special types for fire safety and other reasons.
These are called "plenum rated". Their special property is that when
they burn (e.g. when the building catches fire), they don't release
toxic gases that will hurt the people/kids who are breathing the air
nearby.
John Gilmore
For important systems, I think a USB hard drive will be a better
choice than an empty enclosure.
They are also often cheaper than a new empty enclosure and a new hard
drive.
Indeed, buying a brand-name external USB2/3 hard drive, which is
invariably implemented as a SATA drive in an
For important systems, I think a USB hard drive will be a better
choice than an empty enclosure.
They are also often cheaper than a new empty enclosure and a new hard
drive.
Indeed, buying a brand-name external USB2/3 hard drive, which is
invariably implemented as a SATA drive in an
We are talking of end users systems, how many kids will add a cron task?
I was more concerned with other Fedora packages that insert cron jobs
when they are installed. But if Fedora gets the dependencies right,
rpm would install and run cron at the same time the package that needs
cron is
As a simple step in reducing base system footprint a little, I'm
thinking of removing cron in 13.2.0.
The 2 current users of cron (ds-backup and olpc-update-query) will be
moved to systemd timer units which have equivalent functionality.
The classic Unix interface for starting processes
Wad said:
Please don't redistribute secure laptops --- OLPC's policy since
early 2009 has been to deprecate the security system. The
exceptions have been deployments large enough to have dedicated
support staff capable of handling their own keys.
Richard said:
That policy is fine but
(1) If powerd fails when the clock is set to before the Unix epoch,
powerd is buggy, and this bug should be ticketed and fixed.
That bug is independent of the situation that causes the clock to get
set that way (which may well be another bug in another component, which
would deserve another
I'm way outside the OLPC Fedora development processes nowadays, which
is why I'm asking what may be a dumb question.
The Fedora 18 release is finally out for x86 and x64. There's a beta
for ARM that supports half a dozen ARM systems. Oddly, in my mind,
OLPC is not one of them. It's odd
In that case, this machine without that card might be an option
for people who want laptops they can use in freedom.
They would need to get an external USB network device.
Yes, or they could even get a different SDIO network device, if they
can find one that's free and that has a compatible
implemented using Microsoft technologies. However=2C this year we are goin=
g to reimplement it using cross-platform technologies so that it can also b=
e used under Linux.
Have you heard of the Squid caching proxy for the Web? Lots of people
at the slow end of an Internet connection use it,
How can an HTML5 app be closed source ? It may not
be free, and you may not be able to redistribute it, but it is HTML...
It's a scam. It is built upon the open source library JSXGraph
(which is LGPL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsxgraph/ ), but
sketchometry itself is proprietary (only
On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Jose Prous josepr...@gmail.com wrote:
Yes it's a x86 machine, I guess that is the problem. Thanks.
Glad that we found the reason. We should add an explicit check in OOB
that gives you a more useful error msg.
Instead, you should fix OOB so it works to
We have no control over the network environment what so ever and need to
work within the confines of what is available.
This is our primary constraint: we cannot install servers or proxies.
Schools in remote areas have latent/slow/expensive Internet links.
You'd think that a caching
We use yum to provide automatic updates to our XOs in the field, and
we must be mindful that large RPMs can have an impact on the school's
Internet connection. If 400 XOs need to download a ~800KB Sugar RPM,
that's 320MB being downloaded, potentially at the same time.
Isn't there a cacheing
Does anyone know if there are Python bindings based off the Phonegap
API, with similar method calls, etc.?
I'm developing an HTML5/Javascript activity that I would like to
eventually port to Android and other mobile platforms. Having a set of
Phonegap-like Python bindings for Sugar would
The outcome of our discussion was that we don't want this size
increase, not on any of our platforms. But actually we see it as a
significant downside for all small systems, not just ours. The wiki
page mentions 43mb growth - that would be really painful.
And foolish me thought a few years
I doubt that this issue is your problem. But in response to one remark:
On the theory that these writes may
be stalling due to the block number, (and we haven't seen any evidence
yet of this), you can test for that by repeating the writes...
There *is*
Currently, XO hostnames are set on first boot in the following format:
xo-A-B-C
Where A, B and C are the last 3 bytes of the MAC address expressed in hex.
In Nicaragua we are seeing cases where XOs have no hostname set, both
on XO-1 and XO-1.5. On XO-1 this is presumably because libertas
[Summary: 2-screen laptops need fairly deep software support because 2
screens don't look like 1 screen. I excerpted freely below; see
the link for the entire story. --gnu]
http://www.afr.com/f/free/technology/digitallife/g_ZWzfPcJsePV9VdQfxY9w1H
Sony's tablet a good idea gone wrong
PUBLISHED:
a process won't awaken
suspended CPU
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 02:12:01 -0700
From: John Gilmore g...@toad.com
An easy lever for CPU consumption management (power mgmt) would be to
define a set of user processes that won't be scheduled in a
power-suspended system. They won't wake the CPU even
waking up on all multicast frames, apparently even ones that wouldn't
normally be sent from the hardware to the driver
There's a flag for that, ifconfig wlan0 allmulti, which should NOT
be set. That configuration tells the hardware that we want to receive
all multicasts, not just the ones we
The first problem I see is that machines don't wake on ARP.
Ultimately I believe we don't want our machines to wake on ARP, we
really want firmware that can handle ARP and only wake when our
address is ARP'd. I don't know how unreasonable a request that is.
It's completely reasonable, and
On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 10:26 AM, Samuel Greenfeld greenf...@laptop.org wrote:
Disabling suspend during collaboration was discussed a year ago, but as far
as I know this has not made it into any 11.3.x build:
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/10363
There are longstanding bugs from four to five years
I added the rt tag, but when I run command
ok rtc-rollback? .
the laptop powers off.
Is it a normal behaviour?
It's normal for DRM to make your system do obscure, non-intuitive things.
Did nobody explain that to you when you asked for this?
John
John touches upon a sore subject around OLPC here. On both 1.5
and 1.75, OLPC obtained assurances from the companies that the
data sheets for the processor/companion chips/SoC would be
publicly availably by the time the laptop reached production.
In both cases, the companies lied to get
Is it worth looking at enabling the HW crypto devices for the various
platforms? I have a Fit-PC that I use as a FW with a geode and the HW
crypto is pretty good on that, the Via chip has one on the 1.5 and
there's also some form of HW on the 1.75 too. last time I looked we
weren't
a mess. I made the suggestion on adding an a/i to the build so it
would be os4i.zd4 or os4a.zd4.
You couldn't put the model number into the file? Rather than
a cryptic a or i, how about 1, 1.5, or 1.75? Teachers and kids
aren't going to know who designed the processor inside their laptop.
Uruguay replaces the OLPC key with theirs. There is nothing we can
do. You must talk to Uruguay support.
Ah, thanks. I'll stop thinking about it then.
Don't stop thinking about it.
OLPC always has the choice to stop making DRM-locked machines. Your
next machine should not offer a
The theory was to provide, in flash, the unofficial license
translations in the languages primarily used in deployments,
e.g. Spanish. That way the kids can actually tell what rights they
have without having to (1) learn English, or (2) access a perhaps
nonexistent or very slow Internet
What kind of idle-suspend are we talking about here (and on what XO
hardware)? Shouldn't a proper idle-suspend be resumed when the system
isn't idle any more, i.e. when a packet comes in or a timer expires in
NetworkManager? Fixing that would eliminate having to build a
separate kludge for every
I'm sorry, I don't mean to ruffle any feathers, but the flat journal
is a really broken model when you stick in a USB stick with 2000+
The flat journal worked great on 8 floppies. It was obsoleted
in 1982 or so.
The whole emphasis on the journal as filesystem interface was
another of those
Anyway to quantify touchpad use and behaivor in F9 builds?
I don't know of any way that involves only the laptop or software.
Quantifying use and behaviour would require a video camera on both the
touchpad and the screen. Or accurate reporting from both people who
experience a problem
I had to think about this some before having a useful response.
I cannot speak for every Sugar developer, but the approach I have tried to
take with Turtle Art is a bit different than you are describing. The
block-based programming environment is not meant to be a substitute for real
tools;
Using a well-behaved olpc-update, minor updates should be really
lightweight and low-risk to deploy.
The standard solution to that is called package managers - rpm in
your case. Unfortunately its network version, yum, is really
heavyweight and too clumsy to run in many XOs. Installing updates
Recently, I finished my dissertation on mobile development
directly from mobile devices. Something like this might've been very
useful, although I did target experienced developers, not beginners.
Mobile development would work great on mobile devices like the XO-1,
XO-1.5, XO-1.75, and
Any objections to prelink being disabled?
I object. You are running a diskless, swapless system. The whole
point of prelink is to make your read-only binaries actually remain
read-only, rather than requiring the dynamic linker to modify them
in memory. This allows large numbers of pages of
Currently, when installing software, OLPC firmware erases the entire
disk then writes the entire disk contents, even if most of that is
zeroes. I am looking at an optimization where we can simply avoid
writing those 0 blocks, greatly speeding up the flashing process. In
my test case of 1 SD
Has anyone used the Mesh Potato devices from villagetelco.org to
provide mesh connectivity to a network of OLPCs?
Eben Moglen's Freedom Box mailing list has been exploring whether to
include mesh in their boxes. My experience with OLPC's mesh has led
me to question the risk/reward payoff of
Over time, most embedded system developers have pushed their work
upstream. This happened gradually as system developers learned that
it was more expensive to maintain their customizations locally then to
work with upstream. The tipping point was often found as system
developers tried to
FYI: Early Fedora 15 builds don't run on the Geode, again. This time,
people seem to be on the issue, and may resolve it without much work
from OLPC. But I think it would be worth spending some testing time
to make sure it's really resolved, so the final F15 can be used as
a basis for an OLPC
Please post any ideas here, and they'll be considered when we come to
plan which features we'll aim to include.
Well, the obvious one is to actually implement the real idle suspend
that happens in between keystrokes, turning off the CPU to save massive
amounts of power, while keeping the screen
Do a df and see if any temp file systems are chewing up a lot of memory.
yum is known to just barely work and leave a lot of junk files in memory.
Perhaps someone could produce a patch to yum to remove these junk
files before it exits? That would benefit all yum users, not just
(nor for the first time) I spot an XO that goes into suspend in the
middle of the DHCP conversation. In this case, it was with a bad WEP
key so we never heard back from the DHCP server.
But if you look at /var/log/messages, you see dhclient's DHCPDISCOVER
and 12s later PM: Syncing
[1] http://www.lshift.net/blog/2008/11/14/tracing-python-memory-leaks
[2] http://mg.pov.lt/blog/python-object-graphs.html
Fedora 14 (imminent) includes GDB updates for debugging heap allocation
issues. It's python friendly. You can probably backport it into
whatever Fedora you're running
It would be better if you could explain WHY you need to take a photo
quickly after resuming. Is the idea that the laptop will save power?
It could remain suspended for a long time, wake and take a picture,
then suspend again until the next picture is needed. In that case,
you can wake it a bit
It's pretty simple, actually. When in idle suspend, the system should
remain fully functional, just burning fewer ergs. It's an optimization,
not a change of behavior.
This means the system should wake up anytime it would've gotten an
interrupt during normal operation. Which means for any
If a USB olpc-update isn't possible, I'll have to flash my XO-1 and
lose my work. Release notes say only, Make a copy of any data you
wish to keep... how?
I don't know of a guide.
It's because being forced to manage your ongoing work via the Journal
is so much easier and more intuitive than
I didn't do as detailed an analysis as NoiseEHC - I looked at dirty
page frames, and realized that a large part of RAM was filling with
dirtied pages (even dirtied pages of executables, which get patched to
fill in shared library linkages). Without swap, this left very few
page frames for
As long as activities are saving and restoring properly it could be
made pretty much transparent to the user. Of course that's easier
said then done...
Android has a whole mechanism for this:
http://blog.rlove.org/2010/04/why-ipad-and-iphone-dont-support.html
That explains the problem,
There is no 1-second ambiguity in the RTC. The CPU can only read out
a value accurate to 1 second, but the CPU can tell precisely when the
RTC ticks from one second to another, which gives it much higher
precision if it's willing to wait. Its precision is greater than its
accuracy.
On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 8:59 PM, Tabitha Roder tabi...@tabitha.net.nz wrote:
Does anyone have a build they would recommend? I believe the laptops
are locked, so it will have to be signed.
At this point I would recommend the 10.1.2 development builds -- but
as James points out, they are not
My power logging scripts originally used 'sleep'. But what I found was
that if the time-to-suspend was shorter than sleep then the script would
have cases where it would never run.
Are we experiencing confusion between autosuspends and lid-close suspends?
By design, autosuspends should not
By design, autosuspends should not change the timing behavior of programs;
the idea is for the computer to act the same, but do so using less power.
Autosuspend and lid-close suspends are identical in function. The only
difference is the allowed wakeup source. The CPU is turned off.
I'm happy that we experimented but I think it's too early to turn on
idle suspend on the XO-1 builds, like we have attempted for 10.1.2.
You've enumerated the downsides -- what are the upsides? Does it double
battery life in normal use?
John
?? In other words, do they
just brazenly steal the GNU Project's software, knowing it's wrong?
John Gilmore
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[I didn't see a copy of this come through on devel, so assumed
that it bounced because he's not a recipient. --gnu]
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2010 12:47:26 -0400
To: martin.langh...@gmail.com, g...@toad.com, ber...@codewiz.org,
devel@lists.laptop.org, sugar-de...@lists.sugarlabs.org
Subject: Re:
Please explain your statement that lack of root violates GPLv3. Couldn't
the owner of the system insert a SD card with a developer's version of
Linux, mount the internal drive of the XO, and tinker with the installed
packages as root from the external OS? Does GPLv3 expressly mention root
There's a long standing hard bug of non-accelerated video on Linux
(not just XO). That hurts hurts HURTS any Linux device. There is some
backstory on that -- it's whether to use Xv or not, whether the video
frames can be grabbed from the Xv pipeline to overlay stuff on top or
not - early
I looked at the kernel patch for emulating the missing instruction
(long NOP). It looks like it works, and only needs minor patching-up
for security enforcement. The big argument on the Linux kernel list
was about not having a little kludge like this, which is likely to
grow to emulate many
2) FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) is dealing with the
issue upstream [1][2] in Fedora with the view of getting it fixed
upstream for F-14 or at the very least clarified. It was agreed in
F-12 that the Geode LX would be supported and that decision wasn't
discussed otherwise.
I've lost track of this area. Could somebody please give me/us a review
and/or update.
On which hardware?
XO-1 had a lot of niggling bugs around the edges (all documented in
trac). The largest was that the Linux kernel does busy-waits for the
USB bus's startup delays for sequencing power
If somebody gets Android running on a tablet and that somebody actually
honors the GPL, it's likely that much of the work of a real Linux
port has been done.
Except that I've heard from a very credible source that in existing
Android *phones* there are 9 pieces of essential yet proprietary
...the biggest
problem area in terms of suspending and not coming back is the
network, and without wake-on-precisely-what-i'm-waiting-for,
that's problematic.
Most wireless and Ethernet chips can be configured to interrupt or
wake on precisely
There's a classic Unix problem with distribution of disk access times
that relates to how older Unixes did sync -- every 30 seconds there was
an instant traffic jam at the interface to the drives. This has been
studied to death; here are some assorted papers:
Is OLPC's Idle-Suspend not waking up the machine when the next process
wants to run? No wonder you're having all these problems where it suspends
and doesn't come back. Don't fix it with 27 kludge patches (to audio
players, to network managers, etc), just fix the kernel so the suspend
ends when
I have been running into this with the XO-1.5 prototype but thought it
was either a prototype issue or my fat fingers.. however I noticed it
with my kid also. Pretty much the same behaviour you list below.. in
low humidity the cursor will move without touching the keyboard. Is
there anything
but again: where should such a flag go? is there a precedent
for such things?
/.i-am-a-hidden-flag ?
Safety would argue for doing the opposite:
* Build the installation images to contain a file like /.resize-root-once.
* If that file is present
** Remove the file
** Sync the disk
**
Perhaps the suspend/sleep process should be disabled until the laptop is
assigned a child's name and color preference on first boot. I find
sleep to
be more disorienting, as the screen is turned off (my laptop broke!)
and it
takes a press of the power button, not the keyboard, to wake
:-) you're right -- it _is_ awesome. wad seems to have mastered
the art of getting the laptop to really go together right after
the conversion.
One of the things I asked wad to improve when he was looking for
things to fix for the XO-1.5 was the incredible flakey keyboard.
Everyone knows
even a $2 chip (plus analog
components, power supply, connectors, wires, antennas, etc) for such a
marginal use in their low cost product. So please move the discussion
to a place where you'll find researchers *happy* to build SDR chips into
their next hardware project.
John Gilmore
2GB SD card in my XO, and I have Firefox on it. I installed the ePubReader
plug-in for Firefox. This runs nicely and allows you to view eBooks in
ePub format, which is the up-and-coming open format for books. You can
get free ePub eBooks from several free sites, including
Keyboard and mouse will not wakeup from sleep. Can be fixed by disabling
power management in Sugar.
Is there any reason for cutting release after release that don't work
unless end users disable power management (sometimes twice!)?
Surely if you can't fix the bugs, you could at least ship
Since when did it take more than a GB of RAM and 4GB of disk to host
an IDE ?
I think that was Emacs 23.
No, that was Eight Megs and Continuously Swapping. I.e. in an
amazingly large and expensive Sun Workstation with 8 *megabytes* of
RAM, emacs would still make the system page-fault at a
I would argue that an operating system that doesn't
natively host its development tools is not appropriate for OLPC's
target audience.
Does the XO-1 host its own development tools? I don't think anyone
has ever rebuilt the system from source code on an XO-1. I don't even
know
What makes you think that this will be a proprietary version of Android?
Android is licensed Apache 2.0 with kernel patches as GPLv2[1], although
there have been some proprietary apps and customizations on top.
I hadn't looked closely enough to see the detailed licensing. But I'd
seen the
We don't necessarily need to build it, Negroponte told Forbes. We just
need to threaten to build it.
Looks like Notion Ink has already done so, sort of:
http://www.slashgear.com/notion-ink-tegra-android-smartpad-uses-pixel-qi-display-1866308/
The OS is proprietary (android), it would
I would take it all with a large dose of salt.
Also, as usual, the left hand at OLPC doesn't know what the right hand
is doing. The press release isn't on www.laptop.org, nor is there
anything in www.laptop.org or wiki.laptop.org about the XO-3 (or even
the XO-1.75). The press release (which
as Fall semester finishes) but I have a XS-on-XO1 running at home and when a
XO1 associates with it, the XO1 gets a 172.18.xxx.xxx address (school mesh
portal). When the XO1.5 associates with school-mesh-0 (I have to click on it
in the Neighborhood view) the association happens, but the
#10 0xb67fae59 in gst_xvimagesink_xvimage_put (xvimagesink=0x8364160)
at xvimagesink.c:864
src = {x = 134867456, y = 140758336, w = -1259457208, h = 1}
dst = {x = 137730309, y = 3, w = 0, h = 137691184}
result = {x = 0, y = 0, w = 322, h = 241}
draw_border
One disadvantage of doing this is that it would harm the use of
olpc-update -- pristine updates would fail. And also the software
would be silently lost when an olpc-update happens, which is now
Good thing we reinvented the wheel here. RPM packaging was too
complete and flexible for kids
I think for the case of Cambodia with many small deployments
(educational NGOs got XOs donated from G1G1/OLPC or other donors), no
signed builds probably means that the XOs don't get updated anymore.
Are you trying to say that the Cambodian OLPC recipients don't have
any serious chance of
Gnash and youtube is a no go. No error now, just a black screen
Within the last month, Youtube changed their default player to require
Adobe Flash 10, including ActionScript 3. Gnash does not yet implement
AS3 properly -- that's why you got a black rectangle.
The (shrinking) gnash team is
How well does sleep-between-keystrokes work if I ignore USB?
Pretty well -- but check bugs.laptop.org. That's where our institutional
memory of the bugs that prevented full blown suspend exists. Search for
power or suspend or sleep.
If you're serious about working on this, I can spend some
I mean the clock in the 802.11 MAC sublayer. This defines the basis of
the timing synchronization function (TSF) which is a core part of
802.11. Without synchronized clocks, nodes cannot communicate.
I talked with one of the 802.11 experts I know. He's quite sure
that there should be no
I happened to have an SD card with me that had a swap partition
defined on it. The XO's SD slot was already in use, so I attached
an USB card reader (with my card in it), and issued the appropriate
'swapon /dev/...' command.
I'd suggest a small enhancement: that when a removable medium
we tried the synaptics driver initially (when we got the new
touchpads) but by itself it caused extremely erratic (perhaps not
erratic, exactly, but just way-too-fast) mouse cursor behavior.
There seems to be something wrong with general Linux mouse behavior.
Even on ordinary optical mice
On Oct 20 2009, at 19:04, Tabitha Roder was caught saying:
no mesh network showing in neighbourhood
My understanding is that mesh is not currently supported in the
WLAN firmware for the new chips. I am not sure what the plan of
action is in regards to mesh support for 1.5.
For laptops to
it sounded like there was also some thought that the emphasis
should be on tools, like kgdb, which can be more general purpose,
and more widely used and maintained. to which i'd say, the more
the merrier -- i'd love to use kgdb regularly, but it requires a
second machine, and it ties up
there's no SysRq key on the XO keyboard, so you'll need to use a
break on the serial console to invoke it...
Please. If you're going to put this hook in, which I think is a great
idea, at least make it work on the standard hardware! And when the
operating system is not very responsive.
these laptops
have full access to source code, ability to upgrade their laptops
at will, and can tell modified from unmodified software. Please let
me know what is really happening in the schools of Uruguay.
John Gilmore
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Hal, you're asking a lot of great questions. Basically, we could
never turn on the original power management design by default, because
of too many bugs in the periphery (USB, timers, clocks, network, etc).
The bugs are well documented in Trac. The final XO-1 software release
added the ability
there wasn't that much under the hood --
LVM is a simple format -- but it didn't provide the bulletproof
reliability that I've come to expect from, say, MSDOS partition
tables.
John Gilmore
(*): ext3 filesystem recovery also has this dubious property -- even
if you mount such a filesystem read-only
More seriously, I don't know if it is possible, but getting Nicholas
to stop making a scrambled egg out of the software stack with his
omelet analogy would go a long ways to reducing the confusion in the
media as well. His continued insistence that Sugar is an operating
system--the
Given that
we are building the for completely different CPU core, we will need
different kernel RPMs to make sure our kernel is optimized for the
given machine.
Optimization is one thing; functioning is another.
Fedora *functions* on
The process is doing a linear read through the file, and is slow
enough that it appears only to grow. But if I run another process that
allocates a lot of memory, then the kernel does discard pages pages.
So are you saying that two identical processes that mmap large amounts
of memory, (much
Congratulations on the merge.
Note that currently there is nothing keeping anyone from installing a
kernel meant for one gen machine on a different gen machine. Just
don't do that. :)
Eventually if both machines are going to run a standard Fedora
release, the same binary kernel will have to
The new Touch Book by Always Innovating looks interesting as a
possible prototype for the XO-2. It looks vaguely like an ordinary
netbook, but the electronics are behind the screen as in the XO-1, as
is one of the batteries. So the keyboard half can detach from the
screen/electronics package.
Basically, for each configuration (external microphone plugged in, and
external microphone not plugged in), I'd like to know the following:
- which of the 8 microphones is the one to use
- which ports we can turn off
In reading the generic Intel HDA codec spec, and comparing it to the
Is there a better way to do this?
Don't use Browse as if it was a real web browser. Don't use the
Journal as if it was a real file system.
Run Firefox, not Browse.
Open up a terminal and do what needs doing.
You've just stumbled on one tiny corner of the problem that the Sugar
tools don't
Personally, I feel it is a mistake for the OLPC project to continue with the
concept of the Sugar platform as its exclusive model for an educational
computer. The Sugar applications (activities) could just as well be run
from the Ubuntu desktop. Then students would actually be learning
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