first general observation is that the numbers are skewed due to system activity - recall that X runs in user space, so it is subject to be preempted by the kernel. I think that the obviously high numbers in many of the results are due to NAND or wireless interrupts (example): 6: 2261923 (5.25 ms) 7: 16690761 (38.73 ms) 8: 2306919 (5.35 ms) You might want to re-acquire the numbers with wireless turned off and the system in a very quiet state. If you want to be extra careful, you can run the benchmarks in an empty X server (no sugar) and save the results to a ramfs backed directory to avoid NAND. You probably don't have to get _that_ extreme, but I don't want you to spend much time trying to investigate a path only to find out that the numbers are wrong due to a few writes(). In the results below, I tried to mitigate the damage somewhat by removing the highest and lowest value. The list below is sorted by delta between accel and un-accel, with the worse tests on top (i.e - the ones where accel is actually hurting you) - these are good candidates to be looked at. There are three reasons why unaccel would be faster then accel - 1) a bug in the accel code, 2) The accel path requires reading from video memory (which is very slow), and 3) the accel path doesn't punt to unaccel early enough. The first two on the list (textpath-xlib and texturedtext-xlib) toss up a huge red flag - I am guessing we are probably seeing a bug in the driver. All of the upsample and downsample entries are interesting, because the driver should be kicking back to the unaccelerated path - I'm guessing that 3) might be in effect here - though 73 ms is a long time. Most of the operations between 1ms and -1ms are probably going down the unaccelerated path. Most everything in there probably should be unaccelerated, with the possible exception of the 'over' operations - those are the easiest for the GPU to accelerate and the most heavily used, so you probably want to take a look at those. As before, I encourage you to investigate which operation are heavily used - if you don't use textured text very much, then optimizing it would be heavily on the geek points, but not very useful in the long haul. Jordan Test AccelNoaccel Delta -- textpath-xlib-textpath 1562.60 1345.12 217.48 texturedtext-xlib-texturedtext 315.61 140.54 175.07 downsample-nearest-xlib-512x512-redsquar 106.37 33.25 73.12 downsample-bilinear-xlib-512x512-redsqua 96.5735.22 61.35 downsample-bilinear-xlib-512x512-primros 83.3634.81 48.56 downsample-nearest-xlib-512x512-lenna78.1829.83 48.35 downsample-bilinear-xlib-512x512-lenna 83.9136.32 47.59 downsample-nearest-xlib-512x512-primrose 77.4930.06 47.43 upsample-nearest-xlib-48x48-todo 86.2360.14 26.09 upsample-bilinear-xlib-48x48-brokenlock 242.52 216.4926.03 upsample-bilinear-xlib-48x48-script 237.69 211.7025.98 upsample-bilinear-xlib-48x48-mail234.40 208.4325.97 upsample-bilinear-xlib-48x48-todo239.85 213.9425.91 upsample-nearest-xlib-48x48-script 81.6757.02 24.65 upsample-nearest-xlib-48x48-mail 78.9954.42 24.57 upsample-nearest-xlib-48x48-brokenlock 86.1861.73 24.45 upsample-nearest-48x48-script61.9557.46 4.49 downsample-bilinear-512x512-redsquare11.247.77 3.47 solidtext-xlib-solidtext 11.709.51 2.19 textpath-textpath1081.14 1079.371.78 texturedtext-texturedtext112.33 111.79 0.54 upsample-bilinear-48x48-todo 224.06 223.68 0.37
New Browse ready for Emilianio?
Hi Sayamindu, Do you think the new browse version (101?) has been shown to solve the problem Emliano raised here? http://www.mail-archive.com/devel@lists.laptop.org/msg14839.html Has it been tested with build 656 or only 767 (8.2)? If we have verified that it solves the issue raised, let's ask him to try it out. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Cmap tools
Hi Michael and Bert, It got quiet enough that I had a chance to try this myself. I tried installing and running the X activity and I tried following the instructions here: http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/12/run_a_nested_x11_desktop_on_th.html In both cases I got a gray screen with a bar showing Workspace with two triangles next to it (left and right facing) on the left side of the bar and the time with the same triangles on the right side. I didn't see my pointer in the Hackfest version but I did in the X window version. In both cases I didn't see any place to enter text (e.g. a window). Am I missing something? I was hoping to get an X window with a prompt so I could install CMap tools from there. Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks, Greg S Greg Smith wrote: Hi All, Picking up this old thread (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-September/018835.html) I want to move this forward again. There is a beta version of a smaller Linux implementation of CMap tools now. Download it from here: http://cmap.ihmc.us/download/cmaplite.php Does anyone have time to try running this inside of the X windows activity mentioned below? While we have some traction on other concept map tools (thanks Tomeu for Labrynth), CMap is incumbent in a number of countries and I want to figure out how close we are to supporting it. It will affect our ability to get XOs and Sugar in to more schools systems so its certainly valuable work. Let me know if anyone has a chance to try this out and document what it will take to make it work. Thanks, Greg S * On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 4:00 PM, Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de wrote: Am 04.09.2008 um 01:06 schrieb Michael Stone: On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 05:33:28PM -0400, Greg Smith wrote: Has anyone tried making the activity which is X-windows and inside which other activities can run? [1] and [2] seem apropos. Michael [1]: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7768#comment:8 [2]: http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/12/run_a_nested_x11_desktop_on_th.html I couldn't resist making an activity for that: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/X Anybody has any idea about how to make xephyr use the clipboard of the external X server? DND may be even harder. Regards, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Deployment image customization
Hi Dan, Those sound like two good steps. I think we should make a design decision here to either: 1 - clone minus a list of configurations or 2 - Extend customization to include everything relevant for a deployment. Both have challenges. My preference is clone because I think its easier for the end user (create an XO the way you like it then click clone). However, we need to figure out the list of things that should not be cloned as you mention. Extending the customization key has two main challenges as I see it. The first is that we may miss some customization that people want. The second is that its a little cumbersome to collect all the files, put them on a USB stick, add an fs.zip etc. I believe it also requires a second boot of the XO and possibly 2 USB sticks. One to update OS and a second to add customizations. The final image must be deliverable as an upgrade or a clean install via and of the following: olpc-update to internet, via olpc-update to XS, via NAND Blaster, via USB stick. I updated the requirements to bullet those out more clearly. In terms of customization stick or clone, this is where the lead engineer or whoever does the work gets to make the final call. Just make sure you address all the requirements and that we get it done in time for a QA cycle in February and we'll be OK. If some requirement cannot be met (e.g. set the language to Mongolian) we can consider living without it. I prefer to nail them all but hitting the date and improving the product is more important than the perfect solution which never comes. I agree that its closely related to the lease delegation, signing, and building requirements (your next step #1 below). A well architected approach that addresses all the points (section 2 here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Top_Priority) would be great! Thanks, Greg S Daniel Drake wrote: On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Greg Smith gregsmitho...@gmail.com wrote: Your suggestion that we allow addition of RPMs and get those built into a signed image via pilgrim or puritan is certainly valuable and part of the requirement. However, it doesn't cover a few added things (language settings was specifically requested by Mongolia and others): - Updated language packs (I believe we are trying to make this an RPM which may solve it) - Starting language - Date, time and timezone - Network settings Well, my suggestion of pilgrim and puritan was only for customising RPM packages. For the other things, I wrote: As for other customisations, the current method (customization key) works fine for the limited customisations that it allows, so that simply needs to be expanded. I could have probably worded that better. In other words, my opinion is that the existing customisation stick system should be expanded to also allow customisation of timezone, language settings, translation installation, etc. The biggest challenge I see is to find those things which you do not want to clone from the source XO. The only things that come to mind are Name and Color. We could even pre-fill them as long as those dialog boxes come up at start up. There is a lot more than that - it's things that are invisible to the user, technical details of the system, which are the bits we don't have a good answer for. For example (an easy one), keys are generated on first boot, but it is potentially bad news down the line if multiple XOs have the same keys. The hard part is tracking these things, which are not specified anywhere and there's no one place you can look to find them. I wish I could find a link to Michael's mail, where he investigated some of these things for an old build, and some of the findings were surprising even to us who hack on the system level all day... In short, I like your proposal but I still want a little more :-) If you're looking for initial high-level action items: 1. The discussions on lease delegation / allowing countries to sign their builds / providing customised builds for countries need to be finished. The outcome would be someone implementing whatever method allows country A to say we want OLPC build B with added RPMs C,D,E 2. Someone needs to implement the customization stick enhancements (and surrounding projects, such as xot bundles). Will require some modifications on the sugar-level too. Daniel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Cmap tools (with image customization cross over)
Hi Bert, Thanks. It was actually right click for me but that did it. I installed the Cmap tools from within the X activity and it mostly worked. A few oddities in the X activity like the arrow keys not working but nothing fatal. I'll follow up with the Cmap people and see if they can move it ahead some more. Dan, Here's a good use case for the image customization feature. To install Cmap, I open the X activity, downloaded a zip, then unpacked it which created a bin file. I made that executable and ran it which launched an installer which installed Java and some other stuff into a directory I chose (data). I also assume they would want to tweak the X activity initrc file to make it launch Cmap automatically. The whole thing is within a Rainbow instance but I believe its re-usable if its in the data directory. Would your customization stick strategy allow me to make this whole thing part of an image installable on many XOs as described? Thanks, Greg S Bert Freudenberg wrote: Click to bring up a menu and open a terminal. Alternatively, edit the .xinitrc file to auto-launch any X applications you want started (xterm is a common choice) before executing the window manager. This is also how you would bundle and launch a regular X app like cmap. - Bert - On 23.12.2008, at 16:34, Greg Smith wrote: Hi Michael and Bert, It got quiet enough that I had a chance to try this myself. I tried installing and running the X activity and I tried following the instructions here: http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/12/run_a_nested_x11_desktop_on_th.html In both cases I got a gray screen with a bar showing Workspace with two triangles next to it (left and right facing) on the left side of the bar and the time with the same triangles on the right side. I didn't see my pointer in the Hackfest version but I did in the X window version. In both cases I didn't see any place to enter text (e.g. a window). Am I missing something? I was hoping to get an X window with a prompt so I could install CMap tools from there. Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks, Greg S Greg Smith wrote: Hi All, Picking up this old thread (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-September/018835.html) I want to move this forward again. There is a beta version of a smaller Linux implementation of CMap tools now. Download it from here: http://cmap.ihmc.us/download/cmaplite.php Does anyone have time to try running this inside of the X windows activity mentioned below? While we have some traction on other concept map tools (thanks Tomeu for Labrynth), CMap is incumbent in a number of countries and I want to figure out how close we are to supporting it. It will affect our ability to get XOs and Sugar in to more schools systems so its certainly valuable work. Let me know if anyone has a chance to try this out and document what it will take to make it work. Thanks, Greg S * On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 4:00 PM, Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de wrote: Am 04.09.2008 um 01:06 schrieb Michael Stone: On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 05:33:28PM -0400, Greg Smith wrote: Has anyone tried making the activity which is X-windows and inside which other activities can run? [1] and [2] seem apropos. Michael [1]: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7768#comment:8 [2]: http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/12/run_a_nested_x11_desktop_on_th.html I couldn't resist making an activity for that: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/X Anybody has any idea about how to make xephyr use the clipboard of the external X server? DND may be even harder. Regards, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Cmap tools (with image customization cross over)
Hi Bert, That strategy sounds good to me if its easy. You still need a custom image because the end result should be something which can be quickly installed on 10K or more XOs via: - USB - olpc-update over WAN or from XS - NAND Blaster That said, making it an activity would make it easy to use the existing customization key. How hard is it to do what you suggest? Would you be interested in making a Cmap running inside X window activity .xo bundle? I think that would simplify the discussion with them and clarify how it might work. Thanks, Greg S Bert Freudenberg wrote: The better approach would be to install everything into the bundle directory itself. Then simply zip it and you should have a working xo bundle. A custom build should not be necessary for this. - Bert - On 23.12.2008, at 21:35, Greg Smith wrote: Hi Bert, Thanks. It was actually right click for me but that did it. I installed the Cmap tools from within the X activity and it mostly worked. A few oddities in the X activity like the arrow keys not working but nothing fatal. I'll follow up with the Cmap people and see if they can move it ahead some more. Dan, Here's a good use case for the image customization feature. To install Cmap, I open the X activity, downloaded a zip, then unpacked it which created a bin file. I made that executable and ran it which launched an installer which installed Java and some other stuff into a directory I chose (data). I also assume they would want to tweak the X activity initrc file to make it launch Cmap automatically. The whole thing is within a Rainbow instance but I believe its re-usable if its in the data directory. Would your customization stick strategy allow me to make this whole thing part of an image installable on many XOs as described? Thanks, Greg S Bert Freudenberg wrote: Click to bring up a menu and open a terminal. Alternatively, edit the .xinitrc file to auto-launch any X applications you want started (xterm is a common choice) before executing the window manager. This is also how you would bundle and launch a regular X app like cmap. - Bert - On 23.12.2008, at 16:34, Greg Smith wrote: Hi Michael and Bert, It got quiet enough that I had a chance to try this myself. I tried installing and running the X activity and I tried following the instructions here: http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/12/run_a_nested_x11_desktop_on_th.html In both cases I got a gray screen with a bar showing Workspace with two triangles next to it (left and right facing) on the left side of the bar and the time with the same triangles on the right side. I didn't see my pointer in the Hackfest version but I did in the X window version. In both cases I didn't see any place to enter text (e.g. a window). Am I missing something? I was hoping to get an X window with a prompt so I could install CMap tools from there. Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks, Greg S Greg Smith wrote: Hi All, Picking up this old thread (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-September/018835.html) I want to move this forward again. There is a beta version of a smaller Linux implementation of CMap tools now. Download it from here: http://cmap.ihmc.us/download/cmaplite.php Does anyone have time to try running this inside of the X windows activity mentioned below? While we have some traction on other concept map tools (thanks Tomeu for Labrynth), CMap is incumbent in a number of countries and I want to figure out how close we are to supporting it. It will affect our ability to get XOs and Sugar in to more schools systems so its certainly valuable work. Let me know if anyone has a chance to try this out and document what it will take to make it work. Thanks, Greg S * On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 4:00 PM, Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de wrote: Am 04.09.2008 um 01:06 schrieb Michael Stone: On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 05:33:28PM -0400, Greg Smith wrote: Has anyone tried making the activity which is X-windows and inside which other activities can run? [1] and [2] seem apropos. Michael [1]: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7768#comment:8 [2]: http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/12/run_a_nested_x11_desktop_on_th.html I couldn't resist making an activity for that: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/X Anybody has any idea about how to make xephyr use the clipboard of the external X server? DND may be even harder. Regards, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: performance work
Hi Jordan, Looks like we made a little more progress on graphics benchmarking. See Neil's results below. I updated the feature page with the test results so far: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/General_UI_sluggishness What's next? Do we know enough now to target a particular section of the code for optimization? Thanks, Greg S *** Subject: Re: performance work To: Wade Brainerd wad...@gmail.com Cc: OLPC Development devel@lists.laptop.org, g...@laptop.org Message-ID: 494e16aa.3070...@skierpage.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Wade Brainerd wrote: On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 7:08 PM, Neil Graham l...@screamingduck.com Is there a build of cairo that can produce a log of what calls are used in typical XO use? http://www.cairographics.org/FAQ/#performance_concerns says Cairo provides a cairo-trace utility (currently only available from the git development tree, but is planned for inclusion with Cairo 1.10) (I think Joyride builds include Cairo 1.8.0, latest released Cairo is 1.8.6) Some good ways to find out are located here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Performance_tuning I mentioned this. -- =S ** Neil said: I recommend running the Cairo benchmarks on the XO again with acceleration turned off in the X driver. This will give you a good indication of which operations are being accelerated and which are not. Done. http://screamingduck.com/Cruft/cairo_benchmark_XO_NoAccel.txt At a cursory glance it looks like an overall improvement without acceleration except for lines-xlib, add-xlib and over-xlib ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
XOCamp January 12 - 16, 2009
Hi All, The XOCamp schedule and plan is coming together. See the updated schedule here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOCamp_2 Sign up if you are coming here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOCamp_2#Attendees I will keep refining the session details in the next week. Any questions or comments welcome. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] stability of XS 0.5
Hi All, I agree with Sameer that people should be informed in advance if there are known issues. I put a note on the release notes page and a link to this list at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Release_Notes#XS_0.5 When the documented features are working as designed we can remove it. Until then its better to warn people. Thanks, Greg S From: Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu Subject: Re: [Server-devel] stability of XS 0.5 To: Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com Cc: server-devel@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: 5fb387c70812180912o557b3c4bya86a82b9d66c4...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 3:42 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 4:48 AM, Sameer Verma sve...@sfsu.edu wrote: Given that we still have issues cropping up with XS 0.5, are we still going to call it stable? It's great news that you care about this. Do you have a spare (standard modernish x86) you can use to join the testing efforts? Sure! I have a Fujitsu P2120 (Transmeta Crusoe ~900MHz proc, 384MB RAM) that I've been using for testing. We use it at all the OLPC-SF meetings. XS 0.4 works fine on it right out of the box, but no such love with 0.5, hence the concern. I've been following your thread on the built-in wireless card confusion and it looks like I may have the same issue. It's much easier than with the XO, which requires special HW. If you get involved, I can organise shipping additional hw that'll be useful. We can always dig up a relatively modern P4 for testing. What additional hw would this be? I'll soon push a new 0.5.1 candidate build. You'll be CC'd so you can lend a hand. OK. I'll wait for it. OTOH, all the reported issues have been diagnosed, and all but one fixed. Not bad for a milestone release in what is a fast development schedule towards 1.0. Don't get me wrong. I really appreciate your efforts. On my recent trip to India (http://opensource.sfsu.edu/node/593), I realized the immense importance of the school server in environs with no Internet backhaul. Khairat, India's first pilot, has a server, but its an old build (160 or 161, I think) and they recently lost their backhaul, so they don't use it anymore. The teacher asked for a lot of things that could be fixed easily with the current XS feature set. In other schools where they might consider getting XOs, the immense cost of backhaul will kill the effort before it gets off the ground. The XS fills that gap. This reminds me: We should explore sneakernet-like e-mail at some point, but I digress. The offline nature of content and software (wikislice, moodle, etc.) is going to be instrumental in getting XOs to poorer school districts that cannot afford backhaul connectivity.. In fact, I think the role of the school server is undersold and overshadowed by the XO's capabilities and eye candy. I'm just concerned that folks like Manoocher (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/grassroots/2008-December/000953.html) might get misled by the stable monkier only to find out that the 0.5 ISO has issues. cheers, Sameer ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: Minutes of Power in 9.1.0 meeting
Thanks Chris! Could you also mention any planned GUI changes in the specification section? Name changes to the modes and moving the radio off to Network control panel only are two that come to mind. If you can define what it will look like and help close the loop with Sugar or whoever is needed to change the GUI that would be a big help. Also, who is tracking the added ability to shut off power to the radio interface and its logic when the radio is set to off in its control panel (requirement 2)? Joe, Its over to you to write the test plan now. I added two documentation links to the top of the specification section to give you more background on how it is supposed to work. Let me know if you have any questions. I want to have a solid test plan reviewed and in place early this time as I think that was a critical missing piece in the 8.2.0 release. Thanks, Greg S Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:56:04 -0500 From: Chris Ball c...@laptop.org Subject: Re: Minutes of Power in 9.1.0 meeting To: g...@laptop.org Cc: Richard Smith rich...@laptop.org, OLPC Development devel@lists.laptop.org, Joseph A. Feinstein j...@laptop.org Message-ID: m3myeuqum3@pullcord.laptop.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Hi Greg, * Chris to make some additions to requirement linking in the existing documentation, including what happens when the lid is closed. I believe Joe is waiting for Chris to update the requirements before he writes the test cases. I am waiting for the test cases so I can explain to people exactly how much longer the battery will last. I've added these new sections to the requirements (added to the end of the list in order to avoid renumbering the list). I also added a link to the most recent test plan we have for power management, which would be a fine model for the new one. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Improved_battery_life Thanks, - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Cmap tools
Hi All, Picking up this old thread (http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-September/018835.html) I want to move this forward again. There is a beta version of a smaller Linux implementation of CMap tools now. Download it from here: http://cmap.ihmc.us/download/cmaplite.php Does anyone have time to try running this inside of the X windows activity mentioned below? While we have some traction on other concept map tools (thanks Tomeu for Labrynth), CMap is incumbent in a number of countries and I want to figure out how close we are to supporting it. It will affect our ability to get XOs and Sugar in to more schools systems so its certainly valuable work. Let me know if anyone has a chance to try this out and document what it will take to make it work. Thanks, Greg S * On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 4:00 PM, Bert Freudenberg bert at freudenbergs.de wrote: Am 04.09.2008 um 01:06 schrieb Michael Stone: On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 05:33:28PM -0400, Greg Smith wrote: Has anyone tried making the activity which is X-windows and inside which other activities can run? [1] and [2] seem apropos. Michael [1]: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7768#comment:8 [2]: http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/12/run_a_nested_x11_desktop_on_th.html I couldn't resist making an activity for that: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/X Anybody has any idea about how to make xephyr use the clipboard of the external X server? DND may be even harder. Regards, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
9.1 Planning Meeting Today (Wed.) 2PM US ET #olpc-meeting
Hi All, We are on for the weekly 9.1 planning meeting today (Wed. 12/17) at 2PM US East Coast Time. Its an IRC meeting on freenode.net #olpc-meeting. Here are the minutes from last week: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-December/021740.html Per Michael's request, I blocked two hours for the meeting. Tha agenda is: 10 minutes - Review status of last week action items. 30 minutes - XO Camp review and status. 45 minutes - 9.1.0 status. Schedule review, status of major features, page updates and roadmap scrub status. 20 minutes - Trac scrub and conventions review. 15 minutes - set agenda for next week and review action items. Open action items from last week are: - Action item: Greg to edit the camp proposals to focus on top 9.1 priorities and remove most other items. - Action item: Joe to read schedule and update as needed by next meeting: Wed. 12/17. - Action item: Ed to read schedule and update as needed by next meeting: Wed. 12/17 - Action item - Ed to set a date for start of Trac scrub. He will tell us that date by Friday 12/12. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
9.1.0 Meeting Minutes
Greg, Ed, Simon, Chris, Deepak, Sayamindu, Dan, cjl, Ben, Morgan, Marco, SJ and possibly others met on IRC on Wed. 12/17. Minutes: - XO Camp - Page (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOCamp_2) needs updating. See Greg's action item below. Focus on design and requirements review of 9.1.0 target features. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Features Comment that we should have an open time for other topics. Noted: OLPC might be able to fund its own employees, and isn't able to fund anyone else. Action item for SJ to move fundraising link to Sugar site (see below). Comments that sugar or Bernie or community may be able to raise money for others to attend. - 9.1.0 plan review: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 - Feature set is mostly chosen. Need to parse the language work a little more. Action item for Ed to review feature set and ack that is the right must have list. Comments from other welcome. Greg suggested that Arabic should be added to the must have list. Will do that unless there are objections heard soon. Discussion of how to choose the activity set in the manufactured image. Noted that Mel now has the contact info for all activities authors. Discussion of how many activities which run in 8.2 are likely to run unmodified in 9.1.0. Some key ones needing update were noted: Read, Browse, others. Activity compatibility policy link shared by Morgan: http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/API_policy Agreement to discuss activities again next week. Discussion of which activities might break when power save is on. No follow up noted. Requirement #9 at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Improved_battery_life is supposed to say all activities must work with power save on. I will talk to Chris and see if that should be clarified. Discussed need to get better engineering traction on: Activation/lease/signing/image customization. Schedule mentioned. More details in action items below. - Trac conventions and triage plan. - Deferred to next week. See also action items. - Other - Note from Deepak: Status for power stuff is that I believe we are at 700-800ms for resume to userspace, but need to fix a timekeeping bug to get exact data. I will start looking at the more interesting problems of parallelizing some kernel bits next. I will also take a look at and comment on all 9.1 kernel bugs in next week. *** Action items: - Action item: Greg to edit the camp proposals to focus on top 9.1 priorities and remove most other items. Also set exact times and meetings in to the schedule. Also add Sugar 0.84 - 9.1.0 meeting. GS - finish by next week, 12/24 - Action item: Ed to set a date for start of Trac scrub. He will tell us that date by Friday 12/19 - Action item: Ed and Joe to review 9.1 schedule and update as needed. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Schedule - Action item: Ed to review 9.1.0 feature set. Ensure that all fit the goal. Stretch goal to pick engineers to work on them and to review requirements to make sure they are clear. Action item: SJ to move this URL to sugar labs site. *** Next meeting Wed. 12/24 2PM US ET IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting. Yes we are on the day before Xmas! Agenda: 5 minutes - review last weeks action items. 10 minutes XO Camp status 25 minutes - 9.1.0 page and feature development status. Also activity compatibility and activity set selection. Lastly, Trac conventions and scrub status. 10 minutes - Synchronizing with Sugar release cycle 10 minutes - set action items and agenda for next week. Corrections, comments, and additions welcome. Its an open meeting so anyone working on the project can join. Simon/erikos is especially invited :-) Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO (was Fedora 10 on XO)
Hi Paul, I mean slimmed down Fedora (probably shouldn't even call it Fedora at that point) plus Gnome, KDE of XFCE window manager. Is that precise enough? If its as easy as yum install gnome on top of 8.2.0 image, that would be great! Thanks, Greg S p...@laptop.org wrote: greg wrote: Hi All, Thanks for all the feedback on my questions about what it would take to run a slimmed down Fedora 10 on the XO NAND. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-December/msg00022.html To reiterate, the goal is one distribution with two Desktop Environments (Sugar and one standard one). I think the main work now is to pick the minimal package list that we need and will fit on the XO NAND. Can anyone get a slimmed down Fedora 10 with window manager running on an XO? yes. install any joyride. i'm being flip, of course, but please be precise. our installs _are_ slimmed down fedora releases. and sugar _is_ a window manager. (but seriously: we only need to add to what we have -- we don't need to start from scratch, rebuilding and/or subtracting from fedora.) paul =- paul fox, p...@laptop.org give one laptop, get one laptop --- http://www.laptop.com/xo ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: performance work
Forwarding this to devel. Any comments or suggestions on how we can start to optimize graphics performance is appreciated. It looks like we have a good test bed in place which should help us focus on the right bottlenecks. Thanks, Greg S Greg Smith wrote: Hi Neil, That's great data, thanks! I put these links here for tracking: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/General_UI_sluggishness John, Do you have further suggestions on what bottle necks this points to? What part of the code should be optimized to improve the graphics performance based on these results and what do you think Neil's next steps should be? Thanks, Greg S Neil Graham wrote: On Tue, 2008-12-09 at 15:43 -0500, Greg Smith wrote: Three ideas on how you can help. 1 - There is a recent thread on SVG performance. See: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-December/010200.html You may find something there you can contribute to. 2 - I also get the impression we do need to work on the Cairo front. If you can list a set of bugs, we can flag them as useful for 9.1 and track them. Well To start off with I compiled the cairo benchmarks and ran them on my slowest PC (2Ghz) and the XO (from a basic startx ) http://screamingduck.com/Cruft/cairo_benchmark_XO.txt http://screamingduck.com/Cruft/cairo_benchmark_2GHz_E2180.txt At least this gives me some base data to work with. Some of the tests on the XO have some eyebrow raising results, such as... downsample-nearest Testing 512x512-lenna... 0: 851892 (1.98 ms) 1: 855671 (1.99 ms) 2: 905907 (2.10 ms) 3: 862388 (2.00 ms) 4: 852743 (1.98 ms) downsample-nearest-xlib Testing 512x512-lenna... 0: 10102252 (23.44 ms) 1: 33629542 (78.02 ms) 2: 33715350 (78.22 ms) 3: 34031523 (78.96 ms) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO (was Fedora 10 on XO)
Hi All, Thanks for all the feedback on my questions about what it would take to run a slimmed down Fedora 10 on the XO NAND. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-December/msg00022.html To reiterate, the goal is one distribution with two Desktop Environments (Sugar and one standard one). I think the main work now is to pick the minimal package list that we need and will fit on the XO NAND. Can anyone get a slimmed down Fedora 10 with window manager running on an XO? If so, can you record the packages and available space in the specifications section here? http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Run_Fedora_applications_on_XO RTFM answers with URLs also welcome. Chris and Erik, Where are we with getting a proof of concept for this feature in place? You both mentioned some work in this area (Chris on resurrecting something Scott did and Erik on other work). Let me know the status and next steps. The hard part will come when we need to pick the bare minimum set of functionality. I especially want to know what additional libraries/RPMs/features we need to install beyond what we alrady have in XO 8.2.0. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 2588 - Journal unusable
Hi All, This is a great thread! Very respectful but on point and addressing a core concern which needs to become a core competency. Mikus, James, Gary and the other lead developers who pull down joyride regularly are critical to the success of the next release. They proved it in the last release. I agree with James suggestion to get people to test new code in a private stream before they put it in joyride. Whether that can be done or not, we need to be more clear about when Mikus and the cutting edge team should try out the latest version. There will be bumps along the way, miscommunication, lost time and wasted bandwidth. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. As long as we continuously improve and we respect each others time and input, we'll get there. This is open source at its best and we have to become great at it for the success of the project. We're off to a good start but we need to see continual improvement on communicating status and quality of Joyride from now until release. 85 days until we send XO Software Release 9.1.0 to manufacturing! Thanks, Greg S ** Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:27:21 +1100 From: James Cameron qu...@laptop.org Subject: Re: 2588 - Journal unusable To: Chris Ball c...@laptop.org Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: 20081212042721.gg6...@us.netrek.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii G'day Chris, I'll give a partial line of reasoning response ... this is not complete, I'm short of time. Where I said public, I meant developer builds that can be used by other developers. I didn't mean to imply public builds for testing by non-developers. I mean the difference between what a developer does and what a developer releases. That isn't only OLPC originated code, that's also the choice of what RPMs to accept from outside. Accepting lots of RPMs at once is the same as making lots of code change. Why don't you have private build streams? That's what I can do with debxo, for instance ... build on my desktop, test on an XO, and then avoid releasing anything to the public until I've verified that what I've changed actually works. Why can't the build system be replicated so that each developer can test their change before releasing it? What is it about the build system that prevents it? I thought the build system was just a set of downloads and put-it-together processes. -- James Cameron mailto:qu...@us.netrek.org http://quozl.netrek.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Minutes of Power in 9.1.0 meeting
Hi Chris, Joe, Paul and Richard, How are we doing on closing these action items? * Chris to make some additions to requirement linking in the existing documentation, including what happens when the lid is closed. * Mitch and Deepak to figure out who works on requirement 12. * Joe to write test plan and get it reviewed. * Paul to write an explanation of what power button should do and update that requirement and specification. * Richard to determine how to address the no regressions requirement and how to measure the success of the feature in terms of Amps used. I believe Joe is waiting for Chris to update the requirements before he writes the test cases. I am waiting for the test cases so I can explain to people exactly how much longer the battery will last. Let's close these out so we can get this one ready early. Update the feature page here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Improved_battery_life BTW each feature no has its own page and all the features under consideration are listed in a table here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#All_features Sort by target 9.1.0 to see the must have list. Send me a note if you think anything else needs to be on that must build in 9.1.0 list. Other edits and added detail on any feature, welcome anytime. Thanks, Greg S Greg Smith wrote: Greg, Chris, Joe, Erik, Mitch and Deepak met on Thursday 12/4. Minutes: Will use the feature roadmap for tracking: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Power_management We need to address the three separate high level areas on that page. We rewrote the requirement and listed all bugs and areas of work in the specification section. We integrated all of Gnu's comments (some must fix, some should fix and one should be moved to network). We wrote down who owns each of the listed requirements in the owners section. Action items: * Chris to make some additions to requirement linking in the existing documentation, including what happens when the lid is closed. * Mitch and Deepak to figure out who works on requirement 12. * Joe to write test plan and get it reviewed. * Paul to write an explanation of what power button should do and update that requirement and specification. * Richard to determine how to address the no regressions requirement and how to measure the success of the feature in terms of Amps used. Comments and questions welcome. I will check with you on status of your action items next week. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Wireless activation improvements.
Hi Michael, This is definitely a must have/must fix item for 9.1.0. It is needed by Ethiopia and other deployments. It may be used in a warehouse where the XOs are prepared as opposed to in a school where we assume there is less ability to change/tweak the AP ESSID. I'll try to get more feedback on that but right now my impression is that the primary use case is in a warehouse. I was treating it like a bug so it didn't have a full write up on the Feature page. I see there is some design needed so I'll make a section for it here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Activation_lease_security I'm not completely sure what you mean by mesh but if that refers to our Active Antenna (AA) I need to remind everyone that the AA is not a product right now, not supported and not available from OLPC. That may change in the future but right now its not being sold. The bottom line is that wireless activation through an AP to the school server is a must have item for 9.1.0 which fits perfectly in the Deployability and Maintainability theme of the release. Thanks, Greg S * Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:18:47 -0200 From: Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Wireless activation improvements. To: Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org, Kim Quirk [EMAIL PROTECTED], Guadalupe Artigas [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 11:33 PM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Therefore: do we have any interest in developing such a feature? Yes, we want this. The main thing with 802.11abg is that we need to pick an essid using a reasonably stable mechanism. A few months ago we discussed the topic of selecting an essid (on techteam - no archive link, sorry). The summary I have of that conversation is that we can hardcode an essid prefix or suffix and assoc to the first open signal matching it: - Local deployments will probably want to use an ESSID that means school in a local language. (Sidenote: is utf-8 usable in ESSID strings? Sorting/collation rules to pick the first matching utf-8 ESSID are a potential headache.) - An alternative is to just hardcode 'SCHOOLSERVER'. The same signal, however, will be usually be used to associate to the XS, so it's better that it has a localised name for when users pick it from the 'Network view'. - Mitch offered to code up a chooser UI, but it was later agreed it was overkill. - The ad-hoc IPv4 self-assignment done for mesh is ugly but ok. The XS will talk to IPv4 addresses in that range over mesh or abg. - This assumes the signal will be unencrypted. Supporting encryption so early in the game adds a lot of complexity - complex WiFi setups can broadcast an unencrypted ESSID for activation services, and an encrypted signal for the rest of their traffic. - If/when we get a stable Libertas HostAP driver, we can teach the XS to run such a dual-signal configuration if desired. - One thing to keep in mind: no matter what technique we use to pick the ESSID, someone with an AP set to the same ESSID and channel can DoS us and make a bit of a mess. There aren't any usable workarounds. OTOH, we can tell good data from bad as is signed. cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Wireless activation improvements.
Hi Guys, Lease management/renewal is a different feaure which I call Activation lease security. The requirements are written: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Activation_lease_security Ethiopia and Peru have signed off that those requirements meet their needs and I am tracking it as a top priority for 9.1.0. I plan to run it by Uruguayan technical leads ASAP. I mention Ethiopia in regards to initial Activation because they use a custom image and I know its painful to setup all the XOs via USB in a warehouse. Peru, Rwanda, Haiti and essentially all the large deployments will benefit from this feature, when its available (hopefully 8.2.1 but no confirmed date yet). That is, if they are willing to put an AP and a school server in their installation warehouse. We still have to tease apart in the in school activation case from the warehouse case. My impression is that they are always activated in the warehouse but that needs validation. FYI, two other related features on the docket for 9.1 are: Faster imaging and Image customization in the section: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Security.2C_activation_and_deployability Those are due for an update (preview: I plan to ask for one click XO image cloning) and another round of sanity check with engineers and users. I hope to get to that next week. Thanks, Greg S Martin Langhoff wrote: On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Daniel Drake d...@laptop.org wrote: The primary use case that the Ethiopia team is interested in is automating/simplifying the lease *renewal* which is done at schools, not a warehouse. Lease renewal is -- unfortunately -- missing big chunks in 8.2 . I don't think it's doable for 8.2.1. I'm trying to coordinate an effort (eith Ed's help) to team up with Michael and/or Scott to get this done as soon as 8.2.1 is out, with a target of 9.1 or (if people make a strong case for it) 8.2.2. cheers, m ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Testing] Activity Set for 9.1.0
Hi Dan, RTFM :-) http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0#If_your_XO_is_not_connected_to_the_internet Thanks, Greg S Daniel Drake wrote: On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 7:57 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: All of our deployments except one currently take the default image. Many change it (usually adding more than subtracting) after they get the XOs in country but they start with our factory image. Where can this image be found? I'm curious as to what it contains. Thanks, Daniel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
9.1 Weekly Meeting on IRC at 2PM US ET Today
Hi All, Our weekly 9.1 meeting (was called feature roadmap) is today, Wed. 12/10 at 2PM US East Time on IRC Freenode.net #olpc-meeting channel. Agenda for this week is: 20 minutes - XO Camp update 20 minutes roadmap update and 9.1.0 page edits (especially schedule) 10 minutes finalize and approve trac usage 10 minutes agenda and action items for next week Minutes of last weeks meeting is here: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-December/021502.html Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
9.1.0 Weekly Meeting minutes
Ed, Michael, Marco, Chris, Paul, Joe, Greg and possible others met on IRC December 10th for 9.1 weekly meeting (formerly called roadmap meeting). - XO Camp We updated the goals for the camp. See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 We discussed the need to focus on 9.1.0 features. Action item: Greg to edit the camp proposals to focus on top 9.1 priorities and remove most other items. - 9.1 Schedule and Feature Roadmap Greg noted that a new Semantic format for the feature roadmap will be put in place ASAP. See the new format at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Features-test Its locked for editing right now but once the new format is in place we can quickly tag the main features which must be in 9.1. Also noted that we will tag other features which people can work on and we will tie this page in to Trac and to the 9.1 page. The schedule was mentioned but it needs updating. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Schedule Action item: Joe to read schedule and update as needed by next meeting: Wed. 12/17. Action item: Ed to read schedule and update as needed by next meeting: Wed. 12/17 - Trac bug scrub We discussed the need to agree on Trac conventions. Ed is the release manager and its up to him in the end. Action item - Ed to set a date for start of Trac scrub. He will tell us that date by Friday 12/12. - General There were some complaints that we don't have a plan or that we are spending too much time talking about stuff instead of working. There were also complaints that we don't reach consensus on a subject before moving to the next one. There was no consensus on the agenda but people wanted to make the meeting longer so that everyone's opinion could be heard. Just noting that for the record. My proposed agenda is below. Please comment and ask for changes or additions or subtractions as needed. Next meeting Wed 12/17 2PM US ET IRC Freenode.net #olpc-meeting Agenda 30 minutes - XO Camp review and status. 45 minutes - 9.1.0 status. Schedule review, status of major features, page updates and roadmap scrub status. 30 minutes - Trac scrub and conventions review. 15 minutes - set agenda for next week and review action items. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Activity Set for 9.1.0
Hi All, Learning from the last release, I want to start activity selection early for 9.1.0. I created a section on the 9.1.0 planning page for activities: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_requirements#Activities I want to get all potential activities listed there. An activity will need to be tested with the release and have a maintainer to have a chance for inclusion. Like last time, we will gather input from everyone then make a decision on the final set. OLPC management gets the final say but I will make sure they hear the voice of the community, preferably consensus. You can help by updating that Wiki page with the details of the activities you think should be included. Personally, I would like to see a few fun (but not violent) activities. Something colorful, exciting and fun for kids. My kids recently started playing with Spore demos. I'm not asking for something that pretty, but a few really fun looking and addictive applications for kids would be great! Morgan, What can we do to fire up the activity community (and list) again? Can you make sure we have the full list of contacts you gathered from the last round? We can also cook up an invite e-mail to get people thinking about 9.1.0 once we have a contact list. Target is to have tested, working activities to choose from by the end of February. Any comments or questions welcome. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Testing] Activity Set for 9.1.0
Hi Chris,
When this release is done we will update the default image used in
manufacturing.
All of our deployments except one currently take the default image. Many
change it (usually adding more than subtracting) after they get the XOs
in country but they start with our factory image.
We will also offer people an option to clean install with a set of
activities like we did in 8.2.
Let me know if that's not clear or you need more info.
Thanks,
Greg S
Chris Ball wrote:
Hi Greg,
Hi All, Learning from the last release, I want to start activity
selection early for 9.1.0.
Our software releases don't ship with activities, so I don't understand
what's being selected here. We didn't choose a set of activities to
ship with 8.2.0; we chose a set of activities to ship on a G1G1 image.
Each deployment creates its own conjunction of {XO release+Activities},
with G1G1 being one such deployment when it's running.
Could you elaborate on what the list of chosen activities would mean
this time around?
Thanks,
- Chris.
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Greg S work report for 2 Weeks ending 12/5
General status: Uruguay is starting an in-school pilot of 800 XOs running version 8.2. After successful completion of that pilot they plan to upgrade all XOs to the new version. 9.1.0 planning is underway (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0). 90 days until the release! The focus is on deployment and maintenance. The four main areas of work are: 1 - Rebase release on Fedora 10 and make it easy to run standard Fedora Desktop and applications. 2 - Easier installation of secure, customized XO software images, focusing on activation, lease management, image customization and signing. 3 - Improved power management for longer battery life. 4 - New translations and better support for Nepali, Amharic and Chinese. In addition, the release will include many other bug fixes and features. *** User links of the week (Spanish) Jorge Drexler (http://www.jorgedrexler.com/), an Uruguayan music star, wrote a song about Plan Ceibal (XO project in Uruguay) http://www.pilas.net/20081201/drexler-le-canta-al-plan-ceibal/ Here's a brief, informal translation of the song: A little square of heaven (or sky) a window on the river. A river made of light a river made of light and of birds in flight. I want to be a navigator by the austral heavens I want to be a navigator by the austral heavens without leaving my eddy in the shade of the Ceibal tree Welcome fantasy to this transparent course. As a boat in the current I also want to leave my wake of poetry. Then Drexler met with RAP Ceibal volunteers and asked parents to get involved in the project. See: http://www.fedaro.info/2008/12/04/drexler-convoca-a-integrarse-a-rap-ceibal/ Also posted this week, another XO inspired song out of Peru: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQiA5F6AJcQ Status of goals set on 11/21 1 - Build 9.1 project page and select top high level feature requests and layout rough schedule. GS - Done. See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 Needs a lot more detail on features and schedule. 2 - Define Trac usage and Trac scrub plan for 9.1 GS - Partially done. Discussed Trac usage but we need a follow up meeting. Scrub plan is to do a two day historical triage 12/15 and 12/16. Details to follow. 3 - Fill in requirements definition for top 9.1 features and engage engineers. GS - Partially done. First pass at top four requirements written. Discussions with engineering underway. Still need a lead owner on top two items: - Run regular Fedora window managers and applications and - Activation/lease/signing/image customization 4 - Update School Server documentation. GS - Partially done. Updated main XS page http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_server so that everything above slightly outdated section refers to actual features currently available. *** Goals for next week. 1 - Finish collection of all main features on Feature Roadmap page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap. Stretch goal to make that a Semantic query with each feature having its own page. 2 - Update 9.1.0 page with a detailed list of sub-requirements. Add detail to the schedule and get sign off on it from engineering and QA. Engage engineers to get specifications and plans documented for each feature. 3 - Start triage of full feature roadmap to flag 9.1.0 items and prioritize all items. 4 - Create basic presentation on plans for 9.1.0 and run it by main customers and other stakeholders. 5 - Update School Server documentation with links to Readme file for each main feature. Comment on XS roadmap and Moodle plan. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] File transfer in Telepathy
Hi Guillaume, Thanks for reading it over and commenting. I dropped the sugar list and moved this to devel. If someone (Tomeu?) thinks it should be back on Sugar devel, forward as needed. See original threads here: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-December/010122.html and here: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-December/010096.html FYI Requirements with should are nice to have but not critical (AKA do the must ones first and the should ones only if there is time). There was a request to follow RFC guidelines (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_Collaboration_Requirements#Requirements_Definition) but I'm not that formal yet. Can you link to any documentation on your plans in the specifications section? Links to the code itself are OK or whatever you have available without too much added work. I added a link to your GIT sample script already. More comments inline below. Thanks, Greg S Guillaume Desmottes wrote: Le jeudi 04 décembre 2008 à 13:42 -0500, Greg Smith a écrit : Hi Guillaume, Thanks for following up on this! I collected all the known requirements on this here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#File_sharing [...] Comments and questions welcome. Few comments then. Should allow moving an object to any XO visible over the network (AKA pingable) regardless of whether they are visible in the Neighborhood (due to bugs in collaboration or someone not collaborating or any other barrier which does not prevent ping). I'm wondering how would be the UI for this? How can I send a file/object to someone that I'm not seeing? From a Telepathy pov, you have to see the contact (as online) to send him a file. One of the improvement I suggested during my Sugar Camp talk was to add UI allowing users to add buddy based on their JID (like you do with your classic IM client). Then if he accepts you, you'll see it in your neighbourhood view when he's online. That means you can potentially add any one even if you are not seeing him atm (because of a bugged shared roster for example). If that what you mean or am I totally missing the point of this requirement? GS - I like that idea of naming the other XO and seeing them every time. I like it a lot! Should I create a new requirement for it? We should definitely do that if possible. Let me know how close we are. I put this requirement in to try and have a fall back in case other XOs are not visible in the Neighborhood. One of the oddities of our presence concept is that the users are usually sitting right next to each other. That's different than the typical corporate collaboration where people are in different offices. Its frustrating when you can see the kid next to you but your computer can't :-( If others can't solve all our problems of presence I want to have a fall back. The foolish, worst case is to ask kids to open terminal find their IP address, then ping each other then type that IP in to the GUI to share files or otherwise collaborate. Anything we can do to make that happen in the GUI (e.g. your idea above) would be great, as a fall back in case file transfer by existing presence mechanisms is not working. Eben, Can you comment on GUI options and let me know if you have any questions? Should support queuing a file for transfer later. That is, add support for asynchronous sharing over time : the sharing of an effort should not require everyone to be online at once. Do you want a send this file to Bob as soon he's online button? Then it's a pure UI thing, Telepathy (obviously) requiers the contact to be online when sending the file to him. GS - I think this was SJ's idea. Its clever but not critical. If Eben can design (and code?) the UI for it and its otherwise free with your code, we can consider it. I would definitely put it below the above items. I downgraded it to may. Enable automatic activity downloading for shared activities that aren't installed on the joining machine. This would need some design work but should be possible I think. Basically we need a way for the joiner to say to the initiator I'd like to join this activity but I don't have it. Could you send it to me please?. GS - Another SJ idea. Sorry I left out the priority. I marked it may to mean its lower than should. USeful but not critical right now. I'd like to know exactly which meta data should be available when we receive an incoming file transfer. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Specifications/Object_Transfers#Information_to_show contains some. Especially, I think we should distinct mandatory and optional informations. GS - I added that URL to the specifications section. Eben, can you get Guillaume the details he needs ASAP or let me know who to follow up with? All the others points seems perfectly reasonable and should be doable. GS - Awesome! When this is ready, someone should go to School IE 41050 Virgen de Lourdes - Islay, Peru http
Re: Fedora 10 on XO
Hi Erik, My general impression is that its not used that often. Mostly because very few deployments have upgraded and some may choose to clean install when they do. The main value of it is for Beta testers and technical people who work on validating the new releases. Hopefully this feature is not needed by the time an image is qualified for deployment in the schools... Thanks, Greg S Erik Garrison wrote: On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 06:36:53PM -0500, Greg Smith wrote: * Will it stop us from being able to hold two SugarOS builds on the NAND at the same time after olpc-update, as we do now? GS - Possibly depending on space needed. I think we would consider losing that feature if needed. tbd. I'm curious if anyone knows how commonly used this feature is in deployments. Erik ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora 10 on XO
Hi Chris, That sounds good! Please call up Dr. Frankenstein and resurrect the beast for inspection :-) Can you also put a link to any description of it (or to the code, relevant e-mail threads or whatever is available) in the specifications section of the feature? Thanks, Greg S Chris Ball wrote: Hi, I meant that we would ship a Sugar interface and a standard Fedora X-Window interface (e.g. XFCE) on the same NAND. I should have said desktop environments as Martin notes. Okay, I see, that sounds good. If we're comfortable with Xfce, it sounds like we should resurrect Scott's work from about six months ago on Xfce-and-Sugar in the faster builds. Thanks, - Chris. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO identity shared via Browse
Hi Luke, If you're interested in Sugar on XO, I believe that Tomeu et al want you on devel... Anyway I'll try to copy you on this thread. It would be useful to have a generic solution which works with many types of server software and many network configurations. However, this is where I need to separate must have from nice to have. We must allow the XS to know which XO it is talking to when there is an XS and XO on the same protected network (AKA XS doing NAT and acting as gateway to Internet). I can't wait for the nice to have piece if there is no agreement on technical implementation. I want the must have piece by March, no matter what. I'll take both too but I wont settle for none of the above :-) Thanks, Greg S Luke Faraone wrote: On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 19:17, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm copying in Devel and will drop the sugar list on further replies (hope that's the right netiquette in this case...). (note: I'm not on devel, so please keep me CC'd) security) who are the principals? what are their goals? what attacks concern us? GS - In general I don't want any other devices to be able to appear to be the XO. We can assume that the XS - XO is a secure network not visible to the outside workd (whether that is true in practice is another story). So I moved the encryption and stringent security requirements to the optional case where the XO is talking to a non-XS server. I'd rather not make that assumption. Some schools may not have a _local_ school server (even dispite our best wishes) or a student may want to access the server from a non-local connection. The XS, IMHO, should support the road warrior use case (at least for post-registration) -lf ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
9.1.0 Weekly Meeting Minutes (formerly called the feature roadmap meeting)
Caryl, Chris, Scott, Ed, CJL, Greg, Marco and possibly others met on IRC, Wed. December 3. Next meeting December 10 2PM US ET. See agenda below. Notes: - XO camp update. See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 Comment that travel budget is not final but Ed is working on it. Discussion about the goal of the meeting (see link) and comment that SJ plans to add a community track of meetings which will run in parallel to the technical proposals. Comment by Scott: for the record, i think we should come up with a better goal for xocamp2 Request that anyone who is presenting or has something valuable to add, please update the proposals with agenda details and presentations. More time reserved next meeting week for XO Camp. All are welcome to iron out goal and proposals in e-mail and on the wiki page. - Status and action items for Feature roadmap page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap Comment that Greg and S. are working on turning it in to a sortable semantic format. See definition here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Semantic_MediaWiki#Software_features_December_proposal When all well-defined features are listed in the main section, we will triage them for inclusion in 9.1. Target of next Wed to start feature triage. - Agree on Trac conventions for 9.1. General agreement that Milestone = 9.1.0 will list all bugs which are targeted for the release. IDs with milestone = 9.1.0 will be turned into real, implementable work with someone working on them (or assigned to them, even if work hasn't started). More trac usage to be defined in follow up meeting which Ed will convene with Michael and others. Will also cover synching with upstream bug systems. Discussion of Trac - Bugzilla, Trac to Trac, and OLPC - Fedora tools. After the meeting, Ed and team will update this page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Trac_conventions for 9.1.0. Goal to start review of all open Trac items December 15 and 16, four hours each day. End result will be a list of must fix bugs for 9.1.0. - General comment by Greg: To post 9.1.0 in March we must have a clean list of features and must fix bugs before Christmas! Time to ratchet up the productivity! See the updated 9.1.0 page, especially the schedule section: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 Edits and additions welcome. - Action items * Everyone to update roadmap page. I especially need help finding a home for everything in the engineering section: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Priorities_from_Engineering Please move your comments from there in to the main section. * Greg to get semantic format in place and start flagging features for 9.1.0. * Ed to convene meeting on trac conventions for 9.1.0 * Greg to update XOcamp page with an attendee section * Greg to schedule two grueling bug backlog triage meetings for 12/15 and 1/16. Next meeting December 10, 2PM US ET, IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting. Agenda for next week: 20 minutes - XO Camp update 20 minutes roadmap update and 9.1.0 page edits (especially schedule) 10 minutes finalize and approve trac usage 10 agenda and action items for next week Comments and additions welcome! Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Power Management plan for December - Meeting 2PM US ET 12/4 (today)
Hi Chris et al, We will have a one hour meeting from 2 - 3 PM US ET today (Thursday 12/4) to talk about power work for 9.1. Everyone who wants to contribute is welcome. We will use this dial in: From the United States 866-213-2185 From Outside the United States 1-609-454-9914 Code: 1671650 No IRC today. I want one round of old fashioned talking and writing on the whiteboard :-) I'll send out notes and we can do more IRC meetings in the future. Sorry for the short notice but call in if you can. Here is a proposed agenda: 10 minutes - confirm where we will document the requirements, specification and work plan. 10 minutes - layout the high level areas of work and assign engineering and QA lead for each. (one break of work is here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Power_management) 30 minutes - review list of trac IDs (see below and URL above) targeted for inclusion. 10 minutes - assign action items and pick next meeting as needed. Thanks, Greg S * http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-November/021412.html Hi, This e-mail describes the work plan for power management during December. I've filed bugs for each item, so this plan is the list of bugs that should be fixed during December. Bugs I plan to fix: * #2765 -- Need to turn off DCON after some time in idle suspend * #3732 -- ARP broadcasts don't wake autosuspended laptops * #7981 -- EC mask setting is inefficient * #9055 -- Create 9.1 test plans for automatic power management Bugs I will need significant help to fix: * #6818 -- Make the multicast wakeup filter work with collaboration (Ricardo Carrano?) * #7958 -- DCON flicker on resume (kernel regression; perhaps Deepak, Andres, Mitch, or Adam Jackson?) * #9054 -- Speed up USB resume (kernel) It will take some effort to gather the resources for fixing the second list of bugs (and if anyone reading can help, I'd love to hear from you). However, if we are able to fix all of these bugs we'll be in excellent shape for having a shippable-by-default automatic suspend feature in 9.1, assuming serious bugs uncovered during testing can be fixed. The plan for January would largely involve following up with QA and looking for further cheap performance wins in suspend/resume. Comments welcome. Are there important power management bugs that I've left out? Thanks, - Chris. -- Chris Ball cjb at laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: xo activity idea
Hi Yifan, Sounds like a good idea! I made a feature for you to track this work on our roadmap at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Spell_checker_in_write Fill in more details as you have them and other people can sign up to help there too. FYI all, I'm making a last push to get every well defined feature request in to the right form on the roadmap page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap I'm collapsing all the older comments from the Engineering section in to the main list and noting edits on the Discussion page. The goal is to make this a sortable list with a separate page for each Feature by next week. Then we can read and prioritize it to flag priority items for 9.1. Please help add your feature requests and fill in the existing ASAP. Thanks, Greg S *** Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 18:14:34 -0800 (PST) From: genesee [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: xo activity idea To: devel@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii I would love an ubiquitous spellchecker. Maybe in 9.1? Goodness knows I nedd one. Never got the spellcheck to work in the 'full' cmd-N AbiWord, (AKA Write's slightly smarter older brother). Might be a good jumping off point? BTW, would also die for a Sugar svg program to make my own xoguy or icons etc... -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/xo-activity-idea-tp1609182p1611725.html Sent from the Software development mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Minutes of Power in 9.1.0 meeting
Greg, Chris, Joe, Erik, Mitch and Deepak met on Thursday 12/4. Minutes: Will use the feature roadmap for tracking: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Power_management We need to address the three separate high level areas on that page. We rewrote the requirement and listed all bugs and areas of work in the specification section. We integrated all of Gnu's comments (some must fix, some should fix and one should be moved to network). We wrote down who owns each of the listed requirements in the owners section. Action items: * Chris to make some additions to requirement linking in the existing documentation, including what happens when the lid is closed. * Mitch and Deepak to figure out who works on requirement 12. * Joe to write test plan and get it reviewed. * Paul to write an explanation of what power button should do and update that requirement and specification. * Richard to determine how to address the no regressions requirement and how to measure the success of the feature in terms of Amps used. Comments and questions welcome. I will check with you on status of your action items next week. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora 10 on XO
Hi Erik, Peter and Chris, Thanks a lot for the comments and offer of help! I updated the requirement to explain that the idea is a slimmed down version of Fedora which fits on our NAND. I added a comment about upgrading too. Here are some comments on the rest of Chris's questions: * So we'd ship two different distributions on the NAND? GS - Yes. * Would they live on different partitions? GS - Prefer a single partition. I added a requirement to say that libraries and files should be hard linked so that any code is used only once by both implementations. * How will we allocate space between them? GS - The goal is that they (Sugar and standard X-Window manager) are both just different views of the same image. So we don't allocate space between them. * How much extra space on the NAND are we going to use? GS - Not sure. How much do we need, minimum? It has to be less than 1GB - user file space but exact amount still needs definition. * Will it stop us from being able to hold two SugarOS builds on the NAND at the same time after olpc-update, as we do now? GS - Possibly depending on space needed. I think we would consider losing that feature if needed. tbd. Keep them coming! FYI for the devel list, I pasted the original e-mail below. Thanks, Greg S Hi All, I am working on requirements for the next major release of the XO, 9.1.0 (see: overview at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0). There are two major requirements which would benefit from expert Fedora knowledge: - Rebase to Fedora 10 - Run Fedora applications The first draft requirements on them are defined here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Linux_and_OS Any comments welcome. Do they make sense? Are they well defined? What else do we need to track? A few other questions (RTFM with URL responses OK): 1 - How big (MBs) are the supported X window managers? If we have to choose one or two which should we include? 2 - Is there a Netbook implementation of Fedora? We're going to need a bare minimum of default installed applications. Let me know if there are suggestions on which to include. 3 - Does Fedora 10 supports 802.11s? I will do more research on those but if anyone has a quick answer handy it will save me time. Also, send me a note if you're interested in working on either of those or anything on our not-yet-prioritized roadmap http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap. Thanks, Greg Smith OLPC Product Manager Erik Garrison wrote: On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 06:01:31PM -0500, Chris Ball wrote: Hi Greg, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Linux_and_OS Any comments welcome. Do they make sense? Are they well defined? What else do we need to track? FWIW, I think this is the first I've heard of: Must allow switching between Fedora 10 with a conventional desktop manager and XO running Sugar, and back. Must/should? allow this on all XOs shipping with XO release 9.1.0. That is, an XO which ships with Sugar Fedora 10 (at least, as shipped on SD for G1G1) doesn't fit on our NAND at the moment, and requires swap, so this one needs to become much more concrete. This is the case for the official Fedora 10. It need not be the case for an rpm-based system built out of the Fedora 10 repositories. I am currently working on a solution which should comfortably fit into the 1 GB of NAND FLASH. Call it a respin. rpmxo. Erik ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] XO identity shared via Browse
Hi All, I'm copying in Devel and will drop the sugar list on further replies (hope that's the right netiquette in this case...). Of all the e-mails I have sent this week I never would have guess that this one would generate the most responses! Maybe it was the use of the term SSO :( I updated the requirements to address Michael's comments below. The one which did not engender a requirement update are noted here: what software, on the XO, should be responsible for proving identity? GS - It says Browse and I mean only Browse (that's why I sent it to the sugar list initially) if Browse, how does Browse talk to the registration code? if Browse, what about Gmail, Help, WikiBrowse, ... GS - Not a requirement either way on registration code. Not a requirement to work with Gmail, Help or Wikibrowse, but I left in other server (Gmail case?) as nice to have. when should we make use of an ability to prove user identity? GS - Not sure what this is asking. Its purpose is to make it easier to work with XS. The identity should be tied to the XO hardware (except as noted below). I want the XS to know that its talking to the same XO as before without the user needing to enter anything. security) who are the principals? what are their goals? what attacks concern us? GS - In general I don't want any other devices to be able to appear to be the XO. We can assume that the XS - XO is a secure network not visible to the outside workd (whether that is true in practice is another story). So I moved the encryption and stringent security requirements to the optional case where the XO is talking to a non-XS server. users) what do we do if something looks wrong? fail silently? log an error somewhere? fail loudly? are there any user overrides? GS - Make sure it never fails! Just kidding. Give me some concrete examples for how it might fail and I'l think about it some more. can I turn this off? GS - Good suggestion. Added. can I have multiple identities? can I share my identity with someone else? GS - No for both. The XO is the indentity. what happens if the user loses their laptop and gets a new one? what happens if the server breaks and a new one is installed? what happens if I move from an old school to a new one? what happens when the XO's software is upgraded? downgraded? GS - I added two server side requirements to cover this. In general, I assume the XS is secure and that any identity data can be passed securely from one XS to another. HTHs. Good questions and let me know if the requirements are still not clear. BTW This came up because the current XS restore interafce requires that you type in the serial number of the XO to find its backed up files. There was also a request on the server list to make the backup and restore secure (hidden from devices other than the backed up XO). That is the must have requirement. The use of password less identity outside the secure environment of the school is nice but not critical. Just have the kids log in once then use cookies or HTTPS or OpenID for that, I'm not partial to the technology and if there's no consensus we can live without it. I'm OK with the debate but if we release 9.1.0 without making it easy to get your files off the XS and to automaticaly associate with the right Moodle identity, then we will miss an important user valuable feature. Thanks, Greg S Michael Stone wrote: On Tue, Dec 02, 2008 at 03:56:06PM -0500, Greg Smith wrote: We're mostly thinking of the school server as the server side but a more generic solution may be acceptable. I'm relatively comfortable with our vague identity plans for the XS but I'd like to know more about your idea for a more generic solution before going further in that direction. That's one example. I would also like any Web server to be able to extract the XO identity and use it in CGI (e.g. PHP) for processing. What could possibly go wrong? -- anonymous. I put a stub of a requirement for it on our roadmap here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Single_Sign_on_from_Browse This seems decent so far. Do you have any ideas or designs for how we can achieve that? We discussed it at SugarCamp. The essential idea from that discussion was to have the XO and the XS exchange certs at registration time so that they can later prove their identities to one another on demand. The tricky bits involve scope, security, users, and maintenance: scope) what are we proving identity to? e.g.: one single XS, ever. one single XS, whichever we're currently registered with several servers at once other XOs what software, on the XO, should be responsible for proving identity? if Browse, how does Browse talk to the registration code? if Browse, what about Gmail, Help, WikiBrowse, ... if something else, how does the something else talk
Re: Fedora 10 on XO
Hi Martin and Peter, Sorry got my Linux terminology a little munged there. I meant that we would ship a Sugar interface and a standard Fedora X-Window interface (e.g. XFCE) on the same NAND. I should have said desktop environments as Martin notes. Thanks for the tips and comments. You can even edit the requirement to make it more crystal clear if you think my wording there is confusing. I'll see the edits and roll back anything which I think changes the fundamental requirement. Thanks, Greg S Martin Dengler wrote: On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 06:36:53PM -0500, Greg Smith wrote: [Chris] So we'd ship two different distributions on the NAND? GS - Yes. GS: I think you meant desktop environments, not distributions. Greg S Martin ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Roadmap Meeting today at 2PM US ET IRC Freenode.net #olpc-meeting
Hi All, We are on again for the weekly XO Roadmap meeting today. Its 2PM US New York City time on IRC: freenode.net #olpc-meeting channel. Agenda for this week is: 10 minutes - XO camp update 10 minutes - Status and action items for Feature roadmap page updates. 30 minutes - Agree on Trac conventions for 9.1. 10 minutes - Set agenda for next week and write down action items. I may tuck in a few minutes on the 8.2.1 release as well. Minutes from last week are here: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-November/021391.html FYI I have started updating the 9.1.0 page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 It now includes a preliminary schedule. 94 days until release! Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: will there be an 8.2 update ?
Hi Mikus, I need to take that page down! I am remiss in doing that. Its a page which is automatically generated by Trac. Since Trac items and associated tags are not up to date, its not a useful page. I keep hoping I can fix it but since it hasn't happened, its time to take it down. Michael or anyone in engineering, do you know how to remove that Trac roadmap page? Just take it offline until I can figure out how to make it show something meaningful. The real roadmap, such as it is, is here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Releases Not much there right now but I think 8.2.1 will come together quickly now and 9.1 shortly after that. I will post links to more details on each of those as soon as I get enough buy in. I plan to talk about Trac usage conventions for 9.1 at the next weekly Feature planning meeting on Wed. at 2PM US ET, freenode.net #olpc-meeting. After that I should be able to tell you how to update Trac to flag a bug as a candidate for inclusion in 9.1. The 8.2.1 early thinking is here: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-November/021388.html To your question: No we do not currently plan to improve the NM 0.6 implementation in 8.2.1. It may still come up as a critical item for Uruguay or another deployment, but so far it is not on the list. I think your best bet is to have issues resolved with NM 0.7, targeted for inclusion in 9.1. Let me know if that is not clear or you need more info. Thanks, Greg S Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:48:17 -0500 From: Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: will there be an 8.2 update ? To: devel@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Looking at the official http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap, it is not clear to me whether an official update to 8.2 (f9) will be released. My reason for asking is that I have a problem with Network Manager 0.6 (ticket #8343). If there is a chance that 8.2 will be improved, I will leave that ticket open. If 8.2's Network Manager will not be updated, then I can close that ticket as 'wontfix', and instead write a different ticket against the newer Network Manager. [What Network Manager 0.7 does/does_not_do needs to be described differently from what Network Manager 0.6 does/does_not_do.] Will a 'fixpack for 8.2' be released ? mikus ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
XO Feature Roadmap meeting on today at 2PM US ET IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting
Hi All, The weekly XO Feature Roadmap meeting is on today at: 2PM US ET IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting Minutes from the last meeting and agenda for todays meeting are here: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-November/021252.html The count down to release 9.1 has begun! Target release day is March 7. Assuming we hit the date, we have 101 days from today until the release. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] small form factor XS options?
Hi Bryan et al, This probably goes without saying, but make sure that all your hardware is supported by Fedora 9 and know to run well on that distribution. Also FYI, here's the list of recommended HW: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Recommended_Hardware Update and correct as needed but please do not put anything new on there until its fully installed, tested and known to work rock solid with an out of the box XS ISO binary. Thanks, Greg S Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:31:21 +0545 From: Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Server-devel] small form factor XS options? To: Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: server-devel [EMAIL PROTECTED], Prithak Sharma [EMAIL PROTECTED],Tony Anderson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain On Wed, 2008-11-26 at 09:39 -0200, If you look for machines with VIA CPUs, they are low power dissipation, and often cheap too. We have a few samples at 1cc with heatsinks - no fans! Will do, tks for the heads up I definitely need at least 1 Ghz processor because we intend to host an offline E-Library on the XS. Even w/out the E-Library we want to host a lot of content cached from the broader Internet and that will require a good bit of RAM and some CPU. I have looked at the Excito and they are impressive but do not offer a fast enough processor and the price is higher than I would like. Eee Box - more expensive but doesn't seem to have the same cooling problem I talked with Asus engineers who assured there's a version of it with no fans, and a heatsink. Not sure if it's in the catalog though :-/ Unfortunately, none of these have a spare PCI slot that I can use for the XS's 2nd NIC card. We are considering using a USB NIC for the eth1. That'll hurt if you have significant traffic. In fact, I'd recommend using the usb nic for eth0 which is guaranteed to have less traffic ;-) Does anyone know of similar small form factor PC's that do have an extra PCI slot? Or other good XS choices? This is very true. Small form factor isn't actually that important. Low-Power is much more important. I have to say I am still leaning towards the Shuttle X2700N. It seems to have adequate cooling features compared to other small form-factor PCs Perhaps my best option would be to purchase an Atom CPU, appropriate motherboard, and fit into a regular PC chassis . . . But I still haven't checked out the Via CPU options ;) -- Bryan W. Berry Technology Director OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org -- ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel End of Server-devel Digest, Vol 19, Issue 29 ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: XO Feature Roadmap meeting on today at 2PM US ET IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting To: OLPC Development
Hi Bert, We are closer to an 8.2.1. The main motivator is likely to be a few bug fixes for Uruguay. It will be a very focused release, just resolving a few specific items over 8.2.0. Not taking the Joyride branch. That's the latest thinking but its not final yet. I'll keep the list up to date on plans as they develop and I'll update the 8.2.1 section of this page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Releases. Thanks, Greg S Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:02:08 +0100 From: Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: XO Feature Roadmap meeting on today at 2PM US ET IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting To: OLPC Development devel@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed On 26.11.2008, at 15:27, Greg Smith wrote: Hi All, The weekly XO Feature Roadmap meeting is on today at: 2PM US ET IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting Minutes from the last meeting and agenda for todays meeting are here: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-November/021252.html The count down to release 9.1 has begun! Target release day is March 7. Assuming we hit the date, we have 101 days from today until the release. Will there still be an 8.2.1 release? Have not heard of that in a while. - Bert - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
XO Feature Roadmap Meeting Minutes from November 26
Ed, Gary, Deepak, Ben, Caryl and possibly other met on IRC on Wed. November 25. Minutes: - XO Camp miniconference dates are set for January 12 - 16 in Cambridge! * Greg, Ed and others to update XO camp agenda to refine it and follow up with presenters to get more detailed agendas and presentations. - Feature Roadmap page and 9.1 planning (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap) : * Greg to send e-mail to Mel asking for help recruiting people to work on the Feature roadmap page. The roadmap gang will work on updating the feature roadmap page to ensure every important feature request has a place and adding tags and reformatting as needed. * Greg to send cjb and ed and invite for a power meeting (other key stakeholders welcome so may do it on IRC if there is demand). Current documentation on requirements is at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Power_management * Greg to add detail to meaning of Deployability as the goal for 9.1. So far, the top 5 items for 9.1 are: - Rebasing on F10 - power management - localization/translation - activation/lease/signing/management - run linux and any linux app easily Other things can be worked on as bug fixes. Lots of debate about feature vs. bug. Agreement that major areas of work should have an item on the feature roadmap page but Trac will also be tagged to allow easy querying of must fix bugs. Discussion of touchpad as something we will work on and how to document it. Main idea is that all items have one or more tickets in Trac. Main topics and features should also have a location in the Wiki which can also list Trac bugs. Mention that we need to keep 9.1 plan up to date with sugar plans (http://sugarlabs.org/go/DevelopmentTeam/0.84/Ideas). I believe that is all accounted for but should check for synch again soon. Next steps on Roadmap page are to get the feature roadmap in to shape by Wed. December 3. Then documentation can focus more on Trac after that. Next meeting: Wed. December 3, 2PM US ET IRC Freenode.net #olpc-meeting channel. Agenda for next week: 10 minutes - XO camp update 10 minutes - Status and action items for Feature roadmap page updates. 30 minutes - Agree on Trac conventions for 9.1. 10 minutes - Set agenda for next week and write down action items. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO Feature Roadmap Meeting Minutes from November 26
Hi Marco, NP on the meeting, thanks for reading the minutes! Comments inline. * What's the time target of these features? I assume 9.1 *and* beyhond? GS - This page is the heap of all items we have thought of building on the XO: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap I have a few days left to make sure everything under consideration is on there. Then I plan to start tagging items for 9.1 and adding other tags. For 9.1, a quick filter will show what is top priority for that release. In the end I want it to look like this: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+specs Then I will have a separate 9.1 page with the 9.1 filter and additional project management details (schedule etc. like we did in 8.2) and a statement of goals. * Is it work OLPC stuff is going to do or something we encourage the community to take over? GS - Its going to cover both. I need to get the top priority OLPC stuff nailed down ASAP. Then I want to list the things which are important to XO users and make it easy for anyone to work on those. * Do we need some sort of consensus about features before adding them to the roadmap? For example it's the first time I hear Joe remove the frame idea and I don't think it has been discussed at all with the design team. GS - No consensus needed to put it on this page. Just follow the guidelines (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Suggestions_for_providing_input) and make sure its well motivated. Getting something built is another story. * Any reason to *not* use trac directly for it instead of the wiki? It mostly seems like a list of items. GS - I want requirements, specifications, lists of customers and more detail then we have in trac. I also use the wiki to show the feature design to customers and get their ack on the requirements. Lastly, I want an easy place to track topics and main ideas. Items on the wiki can have one or more Trac items as well. Its extra work to use wiki and Trac but those are my reasons. Again, I want to follow the Ubuntu example and I think Semantic wiki will get me real close... * How do I propose a feature to be added to the list? GS - Just out it on there. Follow the guidelines and make sure you are as clear as possible about who benefits from the feature and how. I get an e-mail whenever the page is updated but you can also e-mail me directly. Also, if you have an idea and want to know if any customers have asked for it or if they would benefit from it, feel free to ask and I'll hunt down an answer for you. Thanks, Greg S PS Thursday and Friday are holidays in the US. Back online Monday. Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:14 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Ed, Gary, Deepak, Ben, Caryl and possibly other met on IRC on Wed. November 25. Sorry to not have made this, still fighting with the jet lag here... - Feature Roadmap page and 9.1 planning (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap) : I went through it and I'm a bit confused about time/scope/target: * What's the time target of these features? I assume 9.1 *and* beyhond? * Is it work OLPC stuff is going to do or something we encourage the community to take over? * Do we need some sort of consensus about features before adding them to the roadmap? For example it's the first time I hear Joe remove the frame idea and I don't think it has been discussed at all with the design team. * Any reason to *not* use trac directly for it instead of the wiki? It mostly seems like a list of items. * How do I propose a feature to be added to the list? Thanks, Marco ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Write Plug in posts to Blogs (was Re: Greg Smith Weekly Report Week Ending November 14 )
Hi Zeke, That's great! I think a lot of people will use it, if we can test it and make it available to XO users. As you may know we debated whether to implement the EduBlog tool (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_Blogger_Project) as part of Write or as a server side implementation. I pushed for server side (as opposed to Sugar or Write) because it was faster to market and I didn't see a good answer for the Teacher - Student interaction requirements without it. Just FYI on the history. In short, many people would love to see Blogging directly from Write as an activity on the XO. Have you been able to make your customized Write w/blogging in to a .XO file? If so, post that somewhere (our wiki is OK) and I'll ask people to try it out ASAP. If you need help making a .XO file, let us know and we'll get you support on that. Also, you should synch up with the Write maintainers (Marc and Martin copied). Write is a derivative of AbiWord. If they can review the code and they like the idea, this could become part of the official AbiWord. They are about to release a new AbiWord so it may be too late for this round but get the details to the lead guys and we can go from there. I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions or need any more info, help or collaborators. Optionally, I'm interested to hear more about your experience with the XO or any more info you have on yourself, your skills and your work. One Blog per Child! 500K kids writing Blogs / 1K developers reading blogs and writing code with those kids = one turbo charged project :-) Thanks, Greg S *** From: meticulo [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Greg Smith Weekly Report Week Ending November 14 To: devel@lists.laptop.org Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Hello my name is Zeke Dean, I have been developing a bloging client for the past couple of months for the olpc based on the write activity. It is a solid bloging client that supports many different blogs and I believe it has a decent user interface. I would like to discuss if we can work together as we are both trying to promote the benefits of bloging for educational purposes. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Greg S Weekly Report Week Ending November 21
Weekly report for Greg Smith. *** User link of the week (English): http://blog.stone-head.org/olpc-peru-a-silent-revolution/ Includes a review of XOs in rural Peru with insightful comment on the cultural context. On the technical side, the teacher and kids completely missed the XO's Collaboration capabilities! Worse, he assumes that our collaboration allows users to easily move files from one XO to another, something that is not available in the GUI right now. ** Status of last weeks goals: 1 - Update roadmap page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap Follow up with deployments to verify priorities. Get a second level of detail from deployments on what they need. GS - Partially done. Lots more to go. Reordered and tweaked my top suggestions for next release: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_requests#Greg.27s_Top_9_Feature_Requests Added some details to the following requirements: - Copy file form one XO to another requirements http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Object_transfer - Run any linux app on XO http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Easy_.22Sugarization.22 - Updated activation lease security one more time with details from Ethiopia http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Activation_lease_security -UI section of the performance requirement http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#General_UI_sluggishness 2 - Listen to ideas and plans from Sugar camp and integrate them in the Feature roadmap page as needed. GS - Done. Sat in on most meetings from Tuesday to Friday. Made a few updates to the Roadmap page based on discussions. 3 - Start process and operations page for 9.1 release. Come up with Trac conventions and other tracking systems for execution of a quality release. GS - Not done. 4 - Update school server wiki pages and documentation. Add links to Readme files to 0.5 release notes. Mark older pages obsolete and try to make it crystal clear what the server supports now. GS - Not done yet. Prepared edits to only include supported features in http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_server *** Goals for next week 1 - Build 9.1 project page and select top high level feature requests and layout rough schedule. 2 - Define Trac usage and Trac scrub plan for 9.1 3 - Fill in requirements definition for top 9.1 features and engage engineers. 4 - Update School Server documentation. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] XS 0.5 upgrade notes
Hi Douglas and Martin, Good info! As Martin says, can we put that in the release notes? Also on release notes, I was poking around in GIT and came across a bunch of very useful looking Readme files. Can we copy those in to the release notes (or maybe link to them in GIT if they will stay the same)? I think that's all the documentation we will need for most features. Let me know how I can help with the mechanics of making the info available or with creating the release notes content. Thanks, Greg S Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:26:22 -0500 From: Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Server-devel] XS 0.5 upgrade notes To: Douglas Bagnall [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: server-devel [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 12:31 AM, Douglas Bagnall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Some issues noticed with an upgrade from XS 0.4 to a XS 0.5 candidate. 1. eth0 and eth1 swapped physical ports. After swapping the cables and `service network restart`, everything was good. Yeah, that's worthy of a release note commment, and a pointer to xs-swapnics which does the job too :-) I think Martin is working on #3. #4 is (theoretically) fixed. The others look WONTFIX-able. Agree. At this point I tried to yum upgrade to get changes I'd made since spinning the ISO, but nothing happened, because: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]# yum repolist repo id repo namestatus fedora Fedora 7 - i386 enabled : 7,382 olpc OLPC 7 - i386 enabled : 83 updates Fedora 7 - i386 - Updates enabled : 4,545 Yum still wants to use the XS 0.4 repos. This seems to be related to #8033 and the use of the alternate /etc/yum.repos.olpc.d/, but I'm not entirely sure of the solution. Ouch. So it's still using the old/bad yum config file? That'd be something to look into around the xs-config upgrade path where we try to fixup overwritten files. good spotting, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
[Server-devel] XO Future Feature Planning Minutes
Several engineers and others met on IRC on Wed. November 12 Minutes - We finished the review of proposals for XO Miniconference planned for January. Edits and updates made directly on the page. After the meeting I made some major updates to the page, combining items, reorganizing them and dropping a few more. Its not down to 9 main topics each with sub-topics. We have an estimated of 30 hours of talks! See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 Any comments or concerns on the updated version welcome in e-mail or on the page. We will refine the agenda throughout November try to reduce it and get the proposals filled in. The page needs copy edit and formatting, but if you are an owner of a talk, please filling in agendas and presentations now. The best prepared proposals will have the best chance to make the final agenda. Next meeting Wed. November 19, 2PM US ET on IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting channel. Agenda: 10 minutes - Update on January camp and reminder to fill in details on proposals. 40 minutes - Start work on reviewing and prioritizing the Feature Roadmap http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap. Focus on criteria for prioritizing items for inclusion in 9.1. Describe mechanics of how we track and edit the requirements. Assign people to ensure all serious ideas have a feature to track them. 10 - Set agenda for next week and assign action items. Comments, questions and more meeting participants welcome! Thanks, Greg S ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
XO Feature Roadmap Meeting - Wed Nov. 12, 2PM US ET
Hi All, The next XO Feature Roadmap meeting is Wed November 12 at 2PM US ET on IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting channel. Agenda is the following: - 5 minutes - Review edits and action items. - 40 minutes - Review proposals (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2) starting at Fedora 10. - 10 minutes - Relationship between January conference and November Sugar Camp (agenda item request by Joe). - 5 minutes - set agenda and action items for next week Hope to see you there! Thanks, Greg S *** Minutes from last week Several engineers and others met on IRC on Wed. November, 5 to discuss Future Feature planning for the XO. * Agenda: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-November/020918.html This meeting is currently focused on setting the agenda and preparing material for an XO and XS focused technical conference in January, 2009. * Minutes: - Review open action items. Mel updated Automated testing tools proposal. Kim removed 'What is support' and Customization, imaging, and Activating XOs. No other updates done this week. Will start pushing harder for more details on target talks once we finish first pass review of all proposals. - Reviewed proposals * Uruguay Observations Yes agreed we want to do this. Chris to add details. Networking section: The proposal is to fold this whole section in to two sessions. 1 - GUI, activities, asynchronous collaboration, journal and object file sharing including requirements and use cases. Networking and collaboration technology including network manager, mesh, presence and 802.11s ad hoc, and wireless. Pending buy in, Greg, Morgan, Michail and Scott to work on setting those agendas, times and preparing materials. Linux section: * Filesystems Yes want to discuss this. Deepak to fill in details * Updates Defer. May be good but we need more details from Scott. * Dealing with Low Memory conditions. Should be part of performance section. Greg to move up. ** Comments, edits and suggestions welcome. Please update your proposals with more detail! http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Proposals Next meeting Wed November, 12 2PM US ET on IRC Freenode.net #olpc-meeting Agenda for next meeting: 5 minutes - Review edits and action items. 40 minutes - Review proposals starting at Fedora 10. 10 minutes - Relationship between January conference and November Sugar Camp (agenda item request by Joe). 5 minutes - set agenda and action items for next week ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Greg Smith's Weekly Report
Overview: We are collecting all well formed ideas for future development at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap Add your suggestions to that page. In the near future we will start prioritizing them and choosing the target set for inclusion in the next release, 9.1.0. Product management and support now have regular calls and a tight synchronization with the technical teams in Uruguay and Peru. We are working with them to qualify 8.2 for their deployments and to track their feature requests for future releases. The agenda for a technical conference in January is being set at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2. The first review of all proposals should be done by next week. Next, we will create detailed materials and pick lead presenters for each session. ** User links: Link of the week (Spanish): http://ceibalflorida.blogspot.com/search/label/etoys Shows eToys presentations built in Uruguay. See also the Blogósfera link on the right. Blog posts by XOs in Uruguay have taken off again in the last month! Link of the week (English): http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/321 US University-style evaluation of the XO deployment in Nepal. * Goals and to do list. Status of last weeks goals: 1 - Continue prioritization of January Mini-conference proposals and start filling in next level of detail for each. GS - Underway. Meeting every Wed. at 2PM US ET on IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting to review proposals. 2 - Update roadmap page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap Follow up with deployments to verify priorities. Get a second level of detail from deployments on what they need. GS - Partially done. Focusing on the Activation Lease Security: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Activation_lease_security Now drilling down on top priorities for largest deployments. Everyone, please add your feature ideas. Each should have a Requirement Definition, some software design comments (AKA Specification), target users and engineering or product management owners. Any of the above can be URLs to web pages, Trac IDs, or e-mail threads. Put me down as interim owner if no one else is available. 3 - Start writing detailed use cases, complete ideas for using XO/XS (probably a requirements definition for supporting learning projects), and presentations for mini-conference. GS - Not done. Top priority is Asynchronous collaboration (AKA multi-user projects) http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Asynchronous_collaboration Goals for next week: 1 - Finish first review of January mini-conference proposals. Transition conference work to follow up and status only. Add agenda items to weekly Future Feature planning meeting (Wed. at 2PM US ET on IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting) to prioritize full feature roadmap and decide how we will pick 9.1.0 target features. 2 - Update roadmap page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap Follow up with deployments to verify priorities. Get a second level of detail from deployments on what they need. 3 - Start writing detailed use cases, complete ideas for using XO/XS (probably a requirements definition for supporting learning projects), and presentations for mini-conference. * Other: Inspired by Greg D's recent comments on creating team, I'm thinking of starting a roadmap team which will work on the Feature roadmap page and strategy. We already have a weekly meeting, minutes and action items. All we need now is a wiki page and a better todo list! I'll send out more details and URLs on that soon. Questions and comments welcome. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
XO Future Feature Meeting Minutes - 11/5
Hi All, Several engineers and others met on IRC on Wed. November, 5 to discuss Future Feature planning for the XO. * Agenda: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-November/020918.html This meeting is currently focused on setting the agenda and preparing material for an XO and XS focused technical conference in January, 2009. * Minutes: - Review open action items. Mel updated Automated testing tools proposal. Kim removed 'What is support' and Customization, imaging, and Activating XOs. No other updates done this week. Will start pushing harder for more details on target talks once we finish first pass review of all proposals. - Reviewed proposals * Uruguay Observations Yes agreed we want to do this. Chris to add details. Networking section: The proposal is to fold this whole section in to two sessions. 1 - GUI, activities, asynchronous collaboration, journal and object file sharing including requirements and use cases. Networking and collaboration technology including network manager, mesh, presence and 802.11s ad hoc, and wireless. Pending buy in, Greg, Morgan, Michail and Scott to work on setting those agendas, times and preparing materials. Linux section: * Filesystems Yes want to discuss this. Deepak to fill in details * Updates Defer. May be good but we need more details from Scott. * Dealing with Low Memory conditions. Should be part of performance section. Greg to move up. ** Comments, edits and suggestions welcome. Please update your proposals with more detail! http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Proposals Next meeting Wed 11/12 2PM US ET on IRC Freenode.net #olpc-meeting Agenda for next meeting: 5 minutes - Review edits and action items. 40 minutes - Review proposals starting at Fedora 10. 10 minutes - Relationship between January conference and Sugar Camp (agenda item request by Joe). 5 minutes - set agenda and action items for next week Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Feature Roadmap Meeting
Hi All, We have our next Feature Roadmap planning meeting tomorrow, Wed. 11/5 at 2PM US ET on IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting channel. Agenda is: 10 minutes: Follow up on action items from last week. 45 minutes: Continue reviewing miniconference proposals (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Proposals). Starting at Networking section. 5 minutes: set action items and agenda for next week. Let me know if there are any additions or comments on the agenda. Minutes from last week's meeting are at: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020805.html Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Greg Smith Weekly Report, Week Ending 10/31
The technical miniconference (AKA XO Camp) has been rescheduled from November, 2008 to early January, 2009. The agenda and exact dates are under construction at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 Future feature requests and roadmap goals are being collected at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap This page collects all well motivated feature ideas without regard to priority. After a period of brainstorming and discussion, we will choose the most important and update them with more detail (i.e. requirements and specifications). Then we will scope the work effort for each and pick target releases. Some features will take longer than one release to deliver. Feature requests by country are tracked at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_requests The two pages will be tied together so that every feature has one or more countries identified as target users. * Status of last weeks goals: 1 - Update Feature Roadmap page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap Get everything on the page (especially field input gathered this week). Work with engineers to move their stuff up to main requirements section and start adding specifications. Add more details in countries section. Prepare to link country requests to requirements. GS - Partially done. Thanks to Eben, the feature roadmap page was redesigned! Many features were added and country requests were updated with input from people who spent time in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Peru. Please add your well defined and/or user motivated feature requests to the page. For engineers, please move your ideas up from the Priorities_from_Engineering section so that every piece of work has a place in the roadmap. Include links to e-mail threads or other web pages as needed and try to separate requirements (what it should do for the user) and design/specification (what it actually will do in terms of interface and how it can be coded). 2 - Make first pass agenda for Mini-conference. Update proposals page as needed: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 GS - Partially done. The miniconference has been postponed to early January. We reviewed 1/2 the conference proposals and will do the rest next week. 3 - Update deployments page. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments GS - Done. I updated the status of all the large deployments. Smaller ones are still listed but not updated. 4 - Start writing detailed use cases, complete ideas for using XO/XS (probably a requirements definition for supporting learning projects), and presentations for mini-conference. GS - Not done. Started a brief thread on asynchronous collaboration but haven't gotten to real requirements or use cases yet. * Goals for next week. 1 - Continue prioritization of Mini-conference proposals and start filling in next level of detail for each. 2 - Update roadmap page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap Follow up with deployments to verify priorities. Get a second level of detail from deployments on what they need. 3 - Start writing detailed use cases, complete ideas for using XO/XS (probably a requirements definition for supporting learning projects), and presentations for mini-conference. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Future Features Planning Meeting: Minutes from 10/29
We met on IRC on Wed October 30. **Important note: The miniconference has been postponed to early January. ** Minutes from the meeting: 1 - Follow up on open action items from last week. AI: Greg to resend request for proposals and include deadline of Monday October 27. Will send to devel, sugar, techteam and server lists. GS - Done AI: Everybody: Read and update wiki. Add any major feature request to: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Requirements_and_Feature_Suggestions link to relevant threads on lists as needed. GS - Page design updated thanks to Eben. Still needs more feature suggestions. This will go on beyond the miniconference. AI: Greg to add submission to xocamp e-mail address to xocamp2 wiki proposals section: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 GS - Done AI: Eben to transfer or transclude or link XO related sugar features on feature roadmap page. GS - Not sure if this is closed. Greg to follow up with Eben. ** 2 - Review XOCamp proposals from: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 We reviewed the proposals for about 1 minute each. Two follow up items identified for each proposal: - Check for consensus on reserving time for the proposal. Each was tentatively flagged as Yes/No/Defer. This was the preliminary opinion of those present and subject to change. No means people thought it was not a good topic for the conference (can be changed). Defer means people wanted to see more detail before deciding. - Pick an owner who will follow up as follows: A -- How much time is needed. B -- Who can lead the discussion C -- What preparation and materials should be created (e.g. presentations, code samples, other) Since proposals may not make the final cut, owners should only do as much preparation work as needed to help us decide. Those topics which make the next round of selection will then get more detailed preparation. For the owner of each item, please address the three points above (A,B,C) by updating the wiki page. I started reformatting the page to make a place for follow up. Eben, S and wiki experts I appreciate any reformatting help! Proposals reviewed: * Who is the user and what do they want? Yes. Follow up person: Greg * Distributing OLPC Defer. Follow up person: Rafael and Greg * Annotation Defer. Follow up person: Mel to follow up with SJ and Ed to get details filled in. Also suggested that this and next two be merged with Ed's proposal called: What does an electronic textbook look like? * Book reading Defer. Follow up person: Mel to follow up with SJ and Ed to get details filled in. * Searching Defer. Follow up person: Mel to follow up with SJ and get details filled in. * 8n and l10n: 9.1 and beyond Yes. Follow up person: Sayamindu and CJB to start filling in detail. * Language learning on the XO Yes. Follow up person: CJB to start filling in detail. * Multiplayer wikipad Defer. Follow up person: Mel to contact SJ to get more info. * Customizing skins Defer. Needs owner. * School Server Yes. Follow up person: Martin to add more detail. * Customization, Imaging, and Activating XOs Yes. Follow up person: Reuben, Kim to add detail and find an engineering partner to help present. * Automated testing tools Yes. Follow up person: Mel * How does support work today - what can we do to make it better/easier? Defer. Follow up person: Mel, Kim to flesh it out. * View source key everywhere Defer. Follow up person: Scott owner with Tomeu holding some info. Definition of this may be done already or may just need a flash session. * Report Cards on XO No. Follow up person: Greg to contact Yama and Mikus. If there is strong demand may come back. * Power management Yes. Follow up person: Deepak, CJB * Eliminating Mesh, keeping 802.11 Defer. Follow up person: Greg to look for owner. May want to give Gnu and hour or two to use as he likes. * Eliminating DRM in G1G1 No. Follow up person: Greg to check with Gnu. See comment above. * Whether and how we want the volunteer community to help us with 9.1 Defer. Follow up person: Mel and Sebastian to follow up and combine with support item above. * Replacing Sugar Totally Defer. Follow up person: Greg to follow up with Gnu. See also above. * Fixing featuring activities No. Follow up person: Needs owner. * Next-generation journal ideas Yes. Follow up person: Scott * Interoperation with legacy apps Yes. Follow up person: Scott and Marco. Also combine with Marco's Compatibility with desktop applications proposal below. * Printing No. Follow up person: ? * Libraries Defer. Follow up person: ? * Performance Yes. Follow up person: Erik, Marco and Deepak. Also merge with Marco's performance item below. * Compatibility with desktop applications Yes but merge with Interoperation with legacy apps above * Top five performance problems - Marco Pesenti Gritti Yes but merge with Performance proposal above * Web based activities Defer. Follow up person: Marco to add more detail * Sugar as an upstream
[Server-devel] XO Miniconference (aka XO Camp) postponed
Hi All, We are re-scheduling the miniconference from November 17 to early January. The new dates will be posted as soon as they are available at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 See the announcement below and let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Greg S ** Folks - The OLPC XOCamp event being planned for November 17  21 is being postponed until January, 2009. The Fedora FUDCON conference is in Boston on January 9 - 11 , and we will be rescheduling to dates either immediately before or immediately after that event. I¹d like to make that decision as soon as possible, so if anyone knows of major reasons to choose one over the other, please let me know. Unlike the November event, participating OLPC staff and employees who do not work in Cambridge will be traveling here to participate. I hope this will make the January event a more substantial and productive one for everyone, despite the delay. - Ed P.S. If you have previously forwarded announcements of the November event to other mailing lists, please help us spread the word of the postponement to those other lists. But please take a moment to check those lists first so we don¹t bombard them with multiple forwards; thanks. Ed McNierney VP, Software Development One Laptop per Child [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Mini-conference Proposals and Feature Requests
Hi All, Thanks for all the good discussions on proposed topics for discussion during the XO miniconference. In addition to e-mailing them to the list, please put any specific proposals for sessions during the conference on the wiki page, proposals section: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Proposals Fit them in an existing section or create a new one as needed. FYI We will review existing proposals on that page in 40 minutes from now (1PM US ET, Wed.) on IRC Freednode.net #olpc-meeting channel. If you want to make a suggestion for features that OLPC should work on, please put that on our Feature Roadmap page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap In short, proposals for talks at the miniconference on [[XOcamp]] page, feature suggestions on the [[Feature roadmap]] page. Comments and questions welcome. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Sugar unusable as an e-book reader
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 -- Message: 2 Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:06:29 -0500 From: James Simmons [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 All, As the author of Read Etexts I am grateful for all the mentions of my Activity on this mailing list. To answer David Lang's question, being able to read Gutenberg's plain text files without converting them IS the feature. There are hundreds of thousands of books available in this format, including some that would be very difficult to obtain at any price (Richard Burton's 1001 Nights, a complete English translation of the Mahabharata, old science fiction like Edison's Conquest of Mars, and so much more). Plain text files can be easily resized for comfortable viewing in either portrait or landscape mode, the font is easier on the eyes than PDF fonts generally are, and eventually we'll have reliable text to speech with karaoke highlighting that will read the books out loud to you. I have read several books on the XO using my own Activity, and other than the fact that it cannot remember the page you left off on last time (which will be corrected in time) I find it quite useable. I also wrote the View Slides Activity, which can be used to read comic books, among other things. The comments about Read being unuseable say more about the PDF format than about the Activity. I think Read does about as well for viewing PDFs as anything I've used, but looking at PDFs on a small screen is not that great. When someone gives me a PDF I tend to print it out. James Simmons the page for read_etexts doesn't say what it does that makes it better than the default read (other than being able to read zip files and gutenberg formats) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Future feature planning meeting Wed. 1PM US ET
Hi All, We are on for our weekly Future Features planning meeting tomorrow Wed. 10/9 at 1PM US ET. The public meeting will be held on IRC freenode.net #olpc-meeting channel. Notes from last week are at: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/020565.html The agenda for this week is as follows: 1 - 10 minutes Follow up on open action items from last week. 2 - 40 minutes Review XOCamp proposals from: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 We will walk quickly through each proposal to: - Decide if its worth additional follow up as a topic - Pick a lead person to flesh it out and follow up on what is needed to make this an effective topic -- How much time is needed. -- Who can lead the discussion -- What preparation and materials should be created (e.g. presentations, code samples, other) We wont have time to go into details on each. The goal of this meeting is to find a person to follow up and gather that material. 3 - 10 minutes Review and assign new action items. Let me know if you have anything else for the agenda. See you online tomorrow. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Devel Digest, Vol 32, Issue 113
Hi David, Thanks for the detailed write up. I created a Feature request for better eBook reader on the feature roadmap page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Better_eBook_reader For requirements, I included a link to this thread and a few specific items which came to mind. If you have the time and inclination, could you update that requirement with a bulleted set of things you think the reader should be able to accomplish? (e.g. flip pages one at a time, zoom, etc.). If John or anyone else wants to start filling in the specification section with design ideas that would be helpful too. Links to other pages or inline is fine. Thanks, Greg S [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: opening the book in .html just produces a lot of errors becouse the book is spread across lots of files, and the jurnal isolation mechanisms copy the file being opened to a temporary directory, where all the links to the other files don't work. Note that you could have entered file:///media in Browse and located the HTML files; I believe the links to other files would then have worked OK but you'd have to wander around with the USB flash drive hanging out of your XO. thanks, I'll have to give that a try. this should also work with a SD card. unfortunantly, the mere fact of plugging in the USB stick makes the journal go through the entire thing and index it. this takes a significant amount of time and the XO is unusable during this time (I ran into a few min where the mouse didn't even respond) In an ideal world the book would be packaged as a single collection (.xol) file, so downloading it would unpack it in ~/Library and add it to the content navigation in the OLPC Library home page. You could try http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Creating_a_collection and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Content_bundle_making_script . I'll look into these. (I put Little-Brother.xol on USB, it showed up in Journal, I chose Start and this all happened and Browse displayed the e-book.) In this ideal world the .xol container would gain traction as an e-book format and Bain, Project Gutenberg, and the other content repositories would offer books as .xol bundles. I just tried a quick google search and found three different .xol file formats (an biometrics data format, a database format, and a map format), and I'm still looking for the one that you are using for collections. if there is a trivial means to convert from .xol to a standard directory (tar/zip) then it would have a chance. if you were to define your bundle as a zip file with specific files in it then you could also have your software use heristics to deal with zip files without your metadata in it (if by no other way then to show the list of files to the user and ask for the nessasary data) HTML in Browse integrates cleanly with the library/home page, can use advanced CSS for attractive layout, takes you from a link to a document without the download-Journal-Read steps, avoids PDF's fundamental broken-ness rendering a paper page on a screen, has JavaScript to add interactivity and features like annotations, etc. etc. It's the future. But PDF is certainly an important legacy format. html in browse does have one nasty problem, it shows partial lines of text at the top and bottom of the screen as another smaller problem, you have to figure out where to put the oversized mouse pointer to minimize it's annoyance when you are trying to read. I initially tried to put it on the right edge of the screen, but I discovered that it's very easy to flex the case enough to click the mouse butten when in tablet mode, which scrolls you to whereever the mouse happens to be sitting on the scrollbar. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Proposals for XO Mini-conference Due by Monday October 27
Hi All, We are planning a mini-conference at OLPC headquarters November 17 - 21. For more information, see the conference wiki page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 Please post any proposals for talks directly on the wiki page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Proposals Starting at the end of the day US ET, Monday October 27th we will review all proposals and begin setting the agenda for the conference. Create a new section as needed and make sure your proposed subjects for mini conference are on the wiki by Monday, October 27! Discussion on the lists is useful but its not enough to get a proposal on the agenda. You must also, create a section in the wiki. I will review all e-mails to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] e-mail address. I will forward any that weren't copied to the devel list and I will extract the ones that look like proposals for inclusion in the wiki. In contrast to proposals for the mini-conference, well motivated feature suggestions go on our Feature Roadmap at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Requirements_and_Feature_Suggestions In short, proposals for talks at the conference go on the XOcamp wiki page and specific feature and coding work go on our Feature Roadmap page. This is the idea gathering phase (similar to brainstorming). Not everything on the wiki will get built but it must be on the wiki to get considered. Its up to you to add features for the roadmap and proposals for the conference! Please have at it and let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
[Server-devel] Proposals for XO Mini-conference Due by Monday October 27
Hi All, We are planning a mini-conference at OLPC headquarters November 17 - 21. For more information, see the conference wiki page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 Please post any proposals for talks directly on the wiki page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Proposals Starting at the end of the day US ET, Monday October 27th we will review all proposals and begin setting the agenda for the conference. Create a new section as needed and make sure your proposed subjects for the mini-conference are on the wiki by Monday, October 27! Discussion on the lists is useful but its not enough to get a proposal on the agenda. You must also, create a section in the wiki. I will review all e-mails to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] e-mail address. I will forward any that weren't copied to the devel list and I will extract the ones that look like proposals for inclusion in the wiki. In contrast to proposals for the mini-conference, well motivated feature suggestions go on our Feature Roadmap at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Requirements_and_Feature_Suggestions In short, proposals for talks at the conference go on the XOcamp_2 wiki page and specific feature and coding work go on our Feature Roadmap page. This is the idea gathering phase (similar to brainstorming). Not everything on the wiki will get built but it must be on the wiki to get considered. Its up to you to add features for the Roadmap and proposals for the conference! Please have at it and let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Greg S ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: Feature Roadmap and Miniconference Meeting Notes
Hi All, I need to move the weekly future feature planning meeting next week. The next meeting will be Wed. October 29 in IRC, freenode.net #olpc-meeting channel at 1PM US ET (not 2PM as previously communicated). I have a hard stop at the end of one hour so we will try to stay on agenda. I apologize for the change. A conflict came up that I couldn't move. We will go back to the regular 2PM US ET time after next week. Thanks, Greg S Greg Smith wrote: Hi All, We met on IRC on Wed. October 22 to talk about the XO feature roadmap and plans for the mini-conference November 17 - 21. Brief minutes: Talked about getting more feature requests in feature roadmap page. Talked about getting sugar list on feature roadmap page. Debated 1-1 and onto, and set theory re: sugar list and XO list. Decided for Greg and Eben to make sure that all sugar for XO items have a place on XO feature roadmap. Decided to set deadline for submission of conference proposals of Monday October, 27. Asked everyone to review of all submissions at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Proposals and to prepare to pick the target set next Wed. Asked everyone to add feature ideas t http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap Closed action items: AI : Greg will send an e-mail asking for call for proposals for November meeting (called XOcamp). GS - Closed. Sent e-mail last week. AI : Ed and Kim will talk together about support and deployment input and ensure that it gets included. GS - Closed. Kim and Ed working on it and will ensure relevant proposals and presentations are booked. Open and new action items: AI: Greg to resend request for proposals and include deadline of Monday October 27. Will send to devel, sugar, techteam and server lists. AI: Everybody: Read and update wiki. Add any major feature request to: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Requirements_and_Feature_Suggestions link to relevant threads on lists as needed. AI: Greg to add submission to xocamp e-mail address to xocamp2 wiki proposals section: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 AI: Eben to transfer or transclude or link XO related sugar features on feature roadmap page. Next meeting: Wed. 10/29 2PM US ET freenode.net #olpc-meeting. Agenda for next week: Review/discuss/vote on proposals in the meeting, set owners for organizing into an agenda Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
MD5 Sum for 767 images
Hi All, Can someone post the MD5 Sum details for the 8.2 images linked from the release notes? See the request at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Release_notes/8.2.0 Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Thread on a new model for collaboration
Hi All, Below is a thread I had with Juliano (learning team member with lots of experience in Brazil and more recently Rwanda) on collaboration. I wanted to share it with everyone, mostly verbatim. I haven't had time to edit this for the list but I wanted to share it before waiting any longer. The main idea is that there is another asynchronous concept of collaboration which we may be able to implement with less complexity than what we now call collaboration (e.g. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_Collaboration_Requirements). Comments and input welcome. Thanks, Greg S Hi Greg, Thanks for the answer. I will read your message more carefully since it has many ideas, so I can think and bring new ideas. But two points I can comment right now are that you can cite me in public messages. I just send it in private so I don't expose nobody and everybody are aware of the history of the idea. The other is that I know the edublog since the beginning, actually even before it start. Uruguay was interested in Using AMADIS, but I hold it since the tool, yet interesting, was very unstable. They became interested because, Léa Fagundes, my former boss, is very famous is Uruguay in the education area and made a lot of propaganda about amadis. After that, Pablo flores and others start thinking abou EduBlog. But I think we need something different than just a blog, however using some blog interface ideas. You can thing some information about amadis in: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/AMADIS And in Portuguese in: http://amadis.lec.ufrgs.br Maybe google translator can give you some help. Write more soon. Thanks again, Juliano On 24/09/2008, at 21:15, Greg Smith wrote: Hi Juliano, Thanks a lot for reviewing the 9.1 page and for offering these suggestions on where we should focus our development. We all get bogged down in the daily challenge of deploying these computers, but this kind of feedback is super valuable. I think everyone is very receptive to the Learning team members taking the lead in setting the direction of future development. On the 9.1 page in general, its mostly a catch all place right now. I haven't had time to add more structure and categorization yet. I hope to focus on that starting late next week. BTW If someone wants to take a stab at an overall pedagogical strategy, that would be great! I have a section reserved for that at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Pedagogical_Strategy I did get some related input from David when we had a brief chat in August. I haven't fleshed that out but it resulted in two points in the Collaboration Strategy section at bullets 2 and 3: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Collaboration It doesn't really cover the workflow of collaborative building of projects so I added bullet #4 to cover your comments. Edit and update that to fit your conception. Just keep it short and we can add detail in the collaboration section below. On your main idea, I like the way you break it in to synchronous and asynchronous. I think that will resonate well with the engineers. Starting with the synchronous, I have a thread with the lead GUI engineer about how best to build an interface that let's kids take a project home, do some work then integrate it in write when they are all online. See: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-September/018874.html The baseline idea right now is for each kid to write their stuff at home, then in class the next day they open two instances of write. One has their personal work and the other the shared write instance. Then they can copy and paste from their personal one to the shared one. I think we can do better than that. So far, the best idea is to have a button add to share that just takes whatever is selected and copies it to the shared instance. That saves the intermediate clipboard step. Cleaner but still kuldgy as you have to look at two activities and switch between them. Any comments appreciated. One thing you could especially help with is to explain exactly how kids collaborate on a common project together. If you can describe it in terms of who sits where, who types what and how they decide what goes in to the shared/final project, that will help a lot. I've been asking my kids but I could use some more explanation from people who have spent time in class. e.g. does one kid type and other kids look over their shoulder and make suggestions? Do they pass the shared project around and take turns? A take home then come together example using paper and pencil examples is a good place to start. On the asynchronous case which is I think your main point, I completely agree this is central to successful education. Do you have a link or any more info on AMADIS? As it happens, I have been involved in a related project (started when I was a volunteer) called EduBlog. You can see
Feature roadmap and Miniconference Meeting Today at 2PM US ET
Hi All, We have a feature roadmap and miniconference planning meet set for today from 2 - 3 PM US ET. Meeting is on IRC, freednode.net #olpc-meeting channel. FYI I moved most content on the 9.1.0 page to: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap I am now restructuring that. The goal is to have a spot for every major feature (each feature should be at the === level in wiki mark up). Each one should have 1 - A requester 2 - A requirement defintion 3 - A technical design 4 - Names for proponents This is a heap right now. I want to capture every major, serious request on this page. Prioritization can come later. I plan to have a clean implementation of all items in section 8 by the end of this week. Then I hope everyone can help me: - Fill in all four parts for each item - Move items in section 9 up to section 8 and fill them in - Add any new features The agenda for todays meeting is as follows: 1 - 10 minutes - Review status of action items: -- AI : Greg will send an e-mail asking for call for proposals for November meeting (called XOcamp). -- AI : Ed and Kim will talk together about support and deployment input and ensure that it gets included. -- AI for everybody: Read and update wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 2 - 40 minutes - Take wiki, input from call for proposals and input from Kim and Ed and make a draft agenda for November 17 - 21 meeting. 3 - 10 minutes - set agenda for next week and assign/review action items. Thanks Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Feature roadmap and Miniconference Meeting Today at 2PM US ET
Hi Scott, Hope you are doing well in Peru! A few follow ups: I plan to have a clean implementation of all items in section 8 by the end of this week. Then I hope everyone can help me: I think this is a bit premature: this sounds like what the Nov 17 meeting is supposed to hammer out. I guess it can't hurt to try to start the process, as long as we don't fool ourselves into thinking the result is in any way definitive before the Nov 17 planning meetings. GS - I want to include every serious feature. I want to collect as many as possible before the meeting and we can keep collecting during the meeting and after. The hard part will be prioritizing them and picking the ones we work on. ** Also, there may have been proposals emailed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] but not to a public forum; these should be reposted to devel@ so that we can all see and comment on them. GS - I'm getting copies of all xocamp e-mails while we decide if we should start an RT queue or not. I'll scrub through them and make sure to forward any to devel. I think they all have been copied there but I'll double check. * -- AI for everybody: Read and update wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 At the moment, I'd like to see this include a prominent section linking to the various proposals made on devel@ (via links to the archives on lists.laptop.org), including a list of 'interested parties' when that can be extracted from the discussion. GS - I agree that this is a good idea and should be done whenever possible. I added a note to that effect at the top (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Requirements_and_Feature_Suggestions). Anyone is welcome to help link in threads and define these features as well as possible. HTHs. I'll send notes from the meeting too. Thanks, Greg S C. Scott Ananian wrote: On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:28 AM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We have a feature roadmap and miniconference planning meet set for today from 2 - 3 PM US ET. Meeting is on IRC, freednode.net #olpc-meeting channel. I will likely not attend, since I think I'll be lunching with Hernan Pachas in Peru during that time. I plan to have a clean implementation of all items in section 8 by the end of this week. Then I hope everyone can help me: I think this is a bit premature: this sounds like what the Nov 17 meeting is supposed to hammer out. I guess it can't hurt to try to start the process, as long as we don't fool ourselves into thinking the result is in any way definitive before the Nov 17 planning meetings. 1 - 10 minutes - Review status of action items: -- AI : Greg will send an e-mail asking for call for proposals for November meeting (called XOcamp). I don't think I've seen proposals from Chris or Michael yet, and Marco said he was going to send a proposal and I haven't seen that yet, either. I'd like to see a proposal from Deepak as well (possibly with cjb). I would hope that can be remedied before today's meeting. Also, there may have been proposals emailed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] but not to a public forum; these should be reposted to devel@ so that we can all see and comment on them. -- AI for everybody: Read and update wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0 At the moment, I'd like to see this include a prominent section linking to the various proposals made on devel@ (via links to the archives on lists.laptop.org), including a list of 'interested parties' when that can be extracted from the discussion. 2 - 40 minutes - Take wiki, input from call for proposals and input from Kim and Ed and make a draft agenda for November 17 - 21 meeting. This should include whipping OLPC developers who haven't made proposals, and canvassing the proposals to see if anything is obviously missing, so that the draft agenda has placeholders for important things even if proposals have not yet been made. 3 - 10 minutes - set agenda for next week and assign/review action items. Has this become a(nother) standing weekly meeting? --scott ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Feature Roadmap and Miniconference Meeting Notes
Hi All, We met on IRC on Wed. October 22 to talk about the XO feature roadmap and plans for the mini-conference November 17 - 21. Brief minutes: Talked about getting more feature requests in feature roadmap page. Talked about getting sugar list on feature roadmap page. Debated 1-1 and onto, and set theory re: sugar list and XO list. Decided for Greg and Eben to make sure that all sugar for XO items have a place on XO feature roadmap. Decided to set deadline for submission of conference proposals of Monday October, 27. Asked everyone to review of all submissions at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Proposals and to prepare to pick the target set next Wed. Asked everyone to add feature ideas t http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap Closed action items: AI : Greg will send an e-mail asking for call for proposals for November meeting (called XOcamp). GS - Closed. Sent e-mail last week. AI : Ed and Kim will talk together about support and deployment input and ensure that it gets included. GS - Closed. Kim and Ed working on it and will ensure relevant proposals and presentations are booked. Open and new action items: AI: Greg to resend request for proposals and include deadline of Monday October 27. Will send to devel, sugar, techteam and server lists. AI: Everybody: Read and update wiki. Add any major feature request to: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Requirements_and_Feature_Suggestions link to relevant threads on lists as needed. AI: Greg to add submission to xocamp e-mail address to xocamp2 wiki proposals section: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 AI: Eben to transfer or transclude or link XO related sugar features on feature roadmap page. Next meeting: Wed. 10/29 2PM US ET freenode.net #olpc-meeting. Agenda for next week: Review/discuss/vote on proposals in the meeting, set owners for organizing into an agenda Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] 9.1 Proposal: Printing support
Hi Jeff, If you will help develop with us, you can sign up here for a free XO: http://projectdb.olpc.at/ BTW I'm a comic book fan myself. I give out Gyro Gearloose comic books whenever a kid comes by the office :-) Thanks, Greg S Jeff wrote: On 21 Oct 2008, at 4:15 PM, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 3:05 AM, Jeff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please stop imagining that lowest-spec, cheapest hardware and crippleware is the answer - or that 3'rd World countries will never progress towards a reasonable standard. That attitude is patronizing and demeaning. And wrong. Hey - I'm familiar with a lot of variety and I'm working towards options and flexibility as much as I can. But I'm shorthanded as hell, so help is appreciated in *getting things done*. And no -- server-devel is not about crippleware. It's just not very far along. I'm sorry to have offended you Martin. I have tremendous respect for you and think you've done amazing work here, but I think some of the limitations are a result of the (artificial) constraints which you currently perceive or experience, but which may not actually be constraints in a couple of years. . . Including the cost of your data traffic in NZ. From my perspective I would love to see a full featured XS deployment that includes wikipedia, gutenberg library, comics, games, and a DVD distro with all the necessary software applications and packages - rather than a server OS cut down to the bone to be able to fit on an XO as a server. The Server and the Content Library are inextricably interwoven in my mind. It could be worth considering focusing on XS running on XO as a server to handle the basic requirements (DNS, DHCP, ejabberd, and CUPS (hehe), etc.) - but for the rest I think that everything required for an XO deployment server could as easily be packaged for Debian and Fedora separately as distinct repositories. Another thing which is important, in my experience, is single sign-on authentication across the board: from a user data directory on the server - to Moodle and Drupal... and much more. In that regard I would love if there was a closer correlation to normal desktop deployments instead of depending on the XO's unique ID or MAC address (or however it is planned... I don't really have a clue about that. Sorry. Send me an XO, please. : -). Unfortunately I don't have access to an XO, and each 500mb download of an ISO (Sugar XS, but excluding Qemu) costs me a very significant percentage of my monthly income. *sigh* That's my own fault for choosing to be where I am and doing what I'm doing, I guess. I just wish I knew how to help you get more things done. I believe strongly in the OLPC vision (actually, Nicholas Negroponte's original vision)... and as far as I'm concerned, if we had a deployment of OLPC here (and I mean 1 laptop /per/ child) we will use it as medium to instill a love of reading in children. If OLPC misses every constructivist wish and vision; and only creates a mobile Library of Alexandria for our children (including, and probably especially, classic comic material) - thereby instilling a love of reading and an improved literacy - it will have succeeded beyond Nicholas's dreams. Please don't think by that I misunderstand or believe that such a foundation will not provide the constructivist platform that we all, mostly, believe in. It's just that my perspective is colored by my real life experience here. To put that in context: here where we are the text-books are locked up in safes, and the children learn to regard the teacher as a font of all knowledge and wisdom. It is a very dangerous mindset that; and creates an appalling dependency on perceived authority and artificial hierarchies. -Jeff ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Greg Smith's Weekly Report, week ending 10/17
Greg's User Feedback URL of the Week (English): 8.2.0 question, posted and resolved by the community in the same day! http://en.forum.laptop.org/viewtopic.php?f=6t=160964sid=775110c2027abed37bc769241c829a08 Greg's User Feedback URL of the Week (Spanish): Public Moodle with Forums created and used by teachers in Peru since 2006. http://www.innovavirtual.org/moodleperu/ Bonus URL courtesy of Seth. Recent blog posts about 8.2.0: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=enq=olpc+8.2.0 * Status of last weeks goals: 1 - Send out 8.2 announcement e-mail to public lists and technical leads at deployments. GS - Done! 2 - Update and restructure 9.1 page. Continue to engage learning team, Ed, engineering and others to come up with use cases and high level strategic plans which can motivate development over the course of multiple releases. GS - Mostly not done. Held first 9.1 meeting and sent out invite for conference in November. Continued discussions with learning and operations. 3 - Join more sugar and other design meetings. I want to add more motivation and customer side info to features planned. Also want to communicate better what work is essentially underway and being worked on now. Lastly want to write more detailed requirements and see if I can get an engineer to write at least one full design document (best chance is design for activation/security management in response to: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Activation_lease_security_feature) GS - Partially done. Joined Journal meeting but didn't make any sugar meetings. No design proposals (AKA functional specifications) received yet. May make progress if Chris implements a spec. writing tool... 4 - Update deployments page with the latest status details. GS - Not done. 5 - Engage more users to understand their needs. Focus especially on Sur list and country technical leads (top targets: Peru, Uruguay, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Haiti). GS - Partially done. Debriefed Brian on his Rwanda trip. Talked with Peru leads on IRC and e-mail. Kept up with torrent of Sur list e-mails and talked to Uruguay contacts. * Goals for next week: 1 - Update and rename 9.1.0 page. Prioritize and organize requirements. Flesh out two more requirement definitions. 2 - Work on agenda for miniconference. Review proposals, submit a few of my own, and update conference page. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2 3 - Meet with deployment teams and learning teams. Write use cases and collect more user input. 4 - Update deployments page. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Future Feature Weekly Planning Meeting
Hi Michael, Thanks for the questions and input. Some replies: How, in your opinion, did the private setting improve the meeting? GS - I find it helpful to talk to people face to face on occasion. We interrupt each other a little more than I would like but I found it to be very helpful to kick off in person. IMHO It doesn't have to be private but in person and on the phone was important. Ed mentioned concerns about the value of standing weekly meetings which are not absolutely necessary. Who are you expecting will attend this Future Features meeting? For how long do you expect it will recur? (Also, can you define feature for me?) GS - Two main reasons for a weekly meeting. 1 - It sets a deadline for follow up and allows tracking of action items and progress. I find a weekly meeting useful to push me to get stuff done before the next meeting. 2 - It gives people a chance to bring things up. If you are concerned about something you can hold it until the next meeting and you know there is a spot on the agenda for you. A feature is new functionality which allows the end user to do something which was not available to do in previous releases. That includes, do something more easily, e.g. change the timezone in the GUI instead of at CLI. I expect this meeting to go on until 9.1 is released and possibly beyond. Once we get past the strategic planning stage we should transition it to a more tactical release status meeting. My position is that anyone working on the project is welcome to attend. Hopefully it doesn't get too big to make rapid progress and we'll see how it goes on IRC this week. Then why not just call it a (software?) strategy meeting? GS - That works for me but I believe Ed wanted to call it future feature planning. The only difference I see is that it can cover more than just technical SW design. It can cover what is important to build and why. P.S. - I noticed that the desire of many of the meeting participants to hash out policy differences during the meeting conflicted with your understandable desire to stick to your schedule and agenda. Is there some other venue where you would prefer to see people trying to resolve these disagreements? GS - I want to make sure we cover the agenda items every meeting. People are welcome to suggest additional agenda items and if we have extra time we can open it up at the end. Other venues and discussions are welcome. This list seems like a good venue but IRC and one on one is fine too. Convince whoever you want to convince and however you want to do it. Hopefully all the discussion helps us define and execute on a common purpose. I hope that answers your questions. Let me know if I missed anything or you need a better explanation. Thanks, Greg S Michael Stone wrote: Greg, Here are some comments and questions on your meeting and minutes. I hope you find them helpful. We had an internal kick off meeting for next release planning on Wed. October 15. How, in your opinion, did the private setting improve the meeting? Starting next week, this will become a public Future Features planning meeting every Wed at 2PM US ET on IRC channel #olpc-meeting freenode.net Ed mentioned concerns about the value of standing weekly meetings which are not absolutely necessary. Who are you expecting will attend this Future Features meeting? For how long do you expect it will recur? (Also, can you define feature for me?) I call it Future Feature planning instead of 9.1.0 and plan to move the web page to that name as well. The idea is that we need to layout a long term strategy first, then decide which parts can be executed in the strict 9.1.0 time frame (March, 2009 delivery). Then why not just call it a (software?) strategy meeting? Very condensed minutes of yesterdays meeting are below. This is my rough take so any edits or additions welcome - Mitch and others talked about the importance of starting with the customer, finding out what they need and hearing from them directly. How to get comprehensive input and to then filter it in to a set of to items which the most benefit for the most people. There was substantial push-back from people who said that we're already swimming in feedback which has, as yet, not been acted upon. - We talked about how to find a feature champion and also a programmer and the two may not be the same. No consensus on exactly what the champion will do. I thought the key points from this discussion were as follows: * People often propose changes; sometimes, they explain why the changes are desirable. * Release contracts and release managers are believed to be helpful supporting devices for bringing changes to release quality in a timely and transparent fashion. Champions are therefore the people who perform or organize the work necessary to expire release contracts. * We haven't yet figured out how to effectively develop
Call for Proposals for OLPC miniconference November 17-21, 2008
An OLPC miniconference will be held November 17-21, 2008 at our Cambridge offices (10th floor, 1 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, USA) This week-long event will help frame our long-term software development efforts. In addition, we will work on prioritizing requirements, features and goals for the next major feature release called XO Software Release 9.1.0. Please submit proposals for topics to cover. These may include, but are not limited to: - Top concerns and requirements of users and countries including reviews of available feedback - Learning priorities and tools needed to support them - Technologies, applications and software design proposals - Process and infrastructure proposals - Current and needed research For details about the event and submission process, see the XOcamp description online. [1] Please submit 200 word descriptions of topics or sessions on the event page [2] or by emailing your ideas to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Thanks, Greg Smith OLPC Product Manager on behalf of the OLPC development team [1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp [2] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Sessions ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
[Server-devel] Call for Proposals for OLPC miniconference November 17-21, 2008
An OLPC miniconference will be held November 17-21, 2008 at our Cambridge offices (10th floor, 1 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, USA) This week-long event will help frame our long-term software development efforts. In addition, we will work on prioritizing requirements, features and goals for the next major feature release called XO Software Release 9.1.0. Please submit proposals for topics to cover. These may include, but are not limited to: - Top concerns and requirements of users and countries including reviews of available feedback - Learning priorities and tools needed to support them - Technologies, applications and software design proposals - Process and infrastructure proposals - Current and needed research For details about the event and submission process, see the XOcamp description online. [1] Please submit 200 word descriptions of topics or sessions on the event page [2] or by emailing your ideas to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Thanks, Greg Smith OLPC Product Manager on behalf of the OLPC development team [1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp [2] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp_2#Sessions ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Greg Smith Weekly Report for Week Ending 10/10
Greg's User Feedback URLs of the Week (Spanish): http://ceibalpuertosauce.blogspot.com/ and http://www.ceibalbellaunion.blogspot.com/ Two great teacher generated blogs out of Uruguay showing how XOs and activities are used in real schools. Greg's User Feedback URLs of the Week (English): http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41706?show=full PhD Thesis of OLPC Learning team member Claudia Urrea. Includes detailed overview of and analysis of 1:1 learning projects in Latin America. http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-October/019994.html Input on devel list from Elena based on experience in Mongolia. See also the extensive thread that grew out of this. ** Status of last weeks goals: 1 - Get sign off and incorporate final edits on 8.2 release notes. GS - Done. That upgrade section was a bear! Thanks to Frances, Mel, and Lionel who helped get it finalized and as clean as possible. 2 - Prepare 8.2 marketing launch. Update Releases wiki pages and write announcement e-mail, wiki home page update, post for OLPC News, open source participants acknowledgment list, (other source material or communication vehicles?). All of the above should be in place for posting Monday 10/13. GS - Done. Release announcement e-mail written. On Tuesday 10/14, I will send it to all lists (except devel where Michael gets the honor of making the announcement). Will also update wiki home page and send announcement to OLPC News 3 - Start weekly 8.2.1 and 9.1 meetings. Update 8.2.1 and 9.1 pages. Start triaging Trac to create queries which will show target 8.2.1 bugs. Reach out to target customers for 8.2.1 and track deployment time frames. GS - Partially done. Internal 8.2.1 meeting held. Further meetings on hold until we identify the lead customer needing a critical bug fix. First internal 9.1 meeting postponed to next week. The goal is to make both of these meetings public meetings on IRC after an initial internal kick off. ** Goals for next week in priority order: 1 - Send out 8.2 announcement e-mail to public lists and technical leads at deployments. 2 - Update and restructure 9.1 page. Continue to engage learning team, Ed, engineering and others to come up with use cases and high level strategic plans which can motivate development over the course of multiple releases. 3 - Join more sugar and other design meetings. I want to add more motivation and customer side info to features planned. Also want to communicate better what work is essentially underway and being worked on now. Lastly, want to write more detailed requirements and see if I can get an engineer to write at least one full design document (best chance is design for activation/security management in response to: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0#Activation_lease_security_feature) 4 - Update deployments page with the latest status details. 5 - Engage more users to understand their needs. Focus especially on Sur list and country technical leads (top targets: Peru, Uruguay, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Haiti). Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
[Server-devel] Announcing the General Availability of XO Software Release 8.2.0
Announcing the General Availability of XO Software Release 8.2.0 XO Software Release 8.2.0 was developed by OLPC engineers and the OLPC open source community. The XO and its software is the only major computing platform designed specifically for the educational benefit of children in the developing world. Release 8.2 is based on a child focused graphical interface called Sugar, a Red Hat Fedora 9 Linux operating system and OLPC customized implementations of core software including power management, wireless drivers, NAND flash file system, Open Firmware, and other components. XO Software Release 8.2.0 runs on the award winning XO Laptop. http://laptop.org/laptop/ Major new features in this release include: - A updated Home view and Journal with new options for finding and organizing activities. - An enhanced Frame for collaborating with other XOs, switching between running activities and accessing external USB sticks. - A graphical Control Panel for setting language, network, and power preferences. - An automated Software Update tool which finds the latest version of activities and updates them over the Internet. - Integration with the School Server for backup of XOs and restore of files to the Journal as needed. - New and updated translations for many languages. - A new user manual shipped with the XO as an activity. - Hundreds of bug fixes. For installation instructions and more details on the new features, see the the 8.2.0 Release Notes at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.0 Thanks to the many people who gave their time and energy to make this release a reality. Thanks, Greg Smith OLPC Product Manager ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: journal is hard + sugar and the digital age
Hi Carol, Re your comment: In response to Scott's mail, if you look at the roadmaps linked to there is nothing approaching a feature oriented roadmap there, though a lot of good input is gathered in the mails captured at the end of his w.l.o/9.1 link, and of course there is no clue in this page as to which if any of these suggestions will be implemented and when. That is the problem. Here's what I mean by a feature roadmap. Pick a set of key improvements. Say when you are going to do them in words that can be understood by an outsider. (Not, for example, glucose 6.7.8.9 with a git pointer ). Asking for this roadmap is not about criticizing that the development is going too slow. ** I agree that we need better future directions communication. I think Eben recently said he will try to clean that up from the Sugar UI side. On the XO software in general, right now we do not have a firm enough plan beyond 8.2 to create a roadmap like you describe. Its on my to do list to clean up the 9.1 page but it will be a while before we can choose the set of features and approximate order or time frame for them. That said, 8.2 is not quite released yet (will be generally available and and manufactured next week) so for a few more days, the current roadmap is: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.0 Let me know if that is written in the user accessible language you want to see. As soon as we have a plan for after 8.2, I'm all in favor of writing a feature level roadmap. Its a high priority but we have to get over this big hurdle first: Pick a set of key improvements. BTW the starting point for seeing the future plans is here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Future_releases Hopefully that gives you an idea of the status of forthcoming releases and links to the past releases. Let me know if that does not address your concerns. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] Password-less authentication with moodle
Hi Andres, Looks like I answered the wrong question, sorry :-( Can you tell us more about where the Moodle and EduBlog will be deployed? Will it go on the existing Debian based servers in Uruguay or will it go on a server which is in a data center and access from Uruguay schools via WAN (private or Internet)? In terms of authentication to Moodle, I think the best you can do with the XO is to have user name/password on the first try. Then Moodle cookies the browser so its recognized and you don't need to login again. That's my guess but I think Tarun knows more about the available options. Let me know if that is closer to what you are asking. Thanks, Greg S -- Message: 2 Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 20:22:48 -0200 From: Andr?s Ambrois [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Server-devel] Password-less authentication with moodle (Martin Langhoff) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Hi Greg! Thanks for your insight. Currently, the scope of our project is restricted to the application (id est Moodle) layer, and my question was directed towards authentication at that level.But your notes are very relevant for installations in the future. Thank you! In reply to your comments, school servers in Uruguay have no public presence. I dont know the details but I would think this is done with a firewall blocking everything but monitoring services used by LATU. With some luck we will be able to work on these lower layer problems in deployment at later stages. Cheers! On Monday 06 October 2008 11:58:49 Greg Smith wrote: Hi Andres, I missed one key one. Have a known clean backup. Add user data to it if you can, but backup regularly. Be ready to restore to a clean backup on short notice if you are compromised and need to start from scratch. Thanks, Greg S Greg Smith wrote: Hi Andres, A few comments to get you warmed up. I will ask the current EduBlog team to give you more suggestions and details too. 1 - My understanding of the current XS design is that it has one interface visible to the Internet and another visible to the school only. It seems pretty secure that way but it can open up a bunch of security issues if you expose the School side interface to the Internet. You may need to do that in order to run EduBlog on the Internet so let us know ASAP which services are available on public routed interfaces. 2 - Use denyhosts (http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/) or some other protection against dictionary style attacks on any public facing interfaces. 3 - Put an anti-virus tool on the box. e.g. clamAV. Especially if your PHP, Apache, Moodle, SQL services are visible publicly its important to have a second line of defense in case some virus SW gets on the box. 4 - Run a port scan yourself (e.g. Nessus). Also, watch and protect yourself against being port scanned by an attacker. Those are some suggestion off the top of my head. I'll try to collect all suggestions from EduBlog round 1 and get those to you as well. HTHs. Thanks, Greg S Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 14:52:25 +1300 From: Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Server-devel] Password-less authentication with moodle To: Andr?s Ambrois [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 5:29 AM, Andr?s Ambrois [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - What's your timeframe? The timeframe for our project is 5 weeks starting from last Wednesday, in which I need to cover the interface (Moodle and Wordpress theming), course configuration, authentication, modifying Write to enable blog posting, and document all this for a manual. Ouch - that's very tight! I'm glad I wasn't that far off :) . Are these required modifications documented somewhere? Not yet. We're finishing off 0.5 - will be looking into this for 0.6 or 0.7, not too far away, unlikely to be done in the next 5 weeks either :-/ cheers, m ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Read bug hit in Rwanda
Hi Sayamindu, Are you maintaining Read now or is Morgan? I got a ping from Brian who is in Rwanda and he confirmed that this bug: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7090 was actually seen by kids there. Just as cjl predicted in Trac, it was hit by kids on first exposure to the XO. Can we get some attention on that one? Especially if it can be fixed in the activity, I would like to have a new version in place when we try to upgrade Rwanda 8.2.0 later this year. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] Password-less authentication with moodle (Martin Langhoff)
Hi Andres, A few comments to get you warmed up. I will ask the current EduBlog team to give you more suggestions and details too. 1 - My understanding of the current XS design is that it has one interface visible to the Internet and another visible to the school only. It seems pretty secure that way but it can open up a bunch of security issues if you expose the School side interface to the Internet. You may need to do that in order to run EduBlog on the Internet so let us know ASAP which services are available on public routed interfaces. 2 - Use denyhosts (http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/) or some other protection against dictionary style attacks on any public facing interfaces. 3 - Put an anti-virus tool on the box. e.g. clamAV. Especially if your PHP, Apache, Moodle, SQL services are visible publicly its important to have a second line of defense in case some virus SW gets on the box. 4 - Run a port scan yourself (e.g. Nessus). Also, watch and protect yourself against being port scanned by an attacker. Those are some suggestion off the top of my head. I'll try to collect all suggestions from EduBlog round 1 and get those to you as well. HTHs. Thanks, Greg S Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 14:52:25 +1300 From: Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Server-devel] Password-less authentication with moodle To: Andr?s Ambrois [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 5:29 AM, Andr?s Ambrois [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - What's your timeframe? The timeframe for our project is 5 weeks starting from last Wednesday, in which I need to cover the interface (Moodle and Wordpress theming), course configuration, authentication, modifying Write to enable blog posting, and document all this for a manual. Ouch - that's very tight! I'm glad I wasn't that far off :) . Are these required modifications documented somewhere? Not yet. We're finishing off 0.5 - will be looking into this for 0.6 or 0.7, not too far away, unlikely to be done in the next 5 weeks either :-/ cheers, m ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] Password-less authentication with moodle (Martin Langhoff)
Hi Andres, I missed one key one. Have a known clean backup. Add user data to it if you can, but backup regularly. Be ready to restore to a clean backup on short notice if you are compromised and need to start from scratch. Thanks, Greg S Greg Smith wrote: Hi Andres, A few comments to get you warmed up. I will ask the current EduBlog team to give you more suggestions and details too. 1 - My understanding of the current XS design is that it has one interface visible to the Internet and another visible to the school only. It seems pretty secure that way but it can open up a bunch of security issues if you expose the School side interface to the Internet. You may need to do that in order to run EduBlog on the Internet so let us know ASAP which services are available on public routed interfaces. 2 - Use denyhosts (http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/) or some other protection against dictionary style attacks on any public facing interfaces. 3 - Put an anti-virus tool on the box. e.g. clamAV. Especially if your PHP, Apache, Moodle, SQL services are visible publicly its important to have a second line of defense in case some virus SW gets on the box. 4 - Run a port scan yourself (e.g. Nessus). Also, watch and protect yourself against being port scanned by an attacker. Those are some suggestion off the top of my head. I'll try to collect all suggestions from EduBlog round 1 and get those to you as well. HTHs. Thanks, Greg S Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 14:52:25 +1300 From: Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Server-devel] Password-less authentication with moodle To: Andr?s Ambrois [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 5:29 AM, Andr?s Ambrois [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - What's your timeframe? The timeframe for our project is 5 weeks starting from last Wednesday, in which I need to cover the interface (Moodle and Wordpress theming), course configuration, authentication, modifying Write to enable blog posting, and document all this for a manual. Ouch - that's very tight! I'm glad I wasn't that far off :) . Are these required modifications documented somewhere? Not yet. We're finishing off 0.5 - will be looking into this for 0.6 or 0.7, not too far away, unlikely to be done in the next 5 weeks either :-/ cheers, m ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
[Server-devel] DanGuardian and XS Plans
Hi Bryan, Martin et al, Good input on content filtering, thanks. Here's my take on the current state of affairs: 1 - We have a release called 0.5 which is almost done and should be available in October. It does not include DanGuardian. The following URL lists the work that is in or close to in: https://dev.laptop.org/query?group=statusmilestone=xs-0.5 Hopefully we can write a nice release note for it shortly, giving a better explanation of the new features. 2 - We can consider DansGuardian for 0.6 but there is not a firm date for 0.6 at this time. Looks like we have agreement on the need for a Content Filtering solution but not quite locked down on which one. I will work with Martin to try and get it on the roadmap. That said, looking at your deployment dates, you should plan on taking 0.5 and setting up the content filtering yourself. One question for Martin, Is Squid in and supported? Will it be configured/configurable and easier to install in the 0.5 release? I think I have asked that before and I'm pretty sure that the answer is Yes Squid is part of the XS image. Just double checking and seeing if we have made it any easier to configure. Thanks for the details on your plans from Tony and Bryan. Let me know if you have any other questions or need any more info. If Nepal can be a lead user for XS 0.5 that will help us burn it in for use in Birmingham and Paraguay and elsewhere. Thanks, Greg S ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Greg Smith's Weekly Report for 9/29 to 10/3
New Feature of the Weekly Report. Greg's User Feedback URL of the Week (English): http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Academic_papers#Evaluation_of_the_Teaching_Matters_One_Laptop_Per_Child_.28XO.29_Pilot_at_Kappa_I_V This is a great evaluation of an XO pilot in a NYC school. Greg's User Feedback URL of the Week (Spanish): http://www.mediagala.com/rap/foro/ New forum for volunteers and teachers out of Uruguay. ** Status of last weeks goals: 1 - Get 8.2 to manufacturing. Catch up on bug triage. GS - Done! 8.2-767 has gone to Quanta for manufacturing test. Barring any surprises 8.2.0 will be manufactured on new XOs starting Monday October 13. 2 - Finish 8.2 Release notes and get final review of them from engineering. GS - Done. Final draft Release notes is ready. A short and sweet version is at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0 with links from there to the detailed version at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0-detailed-version Last call for edits and final sign off needed from management and engineering. 3 - Finalize blurb used to promote the release and start sending it out to internal lists. Write more generally usable Release message. GS - Not done. Last weeks blurb is the current best version. 4 - Update deployments page and releases page. GS - Partially done. Deployments page (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments) updated with the XOs delivered, shipped, and ordered. Status section needs more updating and timeline needs editing/bug fixing. No changes to Releases page (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Releases) this week. 5 - Post more detailed 8.2.1 page and restructure 9.1 page. GS - Partially done. Some minor edits to 9.1 page. 8.2.1 page removed and link to unscheduled release process page left. If/when we hear a specific blocking issue for a deployment we will start filling it out again. ** Goals for next week: 1 - Get sign off and incorporate final edits on 8.2 release notes. 2 - Write 8.2 availability announcement e-mail. Update wiki home page to link to 8.2. Should be in place for posting on or before Monday 10/13. 3 - Start weekly 9.1 meetings. Do major restructuring of 9.1 page. Start planning in person 9.1 conference. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] What's cooking in the XS pot this week (2008-10--01)
Hi Martin, A little more info. Birmingham just updated to XS 0.4. I think its in their lab right now but my impression is they can put it in production in a school at any time. The only key feature that I am aware of for them is the scalable eJabber server. If that's newer, tested and more scalable they may take 0.5 just for that. No need to include the DansGuardian, yet. Right now the deployments seem to take the XS, customize it and add their own filtering tool. I think a default, built-in filtering solution would be nice but not critical quite yet. We need to reach out to Paraguay and see if they will use the default XS or if they have any customizations or critical requirements. I'll try to do that ASAP. I think the main strategy for us is to have an answer to the following at any time: 1 - What version should I deploy if I need to do something today and what features does it have? 2 - When will the next version be available and what new features does it offer? I think we're close to a crisp answer on those but it would really help to have a single URL type answer (let me know if I can help with that). My main message is that we should start treating this like a production class system which will go in to real schools (some we know about and some we don't) every month from now on. Thanks, Greg S Martin Langhoff wrote: On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On your question of who is waiting for XS 0.5, I know of at least two deployments that are building labs and testing configurations with XS software: Paraguay Birmingham Those two appear to be a bit later. We can probably get 0.6 out the door for them mid-november-ish, with a few more end-user features :-) Actually, this is good so we now know the target date for xs-0.6 should be early-to-mid Nov. AFAIK Moodle is not a must have item for either deployment. Well, a UI for the XS will be a must-have for them, and that is based on Moodle, so... A stable and scalable eJabber is critical as are basic XS features like: - Caching - NAT those are in - Filtering (is DanGuardian built in and shipped with the XS ?) that's not in 0.5 - we can prioritise for 0.6. Spending a little more time to make sure that XS 0.5 is very stable and well documented is a good idea. Just a little time... 0.5 is base frameworks, some basic features, 0.6 is the now we add useful features release. However, we should start to be more precise about the features and dates for each release we plan to deliver before the end of CY 08. so far I'm hoping to keep my cards close to my chest for 0.7 :-) cheers, m ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
[Server-devel] DansGuardian (was What's cooking in the XS pot this week, (2008-10--01))
Hi Guys, Sorry I sent that last e-mail before reading the full list. If Bryan needs Dansguardian built in that's good enough for me. I take back what I said about it not being critical. Let's put it on the roadmap for 0.6 and see if we can make it happen in time for Nepal to deploy it. Bryan, What is the delivery date of a tested and working version which will meet your time frame? I want to make sure we give it you with enough lead time so you can test it before you put it in production. Thanks, Greg S From: Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Server-devel] What's cooking in the XS pot this week (2008-10--01) To: Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 6:22 PM, Bryan Berry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How happy are you with DanGuardian? Is it a useful filter? We use it internally w/in our office and we are happy w/ it. We use it locally to eat our own dog food. By default it blocks a lot if not most content on the Internet, including stuff that doesn't seem objectionable at all. Yeah, that's one of my concerns. I looked a little bit at DG documentation a few days ago, as I was fighting with Squid's memory usage, to understand how resource intensive it is, and how it works. And in the back of my mind the question was - is this the right tool? When you mention it blocks most content, I'm less than thrilled. A filter that is too blunt will actually backfire -- will be too easy to false-match and also easy to workaround. Users will learn something but perhaps not what we want. A smarter filter, one that does not give all/most users an incentive to find workarounds, is a much healthier solution. But I'll get deep into it later, more likely in the 0.6 cycle. Now that you mention you're using it in a real life setup, what does top tell you about its memory usage? I think dans is essential because it will keep the adults from using up all the bandwidth to look at porn. the secondary reason, to protect kids is also important ;) Noble causes indeed! cheers,, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Preparation of 8.2 Final ECO Form
Hi Michael, Can you begin filling out the final ECO form for 8.2? I believe that entails updating this page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/ECO/8.2.0/Checklist Let's build it with the assumption that 8.2-767 will be the release version. All systems are go according to the latest info I have. Quanta begins their final test Monday 10/6 and our official launch date (start of manufacturing, update of Wiki pages, sending out announcement e-mails, etc.) is Monday 10/13. I think we should have the ECO filled in and completed ASAP to be safe. Let me know what I can do to help. Thanks, Greg S ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
