date:20080801

Hello everyone,

I am trying to get started experimenting with mesh networking,
but I can't seem to be able to do the basics.

I got two XOs (with different builds, one is the latest joyride). I
get them both connected say to Mesh 1. I see that ifconfig reports
a  IP address on each machine for mesh0, but I can't ping
each other.

In fact I can ping from one to the other but indirectly: one is connected
to ethernet and then it finds a route via the lan and wlan to the wifi-only
machine. Do you think the wlan is interfering with the mesh?

Also: I am not really using the wlan for general internet because it uses
VPN and (unless someone shows me how to do otherwise) I can't use
it with the XO (but I am happy with just using ethernet).

Any suggestions welcome. Thanks for your earlier replies to my other
queries.

Dr Victor Lazzarini
Senior Lecturer
Music Technology Laboratory, Music Department
National University of Ireland, Maynooth 

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

2008-08-01 Thread Hemant Goyal

Hi James,


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 know Hemant Goyal was working on that
 problem and I don't know where he left it.


I did explore a few solutions to the problem and make the speechd API use
gobjects to make the communication with the speech server asynchronous. I
believe a certain bugfix in python 2.6 will resolve the problems we are
facing, hence for the moment it was decided to postpone the modification of
the speechd API (also modification of the API implementation was not so
straightforward).



  He was also working on packaging RPMs for speech-dispatcher on Fedora.  He
 has some that work but have many dependencies that chew up scare disk space.
  I know he's working on an alternate set of RPMs with fewer dependencies for
 OLPC.  I haven't tried them.


The latest package (OLPC-2 Release 18) can be retrieved from
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=57201

I have removed the pulseaudio and nas dependencies. You do not have to be
root to be able to run the speech-dispatcher package on XO.

To install speech-dispatcher please uninstall the previous package that you
installed using rpm -e speech-dispatcher and then install the latest
pacakge.

To run speech-dispatcher execute:

/usr/bin/speech-dispatcher -C ~/.speechd/ -P /tmp/speechd.pid

In case you run into any trouble please let me know.

The instructions in the wiki for installing speech-dispatcher are incorrect
 and out of date.  I'm hoping Hemant will update these as well when he is
 ready.


Again, until things are not finalized (they seem to be changing so much) I
dont want to update the documentation.

Cheers!
Hemant
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Re: sugar start-up profiling

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 7:55 AM, riccardo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 17:27 +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
 On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 3:15 PM, riccardo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 I guess that's for the mesh and friends view?
 Oh, right!
 +1 for changing the algorithm.

Eben, can you write down a list of requirements for the spread layout?

Thanks,

Tomeu
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Re: Your journal is empty

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 3:26 AM, Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Recently, I have on two occasions with Joyride (2229+, 2232) pressed
 ctl-alt-erase in order to restart Sugar.  Both times. when Sugar
 came up, the Journal screen told me 'Your journal is empty'.

 If unwanted emptying of the Journal were to be experienced by
 others (in addition to me), then I think this problem should be a
 SERIOUS blocker to 8.2.

Yes, that's pretty worrying. Can you more or less reliably reproduce it?

Thanks,

Tomeu
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Sucrose 0.81.6 Development Release

2008-08-01 Thread Simon Schampijer

The new Sucrose 0.81.6 Development Release is out!

This is Release Candidate 2 [1]. This cycle was again about stabilizing the 
release. Thanks to all the translators we were able to get many new 
translations 
in. All the Fructose modules have been released containing the new strings.

Thanks for all your efforts!

Checkout the detailed release notes:
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.6

In behalf of the Sugar community,
Your release team

[1] Sucrose schedule: http://sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Roadmap


_

== Glucose news ==

=== sugar-toolkit ===
* #7566 sugar-shell enters in infinite loop after a failed shutdown
* #7534 Safer to always install, rather than comparing versions
* #7494 Updates to Browse-92 fail.

=== sugar ===
* #7248 Speaker device has inconsistent behavior
* #7625 alt+tab switching is slow because activities are notified unneccessary
* #7560 cp: Inconsistent behavior after changing the xo color
* #7641 Control panel sugar theme infelicities.
* #6136 No feedback from 'register' request.

=== sugar-artwork ===
* Add emblem-downlaods to the theme
* Fix text color on white background
* Add a special case for the SugarSectionView as it has a white background

=== sugar-base ===
* Make logger safe to full disk
* translation updates

=== sugar-datastore ===
* #7234 Request all the results so we get an accurate entry count

=== etoys ===
* Allow to configure Squeaklet directory location by VM parameter (trac #7624)
* Initial import of GStreamer
* Fix PolygonMorphs stepTime
* Pango Speed up
* Convert ParticleDyeInWater.mpg to OGG

=== journal-activity ===
* #5907 resume activity when preview is clicked (Daniel Drake)
* Dutch translation update (Myckel)
* Telugu translation update (Satya)
* Spanish translation update (Rafael Ortiz)
* #7600 Discard palette when the jobject changes (Tomeu Vizoso)
* Mongolian translation update (Odon)
* #7718 Fix set title (Simon Schampijer)


== Fructose news ==

=== chat-activity ===
* #7633: Close the text channel when stopping a 1-1 chat (morgs)
* #7717: Log incoming messages (morgs)
* #7692: Don't show pending messages when joining a chat (morgs)
* Updated translations: nl, te, es, mn

=== browse-activity ===
* #6825 Problems with email webfrontend www.adinet.com.uy
* Translation updates: Dutch, Telugu

=== terminal-activity ===
* Translation updates for Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, Mongolian and Telugu

=== read-activity ===
* Translation updates

=== write-activity ===
* Translation updates

=== log-activity ===
* Translation updates

=== pippy-activity ===
* many great translations
* more sugar thanks

=== calculate-activity ===
* Updated translations
* Fix bugs in Rational class (#7235)
* Fixed #5902 (help msg)


== Fructose dependencies news ==

=== hulahop ===
* #7645 Browse loses on comcast.net
* #7530 google gears fail to register as a component in Browse
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Re: Your journal is empty

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 3:26 AM, Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Recently, I have on two occasions with Joyride (2229+, 2232) pressed
 ctl-alt-erase in order to restart Sugar.  Both times. when Sugar
 came up, the Journal screen told me 'Your journal is empty'.

 If unwanted emptying of the Journal were to be experienced by
 others (in addition to me), then I think this problem should be a
 SERIOUS blocker to 8.2.

 Yes, that's pretty worrying. Can you more or less reliably reproduce it?

Just to point at the code that should handle the unexpected shutdown:

http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/datastore;a=blob;f=bin/datastore-service;h=aba711221eded35ad919196ea0942072d96d966c;hb=HEAD#l49

We should make sure that the shutdown is handled gracefully and
there's no index corruption nor a stale locking file.

Regards,

Tomeu
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Re: [sugar] Remarks on the Work of Sugar (kid contributions)

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 4:14 AM, Bastien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 you can't just share a file, you have to share an activity, ...

 Right.

 Idea for a new activity: Candy Bag.  You open a bag (i.e. you launch the
 CandyBag activity), then you put journal entries in it, then sharing
 this activity means that your friends can grab a candy in your bag.

I thought Benjamin Schwartz had already done something similar?

Tomeu
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Solar charging - Smart Drive possibilities?

2008-08-01 Thread Stan. SWAN

More in the just how ARE these XOs meant to be charged off grid 
department


Rescued  Smart Drive  NZ made washing machine PM stepper motors have
found immense use for microhydro  wind work, as ~ 200W can readily be
obtained when used as a generator. Even a ~50W hand cranked unit has
been developed by the Eco-Innovcation gurus, but as of course human
fatigue sets in after ~ 10 minutes a pedaled exy-cycle version may be
however much more ergonomic.  The thought crossed my mind that rewound
 Smart Drives may have some  mileage in the style of  African water
well pumping Play Pumps ?  More details  at these pix =

http://www.manuka.orconhosting.net.nz/smart1.jpg
http://www.manuka.orconhosting.net.nz/smart2.jpg
http://www.manuka.orconhosting.net.nz/smart3.jpg
http://www.manuka.orconhosting.net.nz/smart4.jpg

Stan
---

Stan. SWAN - Educator/writer/consultant (ICT-Electronics-Sustainable Energy)
EMAIL: = [EMAIL PROTECTED]  (Work) = [EMAIL PROTECTED]
CELL: (64)-021-672-958 HOME: (64)-(4)-562-7494 GST Reg: 36-921-021
POSTAL: 24 Tuatoru St, Eastbourne-L.H., Wellington 5013, NEW ZEALAND.
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Re: [sugar] Your journal is empty

2008-08-01 Thread Shikhar

Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
 On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 3:26 AM, Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
   
 Recently, I have on two occasions with Joyride (2229+, 2232) pressed
 ctl-alt-erase in order to restart Sugar.  Both times. when Sugar
 came up, the Journal screen told me 'Your journal is empty'.

 If unwanted emptying of the Journal were to be experienced by
 others (in addition to me), then I think this problem should be a
 SERIOUS blocker to 8.2.
 
I tried several times to reproduce this issue by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Erase 
while doing various things on the XO but did not run into it. Joyride 2230

Shikhar
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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread James Cameron

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 11:23:49AM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
 http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/whiteonblack.tar.gz

+1

Works for me.  But.

Odd that it is slower than an xterm for displaying a ps ax ... 0.517s
on 703 in the xterm, 3.068s in the text console ... why is it six times
slower?

(The xterm being compared was xterm -fa DejaVu LGC Sans Mono -fs 9 +sb
-bg black -fg white started within a Terminal activity.  Tested on a
C2, which was idle.)

Over to Alt/F2, the old font gives 1.359s for the text console.  Still,
this default font is slower than the xterm.

It must be due to the output device ... ssh to the C2, ps ax takes
0.073s.

Not exactly a rock solid test ... does anyone else see similar?

-- 
James Cameronmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://quozl.netrek.org/
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New joyride build 2239

2008-08-01 Thread Build Announcer v2

http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2239

Changes in build 2239 from build: 2237

Size delta: 0.13M

-kernel 2.6.25-20080730.1.olpc.85e8ce3752b87a2
+kernel 2.6.25-20080801.1.olpc.4cb5af5103d70b9

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See http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer/joyride-pkgs.html for aggregate logs
See http://dev.laptop.org/~rwh/announcer/joyride_vs_update1.html for a 
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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread Bert Freudenberg


On 01.08.2008, at 14:43, James Cameron wrote:

 On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 11:23:49AM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
 http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/whiteonblack.tar.gz

 +1

 Works for me.  But.

 Odd that it is slower than an xterm for displaying a ps ax ...  
 0.517s
 on 703 in the xterm, 3.068s in the text console ... why is it six  
 times
 slower?

 (The xterm being compared was xterm -fa DejaVu LGC Sans Mono -fs 9  
 +sb
 -bg black -fg white started within a Terminal activity.  Tested on a
 C2, which was idle.)

 Over to Alt/F2, the old font gives 1.359s for the text console.   
 Still,
 this default font is slower than the xterm.

 It must be due to the output device ... ssh to the C2, ps ax takes
 0.073s.

 Not exactly a rock solid test ... does anyone else see similar?


Yes, the console feels rather slow. Guess the kernel is not using  
optimal blitting for scrolling (the X server is accelerated even). But  
then, I don't know how displaying/scrolling the console really works,  
hence, not pointing fingers ...

- Bert -


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Re: activity bar

Now, another bit of info I can't find in Walter's minimalist draft 
for the updated
Sugar is how access newly created activities, which I have put in the
~/Activities together with the rest.

The 'list' view only gives me the installed activities, which is no use to me.
Restarting X does not make sugar find the new activities. I was trying to look
into Bert's script to see if there was a trick to make sugar see 
newly installed
activities, but I saw nothing obvious.

Thanks
Victor

At 13:55 31/07/2008, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
Victor,

please refer to Walter's draft for the updated Sugar documentation 
for more information on the re-designed home-view:

http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Walter/sandbox/Homehttp://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Walter/sandbox/Home

Hope that helps,
Christoph

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Victor Lazzarini 
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hello everyone,

I have upgraded to the latest joyride and installed the activities
with Bert's script. One question remains: is the activity bar
gone, or is somewhere else now?



Victor Lazzarini
Music Technology Laboratory
Music Department
National University of Ireland, Maynooth

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--
Christoph Derndorfer
Co-Editor, OLPCnews
url: http://www.olpcnews.comwww.olpcnews.com
e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED]

Victor Lazzarini
Music Technology Laboratory
Music Department
National University of Ireland, Maynooth 

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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread Gary C Martin

On 1 Aug 2008, at 03:25, Walter Bender wrote:

 Curious as to what occasions need root access within X Windows? Maybe
 the console is enough?

 -walter

I don't think I've used the console in months, nice to know it's there  
in an emergency, but it was problematic to use for normal admin tasks  
for two reasons:

1) The keyboard map does not match the machines actual keyboard, so  
trying to remember US key layout on a Spanish keypad is a  
nightmare :-) Anyone know any tricks to correct that?

2) Often the olpc related scripts I'd be trying to use would have some  
hooks into X, and other environment variables. Without a lot of env  
hacking/guessing they would just bomb out in console.

 On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 9:38 PM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED]  
 wrote:
 One of our present security difficulties is that the Terminal  
 activity
 is not isolated. It is de-isolated so that it can serve the dual  
 role of
 root terminal and 'general exploration' terminal. Perhaps reviving  
 the
 Quake Terminal for the root-terminal role and isolating the Terminal
 activity proper would be a nice way to solve half of our security  
 issue?

--Gary

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Re: activity bar

2008-08-01 Thread Marco Pesenti Gritti

Victor Lazzarini wrote:
 Now, another bit of info I can't find in Walter's minimalist draft 
 for the updated
 Sugar is how access newly created activities, which I have put in the
 ~/Activities together with the rest.

 The 'list' view only gives me the installed activities, which is no use to me.
 Restarting X does not make sugar find the new activities. I was trying to look
 into Bert's script to see if there was a trick to make sugar see 
 newly installed
 activities, but I saw nothing obvious.
   

No trick required, it should work. Can you provide logs please?

Marco
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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread Walter Bender

The keyboard issue is simply a matter of having the correct console
keyboard map files installed. The one for Spanish is attached. Not
sure what the current plan is for inclusion of these files (Dennis?).
It should be installed in /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty

Regarding your second point, this is really what I was asking: what
dependencies do we have for Sugar/X in normal admin tasks that require
root?

thanks.

-walter

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 9:45 AM, Gary C Martin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On 1 Aug 2008, at 03:25, Walter Bender wrote:

 Curious as to what occasions need root access within X Windows? Maybe
 the console is enough?

 -walter

 I don't think I've used the console in months, nice to know it's there in an
 emergency, but it was problematic to use for normal admin tasks for two
 reasons:

 1) The keyboard map does not match the machines actual keyboard, so trying
 to remember US key layout on a Spanish keypad is a nightmare :-) Anyone know
 any tricks to correct that?

 2) Often the olpc related scripts I'd be trying to use would have some hooks
 into X, and other environment variables. Without a lot of env
 hacking/guessing they would just bomb out in console.

 On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 9:38 PM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 One of our present security difficulties is that the Terminal activity
 is not isolated. It is de-isolated so that it can serve the dual role of
 root terminal and 'general exploration' terminal. Perhaps reviving the
 Quake Terminal for the root-terminal role and isolating the Terminal
 activity proper would be a nice way to solve half of our security issue?

 --Gary




es.map
Description: application/extension-map
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Re: activity bar

Not sure which logs. I can see all the installed activities but
none of my custom ones.

Victor

At 14:51 01/08/2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
Victor Lazzarini wrote:
Now, another bit of info I can't find in Walter's minimalist draft 
for the updated
Sugar is how access newly created activities, which I have put in the
~/Activities together with the rest.

The 'list' view only gives me the installed activities, which is no 
use to me.
Restarting X does not make sugar find the new activities. I was 
trying to look
into Bert's script to see if there was a trick to make sugar see 
newly installed
activities, but I saw nothing obvious.


No trick required, it should work. Can you provide logs please?

Marco

Victor Lazzarini
Music Technology Laboratory
Music Department
National University of Ireland, Maynooth 

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Re: activity bar

2008-08-01 Thread Walter Bender

not sure what the difference is between an installed activity and a
custom activity.

-walter

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 10:01 AM, Victor Lazzarini
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Not sure which logs. I can see all the installed activities but
 none of my custom ones.

 Victor

 At 14:51 01/08/2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
Victor Lazzarini wrote:
Now, another bit of info I can't find in Walter's minimalist draft
for the updated
Sugar is how access newly created activities, which I have put in the
~/Activities together with the rest.

The 'list' view only gives me the installed activities, which is no
use to me.
Restarting X does not make sugar find the new activities. I was
trying to look
into Bert's script to see if there was a trick to make sugar see
newly installed
activities, but I saw nothing obvious.


No trick required, it should work. Can you provide logs please?

Marco

 Victor Lazzarini
 Music Technology Laboratory
 Music Department
 National University of Ireland, Maynooth

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Re: [sugar] Your journal is empty

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 1:24 PM, Shikhar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

 On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 3:26 AM, Mikus Grinbergs [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


 Recently, I have on two occasions with Joyride (2229+, 2232) pressed
 ctl-alt-erase in order to restart Sugar.  Both times. when Sugar
 came up, the Journal screen told me 'Your journal is empty'.

 If unwanted emptying of the Journal were to be experienced by
 others (in addition to me), then I think this problem should be a
 SERIOUS blocker to 8.2.


 I tried several times to reproduce this issue by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Erase
 while doing various things on the XO but did not run into it. Joyride 2230

Mikus, any idea about how we could better reproduce it?

Thanks a lot for your testing, is very appreciated.

Regards,

Tomeu
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Re: activity bar

2008-08-01 Thread Bert Freudenberg

On 01.08.2008, at 16:01, Victor Lazzarini wrote:

 Not sure which logs. I can see all the installed activities but
 none of my custom ones.


Then your custom activity must be malformed. See

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles

(once the wiki finds its marbles again).

The logs are in ~olpc/.sugar/default/logs

- Bert -


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

2008-08-01 Thread James Simmons

Hemant,

Thanks for the reply.  I'll try to get to using those new RPMs when I 
can.  I hope the Python fix does the trick.  It would save me from 
having to rewrite the Activity.

I understand about the instructions for installing the RPMs not being on 
the Wiki.  I just mentioned that for the benefit of others on the 
mailing list who might want to try out the Activity with speech.

I am more concerned about the synchronization problems I'm having with 
text highlighting.  As you know if you've tried my activity, the 
highlighting tends to lag behind the speech and some words never get 
highlighted at all.  It may be that we can't count on espeak to do the 
callbacks in a timely manner and would be better off using festival or 
something else.  I know that the code for the Speak activity has some 
commented out code for supporting speech-dispatcher.  I borrowed a lot 
of it for my own Activity.  So if the author of Speak can fix that up we 
might be able to remove espeak without hurting anything much.  I haven't 
tried festival myself, though.

Thanks again,

James Simmons


Hemant Goyal wrote:

 Hi James,

 I did explore a few solutions to the problem and make the speechd API 
 use gobjects to make the communication with the speech server 
 asynchronous. I believe a certain bugfix in python 2.6 will resolve 
 the problems we are facing, hence for the moment it was decided to 
 postpone the modification of the speechd API (also modification of the 
 API implementation was not so straightforward).



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Re: activity bar

I know where the logs are. I am not sure which of the logs Marco
was referring to.

At 15:13 01/08/2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
On 01.08.2008, at 16:01, Victor Lazzarini wrote:

  Not sure which logs. I can see all the installed activities but
  none of my custom ones.


Then your custom activity must be malformed. See

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles

(once the wiki finds its marbles again).

The logs are in ~olpc/.sugar/default/logs

- Bert -


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Music Technology Laboratory
Music Department
National University of Ireland, Maynooth 

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Re: sugar start-up profiling

Spread layout should:
* Position icons so as to minimize overlap
* Support a suggested location for the position of a given icon
* Support both addition and removal of nodes
* Support in-place scaling of nodes, both growing and shrinking
* Have a low big-O (O(n)? O(nlogn)? But, as we've seen, it also needs a
fairly low constant)

I noticed after glancing at the code in place now that you don't actually
follow my algorithm (which is technically O(n), I think, but with a (really)
large constant) because you recurse on the collision checks.  Removing that
recursion is one small step in the right direction.  However, the overhead
of maintaining the weights array seems to be a bottleneck on the laptops.

I discussed a few possible options with Michael the other day. One option is
to use a quad tree to isolate nodes hierarchically, to minimize the amount
of collision checking needed and to prevent the need for a weights array.
 Instead, the nodes of the quad tree are assigned weights which represent
the sum total of weights in their subtrees.  This is really nothing more
than an optimization of the current algorithm, but it could help a fair
amount.

Another potentially interesting solution is a pseudo-spring algorithm, by
which we detect some numbers of neighbors (O(n)) and then we push those
neighbors away with some force vector, the magnitude of which is weighted
based on the size of the nodes, and the direction of which is calculated as
the angle between them.  This solution doesn't, in theory, yield results
that are as good as the other options (since it pushes away at a fixed
angle, instead of towards nearby positions with ow weights), but it should
be really quick.

I'm sure there are other options, or combinations of these, that we could
explore as well.

- Eben

PS.  I did a review of the current algorithm a while back, but lost the
notes on it.  I'll go back through it again, because there did seem to be a
bit of unnecessary work being done when I looked at it before.



On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 6:30 AM, Tomeu Vizoso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 7:55 AM, riccardo [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
  On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 17:27 +0100, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:
  On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 3:15 PM, riccardo [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
 
  I guess that's for the mesh and friends view?
  Oh, right!
  +1 for changing the algorithm.

 Eben, can you write down a list of requirements for the spread layout?

 Thanks,

 Tomeu

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Re: sugar start-up profiling

2008-08-01 Thread Benjamin M. Schwartz

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Eben Eliason wrote:
| Spread layout should:
...
| * Have a low big-O (O(n)? O(nlogn)? But, as we've seen, it also needs a
| fairly low constant)

Surely the layout should be cached on disk, so that the algorithm is not
invoked on boot?  The layout algorithm should only be invoked when the
list of Activities changes.

- --Ben

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Re: sugar start-up profiling

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 10:19:50AM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote:
 Another potentially interesting solution is a pseudo-spring algorithm, by
 which we detect some numbers of neighbors (O(n)) and then we push those
 neighbors away with some force vector, the magnitude of which is weighted
 based on the size of the nodes, and the direction of which is calculated as
 the angle between them.  This solution doesn't, in theory, yield results
 that are as good as the other options (since it pushes away at a fixed
 angle, instead of towards nearby positions with ow weights), but it should
 be really quick.
 
 I'm sure there are other options, or combinations of these, that we could
 explore as well.
 

Could we be positioning icons on the basis of prior usage patterns?  By
this I mean that icons are spring'ed toward the XO icon with a force
vector related to their recent usage patterns.  Additionally, activities
which are started at similar times could be spring'ed together.  I'm
envisioning a learning layout algorithm to distinguish the most-used
activites.  This layout necessitates the collection of usage data which
could also be shared with our developers.

Erik
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Re: sugar start-up profiling

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 10:27 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 Hash: SHA1

 Eben Eliason wrote:
 | Spread layout should:
 ...
 | * Have a low big-O (O(n)? O(nlogn)? But, as we've seen, it also needs a
 | fairly low constant)

 Surely the layout should be cached on disk, so that the algorithm is not
 invoked on boot?  The layout algorithm should only be invoked when the
 list of Activities changes.


Agreed.  This should definitely be cached to prevent the startup lag.  (We
still need a better algo, though...)

- Eben




 - --Ben

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Re: sugar start-up profiling

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 10:19:50AM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote:
  Another potentially interesting solution is a pseudo-spring algorithm, by
  which we detect some numbers of neighbors (O(n)) and then we push those
  neighbors away with some force vector, the magnitude of which is weighted
  based on the size of the nodes, and the direction of which is calculated
 as
  the angle between them.  This solution doesn't, in theory, yield results
  that are as good as the other options (since it pushes away at a fixed
  angle, instead of towards nearby positions with ow weights), but it
 should
  be really quick.
 
  I'm sure there are other options, or combinations of these, that we could
  explore as well.
 

 Could we be positioning icons on the basis of prior usage patterns?  By
 this I mean that icons are spring'ed toward the XO icon with a force
 vector related to their recent usage patterns.  Additionally, activities
 which are started at similar times could be spring'ed together.  I'm
 envisioning a learning layout algorithm to distinguish the most-used
 activites.  This layout necessitates the collection of usage data which
 could also be shared with our developers.


This is a good point, and I have to say yes and no at the same time.  I
think your solution (I could be wrong!) is somewhat biased toward the
particular case of the Home view, but this algo needs to work on the Groups
and neighborhood views too.  Perhaps there are some (non-historical) ways to
compare data in those views, but I'm not sure.

In any case, there is another variable I would like to propose, which is a
suggested distance from the center of the screen -- or, if you'd like, a
spring of a particular k value between the center of the screen and the
object.  My particular use case is that of search.  I'd like to see a bunch
of search results slide onto the screen (and non-results slide off), and I'd
like it even more if the most relevant matches moved closest to the center.
 This is essential for scalability in the Groups and Neighborhood views.

I could also see this working to bring frequently used activities to the
center of the screen, and less frequently used ones to the edge (thought
that interferes with free placement).  I also see it making for an intuitive
activity search in the favorites view.  Even though only favorites are shown
on screen by default, anytime a search is entered, the non-favorites (which,
I propose, lay beyond the screen edges) which match can slide in, and
non-matching favorites slide off, presenting this weighted view of matches.
Clearing the entry, of course, returns the view to its natural state, with
only favorites showing.

- Eben



 Erik

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Re: sugar start-up profiling

2008-08-01 Thread riccardo

On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 10:41 -0400, Eben Eliason wrote:
 
 On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
 On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 10:19:50AM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote:
  Another potentially interesting solution is a pseudo-spring
 algorithm, by
  which we detect some numbers of neighbors (O(n)) and then we
 push those
  neighbors away with some force vector, the magnitude of
 which is weighted
  based on the size of the nodes, and the direction of which
 is calculated as
  the angle between them.  This solution doesn't, in theory,
 yield results
  that are as good as the other options (since it pushes away
 at a fixed
  angle, instead of towards nearby positions with ow weights),
 but it should
  be really quick.
 
  I'm sure there are other options, or combinations of these,
 that we could
  explore as well.
 
 
 
 Could we be positioning icons on the basis of prior usage
 patterns?  By
 this I mean that icons are spring'ed toward the XO icon with a
 force
 vector related to their recent usage patterns.  Additionally,
 activities
 which are started at similar times could be spring'ed
 together.  I'm
 envisioning a learning layout algorithm to distinguish the
 most-used
 activites.  This layout necessitates the collection of usage
 data which
 could also be shared with our developers.
 
 
 This is a good point, and I have to say yes and no at the same
 time.  I think your solution (I could be wrong!) is somewhat biased
 toward the particular case of the Home view, but this algo needs to
 work on the Groups and neighborhood views too.  Perhaps there are some
 (non-historical) ways to compare data in those views, but I'm not
 sure.
 
 
 In any case, there is another variable I would like to propose, which
 is a suggested distance from the center of the screen -- or, if you'd
 like, a spring of a particular k value between the center of the
 screen and the object.  My particular use case is that of search.  I'd
 like to see a bunch of search results slide onto the screen (and
 non-results slide off), and I'd like it even more if the most relevant
 matches moved closest to the center.  This is essential for
 scalability in the Groups and Neighborhood views.
 
 
 I could also see this working to bring frequently used activities to
 the center of the screen, and less frequently used ones to the edge
 (thought that interferes with free placement).  I also see it making
 for an intuitive activity search in the favorites view.  Even though
 only favorites are shown on screen by default, anytime a search is
 entered, the non-favorites (which, I propose, lay beyond the screen
 edges) which match can slide in, and non-matching favorites slide off,
 presenting this weighted view of matches. Clearing the entry, of
 course, returns the view to its natural state, with only favorites
 showing.
  

What about doing collision detection with Box2D (fast, well maintained
etc..) ?

This would enable any of the layout discussed here (and funny animations
when new icons are dropped in the layout ;).


 - Eben
 
 Erik
 
 

riccardo


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Re: sugar start-up profiling

2008-08-01 Thread Martin Dengler

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 04:53:20PM +0200, riccardo wrote:
 What about doing collision detection with Box2D (fast, well maintained
 etc..) ?

Didn't get shouted down last time you (or someone) mentioned it on
IRC.  +1.

 riccardo

Martin


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Re: sugar start-up profiling

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 10:41:41AM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote:
 On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
  On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 10:19:50AM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote:
   Another potentially interesting solution is a pseudo-spring algorithm, by
   which we detect some numbers of neighbors (O(n)) and then we push those
   neighbors away with some force vector, the magnitude of which is weighted
   based on the size of the nodes, and the direction of which is calculated
  as
   the angle between them.  This solution doesn't, in theory, yield results
   that are as good as the other options (since it pushes away at a fixed
   angle, instead of towards nearby positions with ow weights), but it
  should
   be really quick.
  
   I'm sure there are other options, or combinations of these, that we could
   explore as well.
  
 
  Could we be positioning icons on the basis of prior usage patterns?  By
  this I mean that icons are spring'ed toward the XO icon with a force
  vector related to their recent usage patterns.  Additionally, activities
  which are started at similar times could be spring'ed together.  I'm
  envisioning a learning layout algorithm to distinguish the most-used
  activites.  This layout necessitates the collection of usage data which
  could also be shared with our developers.
 
 
 This is a good point, and I have to say yes and no at the same time.  I
 think your solution (I could be wrong!) is somewhat biased toward the
 particular case of the Home view, but this algo needs to work on the Groups
 and neighborhood views too.  Perhaps there are some (non-historical) ways to
 compare data in those views, but I'm not sure.
 

I am thinking of a generalizable layout algorithm which can be invoked
on any set of icons with a list of weights.  The icons could be buddies
or access points.  We could weight them on the basis of the number of
(successful?) collaboration or connection events.  The same pattern
could be used for the group view.

 In any case, there is another variable I would like to propose, which is a
 suggested distance from the center of the screen -- or, if you'd like, a
 spring of a particular k value between the center of the screen and the
 object.  My particular use case is that of search.  I'd like to see a bunch
 of search results slide onto the screen (and non-results slide off), and I'd
 like it even more if the most relevant matches moved closest to the center.
  This is essential for scalability in the Groups and Neighborhood views.

This is interesting and snazzy.  I should note that I was thinking of
static views.

 I could also see this working to bring frequently used activities to the
 center of the screen, and less frequently used ones to the edge (thought
 that interferes with free placement).  I also see it making for an intuitive
 activity search in the favorites view.  Even though only favorites are shown
 on screen by default, anytime a search is entered, the non-favorites (which,
 I propose, lay beyond the screen edges) which match can slide in, and
 non-matching favorites slide off, presenting this weighted view of matches.
 Clearing the entry, of course, returns the view to its natural state, with
 only favorites showing.

Seems like the inerference with free placement means that such a
placement algorithm is its own beast.  Not sure how you can easily
rectify 'user-directed placement' and 'usage-directed placement'.

Erik
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Re: sugar start-up profiling

2008-08-01 Thread Martin Dengler

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 10:41:41AM -0400, Eben Eliason wrote:
 I could also see this working to bring frequently used activities to the
 center of the screen, and less frequently used ones to the edge (thought
 that interferes with free placement).

As long as we don't end up with personalized layouts - I
(personally, clearly not target audience, am mad, etc. disclaimer)
really hate that feature and always find it's better to have something
in a fixed place when trying to find it.  I like the
insensitive-ness the current (basic) filtering in the Neighborhood
view uses, since it makes things findable but also memorable.

 - Eben

Martin



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New joyride build 2240

2008-08-01 Thread Build Announcer v2

http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2240

Changes in build 2240 from build: 2239

Size delta: 0.00M

-sugar-journal 95-1.fc9
+sugar-journal 96-1.fc9
-sugar 0.81.7-1.fc9
+sugar 0.81.8-1.fc9
-sugar-base 0.81.2-3.fc9
+sugar-base 0.81.3-1.fc9
-sugar-datastore 0.8.3-1.olpc3
+sugar-datastore 0.8.4-1.fc9
-sugar-toolkit 0.81.7-1.fc9
+sugar-toolkit 0.81.8-1.fc9

--- Changes for sugar-journal 96-1.fc9 from 95-1.fc9 ---
  + 5907 resume activity when preview is clicked (Daniel Drake)
  + Dutch translation update (Myckel)
  + Telugu translation update (Satya)
  + Spanish translation update (Rafael Ortiz)
  + 7600 Discard palette when the jobject changes (Tomeu Vizoso)
  + Mongolian translation update (Odon)
  + 7718 Fix set title (Simon Schampijer)

--- Changes for sugar 0.81.8-1.fc9 from 0.81.7-1.fc9 ---
  + 7248 Speaker device has inconsistent behavior
  + 7625 alt+tab switching is slow because activities are notified unneccessary
  + 7560 cp: Inconsistent behavior after changing the xo color
  + 7641 Control panel sugar theme infelicities.
  + 6136 No feedback from 'register' request.

--- Changes for sugar-base 0.81.3-1.fc9 from 0.81.2-3.fc9 ---
  + Update to 0.81.3
  + Make logger safe to full disk
  + Translation updates

--- Changes for sugar-toolkit 0.81.8-1.fc9 from 0.81.7-1.fc9 ---
  + #7566 sugar-shell enters in infinite loop after a failed shutdown 
  + #7534 Safer to always install, rather than comparing versions
  + #7494 Updates to Browse-92 fail

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Re: identifying which builds are signed

2008-08-01 Thread Michael Stone

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 12:49:31AM -0400, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
 I have a general question.  I'm going to be helping some Ship.2 G1G1
 users (without developer keys) to perform off-line-upgrades of their
 systems.  Currently I have to data mine through the wiki to verify
 which builds are signed (and can be applied from an USB stick).
 
 Things in
 
 http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/
 http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/candidate/
 
 can be installed on locked machines.
 
 When we sign candidates or make candidates official, we send
 announcements and publish the signed build in the appropriate directory.

Thank you for the information.

I'm concluding from your answer that there is _no_ way to tell, by 
examining the 'binary' of the build (e.g., os___.ucb), whether that 
build is signed or not.

NAND-reflash-lock signatures are external to the build and are contained
in the attached fs.zip.

Boot-lock signatures on the kernel, initramfs, and firmware are
contained in 'actos.zip', 'actrd.zip', 'runos.zip', and 'runrd.zip', on
the installed filesystem.

SPI-reflash-lock signatures are contained in the 'bootfw.zip'.

olpc-update is presently only runnable on machines which have already
passed the boot-lock; therefore its operation does not require any
additional signatures.

Michael
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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread Michael Stone

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 02:45:38PM +0100, Gary C Martin wrote:
 On 1 Aug 2008, at 03:25, Walter Bender wrote:

 Curious as to what occasions need root access within X Windows? Maybe
 the console is enough?

That would work nicely for me, though it will work much less well for
people who desire the ability to display non-Latin text.

 1) The keyboard map does not match the machines actual keyboard, so  
 trying to remember US key layout on a Spanish keypad is a nightmare :-) 
 Anyone know any tricks to correct that?

loadkeys us
loadkeys es
etc. (There may be errors in the console keyboard maps but we fix them
as we find them.)


 2) Often the olpc related scripts I'd be trying to use would have some  
 hooks into X, and other environment variables. Without a lot of env  
 hacking/guessing they would just bomb out in console.

export DISPLAY=:0 
export XAUTHORITY=/home/olpc/.Xauthority  # may have moved.

Michael
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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread Martin Dengler

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 12:08:25PM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
 On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 02:45:38PM +0100, Gary C Martin wrote:
  2) Often the olpc related scripts I'd be trying to use would have some  
  hooks into X, and other environment variables. Without a lot of env  
  hacking/guessing they would just bomb out in console.
 
 export DISPLAY=:0 
 export XAUTHORITY=/home/olpc/.Xauthority  # may have moved.

DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS too, depending on the script:
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/phil/support-scripts;a=commitdiff;h=c2b508de1524ae46975af290bd4cff8db5f73dd1

 Michael

Martin


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Re: identifying which builds are signed

2008-08-01 Thread Mikus Grinbergs

 olpc-update is presently only runnable on machines which have already
 passed the boot-lock; therefore its operation does not require any
 additional signatures.

Thank you.  Now it makes sense to me -- a wrongdoer can insert a 
device and try booting it (e.g., the four-game-button press) -- so 
*what* he is trying to load needs to be verified for authenticity. 
Whereas the 'olpc-update' user already has a running system, and 
root privilege, so he is allowed to load.

Michael, thank you for this explanation (and for describing where 
the signatures are contained).  This is *much* clearer than the 
wiki, which gives cookbook explanations but does not say how come.


mikus

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Log Viewer-6 aborts on joyride-2230

2008-08-01 Thread Ton van Overbeek

Just entered a ticket (#7755) in trac about this subject.
See the trac entry for details.

Ton van Overbeek
PS if this is considered too much noise on the devel list, please tell 
me and I'll confine my bug reporting to trac.
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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread david

On Fri, 1 Aug 2008, Gary C Martin wrote:

 On 1 Aug 2008, at 03:25, Walter Bender wrote:

 Curious as to what occasions need root access within X Windows? Maybe
 the console is enough?

 -walter

 I don't think I've used the console in months, nice to know it's there
 in an emergency, but it was problematic to use for normal admin tasks
 for two reasons:

 1) The keyboard map does not match the machines actual keyboard, so
 trying to remember US key layout on a Spanish keypad is a
 nightmare :-) Anyone know any tricks to correct that?

 2) Often the olpc related scripts I'd be trying to use would have some
 hooks into X, and other environment variables. Without a lot of env
 hacking/guessing they would just bomb out in console.

numerous 'special keys' don't work at the console, including adjusting the 
screen brightness.

David Lang

 On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 9:38 PM, Michael Stone [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
 One of our present security difficulties is that the Terminal
 activity
 is not isolated. It is de-isolated so that it can serve the dual
 role of
 root terminal and 'general exploration' terminal. Perhaps reviving
 the
 Quake Terminal for the root-terminal role and isolating the Terminal
 activity proper would be a nice way to solve half of our security
 issue?

 --Gary

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Re: Terminals

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 11:03:39AM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 numerous 'special keys' don't work at the console, including adjusting the 
 screen brightness.

To get this to work we would have to push olpc-specific drivers into the
kernel, correct?

Erik


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Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

2008-08-01 Thread Bastien

Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 12:40:39AM +0200, Bastien wrote:
 It's not that important anyway.  It just occurred to me that the
 dependancies management challenge could be somehow dealt with by
 delivering a set of default activities.  I'm not aware of any 
 software distribution drawing such a strong line between the 
 core system and the applications/activities.
 

 We have been managing the dependency issue by ensuring that the 'core'
 activities required for a given build all work on the system-level
 software packages we include.  

What is the set of core activities?  how does this depend on a given
build?  

Maybe what I'm suggesting boils down to integrate this core activities
in the environment so that people installing Sugar won't have to install
them separatly.  Just the same way that installing a standard Fedora
will install Gnome (will install evolution (etc...)).

-- 
Bastien
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Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 08:21:34PM +0200, Bastien wrote:
 Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
 
  On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 12:40:39AM +0200, Bastien wrote:
  It's not that important anyway.  It just occurred to me that the
  dependancies management challenge could be somehow dealt with by
  delivering a set of default activities.  I'm not aware of any 
  software distribution drawing such a strong line between the 
  core system and the applications/activities.
  
 
  We have been managing the dependency issue by ensuring that the 'core'
  activities required for a given build all work on the system-level
  software packages we include.  
 
 What is the set of core activities?  how does this depend on a given
 build?  
 

e.g., (for an old build): http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Core

I mean 'core' in the sense that the core activities are those included
on a specific os image by default.  Users can install activities later.
These are not 'core'.

 Maybe what I'm suggesting boils down to integrate this core activities
 in the environment so that people installing Sugar won't have to install
 them separatly.  Just the same way that installing a standard Fedora
 will install Gnome (will install evolution (etc...)).
 

What I'm suggesting is that this step requires global optimization wrt
which activities are 'core'.  This is difficult, as various deployments
have different usage patterns and require different sets of software.

I have often built debian systems using debootstrap to pull in the most
minimal typically used system components.  On top of such a system
customization is easy.  I am suggesting that we may wish to develop a
similar system so that our downstream developers can have more
flexibility in customizing their systems.  Activites could be Sugar-core
and not XO-system core.

Erik
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New joyride build 2241

2008-08-01 Thread Build Announcer v2

http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2241

Changes in build 2241 from build: 2240

Size delta: 0.00M

-sugar-artwork 0.81.1-2.20080709gitc77b345c02.fc9
+sugar-artwork 0.81.3-1.olpc3

--- Changes for sugar-artwork 0.81.3-1.olpc3 from 
0.81.1-2.20080709gitc77b345c02.fc9 ---
  + git snapshot
  + 7385 Add view-freeform icon (eben)

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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread pgf

erik wrote:
  On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 11:03:39AM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
   numerous 'special keys' don't work at the console, including adjusting the 
   screen brightness.
  
  To get this to work we would have to push olpc-specific drivers into the
  kernel, correct?

not necessarily.  the keys can be monitored and acted on by a
daemon of some sort.

(but asking people to use the console with any regularity sure
feels like a copout.  To enter shell commands, first type
'ctrl-alt-networkview' just seems wrong.)

paul
=-
 paul fox, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread Walter Bender

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 Sugar/X Window actions that require root
access?

-walter

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 11:03:39AM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 numerous 'special keys' don't work at the console, including adjusting the
 screen brightness.

 To get this to work we would have to push olpc-specific drivers into the
 kernel, correct?

 Erik



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obsolete activity bundles are being packaged into current Joyride builds

2008-08-01 Thread Mikus Grinbergs

Happened to notice *two* entries for the same Activity (different 
versions) in the list view of Home.  [I don't know *how* that 
happened to come about.]  Investigated, and found that while I had 
manually (with 'sugar-install-bundle) installed the current version 
of that Activity, there was also an obsolete version of that same 
Activity contained in /usr/share/activities/bundle-archive/bundles.

mikus

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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread Benjamin M. Schwartz

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Walter Bender wrote:
| What are the Sugar/X Window actions that require root
| access?

This discussion is becoming a little confusing.  The problem is not just
root access.  There are three accounts in play here: root, olpc, and
10005 (an arbitrary isolated instance uid generated by Rainbow).

An isolated Terminal runs as 10005.
It can: run any binary in the major world-readable directories
(/usr/bin/*, etc.), spawn additional X applications in additional windows,
provided those X applications are happy to run as user 10005.
It cannot modify user settings with sugar-control-panel, read arbitrary
items from the Datastore, read or write /home/olpc, or start new Activity
instances.

A de-isolated Terminal runs as olpc.
It can: do anything that the olpc user can do, including use su to start
a session as root, run any X program as olpc or root, modify settings with
sugar-control-panel, launch new Activity instances, etc.

A console session starts as root.
It can: install RPMs, mess with stuff in /sys, and otherwise do anything
whatsoever on the system.
HOWEVER, it is currently nearly impossible to use this console to launch
activities, run X programs, modify settings with sugar-control-panel, and
otherwise mess with the running Sugar instance.  This is mostly because
the shell does not contain the correct environment variables to connect
with the X display and D-Bus bus.

- --Ben
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkiTXqUACgkQUJT6e6HFtqTOjwCfXYvrQxCp/pPiI765U5rvvrVd
w7YAn127vjO5xgNpAQiAzpvo4CDmt4qQ
=rymY
-END PGP SIGNATURE-
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Libertas thinmac/hostmode driver for Joyride kernels

2008-08-01 Thread Deepak Saxena


Hi,

Cozybit has been working on new thinmac firmware for the Libertas
chip that allows use of the chip in hostmode and I've built it 
against our Joyride kernels so that others can play around with it
and provide feedback.

You will need to do the following:

Install a recent joyrid. Latest is best and as of 2239, the kernel 
include network bridging enabled as a module, which is useful for
WiFi - Wired 

Download libertastf and helper modules from
http://dev.laptop.org/~dsaxena/libertastf_modules/ and copy
these on the XO to /root/libertastf

On the XO (mostly copied from wiki:Libertas_Thinfirmware_HOWTO):

# cd /lib/firmware
# wget 
http://dev.laptop.org/pub/firmware/libertas/thinfirm/lbtf_usb-5.132.2.p3.bin
# ln -s lbtf_usb-5.132.2.p3.bin lbtf_usb.bin
# rmmod usb8xxx
# rmmod libertastf
# cd /root/libertastf
# insmod cfg80211.ko
# insmod mac80211.ko
# insmod libertastf.ko
# insmod libertastf_usb.ko
# ifconfig wlan0 up

At this point network manager should take over and associate with your
network of choice. Note that suspend/resume does not work with the
thinmac driver and if you do suspend/resume, you will need to
rmmod the libertas_usb driver and then reload it.

To use the XO as an AP (I haven't tested this yet), see wiki:XO_as_AP.

If you want to just boot to the libertastf driver by default, you can do:

# mv /root/libertastf /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless
# mv /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/libertas /root
# depmod -a

On reboot, the libertastf driver will load and manage the card. 
To return to previous state of using the fullmac driver:

# mv /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/libertastf /root
# mv /root/libertas /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless
# depmod -a

I know this is not the most user-friendly method of using the driver
but should let folks play with it until I figure out a better way
to package it. The issue is that the driver requires the latest
mac80211 codebase and backporting this to our 2.6.25 kernel turned
out to be a massive nightmare. I ended up using the compat-wireless 
package [1] to build the lateset 802.11 codebase out-of-tree from
our kernel.  We need create a separate RPM or a set of scripts that 
end-users can use to install the drivers on their systems.

Enjoy,
~Deepak

[1] http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Download 

-- 
Deepak Saxena - Kernel Developer - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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video bleeds through somewhat between sessions

2008-08-01 Thread Mikus Grinbergs

G1G1, Joyride 2241.  In one Terminal session started mplayer -- it 
was playing a movie.  Went to another Terminal session, and entered 
some commands.  Noticed that not all of the text on that screen was 
equally distinct - some of it was paler than others.  Noticed that 
*which* text was paler changed from second to second.  Realized that 
the paler text in the second Terminal screen corresponded to the 
*brightest* areas of the movie frame then being shown in the first 
Terminal screen (the one I had switched way from).

mikus

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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 Sugar/X Window actions that require root
 access?

It doesn't matter if you have to abandon Sugar to do system
administration or to recover from a problem?  Walter, I'm shocked; I
would've expected you to be arguing on the other side: Sugar should
be the preferred environment.  That we shouldn't be kicking people
out of Sugar, particularly when their system is fragile and in need of
diagnosis, repair, or upgrade.  We should keep them in the environment
they know and understand, where the Frame works, the controls work,
the tabs work the same way, the keyboard keys all do the same things.

It was hard for the Support Gang to explain to people how to become
root so they could diagnose or fix something they reported as a
problem (like a full filesystem, a USB key that didn't work, ...).
OLPC was also changing the way you become root (su versus sudo) in
different software releases, based on Fedora changes.  We hashed all
this out in January, and the Terminal got a new # button at the top,
which injects the right command to make you root.  There's no such
button in the console.  If we push people back to the console, the
support load increases.  It's easier to get them to run the Terminal
applic...uh, activity, and press the root button, and type this
command.  Also, in Terminal, cut and paste works to send us back
diagnostic results via Browse.

The owners of free software based machines also need the ability to
inspect and revise the free software in those machines -- or it isn't
free as in freedom.  Legally, OLPC can push that ability out to the
very corners of the system (e.g. You can't do that in Sugar.).  But
morally and philosophically, we ought to be pulling it right into the
heart of the system (Of course you can, and it's so easy; here, let
me show you!).

Let's not lose sight of what's going on here.  The whole reason we are
having this discussion at all is because of OLPC's security model
(Bitfrost).  If the security model doesn't permit integrated,
interactive root access that lets people diagnose, repair,
investigate, and alter their systems, there's something wrong with the
security model -- not something wrong with root access.

John



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Re: status of 8.1.1 and now 8.1.2 ?

Hi S,

Thanks for the comments and for checking these pages!

Let me try to clarify.

As it stands today:

***
8.1.1 = ECO-5 = 708

8.1.1 is almost ready but it needs another review of the release
notes (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.1.1) and confirmation
of the exact image name for use in upgrade.  We especially need to
document properly the upgrade from 656 including how you get back your
activities when updating via olpc-update and via USB.

It can be used for G1G1 users if they read the release notes carefully
to understand upgrade choices affects on activities and the SD card issue.

In short, 8.1.1 needs one more sign off which I hope to close on early 
next week.

*
8.1.2 = ECO-6 = 709

8.1.2 may be used for the next G1G1 factory image but that's not final
yet either. The primary purpose is an updated image for Peru.

This one is getting a little closer and does need to be closed ASAP for 
Peru.

That's where things stand today. Does the Wiki adequately communicate 
that? Let me know if you have any suggestions on getting that explained 
better.

***

This link is owned by Seth:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Documentation_Projects#8.1.2

Hopefully he can update it based on this thread.

Both need to come together quickly, target next week. Neither is 
completely final as of this writing.

I'll definitely keep you and this list in the loop.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Thanks,

Greg S
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Re: Terminals

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 4:07 PM, John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  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 Sugar/X Window actions that require root
  access?

 It doesn't matter if you have to abandon Sugar to do system
 administration or to recover from a problem?  Walter, I'm shocked; I
 would've expected you to be arguing on the other side: Sugar should
 be the preferred environment.  That we shouldn't be kicking people
 out of Sugar, particularly when their system is fragile and in need of
 diagnosis, repair, or upgrade.  We should keep them in the environment
 they know and understand, where the Frame works, the controls work,
 the tabs work the same way, the keyboard keys all do the same things.

 It was hard for the Support Gang to explain to people how to become
 root so they could diagnose or fix something they reported as a
 problem (like a full filesystem, a USB key that didn't work, ...).
 OLPC was also changing the way you become root (su versus sudo) in
 different software releases, based on Fedora changes.  We hashed all
 this out in January, and the Terminal got a new # button at the top,
 which injects the right command to make you root.  There's no such
 button in the console.  If we push people back to the console, the
 support load increases.  It's easier to get them to run the Terminal
 applic...uh, activity, and press the root button, and type this
 command.  Also, in Terminal, cut and paste works to send us back
 diagnostic results via Browse.

 The owners of free software based machines also need the ability to
 inspect and revise the free software in those machines -- or it isn't
 free as in freedom.  Legally, OLPC can push that ability out to the
 very corners of the system (e.g. You can't do that in Sugar.).  But
 morally and philosophically, we ought to be pulling it right into the
 heart of the system (Of course you can, and it's so easy; here, let
 me show you!).


I agree with everything said above.


 Let's not lose sight of what's going on here.  The whole reason we are
 having this discussion at all is because of OLPC's security model
 (Bitfrost).  If the security model doesn't permit integrated,
 interactive root access that lets people diagnose, repair,
 investigate, and alter their systems, there's something wrong with the
 security model -- not something wrong with root access.


And I wonder if it could really be so simple.  Is it possible that we could
simply have a P_ROOT permission as well, or does that blow Bitfrost out of
the water?  In a way I'd hope not, since the whole point is that the desire
for root is requested/advertised, and therefore can (eventually) be denied;
P_ROOT clearly wouldn't be granted  within the default permissions either,
once we have them.

I write this assuming that this might not help matters at all...it could be
too lenient.  But perhaps we could offer the P_ROOT only to activities which
a) request it and b) are signed by some signing authority (could be us,
could be a country, etc.), where the security section of the control panel
offers a place to designate trusted signing authorities.  I'm no security
guru, though, which I willingly admit!  Is anything I've mentioned worth
even considering?

Clearly it's not as secure, and there are ways that someone can instruct a
kid to go to the CP, enter a new authority, install an evil app, etc.  But
There's a tradeoff here much like the memory/speed tradeoff we battle with
every day we hack at code...you can only improve some algorithms so much,
and beyond that you have to choose what to optimize for.

- Eben



John



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Difference between Sugar-Launch and launching from the ring

2008-08-01 Thread Alex Levenson

Hello,

I'm writing a physics problem solving game: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X2o

It runs fine when I launch it from the command line (Terminal Activity as
user olpc) via sugar-launch. It works regardless of the current working
directory.

But, it hangs when I launch it from the ring on the home screen. It pops up
with all the tool bars (but is missing all the icons in the custom toolbars)
and a gray canvas.

Anyone have an idea as to what's causing this?

Check out my source code at: http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=activities/x2o

Thanks!
Alex Levenson
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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread Jameson Chema Quinn

2008/8/1 Eben Eliason [EMAIL PROTECTED]



 On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 4:07 PM, John Gilmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

  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 Sugar/X Window actions that require root
  access?

 It doesn't matter if you have to abandon Sugar to do system
 administration or to recover from a problem?  Walter, I'm shocked; I
 would've expected you to be arguing on the other side: Sugar should
 be the preferred environment.  That we shouldn't be kicking people
 out of Sugar, particularly when their system is fragile and in need of
 diagnosis, repair, or upgrade.  We should keep them in the environment
 they know and understand, where the Frame works, the controls work,
 the tabs work the same way, the keyboard keys all do the same things.

 It was hard for the Support Gang to explain to people how to become
 root so they could diagnose or fix something they reported as a
 problem (like a full filesystem, a USB key that didn't work, ...).
 OLPC was also changing the way you become root (su versus sudo) in
 different software releases, based on Fedora changes.  We hashed all
 this out in January, and the Terminal got a new # button at the top,
 which injects the right command to make you root.  There's no such
 button in the console.  If we push people back to the console, the
 support load increases.  It's easier to get them to run the Terminal
 applic...uh, activity, and press the root button, and type this
 command.  Also, in Terminal, cut and paste works to send us back
 diagnostic results via Browse.

 The owners of free software based machines also need the ability to
 inspect and revise the free software in those machines -- or it isn't
 free as in freedom.  Legally, OLPC can push that ability out to the
 very corners of the system (e.g. You can't do that in Sugar.).  But
 morally and philosophically, we ought to be pulling it right into the
 heart of the system (Of course you can, and it's so easy; here, let
 me show you!).


 I agree with everything said above.


 Let's not lose sight of what's going on here.  The whole reason we are
 having this discussion at all is because of OLPC's security model
 (Bitfrost).  If the security model doesn't permit integrated,
 interactive root access that lets people diagnose, repair,
 investigate, and alter their systems, there's something wrong with the
 security model -- not something wrong with root access.


 And I wonder if it could really be so simple.  Is it possible that we could
 simply have a P_ROOT permission as well, or does that blow Bitfrost out of
 the water?  In a way I'd hope not, since the whole point is that the desire
 for root is requested/advertised, and therefore can (eventually) be denied;
 P_ROOT clearly wouldn't be granted  within the default permissions either,
 once we have them.


Coincidentally, I have a patch which does just that! See my thread on [EMAIL 
PROTECTED]
OK, I guess I should copy it to devel@ and security@ while I'm at it.

I write this assuming that this might not help matters at all...it could be
 too lenient.  But perhaps we could offer the P_ROOT only to activities which
 a) request it and b) are signed by some signing authority (could be us,
 could be a country, etc.), where the security section of the control panel
 offers a place to designate trusted signing authorities.  I'm no security
 guru, though, which I willingly admit!  Is anything I've mentioned worth
 even considering?


Once we have activity signatures, we can talk about this more concretely. I
expect that, for general bitfrost permissions, there will be a bitfrost
control panel that allows you to grant certain permissions to a specific
(hashed version of an) activity; or to delegate the power to grant certain
permissions to other signers (such as the author of an activity, so that
updates get same permissions). I think that it is reasonable to put
additional restrictions on the P_ROOT permission: perhaps it can ONLY be
granted to activities installed at build time OR signed by current XO?
(Then, to change the version of your terminal, you'd either have to do a
full update to a new build, or touch the new version of terminal activity
with Develop to make it yours).
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preliminary [PATCH] and discussion for #5657: activity isolation for all activities in ~/Activities

2008-08-01 Thread Jameson Chema Quinn

Problem: anything named Journal, Terminal, Log, or Analyze is not
isolated. This is the biggest security hole we have right now: it is a
trivial way for any activity to get root access.

Idea: as a short-term hack (until we have good cryptographic signatures for
activities), only turn off isolation if an activity is in
.../share/sugar/activities. Installation here is only possible for root (or
at build time).

Implementation:
This makes sense to implement in activitybundle.py, respecting a line in
activity.info like:
bitfrost_requests = P_ROOT, P_OTHER_UNIMPLEMENTED_THING, ...
That means that the data then passes up the chain: to bundleregistry, to
activityregistryservice, to sugar.activity.registry, and then to
activityfactory. Passing it up the chain meant fixing the call signatures
all the way along, and doing some refactoring along the way.

Status:
Works, not well tested (I will test more before submitting it definitively.
Also I'll have to include the patch to Journal's activity.info. Patches to
the other activities and packaging concerns will wait for round 3.) Marcopg
or others, feel free to start the review on the included patches; there are
enough bigger design decisions evident that we can get a jump on review even
before I do the solid testing on Monday.

Consequences:
- Changing the four activities named above to be installed in
share/sugar/activities. To remove them, a country would need to use a
customization key.
- If the activities above are in a country's build, they cannot be
uninstalled by user. If they are upgraded by user, they lose their
unisolated powers; if the upgrade is removed, they regain them. (Not tested)

Related issues:
- The use of version numbers to distinguish two versions of a single
activity is improved by this patch, but is still inconsistent. Erratic
behaviour is expected when two versions of the same activity are present,
although in normal use (all installation through the journal) this would
never happen as the older versions would be uninstalled automatically.
- Of course, the long-term solution is activity signatures.
- It will still be possible for a web link to claim to be activity X, but to
actually replace Browse (or other) with a trojanned version. (I know, this
is only weakly related, but it came up while I was discussing this patch
with Eben, so I mention it here.) I tracced this: #7761
 http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7761
From 2c114c26003d10705e3d174d47eae11311bffaaf Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jameson Quinn [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 13:40:25 -0600
Subject: [PATCH] bug #5657: gets security requests from activitybundle, checks them, and passes them up to registry

---
 service/activityregistryservice.py |   54 ++
 service/bundleregistry.py  |  107 
 2 files changed, 102 insertions(+), 59 deletions(-)

diff --git a/service/activityregistryservice.py b/service/activityregistryservice.py
index 6ba5598..7b3415a 100644
--- a/service/activityregistryservice.py
+++ b/service/activityregistryservice.py
@@ -24,6 +24,11 @@ _ACTIVITY_REGISTRY_SERVICE_NAME = 'org.laptop.ActivityRegistry'
 _ACTIVITY_REGISTRY_IFACE = 'org.laptop.ActivityRegistry'
 _ACTIVITY_REGISTRY_PATH = '/org/laptop/ActivityRegistry'
 
+def log_it(s):
+f = file(/home/chema/.sugar/default/logs/hardcoded,ab)
+f.write(s+\n)
+f.close()
+
 class ActivityRegistry(dbus.service.Object):
 def __init__(self):
 bus = dbus.SessionBus()
@@ -64,11 +69,8 @@ class ActivityRegistry(dbus.service.Object):
 @dbus.service.method(_ACTIVITY_REGISTRY_IFACE,
  in_signature='', out_signature='aa{sv}')
 def GetActivities(self):
-result = []
 registry = bundleregistry.get_registry()
-for bundle in registry:
-result.append(self._bundle_to_dict(bundle))
-return result
+return (bundle for bundle in registry)
 
 @dbus.service.method(_ACTIVITY_REGISTRY_IFACE,
  in_signature='s', out_signature='a{sv}')
@@ -78,7 +80,8 @@ class ActivityRegistry(dbus.service.Object):
 if not bundle:
 return {}
 
-return self._bundle_to_dict(bundle)
+log_it(service about to return +str(bundle))
+return bundle
 
 @dbus.service.method(_ACTIVITY_REGISTRY_IFACE,
  in_signature='s', out_signature='aa{sv}')
@@ -90,18 +93,15 @@ class ActivityRegistry(dbus.service.Object):
 name = bundle.get_name().lower()
 bundle_id = bundle.get_bundle_id().lower()
 if name.find(key) != -1 or bundle_id.find(key) != -1:
-result.append(self._bundle_to_dict(bundle))
+result.append(bundle)
 
 return result
 
 @dbus.service.method(_ACTIVITY_REGISTRY_IFACE,
  in_signature='s', out_signature='aa{sv}')
 def GetActivitiesForType(self, mime_type):
-result = []
 registry =

Re: Difference between Sugar-Launch and launching from the ring

2008-08-01 Thread Marco Pesenti Gritti

Alex Levenson wrote:
 Hello,

 I'm writing a physics problem solving game: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X2o

 It runs fine when I launch it from the command line (Terminal Activity 
 as user olpc) via sugar-launch. It works regardless of the current 
 working directory.

 But, it hangs when I launch it from the ring on the home screen. It 
 pops up with all the tool bars (but is missing all the icons in the 
 custom toolbars) and a gray canvas.

Where do you run sugar-launch?

Marco
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Re: activity bar

Hi All,

I believe the definitive documentation is in the release notes:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_Notes/8.2.0#Home_View_Redesign

Walter's link has some more detail and information but I don't think its 
up to date. e.g. it doesn't have the Software Updates GUI in the Sugar 
Control Panel.

Let me know if I am not correct or you find any errors in the release 
notes. I need to nail down the final, canonical documentation and make 
sure it gets in the release notes ASAP.

Thanks,

Greg S

At 13:55 31/07/2008, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
  Victor,
  
  please refer to Walter's draft for the updated Sugar documentation
  for more information on the re-designed home-view:
  
  
 http://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Walter/sandbox/Homehttp://sugarlabs.org/go/User:Walter/sandbox/Home
  
  Hope that helps,
  Christoph
  
  On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Victor Lazzarini
  mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Hello everyone,
  
  I have upgraded to the latest joyride and installed the activities
  with Bert's script. One question remains: is the activity bar
  gone, or is somewhere else now?
  
  
  
  Victor Lazzarini
  Music Technology Laboratory
  Music Department
  National University of Ireland, Maynooth
  
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Re: Difference between Sugar-Launch and launching from the ring

2008-08-01 Thread Marco Pesenti Gritti

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 11:35 PM, Alex Levenson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 In the Terminal Activity, from any directory. Usually from the activity's
 directory, but it works from anywhere (I've tried).

Do you have the same problem with other activities? If so please open
a ticket about this.

Marco
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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread david

On Fri, 1 Aug 2008, Walter Bender wrote:

 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.

so you switch from sugar to the console, something changes (including 
noticing that the font needs more light to be readable), so you then have 
to change back to Sugar to change the setting, then go back to the console 
to try and do the work.

this seems like a very user hostile approach.

the fact that you can't cut and paste to or from the console is also a 
problem (try and enter the command to get a developer key by switching 
back and forth from Sugar (where browse is displaying it) to the console 
(where you need to type it)

David Lang

 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 Sugar/X Window actions that require root
 access?

 -walter

 On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 11:03:39AM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 numerous 'special keys' don't work at the console, including adjusting the
 screen brightness.

 To get this to work we would have to push olpc-specific drivers into the
 kernel, correct?

 Erik




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Collaboration Bug Triage Notes

Hi All,

Guillaume, Sjoerd, Dafydd, Elliot, Robot101 and I met on IRC today at
10AM US ET.

We reviewed the open collaboration bugs list by this query:
http://dev.laptop.org/query?status=assignedstatus=newstatus=reopenedgroup=milestonecomponent=telepathy-gabblecomponent=telepathy-salutcomponent=telepathy-othercomponent=presence-serviceorder=prioritycol=idcol=summarycol=statuscol=typecol=component

We focused on identifying the blocker bugs. Trac conventions are at:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Trac_conventions

The main point is to put blocks:8.2.0 in any critical, must fix bugs.

Most updates were done in Trac and I include a few notes here:

- 6448
release note that both must be on Mesh or AP. Otherwise defer.

- 5313
We need a baseline number of XOs which work when connected to a jabber
server. Collabora will try to come up with a conservative number for that.

- 5414 - defer. May be possible to close forever if Pep is N/A now.
Collabora to decide.

- 5908 - related to 6881
Hard to reproduce. May be dependent on RF environment. Collabora will
try to test with their emulator. It was reported against only 4 x XOs

Let me know that does not accurately represent what we went over on the
chat.

Also:
I recorded this URL but forgot what it refers to :-(
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:Z1ajb0I4Aj8J:wiki.laptop.org/go/XMPP_Extensions+olpc+shared+rosterhl=cyct=clnkcd=1

I need to review an e-mail which Guillaume posted recently on
collaboration status. Sorry I lost that :-( can you resend?

We're on again Monday at 10AM US ET on freenode.net #olpc-meeting.
Picking up the same query from the top. Please add any other critical
collaboration bugs to the list ASAP

Thanks a lot to the collabora team for their time and patience getting
me up to speed.

I hope we get to the must fix, show stopper list before the week is out.

Thanks,

Greg S

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Re: [OLPC Security] preliminary [PATCH] and discussion for #5657: activity isolation for all activities in ~/Activities

2008-08-01 Thread C. Scott Ananian

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 5:01 PM, Jameson Chema Quinn
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Problem: anything named Journal, Terminal, Log, or Analyze is not
 isolated. This is the biggest security hole we have right now: it is a
 trivial way for any activity to get root access.

Another possible short-term hack is to simple disable
activitybundle.install() and activitybundle.upgrade() for bundes with
bundle_ids matching those of Journal, Terminal, Log, or Analyze.  This
allows these activities to be installed in /home/olpc/Activites with a
customization key, as usual, but prevents malicious attackers from
using a web link or the activity updater to replace the
originally-installed versions.

This has the benefit of (a) not requiring us to revisit the
activities in /home war, and (b) allowing us to upgrade the versions
of these trusted activities in /home in (say) 9.1, using the proper
mechanism.
 --scott

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ATTN Activity Authors/Owners: Default activity icon colors

Ticket #7741 [1] points out that inconsistencies in the default colors of
activity icons appear in the filter of the Journal.  This is Sugar's fault,
not yours.  Unfortunately, we can't adjust the APIs as needed in order to
fix this correctly for 8.2, and so we instead humbly request that all
activity icons be bundled with the defaults listed below, to help us hide
our indiscretion until we can do so.  The appropriate defaults, for now,
are:

stroke: #010101
fill: #FF

Note that it should be easy to fix any icons simply by hand editing the file
to adjust the entity definitions (see
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Making_Sugar_Icons#Defining_Entities_2); it's not
necessary to export the icon again. Thanks for helping us hide our
embarrassment!

- Eben, and the Sugar team

PS.  Note that in the future, even though Sugar will always render icons
appropriately in any context, the recommended default for icons will be a
#66 stroke (and white fill), so as to match the appearance of the icons
when rendered in Home.  This will, in particular, improve the consistency of
icon appearances of the wiki.  The script linked from the above wiki page
includes a flag to automatically render icons in the (new) defaults, for
future reference.

[1] http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7741 (see also:
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7578)
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Re: [OLPC Security] preliminary [PATCH] and discussion for #5657: activity isolation for all activities in ~/Activities

2008-08-01 Thread Jameson Chema Quinn

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 4:01 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 5:01 PM, Jameson Chema Quinn
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
  Problem: anything named Journal, Terminal, Log, or Analyze is not
  isolated. This is the biggest security hole we have right now: it is a
  trivial way for any activity to get root access.

 Another possible short-term hack is to simple disable
 activitybundle.install() and activitybundle.upgrade() for bundes with
 bundle_ids matching those of Journal, Terminal, Log, or Analyze.  This
 allows these activities to be installed in /home/olpc/Activites with a
 customization key, as usual, but prevents malicious attackers from
 using a web link or the activity updater to replace the
 originally-installed versions.

 This has the benefit of (a) not requiring us to revisit the
 activities in /home war, and (b) allowing us to upgrade the versions
 of these trusted activities in /home in (say) 9.1, using the proper
 mechanism.
  --scott


I like this idea. Of course, it means that can install using cp -r,
including installing a trojan activity which does not *look* like Terminal.

... My patch has activities requesting P_ROOT in activity.info. Could we
simply refuse to do a normal install for such activities? We could even keep
a list of them, and not respect what's not on the list, and only update the
list on a keyed install. This is not as secure as signatures, because a
sneaky attack could still modify the contents of an installed activity, but
it is getting pretty close.

Jameson
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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread Benjamin M. Schwartz

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Eben Eliason wrote:
| Is it possible that we could
| simply have a P_ROOT permission as well, or does that blow Bitfrost out of
| the water?

It's called P_SF_RUN or P_SF_CORE, depending on what you mean by root.  In
other words, yes, this was planned.

We need an interface that allows users to specify which Activities can run
with which permissions.
To build that, we need Rainbow to support different running different
Activities with different permissions.
To build that, we need Activities to be identified by a unique secure token.
To build that, we need a new bundle format.

- --Ben
-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkiTnPsACgkQUJT6e6HFtqSMZQCfcMSVCMON075fA/uuHedDAvas
UwwAnAgj38pi0eRjVKsjzsiVV8PMSnkZ
=E5dh
-END PGP SIGNATURE-
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Re: video bleeds through somewhat between sessions

2008-08-01 Thread Jordan Crouse

On 01/08/08 15:00 -0400, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
 G1G1, Joyride 2241.  In one Terminal session started mplayer -- it 
 was playing a movie.  Went to another Terminal session, and entered 
 some commands.  Noticed that not all of the text on that screen was 
 equally distinct - some of it was paler than others.  Noticed that 
 *which* text was paler changed from second to second.  Realized that 
 the paler text in the second Terminal screen corresponded to the 
 *brightest* areas of the movie frame then being shown in the first 
 Terminal screen (the one I had switched way from).

Video is muxed to the visible screen through the use of a color key -
given a rectangle of some size, the hardware compares all of the pixels
in that rectangle against a set color - if they match, then a pixel of
the video frame is shown, otherwise not. 

The color is specified by the video application - most applications use
very saturated colors similar to those used in green or blue screens.
My favorite is hot pink (0xFF00FF).  IIRC, mplayer uses an off-shade color
of grey, so it is easier to run into the possibility that other applications
will match the color key, especially with automatic shading such as
anti-aliasing.

Nothing to worry about - just a fun little side effect of video
acceleration.

Jordan

-- 
Jordan Crouse
Systems Software Development Engineer 
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

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Re: Difference between Sugar-Launch and launching from the ring

2008-08-01 Thread Alex Levenson

In the Terminal Activity, from any directory. Usually from the activity's
directory, but it works from anywhere (I've tried).

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote:

 Alex Levenson wrote:

 Hello,

 I'm writing a physics problem solving game: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X2o

 It runs fine when I launch it from the command line (Terminal Activity as
 user olpc) via sugar-launch. It works regardless of the current working
 directory.

 But, it hangs when I launch it from the ring on the home screen. It pops
 up with all the tool bars (but is missing all the icons in the custom
 toolbars) and a gray canvas.


 Where do you run sugar-launch?

 Marco

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Re: Terminals

2008-08-01 Thread Gary C Martin

On 1 Aug 2008, at 14:54, Walter Bender wrote:

 The keyboard issue is simply a matter of having the correct console
 keyboard map files installed. The one for Spanish is attached. Not
 sure what the current plan is for inclusion of these files (Dennis?).
 It should be installed in /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty

Thanks Walter. From Michael's email (thanks too), it looks like the  
maps are installed (current Joyride build) already, and a loadkeys es  
from the console gets a fair few more of the keys correct. Is this  
something worth improving as the map could do with quite a bunch of  
corrections? Here's a quick list of miss-matches I noted:

` (shift 3) generates a floating dot of some kind
{ (shift [) generates a strange star like character (not *)
[ generates a +
] generates a ç (c with a 5 shape like accent below)
} (shift ]) generates an uppercase Ç (as above)
+ generates some hidden accent modifier
* generates some hidden accent modifier
~ generates {
^ (alt-gr 5) has no visible effect
\ (alt-gr 7) generates }
º generates [
  has no visible effect
 has no visible effect

(please let me know if there is a formal place/format I should report  
these to if the change is worth making).

The console still feels like a fallback tool in the case of  
emergencies (I'm glad to have it there), but Terminal is now a much  
more functional (and integrated) interface as noted in a number of  
other emails.

--Gary
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Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

2008-08-01 Thread Bastien

Erik Garrison [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 Maybe what I'm suggesting boils down to integrate this core activities
 in the environment so that people installing Sugar won't have to install
 them separatly.  Just the same way that installing a standard Fedora
 will install Gnome (will install evolution (etc...)).

 What I'm suggesting is that this step requires global optimization wrt
 which activities are 'core'.  This is difficult, as various deployments
 have different usage patterns and require different sets of software.

Yes, I understand this, but it's quite reasonable to assume that each
deployment will like the list of activities that is listed in the Core
category (cf. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:Core)

 I have often built debian systems using debootstrap to pull in the most
 minimal typically used system components.  On top of such a system
 customization is easy.  I am suggesting that we may wish to develop a
 similar system so that our downstream developers can have more
 flexibility in customizing their systems.  Activites could be Sugar-core
 and not XO-system core.

Agreed.

We could have something like:

  ~$ apt-get install sugar
 = Install Sugar with a default set of activities
  
  ~$ apt-get install sugar-extra-activities
 = Install a set of extra activities
  
  ~$ apt-get install sugar-nepal-activities
 = Install a specific bundle with extra activities
  
If Sugar installation takes this route, then there is something else
that has to be defined: the default favorite activities.  Each deb
package above should define the default set of favs.  And maybe there
could be a way of importing someone's favs easily, whatever the extra
package people installed.

My 2 cents...

-- 
Bastien
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Re: video bleeds through somewhat between sessions

2008-08-01 Thread Albert Cahalan

Jordan Crouse writes:

 Video is muxed to the visible screen through the use of a color key -
 given a rectangle of some size, the hardware compares all of the pixels
 in that rectangle against a set color - if they match, then a pixel of
 the video frame is shown, otherwise not.

That should have gone out of style with those ISA VGA cards that
had a ribbon connector on top to accept video from a tuner card.
The hack almost made sense with a palette.

If a 32-bit framebuffer were used, would the use of the top 8 bits
fix this problem? (valid colors are 0 to 0xff, so use 0x100)

 The color is specified by the video application - most applications
 use very saturated colors similar to those used in green or blue
 screens. My favorite is hot pink (0xFF00FF).  IIRC, mplayer uses an
 off-shade color of grey, so it is easier to run into the possibility
 that other applications will match the color key, especially with
 automatic shading such as anti-aliasing.

Better would be 0xff00fe or 0xfe00ff, appropriately adjusted to
deal with 16-bit color. (0xf81e or 0xf01f I think) Decrement either
the red value or blue value to avoid being perfect magenta.

 Nothing to worry about - just a fun little side effect of video
 acceleration.

Well, it does detract from the overall appearance.
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RE: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO

2008-08-01 Thread Martin Sevior

On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 22:12 +0200, J.M. Maurer wrote:
 On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 21:37 +1000, Martin Edmund Sevior wrote:
  
  Thanks Tomeu and Eben. Yes, we'll need to expand the abiwidget api.
  I'll look to do this if I can can get sugar-jhbuild to work again.
 
 That, or we could just add an 'EditMethod', so we can invoke it using a
 'well known' function name. Not sure what the nicest approach is. I'm
 inclined to expand the api though.
 

Hi everyone,
   I'm perfectly willing to do this work but how I can be sure
it will actually be used?

What do we need to do to get libabiword updated?

sugar-jhbuild uses an ancient patched tree dating from November last
year. We've released 2.6.4 3 weeks ago with *tons* of bug fixes on that.

What version is actually being shipped with sucrose? What do we need to
do to get it updated?

I'd just like to know what I need to do to get the required libabiword
into the tree so that this feature can be implemented.

Cheers

Martin

   Marc
 

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Odd python proc control / buffering behaviour

something very basic is not working well with Python - reading 1MB
from a process and writing it to a file gets truncated at random
points. Not being a native Python speaker, review and comments
welcome. Hopefully I'm not losing my mind just yet.

Summary:
 - The script untars an XO image under fakeroot, saving a 1MB state
file from fakeroot.
 - Then concatenate all the state files from all the builds into a master one.
 - The concatenation ends up truncated (due to buffering issues?)

Some interesting aspects
 - If I comment out the untarring of the image just before we hit this
code, the bug disappears.
 - If we sleep for 1s, the bug disappears!
 - output redirection under os.system() also suffers the problem
 - os.fdatasync(), proc.wait() don't seem to help
 - there is no corruption in the file - just truncated
 - the truncation is not at a newline

   Code affected:
   ... just after untarring the image -

# (cat *.state  .tmpstate)  mv .tmpstate rsyncd.all
(tmpfh, tmpfpath) = tempfile.mkstemp()

# Uncomment the line below and the truncation goes away!
# time.sleep(1)

# Using os.system() shows truncation problems
#os.system('find %s -type f -name \'*.state\' -print0 | xargs -0
--no-run-if-empty cat  %s' % (options.statedir, tmpfpath))

#
# The Python way - shows truncation problems
#
pfind  = Popen(['find', options.statedir, '-type', 'f',
'-name', '*.state', '-print0'], stdout=PIPE)
pxargs = Popen(['xargs', '-0', '--no-run-if-empty', 'cat'],
   stdin=pfind.stdout,stdout=tmpfh)

# wait() or a small loop checking for poll()!=None
# neither helps
pxargs.wait()
# fdatasync() does not make a difference
os.fdatasync(tmpfh)
os.close(tmpfh)

Changing the stdout of pxargs to PIPE and reading it explicitly with a loop like

while True:
buf = pxargs.stdout.read(4096)
if not buf:
if pxargs.poll() == None:
 continue
break
os.write(tmpfs,buf)

does not make any difference either.

The truncation is not stable - the file should get 1036681 bytes, and
it gets anywhere from 300KB to 700KB. I suspect that Python is
forgetting to flush the buffers when the process finishes. This is
python 2.5-15.fc7 on the XS image.


Any hints? Ideas?




m
-- 
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 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
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Re: Difference between Sugar-Launch and launching from the ring

2008-08-01 Thread Bobby Powers

can you post the logs?

2008/8/1 Alex Levenson [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
 In the Terminal Activity, from any directory. Usually from the activity's
 directory, but it works from anywhere (I've tried).

 On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:

 Alex Levenson wrote:

 Hello,

 I'm writing a physics problem solving game: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/X2o

 It runs fine when I launch it from the command line (Terminal Activity as
 user olpc) via sugar-launch. It works regardless of the current working
 directory.

 But, it hangs when I launch it from the ring on the home screen. It pops
 up with all the tool bars (but is missing all the icons in the custom
 toolbars) and a gray canvas.

 Where do you run sugar-launch?

 Marco


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2X zoom X display possible?

2008-08-01 Thread Chris Marshall

I need to install a win32 program for my father to
use on his XO.  At 1200x900 resolution the text is
**way** too small for him to read.  However, it is
very clear :-)

In some previous discussion on the XO bug tracker
ssb22 managet to use x11vnc to get a 2X zoom going
for the XO and WINE.  In some later discussion on
the same problem it was mentioned that the XO
display hardware should be able to do a 2X zoomed
X11 display (I think this was by a developer working
the AMD hardware side of the laptop).

Has any work on a zoomed X11 display configuration
taken place or come to fruition?  I looked at the
AMD processor manual and it definitely looks doable
as far as the hardware goes.

My current plan is to get the x11vnc hack zoom to
work.  It may mean the laptop will need to be plugged
in for use but at least Dad'll be happy.  I would love
to hear that the 2X (or even 1.7X) zoom resolution is
available.

--Chris


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Re: New faster build 2242

2008-08-01 Thread C. Scott Ananian

2008/8/1 Build Announcer v2 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
 http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/faster/build2242

I've unretired the faster branch temporarily to collect some
measurements on the costs of adding xfce to our builds.  I also added
some patches from my local git to sugar-artwork for #7641 (fixing some
broken icons in xfce) and to sugar for #7495 and #7685 for my own
testing and development.

You can safely ignore the faster branch, unless you are inordinately
curious, bored, or stalking me.  Or if you want to play around with a
sugar layout whose code involves the golden ratio, fibonacci numbers,
and sunflowers. ;-)
 --scott

p.s. 
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/cscott/sugar-tmp;a=blob;f=src/view/home/favoriteslayout.py;hb=HEAD#l292

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Re: New faster build 2242

2008-08-01 Thread C. Scott Ananian

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 11:57 PM, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 2008/8/1 Build Announcer v2 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
  I also added
 some patches from my local git to sugar-artwork for #7641 (fixing some
 broken icons in xfce) and to sugar for #7495 and #7685 for my own
 testing and development.

Sorry for getting your hopes up; these packages didn't actually land
in faster-2242; you'll have to wait for faster-2243.
 --scott

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Re: New faster build 2242

2008-08-01 Thread Chris Ball

Hi,

I've unretired the faster branch temporarily to collect some
measurements on the costs of adding xfce to our builds.

Could we see what the cost is to go to a full GNOME/nautilus, too?

Thanks,

- Chris.
-- 
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Re: Odd python proc control / buffering behaviour

On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 3:29 PM, Martin Langhoff
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 something very basic is not working well with Python - reading 1MB
 from a process and writing it to a file gets truncated at random
 points. Not being a native Python speaker, review and comments
 welcome. Hopefully I'm not losing my mind just yet.

The full unedited script is at
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/martin/xs-rsync.git;a=blob;f=xs-publish-xobuild.py;h=2521d5b7970b2133489246d651b70b27ba19a2b0;hb=380738e1c36b18e9aca3e39b8c7919fe7a7a0d20

cheers,


m
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Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

2008-08-01 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 6:32 PM, Jerry Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Seems like this problem for linux was solved with RPM.

I wouldn't go quite that far. The holes in RPM drove me to Debian. %-[

 With rpm if something is missing for something you want to install, it
 complains and won't let you install it.

Apt and yum also track dependencies, both better than RPM, and rather
than refuse to install, they offer to get the dependent libraries for
you. Why aren't we using this approach with xo-get?

 It seems like a lot of the python code I have looked at assumes you have
 stuff and just quietly dies and you have to look at the log and see, oh I am
 missing some module.
 Like the Terminal activity needs python-json.
 Pacman needs pygame.

 Jerry Williams

 -Original Message-
 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:sugar-
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mikus Grinbergs
 Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 6:19 PM
 To: devel@lists.laptop.org; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

 There was an earlier discussion of how to provide the right build
 level for users out in the field, since now Builds can be installed
 separately from Activities -- leading to the possibility that for
 someone an Activity_version on his XO will find itself *mismatched*
 with the Build_version on his XO.


 The problem is bigger than that.

 Since Joyride 2210, I have seen three of the Activities I often show
 off get broken by the *removal* of services from the Joyride builds.
 If the current software distribution process has trouble matching
 existing Activities to the services_provided_by_a_Build -- how will
 NOT YET EXISTING Activities be accommodated by the software that
 Sugar is supposed to run on top of ???

 I'm thinking of someone in a far-off land who has an idea for a
 killer Activity, to be run under Sugar.  HOW does he learn which
 (library, or kernel, or whatever) services will be available
 *everywhere* Sugar can be installed, which services will be
 available only with *specific* builds/platforms, and which services
 would *never* be available for functions fitted into Sugar ?


 mikus

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Re: Collaboration Requirements

2008-08-01 Thread Edward Cherlin

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Hi All,

 I wrote up some collaboration requirements to help get us to a
 definition of collaboration support that teachers can use in schools.

Thanks. It is not clear to me whether you mean to include the case of
children at different schools collaborating, even in different
countries. This will be vital for language learning, and important for
many other educational and other functions.

 This is my first somewhat rigorous requirements definition for OLPC so
 comments on style as well as substance are welcome.

 I will take one round of comments then I'll find a place for it in the
 wiki (more comments always welcome after that).

 Collaboration requirements for OLPC XOs and XS
 Greg Smith
 July 30, 2008

 Background:
 The concept of Collaboration has been around for a long time. I have
 used cuseeme, MeetingPlace, NetMeeting, WebEx, IRC, AIM, Gobbby,
 Sametime, PC Anywhere, Cisco HD Video conferencing and others. Our
 challenge is different in three respects.
 - wireless
 - educational use
 - greater scale

 Motivation:
 The goal of this requirement definition is to provide all the information
 necessary to define tests and fix critical collaboration bugs in 8.2.0
 and to set a goal for 9.1.0.

 The best case is that this write up motivates test cases which results
 in a list of detailed examples of collaboration  that will be supported
 in 8.2.0. These examples should be deployable and usable by teachers in
 class. Examples of use cases generated by teachers are at:
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Use_Cases#Collaboration_Examples

 Collaboration is an area where we are on the cutting edge of available
 technology. It was well promoted and teachers on the sur list have
 repeatedly asked for a definition of how to use it successfully.

 A list of activities supposedly enabled for collaboration is at:
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Collaboration_Central

 Documentation on previous wireless tests is at:
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Test_Config_Notes#Wireless_.26_Network

 Requirements Definition:

 I set a high bar but I try to balance between available technology and
 the desires of the teachers. I hope can at least test to this standard
 soon, even if we don't close all bugs found by that testing until later.

 Requirements beginning with must are critical to success, should are
 very important but can be deferred and nice to have are very useful
 but likely to be deferred.

 If a must requirement cannot be met, we should still attempt to
 support as much of it as possible (e.g. if we can't do 50 XOs in N9, 40
 or 30 should be tested and supported).

 I - Network Requirements

 i - Supported Architectures
 N1 - Must support one of the four network scenarios defined at:
 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Networking_scenarios

 The scenarios in priority order are named as follows.
 S1 - Simple Wifi
 S2 - School Wifi
 S3 - Simple Mesh
 S4 - School mesh (no need to test, just recorded here for completeness)

 ii - RF Environments
 N2 - Must support environments where there are no other RF signals
 beyond the APs as needed by the network scenario.

 N3 - Must support RF environments where up to 2 other APs are visible in
 the XO neighborhood.

 N4 - Should support environments where there are up to 4 other APs
 visible in the XO neighborhood.

 II - Scale
 i - Scale of XOs collaborating
 N5 - Must support up to 10 XOs collaborating together. See activity
 examples for exact steps.

 N6 - Should support up to 20 XOs collaborating together.

 N7 - Nice to support up to 30 XOs collaborating together.

 ii - Scale of XOs visible within range of each other

 N8 - In N5 above must allow up to 1500 XOs within range in the school.
 Can require that all other XOs aside from those collaborating have their
 antennas turned off.

 N9 - Must allow 50 (should allow 100, nice to have 300) other XOs within
 range in the school where all XOs have their radios turned on. Can
 require that only those collaborating are using the network (AKA
 everyone else is verbally asked to stop using the Internet and stop
 collaborating) but they can leave their XO radios on in scenario S1

 N10 - Must allow 50 (should allow 100, nice to have 300) XOs within
 range in the school where all XOs have their radios turned on. Can
 require that only those collaborating are using the network (AKA no
 collaboration and no Internet access) in scenario S2.

 N11 - Must allow 50 (should allow 100, nice to have 300) XOs within
 range in the school where all XOs have their radios turned on. Can
 require that only those collaborating are on a given Mesh channel (1,6
 or 11) while all the other XOs are on different Mesh channels in scenario S3

 III Types of collaboration

 In all cases, a single XO starts activity, then shares it, then other
 XOs join the shared activity.

 N12 - Must support up to 3 XOs using an activity and all others XOs (as
 allowed by the scale) watching what happens on that

[Server-devel] XS Update: build tools, pungi, xs-rsync

Some notes that will come out in the community news tomorrow -

- I'm working hard to make xs-0.4 a more featureful release, I know
0.3 is _boring_ :-)

- I've spent a lot of time exploring the state of distro build tools
for Fedora. The livecd approach we use on the XS images is brittle and
not suitable for upgrades; we need to move to traditional installer
CDs using either pungi or revisor. I now have a sample pungi config
file that can build a minimal F9 install, and scripts that turn the CD
installer into a USB installer. Unfortunately, anaconda maintainers
are threatening to deprecate text-based installations.

- After studying Scott's update-server, I've started putting
together an xs-rsync package to publish content via rsync on the XS,
with utilities that allow it to serve XO builds mimicking
update-server's behaviour. Unfortunately, update-server is mostly
dedicated to the task of serving rsync://updates.laptop.org/, a
completely different task, and code reuse opportunities were about
nil.

For the XS to be useful as an updates server it needs be paired with
the local activation server, so that's what I'll be working on next
week :-)

cheers,



m
-- 
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
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Re: [Server-devel] Testing EduBlog

Hi Tarun,

Thanks.

I think Pablo is the primary driver of requirements and priorities now. 
As long as he appreciates that we only have one more week of coding 
time, we should try to do whatever he needs to get us to Beta and real 
blog posts from real schools.

You have done a super job! Way above and beyond the call of duty and 
beyond all expectations. The Abiword conversion thing is really tough 
but its a huge win if it allows uploading images from Write to EduBlog.

We changed the requirements. So you didn't miss the deadline, we missed 
the requirements. Feel free to use that one in the future if you have 
another paid programming job :-)

Have a good trip back and thanks a lot for your hard work.

Greg S

Tarun Pondicherry wrote:
 Hi Greg,
 FYI presentation will be in 1CC at 12:30 - 1:30 US ET Friday so please 
 don't mess with the server for that hour.
 We won't touch the server until after the demo is all done.  Especially 
 since this abiword stuff affects the whole server and is therefore 
 potentially dangerous.
 Send over any presentation or demo stuff you have done already (we 
 will use it eventually) but top priority is doing what Pablo needs to 
 start the beta.
 If all goes perfectly well, we should be ready by Wednesday, Friday if 
 there are minor glitches.  Sorry for missing the August 1st target, I 
 did not foresee this Write issue in 656.  Marcel made good progress in 
 getting abiword installed and there are now a few dependencies to 
 resolve.  I am mostly trying to perfect the UI with Pablo's suggestions 
 and we can test both areas of work after abiword is installed.
 
 I like your idea of using the mockup/backup for the demo.  I just tested 
 the version at: 
 http://edublog.venango.org/test/EduBlog/mockup/ui/student_sp.php
 and it is working.  In the event something goes wrong with that, the 
 older version at:
 http://olpc.betarun.com/dev/ui/student_sp.php
 is also still up.
 
 ==
 
 Also, I'm flying back Friday night and will be offline until Monday.
 
 ==
 
 Thanks,
 Tarun
 
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Re: [Server-devel] Testing EduBlog

Hi Tarun et al,

The presentation went well and there were applause when I posted some 
pictures and text to blogger.com!

Scott and Michael raised the question of why we didn't build it as a .xo 
only project with no need for server. I explained the constraints of 
time and image in Uruguay and they understood that.

There were less convinced that it should be a web app instead of built 
in to Write but on further discussion I think they understood that the 
dynamic nature of EduBlog (that teachers can change and control where 
the students post to and what they see e.g. frog blog) makes it hard 
to build in to Write.

Scott raised some future ideas (e.g. a blackboard activity for the 
teachers XO) and we talked about collaboration in a general sense.

Good discussion which may lead to some valuable thinking re: 9.1.0.

In short, it was a great demo! I'll help write up a 1 hour PPT we can 
deliver in late August to wrap up. You can prepare the final report for 
SJ instead if you prefer.

I just hope we have some new posts from kids to show off within the next 
two weeks ...

Thanks,

Greg S

 Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:49:01 +0100
 From: Tarun Pondicherry [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: Re: [Server-devel] Testing EduBlog
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Cc: Pablo Flores [EMAIL PROTECTED], server-devel@lists.laptop.org,
   marcel r [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
 
 Hi Greg,
 FYI presentation will be in 1CC at 12:30 - 1:30 US ET Friday so please 
 don't mess with the server for that hour.
 We won't touch the server until after the demo is all done.  Especially 
 since this abiword stuff affects the whole server and is therefore 
 potentially dangerous.
 Send over any presentation or demo stuff you have done already (we 
 will use it eventually) but top priority is doing what Pablo needs to 
 start the beta.
 If all goes perfectly well, we should be ready by Wednesday, Friday if 
 there are minor glitches.  Sorry for missing the August 1st target, I 
 did not foresee this Write issue in 656.  Marcel made good progress in 
 getting abiword installed and there are now a few dependencies to 
 resolve.  I am mostly trying to perfect the UI with Pablo's suggestions 
 and we can test both areas of work after abiword is installed.
 
 I like your idea of using the mockup/backup for the demo.  I just tested 
 the version at: 
 http://edublog.venango.org/test/EduBlog/mockup/ui/student_sp.php
 and it is working.  In the event something goes wrong with that, the 
 older version at:
 http://olpc.betarun.com/dev/ui/student_sp.php
 is also still up.
 
 ==
 
 Also, I'm flying back Friday night and will be offline until Monday.
 
 ==
 
 Thanks,
 Tarun
 
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Re: [Server-devel] Odd python proc control / buffering behaviour