OLPC software: our first release and beyond.
, and sort in the coming months, and an API for developers. The ability to open files, read, write, etc., are being transitioned to mediation by both the Journal and, at a lower level, Bitfrost, our security system. These transitions will be completed before we ship. One important feature where we have made little progress is the View Source key. We decided to build the user experience—and the core Activity base—in Python, in large part, to facilitate the children's direct access to modifiable code. We are moving to the latest stable version of Python as part of our Fedora Core 7 migration; however, we have yet to put enough resources into building a suitable development environment for children. This remains an important goal, but not one we can reasonably meet for our first release. The incorporation of the context-sensitive spirit of view source into all Activities is another area where we lag. Bolstering these efforts is second only to stabilizing the current system. We look forward to the possibility of Guido van Rossum, Python's creator, leading these efforts in the fall. One of the most frustrating things for OLPC developers—and potential community developers—is to bring the Sugar environment up and have it run. Sugar-jhbuild is difficult to use (and overkill for those who are interested in developing activities as opposed to working on Sugar itself). The QEMU and live boot images do not offer easy integration and workflow access for developers. We are keenly aware of this and are working with VMWare to provide bootable virtual machines (VMs) that will enable developers to both develop directly from their host machine within their normal development environment and simulate a mesh of XO laptops for testing. The first iteration of a development VM will be available soon, after which we will turn our efforts over to mesh emulation. Another unfortunate byproduct of our approach to desktop software is that it is difficult to run Linux GUI applications within Sugar without first adapting (sugarizing) the applications. Work is being done on an extension to the Matchbox window manager; the manager should help with this problem by offering the ability to launch un-sugarized applications in a second desktop. The realities of time and resource constraints dictate that all of our software goals will not be met by ship date. However, we will ship an efficient software update system that will let us continually push out improvements in both stability and features for the XO. This will let us take advantage of our fast development cycles to provide a steady stream of small software updates, instead of large and infrequent monolithic ones. We are hopeful many of our unmet goals will be completed and improved features will be added to the XO in the first few months after we begin to ship. As a community, we have made great strides; and we continue to head in a productive direction that will have a positive impact on the learning experiences of children worldwide. Finally, it is critical to establish that—though we have designed the laptop for a target audience of age 6 to 16—our intention is not that the children graduate to the conventional world of computing. Rather, we firmly believe that the tools and functionality you have created in support of learning, such as Sugar, Bitfrost, the Journal, view source, and mesh presence and collaboration are fundamentally solid ideas that will carry over to other computing platforms as this new generation of computer users matures; we will strive to ensure that Sugar and the Activities developed on top of it will be usable in conventional systems, thus impacting the general world of computing. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: suspend-to-disk
In any analysis, please don't bother with the B1 and B2 configurations as those platform profiles will not be an option in the production machines. -walter On 7/8/07, Mitch Bradley [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andres Salomon wrote: ... Implementation questions: I'm not going to concern myself with our B1s, for they have more ram and less nand. Our B2s have 128MB of ram, and 512MB of nand; B3s and up have 256MB of ram, and 1GB of nand. We need to figure out just how much space we'd need to set aside in a snapshot partition for STD. I'm not sure what would be required from the OFW side; Mitch? First-order swag: You need 256MB of disk to store 256MB of RAM, in the nothing-fancy scenario. Second-order swag: Machine code compresses about 2:1 with gzip, so if the memory were full of code, you would need about 128MB of disk for 256 MB of RAM. OFW already includes a gunzip-compatible decompressor which is reasonably fast (written in C, runs from cached memory). It would be easy enough to add either LZMA , LZO, or QuickLZ. It's likely that we could overlap the compression/decompression with NAND access, so the speed penalty would be minimal. Third-order swag: The memory is likely to be significantly more compressible than random machine code, due to the likely prevalence of sparsely-encoded data. So maybe the average compression in practice would be 3:1 or 4:1 or even better. But we would might need to allocate space for the worst case. Fourth-order swag: It wouldn't be necessary to save read-only code (text pages) to the save area; just mark those pages not present and save the information necessary to page them back in. But that would probably make the resume slower, because of the JFFS2 operations necessary to resolve all those page-in references. The firmware part of the resume would be faster, but the overall suspend/resume process might take longer (or maybe not; you trade not having to write the data out on the way down for having to do more work on the way up). The firmware part of this shouldn't be particularly difficult if we can make the save format reasonably straighforward. It could get more difficult if we run into enough examples of somebody has already done this so we have to use their existing solution even though it is massive overkill for our situation. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: August Penguin talk
James's suggestion is a good one. Unfortunately, the hardware problem that was fixed between B2 and B4 (and which was more extensive than just the difference between a GX and a LX) was such that the overhead of maintaining compatibility is not worth the effort. Regarding which build to run, I'd suggest either 406.15 or 542. There is no reason to run 538, which is less stable than 542. 406.15 will run fine on B2 hardware. 542 will be a bit slower and you need to take care that you don't run into OOM problems. I suggest only running one activity at a time. If you only have one machine, the advantages of running 542 are greatly diminished, since many of the new features are related to collaboration over the mesh. However, it does incorporate the Journal and the cleaner, more consistent tab interface. Sorry we cannot get you a B4 yet: we are negotiating with Israeli customs about the proper procedure to bring the machines into the country. -walter On 8/5/07, James Cameron [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 05/08/2007, at 5:13 PM, Zvi Devir wrote: Recently I've updated my B2 machine to build 538. The camera activity in this build is totally broken. Actually the camera activity is broken for quite some time now, [...] I offer a workaround rather than a solution ... depending on the nature of the problem, for demonstration purposes you may be able to grab just the files of an earlier Record (camera) activity that is known to work. Keep a copy of 406.15 handy in case you strike a problem that prevents all demonstration. -- James Cameron ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #2819 NORM Trial-3: need way to make a non-sharable activity
It isn't clear that making the popdown insensitive is the right solution. Why should it appear at all if there is no sharing? -walter On 8/16/07, Zarro Boogs per Child [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: #2819: need way to make a non-sharable activity --+- Reporter: erikb| Owner: marco Type: enhancement | Status: closed Priority: normal | Milestone: Trial-3 Component: sugar| Version: Build 542 Resolution: fixed|Keywords: Verified: 0| --+- Changes (by marco): * status: new = closed * resolution: = fixed Comment: Fixed. self.props.max_participants = 1 will make the popdown insensitive. -- Ticket URL: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2819#comment:5 One Laptop Per Child http://laptop.org/ -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Power manager specification... (request for comments).
Lets please be careful not to over-engineer. While Mike makes good points, we have this wonderful human social network we can depend upon as well. E.g., If I am downloading something from your machine, I can ask you to hold on a second until I finish. Let's take advantage of the fact that the kids are in the same community/school most of the time and not worry so much about corner cases until we have some more breathing room. -walter On 8/16/07, Mike C. Fletcher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jim Gettys wrote: ... There seems to be no way to manually adjust the backlight level in ebook mode. What would be the policy for it? Leave it on all the time or dim down after some idle time? Also CPU (and wireless?) should go to suspend for most of time in ebook mode? We have code in at least our PDF viewer to literally do exactly this; as soon as the page is rendered and it is idle, it puts the machine to sleep. For the activity developers in the audience: This is (I believe) in the GIT read-activity/readactivity.py[1] module. The implementation uses the HardwareManager[2] service (set_kernel_suspend) exposed over dbus to directly send the kernel into suspended state. AFAICS there's no allowance for tracking whether something *else* might need the machine to be alive (e.g. a download or the like being done in the background). The same Manager object has controls for various operations such as changing brightness and the like. On the original topic of the thread (what the power manager should do): I'm guessing eventually we'll want some of the logic currently in the read activity to migrate into HardwareManager. That is, allow for signaling inhibit_suspend( ) and allow_suspend()[3], rather than directly setting suspend, such that a given activity can declare that it must be allowed to continue processing in the back-end. Then you'd want something like suggest_suspend() so that a foreground activity can tell the system hey, I don't expect to do anything for a second or two, if no-one objects, feel free to suspend. From there, a second level does a suggest-suspend from Sugar (or whoever) on no-cpu, no-network (other than the autonomous routing), no-input, for a given period. No opinion on where/how to put that. HardwareManager should likely send dbus events so that activities can watch for resume, suggested-suspend, or what have you and adjust behaviour accordingly. Example usage scenario: switch a per-second clock-updating timer to a per-minute timer. Hope this helps, Mike [1] http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/read-activity;a=blob;f=readactivity.py;h=3eeb858cc5ea1dc67a60faee90628100479509be;hb=HEAD [2] http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=hardware-manager;a=blob;f=hardwaremanager.py;h=3154b17553621cc41fa947cbff2756372e6e37ec;hb=HEAD [3] with allow-suspend happening automatically after a short-ish timeout if the activity doesn't re-assert the inhibition -- Mike C. Fletcher Designer, VR Plumber, Coder http://www.vrplumber.com http://blog.vrplumber.com ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Use-case for turning off display smoothing
We should alway make sure that there is some value contrast in our color choices so that (a) things will work in reflective mode and (b) those with color vision deficiencies can still see important distinctions. -walter On 8/22/07, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 8/22/07, Jameson Chema Quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm thinking about syntax coloring. In cases like this, it is more important to be able to see *whether* something is colored than to see what color it is. Even with no backlight, the diagonal banding would give you that information; the smoothing, by reducing that banding, would be getting in the way. There's no display smoothing without the backlight. The smoothing is only done when color is being shown (thus the backlight is on). It might be better to use 'reversed text' and/or slightly-tinted backgrounds for highlighting. These should expand the number of different style variants which we can distinguish without needing to parse small differences in greylevel. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #2270 BLOC Trial-3: Bookmarks feature missing in Browse
As long as we can hide them, I don't mind that they fill up the bottom third of the screen. On 8/29/07, Zarro Boogs per Child [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: #2270: Bookmarks feature missing in Browse --+- Reporter: cmeadors | Owner: Simon Type: defect | Status: assigned Priority: blocker | Milestone: Trial-3 Component: web browser | Version: Resolution: |Keywords: Verified: 0| --+- Comment (by kimquirk): The bookmarks that show up now when you click on the star to the right of the url are good; but they take up too much real estate. Almost a third of the screen is used up. The icons are good because of the graphical nature, but that makes them too large to continue to display while you are trying to browse the web. One idea would be to be able to shrink the bookmark area to a much smaller bar across the bottom, and to be able to expand that with a button to see the full thumbnail screen shot. This needs to be addressed for trial-3. -- Ticket URL: https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2270#comment:11 One Laptop Per Child http://laptop.org/ -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #3593 NORM Trial-3: Mesh channel randomization breaks NM 'mesh-start' tweakable
I would recommend not making the patch; I think I found it confusing
only because I didn't know that random impacted link-local. But do we
still default to channel 1 if no school server is found?
-walter
On 9/18/07, Zarro Boogs per Child [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
#3593: Mesh channel randomization breaks NM 'mesh-start' tweakable
-+--
Reporter: dcbw | Owner: jg
Type: defect | Status: new
Priority: normal | Milestone: Trial-3
Component: network manager | Version:
Keywords: |Verified: 0
-+--
Since we switched back to randomized mesh channels two weeks ago at the
request of the server team, this inadvertently broke expectations about
how the /etc/NetworkManager/mesh-start file affects things when using
local-only. In this case, if you do local-only through mesh-start, you
are not guaranteed to come up on channel 1 because the start channel is
random.
Please determine if this is trial-3 material or not. Obviously, the
factors against fixing this for trial-3 are that:
1) our target users for trial 3 aren't expected to have to do this
2) you can always switch directly to mesh-1 from the UI
3) we are in code freeze
However, the fix is low-risk and does not affect normal codepaths.
```
Index: src/nm-device-802-11-mesh-olpc.c
===
--- src/nm-device-802-11-mesh-olpc.c(revision 2824)
+++ src/nm-device-802-11-mesh-olpc.c(working copy)
@@ -459,7 +459,10 @@
self-priv-use_mesh_beacons = TRUE;
}
- self-priv-channel = get_random_channel ();
+ if (self-priv-default_first_step == MESH_S4_P2P_MESH)
+ self-priv-channel = 1;
+ else
+ self-priv-channel = get_random_channel ();
self-priv-activation_started_ids = g_hash_table_new
(g_direct_hash,
g_direct_equal);
@@ -1718,7 +1721,10 @@
nm_device_set_active_link (NM_DEVICE (self), FALSE);
if (reinit_state) {
self-priv-step = self-priv-default_first_step;
- self-priv-channel = get_random_channel ();
+ if (self-priv-default_first_step ==
MESH_S4_P2P_MESH)
+ self-priv-channel = 1;
+ else
+ self-priv-channel = get_random_channel
();
self-priv-chans_tried = 0;
self-priv-channel_locked = FALSE;
}
@@ -1754,7 +1760,10 @@
self-priv-channel =
nm_act_request_get_mesh_channel (req);
self-priv-channel_locked = TRUE;
} else {
- self-priv-channel = get_random_channel ();
+ if (self-priv-default_first_step ==
MESH_S4_P2P_MESH)
+ self-priv-channel = 1;
+ else
+ self-priv-channel = get_random_channel
();
}
}
```
--
Ticket URL: https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3593
One Laptop Per Child https://dev.laptop.org
OLPC bug tracking system
--
Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org
___
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.laptop.org
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #3655 (Specify the order of the Activity taskbar icons)
But my estimation, Etoys will be in very center of the taskbar by default. I'd say that is putting a high priority on hard fun. The idea was to put a combination of explore, express, and communicate onto the primary taskbar. We are certainly open to other suggestions. -walter On 9/20/07, Yoshiki Ohshima [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello, We came across this bug ticket: https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3655 - Specifically, the first 6 icons from the left should be (in order): Chat, Browse, Write, Record, Paint, TamtamJam? After that: Turtle Art, eToys, Pippy, Calculator, Measure, TamTamEdit?, SynthLab?, Memorize, Blockparty, and Connect4. - It appears to me that this ordering puts higher emphasis on simple and easy things and less emphasis on things that require creativity and hard fun (excluding games). Is this observation correct? If so, it may send a wrong message to the rest of world. Many potential cuostomer contries have cellphones and PCs already, and adults and youth are chatting and browsing and taking notes (and playing games) with them. Are we trying to compete in such cellphone culture domain? I'd say, cellphones and PCs they already have can take care of simple stuff, so our priority (or our message) should be more on the hard fun items. What do you think? -- Yoshiki ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #3655 HIGH Trial-3: Specify the order of the Activity taskbar icons
I agree we'll want some level of customization for the order, but it is a low priority. A high priority to ensure that we have the core activities: explore, express, communicate on the primary taskbar. Having to scroll to discover Write or Etoys (as per the 593 default ordering) is suboptimal. -walter On 9/20/07, Zarro Boogs per Child [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: #3655: Specify the order of the Activity taskbar icons ---+ Reporter: kimquirk | Owner: marco Type: task | Status: new Priority: high | Milestone: Trial-3 Component: sugar | Version: Resolution:|Keywords: Verified: 0 | ---+ Comment(by marco): At some point we will need to customize the order (and the list itself). Though if for trial-3 we can go with danw approach that would mean no code changes, which is good. Kim, is the order required also for optionally-installed activities? (for trial-3) -- Ticket URL: https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3655#comment:3 One Laptop Per Child https://dev.laptop.org OLPC bug tracking system -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #3655 HIGH Trial-3: Specify the order of the Activity taskbar icons
I don't think we have to worry about the order of other activities that are installed for Trial 3 or FSR. We do care that things like Write and Etoys and the Web Browser are visible in the Frame by default... -walter On 9/20/07, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 9/20/07, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I agree we'll want some level of customization for the order, but it is a low priority. A high priority to ensure that we have the core activities: explore, express, communicate on the primary taskbar. Having to scroll to discover Write or Etoys (as per the 593 default ordering) is suboptimal. Sure, I agree. My main question was about optionally-installed activities... Do we care about their order for Trial-3? If not, then we change the order of installation of the activities in pilgrim and we get what we want without code changes (which is good at this date). Marco -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #3690 NORM First D: kazakh xkb symbols
Well. a bit more than one character: one added and a few taken away. I'll make a diff for Bernie. -walter On 9/23/07, Zarro Boogs per Child [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: #3690: kazakh xkb symbols --+- Reporter: walter | Owner: bernie Type: defect | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: First Deployment, V1.0 Component: x window system | Version: Resolution: |Keywords: Verified: 0| --+- Comment(by svu): Walter, you're saying there only one character difference. IMNSHO it would be better to use include statement instead of specifying the entire layout, don't you think? -- Ticket URL: https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3690#comment:2 One Laptop Per Child https://dev.laptop.org OLPC bug tracking system -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Sugar's fonts
I agree that the DejaVu fonts are far from optimal. There are some instructive comments on the wiki about seemingly mundane things like the shape of the 4, etc. While we certainly will have a mechanism for varying the basic system font and size, for the most the activities where the majority of reading is expected to take place have mechanisms for scaling already (Read and Write). The interface in the browser is not yet exposed and Etoys is a place where we expect children to spend time reading and writing as well. That said, I'm not sure that we'll find one set of metrics for all activities and all children from running field tests. But we could be better informed about some of the default settings. -walter On 9/28/07, Albert Cahalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Bert Freudenberg writes: I wonder if comparative studies have been made with the XO screen? My gut feeling is that it is more comparable to paper-based text books than CRTs. Now Colbert says gut feeling is all you need, but maybe some research is still in order. Let's do it. Everybody with an XO can find at least a few kids. We need some images of text, and a way to display them on all XOs. (B2-1 hardware too, which normally runs build 406) We'll need several languages. One of the CJK languages would be particularly good to have; at one point Tux Paint had to localize the font size for Japanese if I remember right. Let's try several fonts. I find DejaVu to be somewhat difficult to read because of the non-standard shapes. DejaVu appears to be much worse for the African hooked characters, with defective line widths. Reading speed and accuracy seem like the right metrics. Both black-on-white and white-on-black should be tested. Mono mode in very bright sunlight should be tested. Consider line-to-line spacing separately. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: New manufacturing data flags for keyboards (2nd draft).
Back to the original question, in case it is needed: Keyboard Layout KM KLKVComment USInternational_Keyboard olpc usolpc OLPC_Argentina_Keyboard olpc esolpc (Spanish) OLPC_Brasil_Keyboard olpc brolpc (Portuguese) OLPC_Ethiopia_Keyboard olpc us,et olpc2,olpc OLPC_Libya_Keyboard olpc us,araolpc2,olpc(Arabic) OLPC_Nigeria_Keyboardolpc ngolpc (for West Africa) OLPC_Rwanda_Keyboard (eliminated) OLPC_Thailand_Keyboard olpc us,th olpc2,olpc Urdu_Keyboardolpc us,ur olpc2,olpc Cyrillic_Keyboardolpc us,ru olpc2,olpc OLPC_Turkey_Keyboard olpc us,tr olpc2,olpc OLPC_Nepal_Keyboard olpc us,np olpc2,olpc(Not final) Mongolian_Keyboard olpc us,mo olpc2,olpc Kazakhstan_Keyboard olpc us,kz olpc2,olpc -walter ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: New manufacturing data flags for keyboards (2nd draft).
I don't know about just enumerating them, but the naming scheme seems a bit ad hoc. Even though X windows assigns kb symbol tables by country code, I would suggest we use the language name for the keyboard itself, e.g., es, pt, etc. with the ability to add qualifiers, such as es_AR. Also, we will undoubtedly have many more keyboards over time. That said, the plan for keyboards with non-Latin scripts is to also have the Latin, so at the OFW level, that mapping will always work. The tricky one is for keyboards that introduce variants on the Latin layout, such as Spanish and Portuguese. These latter changes are generally pretty small, so there may be a compact diff way of specifying them, saving Mitch some space. -walter On 10/7/07, Albert Cahalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Re: New manufacturing data flags for keyboards (2nd draft). Keyboard Layout KMKL KV Comment USInternational_Keyboard olpc us olpc OLPC_Argentina_Keyboard olpc es olpc(Spanish) OLPC_Brasil_Keyboard olpc br olpc(Portuguese) OLPC_Ethiopia_Keyboard olpc us,et olpc2,olpc OLPC_Libya_Keyboard olpc us,ara olpc2,olpc (Arabic) OLPC_Nigeria_Keyboardolpc ng olpc(for West Africa) OLPC_Thailand_Keyboard olpc us,th olpc2,olpc Urdu_Keyboardolpc us,ur olpc2,olpc Cyrillic_Keyboardolpc us,ru olpc2,olpc OLPC_Turkey_Keyboard olpc us,tr olpc2,olpc OLPC_Nepal_Keyboard olpc us,np olpc2,olpc (Not final) Mongolian_Keyboard olpc us,mo olpc2,olpc Kazakhstan_Keyboard olpc us,kz olpc2,olpc It seems like you could just enumerate them, 0 to 12. If key shapes ever change, you can add a flag at that time. Supplying mapping data would be nice as well. There needs to be a way to change this in case somebody swaps a keyboard or draws new characters on the keys. (something that would change what OpenFirmware uses, with low risk of bricking) Best would be something that works even with secure boot, but a simple OpenFirmware command would do for now. Locale needs to be separate from the keyboard, but machines should have nice defaults as they come from the factory. Default locale could go in the manufacturing data (separate from keyboard) or could be in the OS image. Just give it straight and simple: en_US.UTF8, es_AR.UTF8, etc. This looks about right: Keyboard number: manufacturing data Keyboard mapping data: manufacturing data Default locale: either manufacturing data or OS image Default timezone: either manufacturing data or OS image Radio restrictions: manufacturing data (for WLAN boot) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2007-10-13
[It has been suggested that I CC @devel with this weekly update. Feedback from the list members would be appreciated.] 1. Indianapolis: Benjamin Mako Hill and David Cavallo gave keynote talks and led a session on the laptop at the OpenMinds conference in Indianapolis this week. Indiana is in the vanguard in the US on laptops for learning (over 110,000 already deployed) and in using free and open-source software (FOSS) for learning. The conference brought together educators and developers to discuss issues and share experiences. OLPC was highlighted for making laptops more affordable everywhere and for our commitment to FOSS. In attendance were various governmental entities about to begin 1:1 laptop initiatives. 2. Suspend/resume: John Watlington has written a long description of the B3/B4/C1 suspend/resume problems, along with what it takes to modify a B4 to correct the problems can be found at in the wiki (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/B4_Suspend_ECR). A small pre-build will be assembled next week to test the circuit changes introduced since the C1 build. 3. Schedules: The Trial-3 Open Firmware (OFW) first code-drop is scheduled for Monday. Testing of the Q2C28i is happening this weekend, and a final drop will be available for Quanta next Wednesday. Trial-3 is essentially complete, but we do not need to drop it to Quanta for another week or two, so we will consider critical bug fixes—if there is adequate time for testing. Everyone should please be focusing on First Deployment bug fixes, minor features, and, most especially, testing. 4. Test: Alex Latham spent most of the week performing suspend/resume testing. We now have a setup that is pretty easy to get running and keep running. Yani Galanis has spent the week documenting and testing various network configurations. There were a number of bugs/enhancements found this week that will help people who have recently been experiencing problems connecting to their home access points; for example, now that we support multiple key types, it is necessary to type $: in front of a hex key for a WEP connection. Michael Stone is spear-heading a Test Sprint day to review test plans, automation, and finding ways to make it easy others community to help out. Next Wednesday will the the test sprint day. Please join in. (Details will be sent to devel, sugar, and testing mailing lists.) SJ Klein will be getting the wiki to produce inline diffs of watched pages in response to changes to those pages so that we can more efficiently track the progress of the sprint. 5. Mesh view: Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos has developed a new activity, Space, which displays an alternative mesh network neighborhood; it offers a sense of space by placing you in the center and everyone else in the mesh network at a distance proportional to link quality between you and the node that is being displayed (See http://web.media.mit.edu/~ypod/mesh/). 6. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent much of the week debugging suspend/resume patches related to the display controller (DCON). He also worked with upstream, massaging patches in, getting more patches ready, and helping others with their patches. 7. Sugar activities: Simon Schampijer set up a page in the wiki for the activity template (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_Template) in order to set a standard by which activity developers communicate about their projects. (Now that loading new activities is as easy as clicking on an .xo bundle from the browser, there is certain to be more activity-related traffic in the wiki.) Simon also implemented the standard control for providing in-activity alerts (See https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/2822); these can be used in the activities and can be placed at the top or bottom of the window. He has also begun work on a Sugar control-panel window. 8. X Window System: Bernardo Innocenti has gotten Xorg 1.4 fully packaged and available for general testing; while we haven't done any benchmarking yet, it seems to be quite a bit faster. There is still need for a kludge in the kernel to help the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and evdev_drv see the glide sensor as a normal mouse, but that will soon be fixed. Bernie also reports that we have a fix for the glibc problems affecting Ethiopian, but it requires upgrading to the F8 version of the library. Replacing glibc at this later stage isn't as destabilizing as it may seem: the only fallout Bernie can see is the exposure of a latent memory allocation bug in the olpc-dm program, which he has already fixed. Of course, we have more testing to do. Rob Savoye may be helping us with the Geode specific optimizations in glibc, for the benefit of Gnash and all other applications that rely heavily on memcpy() and similar functions. Walter Bender has been working with Bernie, Tushar Sayankar, Jens Petersen, Parag Nemade, Manusheel Gupta, and Rosh Kamath on a Devanagari keyboard for the laptop that will be deployed in Mumbai (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Devanagari_keyboard
Re: keyboard layout image license
I'll try to get around to uploading the SVGs ASAP. -walter On 10/14/07, Ed Trager [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Albert, 1. Put Keyboard Layout Images under Creative Commons License -- The interests of everyone will be best served if the keyboard layout images are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Currently the Wiki pages at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Keyboard_layouts are clearly marked as licensed under CC Attribution 2.5 Generic. But the status of the image artwork itself is not clearly noted. For purposes of clarity and to avoid misunderstanding, it would be better if OLPC can explicitely state that the keyboard image artwork in any form (PNG, SVG, etc.) is available under a CC license -- if that is indeed the case. Based on my understanding of a recent discussion I had with licensing experts at the institution where I currently work (USA), LGPLv2 or Apache or other software licenses which Albert mentioned are not applicable to a visual image work. A Creative Commons license is what we want. Public Domain is not recommended. Bundling or including CC-licensed image artwork in a software package is of course allowed so long as you state the license and provide attribution, so I see no need for multi-licensing under LGPL or Apache or whatever. 2. OLPC should make Keyboard Images available in SVG format Also, it would be a very good idea if OLPC could make the images available in SVG format. Is it possible to have the masters done up or converted to Inkscape-style SVG? Having the template artwork available in SVG format will allow the community to participate more fully in helping to create and document additional keyboard layouts. -- Ed On 10/14/07, Albert Cahalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think I'd like to use those images in some software. Mind multi-licensing them under the usual licenses? (LGPLv2 or later at least, plus maybe others like the share-alike Creative Commons licenses and Apache license -- or just public domain to make things simple) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: new FRS blocker 4418 - no sound in tamtam
FYI, sound doesn't work for lots of activities on joyride-81 (pippy for example). I doubt the problem is TamTam specific. Note that the microphone is on (or at least the LED indicator) by default. This suggests that perhaps alsa is not being initialized properly in the build. -walter On 10/23/07, Kim Quirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Jean, We are finished with Trial-3 branch. I need to let cscott send out the details of the new build system since I'm not very familiar with. For the next few days I'll assume issues like this bug (sound not working) are probably caused by something in the build process. So changing owner to jg or cscott is appropriate. Thanks, Kim On 10/23/07, Jean Piché [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello, We develop almost entirely on the machine itself or in jhbuild. What does the joyride build entail and why would TamTam fail in it? Does sound work otherwise? Does csound work otherwise? A wiki search on joyride brings up almost no information. jp On 23-Oct-07, at 3:45 PM, Kim Quirk wrote: Latest joyride build, 81. Also, I recommend putting notes in the Test Group Release Notes page to help others decide whether they want to load a particular build.: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Group_Release_Notes ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: new FRS blocker 4418 - no sound in tamtam
Is pippy able to play sounds? -walter On 10/23/07, Andres Salomon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 02:54:56 +0200 Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 10/24/07, Andres Salomon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've noticed this as well; note that the MIC LED comes on *after* X starts, while sugar is being initialized. We also see the following message on the console: [ 91.166430] snd-malloc: invalid device type 0 I'm not sure what userspace is doing yet to trigger that, but if the sugar folks could isolate it, that'd be helpful. Strace FTW? I suspect the sugar startup sound because it went on git master and not on the trial-3 branch. I'm unable to test on a XO right now but it should be easy to verify by deleting the sound file: /usr/share/sugar/data/startup.flac Marco Well, the sugar startup sound is what's triggering it (moving startup.flac out of the way causes the MIC LED to not come on).. However, tamtam still appears to be broken (and the MIC LED comes on when we start tamtam). -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2007-10-27
to ease testing. 8. Backups: Tomeu Vizoso, Ivan Krstić, and Marco Gritti discussed and implemented Journal backups to the server and individual file restore. Datastore performance will also be good enough to do full restores. Along the way, a number of bugs were fixed. Ivan wrote the corresponding school-server backup system (#4100) with Tomeu assisting on the datastore side and Marco on the Journal-activity side. It should be ready to land in builds early this week. 9. Screenshots: Tomeu and Marco are working on an improved way of taking screenshots of running activities for the Journal preview. (Typing Alt+1 will still cause a screenshot to be placed in the Journal.) 10. Read activity and Sugar documentation: Tomeu gave some support to Pascal Scheffers for his work in Read (which now saves its state in the Journal and has numerous improvements to the UI) and documentation of the Sugar API. He is doing an awesome job! 11. UI polish: Simon Schampier added (Ctrl+Q, Ctrl+Escape) for closing the activities and the keybinding (Alt+Space) to the activity window to hide/show the tray. The browse activity was adopted accordingly to these API changes. He is now finishing up work on a control panel. 12. Battery-life testing: Richard Smith repeated a number of tests on power consumption and battery life. These tests were gratifyingly consistent with other direct power measurements Joel Stanley had performed in late summer. There are remaining power savings to be had by better use of the DCON hardware and optimization of the wireless firmware when running in mesh mode, which have just begun. Scott found a battery-charging bug with NiMH batteries, which Richard is working on. 13. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released Q2D02 firmware: * turned off indexed I/O before early interaction to close a security hole; * added rtc-wackup command for suspend-resume testing; * enabled reboot using the new EC command that resets the EC too, thus re-enabling indexed I/O, thus making auto-firmware-update possible; * fixed bug in signature parsing for developer keys; * increased countdown to five seconds because its harder to catch it with security activated; * when searching for a signature string, look for one whose key signature matches the trailing portion of our pubkey, instead of just taking the first line with a sig01: format; * disabled X button toggle between secure and non-secure modes (The X button now forces secure mode when in non-secure mode, instead of going in either direction.); * disabled indexed I/O when entering the kernel in secure mode; * disabled PSCLK in low state to fix the PS2 flow control bug from a cold boot; * added feature to send battery-status SCIs on low_bat change; * fixed the bug that caused a failure to recognize the C2 board revision number; * implemented command 0xDB to auto restart with indexed IO enabled. 14. Schedule: The upcoming releases have been renamed and re-purposed: Oct. 26:Trial-3 (Build 622) are the bits being loaded for mass production. This was completed this week. Nov. 16:Reload are bits that could possibly be loaded before shipping laptops to individuals. We will hand pick blocking bug fixes only if we need to. Dec. 07:Killjoy (V1.0, previously referred to as FRS or First Deployment) is a release based on the Joyride builds. This will include bug fixes/minor features that are in Joyride today; and we are actively moving some trac items to this release based on what we know about in the next week. Feature freeze for this is next week; code freeze the week after. Q1 2008:Future Release (V1.1) is the release after Killjoy. Not well defined. Right now it is where we moved all the features that didn't make it into Killjoy. (See https://dev.laptop.org/roadmap for more info.) As we do the triage for these builds, we'd very much appreciate community feedback as to what you think is important. Feel free to send email to Walter Bender, Kim Quirk, or Jim Gettys in regard to priorities. 15. Testing: Alex Latham kept the suspend/resume testbed running with the same OS, OFW, kernel, and wireless firmware release as the test team in China, who are bringing up 42 boards with new PCB. He also worked on connectivity testing and upgrade testing. Next week he will be working creating a more comprehensive smoke/regression test to provide the basis for our final release testing. Yani Galanis has put together a detailed wiki page on testing network connectivity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Network_Configuration). There is information on how things work today and where to find information about your connectivity; he has also created a connectivity-status script that will send all this info to standard output. Ricardo Carrano has been working our RF sniffer to provide debug and analysis help on some of the difficult wireless hangs and access-point association problems we have been seeing. 16. EC code: Three new EC bugs seemed to have surfaced this week: * The EC
gmail activity hosting request
1. Project name : gmail
2. Existing website, if any :
3. One-line description : gmail launcher for OLPC
4. Longer description : essentially just using gmail as the default
: homepage for the web activity; uses a gmail
: icon. over time, it will behave differently
: with the Journal than the browser in that
: resume should be the default.
5. URLs of similar projects :
6. Committer list
Please list the maintainer (lead developer) as the first entry. Only list
developers who need to be given accounts so that they can commit to your
project's code repository, or push their own. There is no need to list
non-committer developers.
Username Full name SSH2 key URLE-mail
- --
#1 walter Walter Bender
#2
#3
...
If any developers don't have their SSH2 keys on the web, please attach them
to the application e-mail.
7. Preferred development model
[X] Central tree. Every developer can push his changes directly to the
project's git tree. This is the standard model that will be familiar to
CVS and Subversion users, and that tends to work well for most projects.
[ ] Maintainer-owned tree. Every developer creates his own git tree, or
multiple git trees. He periodically asks the maintainer to look at one
or more of these trees, and merge changes into the maintainer-owned,
main tree. This is the model used by the Linux kernel, and is
well-suited to projects wishing to maintain a tighter control on code
entering the main tree.
If you choose the maintainer-owned tree model, but wish to set up some
shared trees where all of your project's committers can commit directly,
as might be the case with a discussion tree, or a tree for an individual
feature, you may send us such a request by e-mail, and we will set up the
tree for you.
8. Set up a project mailing list:
[ ] Yes, named after our project name
[ ] Yes, named __
[X] No
When your project is just getting off the ground, we suggest you eschew
a separate mailing list and instead keep discussion about your project
on the main OLPC development list. This will give you more input and
potentially attract more developers to your project; when the volume of
messages related to your project reaches some critical mass, we can
trivially create a separate mailing list for you.
If you need multiple lists, let us know. We discourage having many
mailing lists for smaller projects, as this tends to
stunt the growth of your project community. You can always add more lists
later.
9. Commit notifications
[ ] Notification of commits to the main tree should be e-mailed to the list
we chose to create above
[ ] A separate mailing list, projectname-git, should be created for commit
notifications
[X] No commit notifications, please
10. Shell accounts
As a general rule, we don't provide shell accounts to developers unless
there's a demonstrated need. If you have one, please explain here, and
list the usernames of the committers above needing shell access.
11. Notes/comments:
-walter
--
Walter Bender
One Laptop per Child
http://laptop.org
id_rsa.pub
Description: Binary data
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Re: MP Build... FYI
To summarize: (1) We have consensus from both OLPC and Quanta that we do NOT put bits on any MP machines that have not gone through our testing regimes. This means that 625 will NOT go on any machines until we have tested it. (2) We have tested 624. (3) OLPC believes that the risk associated with the DCON bug, given the lack of aggressive suspend/resume in the 624 build, is minimal. (4) We believe that the kernel patch in 625 is adequate to address the DCON bug. This is being tested now. Until we reach conclusion re 625, we should be using 624 for MP. If 625 does indeed fix the DCON bug, then we should roll over to it, if and only if we are able to find adequate testing resources. The changes will be incorporated into Update.1 regardless. If 625 does not fix the DCON bug, we need to consider alternatives. Agreed? -walter ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Msoffice on xo
For that matter, Google docs lets you import .doc, .ppt. and .xls files. They are already running a server. And they include sharing. Better to put our efforts in to continuing to improve our own offerings: Abiword (Write) is more than adequate for most needs; there is a simple spreadsheet program in the works; Etoys can view Powerpoint and be used to create rich media presentations, etc. -walter On Nov 15, 2007 11:12 PM, John (J5) Palmieri [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 2007-11-15 at 20:10 -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Would it be possible to set up an inexpensive data center in china, put an application server together, and serve windows xp and ms office (at the $3 educational pricing) Remember that is $3 per user , and then serve them through VNC on the xo, Yes it is possible treating it as a thin client, to address those in some countries who may feel it is important to have children learn ms office and windows for employment purposes? Schools should be teaching the concept of word processing not a specific word processor but that is as far as I will go with throwing tomatoes. or instead of a datacenter, make the school server an app server through Wine? Why not just serve up open office? Alternatively, possible to ask sun to adapt open office for xo? OO is way to big to run on the xo. AbiWord is the basis of the Write activity so it would be easy enough to run it on the xo. The big question to ask is if you have any experience with education in China or if this is just your perception of what China wants. -- John (J5) Palmieri [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2007-11-17
a friend is participating in the Friends/Group view. Sayamindu Dasgupta fixed a problem with font caching (Ticket 1525) by backporting some changes from fontconfig 2.4.92 to 2.4.2 (the version being used in the builds). This leads to more robust font caching, and hopefully will resolve the issue of Activities taking up 100% of the CPU due to an incorrectly set real-time clock and the issue of newly added fonts not beng recognized by the system. Sayamindu has also been helping with the final phase of our Pootle deployment: GIT integration has begun and http://dev.laptop.org/translate should be fully open for translation very soon. Gabriel Burt posted a Pippy library to the Sugar list: the library allows access to the camera from Pippy and can easily be used to create time-lapse photography—thanks, Gabriel! An intuitive extension would be to add a slide-show image viewer to Pippy for viewing these images. There is a initial pass at a Thanks program in the Pippy library. Please add any names we have inadvertently overlooked—in addition to demonstrating table use, we are also using it to acknowledge community contributions to the project. Muriel Godoi release Memorize Version 20, which uses the new tubes interface and has some fixes to collaboration mode. However, he has some problems due to Rainbow issues (Ticket 4872) regarding loading journal objects using objectchooser. Muriel is also making progress on Food Force. He has the main interface coded in pgu, the GUI library for pygame; there is a Sugar skin to widgets in pgu; and the first version of the three basic classes that compose the game model—resource, facility, and indicator—are running. Bernie has integrated a few more keyboard changes and sent them upstream. There are still a few pending keyboard changes unmerged, e.g., Walter Bender has finished Dari and Uzbek keyboard layouts that need merging. Bernie also released an updated version of olpc-utils with bug fixes and simplifications. He is backporting it to our old builds to enable localization on the stable builds too. He has integrated more of his packages upstream and built them with Koji. 9. Power management: Chris Ball added more features to the power manager, including a way to disable automatic suspend (run touch /etc/ohm/inhibit-suspend), a shortening of the automatic timeouts (25 seconds until screen dim; a further 5 seconds until suspend), and disabling these features when plugged into AC (or on an early-model XO without reliable suspend support). 10. Builds: Dennis Gilmore joined OLPC this week to become our buildmeister. Dennis has been a mainstay in the Fedora build community and with his joining the team, we hope to make integration easier for community contributors. This week Dennis has been working on automating conversion of .xo to .rpm—useful for when we build our images. He also spent some time teaching SJ Klein and and Mako Hill how to write spec files. And he has been working on getting those pieces we have outside of Fedora back into Fedora; Dennis has branched all the X packages Bernie has had separated for OLPC-2 and generally trying to work out what is where, how, and why. As noted above, C. Scott Ananian has continued work on build maintenance. He also rewrote olpc-update, which is back in the builds for those of you who'd prefer to update over the network. He also has made a preliminary auto-update/theft-deterrence server implementation. 11. Kernel: Andres Salomon attempted to fix the double mouse-click bug, which led him to attempt to build the xorg evdev driver, which in turn required him to find all the appropriate RPMs—which were not all that easy to find—and required him to set up an FC7+OLPC build machine, which led to him to upgrading the kernel build machine (from FC6) to FC7+OLPC, which has reaffirmed his great dislike of yum (and rpm), caused kernel builds no longer worked, which thus required a bunch of changes to the kernel spec file. He then decided that because some of his sanity was still intact and because he could not get his XO online to actually test the freshly built evdev driver, he would start fixing Libertas (wireless driver) problems. He is now looking for a brick wall to pound his head against. 12. Wireless: Dave Woodhouse spent the week working on the critical wireless bug (Ticket 4470). Although the driver was misbehaving, we have improved its behavior (the driver is now properly serializing commands sent to the 8388's firmware) and we have fairly much eliminated the possibility that the problem is caused by driver misbehavior. Thanks also to Marcelo Tossati and Asish Shukla. Marvell's team in Pune discovered that a wireless scan command would occasionally timeout without a response, triggering a halt in further command processing by the firmware. This seems to explain the behavior noticed by David. There are plenty of issues with the driver—which may well be causing less frequent problems—and the whole of the command queuing needs
OLPC News 2007-11-24
to accept subscriptions coming only from trusted servers (Ticket #4993); and he checked the status of PS patches in Update.1, enabling him to close out a number of tickets. He implemented Activity.ListChannels in the PS and wrote a Sugar patch using this new API (Ticket #5079). Guillaume also began chasing down activities that still are using the old sharing API and that don't catch TypeError when calling get_preferred_connection; he is filling in more could you use new sugar sharing API tickets. Finally, he began an investigation into ejabberd's external component system. Sjoerd Simons performed simulations and tests with Salut and worked on some fixes for problems that those turned up there. Morgan Collett is testing sharing within Rainbow; he chased down issues with Buddy Handle tracking in the PS (Ticket #4920). He worked with Simon and Guillaume on Chat's handling of URLs (within Rainbow we cannot launch Browse directly—the workaround is to use the clipboard (Ticket #5080). 10. Power management: Chris Ball continued to improve our power manager: it now checks to see whether the Linux tty console is active before deciding to suspend; it turns off wake-on-wireless when in sleep mode; and has better alarm handling. Next up is inhibiting suspend-on-idle when the CPU is extremely busy. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2007-12-01
will not be apparent to the user. Wireless support from within OFW is still not totally robust. Mitch is unsure whether it is the WLAN firmware, the 1CC RF jamming, or an OFW driver problem. (Over the past week we have been unable to use WiFi channel 6 at 1CC due to constant, high level non-WiFi signal from an unknown source, the aforementioned jammer.) 17. Touchpad: Richard Smith is now pretty convinced that our touchpad problems are caused by the auto-calibration feature of the touchpad. The two problems—undersensitivity and jitteriness—are opposite results of a bad recalibrate. By forcing a calibrate to happen with the touchpad in various conditions he can recreate our touchpad problems. Go to a corner and stay is caused by under-sensitivity. Duplicating this is fairly easy. Do the recalibrate (the four-finger salute) with as much of your thumb on the touchpad as you can, pressing quite hard. Jumpiness is caused by over sensitivity. Duplicating this is bit harder. The best Richard has found is placing a large chunk of thick rubber on the touchpad while the unit is on battery power and then recalibrate. A recalibration while the touchpad is in use causes under-sensitivity but we're not sure how over-sensitivity happens the field. Nor do we yet understand why some laptops are so much worse than others. We are arranging a conference call with ALPS to discuss the issue. The only fix Richard proposes is to disable auto-calibration. It seems that auto-calibration can't ever be made safe without some method of insuring that the touchpad is free and clear for the recalibration. It is unclear whether we still need to auto-calibrate, or if this was only needed for the problems seen with the B2 build. 18. School Server : School server development has restarted. It was discovered that previously distributed installers will no longer work due to a reliance on a now missing Fedora server. The build system also needed repair but seems to be behaving again. A new build is being tested and will be released over the weekend. This build will have no new features but will contain the latest wireless mesh firmware and drivers. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2007-12-08
to complete it over the weekend. The Urdu localization of EToys is 75% complete; Waqas and Salman are confident to complete it sometimes next week. 18. Documentation: Anne Gentle and Seth Woodhouse are finishing laying out a simple introductory guide to ownership and care of the XO, working with material from Todd Kelsey and older demo notes and a number of community artists. Translation will begin this week (Please see http://dev.laptop.org/~sj/quickstart/). Anne is working on fixing the banner and adding an actual index; generated by Author-IT, a commercial tool that we are currently using. Adam Hyde of FLOSSManuals has offered to port the documents to his site and set up a system to auto-update manuals there with text from the olpc wiki; we may switch to this next month. 19. Science fare: Sunee Piromprames has been working with Lauren Klein and teacher Srinuan to organize a bug-identification project at Ban Samhka, Thailand. David Stang of the BayScience Foundation is setting up forums for them to use to classify their findings, with photos and local text and pronunciation of bug names. They will have a worked example this week for the children to follow, and are working with Thai strings. 20. Library: Mako Hill, Lauren, and SJ Klein have worked out what bundling scripts need to be written to provide for simple bundle creation. It will be possible to make (and verify) bundles through a web upload form soon. 21. Our Stories: Google, UNICEF, and OLPC issued a joint press release regarding a global storytelling project being orchestrated by Google's Stephen Cho. The goal of the initiative is to preserve and share stories, histories, and identities of cultures around the world by making personal stories available online in many languages. Using XO laptops, mobile phones, and other recording devices, children will record, in their native languages, the stories of elders, family members and friends. These stories will be shared globally through the Our Stories website (See http://www.ourstories.org/), where they can be found on a Google Map. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Help wanted: video demo!
The Sesame Street video that runs in the Helix player (RV encoded) is quite a good demo of full screen video on the laptop. -walter On Dec 11, 2007 6:07 PM, Erik Blankinship [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 12/11/07, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We need a demo which shows off the full-screen video capabilities of the XO. Unfortunately, Record compresses its input rather heavily, so it's not a great demo for video playback. We bundle the Ogg Theora codecs, and Browse can play media files full-screen, so the first step is for someone to invest some time in transcoding an appropriate demo movie (I suggest http://www.elephantsdream.org/ -- some ogg transcoding linked from http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Elephants_Dream ) to an appropriate bit rate / size for the XO. Make it look good! It may be that we need to find a higher-performance (but still free) codec or some such to make this really look good. Help here could be useful, too. To handle most any digital video format, Quicktime would be easiest to get started. Encode your existing files into DV (using Quicktime pro). Use gstreamer to encode into ogg files: gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=grover.dv ! dvdemux ! dvdec ! ffmpegcolorspace ! theoraenc ! oggmux ! filesink location= grover.ogg Of course you will want to alter settings to change the file size, rate, etc. You would make these changes in the gstreamer pipeline or in quicktime as a pre-processing step. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Voice IM project proposal
Just as a reminder, there is push-to-talk already built into EToys, though I haven't tried it for awhile--it certainly used to work just fine. -walter On Dec 12, 2007 9:33 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: although full voip would be nice, simply adding voice to chat in a push-to-talk fashion might be nice, too. i don't see why we shouldn't do both, unless the exact same people are invoved. --scott On 12/12/07, Sjoerd Simons [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Dec 12, 2007 at 11:21:59AM -0500, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: 4. Longer description : Support voice conversation using voice IM : between any two XO in a local mesh or : globally, using the XO presence : infrastructure This would be welcome. VoIP has been part of the plan from the beginning, and there's even a draft implementation at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Push_to_Talk and early discussion at http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/22 VoIP development is currently blocking on Telepathy-Salut, which is our serverless communication manager. Telepathy-Salut does not yet implement any real-time channels (e.g. RTP), so there is no clean way to build VoIP into the presence infrastructure when not connected to the global internet. That is quite an overstatement. It is true that salut at currently doesn't support the telepathy interfaces needed for video conferencing. Which does indeed mean we can't do VOIP when not connected to the internet at this point. Adding jingle support on salut is planned, but untill now we had other priorities :) This does not mean VOIP development is blocked on salut though.. Gabble does support the needed bits for VOIP. So you can continue work on the Video Chat application right now, without needing to wait on salut. Also thanks to the beauty of the telepathy design, as soon as salut starts support VOIP, it will work with the VOIP activity without any changes. So this work can be done in parallel. And last but not least, Connection manager never implement RTP or other real time channels themselves, they just do the signalling. All the actual work of sending and receiving the media is done by another component called stream-engine which is independant of the protocol used for signalling. Sjoerd -- Life exists for no known purpose. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
olpc devel qlikview
The folks at qliktech analyzed the git tree for us: http://demo.qliktech.com/qlikview/ajax/olpc/ enjoy. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: updated GStreamer RPMs
Yes. We need to discuss this in detail. Let's get over the Update.1 hurdle and regroup, hopefully with better mechanisms for discussion and vetting. -walter On Dec 15, 2007 7:46 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Dec 15, 2007 1:12 PM, Bernardo Innocenti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Moreover, some experimentation shows that it would be somewhat painless. The only problem I experienced was the one I mentioned with hal. I don't really think your testing proves much in this regard. You only really figure out what breaks when you start doing serious testing. I'd like to see stronger arguments in favor of the upgrade, before deciding to take the risks and the costs. Marco ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2007-12-15
worked with Dennis on consolidating our Xorg packages for Joyride and Update.1, including the drivers for QEMU and VMware. Moreover, they analyzed a failure in our build system that seems to be triggered by recent olpc-utils packages, but so far we found nothing conclusive. Bernie has been working on fixing a nasty localization bug that would make Ship.2 machines autoconfigure in English regardless of what the manufacturing data said. They had it working in Joyride for some time, but the fix did not make it to Ship.2, and his first attempt at a backport caused even more breakage. On the RD front, Bernie and Dennis started looking at how we could improve our boot time, or at least bring some useful interface up while the user is waiting. Some eyebrows may rise hearing that we can easily start the X server in a few seconds, with absolutely no prerequisites other than mounted /proc and /sys and a few device nodes in /dev. So we are confident we can enhance our pretty boot graphics with a fluid Cairo animation that Carl Worth contributed. Additionally, we could try to start Sugar very early, before NetworkManager and other services are up and running. It may require some bug fixing around, so it's not material for an upcoming release. 15. Updates: Scott Ananian released olpc-update 1.9, which avoids wasting work if it is interrupted and resumed later, and also properly warns the user if they try to update to an unsigned build on a locked machine. He properly fixed Ticket #5197, which could cause machines to crash if interrupted during first boot (olpcrd-0.37). He pestered Dave Woodhouse enough that he gave him a new mkjffs2 for a better fix for 5197 (Ticket #5174). And he worked out more details of an automated test framework for XO builds with Michael Stone and others. 16. Security: Michael Stone learned (and reported) many things about encryption export control (Ticket #5346)—community coordination on this issue is a must; he discussed the Mozilla permissions stuff with Marco and Simon (Ticket #5489); he helped Erik Blankinship correct Record's permissions-violations (Ticket #5448); he verified that causing rainbow-daemon to request utf8-encoded strings fixes the bug that prevented us from launching activities whose names contained non-ASCII characters (Ticket #5013); and he suggested implementation proposals for the view-source feature (Tickets #4909 and #5475). 17. Etoys: Scott Wallace and Yoshiki Ohshima fixed dozens of isolated bugs reported on trac. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness experimented with a static web version of Etoys Quick Guides (Please see http://tinlizzie.org/olpc/QG-web/). Takashi Yamamiya fixed a bug in OggPlugin for Squeak. Yoshiki wrote up a little wiki page for Smalltalk programming on XO (Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Smalltalk_Development_on_XO). Bert Freudenberg is in Kathmanzu give some local Nepali groups a deeper understanding of Squeak and Etoys. They are using Squeak to develop learning activities for the XO even before they have machines. Bert is participating in an Etoys Workshop today at Kathmandu Prime College. Students and adults are having great fun implementing a car racing game in Etoys. Bert is also experimenting with the new Devanagari rendering engine (with a Squeak-Cairo-Pango interface) that he and Yoshiki developed. 18. Mplayer: Reynaldo Verdejo and Eduardo Silva have been working on getting full screen decoding of video/audio with MPlayer on the XO; so far they have succeeded using the most used codecs/formats as a test case. They are working on an activity bundle to let anyone try this out. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: multiple MTD partitions
but unfortunately have not got feedback, and I suspect one of the reasons is that it is too difficult to boot UBIFS on XO. I think you would be well served by making it clearer to people what the goals are of UBIFS relative to existing systems, such as JFFS2, on the XO. This may motivate more people to both do the testing and it may help better focus the feedback. thanks. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2007-12-22
CurrentActivityChanged occurs before ActivitiesChanged, so the buddy icon moves before the activity is known about. Sjoerd Simons investigated why avahi under some circumstances marks records as failed a bit too easily, causing the contacts flashing bug. He discovered that the passive-observation-of-failures implementation was a bit too sensitive and created a patch to make it less sensitive. The patch needs further testing in a crowded RF environment like the OLPC headquarters to see if it solves the issue. Guillaume Desmottes continue to investigate the stream-tubes problem with Rainbow. The Telepathy side should be fixed in Update.1. He start to implement/design peer-to-peer connections for stream tubes in Gabble (Ticket #4047) and improved Gabble-tubes test coverage. 22. Sugar: Reinier Heeres worked on fixing a Read sharing issue (Ticket #5365), a Calculate internationalization issue (Ticket #5319) and adding ellipsis to long texts in palettes (Ticket #4562). He also wrote a simple script to copy a regular file to the datastore/journal that got extended with quite a bit more functionality by Phil Bordelon. He tested previous fixes in Joyride and Update-1 and tried to understand the memory leaks the sugar shell was showing. Simon Schampijer focused on the browser, testing and implemented a solution for the browser permission issue described here (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Concurrent_activity_instances). Actually we don't think anymore that copying the profile around is a good thing to do; we think we should run the browser outside the container for Update.1 (Ticket #5489). Michael Stone send an email to the mozilla devs to start discussion with them about a long term solution. 23. Trac: Noah Kantrowitz visited Friday and helped improve our trac system, adding bug dependencies and sketching out better workflow features that can now be implemented in it. He also made some great suggestions for the Support/Help pages. 24. Documentation: Mako Hill and SJ Klein packaged together a new version of the Getting Started Guide for inclusion in the library on the laptop itself. (Walter Bender wrote a new stylesheet to fit the pages in the XO.) -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: OLPC News 2007-12-22
Wasn't the clearance made wider sometime between B1 and B2 to fix the problem with interlocking plastic parts? Please explain further. As I recall, we widened the base to reduce some wobble. This is an effort to further reduce wobble (in the 90 degree rotation). Is this a hardware or software bug? Software. This may have been asked before, but how far is the progress in freeing the EC code? IIRC first there were official statements that the EC code would be free (and all parties would agree to that), then after some time it was announced that OLPC were talking with Quanta about setting the code free, now we just hear about EC bugs, but nothing about the code. I don't think we'll get this code freed up because it is a tangle of ownership and licenses. But we do plan to rewrite it from scratch when we come up for air. -walter --- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [PATCH] CLI Interface to the Sugar Datastore
Is there a corresponding copy from datastore? (It sure would make installing Java simpler for the faint of heart.) -walter On Dec 21, 2007 9:45 PM, Phil Bordelon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hey there, folks. With the wonderful help of m_stone on IRC, I've managed to take a script I banged on (copy-to-datastore, originated by rwh) and have at: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5571 and put it in a Git repository, built RPMs for the ship.2 build, and so on. The patch follows; the RPMs are at: http://teach.laptop.org/~phil/ Specifically: http://teach.laptop.org/~phil/sugar-datastore-0.2.2.1-0.40.20071221git.d9bf5f08e7.noarch.rpm http://teach.laptop.org/~phil/sugar-datastore-0.2.2.1-0.40.20071221git.d9bf5f08e7.src.rpm Hopefully others will find copy-to-datastore useful. Many thanks to m_stone for all the help in getting me to this point! Phil ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: T-Mobile Hotspot access?
Please see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_FAQ#How_do_Give1Get1_donors_access_their_free_year_of_T-Mobile_wireless_Internet.3F -walter On Dec 26, 2007 11:45 AM, Jeffrey Kesselman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hey Guys, This probably ISNT the right place for this question but maybe you could redirect me? I bought a G1G1 but I still havent recieved a key for the T-Mobile access. Who do I ask about that?? Thanks JK -- ~~ Microsoft help desk says: reply hazy, ask again later. ~~ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: A couple of adult use case questions
Alas, try logging into the WiFi system at Boston's Logan Airport. I've not been able to get the website to let me select alternative service provider using either Firefox of Opera on an Ubuntu machine... Haven't tried recently with an XO; maybe I'll have better luck. -walter On Dec 27, 2007 4:57 PM, Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Dec 26, 2007 7:20 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2. My experience with wireless in hotels and Linux is that: I've seen those (sometimes with JS/HTML breakage that would only work in IE) in the past, but they are mostly gone or going away. You can always get ie4linux if you have disk space for it. Or WebKit-GTK (for a Safari-lookalike). In the last 2 years I haven't seen any breakage with APs on linux/firefox. Perhaps I'm just lucky but I've done a lot of travelling... cheers, m ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: A couple of adult use case questions
There is no T-Mobile hotspot outside of lounges at Logan. They have granted a monopoly to a woefully inadequate provider. -walter On Dec 27, 2007 5:57 PM, Jeffrey Kesselman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Dec 27, 2007 5:01 PM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Alas, try logging into the WiFi system at Boston's Logan Airport. Can't you use the T-Mobile hotspot? -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2007-12-30
, openspark, orospakr, osbornisle, osmosys, otakuj462, ozwald, pacease, pamela.dallas, pascal, path, paul, paulproteus, pavel, pavel, pd, peiwei, pekayatt, pengo, pepboy, pepboy, perlhacker, peter, peter.lorenzen, petria, pezhman, phil, philipmac, phollings, php5, pierre, pierreossman, ping, pmj, pnasrat, polvi, ponafarioli, power guo, pr3d4t0r, prasanna, prashant.thakkar, probono, pvanhoof, pwiltsey, pwr, py_geek, pzelenka, qq, quantumcat, quantumg, quozl, rabeeh, rafaelortiz, ramaseshanr, raven, ravikondamuru, ravualhemio, ray.tseng, rbh00, rbhagwat, rblengio, rbwjrw, rcauk, rchokshi, rdebath, rdike, rdobson, rebecca, rebecca, rebecca allen, rebeccag, rebeccagettys, redpawn, reg, regan20, reillysl, rejon, reservedoc, retired_techie, retroplumido, reynaldo, rgs, rharrison, rhindak, rhindak, richard, richie.wang, riv, rj_dean, rkevans, rminnich, robertfadel, robot101, robsta, rock, rodarvus, roel, roozbeh, rorrim, roscherfr, roubert, roy, rsavoye, rsmith, rsriniva, rtlm, ruby, russnelson, rwh, ry313323, ryankelln, ryant5000, ryebo1, sabu, sam, samuel bizien, sandeepdutta, sankarshan, santanu, sarahmoodoo, saramah, satch89450, satyajeet, sayamindu, sbelter, scomst, scott_kirkwood, scottwallace, sdalvi, seberg, segher, seph, seralewise, sero189, shailen, shang, shankar, sharon, shekay, shenki, shiu, sholton, sierrahombre, simon, simon, simosx, sirjuanlu, sj, sjg, sjoerd, skeezix, skiboo, skierpage, slasc, sleet01, smcv, smetz52, smohan, spacey, spditner, splinux, sprezzatura, ssb22, ssc, s, steck, steeg, stepheneb, steveb, steve fullerton, stevew, stevo, stoecker, stoutbigred, stressyndrome, sturnfie, subbu, sulmanminhas, sunny, sverma, svu, swagle, sxpert, syd, sylvinus, s.zytkiewicz, t3, tags07, takashi, talmage, tamichan, tannewt, tbpringle, te294177, tedch, ted.juan, tedkaehler, teefal, term, terry su, tess, testing, teus, tf, theperturbator, thiago_s, timbutler, tim.millerdyck, titus, tomeu, tomhannen, tonsofpcs, toygmail, trapdoor, trevor, tribleyl, trobertson, tsylla, tudd, turadg, tushards, twinkle, uden, ufg, uflchamp, ujwal2, usman ansari, usman.ansari, uwog, vadim, vance.ke, vandien, vasukrishnan, vbhunt, vegpuff, vgiasolli, victorchao, victor-y, vjohn, vmb, voden, vorburger, vradok, wad, wadeb, walter, wangwebbxydd, waqastoor, warp, watchhillfarm, wcohen, weixiang, wenmi01, we.three.tees, wildem, williamb68, wiswaud, wkraimer, wmb, wmfwlr, wolf, wolfgang, wvbailey, wwworkshop shannon, wwworkshop terrence, wybiral, xardox, xatzipe, xavi, xiang.wei, xorAxAx, yani, ychao, yhosoai, yosch, youssef, ypod, ywwg, zack, zakarpatska, zapador, zarcher, znmeb, zogger50, zoltanthegypsy, zwl821022, and zztopd. Best wishes for the new year. 20. Special thanks: As mentioned, the contributions to the project have been numerous and diverse. However, I'd like to acknowledge one contributor who has quietly been playing a central role in perhaps the most critical user-facing aspect of the OLPC effort, Sugar. Red Hat's Marco Pesenti Gritti seems to never rest; he never tires of answering questions, writing patches, and engaging in design discussions. His productivity is monumental; his insights are invaluable. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: B2s
http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/build406.15/ -walter On Jan 2, 2008 2:48 PM, Ricardo Carrano [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am trying to put some B2-1s in good use. I read that 406.15 is the recommended os version but I can't find it anywhere. Any idea of where can I get it? Thanks a lot! -- Ricardo Carrano ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: B2s
The problems go a bit beyond cpu and memory usage: some drivers have changed: the camera for one. Maybe after Update.1 is out the door... -walter On Jan 2, 2008 2:58 PM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 16:48 -0300, Ricardo Carrano wrote: I am trying to put some B2-1s in good use. I read that 406.15 is the recommended os version but I can't find it anywhere. Any idea of where can I get it? Thanks a lot! In my opinion, the current software should be able to run on the B2-1s fine after some work. We just haven't had time yet to work seriously in reducing cpu and mem usage, but I don't see any reason why the latest features couldn't run on the old version of the xo. So that's another path you can follow ;) You can find older releases here: http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/ Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Printing and the XO
I started a page in the wiki: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Enabling_CUPS -walter On Jan 3, 2008 12:49 AM, Bernardo Innocenti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Peter Krenesky wrote: While not a primary concern of the project, printing is something that teachers are asking for. [...] Is this nice documentation already in the wiki? If not, please be bold and create a new page! -- \___/ |___| Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/ \___\ One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: A jabber hosting offer...
While we have ideas about how to scale up the jabber interface, it has also always been the idea that local communities (schools, neighborhoods), communities of interest (book clubs, chess clubs) etc., would run their own servers. The more the merrier at this stage. We probably need a better forum for advertising them. In any case, there are instructions in the wiki: go for it. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ejabberd_Configuration -walter On Jan 5, 2008 3:28 PM, Dave Belfer-Shevett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've just received my, er, my son's XO, and he's ecstatic with it, enjoying fiddling with Python programs and other tidbits. I've heard that the Jabber 'chat' functions are disabled on the US XO's, mostly because the existing jabber hosts can't really take the load of all these machines going out. I have machinery and bandwidth available for setting up a dedicated, fairly powerful machine specifically to run Jabber for the OLPC community. I have no problems building, configuring, installing, and maintaining the machine in a colo facility in Bedford, MA. I'll donate the hardware and time to make it work, if it'll benefit the project. I'm looking at a dual-Xeon 2.8 gig Ubuntu Gutsy box (1U) with a pair of mirrored drives. The facility has multiple peered connections (it supports a series of VOIP servers), and is well managed. I have experience running jabber servers, and sysadminning. Would this be of benefit to the community? Please let me know. I can be reached on jabber at [EMAIL PROTECTED] , or email at [EMAIL PROTECTED] is fine too. I'm also (obviously) on the devel list :) Thanks. I do want to contribute to the project in any way I can... -dbs ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: wiki is being spammed with huge numbers of new pages
yes. there is a page revert option. -walter On Jan 6, 2008 12:36 PM, Jeffrey Kesselman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 5, 2008 5:39 PM, Bernardo Innocenti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ffm wrote: User blocked, all articles created by user deleted. Don't they ever learn that vandalism is pointless with a wiki because it can be undone faster than it was done? hmm. adding text is pointless... If a vandal went through and did massive deletions, is it recoverable? JK Thank you for fixing it. -- \___/ |___| Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/ \___\ One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- ~~ Microsoft help desk says: reply hazy, ask again later. ~~ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Offering Hosting For OLPC Projects?
how about a mirror? On Jan 6, 2008 8:31 PM, rupa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There are a few projects floating around that are sort of grey area - for xo's but not really endorseable by olpc - maybe they involve non-free codecs or aren't kid oriented or just won't ever get into the olpc builds, seems like there could be still be a use for a place for these things to end up in a central sort of place. It doesn't strike me as in line with what you are offering, but I thought I'd throw it out there ... On Jan 6, 2008 8:25 PM, Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Duane, I pondered what I would do with it now that the new year is here, and thought it would be both fun and interesting to offer free hosting for projects I felt need the helping hand. This includes any technical help (svn accounts, etc) I can give. I think it would be better if you didn't do this -- we have no shortage of bandwidth and disk space for project hosting at OLPC, and there are significant advantages to having all OLPC projects available from a single place. I don't want to be discouraging, though; I'm sure we can come up with a use for your server, but I don't think hosting is a good one. Thanks! - Chris. -- Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
-- Forwarded message -- From: Sebastien Adgnot [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Jan 8, 2008 4:27 PM Subject: Dailymotion for XO laptop To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hi, My name is Sebastien and I'm a web developer at Dailymotion, a major European video sharing web site. I had the chance a couple of weeks ago to discover the XO laptop and to play with it. I was impressed with what the machine can do, and what the project represents. Unfortunately, when I tried to see Dailymotion's website http://www.dailymotion.com, the videos didn't work. We would like to solve this problem. At first we want to make a version of our web site compatible with the XO laptop. But we might be more interested later in being involved in the OLPC project through, for example, a dedicated activity, helping the community to share and spread videos for different purposes (educational, creative, etc.). However to achieve the first step, I wanted to know: what is the best way for us to display the videos in the browser with no extra configuration for the user? I read this page http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Video and this one too http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question_about_Software#Include_Flash_Player.3F http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ask_OLPC_a_Question_about_Software#Include_Flash_Player.3F but I want to be sure to be optimized with all the parameters of the laptop (video performance, cpu, power management, etc.). We encode our videos in flv, mp4, 3gp, etc. Also, to test if the videos are displayed the right way, it would be great if we could have a laptop. Is it still possible, in our case, to get one through the G1G1 program, exceptionally? Ortherwise, what would be another way? I tried the VMWare image of the OS but I'm not sure that it's a good way to test the real performance when we watch a video on the laptop. Thank you for your help Sebastien Adgnot PS: here is my contact information: 1. Sébastien Adgnot 2. [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 3. Dailymotion 4. Shipping address * Dailymotion * 51 rue Ganneron * Paris * 75017 * France * phone number: + 33 1 77 35 11 11 5. maybe a French power adapter if possible but not mandatory. Qwerty keyboard is fine. 6. 1 laptop 7. We want to test and improve the quality of the videos for the laptop and its specifications 8. We have within the company all the skills for the software development (python, web programming, video encoding) -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #5859 NORM FutureF: Need a way to tactily distinguish keys on top row
All three bars along the top row of the keyboard act as analog sliders when the FN key is held down. They have four distinct key assignments under normal operation. -walter On Jan 9, 2008 2:51 AM, Zarro Boogs per Child [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: #5859: Need a way to tactily distinguish keys on top row --+- Reporter: mgorse | Owner: walter Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: FutureFeatures Component: keyboards| Version: Resolution: |Keywords: Verified: 0|Blocking: Blockedby: | --+- Comment(by AlbertCahalan): Notches along both edges wouldn't be too bad. That leaves the top smooth, which is important for the slider. The non-slider keys could just be made distinct. Having them connected at all is undesirable. The slider is a funny case. Ideally, the user would not know or care that there are 7 distinct buttons. Ideally, there would be an infinite number of buttons. It is after all supposed to be a slider. -- Ticket URL: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5859#comment:3 One Laptop Per Child http://dev.laptop.org OLPC bug tracking system -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #5859 NORM FutureF: Need a way to tactily distinguish keys on top row
Is it 8 or 7? I thought it was the four + 3 intermediaries. -walter On Jan 9, 2008 1:26 PM, Bernardo Innocenti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Walter Bender wrote: All three bars along the top row of the keyboard act as analog sliders when the FN key is held down. They have four distinct key assignments under normal operation. Yes. And each one of the analog sliders is actually *8* keys rather than just 4. We currently have no mappings in libX11 for these. Me and Jim know about the whole story. -- \___/ |___| Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/ \___\ One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/ -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #5527 HIGH Update.: [firmware] G1G1 users complain that the XO affectst their local network
Have we at a minimum documented this on the wiki as a use case to avoid for the time being? -walter On Jan 10, 2008 1:02 PM, Zarro Boogs per Child [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: #5527: [firmware] G1G1 users complain that the XO affectst their local network ---+ Reporter: kimquirk | Owner: mbletsas Type: defect| Status: new Priority: high | Milestone: Update.1 Component: wireless | Version: Resolution:|Keywords: Verified: 0 |Blocking: Blockedby:| ---+ Changes (by mvalent): * cc: mvalent (added) Comment: I confirm the problem with the Pre-n router and the build 653. It is messing up completely the router and the connection with the other computers. Any solution ? -- Ticket URL: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5527#comment:26 One Laptop Per Child http://dev.laptop.org OLPC bug tracking system -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2008-01-12
working with Joshua Marks and the group-development team at Curriki to design a space and interfaces for OLPC collections on their site. Joshua is rolling out a groups feature that will allow custom design of individual portals within the next week that will make implementing a compile for XO button and an OLPC start page easier. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Classroom tools
://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Software_ideasaction=editsection=16 ] Classroom management Motivation and interest are the best ways to achieve engagement, but social pressure and good examples are also a part of the picture, and these are impossible without transparency. If there is no easy way for teachers (or, for that matter, other students) to tell the difference between a student who is working on the laptop, and one who is playing DOOM, bad things happen. Intel/Microsoft's Classmate competitor is rumored to have tools for the teacher to freeze or take over the student's laptop, to guide them through the interface. Regardless of whether this is a desirable relationship, it would be hard to accomplish within the security model and memory constraints of the XO. However, it would be good to have tools for all members of a shared activity to see the current state and recent history of all other current members. This protects privacy (after all, you can just quit the shared activity for privacy) while creating transparency. For it to be useful, it has to be simple and fast. Useful things to see are which activities have been used, and whether out-of-band communication has happened, over the last minute. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Edward Cherlin Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Violent games on the OLPC Activities page
It seems that there are three ideas that have so far emerged form this discussion: tags, favorites lists, and need for a better back end than the wiki currently supplies to support search, sort, etc. As SJ pointed out very early on in the thread, there is a page in the wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_guidelines) that is dedicated to the definition of criteria by which activities can be assessed. Please help us expand/refine the list and perhaps cross reference the list with existing tag systems. It'd be great to generate some pages in the Activities page hierarchy that include slices through the activity list that are appropriate to different contexts, e.g., my favorites, etc. Finally, any suggestions about how to extent, augment, or replace Media Wiki with tools to make these sorts of things easier for the community to manage would be appreciated. -walter ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2008-01-19
, using the various XO input devices and Sugarizing software. (Please see http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/index.php/Activity_handbook and http://www.olpcaustria.org/mediawiki/upload/a/af/Handbook_20080113.pdf). 19. Hello World: In a related effort, Chris Hager and Jaume Nualart report that they have created two new tutorials (during a pizza-and-beer coding session) for creating Activities with PyGTK, one of them using Glade (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/PyGTK/Hello_World_Tutorial). Chris and Jaume are using activity.py as a wrapper, which loads the code and GTK interface from gtktest.py. This way, very little code is required to get a PyGTK Activity running in Sugar—just six lines in gtktest.py—and PyGTK Activities can run as standalone versions on any Linux system by default. Example Bundles: http://wiki.laptop.org/images/b/ba/Gtktest.xo http://wiki.laptop.org/images/0/02/Gtktest-glade.xo 20. Mongolia: Dave Woodhouse is in Mongolia setting up servers in two schools, which as been an educational experience. Firstly, the wireless penetration through the walls they have here to cope with temperatures of –40°C is fairly dismal—Dave reports that we are having to use a lot of active antennae to get the coverage we need. We're laying them out as if they were normal access points, to try to get coverage of all the rooms they'll be teaching the 2nd–5th grades in. Hopefully, the nature of the mesh will improve coverage. To start with, each school will have five antennae, with two servers. That setup will be re-evaluated when it's fully deployed and tested in the classrooms. It is physically installed in one school so far, and fully cabled (including CAT5 to the other rooms where they have computers). The other school should be similarly set up by the end of Monday. 21. Pakistan: Habib reports progress on the e-book project in Islamabad. Eight elementary text books based on curriculum of the Federal Ministry of Education, Islamabad have been made into e-text books. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why can't i access /dev/dsp or /dev/snd on my XO
Albert, (a) please refrain from dispersion--it is not productive. (b) as has been pointed out repeatedly, CSound is an open standard (which incidentally predates the MIDI standard). (c) Victor gave some very compelling reasons as to why CSound is a better choice, especially for a program that is reaching out to non-Western musical sensibilities. -walter On Jan 21, 2008 12:21 PM, Albert Cahalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 20, 2008 6:34 AM, victor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's not a matter of trying to get a non-standard format across. Not all; it is a matter of supporting more possibilities. Besides, as I pointed out, MIDI will play alright on Csound, even if it is a poor way of conveying musical data. That sounds like an argument Microsoft would make. Common open standards are not good enough. But hey, if MIDI looks damn good to you, it is worthless trying to say anything else. Good luck. I guess you admit that MIDI is damn good? You've given no reason why it will not do. I don't believe there can be such a reason, because in the extreme you could just embed csound data. Obviously, doing that for normal music would be evil, but it's an ability you have to cover the corner cases. Anything normal should be fully standard MIDI. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: New joyride build 1569 (fixed in 1570)
Are you seeing this behavior on a beta machine or an MP machine? The beta machines have limitations re power management. -walter On Jan 22, 2008 5:57 PM, Brian Jepson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I upgraded from build 682 to joyride 1569 and I found that the web activity doesn't start. sometimes I get the toolbar on the top, sometimes just parts of it. after it grinds for a while it crashes (and in the process corrupts the keyboard under X) 1570 fixed this problem I'm still seeing this behavior in 1570. I'm also seeing the backlight dimming/brightening behavior at the text console that you originally reported. joyride-1570 (pkgs) -boost.i386 0:1.33.1-13.fc7 +boost.i386 0:1.33.1-15.fc7 -espeak.i386 0:1.28-1.fc7 +espeak.i386 0:1.30-1.fc7 -libXfont.i386 0:1.2.9-2.fc7 +libXfont.i386 0:1.2.9-3.fc7 - Brian ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Control the +5V USB port power on the XO
that includes USB to the Marvell daughter card? -walter On Jan 23, 2008 1:33 PM, John Watlington [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Be aware that we only have a single control for all the USB power. You can't toggle each port individually. On Jan 23, 2008, at 3:17 AM, Arjun Sarwal wrote: Is there a way to switch Off (and subsequently toggle) the +5V USB power supply on the XO in software ? thanks Arjun ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: EBook Reader (was Re: [PATCH] RFC: ReadActivity fullscreen, paging changes)
We had a real ebook reader written by John Resig in the days of the B2 hardware. I thin the project has sat untouched ever since. It would be worth reexamining. -walter On 1/27/08, Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 27, 2008, at 11:09 , Klaus Weidner wrote: I've now read the old thread, and I think there's some confusion between a page being a screenful versus being the paper sheet to which I've contributed, sorry. Wouldn't a real EBook reader be much more useful than displaying PDFs? You know, one that reflows pages automatically, where I can adjust font size etc. Is this planned or even in existence already? - Bert - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: 3 activities with system-name maze
I think that the JigSaw bundle linked to from the activity page is altogether wrong. It should be Jigsaw, not Maze. I'll try to find the proper link. -walter On 1/29/08, Chris Hager [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hey all, I just wanted to inform you, that we have 3 Activities with the system name maze (specified in activity.info). They are: 1. Maze 2. Jigsaw Puzzle 3. GCompris-Maze I'm not sure what impact it may have on Journal, Sugar or removing the bundles, there are some issues with xo-get, as it removes activities by their system names. Maybe it's possible to give them more distinct names than just maze (except for 'maze' of course :)... Regards from Vienna, Chris http://xo-get.olpc.at/repository/ http://xo-get.olpc.at/repository/xoget.xml ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2008-02-02
1. Active antennae: Another 90 prototype active antennae should be available in a couple of weeks, followed shortly by a large shipment of pre-build antennae scheduled to arrive in three or four weeks. The initial run will be used mostly for field testing, with the majority of the units going to Uruguay. They will be labeled as engineering samples—not for sale. We now have an update procedure for the prototype antennae that allows them to stay connected to a server. (These had been built with firmware that placed them in stand-alone mesh-repeater mode too quickly, thus requiring them to be connected only after a server is up and running.) See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Active_Antenna_Reprogramming. 2. Firmware: Mitch Bradley fixed a problem with OFW reading JFFS2 images (Ticket #6291) encountered when using the multicast update method. (This was one of the bugs uncovered by David Woodhouse in Mongolia last week.) 3. School server: Power continues to concern us. John Watlington realized that the off-the-shelf server prototype he was looking at for rural environments actually came with a 19VDC power supply, not a 12VDC one. While 12V supplies are available, they don't work well with unregulated 12V input. With such a 12V supply, the server prototype required around 16W while idling, and up to 26W when running three meshes and doing heavy disk accesses. The current power consumption requires four hours of pumping on a Weza to keep the server operating for an eight hour day! We will also have to greatly improve the power consumption when the machine is idle to have any hope of the servers being left running when the schools aren't in session. 4. Embedded controller: Q2D10 had some battery charging regressions, so Richard Smith backed out the change that speed up the battery-processing state machine; that fixed the regressions. The EC command saga continues: a machine was brought in that had total EC command failure, yet after Richard started examining it, it magically cleared up. After a long spell of trying to reproduce the problem, Richard made a significant discovery: it appears that if the input-buffer-full (IBF) flag is set and the power to the processor is cut, then the EC can go into a state where it thinks that a constant stream of data is being received. This results in the IBF flag getting reset just a soon as you clear it. Richard is still researching/understanding the issue, but this may explain why the previous interrupt-driven protocol was having so much trouble. 5. Automated charging testbed: Richard has set up an automated charging testbed: four XO laptops are now in a suspend/resume testbed; these laptops are connected to a switch such that every three hours, a supervisor machine turns off the external power to each of them. Each laptop is running a small script that watches for when the battery capacity gets low. When low battery is detected the XO laptop turns its power back on. 6. Power profiling: Now that we have automatic power management in the Update.1 builds we no longer have a simple power profile for measuring battery life. To get an accurate indication of what the real world battery life will be when power management is doing automatic suspend/resume we need to know what the power profile looks like while using the machine. We are gathering data from different use cases by running the olpc-logbat script while using the XO laptop: olpc-logbat samples the battery discharge information every 10 seconds. We can use much more data—please run the script yourself and send us the CSV files that it generates. 7. Testing: Much thanks to Chih-Yu Chao, whose last full time day helping with QA and testing was Friday. This week she was focused on providing test cases, structure and encouragement to the community in our push for Update.1 testing. To help out, please review and execute test cases listed in the wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Update.1), or choose some test plans (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Test_plans) and then post the results (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Update.1#Test_Results). We can really use lots of help! Yani Galanis has been testing avahi, telepathy, and general mesh capabilities with the latest Update1. He has helped open up some discussions of what we have today, what we would like in the future, and how we might get there. There is still some design work, coding, testing, and discussion needed in this area as some of our real deployments are pushing at our limitations. 8. Support: This week Nicholas Negroponte sent out a letter to all donors who have not yet received their laptops apologizing for the problems and explaining some of the on-going issues. The remaining laptops should be shipped by the end of March. Many people can now track their order directly at the laptopgiving.org webpage, which has started to reduce the number of emails to the support team. There was a good discussion on Friday with Mel Chua, Nicki Lee, SJ Klein, Adam Holt, Walter Bender
Re: [sugar] What's left for Update.1
I agree. We shouldn't hold up Update.1 on issues we don't already have resolutions in hand for. Now is the time for testing, not further changes. -walter On 2/2/08, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 31, 2008 10:11 PM, Jim Gettys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 2 - q2d11 OFW - to fix battery problems We'll need a q2d12 to fix #6291, or plan for a update.1.1 for deployments like Mongolia where we need to multicast-update large groups of machines. 4 - UI fix for registration with the school server. http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6136 5 - switch to gabble from salut at school. Both of these might be candidates for an update.1.1, since they involve code we don't even have in hand yet. mesh's implementation of mutlicast. We've upped the multicast bitrate for multicast as a band aid, until we can dynamically adjust the bitrate. But the fundamental issue comes that in large, dense school No, the multicast bitrate fix is not included in Update.1 candidates; Michalis indicated that it was not appropriate for general deployment, since it greatly increases the multicast error rates in non-crowded meshes. There's a mesh TTL hack which was discussed and is also not present in the current update.1 candidate; there's some disagreement about it. Considering the current state of our 'dense mesh' work, I would strongly encourage that all of these issues be targetted to update.1.1, so that we do not delay update.1 for other users any longer than necessary. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: WPA networking status?
We'd certainly love the additional testing help, but if you are desparate to get a working WPA, perhaps consider downgrading to 656. -walter On 2/3/08, Gary Oberbrunner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi folks. I'm running Update.1 690 and WPA is still almost always broken (known issues I think, e.g. #6191?). My question is whether I should just update to current joyride, or wait for Update.1 RC2? Are there WPA connectivity issues fixed in joyride (and could my updating to it help with testing)? Hard to tell from the trac ticket logs. thanks, -- Gary Oberbrunner ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Licensing for One Laptop Per Child
For point of information, the GCompris front end to gnuchess has been ported to the laptop. Enjoy. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Observing games
As I recall, the Connect activitiy was set up to let the first two players play and everyone else who joined observe. -walter On 2/5/08, Don Hopkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I want the multi player version of Micropolis (SimCity) [the new one based on Python that we're developing, not the old X11/TCL/Tk multi player version] to support different roles, including observing and chatting. Some roles (like observing and commenting, or wrecking destruction by playing the monster or tornado) would be simpler and easy for young kids to play, and others would be more advanced and require more skill and trust and communication with other players. Each player who joins the activity could be shown on the map as an animated sprite (color coded of their XO user colors) which depicts their role, that they can move around on the map. For example, to just observe and comment on a game, you could fly the helicopter around, and speak to other nearby players through the PA system, but not edit the map or change the tax rate. Different roles come with their own abilities and simple focused user interfaces (playable with the game controller buttons), like editing the map with various tools. Roles could be dealt out to different players like pokemon or magic the gathering cards, and players could switch between the roles they've been dealt, instead of everyone playing in god mode with all actions available at all time. Players, possibly including observers, could vote on various issues, like building zones, changing the tax rate, electing other players into offices or jobs, like treasurer in charge of finance, demolition bulldozing, building roads, zoning land, etc. Players should be able to publish remarks (time stamped and geocoded) and articles with screen snapshots (and graphs and charts and map overlays) in the city newspaper, a blog-like journal that's saved with the game. You should be able to view all geocoded articles as icons on the map like point of interest markers, and also on a timeline with a calendar like a blog. The Micropolis journal would be something like the stories in The Sims Family Albums that you can upload to The Sims Exchange along with the game save file, to share with other players. But it would be more geographically oriented, and more like a regional newspaper than a family album. -Don Edward Cherlin wrote: While talking with Josh Waitzkin about the chess software he would like to donate, I realized that it would be very helpful if there were a way to share games on XOs not just with players, but with observers, including kibitzers who want to comment on a game in progress, or have a discussion with the other observers. This function is provided on most game servers, with the players unable to tap into the discussion channel. Chess TV in Russia especially, and weiqi/go/baduk TV and xiangqi/janggi/shogi TV in China/Korea/Japan also have expert commentators discussing games in progress, and there is a market in DVDs of commented games. What would we have to do to the XO collaboration model to make that happen? If we can do that, what would it take to extend it to games with multiple players or even teams online? Chaturanga, the earliest form of chess, was a four-way battle. Many combat card games permit fairly large matches, although I haven't seen any larger than eight players. World of Warcraft has team voice communications that the other team doesn't get to hear. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News (2008-02-09)
the XO laptop for Give 1, Get 1 donors. The support gang hopes to extend the site to all XO laptop users throughout the world with regional, language-specific forums over time. Arjun Sarwal worked with advisors Josh Hehner and Jim Hopper to prepare a draft of the role of advisors document and channels of advising. The draft is posted on the Health page (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Health); feedback is invited from all. The agenda and other details of a conference call scheduled for 1PM (EST) on Sunday, 10 February, are also posted. Many thanks to all advisors for their support in this initiative. Yoshiaki Sonoda, an enthusiastic grass-root volunteer and supporter of OLPC in Japan, is going to make two presentations about OLPC in Japan this month. The objectives are purely to draw people's attention to OLPC and to foster better understanding of OLPC philosophy in Japan. In addition, he hopes more people in Japan will take an interest in OLPC and subsequently contribute their ideas and resources to OLPC projects. OLPC roles in Human Security—from the aspect of Network Centric Strategy Feb. 8, 2008, at Sunshine Convention Hall, Ikebukuro, Tokyo. Learning learning on Macintosh: Squeak Etoys and OLPC at the Nagasaki Macintosh User Group Monthly Meeting (supported by Apple, Japan) Feb. 23, 2008, at Nagasaki International University, Nagasaki These activities are supported continually by Mr. Abe, Squeakland.jp and other OLPC Japanese volunteer members. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Keyboard layout: switching from Amharic US
If you can still boot and get to the console, you should be able to both configure your network and do an update. Are you familiar with the iwconfig command? It is in /sbin olpc-update lives in the /usr/sbin directory, which should be in your path on the root shell on the console. But if not, just use the full pathnames. /sbin/iwconfig eth0 essid [your AP name] /usr/sbin/olpc-update 656 -walter On 2/9/08, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 9 Feb 2008, at 14:04, Walter Bender wrote: it is likely just a (simple) matter of checking your i18n-related files. Hi Walter, Thanks for jumping in. With Simon Schampijer's help, I have restored the i18n and keyboard file to (what I believe is) their initial state, but the boot problem persists. If things are so scrambled that you cannot sort them out, you can always: (1) boot with the O key down to load your alternative image; I presume you mean the O key on the game pad? No joy: Release the game key to continue Jingle Xo logo appears, along with a red USB key, an orange floppy/screen(?) and a green XO logo, with four yellow dots underneath it. Then: Trying nand:\security\develop.sig Trying nand:\boot-alt\bootfw.zip Trying nand:\boot-alt\runos.zip Boot failed Use power button to power off And a sad smiley face. Or (most of the time) Release the game key to continue Jingle Xo logo appears Pause Red USB key, an orange floppy/screen(?), a green XO logos a 4 yellow dots appear, along with the sad smiley, plus the text: Boot failed Powering off in 10 seconds (2) do an olpc-update from the console; or (3) reflash Where did my comfort zone go, all of a sudden? I'm not sure how to do an olpc-update from the console, since the XO has not had the chance to connect to the Internet at this point. I presume that I need to follow the instructions http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc-update#Simple_Offline_Upgrade If I understand correctly, I should type... olpc-update --version ... into the virtual console. However, this command is not recognized. I read on: If you don't even have the --version option, or if it does not say that you are using at least version 2.0 of olpc-update, you will need to upgrade olpc-update before continuing. Catch 22. Upgrading to olpc-update means using wget, which means being connected to the Internet. Which the XO is not. Conclusion: I need to download an image to a USB key, and boot from that. I found an encouraging item at http://chanson.livejournal.com/179947.html : Just copy the os653.img file to the FAT formatted USB drive, connect it to the OLPC then reboot with all the game buttons pressed. I reformatted a USB key to MS-DOS (FAT) format. I downloaded os653.img from http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/latest/jffs2/ . I then followed Chris Hanson's instructions (above)... and after more lines of Trying this that and the other, was gratified by another sad smiley. So. What options do I have left? Or where have I gone wrong? On 9 Feb 2008, at 14:55, Walter Bender wrote: time for a full update... sigh. Where do I find the steps for this? Thanks in advance, James -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Offer of help for Amharic
In the short term, there is not much we can do about the physical layout of the keyboard. But getting the rest of the Amharic input issues sorted out would be very helpful. A first step would be to start a collector ticket in Trac for all the open issues. regards. -walter On 2/14/08, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello everyone, Now that I have got Amharic working on my G1G1 XO, I spent some time today with a couple of Ethiopian friends, looking at the Amharic keyboard input and display. They encountered a number of issues both with the keyboard layout and with the way the characters were displayed. How should I report these issues, and to whom? I've already been in touch with Bernardo Innocenti, and have tried to contact Marc Maurer (uwog). I have 10 years' experience as a professional software developer but have only recently started working with Linux and Python. My knowledge of Amharic could be written on the back of a table napkin. Nonetheless, I feel I could be a useful go-between and might even be able to provide a patch or two, if someone could point me at the right bits of code to tweak. James (Holding a lever of indeterminate length, and looking for a place to stand) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
bar code scanners on the XO
Has anyone used a USB bar code scanner on the XO? Any recommendations as to a model we could use for an inventory project? -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO Colors ?
If there are duplicates, that is a bug. The constraints on the color palette are: 1. There must be value contrast between the stroke and fill colors (so that they remain distinct in reflective mode) and allow for clarity of the icon definitions. 2. There must be value contrast between the stroke color and the various background colors: frame gray, circle white, background gray. We chose 6 hues reasonably well-spaced and 3 values that were combined in 5 ways (one combination didn't work because the stroke color rule 2 above.) We maximized the chroma for each hue/value pair, since we use gray to convey absence from the mesh and the saturation of the display is diminished by the reflective screen in any case. 36*5 = 180 color combinations. I don't recall why only 108 are being used. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News 2008-02-16
1. Lima: Ivan Krstić, Walter Bender, and Edgar Ceballos spent much of the week working closely with Oscar Becerra Tresierra's team within the Peruvian ministry of education on the details of the Peru deployment. 2. The Inter-American Development Bank announced that it will finance a pilot project to test whether one-to-one computing can improve teaching and learning in schools in Haiti (the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere). The IDB will make a $3-million grant for the pilot project, which will distribute XO laptops to 13,200 students and 500 teachers in 60 Haitian primary schools. The OLPC Foundation will contribute XO laptops to the project through the Give One Get One program. 3. Laptop hardware: We have approved an engineering change to a lower-cost stainless steel for the metal components of the laptop. This was done in response to a sharp rise in cost of the particular alloy we had been using. Drop tests and corrosion tests run by Quanta show no change from the current material. 4. Power: Richard Smith has been investigating what it is going to take to provide an off-grid solar system that will be able to run a school server for eight hours a day (the Peru challenge). With SJ Klein's help, he has engaged the community, where he is finding great interest this problem; we will leverage this interest by working with some community testing sites on the long-term testing of a solar-power systems. Specifically, the OLPC chapter at the Illinois Math and Science Academy is talking to Richard about testing solar panels and other materials through a green- energy project they have underway. The same project is already collaborating with a research group at Fermilab studying new energy sources. 5. Embedded controller (EC): Exercising the EC charging system with spiky input power has uncovered a bug: the EC seems to get confused. Although it turns on the charge light, the charging circuit is not enabled. Richard is investigating the root cause. 6. Multi-battery charger: Lillian Walter has made excellent progress on the firmware: it now detects battery insert and removal; it enables or disables the charging channels; and it is upgradeable via the USB and serial port. When the prototype hardware is ready, the firmware will be in good shape for testing. Bitworks received the first round of plastic parts off of the tooling and some of the smaller sheet metal parts. These parts are on their way to Gecko for inspection and approval. The new PCB with the design changes for a cooler-running charger is finished and sent out for fabrication. Unless the parts have serious fit problems, the end of February still looks good for the first complete mechanical assembly using these test parts. 7. School server: John Watlington doesn't have a new build to announce this week; however, he does reports that the build environment seems stabilized (Look for an announcement on [EMAIL PROTECTED] soon). There are three new groups using the server software in anticipation of deployments in Nepal, Pakistan, and South Africa; thanks for all of their help testing and improving the software. We are planning for a week-long network test and debug session in Cambridge starting on 25 February. The goal is to recreate some of the scenarios we are seeing in the field in order to prioritize the bug fixes that will make the biggest (positive) difference for our deployments. 8. Firmware: Mitch Bradley implemented a change to the secure-startup process so that it will continue booting even if there is insufficient power to reflash the firmware. This is in response to reports from the field as OLPC begins mass deployments; upgrades were leaving some machines stuck—they would not boot without upgrading the firmware, but did not have the redundant power sources (both battery and line power) required for upgrading the flash. 9. Schedules/releases: Release Candidate (RC) 2, Build 691 went through testing this week. We are already working on RC 3 as there were some important bugs found with mesh sharing, translations that are ready to go, and activity updates that need to get in. Build 693 is available this weekend for developer-only testing—it is not signed yet. At the same time we are trying to wrap up Update 1, we have already started collecting requirements for Update 1.1 based on feedback from our first deployments (Uruguay, Mongolia and Peru). We are looking for some help from the community for testing builds as the become available—especially as we get close to the final Update 1 release candidate. Please visit the test wiki pages (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_issues) to get started. 10. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta spent the first part of the week testing the PO files of all languages for errors. The testing was followed up by a massive push of all translations to the master Git repository at dev.laptop.org in order to ensure that they are included in Update 1. This also required the involvement of the module maintainers
Re: Preparing the XOs for next week's test
Read sharing is a critical feature. Please do test it. -walter On 2/23/08, Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Giannis Galanis wrote: 2. I will try to update all of them with the build we will agree to initially test with. This would be 693/D13? There is a new version of telepathy-salut in 1721, which apparently only fixes smth related to stream tube flush(which i dont know what it is). I dont believe it important to our test. Other than that Update.1 i think should be ok. As I said in reply to Chris's mail, the salut fix is for Read in #6483. If you are going to test sharing PDFs in Read, please use Joyride-1721 otherwise there is a high chance it won't work at all under any conditions. Morgan ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Localization of TurtleArt
I'm a bit rusty, but you can use the Gimp to do this, using Scheme scripts. I did have a bit of trouble with positioning on some RTL scripts as the Gimp is using fairly antiquated text rendering internally, but it is generally OK. -walter On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 6:08 AM, Alexander Todorov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA512 Hello everybody, I've spent some time thinking about this ticket: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3585 TurtleArt developer(s) have decided to use gif images that represent different shapes with text inside. What we need is a helper script that will take the translations from the PO file and apply them on no-text image to produce the localized image. pseudo_code helper(base image, text from PO) = localized image /pseudo_code The idea is simple but I still hit some issues. Any help or ideas will be appreciated. 1) Most of the images have a single word or couple of words next to each other. Some of them like if-then or if-then-else have text which is not on a single line. e.g. if - then if - then - else I'm not sure how we can automate that easily without specifying coordinates where the text should appear. A possible solution is to divide all these strings into different layers and make the helper/PO aware of them. 2) There are some block images that show all available blocks for the chosen category. I guess they fall in 1) if we talk about automating their localization. 3) The source files are Photoshop PSD ones. Is that an open format? I don't really know but still haven't found a tool that can work with them properly except GIMP. And isn't against OLPC vision to use commercial software to produce an OLPC activity? I'm willing to implement the helper mentioned above but I'd prefer some graphics format that I can manipulate easily in code. We can also upload the base images to git. 4) What will happen with all the localized images? How they will be distributed. We certainly don't want all other languages hanging around and occupying disk space when they are not necessary. At present the English ones are 728KB. Multiply that by 10/20 languages and we're talking about MBs here. Thanks, Alexander. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Red Hat - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHx+eyhmd3WOiFct4RCgmGAJ4iWC/clQZBTyPezgsqMkPk4Lc5swCguJLz SryyS4/fBw1wt4U1xI3ObtY= =2vdk -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Localization of TurtleArt
As I recall (it was a while ago) ImageMagic had lots of issues with non-Latin scripts. But it would be an easier route than the Gimp. -walter On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 8:52 AM, Alexander Todorov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA512 Walter Bender wrote: I'm a bit rusty, but you can use the Gimp to do this, using Scheme scripts. I did have a bit of trouble with positioning on some RTL scripts as the Gimp is using fairly antiquated text rendering internally, but it is generally OK. I will give GIMP a try although I was thinking of ImageMagic and the like. -walter On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 6:08 AM, Alexander Todorov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA512 Hello everybody, I've spent some time thinking about this ticket: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3585 TurtleArt developer(s) have decided to use gif images that represent different shapes with text inside. What we need is a helper script that will take the translations from the PO file and apply them on no-text image to produce the localized image. pseudo_code helper(base image, text from PO) = localized image /pseudo_code The idea is simple but I still hit some issues. Any help or ideas will be appreciated. 1) Most of the images have a single word or couple of words next to each other. Some of them like if-then or if-then-else have text which is not on a single line. e.g. if - then if - then - else I'm not sure how we can automate that easily without specifying coordinates where the text should appear. A possible solution is to divide all these strings into different layers and make the helper/PO aware of them. Looks like the images already contain the text in separate layers so it will be easy. 2) There are some block images that show all available blocks for the chosen category. I guess they fall in 1) if we talk about automating their localization. 3) The source files are Photoshop PSD ones. Is that an open format? I don't really know but still haven't found a tool that can work with them properly except GIMP. And isn't against OLPC vision to use commercial software to produce an OLPC activity? I'm willing to implement the helper mentioned above but I'd prefer some graphics format that I can manipulate easily in code. We can also upload the base images to git. 4) What will happen with all the localized images? How they will be distributed. We certainly don't want all other languages hanging around and occupying disk space when they are not necessary. At present the English ones are 728KB. Multiply that by 10/20 languages and we're talking about MBs here. Thanks, Alexander. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Red Hat - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHx+eyhmd3WOiFct4RCgmGAJ4iWC/clQZBTyPezgsqMkPk4Lc5swCguJLz SryyS4/fBw1wt4U1xI3ObtY= =2vdk -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Red Hat - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHyA4Ehmd3WOiFct4RCpgGAJ9v5w02msE/74Av1B7/IWouv7bgjwCgp8K0 v4txJxT9AQpO4YLuSO2vZxo= =Besv -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News (2008-03-01)
1. Learning learning: Darah Tappitake and David Cavallo are preparing for March Learning Workshop with confirmed participations from Thailand, Mali, and the Committee for Democracy in Information Technology. 2. Lima: The Peru deployment continues to progress. 40K laptops arrived in Lima this week and are being sorted by distribution district and school in anticipation of delivery and activation. Ivan Krstić and Scott Ananain have been working with Hernán Pachas Magallanes on a mechanism to map CSV files into activation leases that will be useful across all of our deployments. The first tranch of training in Peru begins on Monday. The 143 representatives from the regional distribution centers (UGELs) and 20 ministry of education personnel will attend a 5-day workshop on all aspects of the XO laptop, school server, and the learning models. John Watlington and Walter Bender are heading to Lima to help with final preparations over the weekend. In the following weeks, teachers and university students will also be attending workshops throughout the country. 3. Assessment: David Cavallo, Edith Ackermann of the learning team, and Tony Earls and Maya Carlson of the Harvard School of Public Health are developing a new framework for assessment that goes beyond typical school approaches to enable accurate sensing of the overall mission of OLPC. In particular, the framework will enable a more scientific evaluation of the whole child and the community. The framework will also permit a more contextualized view as conditions and goals will vary from site to site (e.g. from Haiti to Uruguay to rural Peru to Afghanistan). Haiti will serve as the first instance for applying the framework. 4. Ceibal: Plans are moving forward for an OLPC/Ceibal children's festival in Uruguay in March. The festival will not only provide an environment for children to explore construction and collaboration on the laptop, but also a means for team development in Uruguay. We expect many guests from other countries to visit for both the festival and to visit the initial school in Vila Cardal. 5. Sugar: The Sugar team has posted some new designs for the Home view, Journal, and Frame (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Design). The gist of the proposed changes is to swap the roles of the Frame and Home view in regard to activities: they'll be launched from the Home view and active activities will be carried from view to view on the Frame. The intention is to make it easier to issue invitation and notifications and manage the growing number of activities in our builds (Peru will have more than 30 activities loaded on the laptop by default). 6. Wikireaders: A dozen different development projects related to wikireaders are now signed up to our new [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list, to work out how to coordinate Google Gears, pyxpcom, and existing python and php codebases to generate and browse readers. An old static content project on Wikipedia is being revived around the same themes. 7. Phil Carrizzi, a professor at the Kendall College of Art in Grand Rapids has created an XO viewfinder on his FDM machine (See http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/2225021496/in/set-72157603547309133/). 8. Help wanted: There have been several requests for typing tutor software on the XO coming from the various pilots. If anyone is interested in breathing some life into the Typing Tutor Activity, please contact the devel list. 9. Support: Adam Holt reports that discussions are under way regarding setting up repair centers with Moraine Valley Community College (we gave them 12 broken XO laptops towards prototyping a repair center) and IMSA.edu. Darah Tappitake discussed the long-term challenges of volunteerism at last Sunday's support volunteers meeting. Adam worked with Sandy Culver and Brightstar on shipping out outstanding RMA machines and Fedex undeliverables; and he worked with Alan Claver who's resolving dozens of escalated support tickets daily. 10. Meshing: This week we held a tech meeting in Cambridge to work on issues of scaling our collaboration technology. In attendance were OLPC staff, Dave Woodhouse and Marco Presenti-Gritti of Red Hat, Dafydd Harries and Guillaume Desmottes of Collabora, and Javier Cardona of Cozybit. Several new bugs were identified and characterized; some short-term fixes were adopted; testing of the fixes was started. The longer-term strategy for achieving more scaling was discussed extensively. The actual characterization of the result awaits testing in a quieter network environment—there are over 100 access points that can be detected from the OLPC office, one ofthe most severe network environments anyone has ssen. 11. Custom builds: Scott Anaian and Michael Stone worked with Daniel Grajales Santana of Telmex and Hernán of the Ministry of Education in Peru on developing a customization key (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Customization_key ) to create builds for Mexico and Peru. 12. FOSDEM: Simon Schampijer
Re: Today's mesh testing.
Really is good news. Something we can work from. -walter On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 10:13 PM, John Watlington [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks for the info ! This is good news, as it means that schools up to a hundred students should work right now, given a school server and three active antennas... wad On Mar 2, 2008, at 7:05 PM, Chris Ball wrote: Hi, Daf and I got the school server jabberd/shared roster working today. We connected/registered 32 laptops to it with mesh TTL set to 1 for broadcast, and they were all able to see and join a shared chat session with each other. The workload on the spectrum analyzer increased from 18% (no-one connected) to 26% (all connected). The chat session is consistent -- no-one is dropping out and new messages are seen by each laptop, with a few seconds of lag. With the mass chat session still running, we shared a 500KiB PDF. First we joined the shared Read session with one laptop, and the download took 16 seconds to complete. We then joined two more laptops at once, the first download took 26 seconds and the second finished at 30 seconds. Five more at once: all finished around 1m00s. Ten more at once: the first finished at 2m18s, the last finished at 2m40s. There were no failures downloading the PDF. The sharing was unicast TCP, with mesh TTL set to 1, which explains the slightly worse than linear increase in download time for more laptops downloading at once. This is much more anecdotal than the full test plan, but we thought the testers currently in Peru would want to know what they can expect from the school server setup ASAP. We don't have more laptops upgraded and ready to join the network yet, but we don't have any reason to believe we've saturated the network -- with the PDFs downloaded and Chat still running, the duty cycle on the spectrum analyzer is now at 28%. (In general, wireless networks seem to start degrading around 40%.) - Chris and Daf. -- Chris Ball [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: State of the update.1
Let's you and I take a look at the console problem. I cannot imagine it is difficult to sort out. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Detecting the native locale
$LANG should do the trick. If you want to experiment, try using sugar-control-panel to set the language. -walter On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 10:42 AM, Joshua Minor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm trying to make Speak pick its default accent based on the native language of the laptop (per Walter's request http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6656 ) This is a bit different from normal localization - although I need to do that also - because it is not just replacing strings. My guess is that I can just look at the environment variable $LANG and pick an accent with a similar ISO 639 language code. Can anyone confirm that using $LANG is appropriate for this? Also, aside from just setting $LANG to something else, how can I test that this actually works? -josh ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Detecting the native locale
Not sure what you mean. Speak lets you choose a voice model and sugar-control-panel lets you set locale. The idea was to have the default model set by default to the current locale, but not eliminate the other models. -walter On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Ixo X oxI [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Although.. :) I would be really neat if this was settable as a user option, inside speak too. Example, In locale of US or UK, tune to speak with French accent or vice versa . :) Or in non-english locales, tune to english to learn english speaking ? -Ixo 2008/3/8 Joshua Minor [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Great. This seems to be working. I've updated Speak to v5. -josh On Mar 8, 2008, at 8:47 AM, Walter Bender wrote: $LANG should do the trick. If you want to experiment, try using sugar-control-panel to set the language. -walter On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 10:42 AM, Joshua Minor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm trying to make Speak pick its default accent based on the native language of the laptop (per Walter's request http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6656 ) This is a bit different from normal localization - although I need to do that also - because it is not just replacing strings. My guess is that I can just look at the environment variable $LANG and pick an accent with a similar ISO 639 language code. Can anyone confirm that using $LANG is appropriate for this? Also, aside from just setting $LANG to something else, how can I test that this actually works? -josh ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: ex-preinstalled and now unsupported activities (Re: Update.1)
Part of the confusion is terminology. If by pre-installed, you mean part of the OS image, then the only pre-installed activity is the Journal, and that only because Sugar doesn't really work without (yet). But the activity bundle that will be included with the OS image has pre-installed by default all of the activities that were included since 650. -walter On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mar 12, 2008, at 17:35 , C. Scott Ananian wrote: On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Korakurider [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ex-preinstalled activities are now called unsupported activities :- Where does it say that? I said that, and you answered that my summary was basically right. Calling only selected activities supported (as per #6598) implies the others are unsupported by how the English language works, as far as I can tell. I believe the current plan is that the preinstalled activities are now called supported activities, Is that official? I.e., should we change the pre-installed moniker on the wiki's Activities page? and the build we test here at OLPC is the core build + the G1G1 customization key (which installs those supported activities). We can't afford to test every activity and every combination of activities, but the current plan explicitly maintains the status quo ante. Is that customization key available for download, yet? - Bert - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News (2008-03-16)
Pakistan: Dr. Habib Khan announced the launching of an OLPC pilot project at the Atlas Public School, located in the slums between Rawalpind and Islamabad. (Many thanks to our Afghan volunteers, Usman Mansoor Ansari and Sohaib Obaidi Ebtihaj, who discovered the school and will be mentoring students and their teacher. The area is economically poor and lacks security measures and basic facilities. There are about 100 children (Grades 1–6), mostly Afghan refugees—many of them work during the first part of the day to support their families and attend school in the afternoon. We distributed 39 XO localized in Dari and Pashto, official languages of Afghanistan. 1. UA Birmingham: Walter Bender met with the dean of the school of education at the University of Alabama. He and his colleagues are enthusiastic about the laptop program in the Birmingham schools and plan to engage at every level: teacher preparation, accessibility, curriculum development, support, and evaluation. 2. Learning Workshop: David Cavallo and the Learning Team ran a Learning workshop this week. Attendees included delegations from Thailand, Haiti, and Illinois. 3. Laptop activation: Scott Ananian finished documenting the process for activation key generation. This is a critical issue for deployment as it enables the in-country teams to distribute the activation process to a more manageable level of granularity. Trusted individuals now have the ability to generate activation keys through a simple web interface by simply uploading a list of XO laptop serial numbers. 4. Deployment Guide: With input from the Tech Team, the Learning Team, Brightstar, and the Deployment Team, we now have a Deployment Guide. The guide covers planning, execution, and support, along with some tips based upon our experience in trial deployments around the world; a sample deployment schedule; a sample workshop schedule; a check list to guide you through the deployment process; and a glossary of OLPC terms. 5. On display: The Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art is acquiring two XO laptops for their permanent collection. MOMA's Paul Galloway said, We realize that social betterment is the goal of One Laptop Per Child, not the pursuit of design accolades. Nonetheless, we believe the design of the XO Laptop and the ideas it embodies belong in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. 6. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta reports that we are running a new version of Pootle that is significantly faster and should make tasks such as merging of PO files against new POT files easier and less time consuming. He also introduced a patch into the Pootle server to enable translators to view translations in an intermediate language, e.g., an Aymara translator can view pre-existing Spanish translations rather than just the English-language original. We currently manage ~1600 PO files on the server and have more than 450 volunteer translators signed up. More translators are always welcome! Prabhas Pokharel, Anjali Lohani and Tsering Lama Sherpa from Harvard University have joined the Nepali Language localization team. Now the team of 10 contributors is doing lots of progress in Nepali localization. 7. Support: Adam Holt reports that Yianni Galanis explained the latest wireless mesh testing results at last Sunday's support meeting. The Support Team has responded to an increasing number of support emails as final Give1Get1 shipments are now underway. Adam has been discussing plans for repair centers with various volunteer groups and the OLPC partners. He is also recruiting to fill a Support Specialist Position. 8. Firmware: Richard Smith and Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D14 for inclusion into Update.1. The key change is in regard to the boot process when there is a firmware update available: Currently, the laptop will not boot unless there is external power connected; with Q2D14, the laptop will boot regardless of the availability of external power, deferring the firmware upgrade to the next time that external power is present. 9. School Server: John Watlington reports that a new School Server build (160) is now available. It provides: * an improved ejabberd server, which might improve reliability under load; * web caching (not enabled by default); * the configuration of server domain name has been automated, making setup much easier; * automatic installation is now supported by the default ISO image; and * miscellaneous bug fixes. Release notes and installation instruction are available (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Installing_Software#OLPC_XS_160). Martin Langhoff will be starting to work on the School Server beginning next week. 10. Multi-battery charger: Richard is happy with the way that the new PCB is performing; Bitworks is building several fully loaded PCBs so that we can test all 15 channels at once. Lilian Walter has stated the adaption of the laptop NiMH charging code so that it can be used in the multi
Re: Switching between Arabic and French
you can switch the keyboard on the fly, using the language key. you can switch the language of the interface per session, using the sugar-control-panel. most activities can accommodate Latin and Arabic scripts concurrently. -walter On 3/18/08, Ralph A. Mack [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello, I have a question. Schools in at least some countries in the Middle East and the Maghrib typically teach in Arabic first and then a European language, typically French or English. Therefore, I can envision students having to do two written assignments, one in Arabic and another in French, for different teachers in the same week. (I can imagine this issue would arise in other areas as well.) Short of switching the operating language of the device and restarting it, is there a way to switch between entering Arabic language text and French or English language text from activity to activity in the current emulation images? If not, is this considered a desirable feature? Would it be considered confusing? Has anybody suggested an alternative approach for bilingual students? Has there been any feedback from folks focusing on education in the Middle East or other affected areas about this? Do they consider it important? [Here's what puts the question squarely on the devel list] Assuming that some feature with the needed effect is in the cards, who is working on it? Is it complete? If not, how can I help? While it would affect many areas, I suspect it would be felt most sharply in Write (as might a number of bi-di issues, at least in the last image I tried). Lupestro ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Switching between Arabic and French
While the laptop can readily switch between up to four keyboard mappings at a time, the physical keyboard is probably only capable of supporting two sets of glyphs. We've opted to date to put Latin and one other set per keyboard. Any other ideas more than welcome. -walter On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 2:07 AM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 6:00 PM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: you can switch the keyboard on the fly, using the language key. you can switch the language of the interface per session, using the sugar-control-panel. most activities can accommodate Latin and Arabic scripts concurrently. -walter There is another related issue. Hindi and Urdu are the same language written in Devanagari and Arabic scripts, respectively. Hausa, spoken mainly in Nigeria, was formerly written in Arabic alphabet, and more recently in Arabic. Mongolian was written in Cyrillic in the period of Soviet domination, and the Mongols would like to go back to their traditional alphabet. It used to be normal for people in India to speak three or four languages written in different alphabets, and often more. The Hope Flowers School in Israel teaches in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. On 3/18/08, Ralph A. Mack [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello, I have a question. Schools in at least some countries in the Middle East and the Maghrib typically teach in Arabic first and then a European language, typically French or English. Therefore, I can envision students having to do two written assignments, one in Arabic and another in French, for different teachers in the same week. (I can imagine this issue would arise in other areas as well.) Short of switching the operating language of the device and restarting it, is there a way to switch between entering Arabic language text and French or English language text from activity to activity in the current emulation images? If not, is this considered a desirable feature? Would it be considered confusing? Has anybody suggested an alternative approach for bilingual students? Has there been any feedback from folks focusing on education in the Middle East or other affected areas about this? Do they consider it important? [Here's what puts the question squarely on the devel list] Assuming that some feature with the needed effect is in the cards, who is working on it? Is it complete? If not, how can I help? While it would affect many areas, I suspect it would be felt most sharply in Write (as might a number of bi-di issues, at least in the last image I tried). Lupestro ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: State of Update.1 on March 20, 2008
#5841 should really be fixed. The console in Spanish is hobbled without it. If we don't have an eloquent way to do it up stream today, let's target that for Update.2, but fork the patch today. If we can get 701 signed for testing out the door today, we can get 600 teachers test it for us next week in Peru... seems a good target. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: #5841 BLOC Update.: es.map is broken for XO keyboards
I'll investigate. On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 2:26 AM, Zarro Boogs per Child [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: #5841: es.map is broken for XO keyboards +--- Reporter: walter | Owner: bernie Type: defect | Status: new Priority: blocker| Milestone: Update.1 Component: keyboards | Version: Resolution: |Keywords: console release? Verified: 0 |Blocking: Blockedby: | +--- Comment(by dgilmore): The files i initially got were bad. corrected in kbd-1.12-24.olpc2 I have verified on my spanish laptop that the console has the correct mappings. this is going into a update.1-702 build. i have found one missing keymap. the altgr for the button with ]} on it does not work in the console. all the rest were ok. -- Ticket URL: http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5841#comment:13 One Laptop Per Child http://laptop.org/ OLPC bug tracking system -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News (2008-03-22)
1. Deployment: Walter Bender visited the technology support team for the NYC public schools to discuss issues of connectivity and security in regard to a pending pilot. John Watlington and Martin Langhoff will make a follow-up visit this coming week. Walter also had a follow-up meeting with Enkhmunkh Zurgaanjin, the MIT student who has been helping us in Mongolia: Enky is spending the next ten days in Mongolia--his spring break--and will visit the two pilot schools, engage the local universities, and touch base with the Mongolian MoE. A newly minted Deployment Guide is now posted publicly on the wiki, where it continues to be refined. Much of the remainder of the week was spent working closely with the Tech Team on preparing a candidate Update.1 release build (and process) for Peru and Mexico. 2. Haiti: David Cavallo and Claudia Urrea met with Guy Serge Pompilus, coordinator for the laptop initiative in Haiti, and the InterAmerican Development in Washington to continue planning for the initial roll-out schools and to build the team in Haiti to support the project. The bank has contracted a group to perform assessment and we were able gain alignment on how to broaden the framework beyond the school walls. Edith Ackermann, Tony Earls, and Maya Carlson are developing additional assessment instruments. 3. Presentation: On Thursday Andriani Ferti presented at the TRUST seminar (the Team for Research in Ubiquitous and Secure Technology) at the Department of Computer Science at UC Berkeley about One Laptop Per Child. The presentation was titled One Laptop per Child: Bringing to the children of the world an innovative and secure educational tool, and focused, more generally, on the mission of OLPC and the technology that is being used in and for the XO laptops. It further included a brief description of the security platform of OLPC, given the subject of the TRUST seminar, which is mostly concerned about security technology issues. 4. Human Resources: Christopher Niland has joined the staff of the Chairman's office. Chris has seven years experience in meeting planning and administrative support. Martin Langhoff, New Zealand resident and OLPC School Server Architect, made his in-office debut this week. Martin will be here for the next two weeks and finds New England a bit colder than he is used to. After 18 months at OLPC Ivan Krstić is moving on to other opportunities. We'd like to thank Ivan for his energy and contributions to the project. He contributed to almost every aspect of the project, most recently helping with our deployments in Uruguay and Peru. His innovative work on the Bitfrost security platform was widely recognized and earned him a Technology Review 35 Award in 2007. 5. Summer of Code: SoC is accepting Mentor applications now. If you are interested in becoming a Mentor (See http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mentor_step1.html). Students can apply beginning Monday, 3/24. 6. Nepali Localization: Shankar Pokharel reports that OLPC Nepal developers organized a translation fest, Translation Nite-out with participation of 12 volunteers. The result: Nepali localization of all projects put in Pootle (except Etoys) is complete. Thanks to all who gave up their Friday night on behalf of the project (See http://olpcnepal.blogspot.com/2008/03/yaay-translations-over.html). 7. Squeak: Kathleen Harness from the Office for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education (MSTE) at the University of Illinois reports that www.squeakcmi.org has a Library Collection of OLPC/Etoys projects. Enjoy! 8. Drupal: Pablo Floresve installed Drupal in a XO laptop; he is amazed with how fast it runs!! There has been subsequent discussion about it being a great tool for blogging from the XO laptops (See http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-olpc and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Drupal). There is also an active discussion thread around journalism tools (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Learning_activities/Journalism). 9. Bay Area Learning Workshops?: Kassie Petrick has inquired as to whether there are plans for Learning Workshops scheduled for the West Coast? She received a laptop that she has been using in her 7th grade classroom but would like to do a lot more with it. She is interested to be part of a community of people (especially teachers) who want to talk up the XO. She'd also love to have some kids participate. 10. Bishwamitra/Bashuki Journals: Bryan Berry et al. have been documenting their Nepali deployments (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bishwamitra_Journal and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bashuki_Journal). Ram Singh is designing a power distribution rack for the XO's using locally available materials. Mahabir Pun and Dev Mohanty are using inexpensive point-to-point radios to connect the two remote schools to each other and to the Internet. They have posted their equipment specifications, network diagrams, and configurations in the wiki. You can read Sulochan Acharya's blog post Nepal: ICT in Education and OLPC http
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Presumably the new standard is SVG. SVG animation, AFAIK, is not yet quite in the same league re Flash in terms of tools and support. -walter On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Steve Holton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Rob Savoye [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Carol Lerche wrote: Once again I get depressed about everyone's dependence on proprietary formats, even for worthy causes. :-( specific case of Adobe flash, it would be excellent if someone friendly to the project could approach Adobe and ask that they allow the plugin to be packaged for distribution during school deployments. Adobe has been approached many times by various OLPC people in the past about this... which is why the XO ships Gnash instead. Rather than continuing to have a nasty dependency on a large company with proprietary formats that prefers to make money from software licensing, (translation: we want to avoid this...) we'd do better to support Gnash getting more compatible faster. But here you lost me. Gnash will *never* be fully compatible with Flash because the closer Gnash gets to being a viable free Flash replacement, the more incentive there is for Adobe to change the Flash specification in a way to break compatibility. Two decades in the Microsoft format wars should have taught that lesson to everyone by now. Look how long (and how much) it's taken ODF to get where it's at. OTOH, the XO offers us an opportunity to create a new standard among an audience which has no investment in the old. But this is a limited opportunity. (The point is largely moot. Adobe realizes the market will be very limited for Flash-type services among third-world XO users with limited internet connectivity and bandwidth. But other proprietary vendors such as Intel and Microsoft have much more to lose if the children of the world are exposed to non-proprietary technology by the millions. It should be clear that Microsoft's generous offer to port Windows XP to the XO is motivated by exactly this business rationale.) -- Steve Holton [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Update.1 activities download script
could auto-magically key off these pages One problem is that the naming scheme in the activities.default file, which is what I used to post the activities on the Peru page, is not the same as what one sees when you use xo-get or download bundles from the wiki. Some resolution of the two would be necessary. -walter 2008/3/25 Ixo X oxI [EMAIL PROTECTED]: FYI, Chris, To also help make the 'official' Activity Pack(s) (or bundled activities, or whatever final terminology), I've tried to start a 'clear and written' list of such mentioned Activities. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/G1G1_bundled_activities with a similar vein of thought, started another brainstorm for a main deployment coming up http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peru_bundled_activities This pattern could continue for each deployment... countries specific target users... etc... And I wonder in the future, 'xo-get' script could auto-magically key off these pages to create a useful tool like... # xo-get upgrade G1G1_activity_pack (i.e. # xo -get upgrade [DeploymentName]_activity_pack) which would just take the latest list from the wiki page http://wiki.laptop.org/go/[DeploymentName]_activity_pack Both of the first two pages I listed above, has already gotten some great updates by several people, and recent revisions answer a lot of questions, I had on what is or is not included in those deployments. :-) Take a gander yourself, and offer your thoughts Thanks, -Ixo On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 7:52 AM, Chris Hager [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've implemented the upgrade script now -- on the next xo-get update it will ask to update to version 1.2.5 and then it's capable of xo-get upgrade. When called, it will re-download the upgrade script from http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/update-activities.py all 48 hours, save it in ~/.xo_get/update-activities.py, and run it without parameters. Best, - Chris Chris Hager wrote: I'm just about implementing the script into xo-get, and I was thinking on how to do it. Either simply integrating it into xo-get.py (xo-get is a 1-file script), or download it on an 'xo-get upgrade' if it's not available. This might be smarter, so changes in the upgrade script can be made without changing xo-get. Bert Freudenberg wrote: To save download time, do something like this first: cp -a /usr/share/activities/*.activity /home/olpc/Activities Maybe only make symlinks? ln -s /usr/share/activities/*.activity /home/olpc/Activities/ Chris ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Testing Update.1-702
Michael and I sorted through some customization issues for Peru/Mexico. Other than the 6776 bug that Dennis reported and for which we have prepared a patch, I think we are in reasonable shape. Could we possibly get a signed 704 out the door tomorrow for testing in Peru and Mexico? thanks. -walter On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Dennis Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wednesday 26 March 2008, you wrote: Dear everyone, At today's software status meeting, several individuals, including: dgilmore erikos bemasc Blaketh mstone volunteered [had their arms twisted] into running the http://wiki.laptop.org/go/1_Hour_Smoke_Test I ran through the smoke test today. I used update.1-703 I had one spanish and one english XO I had some keymap errors in X the console was fixed with the kbd update http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6776 I had one issue with Read, Ive not yet filed a bug on it. I created a document in write. Put a picture in the middle with text on top. shared it between XO's. Which all worked fine. I copied to a usb key and opened on the the other XO. The image was left aligned. I wanted to repeat the test before filing a bug. Dennis ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: OLPC security project
We just (in a somewhat terse manner) posted a status for the various Bitfrost components in the wiki (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bitfrost#Current_Status). Perhaps you will find your inspiration there. -walter On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 10:37 AM, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Our presence algorithms should be evaluated in terms of security (impersonation, dos, mim, etc). A list of vulnerabilities should be analyzed and solutions should be proposed. More details will follow if interested. p. Jeremy Flores wrote: Hi all, Does anyone know of any security-related projects that need to be worked on for OLPC? I am taking a computer and network security class, and I was thinking that Bitfrost would be an interesting topic for a final project we have. I poked around the wiki, but I couldn't find a security todo list. Thanks! Jeremy Flores [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos Graduate student Viral Communications MIT Media Lab Tel: +1 (617) 459-6058 http://www.mit.edu/~ypod/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Testing Update.1-702
I'll create a ticket. It is a blocker. -walter On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Kim Quirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Walter found a problem with Chat when using an open AP between two laptops. The Chat invitation shows after the first one shares it, but when the second laptop clicks on it, that opens a new chat -- it doesn't open the shared one. THey can't chat. It worked in simple mesh and school server mesh. Walter - please tell us if this is a show stopper for Update.1 -- especially given that we are pushing for AP in some deployments. If so, we should make sure someone is looking at that one first. Without knowing exactly when this regressed (I hope to try it on some 699 laptops), it isn't clear how quickly it can get fixed. Is there a trac item for this, Walter? Kim On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 10:40 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Denis wrote: I ran through the smoke test today. I used update.1-703 I had one spanish and one english XO I had some keymap errors in X the console was fixed with the kbd update http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6776 I had one issue with Read, Ive not yet filed a bug on it. I created a document in write. Put a picture in the middle with text on top. shared it between XO's. Which all worked fine. I copied to a usb key and opened on the the other XO. The image was left aligned. I wanted to repeat the test before filing a bug. --- This one of those bugs fixed in abiword-2.6.0 that I was talking about a few days ago. There are many more. Cheers Martin ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Sugar mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: No disassemble #5
For what it is worth, we are putting it in the default library for the Peru builds... -walter On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 11:14 AM, Isaac Sutcliffe [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't feel that disassembly should be strongly encouraged or discouraged, and therefore do not agree with either Bernie or Adrianne. Although they both provide good points. Not every kid (or big kid) that has an XO will have an interest in disassembling it. Every school, however, will have a few kids that will learn how to pull one of these things apart and put it together blindfolded, wheather we help them or not, and we should by no means discourage these people from doing so! I suppose if there is some sort of hardware problem with an XO, there will be a few kids that know how to disassemble them, and the rest will refer to them for help. If every school had a disassembly workshop, the result may be enough collateral damage to cause a strong swing in general opinion toward discouraging disassembly. I agree with the disassembly instructions being in the default library. -Isaac 2008/3/30 Martin Dengler [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Does anybody have strong feelings about encouraging/discouraging disassembly? I was downloading the Disassembly page on the wiki to my XO in case I needed the instructions while disconnected (default library addendum idea?) and I noticed there were two very prominent (right under the title), somewhat contradictory comments about this subject. I started a Talk page at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Disassembly ...but with the sensitivity of people to this type of advice (c.f. slamming of the keyboard durability on the support forums...) I figured I'd risk a bit of spam and ask on devel@ too... Martin ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News (2008-03-29)
keyboards pose a tradeoff between the durability of the rubber membrane and the flexibility, or give, of the resulting keys. We are looking at a variety of options. 13. FOSSCOMM: Diomidis Spinellis presented the XO at the Free and Open Source Software Communities (http://www.fosscomm.gr) conference at the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece. The presentation included a live demo of Sugar, Squeak EToys, and the Antikythera mechanism emulator developed using EToys. 14. Video of the week: Tom Boonsiri has posted a Youtube video of an ECG that uses the Measure activity. Power for a small breadboard is drawn from the USB port; the signal is input through the microphone input. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1QKTKAAug4). TOm notes that the amplifier circuit also doubles as an EMG: you can take an electrode and place it on the forearm and flex to see the muscle activity reflected in the waveform, a great example of using the laptop to allow children to explore how their bodies work. 15. FoodForce: Deepank Gupta, with support from Silke Buhr from the WFP, reports much progress on the port of FoodForce to the XO laptop (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Food_Force). 16. SocialCalc: K.S. Preeti (Preeti), an engineering student from NSIT, who has been lately working with Manu Gupta to develop JavaScript-Python Communication support for any JavaScript-based application (See : http://wiki.laptop.org/go/JS-Python). She has recently been selected in the elite group of 25 Best Women Engineering Students of India by Google. Congrats Preeti! Dan Bricklin has been busy as well. He reports that he has sped up the cursor display on the XO laptop such that the cursor just moves when selecting a cell or a range. Dan had also completed the main code in SocialCalc for handling named cells and ranges in formulas. He has inter-sheet support working in the recalculation engine. He has added a comment property to cells so that we'll be able to store a string of text with any cell containing descriptive information about the formula, the data, or whatever. He has written the code for saving and restoring the scroll position of the sheet, including the cursor position and the locked-panes settings. This is especially important for using SocialCalc on a small screen such as the XO. 17. Develop: Jameson Chema Quinn has been working on the Develop activity. He has posted the latest version on the wiki (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities and http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Develop). It really works! Not just a toy. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Mini-conference schedule
I imagine it would be interesting to the devel and sugar lists to hear a summary of your observations in the kindergarten classroom as well. -walter 2008/4/2 Carol Lerche [EMAIL PROTECTED]: For the hangers-on such as myself, it wouldn't be necessary to have a video record if that's too difficult...an audio recording plus slideware might be just fine. (Personally, I am watching XOs be used in a kindergarten tomorrow and Friday, as I have been all week, and will be greatly appreciative of any record that might be feasible of these discussions.) On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 3:30 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On undefined, Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I will join in for Friday afternoon over the phone., and will send an outline of my XS notes beforehand. Will we use the conferencing rig? I assume so; I'm checking with Kim; will send email. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Always do right, said Mark Twain. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Mini-Conference Proposal: Toolbars Tabs
Let me ad that these changes are motivated from feedback in the field. What we are trying to change are precisely the things that people are finding confusing or difficult. Let me further add that very little teacher training has in fact taken place. What we have instead concentrated on is working with teachers on how to best leverage to tool to enhance learning inside and outside of the classroom. The very features of the new interface are designed to facilitate more collaboration, which is *the* distinguishing feature of Sugar. -walter On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 9:59 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Perhaps, in the intervening decade, first-world computer users have convinced themselves that they cannot adapt, but they are wrong. Humans are very adaptable. A teacher who has learned one version of Sugar will not have to spend more than a few days or hours with the new version before understanding it. I'm sure they can adapt, but they need to be motivated to do so. What could happen if we don't make sure these changes are well-received? I think that's Gregorio's message. Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Games for XOs in Nepal
there is an ongoing FoodForce project for the XO already!! Please jump in to help. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Food_Force -walter On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 2:44 PM, Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 10:55 AM, Rena Brar Prayaga [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Bryan, Here are some of the games that I used with 8-12 year olds at a GlobalThink summer camp last year. They tend to focus on global issues (ecology, peace, etc.), and may be less action oriented, but the kids seemed to enjoy them. Perfect. We need more like this. I hope someone will take these on to create XO activities. Peacemaker http://www.peacemakergame.com/ Food Force (UN World Food Programme) http://www.food-force.com/ Water Alert (created for UNICEF) http://www.unicef.org/voy/wes/ Ayiti: The Cost of Life (Global Kids) http://www.unicef.org/voy/explore/rights/explore_3142.html Climate Challenge (BBC) http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/climate_challenge/ Good luck and hope this is what you had in mind.. Rena Brar Prayaga ___ Olpc-open mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open -- Edward Cherlin End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business http://www.EarthTreasury.org/ The best way to predict the future is to invent it.--Alan Kay ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Javascript not working right on Web activity
what build? what version of Web? -walter 2008/4/4 Emiliano Pastorino [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hi everyone! We're having problems here in Uruguay with Web activity. Kids can't upload images to their blogs at www.blogger.com or send mails using their accounts at www.adinet.com.uy. Both sites (and plenty more) use javascript for its user interface, but last versions of Web activity won't show some buttons on those sites. We know that previous versions don't have such issues, so we need to fix that ASAP. Who shall I contact to help us with this problem? Or if anyone knows how to solve it quicly, please let us know! Thanks! Emiliano Pastorino Plan Ceibal ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
OLPC News (2008-04-05)
. Walter Bender signed off with Quanta on two new keyboard layouts: one for Nigeria and one for Haiti. Khmer, Nepali, and Italian are queued up. Walter has been working with Bernie Innocenti, Arjun Sarwal, Manusheel Gupta, and Rabi Karmacharya on the integration of compose characters into the X Window System keyboard mapping tables in order to better support Nepali, some West African languages, and to be able to use exclusively dead keys with the US International keyboard. The Word activity is being translated into Urdu, Dari, and Pashto. 12. Sugar: Tomeu Visozo, Eben Eliason, Marco Presenti Gritti, and Simon Schampijer have been working tirelessly on the Sugar redesign (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs). The first phase has landed in the last Joyride build (1825). It is far from complete, but please to try it and provide feedback. Simon reviewed, polished and fixed numerous bugs. Marco has taught him how to build all the relevant sugar packages as part of a transiating process—Marco is only be part-time on the Sugar project and thus cannot be the primary maintainer any longer. Simon built the packages currently in joyride. He also released a new terminal activity that autoscrolls to the bottom when there is input. Morgan Collett released Chat-37.xo into Joyride, with a UI change as specified by Eben's mockups (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Chat); multiple sequential messages by the same sender are merged together into the same bubble, which saves on screen space. Morgan also fixed an alignment problem for right-to-left scripts, e.g. Arabic (Ticket #6561). 13. Qirat Activity: Waqas Toor has been working on the new update in light of the feedback received from different volunteers. Based on the prototype reported earlier, now we have five short Surahs (chapters) and Ayat-ul-Kursi (stanza) converted into a read-recite activity (See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational_content_ideas#Memorization_and_Regurgitation_Support). 14. OLPC flash: Richard Smith has been working on olpcflash, an application for programming the SPI flash from Linux. -walter -- Walter Bender One Laptop per Child http://laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Build Debate: Followup on Build Naming
Is Uruguay even using 703? Peru is. Mexico probably will... Mongolia probably will... While I like the discipline that is suggested by a date scheme, it doesn't really add much real value over simply sequential numbering. We certainly should avoid using seasonal names, as that will cause hemispheric confusion. As far as a feature-based scheme, that will just increase the pressure to do an end-run around our renewed pledge to do time-based releases. I'm in favor of Dennis's suggestion. OLPC-1; OLPC-2, ... It is simple and, I argue, unambiguous. The hardware is XO-1, XO-2... -walter ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Build Debate: Followup on Build Naming
This discussion reminds me of a favorite puzzle from Douglas Hofstadter 0, 1, 2, 3, 720!, ... That is a numbering scheme with lots of headroom. I agree that OLPC is the wrong name. There are reports that the software is now running, for example, on a Classmate PC. So any direct tie to OLPC is not necessarily appropriate. Maybe Sugar? something else? But there is not much simpler than 1,2,3... -walter On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:06 AM, Paul Fox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: walter wrote: I'm in favor of Dennis's suggestion. OLPC-1; OLPC-2, ... It is simple and, I argue, unambiguous. The hardware is XO-1, XO-2... as perhaps more of an outsider here, i'd say that this is not unambiguous. people with the laptops regularly refer to them as my OLPC -- perhaps encouraged by the unfortunate PC in the acronym. as for numbers: sequential is good, but starting higher than 1 might give room for adding structure later if necessary. (e.g. the 200 series of releases might be a break from the 100 series.) paul =- paul fox, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (arlington, ma, where it's degrees) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Build Debate: Followup on Build Naming
True. How about OLPC-Fedora.1, ... -walter On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:21 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: hmm, Sugar aims to be available as an alternative desktop in all kinds of linux distros, so would be a bad name for an OLPC-made distro. Tomeu On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This discussion reminds me of a favorite puzzle from Douglas Hofstadter 0, 1, 2, 3, 720!, ... That is a numbering scheme with lots of headroom. I agree that OLPC is the wrong name. There are reports that the software is now running, for example, on a Classmate PC. So any direct tie to OLPC is not necessarily appropriate. Maybe Sugar? something else? But there is not much simpler than 1,2,3... -walter On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:06 AM, Paul Fox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: walter wrote: I'm in favor of Dennis's suggestion. OLPC-1; OLPC-2, ... It is simple and, I argue, unambiguous. The hardware is XO-1, XO-2... as perhaps more of an outsider here, i'd say that this is not unambiguous. people with the laptops regularly refer to them as my OLPC -- perhaps encouraged by the unfortunate PC in the acronym. as for numbers: sequential is good, but starting higher than 1 might give room for adding structure later if necessary. (e.g. the 200 series of releases might be a break from the 100 series.) paul =- paul fox, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (arlington, ma, where it's degrees) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
