Micropolis project: git hosting application

2007-11-08 Thread John Gilmore
- -- #1 dhopkins Don Hopkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] #2 gnuJohn Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... If any developers don't have their SSH2 keys on the web, please attach them to the application e-mail. 7. Preferred

SimCity project: git hosting application

2007-11-08 Thread John Gilmore
- -- #1 dhopkins Don Hopkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] #2 gnuJohn Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... If any developers don't have their SSH2 keys on the web, please attach them to the application e-mail. 7

Power manager specification... (request for comments).

2007-11-17 Thread John Gilmore
The laptop should generally not act differently depending whether there is external power. Too many people seem to be assuming that any form of external power is AC power (i.e. a national power grid). In the presence of limited external power, e.g. a car battery, a human powered charger, a solar

Re: wow, wireless go BOOM!

2007-12-11 Thread John Gilmore
Actually, he mentions one B2-1 running an old build on the same environment. Sounds like we should make a point release for B2's, adding the new firmware, so the thousands of B2-1's can avoid being Typhoid Mary to whatever network they approach. John

Re: licensing: GPLv2, v3, and Apache

2007-12-28 Thread John Gilmore
about the *technical* reasons and differences. Apache or GPLv2 is fine. Anything that is GPL-compatable will be acceptable. Gnash is GPLv3, and it's on the OLPC. The latest versions of many other GNU programs are GPLv3 too, and will also make it into later OLPC releases as it gets rebased on

Re: licensing: GPLv2, v3, and Apache

2007-12-28 Thread John Gilmore
Only one or two pieces of software on the laptop are presently GPLv3 Specifically, # rpm -qa --queryformat '%{name} %{license}\n' | grep GPLv3 | sort espeak GPLv3+ gnash GPLv3+ gnash-plugin GPLv3+ info GPLv3 Don't forget SimCity, which is shipped on the laptop in the Library, and is

Re: mesh portal discovery

2008-01-10 Thread John Gilmore
. As long as the previous mesh portal continues to work for a short while, there should be no need for nonstandard mechanisms to let applications know that the IP address is *about* to change. Instead they will naturally find out after it *does* change. John Gilmore

Re: Animation/Python/PyGames vs battery charge

2008-01-29 Thread John Gilmore
I am trying to preserve as much battery energy as I can. So I am setting a specific frame rate and sleeping beyond what it takes to maintain that frame rate. Do you think this will actually reduce the drain on the XO battery? Sleeping for a small fraction of a second (e.g. 1/20th of a

Python 3.0 will be backward incompatible

2008-02-03 Thread John Gilmore
For planning purposes, since OLPC uses so much Python: Python 3.0 changes a bunch of things. E.g. ordinary strings will be Unicode, not ASCII. Metaclasses are used with a different syntax. Raising and catching exceptions uses different syntax. There are lots of other little improvements. They

Re: disabling root and olpc passwords

2008-02-04 Thread John Gilmore
I posted because there appeared to be a regression (regarding asking for passwords) in the OLPC behavior -- that exists regardless of how I described happening to notice it. The theory is that in update.1, the olpc and root accounts will come disabled (locked with a password that nobody can

Re: WiFi power conservation

2008-02-10 Thread John Gilmore
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? We can do better, without losing any functionality in school deployments. First,

Re: problems using the measure activity.

2008-02-11 Thread John Gilmore
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) Why would an activity break when awaiting

Re: Serious side effect of #6299 (silencing salut so gabble can connect)

2008-02-15 Thread John Gilmore
Many activities are calling PS get_preferred_connection() ... However, during the period when we stop salut to let gabble try to connect, this call fails as there is no running plugin in PS. If an activity is launched during this time ... crash with a gray screen. This affects:

Re: Serious side effect of #6299 (silencing salut so gabble can connect)

2008-02-15 Thread John Gilmore
Morgan, thank you for the detailed response. Also the two kids sitting under a tree somewhere scenario must Just Work. Absolutely. But ordinary Internet access doesn't work in Mongolia, and probably isn't going to work in update.1. So, everything will work eventually, when all bugs are fixed,

Re: Salut and Suspend/Resume issues

2008-02-20 Thread John Gilmore
OK, children of the world, please calm down. There are a few too many bugs and egos flaring up to come to a reasonable resolution. This is an interdisciplinary problem that crosses too many architectural boundaries for any of us to be comfortable seeing the whole picture. I filed a bug report

Re: Salut and Suspend/Resume issues (MDNS and LLMNR multicast)

2008-02-22 Thread John Gilmore
of a much closer relationship between the two companies, which will greatly benefit our common customers. John From: John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 4:16 AM To: Bernard Aboba; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: MDNS and power management Hi Bernard

Re: Alternative power/recharging source?

2008-02-23 Thread John Gilmore
There has long been a lot of confusion about power consumption. Many statements were made over the years about the *design goal* for power consumption. The XO did not actually hit that design goal -- but since suspend/resume was the last major feature to debug in the hardware, until it got to

Re: Preparing the XOs for next week's test

2008-02-24 Thread John Gilmore
Ricardo, if you think there is anything else different with B4s in regards to network performance, please tell us. I'm not aware of anything in hardware. They don't suspend. So if MP's have networking trouble that happens when a laptop suspends, the trouble won't happen on a B4. John

Re: OLPC.tv and Gnash

2008-02-29 Thread John Gilmore
can have fun tinkering with it, but there are hundreds of thousands of people with ordinary OLPCs who we aim to support -- with free software -- in the XO software releases and websites. John Gilmore ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org

Re: Is read_file() always called after an activity __init__?

2008-02-29 Thread John Gilmore
Hmmm, so if my activity needs it's preferences before it can display anything to the user, potential future lazy loading of the data-store (to try and speed up general activity start-up time) is going to leave folks watching my activity with a blank screen for a lazy while? Ouch. Ahem.

Re: uucp for sneakernet (was Re: Emulating the School...]

2008-03-04 Thread John Gilmore
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

Re: How can I prevent 'suspend' ?

2008-03-06 Thread John Gilmore
How do I prevent 'Read' (or whatever) from letting my XO 'suspend' ? p.s. I believe I've also seen an unwanted 'suspend' when I temporarily closed the lid (despite the inhibit-suspend file). The simplest way is to go back to Build 656, which never suspends unless you write manually to a

Re: Why is Terminal 'extra' ?

2008-03-06 Thread John Gilmore
Terminal, Log Viewer, and Analyze are not included in the core build, but they *are* included in the core *library*. That is, you can always install them, even though they may not show up by default in the toolbar. Why would we burn up Flash space for activities that are not accessible

Re: Updates from Nepal's Pilot Schools

2008-03-09 Thread John Gilmore
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

olpc-update, update.1, and activities

2008-03-13 Thread John Gilmore
The removal of activities seems to be happening under the assumption that people will use a USB memory stick to upgrade their laptops. Was it only a few months ago that I was told, Skip the USB install notes, all the updating is going to happen via olpc-update from now on? Now the story is

Unlocked laptops can do anything a locked-down laptop can do

2008-03-15 Thread John Gilmore
. I know some folks like John Gilmore feel that everyone has an inalienable right to access the firmware, I'm sorry that you got that impression. Not everything translates well across international borders. Let me try again. Under the terms of the GNU licenses, everyone who gets a binary copy

Re: New bible reading activity

2008-03-15 Thread John Gilmore
In other words, I think that in terms of third party content and activities, we want to be culturally neutral by supporting all types, cultures, religions, and ideals, rather than by ignoring all of them. +1. It did seem odd to me that a whole application would be dedicated to reading

Re: Call for Papers/Talks/Ideas! Update.2 Mini-Conference

2008-03-22 Thread John Gilmore
The second thing is basic UI usability. The pop-around menu border makes the UI thoroughly unusable with the trackpad http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4910 covers this issue and more. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org

Re: Chilling Effects paper at USENIX UPSEC

2008-04-10 Thread John Gilmore
4. It is unfortunate that a respected conference did not do a better job at vetting this paper. The conference is a small USENIX workshop (Usability, Psychology and Security). USENIX workshops generally involve fewer than 100 participants, more timely work, and less pre-publication peer

Re: Notes from a Planning Session

2008-04-11 Thread John Gilmore
(APs in infrastructure mode) is what is happening on the ground mostly. Still, it's not good as it kills the mesh-to-the-school scheme which is one of the key technical goals. This should be easy to fix. Re-enable the NetworkManager code that allows any laptop to gateway the mesh to the

Re: Collaborative Activity Development

2008-04-14 Thread John Gilmore
Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm now working for OLPC, on improving activity collaboration. This is great! The best thing OLPC could do to improve activity collaboration is to get it working for ordinary programs -- running on the X Window System, or on MacOSX, or Windows. Why

Re: [Community-news] on splitting Sugar

2008-04-23 Thread John Gilmore
That said, Sugar needs to be disentangled. I keep using the omelet analogy, claiming it needs to be a fried egg, with distinct yoke and white, rather than having the UI, collaborative tools, power management and radios merge into one amorphous blob. My understanding is that the Sugar

Re: Walter leaving and shift to XP.

2008-04-23 Thread John Gilmore
Considering the complete sentence, it is clear to me that this is a case of the reporter being confused by technology. We all know that Sugar could never run on Windows as well it as can run on Linux. The laptop might run Windows or Linux or both, but not Sugar on Windows. Do we all know

Re: Ad-hoc Networking

2008-04-23 Thread John Gilmore
| The presence implementation only works on access points and on meshes -- | but not on non-meshed, ad-hoc 802.11. The vast majority of computers | with 802.11 don't have mesh, but they would benefit from being able to | see nearby laptops and share applications with them ... There is

Re: [sugar] Sugar\Windows won't ship

2008-04-28 Thread John Gilmore
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. It's more accurate to say that while they are somewhat interested in that as an abstract idea, they are much more

Re: [PATCH stable] Separate multicast configuration for mesh and wlan interfaces.

2008-05-13 Thread John Gilmore
The maximum number of multicast addresses per virtual device has been cut in half to ensure that the merged list can be accommodated by the hardware. If we allocated DRAM this way, no process could use more than 1/N of the memory, where N is the number of processes. Surely this is

Re: Sugar Labs errs on the side of usability

2008-05-16 Thread John Gilmore
I was pleased that the main Sugar Labs page reports: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Main_Page This is a list of some Activites that are installed by default. followed by icons for Browse, Read, Write, Record, Log, Pippy, Terminal, etc. Every fork is an opportunity to get things right that

Re: Microsoft / new firmware

2008-05-16 Thread John Gilmore
[NN] then claimed no OLPC resources would be devoted to the project. I'm left wondering how many of those resources went into this firmware mod. The firmware mod required weeks of a skilled engineer's time. This engineer put in the time, partly or fully paid by OLPC,

Re: Microsoft

2008-05-19 Thread John Gilmore
. It'd cost US$800K even if MS let everyone in the country pirate the OS. Doing so might well suit their purposes even better than charging $3 per copy, since they wouldn't be expected to provide any support for a stolen product, yet they would still be weaning kids away from Linux. John

Re: SSH DSA logins on crank.

2008-05-22 Thread John Gilmore
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. That blanket statement is false. I'm still working my way through the RFC's for

Re: XO-2 software plans

2008-05-22 Thread John Gilmore
What are the software plans for the second-generation XO? First they need to build one out of something other than modeling clay and Photoshop. Then whenever your hand comes close to the laptop, ugly black bars are going to cover all the edges of that nice sky-blue screen. There's no need to

Re: Autoreinstallation image is not signed.

2008-06-03 Thread John Gilmore
Specifically, http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7125. What do people think of the straw man in that ticket? Should we implement it? My comments are in the ticket; let's move the discussion there, where it belongs. John ___ Devel mailing

Re: what about having network connections inhibit sleep?

2008-06-04 Thread John Gilmore
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. Joyride should be awakened from suspend by any received unicast (TCP) packet, so I'm not sure why you

Re: what about having network connections inhibit sleep?

2008-06-05 Thread John Gilmore
(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. If you were displaying a PDF file in another window, a gross kludge in Read might have forcibly suspended

Re: etoys implementation

2008-06-25 Thread John Gilmore
My only experience with Squeak/eToys up til now was trying it on the OLPC as a naive user. Poking at objects on the screen with the handles, since that was the only tutorial offered. The way the darn thing saved its workspace in the friggin Journal whenever you tried to quit it reminded me of

Re: OLPC XO Opera browser as Sugar activity

2008-06-25 Thread John Gilmore
The activity start script should configure Opera to put its configuration file in $SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT/data instead of $HOME/.opera. Also it should set umask to 0002 so the config file is group-writable (otherwise the next activity instance cannot overwrite). See

Re: boot timings

2008-07-02 Thread John Gilmore
...I suspect that [delay]'s the ~1.5s it takes to verify the signature on the dev key. For many deployments that will be 1.5s to check a signature on an activation lease. The original design was to cache that check in some secure manner, but there's not really any appropriate protected

Re: OFW sad face doesn't say why

2008-07-19 Thread John Gilmore
mystery to me. That is why I use a permanent SD card, with my develop.sig on that card -- then if I need to re-flash NAND I don't have to worry about who/how puts a develop.sig file in NAND. Back near Christmas, I put text into the Activation and Developer Keys page recommending that

Re: NAND out of space crash

2008-07-21 Thread John Gilmore
They are being innundated with new problems caused by full disk (but weren't really aware that was the cause.) Since fixes in 8.2 won't help them for months, they need the short term fix (c). Mitch added Forth words to delete files from the NAND flash, after we had similar troubles after

Re: NAND out of space crash

2008-07-21 Thread John Gilmore
I should've said that just removing a couple of useless or easily replaced files -- rather than reflashing -- means that the kids don't lose all their work when the NAND fills up. John ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org

Re: Remarks on the Work of Sugar (kid contributions)

2008-07-23 Thread John Gilmore
2) Sugar would run more smoothly on-XO if jhbuild were retired. I think this is a good point in the abstract. Do any frequent contributors *not* have an XO? I approve of retiring jhbuild, and handing out XO's to Sugar contributors, but you've really got the question backwards: = Do any

Re: TuxPaint woes

2008-07-29 Thread John Gilmore
can't think of a faster way to make developers give up on our platform as a lost cause. As someone whose year-long OLPC-specific project (SimCity) was broken by Sugar interface changes right before the 650 release, I can report that it was pretty disheartening. Both the sound and the running

Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread John Gilmore
Why does it matter that you cannot adjust the screen brightness from the console using the special keys? You can adjust it from Sugar without root access. The idea was to understand what limits we'd face using the console for root access instead of a special terminal activity. What are the

Re: Requesting test help for OFW development release

2008-08-06 Thread John Gilmore
ok wifi my-ssid ok flash http:\\dev.laptop.org\~wmb This didn't work; it required saying: ok flash http:\\dev.laptop.org\~wmb\q2e12f.rom Once I'd flashed it, it doesn't complain about either my tiny 4GB microSD-to-USB reader, nor about the 2GB reader that preceded

Re: XO keeps staring at its own belly button

2008-08-07 Thread John Gilmore
For instance - the XO has been sitting there for a minute or more (in Terminal). I want to key in a command, so I start typing. Nothing changes. I do *NOT* know if my XO is alive or dead. Suddenly (after one or more seconds) the typed character appears on the screen. My XO is alive,

Re: Please help test our new 8.2.0 weekly beta, joyride-2263!

2008-08-08 Thread John Gilmore
On first boot, it found my local School Server and up a big Software Update window popped, and said do you want to install all these activities. Colour me impressed. Bravo! Now, who's coded this up? I am keen on devising a way to fetch the activities locally (if an XS is present) via

Re: Read Etexts problems with speech-dispatcher resolved -- mostly

2008-08-09 Thread John Gilmore
As noted here before, using a multi-threaded activity interferes with power management. Read Etexts will have functioning power management if speech-dispatcher is not installed, but will not if it is installed, even if you never use the Speech feature. I did explore a few solutions to

Re: inhibiting suspend via dbus

2008-08-09 Thread John Gilmore
As it turns out, the activity update control panel needs to inhibit suspend, too, otherwise we go to sleep in the middle of downloading large activities (Firefox, TamTam, etc). Chris, could you make a little wiki page explaining how to interact w/ ohm via dbus to temporarily inhibit suspend,

Python multithreaded GTK programs are still polling in F9, F10

2008-08-09 Thread John Gilmore
binary package, and pygtk is fixed properly, Python multithreaded programs will stop their needless polling. We're getting very close... John Gilmore ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel

How to set up your XO to swap to an SD card

2008-08-10 Thread John Gilmore
Have you tried with a swap partition? Swap is robust now on a SD card, immune to suspend/resume and power cycle. External swap area sounds cool. How does one set it up? I'll give it a whirl. Use a recent joyride. Get a throwaway 1GB SD card. Available for $3-$20 depending where you go.

Re: Motivation behind recent selections of tickets marked blocks?:8.2.0?

2008-08-11 Thread John Gilmore
I've noticed you tagging lots of tickets over the last few days for consideration as 8.2.0 blockers. Some of your selections make good sense to me, like the GPL tickets (#4265), but others make less sense to me, like the debuginfo packages issue (#4264), the TurtleArt naming issue (#5941),

Re: Suspend vs Network Traffic - blockers

2008-08-12 Thread John Gilmore
Though I agree now, as I agreed in the past, that the filter is not easy to use, I would say that it was a mechanism already in place (and the filter would not be used by an end user anyway). Setting up the filter to wake the machine on EVERY arp packet would be trivial. These occur pretty

Re: Suspend vs Network Traffic - blockers

2008-08-12 Thread John Gilmore
If we have multicast wakeup working, then IPv6 takes care of itself. Waking up on all multicast traffic would not only wake up the host on Neighbor Solicitation messages, but also on all other multicast traffic the interface was listening to before suspending (e.g. mDNS multicast

Re: Suspend vs Network Traffic - blockers

2008-08-12 Thread John Gilmore
Waking up on all multicast traffic would not only wake up the host on Neighbor Solicitation messages, but also on all other multicast traffic the interface was listening to before suspending (e.g. mDNS multicast messages). Sorry, I may have misinterpreted Javier's message due to his use of

Re: Suspend vs Network Traffic - blockers

2008-08-15 Thread John Gilmore
Deepak, Would this be considered a blocker for 8.2 ... (Not my call.) or do we primarilly care about collaboration in mesh mode for deployments? Very few deployments use mesh mode, because it currently doesn't scale up to more than about ten nearby laptops. (It's due to many interactions

Re: Missing critical dependency, Koji

2008-08-17 Thread John Gilmore
Anyway, in the meantime, we have raw rpmbuild, mock (which needs to be configured not to use Fedora's koji, but this is not so hard), our own buildroot (probably hidden away somewhere on weka.laptop.org), and the joyride dropbox system. In conclusion, we'll live. I got an impression that all

Re: Fedora User Certificates

2008-08-22 Thread John Gilmore
Isn't it interesting how we have all this public-key infrastructure to secure all these key projects -- but every few years we throw it all out the window and start over -- based on insecure email messages! However if you don't replace the certs you will not have access to cvs or the

Re: Stability and Memory Pressure in 8.2

2008-09-10 Thread John Gilmore
When measuring memory usage, cat /proc/XXX/smaps provides the most accurate info available (as far as I know), and produces directly comparable results in all OLPC software releases. XXX is the process number you're examining (first column of ps output). The smaps file also tells you how many of

Re: AC not present?

2008-09-10 Thread John Gilmore
I know I've said this before, but I really want to get some UI polish into this part of the system. Instead of the cryptic AC not present we should be displaying a fullscreen graphic picturing the power cord... A better fix was implemented a while ago. In the old firmware that caused this

XO power consumption under 8.2-759

2008-09-12 Thread John Gilmore
I spent a few hours tonight testing the power consumption of a G1G1 XO under 8.2-759. I didn't test any of the tricky autosuspend/resume stuff -- just how much power can be saved by various user actions. Both the answers, and how you can do measurements like this on your own XO (using the

Re: mechanisms tied to mesh: under a tree collab

2008-09-16 Thread John Gilmore
[I posted bug #8524 re lease activation not working on AP's.] Another mechanism that only works on Mesh is sharing under a tree. It's perfectly feasible for four or five kids with laptops, all sitting under a tree, to share over ad-hoc 802.11 mode. They don't need a mesh that forwards packets;

Re: mechanisms tied to mesh: under a tree collab

2008-09-16 Thread John Gilmore
Ricardo Carrano said: There are technical challenges in the way, but OLPC should keep pushing this for the benefits it will bring. It seems a perfect fit with the Mission. Mesh and the Marvell WiFi chip have been two of the big disappointments of the OLPC. The mesh implementation simply

Re: mechanisms tied to mesh: under a tree collab

2008-09-17 Thread John Gilmore
The problem comes from the OLPC marketing that equates mesh with collaboration which in fact are two independent concepts. What the UI displays as Mesh Server should be Collaboration Server - it's only needed to mediate if the laptops who want to collaborate cannot talk to each other

Re: idea for running out of RAM

2008-09-24 Thread John Gilmore
I agree with Albert's proposal - Newcomers to the Wellington test team open too many apps all the time - and render their machines unusable through memory pressure. From that experience, I like the idea of adding a bit of metadata that hints the mem footprint, and teaching sugar to prevent

Re: New release8.2 build 764

2008-09-28 Thread John Gilmore
many people who would be good testers don't consider themselves 'developers' so would not get them on their own. Why not call it a tester's key? It is principally useful for testing late-breaking versions. Now that the unfortunately popular iPhone ships with the same centralized- control

Re: devkeys, prettyboot, and G1G1

2008-09-28 Thread John Gilmore
Requesting dev keys should not be difficult! How can we fix that problem? We could consider shipping the next G1G1 batch with developer keys already included (disable-security). The only reason any G1G1 user would prefer a lockdown laptop is because it won't do pretty boot if it's

Walter Bender: Re: devkeys, prettyboot, and G1G1

2008-10-02 Thread John Gilmore
with freedom, and thus every OLPC laptop is jailed, like every iPhone. John Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2008 08:34:09 -0400 From: Walter Bender [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: devkeys, prettyboot, and G1G1 Cc: Mitch Bradley [EMAIL PROTECTED] If Mitch is comfortable

Re: Walter Bender: Re: devkeys, prettyboot, and G1G1

2008-10-03 Thread John Gilmore
I'm glad that people are trying to think of ways to improve the lot of G1G1 users. The fundamental problem doesn't go away, though, unless you make it go away. The plan in November's G1G1, as I understand it, is to build in unnecessary restrictions on the people you should be most grateful for

Re: Major power concern

2008-10-06 Thread John Gilmore
I've just noticed that release candidate 765 when fully charged tells me I have 2 1/2 hours of usage. This is a major concern, and something we really What exactly is your concern? * That the power display includes a time remaining? * That the time remaining is wrong? * That the time

Re: notes on Journal feedback (was Re: Bundle activity)

2008-10-07 Thread John Gilmore
Don't know where you have read that. The Journal is intended to give a better way to deal with the results of the interaction with the machine than a folders-based system inspired on office workers. Please quit making the kids the guinea-pig for somebody's untested pet theories about how to

Re: [sugar] Give a Laptop, Change the World : G1G1 2008

2008-10-08 Thread John Gilmore
I prefer the Sugar learning platform And my laundress prefers fabric revitalization consultant. Sugar isn't about learning. Sugar is a user interface. It draws icons and decorations on the screen, starts and stops programs, and lets you turn control knobs. The things Sugar competes with

Re: journal is hard (was Re: notes from the field - Mongolia)

2008-10-10 Thread John Gilmore
This could be made much easier if Sugar apps prompted the user for tags when shutting down an application. Yes, I think we need to assume this model. I don't think this is going to break the basic paradigm of Sugar, since this prompt need only happen for *new* activities. Anything which

Re: OLPC as Project of the Day at FOSS.in

2008-10-14 Thread John Gilmore
How about Collaboration as project of the day? Isn't our collaboration framework already shipped in other distros? The problem is that few applications actually use it to allow easy collaboration among end-users. There's probably some GUI work needed, and some integration with each app. If we

Re: 9.1 Proposal: Printing support

2008-10-20 Thread John Gilmore
Note that much of the demand for printing comes from G1G1 users, who won't have a School Server (and are unlikely to have another Linux machine handy). I think the answer is probably to run the CUPS daemon when we need it, and kill it off when we don't (a la inetd). As with everything else, I

Re: 9.1 Proposal: Power.

2008-10-25 Thread John Gilmore
awake. The current scheme is already at its lowest it can be. Jump to the lowest setting and then put the cpu to sleep. Any deviation from that will use more juice. If you wake up the CPU to do something you have taken a large step backwards. Actually, there's more we can do to save

Re: 9.1 Proposal: Compatibility with desktop applications

2008-10-26 Thread John Gilmore
I have to commend Marco for pursuing this initiative. I think the only hope for the long term survival of the innovations in Sugar is to port those innovations out into mass market Linux software. (Currently, nobody adopts XO innovations like shared browsers and word processors, or improved

Re: Sugar unusable as an e-book reader

2008-10-27 Thread John Gilmore
Surely the solution for reading books is to ignore pdf That's pretty limiting. There are more legal downloadable books available in PDF than in any other format, about 600,000 on the Internet Archive alone. Scanned-in paper books are still the most popular sort. Producing text, rtf, or html

Re: debxo 0.3 release

2008-11-02 Thread John Gilmore
things that I can see as possibly needed: hardware encryption engine (does this show up to the kernel as an available encryption device? (it would be handy if at least the development builds of the kernel enabled /proc/config.gz for all xo distros (including the OLPC builds) it costs about

Re: ACPI on XO

2008-11-03 Thread John Gilmore
___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel

Re: Scam alert: [Fwd: Thank you from One Laptop per Child]

2008-11-16 Thread John Gilmore
technologies in the Convio user interface -- but they default to on, because Convio and its sister companies care more about data-mining than they do about donor privacy or social cohesion. And they'll continue to do so until donors ostracize any nonprofit who does this. John Gilmore

Re: Sorting out the status of lease serving - and client side

2008-11-25 Thread John Gilmore
If I understand things right, the possible interesting states are: - Never activated - Activated recently (so not looking for a renewal) - Activated looking for a renewal - Expired lease - passive kill - Found self in blacklist - active kill And Permanently activated (developer key

Re: Sugar XFCE (melting treacle)

2008-12-05 Thread John Gilmore
That doesn't change the fact that using the XO is like walking neck deep in treacle. ... The real problem there is it's hard to isolate the slowness, I think largely due to the fact that the problems aren't isolated. Is there any central repository for information about where the speed is

Re: will there be an 8.2 update ?

2008-12-06 Thread John Gilmore
The 8.2.1 early thinking is here: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-November/021388.html If we want to ship any G1 or ChangeTheWorld machines without DRM and with pretty boot, we'll want to put a fix for #7896 into 8.2.1 (and 9.1). The fix goes into /boot/olpc.fth in the software

Re: [PATCH] cafe_nand: remove busy-wait loop

2008-12-10 Thread John Gilmore
So, the transfer rate dropped from about 9.6mb/sec to about 5.3mb/sec. I was afraid of this. Flash is pretty fast, and there's almost no parallelism available in it (e.g. you can't queue up a bunch of reads to occur when the data rotates under the heads, or start a seek early). Thus it's

Re: Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

2008-12-12 Thread John Gilmore
Walter asked: Are there any places where Sugar is in violation of its licenses? Sugar is licensed under the GPLv2, and its source code seems to be provided. (Because it's written in an interpreted language, it never ships binaries -- I think. There may be some small parts that are written in C

Re: Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations

2008-12-12 Thread John Gilmore
Some of us are new to one or another part of this issue, and need a bit more background. o Can you list the offending binaries and explain their faults? Sure. For example, ls is part of the Coreutils. In 8.2.0, it's licensed under GPLv3+ (try ls --version); in earlier releases, it's

Re: Minutes of Power in 9.1.0 meeting

2008-12-15 Thread John Gilmore
On a different note, one test we might think about running is the closest thing the industry has to a standard battery life test. It's specified on a lot of the netbook specs. It's defined here: http://it.jeita.or.jp/mobile/e/index.html However, I'm also seeing that a lot of vendors

Re: No surprise on memory

2008-12-18 Thread John Gilmore
What about using a NAND partition as swap? Has this ever been done? Given that partition support is a recent development it seems unlikely. Swapping to the soldered-in NAND chips is a very bad idea. It will tend to wear them out rapidly. Even if you use load-leveling software (e.g. swapping

Re: Minutes of Power in 9.1.0 meeting

2008-12-24 Thread John Gilmore
Also, who is tracking the added ability to shut off power to the radio interface and its logic when the radio is set to off in its control panel (requirement 2)? The difference between Radio Off and Extreme Power Management should become that Radio Off still leaves the USB bus functioning,

Re: Minutes of Power in 9.1.0 meeting

2008-12-25 Thread John Gilmore
along similar lines an issue I have been seeing with the network screen (but haven't gotten around to reporting). my home access point is encrypted and sometimes I can reconnect to it without a problem, but sometimes it acts as if it's never been connected to before (asking me for the

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