[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; they can all hear each other on the radio just fine. Mac laptops do this, for example, using the standard Zeroconf protocols to assign IP addresses to themselves, and find each other by name with mdns. OLPC's collaboration infrastructure doesn't support this -- or if some underlying layer does, there's no UI for it. There's no way for the user to tell the laptop, "Talk to other nearby laptops -- without the mesh, without an access point". Future hardware might well want to discard the complicated and power-hungry mesh option, since we really aren't using it anyway, except for lease activation and this "under a tree" scenario. That would give us lots more choices on future WiFi hardware. If we fix collab to work in ad-hoc mode under a tree, and when two or more machines are plugged-together via Ethernet without a server, then not only will our future products have that choice, but also, our collab stuff will be MUCH easier to drop into ordinary Linux distros and applications. It seems to me that this would achieve a big piece of OLPC's original software goals -- to spawn a revolution in free software applications that support and encourage online collaboration. (Divorcing the collab support from the OLPC-unique Sugar GUI is also a prerequisite for making that happen.) John _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel