FWN/Beats/OLPC

OLPC Fedora SIG
In this section, we cover Fedora developments for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO laptop, and also Sugar development for Fedora releases[1]. We also pull relevant stories from the OLPC-Community list[2].

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list

[2] http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news

Contributing writer: Pascal Calarco

Merging OLPC with Rawhide
Peter Robinson announced[1] that he is beginning to merge  package branches into the mainline   rawhide and   joyride streams[1]. Jeremy Katz suggested[2] that probably just being concerned with  is all that is needed, "[g]iven that the idea seems to be to rebase to F10 for the next OLPC release..." "In most cases, they're "something needs to be ported" --eg, some of the Sugar bits for the new NetworkManager dbus api or similar," he added[3]

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-October/msg00068.html

[2] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-October/msg00069.html

[3] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-October/msg00071.html

Pre-orders for Fedora 10 XO cards Open October 28th
Karlie Robinson announced[1] that pre-orders for the Fedora 10 OLPC SD cards will start October 28 at On-Disk.com, and she'll update the list when pricing has been finalized. The cards will also eventually be available at Amazon.com. She added that users may be interested in this, "1) for adults who may not find the Sugar environment practical for daily use, the Fedora 10 option allows the machine to behave in a more familiar way. 2) In this sense, the XO is on-par with an Asus Eee PC, except your purchase during the G1G1 promotion directly effects the lives of children. A social purchase rather than a corporate profit purchase."

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-October/msg00073.html

Fedora XO Network Test Meeting
The IRC logs[1] from the meeting on 10/24/2008 were posted by James Laska. The team has outlined their test plans[2], and discussed which applications to test next, including command line tools,, USB wired and wireless devices, and checking status of mesh networking in Fedora 10.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-October/msg00077.html

[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/TestPlans/Networking

XO - XFCE Fedora 10 Test Team
James Laska invited[1] interested folk to join a new team to begin testing  for the Fedora 10 build on the XO. "There's been a lot of buzz around using a more lightweight desktop environment on the XO," he wrote. "While GNOME will continue to be the desktop offered with this years G1G1, I certainly don't want to discourage folks from testing alternatives. I do want to emphasize though that GNOME is the primary focus for Fedora on the XO.  The work that Josh Bresser's and the Performance Test team is doing is very important in identifying memory/cpu/"disk" hogs on the XO."

Interested parties can sign up[2], and more details on the team roles are also available[3]

[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-October/msg00080.html

[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/XO_Test_Roll_Call

[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/TestPlans/Fedora10_On_XO#Responsibilities

Sugar Review Activity
Sebastian Dziallas announced[4] that the  was ready for review.

[4] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-October/msg00081.html

OLPC-Community Updates
This section covers Fedora/Sugar activity summarized on the OLPC-Community list[1], sent out weekly by [| Jim Gettys]. The 10/20/2008 edition is available[2], and relevant items are summarized or reproduced below.

[1] http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news

[2] http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-news/2008-October/000151.html

The QA team continued performance and capacity testing with a session of 20 laptops connected to a school server, with everyone using chat. A few new tickets were opened as a result of the testing, and "We continue testing with the school server while limiting to 50 - 55 the number of laptops connected to a single access point. We also plan to test other performance-enhancing configurations (including more than one access point connected to the same school server). We also plan to conduct performance testing in the "access point, no school server" setting."

The software development group was busy preparing future feature plans for the upcoming XOCamp[3], to be held the week of 11/17/2008 which welcomes presentations.

[3] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XOcamp

[| C. Scott Ananian] continued work on the next version of the Journal (known as Journal2), with new media and screencasts available[4]. [| Eben Eliason] also spent time meeting and planning for Journal2, and will "...begin working on revised screenshots and use case scenarios next week so design and implementation can be brought together early in the next release cycle."

[4] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Journal_reloaded

[| Erik Garrison] spent the week testing various hierarchical file managers which could potentially be used in Sugar and working on UI performance issues. To close the week he published a set of potential modifications to the OLPC software distribution which dramatically improve user interface performance.

Chris Ball worked on power management and an interesting new screencast activity on the XO, "allow[ing] a movie to be created using the content of the display along with narration over the microphone; it could be useful for creating shareable tutorials and walk throughs both for learning how to use the XO and for learning in general."

The 0th issue of The OLPC Journal[5] was put together by [| Michael Stone] and [| SJ Klien], covering activity on the OLPC devel list, announcements of the G1G1 laptop 2008 program, the upcoming XOCamp2, XO tips and tricks, and the Journal2 work.

[5] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC:Journal

An initial implementation of Moodle for the school server was completed by Martin Langhoff.

[| Morgan Collett] debugged connections to jabber.laptop.org, and tried to make presence service more reliable in the face of network delays seen in this setup. He worked on API documentation for activity authors, and discussed 9.1.0 goals for collaboration.

Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote a proposal about API stability policy for Glucose and discussed it in the Sugar irc meeting, and wrote a list of work items to make Sugar window management more standard compliant and better host normal desktop applications.

[| Tomeu Vizoso] worked on several tasks including adding downloading links and images to the Journal, adding a removable storage icon to Sugar's frame, in preparation of further improvements to handling USB sticks, improved shell loads by 70%, and other work.

Simon Schampijer has been landing the use of  for the profile in. The profile is now using  to store the preferences. The old API in sugar/profile has been kept around to not break activities using it, for example to request the nickname or the color of the user. You can keep on running multiple instances of the emulator by using the 'SUGAR_PROFILE=username sugar-emulator' command. This keeps on working since we use gconf-dbus in sugar-jhbuild and therefore run one gconf daemon per instance.

[| Sayamindu Dasgupta] worked on revising the Khmer keyboard layout so that it adheres to the national NiDA standard as closely as possible. He also worked on adding fallback language support for translations (eg: an Aymara user would like to see Spanish translations as fallback if Aymara ones are not available instead of the default English). In the Sugar department, Sayamindu continued his work on Read and added support for handling external hyperlinks in the underlying evince python bindings.

Guillaume Desmottes implemented the last bits of the new search protocol in Gadget. He released Gadget 0.0.2 which should contain all the requested features. On the Gabble front he finished to implement the new protocol as well and merge the new Gadget API branch. In order to drastically simplify Gadget integration in Sugar, he investigated a new path where buddies in views where advertised as online by Gabble. He implemented it as a proof of concept and was able to very easily request views and making their activities and buddies appear in the mesh view without (almost) any PS change! He also released telepathy-python 0.15.2 which contains new API which are needed to perform Gadget searches.

Javier Cardona worked on driver support for the "wakeup on lan" (WOL) functionality that currently is implemented in the wireless firmware. We can now wake up the XO based on the presence of a number of predefined 4-byte patterns in the received wireless frames, making possible scenarios such as waking up on ARP requests for its IP address.

Ricardo Carrano spent the week in tests with the XO acting as an access point, working with students at UFF to build a wireless sparse mesh test bed[6] and working with Cozybit on the remaining WPA timing issues.

[6] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wireless_Sparse_Testbed