- --
#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
- --
#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
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
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
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
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
.
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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:
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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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.
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
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
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
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
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
.
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
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
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.
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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
(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
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
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
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
| 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
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
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
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
[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,
. 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
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
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
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
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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
(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
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
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
...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
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
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
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
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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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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,
binary package, and pygtk is
fixed properly, Python multithreaded programs will stop their needless
polling. We're getting very close...
John Gilmore
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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.
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),
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
[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;
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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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