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. Fi

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: How to create a new MIME type for a Sugar activity?

2008-02-12 Thread John Gilmore
readily discoverable. Stop trying to hide this very useful concept from the end users. Follow the Mac of 2008 rather than the Macintosh of 1984. (The Macintosh upgraded to a hierarchical filesystem in 1985, one year after its introduction.) John Gilmore ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel

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 fixe

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 ab

Re: Salut and Suspend/Resume issues

2008-02-21 Thread John Gilmore
> Can you explain how is this not mooted by considering mDNS, which XO's > all run and listen for? No, I cannot; someone who understands mDNS should describe the protocol and its implications. I could go off and read the RFC eventually (is it spec'd by Informational RFC 4795? Or does the code im

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

2008-02-22 Thread John Gilmore
ith Microsoft on applications and Internet software" said Jobs. "We are confident that this is the beginning of a much closer relationship between the two companies, which will greatly benefit our common customers." John From: John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: T

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 the

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. Jo

Re: OLPC.tv and Gnash

2008-02-29 Thread John Gilmore
appy that the owner of the SSS/OLPC 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

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. Ahe

Re: Testing 200 XO's in two weeks time for Nepal's pilot

2008-03-03 Thread John Gilmore
> Nepal should receive its shipment of 200 XO's in roughly 14 days Congratulations! > How do I get developer keys for all 200 XO's and then how do I > deactivate the developer keys after I no longer need access to the > firmware? (You also need developer keys to install a new OS or kernel releas

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 succe

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

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 accessibl

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 eig

OLPC seeks a CEO -- who was your favorite CEO elsewhere?

2008-03-11 Thread John Gilmore
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2008/tc2008035_429837.htm OLPC is looking for a CEO. Nicholas is more of an "idea man", and he plans to continue as Chairman and cheerleader. But he appears to have realized that with its current management, the organization can't outgrow its ear

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 "Cou

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

2008-03-15 Thread John Gilmore
> XO's by simply sticking in a USB key and holding down the game buttons. > 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 border

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"

2008-03-21 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 http://lists.lapto

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 r

Re: how to let activities write to file without risking security

2008-04-10 Thread John Gilmore
> At OLE Nepal we need to let our etoys image allow writing to disk, > however under rainbow the image is executed under another user id. > What's the way to give an/our activity permission to write to certain > directories without just making them world writable, which is surely > not the way to g

Re: Notes from a Planning Session

2008-04-10 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 Int

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 d

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

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 i

Re: Walter leaving and shift to XP.

2008-04-24 Thread John Gilmore
> I fought long and hard to get the principle of free and open added to > the core principles of OLPC because I believe that (a) there is power > in freedom ... (b) there is efficiency in freedom ... . Not to mention that there's freedom in freedom. :-} One aspect of freedom that has gone unmen

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 mor

Re: Adobe opens Flash--How much?

2008-05-01 Thread John Gilmore
Part of the fun of reading press releases and legal arguments is figuring out what they deliberately left out. In Adobe's case, gnash and swfdec were conspicuously not mentioned. The closest they came was here: http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/faq/index.html ... we want to ensure the i

Re: very simple datastore reimplementation

2008-05-08 Thread John Gilmore
Another way I think of (what I think is) Jim's naming issue is: A kid uses their OLPC for a few years, does all her work on it, then graduates, moves to the capital city, and goes to college. She's written papers on her OLPC, done experiments and logged the results, exchanged significant

Re: Build olpc3-8 dies in early init.

2008-05-09 Thread John Gilmore
> 1) upstart wants to be pid 1. We reserve pid 1 for our own use. We can > remove the conflict with a dirty hack, contained in the upstart RPMs at > http://dev.laptop.org/~mstone/olpc3-repo. Probably, we need to > implement --init for upstart. (Or not use upstart.) Since our PID 1 isn't really do

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 inappropria

Re: [sugar] OLPC priorities for Sugar in the August release

2008-05-14 Thread John Gilmore
> Specifically, check out Feel free to look at the latest at > wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Frame for details on the changes which will > imbue the Frame with much more utility. We still need to address the > usability concerns, naturally, ... See dev.laptop.org/ticket/4910 for a critique of the us

Re: Sugar Labs errs on the side of usability

2008-05-15 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 w

Re: Microsoft / new firmware

2008-05-15 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
rt for a stolen product, yet they would still be weaning kids away from Linux. John Gilmore (not an OLPC employee!) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel

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 g

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

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 s

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 suspe

Re: [IAEP] etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository

2008-06-24 Thread John Gilmore
Jim: > My point is somewhat different: the only way out of the compilation > trust trap is another compiler. Unless someone has done this for gcc, > it has the identical problem, and there are many possible upstream > attacks. I see no reason (probably less) to trust the chain of trust > for gcc

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 a

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 http://wiki.lapt

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

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 af

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 http://lists.l

Re: NAND out of space bikeshed

2008-07-22 Thread John Gilmore
What a bikeshed... Could mgmt please assign one person to push this to resolution? > We need both the reliability in Sugar/Journal > and decent handling of "disk-full boot". For Uruguay, you can't fix it til it can boot. Thus, any small change that makes the machine boot up is an enabler. A si

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

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 runn

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 th

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 precede

Sugared Wine project begins

2008-08-07 Thread John Gilmore
But peaceful coexistence, plus superior technology and licensing on the GNU/Linux side, are our best path to compete with it for mindshare and market share. Most of the improvements being made here will be useful in other portable and embedded systems, making Microsoft OS's even less co

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 prese

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 solu

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 sus

Python multithreaded GTK programs are still polling in F9, F10

2008-08-09 Thread John Gilmore
t be there yet. Soon, if the Python in F10 and/or OLPC is fixed, and its pygobject is recompiled using that Python into a new binary package, and pygtk is fixed properly, Python multithreaded programs will stop their needless polling. We're getting very close... John Gilmore _

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 y

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: inhibiting suspend via dbus

2008-08-11 Thread John Gilmore
> The problem with the pure hereustic approach is that there may > be times when we don't have enough knowledge about the system state > and more importantly the user's behaviour to really make a decision > without information from the application. For example, if I am streaming > music on my

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 mes

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 intera

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 a

Re: Fedora User Certificates

2008-08-22 Thread John Gilmore
> Effective immediately we have replaced the CA that is in use for > cvs.fedoraproject.org and koji.fedoraproject.org This effects uploading to > lookaside cache and building packages. How do we know whether the old CA or the new CA is the secure one? This email "from Dennis" could easily be a s

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 buildsys

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

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 thi

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 power-me

Re: running pre-release images without signing

2008-09-15 Thread John Gilmore
Pia, > Am I able to make a pre-release signed image myself? There is generally no reason to run "signed" images on your XO. A stable, working unsigned image will run *just as well*. The only thing a "signed" image can do is to be installed on a lockdown machine that the user isn't free to upgra

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 doe

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

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 preven

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- co

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 jailbr

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

2008-10-01 Thread John Gilmore
ountry asks for freedom in their laptop shipments, and no G1G1 is shipped 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]

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

2008-10-02 Thread John Gilmore
ountry asks for freedom in their laptop shipments, and no G1G1 is shipped 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]

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 th

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: How to Clean Install Release 8.2.0 (Build 767)

2008-10-07 Thread John Gilmore
Does anyone see any inconsistency between these statements? > Sugar reinvents how computers can be used for education. ... > Everything is saved automatically. > Our goal is to make it almost impossible to lose any data. and > 1. YOU WILL LOSE ALL YOUR FILES. Back up personal files that

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 wi

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

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 co

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 t

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 suppor

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 a

Re: ACPI on XO (or rather, how to use cpuidle on XO)

2008-11-03 Thread John Gilmore
20 >/sys/cpuidle/nslatency cat To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Measuring and using CPU idleness in Ohm Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2007 22:25:02 -0800 From: John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Before you started in on ohm, I had cherry-picked the Linus cpuidle patches into

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
ng 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 ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel

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" (deve

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