Re: Proposal: the 'faster' branch.
On Fri, 8 Feb 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > So: welcome the 'faster' branch, a repository for all these unsafe > ideas. It will be completely untested and may eat your machine. But > let's see how fast we could make things if we allowed all our evil > hacks, and *then* step back and evaluate which of these turned out to > be useful and which of these are (still) too expensive or ugly to try. > Nothing in 'faster' in guaranteed to make it into our stable branch, > ever. But perhaps it will help show us the way forward. > > Faster is set up like joyride. Put rpms in dev:~/public_rpms/faster. > Please keep your ugly hacks safely separate from code you intend real > people to use. Discuss. Enjoy. > --scott so what do g1g1 testers need to do to upgrade to these builds? is there a olpc-update incantation that will install these? will the announcements for releases here be sent out like the joyride builds are? David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: mouse unstable on rc2
On Mon, 11 Feb 2008, Richard A. Smith wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> >> I have also seen this on my second box, but I haven't been useing it as >> extensivly so I can't promise that it never had a problem before (it was >> still on build 650 prior to this weekend, with no noticed problems. > > Please use the clean 'copy-nand' install to roll your builds forward and > backwards. If you can prove that its actually the build doing it then > you've made a really interesting discovery. Perhaps one that will let > us have better fixes for this issue. when I get home tonight I will lookup the exact steps for doing this and give it a try. one problem is that the problem did not show up immediatly (some laptops showed the problem within a half hour, others didn't show it for several hours) the four laptops that I saw the problem on over the weekend were all upgraded by hitting the four game buttons while powering up (and all from the same USB drive). unfortunantly I don't have a copy of that drive. > So far every time someone has claimed its build/firmware related and > I've asked them to prove it by going back and forth it has not held up. what versions do you want me to switch between? at least two of the machines had been vanilla 650 boxes, but one was my primary box that had been updated daily to joyride (up through last wednesday) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: mouse unstable on rc2
I know that initially many boxes suffered this sort of problem, I never experianced it on this box, and I left it on all the time (but I did update it every day or two to the latest test build) the problems I've seen today have been within a couple of hours of being powered on I know that one other person's laptop that we upgraded from 650 to rc2 over the weekend also had mouse problems after the upgrade David Lang On Mon, 11 Feb 2008, David W Hogg wrote: > I don't know if this is related, but if I leave mine booted up for > long enough, the mouse jumps to the lower right corner every second > mousepad touch or so, making it impossible to operate the box (even in > the terminal, because jumping to the lower right corner causes the > black border with activities to appear). > > On Feb 11, 2008 8:23 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I upgraded the machine that I've been useing daily for the last month, and >> I'm noticing that the trackpad is acting very skittish at times. a reset >> will clear it up for a while, but it comes back. >> >> I have not had this problem on this hardware with prior builds. >> >> I have also seen this on my second box, but I haven't been useing it as >> extensivly so I can't promise that it never had a problem before (it was >> still on build 650 prior to this weekend, with no noticed problems. >> >> David Lang >> ___ >> Devel mailing list >> Devel@lists.laptop.org >> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel >> > > > > -- > David W. Hogg - associate professor, NYU - http://cosmo.nyu.edu/hogg/ > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Community-news] OLPC News (2008-02-09)
On Mon, 11 Feb 2008, Hal Murray wrote: >> what's the power draw of the WLAN chip if the transmitter is turned off? > > Most of the power goes into the receiver. Yes, that might seem > counter-intuitive. > > To first order, the transmitter doesn't take any power unless it's actually > transmitting something. After that, it's linear with how much you transmit. > There may be significant overhead on each packet. agreed, although there is probably some level of control in how strong to transmit. I'm familiar with two-way transmitter power requirements as I am a Ham and also do a fair amount of emergancy services communication work. in my experiance there, the transmitter can take so much more power then the receiver that even a small amount of transmitting can match the power needed to run the receiver for a significant amount of time (I'll point out that those radios did transmit _far_ more powerful signals than the WLAN does, so the balance may be different) > So if you are using transmit power you are probably doing useful work. > (That's assuming that you call maintaining the mesh topology useful and > things like that.) almost, what I am thinking is that there may be value in listening to the mesh without transmitting to gather the state of the mesh and decide if you need to participate and transmit. if the mesh is extremely chatty (which I am gathering from other posts) there may be noticable savings in just listening, but not participating in maintaining the mesh, unless there aren't enough other machines doing so. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Community-news] OLPC News (2008-02-09)
On Sun, 10 Feb 2008, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote: > "Walter Bender" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> [...] >> Chris Ball provided Richard with some power readings from our newly >> enhanced power tinderbox running a C2 (mass production) laptop. [...] >> The top auto-suspend power-draw breakdown: >> >> WLAN:734 mW >> backlight: 362 mW >> memory: 239 mW >> LCD: 218 mW >> EC: 108 mW >> other: 339 mW >> total: 2064 mW >> [...] >> A next step will be to see if the wireless power can be reduced during >> suspend. [...] > > Has the following idea already come up? How about just turning off > the wlan entirely during suspend, if the machine has reason to believe > that its contribution to mesh connectivity is negligible? what's the power draw of the WLAN chip if the transmitter is turned off? the big problem with trying to have it off most of the time is the problem in syncing the wakeups (as discussed elsewhere in this thread), but it should take significantly less power if it's only receiving, and it could be on in receive mode a much larger percentage of the time and therefor have a much better chance of hearing another machine's broadcast. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: problems using the measure activity.
obviously I meant the distance utility not the measure (scope) utility. David Lang On Sun, 10 Feb 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:06:48 -0800 (PST) > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To: devel@lists.laptop.org > Subject: problems using the measure activity. > > several of us took our XO laptops to the SCALE conferance this weekend. We > got a LOT of attention (you couldn't walk down the hallway with one > without people asking about them, I stepped out of a class at the > afternoon break on friday and didn't make it down to the registration desk > for 5 hours) > > however when we attempted to demo the measure activity we just could not > figure out how to make it work. we got it working three times over the > weekend (among a dozen or more tries). > > we has laptops with the 650 build, the -rc2 build, and the signed build > released in Jan (one of them started with a joyride build as of > mid-week). no matter which combinations of builds we tried, we were not > able to repeat a sucess. > > could somone explain step-by-step what is supposed to happen (and what > screen we need to be on when to see the result) I have a pair of boxes > which are now on the -rc2 build, so I can try and see if I can get this to > work reliably. > > we also had problems with recent builds that while the laptops were taking > measurements they would go to sleep, breaking the connection and > terminating the joint activity, the one sucess we had with -rc2 machines > required that the person holding each laptop keep masaging the mouse pad > to keep the machine awake. > > we looked in the application bar for the activity to show up as the result > of an invite, useually it wouldn't show up at all, and sometimes when it > showed up we still weren't able to get the two machines to work togeather. > > when it works it's a great demo, but it's extremely frustrating thing to > try and get it to work and fail. > > David Lang > > ___ > 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
problems using the measure activity.
several of us took our XO laptops to the SCALE conferance this weekend. We got a LOT of attention (you couldn't walk down the hallway with one without people asking about them, I stepped out of a class at the afternoon break on friday and didn't make it down to the registration desk for 5 hours) however when we attempted to demo the measure activity we just could not figure out how to make it work. we got it working three times over the weekend (among a dozen or more tries). we has laptops with the 650 build, the -rc2 build, and the signed build released in Jan (one of them started with a joyride build as of mid-week). no matter which combinations of builds we tried, we were not able to repeat a sucess. could somone explain step-by-step what is supposed to happen (and what screen we need to be on when to see the result) I have a pair of boxes which are now on the -rc2 build, so I can try and see if I can get this to work reliably. we also had problems with recent builds that while the laptops were taking measurements they would go to sleep, breaking the connection and terminating the joint activity, the one sucess we had with -rc2 machines required that the person holding each laptop keep masaging the mouse pad to keep the machine awake. we looked in the application bar for the activity to show up as the result of an invite, useually it wouldn't show up at all, and sometimes when it showed up we still weren't able to get the two machines to work togeather. when it works it's a great demo, but it's extremely frustrating thing to try and get it to work and fail. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: problems using the measure activity.
On Mon, 11 Feb 2008, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: > -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- > Hash: SHA1 > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> however when we attempted to demo the measure activity we just could not >> figure out how to make it work. we got it working three times over the >> weekend (among a dozen or more tries). >> >> we has laptops with the 650 build, the -rc2 build, and the signed build >> released in Jan (one of them started with a joyride build as of >> mid-week). no matter which combinations of builds we tried, we were not >> able to repeat a sucess. > > Hmm. It's fairly simple, and usually works just about perfectly, or not at > all. > >> could somone explain step-by-step what is supposed to happen (and what >> screen we need to be on when to see the result) I have a pair of boxes >> which are now on the -rc2 build, so I can try and see if I can get this to >> work reliably. > > To use Distance (formerly called Acoustic Tape Measure): > 1. Launch the activity on XO A. > 2. Share the activity from the toolbar > 3. Using XO B, join the shared instance from the mesh view > 4. Click the big button on each machine (there's only one button) > > That's it. There should be a lot of whooshing, after which the enormous > "0.00" > should change to be the current distance. There's only one screen, and there's > only one number field, and it tells you the distance. > > What happened instead? Do try in Update1-rc2. So far, it's been working > perfectly fine for me, in either build*. one mistake we were making was that we tried to invite the other laptop to join, sometimes this would result in an additional item on the toolbar, useually it would not. when we did join (either through the mesh view or from the toolbar we frequently had both machines sitting and saying that they were waiting for another machine. we did try this with -rc2 (we upgraded 4-5 machines to -rc2 over the wekend.) > *: Due to mysterious telepathy/mesh bug #6061, Distance does not work in > hostile > network environments like at 1CC. This has not been a problem anywhere else, > yet... the RF enviornment was definantly hostile on the show floor (it didn't seem to matter if we used mesh or infrastructure), but we had the same problems in the OLPC bof session where we were far enough away to not detect the networks from the exibit floor. many of the exibitors setup their own access points in addition to the ones the hotel had to start with and that SCALE put up to provide access. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: problems using the measure activity.
On Sun, 10 Feb 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Mon, 11 Feb 2008, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: > >> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- >> Hash: SHA1 >> >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>> however when we attempted to demo the measure activity we just could not >>> figure out how to make it work. we got it working three times over the >>> weekend (among a dozen or more tries). >>> >>> we has laptops with the 650 build, the -rc2 build, and the signed build >>> released in Jan (one of them started with a joyride build as of >>> mid-week). no matter which combinations of builds we tried, we were not >>> able to repeat a sucess. >> >> Hmm. It's fairly simple, and usually works just about perfectly, or not at >> all. >> >>> could somone explain step-by-step what is supposed to happen (and what >>> screen we need to be on when to see the result) I have a pair of boxes >>> which are now on the -rc2 build, so I can try and see if I can get this to >>> work reliably. >> >> To use Distance (formerly called Acoustic Tape Measure): >> 1. Launch the activity on XO A. >> 2. Share the activity from the toolbar >> 3. Using XO B, join the shared instance from the mesh view >> 4. Click the big button on each machine (there's only one button) >> >> That's it. There should be a lot of whooshing, after which the enormous >> "0.00" >> should change to be the current distance. There's only one screen, and >> there's >> only one number field, and it tells you the distance. >> >> What happened instead? Do try in Update1-rc2. So far, it's been working >> perfectly fine for me, in either build*. > > one mistake we were making was that we tried to invite the other laptop to > join, sometimes this would result in an additional item on the toolbar, > useually it would not. > > when we did join (either through the mesh view or from the toolbar we > frequently had both machines sitting and saying that they were waiting for > another machine. > > we did try this with -rc2 (we upgraded 4-5 machines to -rc2 over the > wekend.) I just tried it again with my two machines and it worked for about 60 seconds (at which time the one running on battery did a suspend and the activity stopped) >> *: Due to mysterious telepathy/mesh bug #6061, Distance does not work in >> hostile >> network environments like at 1CC. This has not been a problem anywhere >> else, yet... > > the RF enviornment was definantly hostile on the show floor (it didn't > seem to matter if we used mesh or infrastructure), but we had the same > problems in the OLPC bof session where we were far enough away to not > detect the networks from the exibit floor. many of the exibitors setup > their own access points in addition to the ones the hotel had to start > with and that SCALE put up to provide access. what does it take to be considered a hostile RF environment? David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
mouse unstable on rc2
I upgraded the machine that I've been useing daily for the last month, and I'm noticing that the trackpad is acting very skittish at times. a reset will clear it up for a while, but it comes back. I have not had this problem on this hardware with prior builds. I have also seen this on my second box, but I haven't been useing it as extensivly so I can't promise that it never had a problem before (it was still on build 650 prior to this weekend, with no noticed problems. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: mouse unstable on rc2
On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, Richard A. Smith wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> when I get home tonight I will lookup the exact steps for doing this and >> give it a try. one problem is that the problem did not show up immediatly >> (some laptops showed the problem within a half hour, others didn't show it >> for several hours) >> >> the four laptops that I saw the problem on over the weekend were all >> upgraded by hitting the four game buttons while powering up (and all from >> the same USB drive). unfortunantly I don't have a copy of that drive. > > The four game buttons upgrade is the same as a copy-nand only it uses a > signed image. If your laptops have security enabled then thats the only > method you will be able to use. one of my two is unlocked, I requested the developer key for the other yesterday >>> So far every time someone has claimed its build/firmware related and >>> I've asked them to prove it by going back and forth it has not held up. >> >> what versions do you want me to switch between? at least two of the >> machines had been vanilla 650 boxes, but one was my primary box that had >> been updated daily to joyride (up through last wednesday) > > Whatever build previously didn't have the problem. Although since there can > be a long delay it may be a bit harder to call it working or non-working. > The core of many of the issues appear to be from the touchpad getting out of > calibration. The exact cause is still unknown. According to ALPS the > capacitance the touchpad works against can change considerably in the XO. > Especially when an external power adapter is plugged in. unfortuantly neither machine is acting up for me today. I'm going to avoid doing any updates for several days in the hope that this ends up being repeatable. I shrugged off the firsttwo machines having a problem, but after seeing all four that got upgraded act up within a day or so I decided to speakup. > And if you are feeling really crazy then there have been a couple of > different reports on the community-support list of fixing a jumpy mouse by > using moisturizing lotion on the hands. So if you can get a repeatable jumpy > mouse I'd love to hear if that really does fix it. If I can repeat the problem I'll try it. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: mouse unstable on rc2
On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, Richard A. Smith wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> unfortuantly neither machine is acting up for me today. I'm going to avoid >> doing any updates for several days in the hope that this ends up being >> repeatable. I shrugged off the firsttwo machines having a problem, but >> after seeing all four that got upgraded act up within a day or so I decided >> to speakup. > > Yep.. Thats the way this bug rolls. Here one day gone the next. If it > continues to happen for you keep an eye out for some sort of correlation. > > You may also want to explore some of the newest kernel .rpm builds from > ~dilinger that have some ideas for dealing with some of the problems. > > But with the randomness this bug has its tough to claim you have made any > progress without some long term data. one thing that I thought of, is it possible that it's correlated to environment? useually I keep them in my bedroom, which is climate controlled (it also serves as my server room), but over the weekend I was out at SCALE and so they were moving through many different environments. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
XO visability
In trying to demo the XO to people I run into a recurring problem (it doesn't seem to be version specfic) where one XO can see the other, but not vice versa. I do not have a school server and antenna around, but have seen the problem when machines are connected via the mesh and when connected to standard wifi. I have even been able to join an activity fromone laptop while not being able to see the joining laptop in the other direction, so I know they can see each other at the network layer. At SCALE I was seeing systems that showed up as XO laptops, but later spoke to the people who's names showed up and they don't have XO's (in one case I found the only machine the person had was a MAC) any suggestions on where to start/ David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO visability
On Tue, 19 Feb 2008, James Cameron wrote: > While you don't think it is version specific, knowing what versions you > have seen it on would be valuable problem data. unfortunantly I haven't been keeping track. I know I've seen it on build 650, the recent RC, on joyride 1700. but I know I've also seen it on many other joyride builds as well, I haven't always upgraded both machines so some of the times have been with different builds on the two machines. basicly it's the exception when both machines see each other in the Neighborhood rather then the rule > By "see the other" you mean that the Neighborhood View doesn't show an > XO icon for the other XO? correct > Are these XOs "friends"? with tests between the two XOs that I own the useually have been, but in the few cases where I've had other XO laptops nearby I've had the same problems. at SCALE the olpc bof ended up well away from all other people and the large concentration of access points (it wasn't an empty RF envrionment, but it wasn't the meltdown that was at the other end of the hotel either. it was quiet enough for me to suceed in connecting to the next hotel down the street) and we had 5 XO's in the room but it took us 45 min of trying before we were able to get any two to see each other at the same time. > On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 09:31:02PM -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> At SCALE I was seeing systems that showed up as XO laptops, but later >> spoke to the people who's names showed up and they don't have XO's (in one >> case I found the only machine the person had was a MAC) > > Yes, MacBooks and Pidgin show up as XO icons, I think it is because they > announce over Bonjour / Zeroconf. Ok, that has been confusing at times. >> any suggestions on where to start/ > > Exclude packet loss. I've run into this same problem in every location that I've tried it. when operating on a few of the networks I know that neither machine has had any problems connecting to the outside world or to other local systems. while this doesn't completely rule out packet loss, it makes it pretty unlikly. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO visability
On Mon, 18 Feb 2008, Edward Cherlin wrote: > On Feb 18, 2008 9:34 PM, James Cameron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> While you don't think it is version specific, knowing what versions you >> have seen it on would be valuable problem data. > > We had up to six XOs at a time in the OLPC booth at SCALE, mostly > running build 653. Two B4s and up to four G1G1s. I never saw any of > them display icons for all of the others. note that in the booth we had a very hostile RF environment. however it didn't matter if we connected the laptops to one of the access points (at which point we could sucessfully browse out), or tried to connect them via mesh. we couldn't reliably get any of them to see the others. David Lang >> By "see the other" you mean that the Neighborhood View doesn't show an >> XO icon for the other XO? > > Yes. > >> Are these XOs "friends"? > > No. > >> On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 09:31:02PM -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>> At SCALE I was seeing systems that showed up as XO laptops, but later >>> spoke to the people who's names showed up and they don't have XO's (in one >>> case I found the only machine the person had was a MAC) >> >> Yes, MacBooks and Pidgin show up as XO icons, I think it is because they >> announce over Bonjour / Zeroconf. >> >>> any suggestions on where to start/ >> >> Exclude packet loss. >> >> -- >> James Cameronmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://quozl.netrek.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 > ___ > 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: Two general thoughts
>_Big_ disclaimer: I'm a G1G1 owner and lurker who hasn't contributed >anything yet. Just been lurking and learning. That said, one minor >nit: > >2008-02-19T23:45:14 Ricardo Carrano: >> - Suspend and resume should be a user command and much less >> aggressive when it happens automatically. > >I'm not positive exactly what you meant by this, but if I've been >understanding what I've been reading, the core devs are hoping to >get very aggressive indeed with suspend and resume, to the point >where the common use pattern of spending lots of time looking at the >screen, reading and thinking, would sit there with the DCON, the >EC, and (if active) the autonomous mesh side of the wireless as >the only things powered on except when you hit a key, when it wakes >up (in a couple hundred ms max), repaints, and goes back to sleep. >The dream being lovely hours and hours and hours of ebook, or web >reading, or anything else but active processing or input. > >-Bennett when the resume gets fast enough that the suspend is transparent to the user (and the applications the user is running) super agressive suspend will be just fine. for this to work the suspend/resume cycle needs to be speed up by a factor of 10 or so, and it needs to wake up for scheduled events so that apps polling will keep it alive the problem is that right now the suspend is not transparent to the user, and we keep finding apps that break. and this is not just the presense server, but normal client/server apps like mail clients that want to sleep for a while between checking for new mail. In addition suspend seems to cause the system to loose track of the network it's on, break network connections, distract the user by dimming the screen and being slow to respond to keystrokes, and otherwise make things difficult for the user. I am all in favor of the eventual goal, but I really disagree with the approach of setting it to sleep as much as possible now while these problems are so common. the problems need to be addressed or you will find that most people will learn how to do 'touch /etc/ohm/inhibit-suspend' and not realize that the problems ever get fixed (I've done it on one of my machines, and if I used the other frequently I'd do the same there) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Alternative power/recharging source?
On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Ed Montgomery wrote: > Came across this rather amazing item the other day, > and instantly thought this might be a very, very > useful power/recharging mechanism for the XO... > > A lamp powered by gravity producing 40 watts over 4 > hours...using gravity! :-) (Consider the XO using > about 2 watts...) this isn't producing 40 watts of power, it's producing light roughly equivalent to a 40 watt light bulb. super high power LEDs are about 10x as efficiant, lower power LEDs are even more efficiant. so this is going to produce <4w, possibly as low as <2w > Not affected by weather/season/time of day (e.g. > solar/wind) or behaviour (animal/cow) or location, > etc. An unlimited power source available anywhere > anytime! > > Could this mechanism (which apparently is more durable > than the LEDs in the lamp!) be modified to power > and/or recharge the XO batteries, etc.? the durability of this mechanism is theoretical at this point. and while it avoids the problems you describe above it gains it's own set (lots of fine cut gears, the need for smooth surfaces for the weight to slide on, etc) I'm not saying that this isn't a useful concept, but it's not perfect > A preliminary article about the gravity lamp can be > found here (from Virginia Tech): > http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/story.php?relyear=2008&itemno=111 an additional possible problem is the patent that they are trying to get on the mechanism. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Staffing of an OLPC Booth at PyCon, volunteers needed
just a word of warning, at SCALE the OLPCs were the hit of the show. you may end up finding that you spend a lot more time talking about them than you ever imagined. (depending on what else you are trying to do this may or may not be a problem) one thing that will be extremely useful is if a FAQ can be put togeather with the correct answers for everyone to provide when asked. everyone does their best to answer the questions correctly, but there's pleanty of room for mistakes. simple start of FAQ list (just the questions for now) system specs expandibility does it have wireless where are they being deployed how can someone (or some orginization) get them price various questions about the G1G1 program (how many were purchased, why was the program stopped, will it re-open, what about overseas, why haven't all of them been delivered) battery life what new technology is in it why is this better than the EEPC/classmate/surplus PC/etc can you run other software on it how can you develop for it without getting one how do you open the [EMAIL PROTECTED]@# thing (especially amusing when you hand them the open laptop, they close it and can't re-open it) what are the two squares to the side of the touchpad where is the crank (if OLPC can spare some sample chargers to display at the booth it would be wonderful) things to demo pippy distance (if you can make it work reliably) measure camera browser network view chat decide if you are going to have the machines on a mesh with each other, or on an access point so they can connect to the Internet (I would say have them connect to the Internet unless there is some specific reason to not do so) David Lang On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Mel Chua wrote: > I'll be at PyCon after all (yay TOPP!). I'm not sure exactly when and where > and what I'm doing yet, but if someone keeps me in the loop, I'll gladly > help with OLPC stuff at PyCon as best as I'm able. I'm sure others will be > drifting around as well. > > -Mel > > On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 2:19 AM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> This makes three for the OLPC booth at PyCon. >> >> Ed Cherlin >> Mike Fletcher >> Karen Smith > > >> >> Others may put their hands up. >> >> > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Alternative power/recharging source?
On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Richard A. Smith wrote: > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> no, in that mode it's down around .2W-ish >> I think in color, screen only mode it's ~1w > > Again whats your source for this info? Because its news to me. http://laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml LCD power consumption: 0.1 Watt with backlight off; 0.2-1.0 Watt with backlight on; in full e-book mode the display unit is the only thing getting power (radio off, cpu fully suspended) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Alternative power/recharging source?
On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote: > On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Richard A. Smith wrote: > >> Where did you see that the XO uses only 2 Watts? Thats only when suspended. >> >> Suspended: 2W >> Running: 5-7W >> Charging the battery: 16W > > Doesn't it only use 2W-ish when it's in monochrome, screen refresh-only > mode? no, in that mode it's down around .2W-ish I think in color, screen only mode it's ~1w David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Alternative power/recharging source?
On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Richard A. Smith wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >>> Again whats your source for this info? Because its news to me. >> >> http://laptop.org/en/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml >> LCD power consumption: 0.1 Watt with backlight off; 0.2-1.0 Watt with >> backlight on; >> >> David Lang >> > > You are misinterpreting that. That is the display _only_. Not the system > power. > >> in full e-book mode the display unit is the only thing getting power (radio >> off, cpu fully suspended) > > And the EC, the memory, various pull up/down resistors, and few other suspend > voltage regulators. All these add up to a non-trivial amount. you are not nessasarily going to be powering the system memory > Claiming that the power draw of the display unit in e-book is the system of > draw of the laptop is inaccurate. It will be close if you were to throw up a > page and let it sit there and never touch it. But the moment you engage the > cpu to flip a page you draw 5-7x more power. The average draw then depends > on how may pages you flip. We do not yet have any metrics for what that will > work out to be. if you flip one page every 5 seconds (a pretty fast reader) and for 1 second the system eats 5x the power of the display you end up with 0.2w of power. the rest of my quote that you clipped said that in full e-book mode the power consumption was ~0.2w. however, the initial source of the data was a presentation by Mary Lou Jespin at Usenix last year. however I can't just cite my memory, so I went looking on the website and found that snippet of information. however, it almost doesn't matter which of us is right. the mere fact that we are having this disagreement indicates a need for better documentation of this sort of info. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: uucp for sneakernet (was Re: Emulating the School...]
On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, John Gilmore wrote: >> uucp ... the first place I'd turn for >> sneaker-netting posix-ish systems together. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP > > Yep. UUCP is great if there's a phone line that can dial overnight > cheaply, but no Internet. I released the first free implementation of > uucp (gnuucp), which was later succeeded by my friend Ian Taylor's > "Taylor uucp", which I believe is still the best free version. Ian > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> may still even maintain it (last release: 1.07 in > 2003). See: > > http://www.airs.com/ian/software.html > > There was also an MSDOS implementation of uuslave (the predecessor of > gnuucp), maintained by Tim Pozar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, which was widely > used to gateway Fidonet nodes to Usenet/UUCP nodes. That was the > first project I worked on to bring thousands of 14-year-olds into the > global network. See: > > http://www.lns.com/papers/ufgate/ > > If a remote school has a dialup phone connection that can run TCP/IP > over a modem, that's probably better than running uucp over it, even > if you can only run it at night due to telco charges. But uucp has a > lot of scheduling and queueing support that more modern TCP/IP systems > have forgotten about. I've used UUCP over TCP/IP as a mail path for systems that only had intermittent network connectivity and it worked very well. if the system can detect when it does have connectivity and connect up to a server every few min while it retains it, it will do a good job of getting the messages through. you don't need to drop down to dialup to make it work, and using uucp avoids reinventing the wheel, intermittent connectivity is what it was designed for, and it doesn't really matter if that connectivity is serial or TCP/IP. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: uucp for sneakernet (was Re: Emulating the School...]
On Tue, 4 Mar 2008, Adrian Chadd wrote: > On Tue, Mar 04, 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> >> I've used UUCP over TCP/IP as a mail path for systems that only had >> intermittent network connectivity and it worked very well. if the system >> can detect when it does have connectivity and connect up to a server every >> few min while it retains it, it will do a good job of getting the messages >> through. you don't need to drop down to dialup to make it work, and using >> uucp avoids reinventing the wheel, intermittent connectivity is what it >> was designed for, and it doesn't really matter if that connectivity is >> serial or TCP/IP. > > Did anyone ever publicly extend UUCP to handle "multicast" messages over > broadcast media, like satellite? > > I did something similar years ago for usenet (as did a lot of other folk) > and I'm sure being able to broadcast objects across satellite would be > very very useful for the project. > > I've got plenty of IP/services over Satellite experience here, so I'm happy > to help however i can. Its just been a while since I had access to the end > node hardware, and stuff has changed quite a bit in the 10 years since I > touched it. :) the good news is that you can simulate things by useing UDP broadcast packets as your transport layer. don't get fixated on the idea of using satellites, as a means for publishing updates a high-powered AM or SSB station can blanket a large area, and the efficiancy gained by only transmitting things a couple times (including error correction to deal with missed packets) instead of once to each destination can counter the drawback of a low bit rate. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: uucp for sneakernet (was Re: Emulating the School...]
On Wed, 5 Mar 2008, Adrian Chadd wrote: > On Tue, Mar 04, 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> the good news is that you can simulate things by useing UDP broadcast >> packets as your transport layer. > > Well yes, I did usenet/proxy object stuff over UDP. > >> don't get fixated on the idea of using satellites, as a means for >> publishing updates a high-powered AM or SSB station can blanket a large >> area, and the efficiancy gained by only transmitting things a couple times >> (including error correction to deal with missed packets) instead of once >> to each destination can counter the drawback of a low bit rate. > > Terrestrial RF would certainly be interesting to trial, but I don't have > any equipment here to toy around with and I don't have a radio licence > to roll my own. > > Still, I'd be interested in helping out if anyone is interested. you should be able to test the concepts using wifi with UDP broadcasts. once you have the concepts down and are just needing to nail down the radio details things get pretty easy. the receiving equipment can be as simple as a radio with headphone jack to plug into a sound card (not ideal, but a good first approximation), and there are enough Ham Operators around that we can setup real-world transmit tests (and hams have been doing packet radio broadcasts for years, 1200 bps on FM is trivial, 9600 not too hard, on SSB/AM you are probably talking 300-1200 bps with cheap equipment (better equipment can do 9600, but that's fairly pricy, at that point satellite receivers are probably a good option) get the basic protocol worked out and then we can dive into the transport details. you may want to look at including an option that once a file gets past x% complete for more then Y time, the receiver will take active steps to fill in the gaps (if a school server has most of the update it can request the last little bit over a landline rather then waiting for the gap to be filled in in a later broadcast) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Updates from Nepal's Pilot Schools
On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Bryan Berry wrote: > Sulochan Acharya and I are keeping journals of Nepal's pilot schools on > the wiki and the OLE Nepal blog. > > http://blog.olenepal.org/ > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bashuki_Journal > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bishwamitra_Journal > > We will do our best to keep updating the wiki pages. > > We hope that reporting this info will be helpful to other pilot sites > and to the larger OLPC community. thanks for posting this info. one thing that struck me as i was reading your write-ups was about the power problems. both schools have very limited power, one of the schools mentioned the power consumption of the light bulbs as part of the calculation. Assuming that they schools are useing conventional light bulbs, they could probably save more power than the laptops need to charge by switching to a high-efficiancy bulb. given the unreliable power, florecent bulbs are probably not a reasonable option, but (assuming theft is not too big a factor) LED bulbs would last and save the power needed to run the other equipment. equipping a school with such bulbs is not cheap (a few thousand dollars per school), but there may be charities around who could fund this. I'm willing to bet that nobody has ever asked them to fund anything like this. you may be able to get some donations from the manufacturers as well. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Updates from Nepal's Pilot Schools
On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Bryan Berry wrote: > David, good idea. > > there are only about 6 light bulbs at the Bishwamitra (smaller school) > and less than 5 at Bashuki the larger school. that may not be enough to matter. on one of the wiki pages it mentioned 25-30 as a number. switching to LED's will save about 90% of the power that the bulbs currently use (plus they will last essentially forever) > I will have to ask Ram (our power guy) about what's available on the > local market. LED lights are not readily available in the local market even in the US, they tend to be internet orders only > Regards to getting some for free, it would be great if you could put us > in contact w/ someone to donate them. In my experience it can be very > expensive time-wise to seek donations from companies w/out an existing > personal connection. Sometimes it just cheaper to buy something than to > spend the time trying to get a donation. That said, a strong personal > connection can make it very easy to get a donation. I don't have any personal contacts. David Lang > On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 04:26 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Bryan Berry wrote: >> >>> Sulochan Acharya and I are keeping journals of Nepal's pilot schools on >>> the wiki and the OLE Nepal blog. >>> >>> http://blog.olenepal.org/ >>> >>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bashuki_Journal >>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bishwamitra_Journal >>> >>> We will do our best to keep updating the wiki pages. >>> >>> We hope that reporting this info will be helpful to other pilot sites >>> and to the larger OLPC community. >> >> thanks for posting this info. >> >> one thing that struck me as i was reading your write-ups was about the >> power problems. both schools have very limited power, one of the schools >> mentioned the power consumption of the light bulbs as part of the >> calculation. Assuming that they schools are useing conventional light >> bulbs, they could probably save more power than the laptops need to charge >> by switching to a high-efficiancy bulb. >> >> given the unreliable power, florecent bulbs are probably not a reasonable >> option, but (assuming theft is not too big a factor) LED bulbs would last >> and save the power needed to run the other equipment. >> >> equipping a school with such bulbs is not cheap (a few thousand dollars >> per school), but there may be charities around who could fund this. I'm >> willing to bet that nobody has ever asked them to fund anything like this. >> >> you may be able to get some donations from the manufacturers as well. >> >> David Lang > > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Updates from Nepal's Pilot Schools
On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, Martin Dengler wrote: >> >> Regards to getting some for free, it would be great if you could put us >> in contact w/ someone to donate them. > > What's the USD cost of what would help in the short term? If I/others > can skip our daily $5 venti latte + muffin for a month, buy something > online and put it in the post, I'm more than happy to do that. > > Hopefully this could complement the work of people with corporate > connections who could arrange a more regular source of donations. they run $50-$100 each some examples equivalent of a 50-60w light, ~$60 http://www.theledlight.com/par30.html equivalent of a 75w spotlight, $120 http://www.theledlight.com/par38.html I have not used either of these bulbs yet. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Updates from Nepal's Pilot Schools
On Sun, 9 Mar 2008, John Gilmore wrote: >> Regarding the suggestion of LED bulbs - a smart person on another list >> said that many brands of LED bulbs are also prone to failure due to bad >> power - so don't treat them as a panacea. > > +1 > > I personally tested a variety of AC-powered LED light bulbs. Not a > single one survived more than eight months -- on clean San Francisco > power. There's a reason that these are not for sale in average > hardware stores -- they aren't ready for prime time. The LEDs don't > seem to fail, but the circuitry around them certainly does. They all > advertise 100,000 hour lifetimes, too :--( don't believe it. hmm, I've had no problems with the ones I've used. definantly worth contacting the manufacturers for more info > Most of the developing world uses linear fluorescent bulbs, which are > more power-efficient than the vast majority of LEDs (and more efficient > than compact fluorescents). I'm interested in learning more about the relative power draws. I was under the impression that fluorescent bulbs were about the same power efficiancy as LEDs. I know that where I've used them fluorescents have died in a couple of months when they had bad or intermittent power. > I suggest a return to the main topic (laptops / education). just a note that this topic started becouse of deployment problems where the schools have trouble getting enough power to charge the laptops. if power is that scarce then improving the lighting efficiancy may be needed to make the laptops useable. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: New faster build 1753
wo what does it take to install the faster build on a machine? David Lang On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Build Announcer v2 wrote: > Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:55:00 -0400 (EDT) > From: Build Announcer v2 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: New faster build 1753 > > http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/faster/build1753 > > Changes in build 1753 from build: 1741 > > Size delta: 2.62M > > -kernel 2.6.22-20080211.1.olpc.9f4e619336a08dc > +kernel 2.6.22-20080304.1.olpc.914fce4d9a8baf3 > -olpc-library-core 1-22 > +olpc-library-core 1-23 > -krb5-libs 1.6.1-6.fc7 > +krb5-libs 1.6.1-8.fc7 > -olpc-library-common 1-21 > +olpc-library-common 1-23 > -olpc-utils 0.68-1.olpc2 > +olpc-utils 0.70-1.olpc2 > -pcre 7.0-2 > +pcre 7.3-3.fc7 > -tzdata 2007k-1.fc7 > +tzdata 2007k-2.fc7 > -xkeyboard-config 1.1-11.20071130cvs.olpc2 > +xkeyboard-config 1.1-15.20071130cvs.olpc2 > > --- Changes for olpc-library-core 1-23 from 1-22 --- > + selection/index fixes, es translation > + new es for xo-guide > > --- Changes for olpc-library-common 1-23 from 1-21 --- > + selection/index fixes, es translation > + new es for xo-guide > > --- Changes for pcre 7.3-3.fc7 from 7.0-2 --- > + Backport patch from upstream pcre 7.6 to address buffer overflow > + Try re-enabling make check again. > > --- Changes for tzdata 2007k-2.fc7 from 2007k-1.fc7 --- > + Chile moves DST to 29/Mar > + Related: #435959 > > -- > This mail was automatically generated > See http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer/faster-pkgs.html for aggregate logs > See http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer/joyride_vs_update1.html for a > comparison > ___ > 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: New bible reading activity
On Fri, 14 Mar 2008, Daryl Daly wrote: > This is a very simple reader for bible and other text modules made for the > Sword project at www.crosswire.org It is version 1 quality and is my first > Sugar project. I welcome any comments and suggestions. There are many things > that need to be added to it for it to become very useful. > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sword_read space on the laptops is limited. it's not a good idea to have lots of different readers to read different documents (and along the same lines, it's not a good idea to have different browser packages with different home pages, like the gmail activity) now if you do something unique with your document there may be a reason to have a seperate reader (and I have seen bible readers that did have such features) nother valid reasons for creating a new reader is as a learning tool (but then you should list it as a text reader and talk about what formats it supports, not list it as a 'bible reading activity'), or if you think you can do a bette job than the existing reader activities and are looking to replace them (or even replace a part of their capabilities) David Lang (speaking for myself) P.S. I do think that it's a good idea for you to create bible files for the reader that are formatted to easy reading/searching/etc on the xo size machines. you just don't need a special reader for the job. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: New joyride build 1774
On Mon, 17 Mar 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Gary Oberbrunner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Build Announcer v2 wrote: >> > http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build1774 >> >> All the recent activity threads have me confused, and now I'm scared to >> update lest I lose all my activities. I'm on a G1G1 on joyride now from >> a month ago. Simple question: if I update to build1774, will I lose >> anything (or have to download the activities, or what)? > > > Joyride still has all the activities. That's mostly because I'm lazy, > not because of any official policy, so that may well change at some > point. But in any case you shouldn't be scared -- you can always > alt-boot to restore your previous build if you olpc-update to > something that you don't like. unfortunantly you did loose me as a tester, I had been upgrading to each build (joyride or update.1) as they came out, but I'm now waiting for the dust to settle and for there to be a known way for me to update the activities without going to a lot of effort each update. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Call for Papers/Talks/Ideas! "Update.2 Mini-Conference"
On Fri, 21 Mar 2008, John R.Hogerhuis wrote: > > I'd agree with Mitch. Performance, or for us, UI responsiveness, the most > visible and painful issue being start up time of applications is paramount. My > 4-year old, with no cushy performant computer experience, loses interest in > the > 10 seconds+ it takes to load activities. Even the calculator takes seconds to > load. Actions taken in the photo/video recorder do not sync up with sounds and > are not proximate enough in time to the UI action. > > The second thing is basic UI usability. The pop-around menu border makes the > UI > thoroughly unusable with the trackpad since focus is lost when you get too > close > to the edge. My daughter's frustration level shoots through the roof whenever > this happens. Maybe that is fixed in a recent release, but the fact that the > border pops up when you get anywhere near the edge frustrates my daughter to > the > point that she finds the trackpad is "too hard to use [control]." Pretty much > the laptop is on the shelf right now for that reason. I agree with this issue, there is a tweak that you can make to the config to disable this feature. I don't have it handy, but if you search a little you should be able to find it. David Lang > Also on UI usability, there are far too many words for a non-reader to use > almost all programs. At one point usability for non-readers was a goal, not > sure > what happened. > > If those two (albeit broad) areas were dealt with the laptop would come back > off > the shelf. > > -- John. > > ___ > 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: State of Update.1, March 24, 2008
On Mon, 24 Mar 2008, Michael Stone wrote: > Folks, > > First, thanks are due to kreneskyp, sayamindu, uwog, dgilmore, rsmith, > marco, wad, rwh, and hhardy for contributing to the state of our > knowledge of Update.1 by updating tickets in Trac. Everyone else: get > behind us, review these bugs, and help push out this release! See > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_setup_for_Update.1_builds > > for rough-cut instructions on how to try out update.1-70x builds. > > Next, the good news: thus far, q2d14 functions as advertised (allowing > us to close #5422/#6245) and I have heard good things about > telepathy-salut-0.2.3-1 (including how wad intends to put it through the > wringer tomorrow). I remain hopeful that the localizations in > olpc-library-core-1-23, olpc-library-common-1-23, and the Spanish > console keyboard will satisfy our Spanish-speaking clients. > Spanish-speakers: please test these facts, report back to us, and update > #6685 and #5841! > > Then, the bad news: in a fascinating conversation with the support-gang > (yay, support-gang!), it was made plain to me that recent Update.1 > builds have received little or no testing by folks who aren't building > them. In light of this datum, we should consider the question: "who do > we want to persuade to try out U.1 and what support do they need from > us?" the removal of the activities is still being sorted out. currently there is no straightforward way for a tester who previously could just do an olpc-upgrade to test the recent builds that have the activities removed. there are several scripts being developed to manage the activities, but no clear direction (or directions) in this area, just lots of people who seem to be working independantly. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Joyride is reopened for development.
On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote: > On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 12:33 AM, Chris Ball <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> We announced the Joyride builds as having been frozen for new features >> several months ago, as we solidified the Update.1 build. Now that it's >> doing fine in its own stream, we're reopening the Joyride process for >> new development. So, consider Joyride to be gradually unfreezing. >> Please announce large changes before pushing them, and push via the >> Joyride ~/public_rpms process or the Koji dist-olpc2 branch. >> >> We'd like to invite a discussion about process changes to ensure that >> our Joyride builds continue to be stable and usable. Ideas welcome! >> > > Some of the things I would like to see during this cycle (from a > localizer's point of view) are > > 1. A branching policy > 2. Strict string freeze periods > > Wrt #1, At some point (say, when feature freeze for Update 2 kicks > in), I would like to see _all_ the translated modules (activities, > etc) to branch to a Update-2 branch (we had this in Update-1 as well, > but only for Sugar, Journal, Record and Browse). This should make life > easier for the developers as well (as they can continue all the fun > and experimentation in the master (or is it HEAD?) branch) > > If #1 is implemented properly, I guess #2 should naturally follow. one problem with this approach is that developers will tend to want to move forward with their new version and not pay the needed attention to the older version that's in the feature freeze branch. I've been watching kernel development for many years now, and they've been fighting the same problem. when a freeze starts to drag out, the rate of fixes to the frozen version drops off. their approach has been to go for quick cycles (all new things must be submitted in a 2-week window, then stabilize, release, repeat). This is working for the kernel because they are keeping the cycle time short enough that people who miss one window are willing to wait until the next one (as it's only 1-2 months away from the close of the merge window) I'm seeing the same pressures here as the releases take a while to get out. the same solution may not work, but it should be considered. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Monday's Testing
On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, Martin Langhoff wrote: > 2008/3/27 Ricardo Carrano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> My suggestion for the Cambrige testbed is: >> 1 - Validade probe response driver patch submitted by Marvell and implement >> it >> 2 - Increase contention window from 7,31 ro 31, 1023 >> 3 - Increase route expiration time from 10 to 20 seconds >> 4 - Increase mcast rate from 2 to 11 Mbps. >> >> All of the above are trade offs and should be considered in dense mesh >> scenarios only. Based on what I see in my own testbed, they will reduce the >> duration of bursts and also make you more resilient to them. > > Hi Ricardo, > > if this improves the behaviour in dense mesh scenarios, am I right in > thinking we'll be looking at - from a high-level pov - changing > contention window, route expiration and mcast rate dynamically on the > XOs when they see the school server antenna with a strong signal, and > then again when they lose sight of it. I am not familiar with the mesh > driver so this may be a stupid question - is it safe to change those > values on the fly? > > The switch-modes decision logic could be tricky > > - needs data from different network layers > - needs tuning to avoid having ranges where we switch back-and-forth > > still getting to grips with how the mesh works - hopefully the above > makes sense ;-) it may be that it's not a case of 'mode A' vs 'mode B' but is instead a continuous function based on how many other nodes that it sees. with small changes based on the number of nodes it won't matter much if it bounces around as the number of nodes change (as long as it doesn't waste a lot of power to make the change) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Monday's Testing
thanks for the list of conditions On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Greg Smith (gregmsmi) wrote: > Hi Wad, et al, > > I think some use cases and requirements definition would be helpful > here. I don't think the field understands clearly what Mesh and > collaboration support and that can lead to misalignment of design and > usage. > > Here is an example of possible use case definition, hopefully relevant > variables for SW design: > > 1 - School has server and Active Antenna (AA) (1,2, or 3) (example? > maybe Uruguay) > > 2 - School has wireless AP and server (Nepal) > > 3 - School has wireless AP and no server (Cambodia) > > 4 - School has no wireless AP or server (aka no internet ala some > schools in Peru) > > 5 - School has n (50, 100, 150, 200) Xos on simultaneously should the mesh even be used in a high-density school setting? (even with an AA), or should the XOs basicly operate in infrastructure mode where they route everything through the AA or AP? if the density is high enough everything is within 1 RF hop (or 2 RF hops, one to the AA/AP, and another back out over a different channel) in these conditions should the XO even try to route through another XO? David Lang > 6 - XO closest to AP or AA providing intermediate hop to internet for > Xos (1, 2, 3 max? hops away) > > 7 - n (50, 100, 150) Xos in class and m laptops providing intermediate > hops to internet (I can also see a whole bunch of "tree" cases and > combinations of roots and branches getting to the internet). > > Looking at the collaboration "layer" (may need Mesh, ad hoc and eJabber > versions, may also need AP, AA and no net versions, not sure) > > 8 - n (1,2,3 max?) classes of students of m each (up to 50?) using XO > simultaneously. Classes are x feet apart and Xos 2 feet apart within a > class (does physical granularity matter at this level?). No need to Mesh > (L2) or collaborate (L5?) between classes. (different subnets?) > > 9 - One class in the school yard with kids running around and two others > in class. Means XOs turned on and off and moving closer and farther away > rapidly (my twins out ran me at 3 years old I hope 50 x 3rd graders > can't out run the dynamic mesh :-) > > 10 - Two students sharing a book or activity with each other *25 (max?) > for all pairs of students in class. > > 11 - Teacher sharing an activity with all 50 students *n classes within > a school (1,2,3,4, n) (also list activities if relevant - e.g. web > browsing vs. others?) > > 12 - Two students watching a video (don't know if its supported, but > find high BW and low BW examples) *25 for class > > 13 - Teacher sharing video with all students (same note as above) > > 14 - 1/2 class sharing high BW, half sharing low BW activities > > 15 - Students form groups of 3 - 5 who all share (low and high BW) > activities *n groups per class. Groups forming and dividing rapidly at > start then settling down. > > 16 - Everyone turns on XO at the same time *n (50, 100, 150 etc). Class > starts with 2 - 3 Xos firing up every minute for 10 minutes. Another > class in range has all 50 Xos on already. > > Etc. > > I hope I didn't munge my mesh and collaboration layers too much. > > My point is that at the end of this testing you need to have some clear, > user understandable supported setups. Nail one or two, bound them well, > and say they are supported. > > Also, define what "supported" means. For example: > > A - Works with same speed as XO solo or works %x slower > > B - Access internet takes up to 50 seconds for first packet out and > latency of .1 second after that per XO hop away from AP > > C- Mouse move on one XO has y latency to appear on second XO and y + z > latency to appear on n (>1) Xos. > > Etc. > > Nail a few supported uses and we can drive everyone to start with those. > Even better, give general guidelines and list unsupported uses. > > That's a quick brainstorm on my part but I haven't actually used XO to > collaborate. Ask the schools and educators how they use it or want to > use it. It takes a long time to develop a meaningful dialog but find > some representative users who get back to you quickly for starters. > > If all of these use cases are supported, that's great as long as they > all work. You should still say what is supported at the user level as > people will have other ideas that we never even thought of... > > Way too much work to do before Monday but think of one or two cases you > know work after this testing. Then ask educators if they fit. Then we > tell all customers to start with that! > > HTHs. > > Thanks, > > Greg S > > *** > Wad - >
Re: [OLPC Networking] RSSI value questions
On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos wrote: > Ryan, > > Like Ben said, inducing the physical layout of the network from metrics > such as RSSI will give you poor results for various reasons. What > "Space" did was to average arrival rates from direct neighbors over a > "long" period of time (anywhere between 1 and 10 seconds) to avoid > highly temporal effects like multipath and noise. Even so, the result is > only a rough layout of the network. If you'd like to achieve better > accuracy I thing you should combine other ideas like sound measurements, > as Ben suggested. trying to work from signal strength won't work well, but you may be able to triangulate based on the arrival time of the signal at various locations. there are companies that do this commercialy with 3+ access points David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [OLPC Networking] RSSI value questions
On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Oliver Mattos wrote: > To be honest I very much doubt the hardware in the wireless adaptors could > measure time in single digit nanoseconds, and even if they could it would > probably require a change in the over the air signal to use more bandwidth > (spectrum) for a "pulse" to get better time resolution, which in turn would > require hardware modification. the commercial products are able to do it with unmodified laptops, so it should not require a change to the over-the-air signal (unless this generation of active antenna hardware isn't up to the task) > I would think the sound and signal strength meter are better metrics. > Remember although signal strength is a bad indicator by itself, it can be > much improved with 2 aerials and the large number of possible pairs to > measure signal strength between in a well linked mesh. the problem with trying to use sound is that it requres a clear path from the servers to the laptops, something I would not expect to see very much. it's also very sensitive to the direction the laptops are pointing. David Lang > On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 3:14 PM, Martin Langhoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > >> On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 4:27 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> trying to work from signal strength won't work well, but you may be >> able >>> to triangulate based on the arrival time of the signal at various >>> locations. >>> >>> there are companies that do this commercialy with 3+ access points >> >> The recommended configuration for mid-to-high-end school servers has 3 >> active antennaes attached, and our recommendation is that they are >> placed well apart. They can be up to 10m apart due to USB cable lenght >> limits, and Wad mentioned 2m minimum recommended distance. If the >> distance is enough (in relation to the granularity of timers in the >> antennaes) then telling the XS about relative location of the >> antennaes could provide enough info. >> >> Having said that, I suspect that being able to do any of the above is >> somewhat far ahead in time ;-) >> >> cheers, >> >> >> >> m >> -- >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect >> - ask interesting questions >> - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first >> - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff >> ___ >> Networking mailing list >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/networking >> > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [OLPC Networking] RSSI value questions
On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Oliver Mattos wrote: >> the commercial products are able to do it with unmodified laptops, so it >> should not require a change to the over-the-air signal (unless this >> generation of active antenna hardware isn't up to the task) >> > > I'd be very innterested to know how they work - I can't see any way it could > work using speed of light triangulation using any old off the shelf > hardware, although there are quite a lot of other tricks I can see it could > do: I'm not saying that it works with off-the-shelf access points. I am sure that it uses custom access points (at the very least custom software on them), but it doesn't require changing the software on the devices being tracked. among other uses, the commercial units are sold to companies who want to secure their WAN access. they triangulate the source of the signal, and if it's outside the company walls it gets blocked. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [OLPC Networking] RSSI value questions
On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Hal Murray wrote: > Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:49:38 -0700 > From: Hal Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: Martin Langhoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], devel@lists.laptop.org, > [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], > Ryan Crawford Comeaux <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > Hal Murray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: [OLPC Networking] RSSI value questions > > >> The recommended configuration for mid-to-high-end school servers has 3 >> active antennaes attached, and our recommendation is that they are >> placed well apart. They can be up to 10m apart due to USB cable lenght >> limits, and Wad mentioned 2m minimum recommended distance. If the >> distance is enough (in relation to the granularity of timers in the >> antennaes) then telling the XS about relative location of the >> antennaes could provide enough info. > > I assume the 10 m above is 5m for each antenna. 5m is the nominal limit on > USB cables. I think you can get longer than that by using hubs/repeaters. > I've got some 1 port hubs that are built into the connector blob on a 5m > cable. I found a web page that said there is a limit of 5 hubs but I haven't > tried it. > > > What sort of timer and/or time stamper does the active antenna and/or WiFi > gear in the XO have? > > > I think there are two approaches that might be interesting. > > If all you have is 2 antennas listening to the same packet, then you need > more than good granularity on the timers. You also need to synchronize the > timers. > > If you have the relative time of arrival of the signal at 2 antennas, you can > compute the direction the signal came from. The scale factor is the speed of > light between the two antennas. That's 1 ft/ns in air. 10 m is (rounding) > 50 ft, so we need time stamps accurate to a (small) fraction of 50 ns. > That's the right ball park. > > That gives you direction, no distance. from two antennas you get just direction. with more antennas you get direction from different points and can then triangulate to get location. you may not be able to do this just with the three active antennas connected to a single school server. you may need an additional active partner (either active antennas connected to a different school server, or a laptop in a known position > > The other approach requires help from the XOs. > > Take a pair of systems. Exchange a pair of packets. Grab the time stamps, > both transmit and receive. That's enough information so you can calculate > the time/distance between the units and the clock offsets. That pattern and > calculation is the core of NTP. I'll say more if anybody wants. > > That gives you distance, no direction. > > > If you had a handful or systems and lots of distance measurement pairs, you > might be able to make a map. I think you need to know the location of a > couple of units. Without that, flips of the map over X or Y (or any other) > axis also give you a valid answer. The other antennas on the XS might be > good enough. > > This needs timestamps with the granularity of how good you want the location > to be. If you want the locations within 10 feet you need (handwave) 10 ns. > You might get some more info by averaging several samples. > Is this a 2D or 3D problem? it can be either, but lets start with 2D David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] [OLPC Networking] RSSI value questions
On Thu, 3 Apr 2008, Aaron Huslage wrote: > How do currently available commercial wireless topology mappers do this? > I don't have direct experiance (the brother of a friend goes around installing these things, so my knowledge is third hand) but my understanding is that they deploy their access points and they triangulate the location of the wireless devices with a minimum of three access points deployed (more if more coverage is needed). I know that calibration is needed (something like walking the building with a known laptop after it's setup) radio direction finding to get a bearing from two antennas is not bleeding edge technology. It can require specialized hardware, but not always. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] [OLPC Networking] RSSI value questions
On Thu, 3 Apr 2008, Michail Bletsas wrote: > Let's not forget that you need some fixed reference points. > In commercial systems, the locations of the access points are well known. > In ad-hoc networks the best that you can hope for is a topological map. the assumption was that the measurements are being done from fixed points. either the school server antenna locations, or the known locations of specific assistant laptops. without known locations you can't do much. David Lang > M. > > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on 04/02/2008 01:45:14 AM: > >> Ryan, >> >> Like Ben said, inducing the physical layout of the network from metrics >> such as RSSI will give you poor results for various reasons. What >> "Space" did was to average arrival rates from direct neighbors over a >> "long" period of time (anywhere between 1 and 10 seconds) to avoid >> highly temporal effects like multipath and noise. Even so, the result is > >> only a rough layout of the network. If you'd like to achieve better >> accuracy I thing you should combine other ideas like sound measurements, > >> as Ben suggested. >> >> Pol >> >> > > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] [OLPC Networking] RSSI value questions
On Fri, 4 Apr 2008, John Watlington wrote: > A guiding design principle for any XO activity is that it be designed > to work without a school server. Learning doesn't stop at the school gate! > > The only thing special about an XS (or any access point) is that we can > know (absolutely) where it is. Whatever system is designed should > allow arbitrary peers to declare that they know where they are (and > should handle the fact that some of them either lie or have a very hazy > idea of where they are...) Perhaps an XS Active Antenna or Access Point > is simply an example of a certifiably trusted position beacon. > > I still prefer the idea of using audio, a la Acoustic Measure by Ben or > a three-D, multiple device version: > http://web.media.mit.edu/~vmb/papers/AES05.pdf > (longer version at http://web.media.mit.edu/~vmb/papers/DaltonMS.pdf) > Research into less intrusive methods (using ambient noise, or sounds > generated by the systems while doing other tasks, as the > basis for obtaining the location information) is needed. you could take three laptops and have them do acoustic measures from each other and then work out from that. I don't think it's worth trying to deal with system lieing about their location (at least not for the first cut) one thing to keep in mind is that each measurement has an error band accociated with it, so as you get secondary positions and work out from there the locations become less precise. one question about the XO hardware. are the two antennas directly connected inside the machine, or is there some way (possibly requiring a firmware modification) to find the difference between a given signal between the two antennas? David Lang > Cheers, > wad > > On Apr 4, 2008, at 4:39 AM, Oliver Mattos wrote: > >> why exactly is an XS needed at all - what about just a mesh of laptops with >> no XS. I agree then there are NO refrence points at all, so orientation >> and world-position of the generated map can't be determined, but the rest >> of the info still remains useful. The XS is simply another node - there is >> no reason it should be required. >> >> In terms of an algorithm for calculating positions from a series of metrics >> with no known points, the best I can think of is successive approximation. >> Basicly, place all the nodes randomly on a map, attach "virtual springs" >> between nodes that have connectivity, where the springs ideal length is >> determined by the signal strength/other metric, and springgyness is >> determined by the metrics margin of error, and then do a physics simulation >> of where they all end up when released. Using that algorithm, multiple >> types of metric can be used to generate the same map. >> >> After generating the map once, future generations would require many fewer >> iterations of the physics simulation, therefore less processing time even >> for big meshes, so it would probably be possible to update the map in real >> time as new results come in. >> >> There are quite a few optimisations for the above, for example "replusion" >> springs with a negative force could be used for nodes that are currently >> close together on the map but have no connectivity. - that would provide >> much more accurate mapping in sparse meshes where some laptops have 2 or >> fewer neighbors. >> >> On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 7:06 AM, Ryan Crawford Comeaux >> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Just to address a few other issues/questions raised... >> >> If there is only one antenna on a server, then as long as 3 other nodes are >> considered relatively stationary, I think their 2D locations can be deduced >> from each node's measurements of the other 4. An easy to use interface can >> allow the user to orient the generated map with respect to whatever >> reference point they like; ideally, the final program would allow for a >> floor plan of the building to be displayed underneath the topological >> mapping. >> >> With respect to granularity of different measurements, I think inaccurate >> measurements can be averaged over time, since some would necessarily be >> more accurate than others, allowing for a more accurate map as time passes. >> >> Ben stated that the dynamic gain isn't available in user space. I'm just >> wondering if there's a way to passively determine the gain and if this >> would even be helpful in determining location. Any ideas? I'm not so >> experienced in RF tech that I can come up with how knowing the gain would >> be useful, but if it is useful, then I think it'd be
Re: 2008 Debate of Build and Release
one thing to be very careful of with a date-based schedule is that as you near the release data you need to be extremely intolorent of regressions. it's useually better to delay a feature becouse you have to revert a patch to fix a regression then it is to break someone's existing setup becouse someone else thought a different feature was more important. as long as the steps are forward, people will accept small steps, and many steps, but if they feel that they are playing russian roulete with each upgrade there will be problems. David Lang On Sat, 5 Apr 2008, Charles Merriam wrote: > Here's my write-up from the April Fools memo > (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/April_Fool_2008_Build_Process) and > Mini-conference presentation. I'll get something on the wiki > shortly, probably at > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/2008_Debate_of_Build_and_Release. I'd > appreciate any comments. > > Thanks, > > Charles > > > About The Debate > > The 2008 Debate on Build and Release started when Charles Merriam (l) > wrote an April Fool's document named "April Fool 2008 Build Process" > (l). The document is short and should be read before reading this > page. The ideas were then presented as a set of slides (l) at the > April 4 Spring Miniconferce (l) Much debate ensued. > >Build and Release processes and tools change over time as software > matures. You can find references to the build and release debates of > 2007 (L), which more more concerned with getting any process to work. > > Debating >Debating occurs in several venues: the talk page of this article > (l); calls and conferences to be determined; and the devel and testing > mailing lists (l). Please start *all* debate posts with "Build > Debate:". If your posts relate to a section, mention the section. > For example, a good subject line might be "Build Debate: Time Based > Release has another problem". Relevant information, conclusions, and > unsolved issues will be eventually be added into this article. If > you want to track the progress and conclusions, you may want to watch > this page (l) on your watchlist (l). > > Social vs Technical Problems >Thinking about build and release management causes arguments > everywhere because it dredges up long standing concerns about > corporate strategy and implementation. Build and release management > is not a solution to social and business problems, no matter how much > you wish it were. Nor will build and release management squeeze > seven months of engineering into a six month cycle. Be cognizant of > discussions that catapult from release management to general > management. > >Also, recognize that the OLPC project is transitioning rapidly > from realizing an "impossible dream" to managing many thousands of > laptops in diverse deployments. People need time to adjust > expectations for this change. > > > Social Problems To Address > > Adopt a Time Based Release System > > * See Ubuntu's Wiki for an explanation (l) and release schedule [l]. > > Time Based Release is a practice and procdure to ship based on the > calendar instead of based on features completed. The release ships > on-time and features still stabilizing will slip forward to ship in > the following release. This change in philosophy provides a regular > heartbeat of new versions, so that slipped features have a reliable > next ship date. > > The ultimate aim is to always be able to build a nearly shipping > version, This means an exceptional circumstance requiring a special > release would only need "Disaster Insurance" final quality testing. > New features still gaining quality are developed in separate branches > until they can be incorporated into a solid branch. > > This is a contentious discussion and took up most of the > MiniConference discussion time: > * Every project starts with feature based releases until it hits a > minimum functionality. Stability and predictability become issues > after there are users relying on the project's functionality. OLPC > now has many schoolchildren, teachers, and developers relying on > releases. > * Delaying releases to serve one market breaks other markets: many > bug fixes and improvements will have been tested and ready each > release date. Some countries will only pick up one release per year > and may not be able to adopt any changes if release dates slip. > * Time-based releases also trigger contemplation of the changing > management directives for each release. Having specific release dates > may make the discussion easier. Specifically, an inflexible ship-date > grounds discussions in reality and helps to evaluate
Re: networking scenarios
On Fri, 11 Apr 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hello Dafydd and all... > > _*Question:*_ > I think that you mean that the "school server" has "internet access". > Is it possible to have a "school server" without "internet access" ? (just to > do... what? bigger "collaboration" between the XOs? software repository? > documents & books repository?. Many scenarios are possible. > > So I think you can add to the fourth scenarios: "Internet access" or "No > internet access" and what kind: ADSL, phone line, Satelital, or other ways. > _*Idea: > *_Add to your scenarios: > "Kind of energy available for the XOs:" > > Then we will face the "forgotten" problem: the humble towns, the ones that > are over the > 3,500 meters altitude, the ones that are in the "worst" scenarios... they > don't have any > kind of electricity. So the "cranck", the "solar panels", air or human > generated energy > is part of the equation IF we are going to reach those "worst scenarios". I think the basic network scenarios cover these situations. they don't care how the machines are powered. even the question of if the school server (or access point) is connected to the Internet doesn't really make a difference when you are looking at how the laptops talk to each other, and to whatever services are available on the wired network (if any). David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Usability testing
On Sun, 13 Apr 2008, Patrick Dubroy wrote: > On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 3:08 PM, Greg Smith (gregmsmi) > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Hi Tomeuz et al, >> >> I have done a few usability tests and they are a lot of work and not >> easy to turn in to code later. > > Many people seem to believe this myth that usability tests are too > much work. But as Jakob Nielsen says: > > "Some people think that usability is very costly and complex and that > user tests should be reserved for the rare web design project with a > huge budget and a lavish time schedule. Not true. Elaborate usability > tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no > more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford." > > (The whole article is worth a read. "Why You Only Need to Test With 5 > Users": http://www.useit.com/alertbox/2319.html) true, but remember that as users are exposed to the product they stop beign as good test subjects to represent newbes (those who remember heathkit remember how good their instructions were, they couldn't use a person for more then a handful of times before that person stoped being baluble as a beginning level tester) David Lang >> [snip] >> >> The report by Carol's daughter: (see >> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User_talk:Gregorio#User_experience.2C_input.2C >> _ideas_and_blogs South Bronx Teacher Feedback link). >> >> One key idea there is that kids wont wait for an activity to load. The >> activity icon blinks but the kids didn't get that. Maybe an animated GIF >> or a mini-animation would help. Or maybe paint the activity window right >> away, then fill it in slowly. Downside of that is you are tied to >> activity even if it never loads. Two ideas but we need more user >> feedback that its important issue before I would suggest it's a >> development priority. > > And that is a perfect example of how informal usability testing can be > done without too much work. I'd love to see more reports "from the > field" like Robin's. > > Pat > -- > Patrick Dubroy > http://dubroy.com/blog - on programming, usability, and hci > ___ > 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: Activity Launch Notification
On Tue, 15 Apr 2008, Eben Eliason wrote: >> BTW I am starting to ask users if they like the "hot corners" frame >> popup thingy. Let me know if you are open to feedback on that and if you >> have any alternative design proposals to share or specific questions you >> want answered. > > We've recognized that accidental activation of the Frame is a problem, > but haven't had time to implement any of the proposed changes. The > simplest change we hope to add is a tiny delay, to prevent accidental > activation when attempting to reach a button or element near the > corners. Even a very small delay of, perhaps, 1/5 second should help > reduce this. We'll likely add a slider to the control panel allowing > this value to be adjusted from instantaneous to off. Other ideas are > welcome, as is any feedback that indicates the common causes for the > accidental activation. (Is it the jumpy trackpad? attempts to hit > buttons in toolbars? activities with canvases such as paint? etc.) just moving the pointer around it's too easy to trigger the frame. the jumpy trackpad makes this worse, but it's just really easy to loose track of where the pointer is and have the frame pop up. since there is a key on the keyboard dedicated to controlling the frame, I have been very happy with just disabling the automatic popup completely. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: New Planning Thoughts draft.
On Fri, 18 Apr 2008, Kim Quirk wrote: In my experience running QA teams and releases for commercial projects, small fast releases require (or imply) quite a bit of focused process and really good automation on the testing side. Also, after other discussions on this list, it seems like there are two other items that drive 'major release' twice a year and a few bug fix releases in between: 1 - Our target users (mostly schools) will not be upgrading often, and many will require weeks or months of their own testing before they do upgrade thousands of computers. however, if you only make two releases a year the schools have very little choice about what they upgrade to. if you have more frequent releases they can more easily make a choice between one that just came out (and hasn't been tested much, but has some more updates) vs one that has been out a little longer na dthey can be more confident doesn't have any major landmines still undiscovered. 2 - From a support perspective, this audience will probably require that we support a major release for an entire school year. If we offer too many releases during that time, we will not be able to keep up with the backward compatibility matrix of releases that have to work with other releases. If kids upgrade on their own, will they work with the older version that was installed on 90% of the other laptops, etc. the compatibility of software is an important issue in any case. whatever your release cycle you are going to have times when you have mixed releases. and if OLPC achieves the deployment scales they are aiming for, you will start to have XO machines near each other that are controlled by different schools (think of the mix that you could get at a vacation spot during school breaks) I think if our product were aimed at developers or if it was a server-based product where we could control the releases and there were no backward compatibility problems, then it would be great to have many small, fast releases. I think more, faster releases are a better approach. the testing effort grows much faster then the count of changes (with the need to test combinations of things) so frequent, small releases are easier to test. I don't view the backwards compatibility issue as a showstopper, becouse I see it as being nessasary in either case, it's just more obvious with frequent releases (which can be a good thing if it makes people do a better job) David Lang Kim On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 7:54 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Tomeu Vizoso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I see this too as a hard problem and don't really have experience neither. What I would expect is that working on frequent time-based releases with features slipping as needed works best for projects like linux distros, where slipping a feature grossly means not updating a set of packages to the latest stable version. Even linux distro (Fedora at least,), doesn't actually do focused releases. Roughly, they set a timeframe and they get in everything which is ready by that date. This is very easy for a linux distribution. It would be harder on the Sugar codebase but still very much feasible, it's the same approach of GNOME releases. Though Michael proposal goes a step further. We would be focusing only on one (or a very limited number) of goals per release. Marco ___ 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
Re: [sugar] [Community-news] where is Walter?
On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Edward Cherlin wrote: > 2008/4/22 Martin Edmund Sevior <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> >> I've stayed away from this discussion until now. But for my own part, if the >> OLPC becomes just another laptop running "standard" educational software of >> the kind that inhabits my daughters primary school, I'm no longer interested >> in the project. > > Hear, hear! > >> I really bought into the "new paradigm" of pervasive collaboration and >> constructionist education. I'm not particularly interested in a cheap laptop >> clone and in any case I guess my own work on Write and abicollab will be >> ditched for some stripped down version of MS Word. >> >> It would nice to know if this is the new vision or not. If it is the new >> vision I can stop wasting my time here. > > You can join the imminent fork of Sugar, and we can continue to do it > right. It won't be the first time that an entire team has deserted an > Open Source project leader, as Bruce Perens himself can tell you. He > says that in several cases where a team left him, they were right and > he was wrong. If there is a fork, I would hope that it's not just a 'official OLPC' vs 'the old OLPC software' fork. it need to split the existing OLPC software into seperate system and userspace pieces. Sugar in an innovative approach to the UI, but there are lots of things about it that don't work well yet (the 7 seconds to start a trivial app through sugar, vs <1 sec outside of sugar for example) I also think that the set of people who do very good work at the system level doesn't overlap much with the set of people who do very good work at the uer level, so seperating the two could let each group focus on what they're good at more and make faster progress. for example, the current discussion about backups seems odd to me. from a system level there should be a half dozen backup implementations (especially since you know exactly where the data you need to backup and restore is). ideally these implementations would then each get a trivial GUI face added to them, and users could either choose between them, or the UI team(s) could pick the one that they like best for their 'feel' and enhance it. instead there are a handful of partial scripts that nobody seems eager to work on becouse they can't be used without full integration into the GUI. the XO hardware in extremely impressive (I have two of them, a roomate has a third, and I would probably buy more if I could), but I have been very disappointed with the software. the good news is that the XO specific modifications are finally getting into the valilla kernel, and as they get there I will be able to consider ditching sugar/fedora and switch to other distros that will work better. I hope that Mary Lou is making good progress with her new machines, as I look forward to more great choices in the future. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Ad-hoc Networking
On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, John Watlington wrote: > On Apr 23, 2008, at 5:26 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: > >> -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- >> Hash: SHA1 >> >> MPP support is in place, but it does not play well with the School >> Server >> (and possibly DHCP), so it has been disabled. MAP support has not >> been a >> high priority, and I do not know anything about its current status. > > The laptop as an MPP is an interesting idea, but the problem is the > havoc > it can wreck when a number of XOs are together in a school. > > Satellite Internet <-> XS <-> 802.11b AP <-> XO > can support around 50 laptops per channel. > But all it takes is one kid running in MPP mode near the AP > to eat up the spectrum with mesh routing packets. This is > why it no longer enters MPP mode by default when connected > to an AP. > >> I would certainly love if the XOs and Active Antennas could be made >> to run >> in MPP and MAP mode. I do not know to what degree the Marvell >> device is >> capable of this > > The hardware is capable of being both. We are working with Cozybit > to get soft AP code for the hardware that will support both. while there are scenerios where it won't work, there are others where it will work very well (in some cases it's the same equipment, but after school lets out and the kids head home) please consider making the capability available when you can, and then it can become another tool that can be enabled or disabled as appropriate. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Walter leaving and shift to XP.
On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Peter Krenesky wrote: > the way they were talking most of those things would just be made into > top level apis. Things like "sharing" would be available to all > applications. > > If these functions are being made into apis then there is no benefit in > developing for sugar. Why would any of us spend time developing a sugar > specific app at that point? we can write a normal desktop app that > uses sugar apis. We would get the same functionality with more portability. > > Sugar as a window manager would be marginalized and fail. if the only way for Sugar to survive is to have product lock-in that prevents things written for general use from working on a system running sugar, I believe that it deserves to fail. If sugar as a concept really is a good idea then making it so that you can run unmodified apps on it will cause more people to use it not less. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Auto backlight management?
On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Eben Eliason wrote: > On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 10:43 PM, John Watlington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> Bert misread the spec. When the backlight is switched off, the screen >> automatically switches to B&W mode. Why would you want to take >> that out of the control of the user ? > > I'm working on mockups for a "screen device" (in the Frame) which will > include a brightness slider and an independent checkbox for color/b&w > mode, so that these can be managed directly by the user at their > discretion. It's clear to me that it would be quite useful to have a > bright backlight AND black & white mode for reading a book at night, > for instance, and this isn't possible in the current UI. I used to think the same thing, but I learned it's not possible in the current hardware. this is the one drawback to the fantasic screen, any light from the backlight that gets through is colored by the screen. it can be made to appear white by allowing all three colors through, but it's still colored. this means that you can't get high resolution mode with the backlight on. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Auto backlight management?
On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Jordan Crouse wrote: > On 24/04/08 22:10 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Eben Eliason wrote: >> >>> On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 10:43 PM, John Watlington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>> >>>> Bert misread the spec. When the backlight is switched off, the screen >>>> automatically switches to B&W mode. Why would you want to take >>>> that out of the control of the user ? >>> >>> I'm working on mockups for a "screen device" (in the Frame) which will >>> include a brightness slider and an independent checkbox for color/b&w >>> mode, so that these can be managed directly by the user at their >>> discretion. It's clear to me that it would be quite useful to have a >>> bright backlight AND black & white mode for reading a book at night, >>> for instance, and this isn't possible in the current UI. >> >> I used to think the same thing, but I learned it's not possible in the >> current hardware. >> >> this is the one drawback to the fantasic screen, any light from the >> backlight that gets through is colored by the screen. it can be made to >> appear white by allowing all three colors through, but it's still colored. >> >> this means that you can't get high resolution mode with the backlight on. > > No part of that is true. The behavior you describe is a myth, > kept alive by people who misinterpet the display specification. > > You can turn on monochrome mode at any time. Try it yourself: > echo "1" > /sys/devices/platform/dcon/output > > Boom - there you go. Monochrome for your pleasure. my machines are out on loan right now. is this monochrome mode the high-res mode, or is this still using multiple screen pixels per display pixel like color does? (or another way to put it, does the screen get much sharper when you do this?) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: New joyride build 1897
On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Build Announcer v2 wrote: > http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build1897 > > Changes in build 1897 from build: 1896 > > Size delta: 11.41M > > +cdparanoia-libs alpha9.8-27.2 > -gstreamer-plugins-base 0.10.15-1.olpc2 > +gstreamer-plugins-base 0.10.15-3.olpc2 > +libvisual 0.4.0-3.fc6 > +perl 4:5.8.8-28.fc7 > +perl-libs 4:5.8.8-28.fc7 > -sugar-toolkit 0.79.5-1.olpc2 > +sugar-toolkit 0.79.6-1.olpc2 > -TurtleArt 7 > +TurtleArt 9 > > --- Included cdparanoia-libs version alpha9.8-27.2 --- what's the reason for adding these libraries? I'm not familiar with this library, but by it's name it seems odd to have in a system with no CD in it. > --- Changes for gstreamer-plugins-base 0.10.15-3.olpc2 from 0.10.15-1.olpc2 > --- > + Add the correct patch for the Thinkpad problem, and keep the old > + Add upstream patch to fix default track selection on Thinkpads > > --- Included libvisual version 0.4.0-3.fc6 --- while I'm asking questions, what's this library do? David Lang > --- Included perl version 4:5.8.8-28.fc7 --- > > --- Included perl-libs version 4:5.8.8-28.fc7 --- > > --- Changes for TurtleArt 9 from 7 --- > + fixed some typos > + fixed divide by zero bug > + French blocks > > -- > This mail was automatically generated > See http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer/joyride-pkgs.html for aggregate logs > See http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer/joyride_vs_update1.html for a > comparison > ___ > 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: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship
On Sat, 26 Apr 2008, Walter Bender wrote: >> Sugar/Linux could easily have compatibility with regular Linux stuff, >> but this has been denied despite strong demand. > > Albert, saying that this has been "denied" is overstated. Was it a > priority in the beginning? No. Were some decisions made that make it > more difficult? Yes. But are people working towards this goal? Yes. I'll say that the impression that I have received as an outsider is that the people working on Sugar have not at all been interested in compatibility with normal linux software. in fact there was a post within the last week claiming that it would be a bad idea to make sugar able to use unmodified linux software becouse that would mean that the educational software and activities being written for sugar could then be used on any linux box without sugar and this would mean the death of sugar. a couple of us responded that if sugar requires that sort of lock-in it deserved to die, but I don't remember anyone speaking up to say that the developers of sugar or the software team at OLPC disagreed with the initial poster. I know that in an ideal world you would not have to speak up to deny each and every crazy statement that's made, but at this point there is so much uncertinty about what the attitudes really are (not to mention the problem of knowing who actually speaks with authority on many of these things) the reality is that everything that's incorrect needs to be responded, if only so others don't start quoting it incorrectly. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: An OLPC Development Model
On Wed, 7 May 2008, Martin Langhoff wrote: > > On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 8:52 AM, C. Scott Ananian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> The model is simple: fork and merge. That is to say, rather than >> trying to maintain a single "upstream" that follows all the > > That thread you point out is a good resource to understand how current > kernel devs handle things, and I agree with the fork-and-merge > approach. Now, Linux is _one_ software project, and to an extent, our > efforts are closer to what Ubuntu does. they could be, but from what I see watching the list since I received my G1G1 machine, many things have been tightly integrated that probably shouldn't have been. ubuntu takes packages maintaned externally and picks what version of each of those packages to put in the main distro. the versions of these seperate packages are almost entirely independant of each other. they then do a lot of testing and some development of adminitrative tools and ship the result. unfortunantly much of the OLPC development has seemed to be against the idea of having external software run unmodified on sugar, and the resulting work to get anything running will hurt this model. David Lang > So IMHO... > > - In all tiers, it only makes sense to fork-and-merge if you have > subsystem maintainers. If you don't, stick to a shared tree or - if > there is a clear lead dev, send him/her patches. > - In all tiers, if you just have a patch of two, just send them as patches. > - For activities, each main lead dev decided, but should recommend > that they sync with Sugar's cycles, and publish a branch or tag > matching a Sugar milestone. > - Sugar "base" (libs, wm, etc) can follow the fork-merge-stabilise > cycle - depending on API stability and number of devs, it might make > sense to make each cycle longer. > - For packages where we are the downstream, maintain external patches > as needed. > >> For example, we may have a "sugar" build with the latest >> sugar UI bits, a "security" build which implements Bitfrost more >> fully, a "printers" build which works on printer support, > > That makes sense if (when) there is enough people - the overhead of > maintaining and testing additional builds is important. > >> an "activities" build which tries to collect all the best activities from >> the community, etc. > > I want to have that "activities" build too 8-) > > cheers, > > > m > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model
On Wed, 7 May 2008, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote: > On Tue, 6 May 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> ubuntu takes packages maintaned externally and picks what version of each >> of those packages to put in the main distro. the versions of these seperate >> packages are almost entirely independant of each other. they then do a lot >> of testing and some development of adminitrative tools and ship the result. >> >> unfortunantly much of the OLPC development has seemed to be against the >> idea of having external software run unmodified on sugar, and the resulting >> work to get anything running will hurt this model. > > Again: what makes Sugar different from Linux? > > The ability to interact *everywhere*, and to share *every activity* by > default. That interactivity basically defines what an activity *is*. > > Yes, this severely restricts the amount of software that can run on Sugar. > But again: the whole world of FLOSS educational software can run on Linux > just fine. > > If we're just (badly) reinventing a new WM, what's the point? which is why I fail to see the big point of Sugar. you don't have to scrap everything to write activities that can be shared easily. a perfect example was the suggeation to make the sugarized activities use a standard file picker call so that it could go to the journal on the XO machine, or to a normal file selecteor window on other desktops. doing this would also meant that other 'well behaved' software that used that call to the window manager would suddenly just start working right on sugar without requiring modification. unfortunantly the concept was greeted with a reaction similar to yours (i.e. 'NO, we don't want to run the risk of people using the apps on a normal desktop, we need to lock them into using sugar') David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model
On Wed, 7 May 2008, Jim Gettys wrote: > On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 09:17 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote: >> On Tue, 6 May 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> >>> ubuntu takes packages maintaned externally and picks what version of each of >>> those packages to put in the main distro. the versions of these seperate >>> packages are almost entirely independant of each other. they then do a lot >>> of >>> testing and some development of adminitrative tools and ship the result. >>> >>> unfortunantly much of the OLPC development has seemed to be against the idea >>> of having external software run unmodified on sugar, and the resulting work >>> to get anything running will hurt this model. > > David, > > We must fix this Help greatfully appreciated. It isn't very much > work to get there from here. at the moment it doesn't seem as if there's agreement yet that this does need to get fixed. until the problem is acknowledged it can't be fixed. unfortunantly my time constraints drasticly limit the code I can work on, so I am mostly a tester and a provider of resources to nearby developers (I just received my two g1g1 machines back from the USC hackathon) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model
On Fri, 9 May 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote: > On 09.05.2008, at 09:59, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> On Wed, 7 May 2008, Jim Gettys wrote: >> >>> On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 09:17 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote: >>>> On Tue, 6 May 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>>> >>>>> ubuntu takes packages maintaned externally and picks what version >>>>> of each of >>>>> those packages to put in the main distro. the versions of these >>>>> seperate >>>>> packages are almost entirely independant of each other. they then >>>>> do a lot of >>>>> testing and some development of adminitrative tools and ship the >>>>> result. >>>>> >>>>> unfortunantly much of the OLPC development has seemed to be >>>>> against the idea >>>>> of having external software run unmodified on sugar, and the >>>>> resulting work >>>>> to get anything running will hurt this model. >>> >>> David, >>> >>> We must fix this Help greatfully appreciated. It isn't very >>> much >>> work to get there from here. >> >> at the moment it doesn't seem as if there's agreement yet that this >> does >> need to get fixed. until the problem is acknowledged it can't be >> fixed. >> >> unfortunantly my time constraints drasticly limit the code I can >> work on, >> so I am mostly a tester and a provider of resources to nearby >> developers >> (I just received my two g1g1 machines back from the USC hackathon) > > > There is agreement that unmodified Linux software should run as well > as possible in Sugar. this is good. I have not received this impression from reading the list. what about Sugar software running as well as possible on normal linux boxes? without having to install the full sugar package and run everything under sugar in one window. this doesn't mean that some libraries won't need to be installed, but like running QT apps on a Gnome desktop, you install the QT libraries, not all of KDE (and similarly running gtk apps on a KDE destop you don't install all of gnome) > There is no agreement that this would imply we do not need Sugar, or > that activities written/adapted specifically for Sugar would not > provide an order of magnitude better learning experience. That's the > whole point of starting this endeavor in the first place. I wouldn't expect for this to imply that sugar is not needed or that the software stack you have been working on isn't the best possible for a learning envrionment. but if people are actually willing to seperate the activities from the platform in a meaningful manner, we gain the ability to mix-and-match as needed to find what really is the best. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model
On Fri, 9 May 2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: > On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 9:59 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Wed, 7 May 2008, Jim Gettys wrote: >>> We must fix this Help greatfully appreciated. It isn't very much >>> work to get there from here. >> >> at the moment it doesn't seem as if there's agreement yet that this does >> need to get fixed. until the problem is acknowledged it can't be fixed. > > What makes you think that the problem is not acknowledged!? in part the other response to my message that seemed to have the attitude that 'fixing' the problem would reduce Sugar to 'just another WM' rendering it worthless. there have been other comments along similar lines from developers as well. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model
On Fri, 9 May 2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: > Bobby Powers wrote: >> >> >> On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti <[EMAIL PROTECTED] >> <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote: >> >> On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 11:32 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED] >> <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote: >> > what about Sugar software running as well as possible on normal >> linux >> > boxes? without having to install the full sugar package and run >> > everything under sugar in one window. this doesn't mean that some >> > libraries won't need to be installed, but like running QT apps >> on a Gnome >> > desktop, you install the QT libraries, not all of KDE (and similarly >> > running gtk apps on a KDE destop you don't install all of gnome) >> >> Not possible at the moment but it's on the plan too. >> >> The way I see it it is somewhat of a two way street. Personally, if I'm >> going to run Sugar apps in Gnome I would prefer them to integrate nicely >> with my other apps, just as I would prefer apps running in Sugar to be >> 'sugary'. In this case the burdon falls on the shoulders of the activity >> developers. >From what I understand (and please correct me if I'm wrong!) >> Abiword is a good example - the text editor canvas is encapsolated as its >> own widget, and both the Gnome Abiword and the sugar activity use it in >> their respective user interfaces. So nice modular UI code should make >> maintaing a Gnome and a Sugar version of a program relatively painless. >> Again, please correct me if I'm wrong - I've been planning out what I want >> to do with a new activity and this is what I seem to have arrived at, if >> peoples experiences are different it could save me some headache... > > I think *platform* integration is great from the user point of view. And I > think designing the code so that it's easy to provide optimized UI for a > certain platform is also a good idea. > > *But* I also think it should be possible to run a Sugar activity on a > standard desktop and a desktop application in the Sugar shell. Integration is > great and we should encourage it, but we can't assume it will always happen. > And in the cases it doesn't happen, not-integrated is better than nothing. > > Also keeping the compatibility barrier low between the two platforms will > make porting and cross pollination of technologies and ideas easier. thank you, this is exactly what I am hoping for. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model
On Fri, 9 May 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote: > On 09.05.2008, at 09:56, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> which is why I fail to see the big point of Sugar. >> [...] >> a perfect example was the suggeation to make the sugarized >> activities use >> a standard file picker call so that it could go to the journal on >> the XO >> machine, or to a normal file selecteor window on other desktops. > > Your example indicates that you indeed fail to see the "big point" of > Sugar. The point is to not have a document-centric environment, but an > activity-centric one. Verbs rather than nouns. Yes it gets > philosophical here. And I'm not the best to explain it. > > Maybe an analogy helps. Many developers fail to see the "big point" of > object-oriented programming. For them, it's just that structs have > function pointers now, so what's the big deal? But that misses the > point completely, oo is all about decoupling and encapsulating > concepts, it's a philosophy rather than an implementation technique. > Or maybe the analogy does not help, depending on which camp one is in. > > Back to your example: even if all the world thinks applications with > file dialogs are "normal" that does not imply it has to be that way. > > "Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto > standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of > incomplete ideas." -- Alan Kay > > We do want to create something better than the status-quo. We may fail > for a gazillion of reasons, but we're trying anyway. Children deserve > the best, our future is in their hands. Bert, if you try and say that the entire world is wrong in how it writes software, and only software specificly written for the Sugar environment should be available to the children, you are doing them a great dis-service. it's fine to produce an alternate approach, but to bet-the-business on that approach with no fallback is betting that you know better then the rest of the world. it's possible that you are right, but not very likly. however if you allow for compatibility you have a fallback. many people have pointed out the limitations of the journal approach, and problems with not naming activites and files. yes it's easier to get started if you don't have to deal with confusing matters like directories, but as more documents are created a flat namespace for them will get overwelmed (be it a time-based journal, or a single layer home directory) you are optimizing for the beginner so much that once they have used the system for a short time it will no longer be suitable for them. dom't make the training wheels for beginners so ridgid that the kids can't remove them as they learn more. As for your arguments about object oriented programming vs functional programming, opject orientation has it's place, but there have been a lot of evils foisted on us over the years under the banner of Object Orientation. just becouse an idea has merit doesn't meant that any implementation of that idea is automaticaly good. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: very simple datastore reimplementation
On Fri, 9 May 2008, Eben Eliason wrote: > On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 10:15 AM, Jim Gettys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> FUSE is great, but... >> >> It means interoperability must be an explicit planned-in-advance action: >> if a datastore is already on a removable device in your pocket, and you >> need to access something on a foreign system, you are stuck unless there >> is some minimal level of human interpretability of the file system... > > You implicitly assume that the kids have managed to get DS formatted > files onto the external device here, though, which is something I > don't think we /need/ to do if we don't want to. I guess the case that > worries me here, though, is backup. I'm not sure it's prudent to > "decompress" and "recompress" with each backup and restore... may I suggest that you dig into git and see how it manages to avoid sending everything uncompressed when you do a pull. it sounds like a very similar problem and so similar solutions may apply. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: very simple datastore reimplementation
On Wed, 14 May 2008, Martin Langhoff wrote: > On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 12:23 PM, Jim Gettys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > Can we shift the behaviour we want to put in the FUSE layer into a >> > Sugar-level library that just uses POSIX underneath? > >> That's what olpcfs is doing: it exploits the POSIX interface as much as >> possible, and if you read Scott's document (as I was today), you'll see >> that > > Not sure if we are agreeing to the same thing ;-) I guess what I was > meaning to say is "can we put the logic in a library _instead of_ > putting it in a FUSE layer?". if we put everything into a library, then all tools that access the datastore need to use that library. if we put that same functionality into FUSE then normal tools do not need to be modified at all to access the files. while I can see the desire to not have to worry about having FUSE available to easily access the raw data, I think that it's far easier to do that then it is to modify every tool in the world to use the library to access the datastore instead. either way you have scenerios where it's hard to access the data (after all, if you are running on an OS that doesn't support FUSE, what makes you think that it will have all your custom tools), but in one case you have to re-write every program that accesses files, in the other you can use standard utilities. David Lang > As I read the Olpcfs document (few weeks ago now), what I understood > is that Olpcfs lays out a mostly POSIX-based convention, but uses a > FUSE layer to store things. > > Did I completely misunderstand it? > > cheers, > > > > m > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: very simple datastore reimplementation
On Wed, 14 May 2008, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 12:45 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> if we put everything into a library, then all tools that access the
>> datastore need to use that library.
>
> All we need is to state a simple enough convention ("put your files in
> *this* subdirectory"), and handle metadata from the journal.
assuming that none of the tools have any reason to do anything with the
metadata
>> if we put that same functionality into FUSE then normal tools do not need
>> to be modified at all to access the files.
>
> If we use FUSE, we also have to get the app to put the files in a
> given subdirectory. And we also have to handle the metadata outside
> (unless we chance the app).
>
> From Olpcfs's document we do win some versioning, but with some
> experience in SCMs I seriously think all we need is versioning on app
> exit, which we can do outside. If we really want to be hanging there
> on each close() we can use inotify() and friends, but you don't want
> to see what apps do to files to _that_ granularity. Really. Ever.
with the FUSE approach you have a lot more potential. since the access to
the filesystem is decoupled from the actual storage of the data it becomes
a very natural place to hide details such as offline file access
(retreiving data from a school server transparently), etc. dealing with
versioning is just the tip of the iceberg.
David Lang
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Re: [support-gang] [sugar] Microsoft
On Thu, 15 May 2008, Steve Holton wrote: On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 8:03 PM, Seth Woodworth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Let's look at this with a slightly different lens before we blow up on NN and Microsoft. What does this agreement equate to? And what are the alternatives to Microsoft? If the XO was running a completely closed source stack with no documentation on hardware, how would the Linux community feel? They would feel that they were being shut out and not allowed to run whatever software they wanted to or develop. This is something the linux community has speared hardware companies over for years. ...and to which the free software (linux) community would respond with a reverse engineering effort, at it's own (collective) expense, and rather quickly have a solution. If turnabout is fair play, let Microsoft adopt the free software community response as well. (When Cisco modified their WRT54G hardware so that Linux could no longer run, the response was to strip-down the gnu/linux stack even more until it would run again.) It's doubtful the free software community would do what Microsoft is demanding: asking the manufacturer to add 5-10% to the cost of the hardware to facilitate their efforts, nor would the free software community charge a $3.00 license fee for the use thereafter. I missed where the hardware was being changed and the cost going up to support this. what I read was that the boot firmware was being modified so that it could dual-boot into windows. please point me at the additional cost involved. David Lang If you're going to paint us all with the same brush, at least use the same paint, too. So as a fair practice I think it's clear that no special actions can ethically be made to prevent Windows or any other OS from running on the machine. So a Windows port for the XO isn't something that could have been preventative. Agree. But that's not what is being proposed. The agreement clearly includes a modification of the original principles (minimum cost for the devices) to provide a Microsoft handicap in this game. I would not call that "fair practice." Furthermore OLPC's sale of the XO hardware doesn't come with any restrictions for use. To not allow countries to install windows once they take ownership would be a completely unethical move given OLPC's commitments to freedom. OLPC has NEVER made any mention of preventing anyone (with a developer key) from installing whatever software they wanted to install on the XO, (which cannot be said of all computer system manufacturers cough*cough*XBOX*cough*cough) That's not what's being discussed here. Negroponte is taking proactive action to create a more favorable environment for Microsoft. Is OLPC making the same offer to Ubuntu? Debian? What about Red Hat? From scuttlebut about this deal and the way that I understand it, it's the equivalent of OLPC/Quanta selling the machines to Microsoft and they doing whatever they want with them. I'm not as clear on this point, but is there an ethical problem with selling the machine to Microsoft? Not at all. The problem appears to be that Microsoft is asking/demanding that the OLPC principles be modified in deference to Microsoft. Could OLPC ethically Not sell the machine to whoever wanted to buy them in large volumes? We must remember that hardware companies have invested a good deal of money on the expectation that they can at best break even on the XO production. They haven't reached nearly the levels of machines sold to satisfy these manufacturors. The hardware manufacturers are not loosing as much on the per-unit sales of these devices as they are gaining from the non-profit funded research and development which went into producing them. I was under the impression the hardware manufacturers weren't loosing anything on the per-unit sales. Do I want to see Windows on the XO? No, never, and god I hope not. Will Microsoft end up screwing us? Likely, given their history. It will not happen unless OLPC facilitates it. They appear to be doing just so. And doing so in part with the time and money I donated to the cause. I don't like to get angry, but Will this still give us the chance to put great hardware and content into the hands of children all over the world? Yes. Nope. It's over. But Linux and FOSS can't triumph over Microsoft by excluding them and by obfusication. We need to make a better product. I think you are under the impression that the 'education project' has been somehow hindered by efforts aimed at *preventing* Microsoft from contributing. I do not see that as the case. Speaking as one of those 'free software fundamentalists", I can say I long ago wrote-off Microsoft and pretty much ignore what they choose to do. (They know it, and that dismissiveness is one of the things that keeps Mi
Re: XP on OLPC - a contrarian view
On Fri, 16 May 2008, Walter Bender wrote: > There is an underlying assertion in your post (and much of the press > coverage of the Windows XP announcement) that the XO has not been > selling well to date. I would assert that 600K units in the first 6 > months is pretty good by most measures. It is a far cry from the 100M > units that Nicholas predicted, but so what? not to mention that the headaches of distribution and deployment are such that OLPC is having trouble with the volume it has sold, if it had 1000 times as many units they could not be deployed. David Lang > -walter > > On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Robert Myers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> There's a lot of discussion about whether OLPC is an education project, >> or a laptop project. Many folks here think that recent developments show >> that the balance is tipped to the latter rather than the former. >> >> It's neither. It's a _sales_ project. If people don't buy them, it >> doesn't matter how pure our hearts are. >> >> The folks that are buying them, Ministries of Education, governments, >> charities all have their own agendas. They do not necessarily line up >> with the agendas of our real customers - children and educators, or our >> own. If we have to give them some of what they want, so that we can get >> some of what we want to to the children, it's a fact of life. >> >> Selling constructionism is hard. The theory is attractive, but the data >> is _not_ compelling. The buyers are probably not convinced going in that >> it's something they want or need. OLPC would probably have an easier >> time selling $100 Apple ][ clones with drill and practice software than >> the XO as it stands. If the buyers demand a machine that can run >> Windows, tell them that the XO can run Windows. >> >> Look at the reaction of the general press to the announcement. It's >> overwhelmingly favorable. To outsiders this looks like the feature that >> can put the XO over. >> >> So put XP on as a dual boot. It won't fit in the flash, so buyers for >> the foreseeable future will still get Linux, Sugar, and all the OLPC >> activities. The Windows guys are talking about a 2G SD card to put XP on >> for that $7 hardware point. That won't fly. I had an Win98 machine with >> specs similar to an XO. It had a 8Gb drive. >> >> The buyer gets to tick Windows off his must have list. OLPC sells a >> machine with XP on a card, a crippled and storage limited XP that still >> doesn't run current first world productivity applications well. XOs get >> out, still loaded with Sugar. Children get them. OLPC gets revenue that >> can help its educational mission. What have we lost but some innocence? >> >> That being said, I believe Bill G is a prime example of 'Daniel >> Plainview' capitalism -- it's not enough for him to win, everyone else >> has to lose. So OLPC has to be careful. >> >> Bob >> ___ >> 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
Re: Frame Decision (was [sugar] OLPC priorities for Sugar in the August release)
On Sat, 17 May 2008, John R.Hogerhuis wrote: > Eben Eliason gmail.com> writes: >> Right. I think this is the biggest point of conflict between my own >> thoughts for solving the issues and those of the community providing >> feedback about it. I certainly take the comments regarding accidental >> invocation seriously, and seriously want to do what we can to >> eliminate sources of frustration. My inclination (I don't know for >> sure!) is that the desire to completely abolish cursor activation >> might be a treatment of the symptom and not the illness. That is, it >> could be that the trackpad plays a big role in the difficulties, and > > From watching my daughter I don't think there is anything going on with the > trackpad. It's just that being near the edge pops the frame which is the > design. > > One possible idea: rather than popping up the frame when near the edge, pop > up a > translucent overlay in key places that looks just like the keyboard frame key. > If the user clicks on it, then bring up the whole frame. it's definantly not just the trackpad, people using external mice have also had problems with this David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: SSH DSA logins on crank.
On Tue, 20 May 2008, Bernie Innocenti wrote: Chris Ball wrote: I've disabled logins with DSA keys on dev.laptop.org. Turns out that while your RSA key is only vulnerable if *created* on a weak Debian or Ubuntu machine, your DSA key is vulnerable if *used* on Debian/Ubuntu¹, due to DSA having a greater reliance on randomness. Hopefully this doesn't mean that the _private_ DSA key can be compromised if the _public_ key was copied on a Debian/Ubuntu machine. If something like this was even possible, as it would make the whole asymmetrical key scheme rather useless :-) the argument is that the PRNG used by buggy versions is predictable and so someone could observe the communication and brute-force attack the handshake, deciphering the key in the process. David Lang___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: SSH DSA logins on crank.
On Wed, 21 May 2008, Chris Ball wrote: > Hi, > > > So DSA is a no-go from now until the end of time? > > I'm open to debate on that, though many systems have made that decision; > debian.org and freedesktop.org are no longer allowing DSA logins, for > example. (I'm curious to hear reasons for wanting to use DSA keys, > now that the RSA patents have expired.) one reason would be that DSA is more secure then RSA. If you have a copy of the secret key from one end of the conversation and they are using RSA you can decrypt the communication, with DSA you cannot do so. There are several products on the market that take advantage of this fact and have you load your keys on a seperate box that then intercepts the communication to your webservers and decrypts the traffic (either inline or from a tap). With these products you have to configure your webservers to refuse DSA and only do RSA becouse with DSA they cannot decrypt the traffic. David Lang > > By the way, will remaining and new RSA keys be tested for bad > > randomness? > > Yes. We have the openssh-blacklist package installed, which contains > keyhashes of all possible weak keys and disallows logins using them. > > - Chris. > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: SSH DSA logins on crank.
On Wed, 21 May 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > On 5/21/08, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> one reason would be that DSA is more secure then RSA. If you have a copy >> of the secret key from one end of the conversation and they are using RSA >> you can decrypt the communication, with DSA you cannot do so. There are >> several products on the market that take advantage of this fact and have >> you load your keys on a seperate box that then intercepts the >> communication to your webservers and decrypts the traffic (either inline >> or from a tap). With these products you have to configure your webservers >> to refuse DSA and only do RSA becouse with DSA they cannot decrypt the >> traffic. > > Documentation, please? I think you've misunderstood something you read. sorry, I mixed up DSA/RSA keys with DH/RSA encryption. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO-2
On Thu, 22 May 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > There will almost certainly be a 'virtual XO-1' mode for > compatibility, where the lower touchscreen will display a keyboard and > touchpad like the XO-1. a touchscreen based keyboard is far inferior to a real keyboard. it's a reasonable stop-gap on something like a DVD player where the primary purpose of the machine is output, not input from the user. but on anything that's going to have a significant amount of input (and a computer used for school had better have a significant amount of input or it's not doing a good job) it's not good. >> The mock-ups didn't really reveal other features than the dual- >> touchscreen. Are there going to be speakers, camera, analog inputs/ >> outputs, USB, mesh-networking, fold-out antennae etc? > > I'm not on the hardware team, so this is just a wild guess: > a) speakers and camera almost certainly: Record is one of the > most-used applications on the XO-1. (The kids in Peru asked for a > flash; there are safety issues with that, though.) given how sensitive cameras are getting nowdays, could you get by with a few LED's as the 'flash'? > Some other features that have been discussed: > d) GPS (unknown whether this will be able to make the cost budget) > e) accelerometer (so that rotation is magic, not manual) make this able to be overriden. kids may way to lay on their side while useing the machine, having it rotate on them will be annoying. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] OLPC's bizarre behaviors
On Thu, 22 May 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > On 5/22/08, Bernie Innocenti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> e) A more broadly-focused "community news", agressively seeking out >>> and incorporating local as well as "offical OLPC" content >> >> Restoring the old weekly news posted to devel@ would be a good >> start. Perhaps even publishing the longer version that went by >> the name of "below the line" or something like that. > > Below the line was never posted to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Community news continues > to be published to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list, which is open > (as far as I know). I guess the only thing that's changed is that it > is no longer cc'ed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Should it be? I admit that I haven't looked for a while, but back when I received my G1G1 laptop the mailing list documentation seemed to indicate that devel@ was the primary place for development and development related news. from watching the mailing list I've seen comments referring to several other lists, but it's not clear what lists people should be subscribed to for what prupose (and what lists are supposed tob e publicly available and what ones aren't) but a weekly summary of development sounds like a good thing to post to the development list. it's only one messge a week to delete for people who are confident that they saw everything, and it's a good summary for people who may have been busy that week. and frankly, the weekly summaries have contained development information that never touched the development list, making them doubly useful (although it may be that the list should have been copied in the first place) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO-2
On Thu, 22 May 2008, Andres Salomon wrote: > On Thu, 22 May 2008 13:33:10 -0700 (PDT) > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> On Thu, 22 May 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: >> >>> There will almost certainly be a 'virtual XO-1' mode for >>> compatibility, where the lower touchscreen will display a keyboard >>> and touchpad like the XO-1. >> >> a touchscreen based keyboard is far inferior to a real keyboard. it's > > So plug a USB keyboard in if you're going to be doing some serious > typing. If you just need to type in a few lines, the virtual keyboard > would be fine. A USB keyboard gives far more flexibility than XO-1 > currently has in terms of languages, layout, cost, and manufacturers. > Being tied to a single keyboard/touchpad manufacturer makes everyone sad. > > http://www.pricewatch.com/keyboards/usb.htm shows ~$4 for a basic keyboard, > and bulk rates could probably do even better.. this makes it a $79 laptop, and I don't think it's really a good idea to say that every kid will carry the XO-2 and a keyboard everywhere. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO-2
On Thu, 22 May 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > On 5/22/08, Andres Salomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Thu, 22 May 2008 13:33:10 -0700 (PDT) >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> > a touchscreen based keyboard is far inferior to a real keyboard. it's >> would be fine. A USB keyboard gives far more flexibility than XO-1 >> currently has in terms of languages, layout, cost, and manufacturers. > > I should point out that a touchscreen keyboard is far superior to our > current keyboards for a number of languages: there are only so many > intricate glyphs you can fit legibly on a keycap. Further, a > touchscreen keyboard can actually show you both the uppercase *and* > lowercase glyphs (depending on your shift setting), which is far > better for language learners, who can get confused when the letter on > the screen doesn't look like the one they typed. > > A touchscreen keyboard also allows far easier customization for > non-Roman-script languages. See > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_writing_system > > Currently we have to manufacture a custom keyboard overlay for each > writing system supported. Regions where there is more than one > dominant writing system have no easy way to change their keyboards > when they shift languages. > > All this is just to say that "ease of typing English" and "keyfeel > like a Remington typewriter" are not the only items on our list of > desired keyboard features. it's not 'keyfeel like a remington typewriter', it's enough keyfeel to be able to touch-type. it doesn't take much, but I haven't seen any touchscreen that has any. I realize that kids aren't going to start off touch-typing, but if the keyboard layout is close to the standard for that country (which the core of it should be, even if there are extra keys) they should learn the skill sooner or later. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO-2
On Thu, 22 May 2008, Andres Salomon wrote: > Date: Thu, 22 May 2008 17:33:24 -0400 > From: Andres Salomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Cc: devel@lists.laptop.org > Subject: Re: XO-2 > > On Thu, 22 May 2008 14:07:26 -0700 (PDT) > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> On Thu, 22 May 2008, Andres Salomon wrote: >> >>> On Thu, 22 May 2008 13:33:10 -0700 (PDT) >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >>> >>>> On Thu, 22 May 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: >>>> >>>>> There will almost certainly be a 'virtual XO-1' mode for >>>>> compatibility, where the lower touchscreen will display a keyboard >>>>> and touchpad like the XO-1. >>>> >>>> a touchscreen based keyboard is far inferior to a real keyboard. >>>> it's >>> >>> So plug a USB keyboard in if you're going to be doing some serious >>> typing. If you just need to type in a few lines, the virtual >>> keyboard would be fine. A USB keyboard gives far more flexibility >>> than XO-1 currently has in terms of languages, layout, cost, and >>> manufacturers. Being tied to a single keyboard/touchpad >>> manufacturer makes everyone sad. >>> >>> http://www.pricewatch.com/keyboards/usb.htm shows ~$4 for a basic >>> keyboard, and bulk rates could probably do even better.. >> >> this makes it a $79 laptop, and I don't think it's really a good idea >> to say that every kid will carry the XO-2 and a keyboard everywhere. >> > > Of course not. Kids can leave the keyboards at school, and share them. > You're assuming that kids will even _want_ keyboards. Maybe they'll > want to use something equivalent to Dasher, or they'll find themselves > becoming quite proficient w/ the on-screen keyboard, or perhaps the > processor will be powerful enough to support speech-to-text software, or > a stylus combined with handwriting recognition software, > or maybe they'll prefer writing on paper and just use the XO for reading > ebooks (despite having access to all this wonderful QWERTY technology, > there are certain tasks that I prefer to use paper and whiteboards for), > or maybe they'll come up w/ some radically new input system that > we haven't enough thought of. people have been predicting the death of keybards for decades, it hasn't come close to happening yet, and I really don't expect it to happen in the next year or two. there are a lot of things that you want to enter text for that must be done on a computer, anything that involves text and collaberation for example (e-mail, etc) also, while you can choose to not use the computer for things like term papers, book reports, etc. not being able to do so is drasticly limiting the usefulness of the computer. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: XO-2
On Fri, 23 May 2008, Gary C Martin wrote: it's not 'keyfeel like a remington typewriter', it's enough keyfeel to be able to touch-type. it doesn't take much, but I haven't seen any touchscreen that has any. I realize that kids aren't going to start off touch-typing, but if the keyboard layout is close to the standard for that country (which the core of it should be, even if there are extra keys) they should learn the skill sooner or later. David Lang Touch type, blimey, I didn't think we were trying to rote train kids to be secretarial staff – didn't that go out with the arc? Well it should have. I've used computers with standard QWERTY keys for the last 26 years, perhaps the last 18 professionally, and I've never been able to touch type. I look at keys and use just a few fingers to hunt and peck, and I pay my bills just fine. I'm guessing I usually re-edit my texts way, way more than just write in one pass, so touch typing in a single pass is just a carpal accident waiting to happen. I hear 'who needs to touch type' from a lot of computer users, but those same users at different times say 'wow, how do you do that so fast' and frequently get distracted from what they are trying to do by the mechanics of entering the data. it's not just secretarial staff that benifits from typing instruction, it's anyone who uses a computer freqently. this is very similar to reading, yes you can get kids to where they can sound out each word and they can get through a book, but once they get to the point where they can stop paying attention to the mechanics of reading they can then start paying attention to the content of what they are reading (this is why speed reading classes frequently improve comprehention and retention as well as speed) ***Immediate visual and low frequency sound feedback (from the touch surface) would be a real good start, and BTW power saving is going to get even tougher... Also physical registration dimples for those that need them would be a very good plan for the HW mould, even if they are just bumps for the F and J positions. And I hope there is a cheap/safe solution to the scratch issue, iPhones and iPod Touches use glass (opinion). normal keyboards get away with FJ dimples becouse you can tell where your fingers are from the feel of the keys. putting raised outlines around the key locations would be a wonderful step forward from a flat touchscreen. the other problem with a flat touchscreen as a keyboard is that a typist wants to rest their hands on the keyboard and press to type something. trying to tell the difference between the hands sitting on the home row and a person trying to type something is going to be extremely difficult. Sorry David, I think it was the touch-type comment that set me off. If in 2010 we have affordable HW that works at least as well as the iPhone / iPod Touch (but with copy/paste), XO-2 will be a fair proposition, and having one of the dual screens devoted as a touch keyboard when needed will be a big UI improvement over current PDA/smart-phone type input. if you are comparing this to a cell-phone, you are probably right, it would be an improvement (although even with them tactile feedback makes a huge difference), but I don't agree that that should be the standard for comparison. David Lang___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Help regarding Sugar on Ubuntu
On Fri, 23 May 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > On 5/22/08, Waqas Toor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I have changed fullscreen mode of Xephyr into 800x600, but now how to >> change the size of frames and icons ? >> I have tried changing sugar-xo.gtkrc file but nothing happens, any clues? >> >> 2ndly, the activities inside this small screen do not show properly >> i.e they remain the actual full screen size >> how to make this environment fit into the size of 800x600 > > I'm not certain the Sugar will scale well to a screen that small. It > seems to scale to 1024x768 quite nicely, though. it should, that's approximatly the same effective resolution that the XO-1 gets with it's screen in color mode. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Bitfrost and dual-boot
On Thu, 29 May 2008, Jameson "Chema" Quinn wrote: I just had an IRC conversation with Benjamin Schwarz in which we talked about: He said that 3,4, and 5 have been considered more serious than 1 and 2; since they are impossible, there is little point doing 1 and 2. I disagreed. There is no way with current hardware to write-protect the NAND storage, and not too much space (<<512K) in the firmware storage. However, it would be possible to hash NAND or some subset thereof, and complain loudly on boot if it changed. not really, you would have to hash NAND on every shutdown. remember everything you do is in thr journal on NAND, and any change (including things like a file timestamp, including atime) will invalidate your hash. David Lang Blanking RAM on reboot, and keeping the private key in firmware instead of NAND are also possible. There is little point spending much energy on this issue until more of Bitfrost is in place. Once this becomes salient, it might be worth doing something along these lines. Also, it might be another good argument against dual-boot, especially with highly insecure OS's like Windows. On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 11:48 AM, Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Jameson "Chema" Quinn writes: Actually, the goals are more limited. Say you have dual-boot; OS 1 has bitfrost, OS 2 does not. Things OS 2 should not do: 1. Read private files from OS 1. ... 2. By writing to OS 1's file system, I do believe that, practically speaking, all of this is moot. Windows uses both SD card storage and the NAND flash storage. (NAND storage being what you'd hoped to protect) I did not hope to protect all of it. I hoped to use encryption and/or signatures to limit the kinds of damage that could be done. ___ 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: Bitfrost and dual-boot
On Thu, 29 May 2008, Jameson "Chema" Quinn wrote: > 2008/5/29 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > >> On Thu, 29 May 2008, Jameson "Chema" Quinn wrote: >> >> I just had an IRC conversation with Benjamin Schwarz in which we talked >>> about: >>> >>> He said that 3,4, and 5 have been considered more serious than 1 and 2; >>> since they are impossible, there is little point doing 1 and 2. I >>> disagreed. >>> >>> There is no way with current hardware to write-protect the NAND storage, >>> and >>> not too much space (<<512K) in the firmware storage. However, it would be >>> possible to hash NAND or some subset thereof, and complain loudly on boot >>> if >>> it changed. >>> >> >> not really, you would have to hash NAND on every shutdown. remember >> everything you do is in thr journal on NAND, and any change (including >> things like a file timestamp, including atime) will invalidate your hash. >> >> David Lang >> >> The idea would be to have a separate read-only volume on NAND, which > included everything executable as root (in other words, 90-100% of glucose > and ribose; the kernel, though, is already signed, so could be elsewhere). > Mounting this ro would prevent silly atime breakage, and there could be > strong protections to prevent anything NOT on this volume from being > considered "executable" by root. (Of course, this is not the whole story, as > there are uncountable ways for non-"executable" stuff to compromise > security; but it is a start. It would break any rpm's that only know how to > run as root - but these are broken anyway.) if you run everything as user olpc and user olpc can become root without a password, getting olpc is as good as getting root. so you have to check everything that could run as user olpc as well. not to mention the fact that you would need to audit every program to see what it will do with the data you feed it (if anything reads something from a file and then executes arbatrary commands based on it, you've lost) given that this would prevent anywone from writing or modifying any software on the machine, this conflicts quite explicitly with the goals of the project. the best you can do is to protect the firmware, and give the firmware a way to re-image the NAND so that you can be sure of recovering from any corruption. you are not going to be able to prevent it. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Bitfrost and dual-boot
On Thu, 29 May 2008, Jameson "Chema" Quinn wrote: > >> if you run everything as user olpc and user olpc can become root without a >> password, getting olpc is as good as getting root. > > > An arbitrary process running as user olpc should not be able to get root. My > impression is that it cannot, currently; am I wrong? the terminal activity can, and if it can why can't everything else use the same mechanism? and there's always sudo /bin/sh available >> >> not to mention the fact that you would need to audit every program to see >> what it will do with the data you feed it (if anything reads something from >> a file and then executes arbatrary commands based on it, you've lost) >> > > If it switches to run as another user (or otherwise reduces its own > destructive capabilities) before doing so, not so. This is the principle > that Bitfrost is built on: ways to run untrusted code. > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [OLPC Security] Bitfrost and dual-boot
On Thu, 29 May 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Michael Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 05:53:49PM -0400, Michael Stone wrote: >>> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 02:58:07PM -0600, Jameson Chema Quinn wrote: >>> In recent builds, any process running as user OLPC can execute code as >>> uid 0 via the setuid-0 user-olpc-executable /usr/bin/sudo. >> >> A small correction: in recent builds, /bin/su is 04550 root/wheel, user >> olpc is a member of wheel, and /usr/bin/sudo is a thin wrapper around >> /bin/su. > > And to elaborate: the idea is that untrusted code should not be > running as the 'olpc' user: 'olpc' is a trusted account. Activities > run/should be running as their own unique UUIDs, which are isolated > from the olpc account. so a python program written by the owner of the laptop won't run as user olpc? what if they write it in the terminal activity using vi? David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Autoreinstallation image is not signed.
On Tue, 3 Jun 2008, Robert Myers wrote: > Chris, > >> > That said, there's a separate bug in trac about X not starting when >> > the NAND flash is full. I'm not sure if that's what you're >> > referring to as "not booting" or not, but we should fix that, too. >> >> Specifically, http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7125. >> >> What do people think of the straw man in that ticket? Should we >> implement it? >> > > >Straw man from ticket> > > We're probably going to see this a lot in the field. It might be worth > having some recovery logic. Here's a straw-man: if disk is full at boot, > delete the single largest journal entry, iterate until disk is not full > anymore. > > > Is there anything that can be thrown away before we start scragging the > user's work? Browser caches, or similar things? > > How much space is needed for a successful boot anyways? Maybe there > ought to be a dummy file stored just for the purpose of being thrown > away in an emergency. > > Or throw away least recently used non-core activities, which hopefully > could easily be reloaded from the web or a teacher's USB stick. > > I'd think that throwing away the child's work would be one of the last > things we'd want to do. especially the largest piece of work. there are journal entries that don't store any useful info other then 'this app was used'. those should all be thrown away before any user-generated content is trashed. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
what about having network connections inhibit sleep?
I just attempted to do an upgrade of one of my machines, and I ran into the problem that if I just kicked off the upgrade and let it sit, it went to sleep in the middle and died. what do people think about the idea of making the existance of established TCP connections inhibit sleep? unfortunantly I don't know exactly what build was on this machine (I loaned it out to a project at USC and they re-imaged it) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: what about having network connections inhibit sleep?
On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 7:12 PM, John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> what do people think about the idea of making the existance of established >>> TCP connections inhibit sleep? >> >> What release are you running? Auto-suspend isn't enabled in production >> releases. where do I go to discover this? when I handed the machines over for the project one was running a recent (april/may right before the activities were being removed) joyride, and the other was as shipped in december. I think they re-flashed both machines, but I'm not sure what with. I got one to upgrade by hitting the arrow keys every couple of min, but I haven't done the other yet (I want to do it tomorrow, I've got a couple of nieces I'm meeting for the weekend that I want to let loose on them) so I can look at it and try things >> Joyride should be awakened from suspend by any received unicast (TCP) packet, >> so I'm not sure why you saw it hang in mid-download, if the update was one >> long >> continuous TCP download. But if it's rsync, maybe it's driven from the >> client >> end (and if the client suspends, the server never sends anything further). > > olpc-update should be touching /etc/inhibit-suspend before it does its > work, so it should not be sleeping. If it does, and your build was > not ancient, it's a bug and I'd like to know more. the machine had a fully charged battery and was plugged into external power, it got to the step where it was doing the rsync, and then a few min later the screen was off. I hit a key and it was still in the rsync and did not recover. >> The real fix is to only force a suspend when the kernel knows no >> process is scheduled to run now or soon, and ato waken in less than a >> whole second. We're slowly working on those issues. If we keep >> kludging things like TCP, there's never the time to put in the real fixes. > > Yes. Better integration of suspend and the kernel scheduler is > discussed near the end of > http://download.laptop.org/content/conf/20080403-olpc-mini-conf/Power/ > but I don't think we've made any measurable progress on it since then. > Dilinger has been resyncing us with upstream, and deepak just started > full-time OLPC work. We could use help! > --scott I don't think that a TCP session waiting for data is nessasarily going to schedule anything within any arbatrary 60 second block so the scheduling detection isn't good enough (especially if going to sleep means that you miss the reception of the packet and have to depend on the retry algorithm re-sending it in one of the windows where you wake up) if wake-on-lan works for packets of an existing TCP session, then sleeping (lightly) while waiting is fine. otherwise an established TCP session is a good indication that this isn't a good time to auto-sleep. if activities need to override this it should be by doing something to tell the systems that it doesn't care about the session being brokern. that way unmodified apps won't break unexpectedly (they will prevent the machine from sleeping too soundly and increase power useage, but I think that's a muchmore graceful failure mode) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: what about having network connections inhibit sleep?
On Thu, 5 Jun 2008, Richard A. Smith wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: >> >>> On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 7:12 PM, John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>>> what do people think about the idea of making the existance of >>>>> established >>>>> TCP connections inhibit sleep? >>>> What release are you running? Auto-suspend isn't enabled in production >>>> releases. >> >> where do I go to discover this? >> >> when I handed the machines over for the project one was running a recent >> (april/may right before the activities were being removed) joyride, and the >> other was as shipped in december. I think they re-flashed both machines, >> but I'm not sure what with. > > When the laptop suspends the power LED blinks. Is your power LED solid or > blinking? it was blinking. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [OLPC Security] G1G1: Security, to enable or disable...
On Thu, 5 Jun 2008, Kim Quirk wrote: > 1 - I thought requiring signed images was part of our bitfrost > security. Doesn't it provide some protection from malicious images? > Assuming we get to the point where upgrading is an easy click from the > G1G1 machine, then we want to be sure that people don't mistakenly > load non-signed images. If you are not a developer; doesn't this add a > level of protection that we want for 90% of G1G1 recipients? how about an option to install a 'tester key' that would let a machine download test builds that are then signed by a different key then the production builds. by comparison a developer key would let them install anything. > 2 - I believe our support issues will go up significantly as people > who have little or no experience are encouraged to download all sorts > of untested builds with no easy way to get back to a working system. > To feel better about the support issues, I would like the one-button > push that restores a laptop to factory default. Actually walking > people through a cleaninstall is a very time-consuming process right > now. there is currently a one button reboot to the prior version, so people wiil only need to do a cleaninstall if they install two broken builds in a row, _and_ can't use either build to install a good build (which is unlikely becouse they used the older one to install the one after that, so they should be able to use that older one to install a working build) David Lang > Finally, I agree with Scott, that the easiest thing we can do in the > short term is to make the 'get a developer key' more prominent for > those who want to find it. I would really like a brief note about how > they should first be familiar with how to do a factory cleaninstall > before they unprotect their machine. > > Kim > > > On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 9:50 PM, C. Scott Ananian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 9:20 PM, reynt0 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> I also want to be able to examine the XO as thoroughly as >>> possible from my own (USA, educated, experienced, and so >>> on) perspective. In that regard, FWIW I found the various >>> infos I later could find from olpc a bit unclear or even >>> seeming at first glance inconsistent about how usable a >>> G1G1 XO could be as-delivered. My present understanding >>> is that I will need a developer's key, and that I can get >>> one by asking when I'm ready to (though I'm not sure if >>> I would be able to if I were a non-compsci G1G1), tho I >>> am willing to accept that this understanding may be wrong. >> >> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developer_key >> >> I would like to see the link for requesting a developer key made much >> more prominent in the library. (I've cc'ed SJ specifically to see if >> he can make that happen for me.) >> --scott >> >> -- >> ( http://cscott.net/ ) >> ___ >> Devel mailing list >> Devel@lists.laptop.org >> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel >> > ___ > Devel mailing list > Devel@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: what about having network connections inhibit sleep?
On Thu, 5 Jun 2008, Morgan Collett wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 6:42 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Wed, 4 Jun 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: >> >>> On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 7:12 PM, John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>>> what do people think about the idea of making the existance of established >>>>> TCP connections inhibit sleep? >>>> >>>> What release are you running? Auto-suspend isn't enabled in production >>>> releases. >> >> where do I go to discover this? >> >> when I handed the machines over for the project one was running a recent >> (april/may right before the activities were being removed) joyride, and >> the other was as shipped in december. I think they re-flashed both >> machines, but I'm not sure what with. > > cat /etc/issue tells you the build number. the one I didn't upgrade is build 656, the one that I had problems with (when booted with the o gamekey held down also shows build 656 (which I know didn't have auto-suspend enabled) both with kernel 2.6.22.20071231*3a269 so now I'm as puzzled as you are. > FWIW I always use verbose for olpc-update: > > sudo olpc-update -fvvr joyride-2013 > > That shows the exact progress of the rsync. (The r is for reboot after > updating.) thanks, I hadn't seen anything about flags for olpc-update before. the hotel I'm staying in has wired internet acces not wireless like I expected. I can either upgrade the machines via USB or I can setup my linux laptop to act as a gateway (assuming I can get everything talking in ad-hoc mode) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
speed reading activity?
one of the things that got me started reading well was that at an early age I went to a school that had a speed reading activity. it had light cardstock sheets that you ran through a machine that moved them at the appropriate speed through a ~4-5 line window and the student would take a quiz on what they just read. I've been digging a little bit, but not finding anything like this available for the XO. has anyone seen anything like this? if so could you point me at it? David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: speed reading activity?
On Sat, 7 Jun 2008, Urko Fernandez wrote: > There seems to be two problems for a speed reading activity in the XO. > The first is that some of those technologies are patent encumbered, but > it seems that the main technology or concept behind speed reading, > called rapid serial visual presentation, it's either patent free or free > of royalties. So writing an activity based on RSVP could be feasible. the approach that I used was over 30 years ago, so if there is a patent on it it's either expired or invalid due to prior art. > The second problem could be that this can be a battery drainer, the > screen is constantly swapping words. I've written a flashcard activity*, > and I've implemented a way to see the answer using RSVP; don't have a > real XO (I'm developing using sugar-jhbuild under Ubuntu) but I could > modify what I've coded to do a test activity to see how much battery > reading a test that way consumes. yes, it will prevent the system from going to sleet, but the current versions of the software can't put the system to sleep while keeping the screen running anyway, so it's not a short-term problem it will eat up a little cpu to scroll the screen, but it should't be that bad (and in any case can be deemed an accdeptable trade-off for the capability. > If speed reading activity is to be written, you could also take > advantage of the screen size, because RSVP seems to be suited for small > screens, like mobile phones and PDAs and the rest of the XO's screen > could be used someway or another. what I'm envisioning is the ability to define a window size (which would be much smaller then the XO screen size in most cases), the scroll rate, and the font size. it would then smoothly scroll the text through the window and then quiz the student for comprehention and calculate a wpm score (raw speed - penalties for missing comprehention questions) this seems such a trivial (but useful) that I'm having trouble beliving that nobody has one already written. David Lang > Cheers, > > Urko > > *http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Assimilate > > On Sat, 2008-06-07 at 06:32 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> one of the things that got me started reading well was that at an early >> age I went to a school that had a speed reading activity. it had light >> cardstock sheets that you ran through a machine that moved them at the >> appropriate speed through a ~4-5 line window and the student would take a >> quiz on what they just read. >> >> I've been digging a little bit, but not finding anything like this >> available for the XO. >> >> has anyone seen anything like this? if so could you point me at it? >> >> David Lang >> ___ >> 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: New, more realistic multi-hop network testbed
On Sun, 8 Jun 2008, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > To clarify, there are at least seven different directions to follow here: > a) telepathy-based collaboration on 802.11g networks > b) telepathy-with-cerebro-backend collaboration on 802.11g networks > c) cerebro-based collaboration in 802.11g networks. > d) 802.11s meshing in dense networks > e) 802.11s meshing in sparse (wide-area) networks > f) 802.11s Mesh Portal Point functionality (bridging a school 802.11g > network to a neighborhood 802.11s network) > g) OLSRd wide-area meshing on an 802.11g sparse (wide-area) network > h) plain ol' 802.11g in 100+ node schools one more (which may be considered a varient of d) i) 802.11s meshing in bad RF environments this is where there are a small number of XO machines (so you don't have the 802.11s traffic issues), but where there are a large number of other 802.11 devices in the area a unofficial testbed for this would be to take a half dozen XO machines to a tech conference and try to run them. David Lang > Let me try to summarize current status on a few of these: > a) what we're currently deploying. believed working for ~20 > machines, but there are problem reports from the field. > b) collabora did some work to abstract out avahi, in theory the > groundwork is present for a cerebro backend. > c) Poly has demonstrated this with 70 laptops (limited only by the > size of his testbed); would require modification of activities. > d) nortel and our old mesh testbed looked at this, but I believe > Michalis' current opinion is that we should be using APs in this > scenario. So, not important? > e) No one looking at this. Poly has proposed a testbed for this. > f) yanni is looking at this? No test bed yet. > g) demonstrated in vienna, berlin, and athens with 600+, 800+, and > ~2000 nodes. Tradeoff: we can't route w/ CPU power turned off; > doesn't make progress towards getting 802.11s working for gen2, > probably requires further tuning for optimal performance in dense > networks. > h) Ricardo looking at this? No test bed that I know of. We know that > tweaks are required to get any 802.11x standard to work in a dense > scenario: media access protocols, probe request/response, beacon > tuning, etc. Marvell's done some of this tuning already, but we don't > have any local resources validating/verifying behavior. > > Which should we invest in? Which should we invest in most heavily? > Let the politicking commence. > --scott > > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Localization] [Fwd: Re: #7116 NORM Never A: Possible European G1G1 program needs appropriate keyboards]
On Mon, 9 Jun 2008, Chris Leonard wrote: > >> >> What about to delivery plain intn'l machines with default keyboard and >> then set up some stocks of nationalized keyboards (FR, DE, IT, GR, etc.. ) >> and offer them at a price that's commisurated to the production cost of the >> keyboard itself (and the planned numbers), not burdening at all XO >> production? >> > > I sincerely hope the OLPC has learned some lessons from the first G1G1 > program. While it seems clear enough that the logistics of providing a > "factory-localized" laptop are very likely insurmountable, it also seems > clear that shipping only US International keyboard to an EU-focused G1G1 > program will NOT be well received and will only bring accusations of > cultural and linguistic imperialism and the like to an organization that > should be earning praise for it's efforts to make computing in local > languages possible. by screaming that any EU available G1G1 program must have many different keyboards available or OLPC will be condemmed, all you are doing is making sure that future G1G1 programs are not made available in europe. the logistics of getting the proper keyboards don't change significantly between having the local keybard installed in the machine, or having it encosed in the box (in fact, I suspect that it would be cheaper to install it, putting it in the box is going to be a manual process) if you can find a supplier to make the keybard skins, and OLPC can ship a single keyboard, with the people receiving the machines ordering the keybards and installing them themselves you may then have something. but demanding that OLPC make them available in more places, and at the same time threatening them unless they provide dozens of localized versions, is not productive. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: How USB's are enumerated on the XO
On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, K. K. Subramaniam wrote: > On Tuesday 24 Jun 2008 5:18:52 pm shivaprasad javali wrote: >> The USB device that I am connecting is not a storage drive. so there is no >> way I can copy a file containing a unique UUID on the device. I just need >> one unique parameter for the device when it is connected to the system. > Have you tried using /sys/bus/usb/devices/../dev? This gives the major/minor > number of the attached device. The major number will be that of the usb > driver, but the minor number will be unique. unique, but not repeatable (reboot and plug the two devices in in the reverse order and the numbers will be swapped) I think he's trying to find a way to identify which software device is which hardware device. unfortunantly with USB this is a hard thing to do. udev does lots of tricks to try and do this job, but with some devices it's just not possible. I've been watching this conversation, and I don't think that there's any way to look at the software device and say 'this is the one plugged into the USB slot on the left side' or 'this is the one plugged into the top USB slot on the right side', which it sounds like is what the OP is trying to do. if the USB device doesn't provide any unique info to the system all you can do is say 'this is the first one that was plugged in' on some desktop systems you have multiple USB busses, so you can say 'this device was plugged into one of the USB slots for bus#1' but the XO laptops only have one USB bus. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository
On Wed, 25 Jun 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote: > Am 24.06.2008 um 23:12 schrieb Frank Ch. Eigler: > >> The gist of the argument is that one can't currently know what's >> really inside an etoys image, except beyond what it itself tells us, > > This is indeed a valid concern. As I wrote before, an external tool > could be written to examine what exactly is in the image. > >> and cannot even be rebuilt from the sources it claims to contain. > > > "even be rebuilt from the sources" ... why would you want to do that? > It could be done, as well as you could tear down the Empire State > building and rebuild it from scratch, but why? leaving aside all the opensource arguments and just looking at it from a purely pragmatic point of view: becouse paranoid people want to be able to verify that what's in the blob is really what it claims to be. and we need to support these paranoid people becouse there are people who really are out to get us, and the small number of paranoid people protect us all. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository
On Thu, 26 Jun 2008, Edward Cherlin wrote: > I think that the result of all this is that we can produce all of the > C (or some other language, maybe CLOS) and Smalltalk source files that > Debian wants (even if we think of the C as compiler output, we don't > have to bother them with that interpretation.) One of the compilers > translates a subset of Smalltalk to C, but I gather that other > compilers can translate all of Smalltalk/Squeak/Etoys/what you like to > their chosen target language. As I understand it, Debian wants to see > a commented set of semi-human-readable code in ASCII files (although > we can discuss using Unicode source) together with various multimedia > files in known open formats, from all of which an Etoys image can be > constructed, so far so good > and they don't care how we generate them I think you are wrong here > , or what mix of > languages we use, as long as there are Free/Open Source compilers and > any other needed apparatus for them. this part is again correct. > I gather that all of this can be done by a fairly trivial Smalltalk > program. Would somebody write it and post it, and would somebody run > it and make the results available? Then if Albert agrees we've done > it, we can invite Debian to examine it, and get back to work. if you send them C that's generated and call that your source, it's the same thing as writing your code in C and sending assembler as your 'source' (assuming there was a cpu independant assembler) breaking out the .source and .changes files that have been referred to in this thread and having the build process create the resulting blob that you use would probably be acceptable (and far more useful as people can then send out patches to those files) David Lang > On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Yoshiki Ohshima <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> At Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:47:11 -0700, >> Edward Cherlin wrote: >>> >>> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>> I'm glad that Debian didn't break the rules for etoys. >>>> You're claiming to be open source, yet you've LOST the >>>> source code decades ago. >>> >>> This turns out not to be the case. All of the source code for the >>> parts of Etoys written in Squeak/Smalltalk is in the image. >> >> ... is in .sources and .changes and the image holds the compiled >> results of them and each of these compiled results hold a file offset >> of the source chunk. >> >>> The .sources file and .changes file contain all of this code nicely >>> formatted. >> >> Yes. >> >>> The core of Smalltalk, the part not written in Smalltalk, >>> is also available in both source and in binary parts of the usual >>> image. The usual tools for handling all of this are in >>> Smalltalk/Squeak. Nothing prevents you from rewriting them in C, >>> Python, or what you like. >> >> Oh, yes. Speaking of which, Dan did a version in Java: >> >> http://news.squeak.org/2008/06/21/jsqueak-smalltalk-interpreter-written-in-java/ >> >>> Now, for the rest of you, let's see what we can produce, to make >>> Albert happy, but more importantly Debian. We have .sources and >>> .changes. Albert and Debian would like to see source for the VM, in >>> the manner of gst, and the binary core of Smalltalk that goes with it. >>> What can we show them, and what would it take to show them the rest? >>> "The Squeak system includes code for generating a new version of the >>> virtual machine (VM) on which it runs. It also includes a VM simulator >>> written in itself (Squeak). For this reason, it is easily ported." >>> What's missing? Is there anything in bytecode without Smalltalk >>> source? It doesn't seem so. The primitives like memory management and >>> BitBlockTransfer get translated to C and compiled along with the VM. >>> Is that right? >> >> Yes. >> >> A sidenote. The repository on squeakvm.org seems is a tree of .c and >> .h source files and you can compile it by gcc to produce the VM. >> However, many of these files are not the "sources" in a strict sense; >> These .c and .h files are target files from another phase. >> >> It is almost the same manner as Scheme48 ships scheme48vm.c. If >> (only if) somebody claims that Squeak's way of doing is wrong, that >> person should also claim that Scheme48 should be taken out from >> Debian. >> >>> "Smalltalk/X [Gitt95] and SPiCE [YaDo95] generate C code from pr
Re: etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository
programs being worked on, and not accept the C code as being the source. it sounds to me as if that is the same request being made of the etoys people (and if it's not it should be). it doesn't mater what language the individual pieces are in (for the python analogy above, the editor could be a C-based thing that gets loaded into the python interpreter as a module), what matters is sperating the various pieces cleanly into their various pieces (the readable, commented code you refer to above) David Lang >> David Lang >> >>> On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Yoshiki Ohshima <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>> wrote: >>>> >>>> At Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:47:11 -0700, >>>> Edward Cherlin wrote: >>>>> >>>>> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 11:04 AM, Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>>>> wrote: >>>>>> >>>>>> I'm glad that Debian didn't break the rules for etoys. >>>>>> You're claiming to be open source, yet you've LOST the >>>>>> source code decades ago. >>>>> >>>>> This turns out not to be the case. All of the source code for the >>>>> parts of Etoys written in Squeak/Smalltalk is in the image. >>>> >>>> ... is in .sources and .changes and the image holds the compiled >>>> results of them and each of these compiled results hold a file offset >>>> of the source chunk. >>>> >>>>> The .sources file and .changes file contain all of this code nicely >>>>> formatted. >>>> >>>> Yes. >>>> >>>>> The core of Smalltalk, the part not written in Smalltalk, >>>>> is also available in both source and in binary parts of the usual >>>>> image. The usual tools for handling all of this are in >>>>> Smalltalk/Squeak. Nothing prevents you from rewriting them in C, >>>>> Python, or what you like. >>>> >>>> Oh, yes. Speaking of which, Dan did a version in Java: >>>> >>>> >>>> http://news.squeak.org/2008/06/21/jsqueak-smalltalk-interpreter-written-in-java/ >>>> >>>>> Now, for the rest of you, let's see what we can produce, to make >>>>> Albert happy, but more importantly Debian. We have .sources and >>>>> .changes. Albert and Debian would like to see source for the VM, in >>>>> the manner of gst, and the binary core of Smalltalk that goes with it. >>>>> What can we show them, and what would it take to show them the rest? >>>>> "The Squeak system includes code for generating a new version of the >>>>> virtual machine (VM) on which it runs. It also includes a VM simulator >>>>> written in itself (Squeak). For this reason, it is easily ported." >>>>> What's missing? Is there anything in bytecode without Smalltalk >>>>> source? It doesn't seem so. The primitives like memory management and >>>>> BitBlockTransfer get translated to C and compiled along with the VM. >>>>> Is that right? >>>> >>>> Yes. >>>> >>>> A sidenote. The repository on squeakvm.org seems is a tree of .c and >>>> .h source files and you can compile it by gcc to produce the VM. >>>> However, many of these files are not the "sources" in a strict sense; >>>> These .c and .h files are target files from another phase. >>>> >>>> It is almost the same manner as Scheme48 ships scheme48vm.c. If >>>> (only if) somebody claims that Squeak's way of doing is wrong, that >>>> person should also claim that Scheme48 should be taken out from >>>> Debian. >>>> >>>>> "Smalltalk/X [Gitt95] and SPiCE [YaDo95] generate C code from programs >>>>> using the full range of Smalltalk semantics, including blocks." >>>>> http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/squeak/oopsla_squeak.html, Related Work. >>>>> So apparently we can translate all of the Smalltalk tools for creating >>>>> code files and rebuilding an image to C source, and we can presumably >>>>> preserve the original comments from the Smalltalk. >>>> >>>> I'm not sure what you mean by "code files" and "an image to C source". >>>> >>>>> Since the result was a complete Squeak >>>>> image with all Smalltalk source code, and C source where needed, is >>>
Re: Running regular X11 apps
On Fri, 27 Jun 2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: > On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:28 AM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> From what I gathered from my experiments, I think it makes sense for >> us to go with Metacity + maximus. That would require no code changes >> in metacity and minor changes in sugar. If we want to support activity >> icons though, we would probably require some more code changes in >> sugar. > > Something that I wonder about the maximus approach... If you maximize > the window when it's already mapped, won't you get a visible redraw? > > The advantage of the maximus approach to me is that you get > applications like firefox to run fullscreen without code changes. for firefox, wouldn't running it in kiosk mode on it's own desktop work without code changes and without having to do the backdoor trickery that has been done up till now? David Lang > Though stuff like gimp or the gnome calculator (try to maximize it on > your desktop) will break. > > Marco > ___ > 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: Running regular X11 apps
On Fri, 27 Jun 2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: > On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 10:38 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Fri, 27 Jun 2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: >> >>> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:28 AM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>> wrote: >>>> >>>> From what I gathered from my experiments, I think it makes sense for >>>> us to go with Metacity + maximus. That would require no code changes >>>> in metacity and minor changes in sugar. If we want to support activity >>>> icons though, we would probably require some more code changes in >>>> sugar. >>> >>> Something that I wonder about the maximus approach... If you maximize >>> the window when it's already mapped, won't you get a visible redraw? >>> >>> The advantage of the maximus approach to me is that you get >>> applications like firefox to run fullscreen without code changes. >> >> for firefox, wouldn't running it in kiosk mode on it's own desktop work >> without code changes and without having to do the backdoor trickery that has >> been done up till now? > > I'm not familiar with firefox kiosk mode, but I suppose it would. > Though there are many other applications which would make more sense > to run fullscreen with no decoration, and which doesn't have a kiosk > mode. I'm looking for the cheap wins first ;-) when people talk about different desktops, doesn't this also imply different window managers for each one? if this is the case, then it should be fairly simple to define a window manager that defaults to opening the app fullscreen and has minimal (or non-existant) decorations on the window. this wouldn't require changing any code on any apps, just selecting the right window manager for that desktop (if the app never opens secondary windows it doesn't need any decorations, if it does, it may need some or all of the traditional decorations) David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Running regular X11 apps
On Fri, 27 Jun 2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote: > On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 11:12 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I'm looking for the cheap wins first ;-) >> >> when people talk about different desktops, doesn't this also imply different >> window managers for each one? if this is the case, then it should be fairly >> simple to define a window manager that defaults to opening the app >> fullscreen and has minimal (or non-existant) decorations on the window. > > Nope, there would still be a single window manager. > >> this wouldn't require changing any code on any apps, just selecting the >> right window manager for that desktop (if the app never opens secondary >> windows it doesn't need any decorations, if it does, it may need some or all >> of the traditional decorations) > > There are ways we can implement different behavior for different > windows (for example the maximus approach could be extended to do so). > The problem is, how do we know which windows should be displayed > fullscreen (say the firefox or the gedit one) and which not (the > gimp)? afaik there is no window hint which could help us there... I don't know of any hints that would provide a concete answer, but i can think of several things off the top of my head that could be used as heristics. among them what is the name of the program (lookup) what size is the requested window (if it's a 80x25 screen or larger maximize it, if it's small don't) is this the first window that's being opened for this program (if so maximize) what is the parent of this program (if the parent is our program launcher maximize). this may be combined with the 'first window' logic is this the first window that's being opened on this desktop (if so maximize) I am not remembering at the moment, but do programs ever ask for a window and not specify it's size? (if so it's probably the main window of the program, maximize it) while no heristics are perfect, I think ones can be figured out that are very good, and if you have a lookup table to let you specify things (and can use the frame button to pull up a menu to let you override the defaults and make an entry for this program) It may be good enough to be useable. David Lang ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: OLPC-Update + RPMs WAS:Re: OLPC XO Opera browser as Sugar activity
On Fri, 27 Jun 2008, Ian Daniher wrote: > What's the logic for having updates erase all manually installed RPMs? the updates aren't package based, they are snapshot based. as a result when you apply an update it alters everything outside of /home. when you have a very standardized system image this can end up being far more efficiant to do then a package-based approach (much faster, using less bandwidth, less CPU, and less disk space) It can also handle more drastic changes as it doesn't care what was in place before. with the snapshot based approach you can upgrade from a OLPC build to a debian build to a ubuntu build using exactly the same steps (and taking the same time) as going from OLPC build 1 to OLPC build 1.0.1 David Lang > A couple of Support-Gangers and myself were talking about ways to remedy > this. > We came up with the following: > > - alias "rpm -i $FILE" to "rpm -i $FILE & cp FILE $HOME/.rpms$/FILE" with > a script on update that runs "rpm -i $HOME/.rpms/*" > - have a script that constantly monitors $HOME/.bash_history for "yum > install $PROGRAM" formatted files, then echos the name of $PROGRAM to > $HOME/.rpms/installed, but removes it from that list if/when it sees "yum > remove $PROGRAM" On update, yum install $(cat $HOME/.rpms/installed) is run. > - rpm -qa > $HOME/.rpms/clean could be run on install > - rpm -qa > $HOME/.rpms/custom could be run before update > - a simple file compare program (python or python-parsed diff output) > would be used to generate a file with which yum install $(cat $FILE) could > be used > > thoughts? > > ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
