Re: Interested in the Google Summer of Code

[Bobby Powers]

Great, I am glad there is some interest!  I just found your older email
thread, Don, [1] on ideas for Micropolis, and I think that what I would like
to do with system dynamic (SD) modeling can easily encompass the visual
programming [2] ideas you and others have talked about.  I believe the
backend to support an agent-based approach is practically the same as what
would be needed to create object-oriented system dynamics models.  I've been
reading up as much as I can on what visual programming tools are available
or in development currently for the XO (I'm downloading an image right now
to boot up and play with as we/I type), it seems like turtle art is the
closest thing to fit the bill.  I haven't really played with it much, but it
looks quite impressive!  My first thoughts are that it seems very nice for
programming agents (like turtles), but its not as expressive for
constructing system dynamics models (see [3] for some ideas I had a couple
weeks ago as to how SD models could look).
It seems there are two main ways I could focus my attention (not necessarily
mutually exclusive):
1. creating and expanding on a simulation engine that can access and perform
operations on spatial and nonspatial data, and integrate with the unique
features of the XO (collaboratively work on models with data sets and layers
from different machines, for example)
2. focus on modularizing micropolis, getting its core logic into a form that
is visually programmable on the XO (though Turtle Art, something new of
mine, or even through Develop python editing) and adding some of the
features Don had mentioned like programmable agents that can edit the world


I will also try to post some information on the simulation engine that I'm
currently working on to the web in the next few days, and look at how turtle
art works (to see if there is something that can be adapted or at least
learned from there).  Where do the communities interests lie?


yours, Bobby


[1] http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/2007-March/001829.html
[2] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Micropolis#Visual_Programming
[3] http://www.bobbypowers.net/mockups.html


On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 12:46 AM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> 2008/3/18 Bobby Powers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > Hi, I'm a master's student at the University of Bergen and I'm
> interested in
> > bringing System Dynamics to the XO.  Before I start, if there is a
> better
> > mailing list for this just let me know (I briefly looked through the
> other
> > ones liked from the Wiki, and this seemed the most appropriate).
>
> Welcome! This is the place.
>
> > System Dynamics (SD) [1][2] aims to help people understand the world by
> > explicitly modeling how pieces of it work and then performing
> experiments in
> > these models.  It is used around the world, frequently in majority world
> > countries, in development planning [3], for example.  More formally, its
> a
> > methodology for examining and describing the behavior of complex systems
> > with an emphasis on the effects that feedback loops and time delays
> have.
> > At a basic level you have to specify the mathematical equations for the
> > different parts of your system.   The same problems can be solved by
> writing
> > code in a programming language (I had a course taught in Fortran a year
> > ago...), but usually in SD the modeling is done using a visual editor
> where
> > you can show causal relationships, stocks and flows graphically.  I
> > personally think the biggest short-fallings of the discipline are the
> > barriers to entry: the current software is far from intuitive and all
> the
> > major commercial offerings (there are no FLOSS products) [4][5][6] are
> very
> > expensive (educational licenses alone are frequently > $500 USD).
> >
> > Will Wright studied SD and used ideas from it when designing SimCity
> [7].
> > So I have several things I would like to work on:  first is a core
> simulator
> > that can transform equations into code (I'm currently working on this
> for my
> > master's thesis, but don't have and funding. eesh): I'm using the JIT
> > library from the LLVM project to be able to do this.  Second I want to
> > create a Sugar modeling interface that makes it easy and fun to create
> > models and explore their results (collaboratively, I hope!), and third I
> > want to hook this into Metropolis.  I think it would just be so cool if
> you
> > could click an icon in Metropolis and have the visual model that
> controls
> > the Metropolis world pop up (in the aforementioned editor) and be able
> not
> > only to fiddle with parameters, but change the structure!  If all of
> this
> > goes smoothl

Re: [OLPC-GSoC] [sugar] Summer of Code update : applications so far, and thanks

[Bobby Powers]

Thanks Homunq (Jameson?) especially for the GSOC category maintenance.

I think I am in the same boat as you - I've gotten some feedback already but
would like to be included on the list for some more especially since I've
rewritten most of it in the past few days to focus more on development of an
activity.  In a nutshell I want to bring System Dynamics (SD) to the XO and
classrooms.  SD is an ideal way to implement a lot of constructionist ideas,
it gives kids an environment where they can can address real world problems
and face the challenge of learning what they need to know to accomplish the
task.  This all happens in an approach grounded in systems theory.  The full
app is here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OpenSim

if anyone has any more comments (either positive, negative or on the
specifics) I'd love to hear them, even as the deadline is looming.

Thanks!
yours,
Bobby


2008/4/7 Jameson Chema Quinn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

>
>
> >
> > Finally, to stimulate discussion, below are a few applications that
> > deserve more feedback and mentor attention.
> >
>
> 2 points:
> 1. A lot of these are not on the wiki, or were not in the [[Category:GSoC
> proposals]]. I've rectified that for the ones I could find, but I'd really
> like to read some that I couldn't find. I understand that some people may
> not have found all the different places for communication - the GSoC
> website, this list, the wiki, IRC, the other mailing lists, trac it is a
> lot to keep track of. So it would be great if mentors could use the GSoC
> website to suggest to students that putting an application on the wiki will
> get more feedback.
>
> 2. My app  has gotten more feedback
> than most, so I understand why I'm not on this list, but I still feel left
> out. My idea is to modify Develop let you program in a Python based on your
> own language, but keep it as English-based python on disk - it takes maybe a
> few more words to describe than most applications because nothing like it
> really exists anywhere else. And yet most of the feedback I've gotten has to
> do more with technical or logistical points, not the basic question of
> whether this new idea is worth doing. For those of you whose first language
> is not English - do you think it would help people learn to program if the
> keywords and basic modules were readable in your own language? (Don't just
> think about your own case, think about your average potential programmer -
> would it help?) If you have an answer, add it to the talk 
> page- of course I'd love any 
> yesses, but if I get a couple of no's there's still
> (barely) time for me to submit another Develop-related application.
>
>
> >
> > = Good applications that need review by a mentor with topic-specific
> > expertise =
> >
> > * An XO Eclipse environment - Phan quoc huy
>
>
> I really want to see this, it sounds very interesting.
>
>
> > * Handwriting recognition - Juliana Lipková (Thomas Breuel, call your
> > office)
> > * "your voice on XO" - Alex Escalona, on community-wide building of new
> > Festival voices for TTS
> >
> >
> > = Projects attracting more than one good application =
> > (e.g., where there are detailed comparisons to be made)
> >
> > * Typing tutor - at least three good proposals
> > * Flashcards - at least two good proposals
> > * [[Elements]] extension - at least two good proposals
> > * Artificial neural network simulations - at least one good proposal
> > * A light email client - a few proposals that need clarification
> > * Blogging platforms -   "  "  "
> > * Finance activities  -  [[Finance One]], &c
> >
> >
> > = Other applications of note =
> >
> > == Core system components ==
> > * The publish/share button - Robson Mendonça, Eric Burns
> > * Server interface design - Michał Ściubidło and others
> > * LustreFS for XO (Distributed mesh filesystem) - Evelina Stepanova
> > * Memory/disk tuning (schoolserver) - Waseem Shaukat
> >
> >  == Fundamental activities ==
> > * [[Listen and Spell]] - Assim Deodia
> > * Homework manager - Jason Tran
> > * [[VideoEdit]] - Roberto Fagá
> > * [[Coding Tutor]] - Rahul Bagaria
>
>
> This is where I'd put my proposal, "Bityi - on-screen code i18n in XO
> Develop activity" . In other
> words, the activity is Develop
>
> >
> >
> > == Learning games ==
> > * Incredible machine - Alex Levenson, with a prototype
> > * [[PlayGo]] extensions - Brandon Wilson
> > * Water Game - Lin Zhou, for learning water sanitation and safety
> > * Garden Game - Javier Trejo, for learning genetics; developing in both
> > en and es.
> >
> >
> > Cheers,  SJ
> >
> > ___
> > Sugar mailing list
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
> >
> >
>
> ___
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>
>
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Re: Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn on HB5000

[Bobby Powers]

Has anyone looked into the Encyclopedia of the Earth / Earth Portal?
http://www.eoearth.org/

They have several ebooks and online textbooks, and peer-reviewed content (to
edit, you have to apply, and all changes to the public pages must be
approved by topic editors is my understanding).  It could be a solid way to
get more content that is less collaborative in nature (as textbooks and some
hard science reference material typically is) onto the machines.  Just my
2¢.

yours,
Bobby Powers

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 12:49 AM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I talked with Ryan Croke of Illinois Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn's
> office today. They are keen on this project, and would like to arrange
> for us to assist in getting the program designed for the best possible
> outcome. HB5000 is moving rapidly through the House, and will then go
> to the Senate, which is likely to turn it over to the Education
> Committee for public hearings. We should organize to bring our XOs and
> our children to Springfield for the hearings.
>
> Among the questions:
>
> Schools will be allowed to choose from among the available laptops.
> The program should capture the differences in outcomes between schools
> using different hardware and software, using appropriate measures LG
> Quinn's office agrees. Nicholas Negroponte is strongly opposed to
> "bake-offs", but the world doesn't work the way he wants.
>
> We need to work with the legislature, the Education authority, and
> with schools on appropriate integration of laptops into curricula, and
> provide at least draft versions of electronic textbooks on all
> requested subjects. Much of what we want to do has yet to be designed.
> In fact, the software that we want to build the textbooks on has in
> some major cases yet to be designed. How much can we promise for the
> start of the next school year in September? That depends very strongly
> on who steps up to do it.
>
> It is very important in pilot projects to do good experimental design
> before hand so that the results contain usable information, not merely
> data. We need to talk to people who know something about these issues,
> who also understand what we are trying to measure.
>
> What training can be put together for the summer before? We need to
> demonstrate the meaning and value of learning by doing through
> collaborative discovery, aka Constructionism. Then we need to provide
> the toolkit for teachers to apply it, and provide feedback mechanisms
> so that their experience and insights steadily improve the process.
>
> This program requires dedicated resources, and management, on our side
> and several others. That means that we need to look for funding.
> Anybody know a good grant writer?
>
> No Child Left Behind creates perverse incentives that can interfere
> with the program. Can we get waivers from the Federal Government for
> the trials?
>
> --
> Edward Cherlin
> End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
> http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
> "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay
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Re: Collaborative Activity Development

[Bobby Powers]

yes, this looks like a great start!  I'm just getting my feet wet with
development (got sugar-jhbuild working today! ;), and was wondering if
anyone has had experience, or examples, of software on regular laptop
collaborating with an XO?  Is this even possible, and if it isn't then is
there a way I can help make it happen?  It would be great for me (and
others!) if I could develop a mac or linux version of an activity and have
them talk to its sister app on some XOs
Bobby

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 10:02 PM, John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> "Morgan Collett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I'm now working for OLPC, on improving activity collaboration.
>
> This is great!
>
> The best thing OLPC could do to improve activity collaboration is to
> get it working for ordinary programs -- running on the X Window
> System, or on MacOSX, or Windows.  Why doesn't AbiWord already
> collaborate with Write?  Why doesn't Firefox collaborate with Browse?
> It's the same code base.
>
> Tying collaboration to Sugar is a losing strategy.  Once the rest of
> the world figures out that *their* programs should be trivial to
> collaborate in too, they'll reimplement collaboration (likely in an
> incompatible way).  Then Sugar's collaboration will be an orphan
> rather than the mainstream.  Instead, if OLPC's collaboration code
> supported cross-platform collaboration, OLPC's model and its
> implementing code would spread throughout the whole computing
> infrastructure.  And that would bring in a new pile of contributors,
> enhancing, debugging, and porting it everywhere.
>
> Easy collaboration is one of OLPC's key advantages over its
> competition.  Making that a reality for all the kids (and adults) in
> the world requires a broader vision.  Merely debugging what makes
> Sugar apps fail to collaborate under load, or getting a few more Sugar
> authors to add collaboration, won't suffice.
>
>John
>
> PS:  If there is a simple way to install a couple of RPM's or DEB's, add
> a paragraph of code and a few automake macros, and add collaboration
> to any program written in C or C++, then please document it!  (If on
> the other hand "it only works in Python" and "requires sugar-jhbuild"
> then there's some work to be done.)
>
> PPS:  This review of AbiWord says:
>
>  http://www.linux.com/feature/131852
>
>  The new AbiWord supposedly offers real-time document collaboration
>  developed for the OLPC project and implemented by means of an
>  experimental plugin. As per the AbiWord-2.6 release notes, there are
>  three implementations of the plugin, one for the OLPC, and two (an
>  XMPP-based one and a pure TCP/IP one) for Linux. The Linux plugins
>  compiled without any issues, but AbiWord couldn't activate them. The
>  plugin isn't currently available for Windows.
>
>  [abiword.com says the Windows plugin is available on 2.6.2 now.  But
>  I never did find the collab plugin, nor any documentation for it.  The
>  2.6.0 release notes imply that the three available collab plugins can't
>  actually interoperate with each other!]
>
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Re: Where is Walter?

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 12:13 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> This lack of transperency is *exactly* the sort of behaviour that kills
> free software and other volunteer projects. People are not going to donate
> their own precious time to a project that may ultimately shaft them.
>
> The community that OLPC has built up is global, outstanding  and committed
> on many, many levels. It would be almost impossible to find the people,
> let alone the money, to do what has been delivered by the community
> already, let alone what could be delivered in the future.
>
> You can't buy this community. You can only create it with an inspiring
> vision and outstanding people living the vision. It is not the least bit
> inspiring to be the spearhead of the latest MS and DELL sales pitch.
>
> Management would do everyone a grand favour by sticking with the original
> vision come what may because they have no hope without the community.
>
> Martin Sevior


I'm new around here, but it seems like this whole conversation is based on a
bunch of what-ifs surrounding that AP article.  People generally seem on the
same page that switching to Windows and non-free software would be a Bad
Thing.  Maybe we could take a break from talking about the sky falling until
we hear something from Negroponte or someone else at 1CC regarding Windows?

Just my 2¢.

yours,
Bobby Powers
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Re: Ideas for testers (what needs testing?)

[Bobby Powers]

I'd be interested in helping

-Bobby

On Sun, May 4, 2008 at 5:16 PM, Jason Galyon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> missed the list
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Jason Galyon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Sun, 4 May 2008 10:14:04 -0500
> Subject: Re: Ideas for testers (what needs testing?)
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> I test and automate tests at my job.  I am greatly interested in
> performing this for Sugar and activities.
>
> So, beyond just needing manual test cases to start from there is a
> need for a modular, reusesble, and extensible architecture overall.
> Let's get together and come up with a plan.
>
> Squash bugs!
> Jason
> On 5/1/08, Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > In the wiki there are testing guides that could do as reference for
> Colors
> > and other activities.
> >
> > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_testing_guide.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > 2008/5/1 Wade Brainerd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> >
> > > Actually I should mention that Colors! has a bug list going on its
> > > Development page:
> > >
> > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Colors%21/Development
> > >
> > > Some of those may have regressed since they were marked fixed, I feel
> like
> > > I have seen the blank toolbar happen recently.
> > >
> > > -Wade
> > >
> > > ___
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> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero
> > One Laptop Per Child
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >
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Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model

[Bobby Powers]

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 11:32 AM,  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > what about Sugar software running as well as possible on normal linux
> > boxes? without having to install the full sugar package and run
> > everything under sugar in one window. this doesn't mean that some
> > libraries won't need to be installed, but like running QT apps on a Gnome
> > desktop, you install the QT libraries, not all of KDE (and similarly
> > running gtk apps on a KDE destop you don't install all of gnome)
>
> Not possible at the moment but it's on the plan too.
>
> The way I see it it is somewhat of a two way street.  Personally, if I'm
going to run Sugar apps in Gnome I would prefer them to integrate nicely
with my other apps, just as I would prefer apps running in Sugar to be
'sugary'.  In this case the burdon falls on the shoulders of the activity
developers.  From what I understand (and please correct me if I'm wrong!)
Abiword is a good example - the text editor canvas is encapsolated as its
own widget, and both the Gnome Abiword and the sugar activity use it in
their respective user interfaces.  So nice modular UI code should make
maintaing a Gnome and a Sugar version of a program relatively painless.
Again, please correct me if I'm wrong - I've been planning out what I want
to do with a new activity and this is what I seem to have arrived at, if
peoples experiences are different it could save me some headache...

As for the sharing stuff, I know you can download and use the telepathy
libs, but would you also need a presence service running?  Could this be
automatically started when an app wants to collaborate, or is it something
that would have to be running in the background beforehand?


yours,
Bobby
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Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 9:14 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 6:37 PM, Martin Langhoff
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 2:03 AM, Jim Gettys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >  > I have always believed we need Sugar.  One only has to watch a child
> >  > struggle with a conventional desktop (Windows, Linux or Mac) to see
> the
> >  > need
> >
> >  It's a lot more than that . When you contrast the current WIMP UI and
> >  generic apps with UIs built for _learning_, it's frustrating to the
> >  point of being ridiculous how what we know as "conventional" UIs get
> >  in the way.
>
> You and I have seen it, but we need to show it to the rest of the
> world. Would anybody be interested in doing videos of children at
> different computers, with commentary on what's happening, or not
> happening?
>
> What is the Constructivist way to teach grown-ups about how children
> learn?
>

Personally I would hope it includes peer-reviewed research.  Does anyone
have links to how constructionist teaching methods compare to traditional
ones? (sorry if people have posted this before... its been hard to keep up
with all the mail)

yours,
Bobby Powers
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Re: Help Running Non-python program on OLPC

[Bobby Powers]

2008/5/14 shivaprasad javali <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> Hi All,
>
>   I am trying to install a new activity written in c++ on the OLPC.
> I tried writing a python script which just launches my application and
> setting the approproate properties in the activity.info file. It launched
> allright but i am getting two windows one blank window for the oython script
> and another one containing my application . I want to know how to make my
> application sit on top of the window for the py script itself. Any help
> would be greatly appreciated.


have you checked out the sugarizing page on the wiki?
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugarizing

they have some tips there


bobby
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Re: [sugar] [support-gang] Microsoft

[Bobby Powers]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 2:57 AM, Simon Schampijer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > On Thu, 15 May 2008, Steve Holton wrote:
> >
> >> On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 8:03 PM, Seth Woodworth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Let's look at this with a slightly different lens before we blow up
> >>> on NN
> >>> and Microsoft.
> >>>
> >>> What does this agreement equate to?  And what are the alternatives to
> >>> Microsoft?
> >>>
> >>> If the XO was running a completely closed source stack with no
> >>> documentation on hardware, how would the Linux community feel?  They
> >>> would
> >>> feel that they were being shut out and not allowed to run whatever
> >>> software
> >>> they wanted to or develop.  This is something the linux community has
> >>> speared hardware companies over for years.
> >>
> >>
> >> ...and to which the free software (linux) community would respond with a
> >> reverse engineering effort, at it's own (collective) expense, and rather
> >> quickly have a solution.  If turnabout is fair play, let Microsoft
> >> adopt the
> >> free software community response as well.
> >>
> >> (When Cisco modified their WRT54G hardware so that Linux could no longer
> >> run, the response was to strip-down the gnu/linux stack even more
> >> until it
> >> would run again.)
> >>
> >> It's doubtful the free software community would do what Microsoft is
> >> demanding: asking the manufacturer to add 5-10% to the cost of the
> >> hardware
> >> to facilitate their efforts, nor would the free software community
> >> charge a
> >> $3.00 license fee for the use thereafter.
> >
> > I missed where the hardware was being changed and the cost going up to
> > support this. what I read was that the boot firmware was being modified
> > so that it could dual-boot into windows.
> >
> > please point me at the additional cost involved.
> >
> > David Lang
>
> from:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/technology/16laptop.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
>
> "Windows will add a bit to the price of the machines, about $3, the
> licensing
> fee Microsoft charges to some developing nations under a program called
> Unlimited Potential. For those nations that want dual-boot models, running
> both
> Windows and Linux, the extra hardware required will add another $7 or so to
> the
> cost of the machines, Mr. Negroponte said."
>

I think the extra hardware is the 2gb SD card, as XP + Office won't fit into
the NAND (especially if you're dual booting...)

Correct me if I'm wrong


-Bobby Powers


>
> Simon
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Re: [OLPC Security] Bitfrost and dual-boot

[Bobby Powers]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 12:39 AM, C. Scott Ananian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:

> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Michael Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 05:53:49PM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
> >> On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 02:58:07PM -0600, Jameson Chema Quinn wrote:
> >> In recent builds, any process running as user OLPC can execute code as
> >> uid 0 via the setuid-0 user-olpc-executable /usr/bin/sudo.
> >
> > A small correction: in recent builds, /bin/su is 04550 root/wheel, user
> > olpc is a member of wheel, and /usr/bin/sudo is a thin wrapper around
> > /bin/su.
>
> And to elaborate: the idea is that untrusted code should not be
> running as the 'olpc' user: 'olpc' is a trusted account.  Activities
> run/should be running as their own unique UUIDs, which are isolated
> from the olpc account.
>
> As to some other issues brought up:
>
> * Windows runs from an SD card, but there is not much space left on
> that SD card to store user files.  User files are stored in NAND at
> the moment.  In the dual-boot scenario which OFW2 will enable, we will
> either partition the NAND (likely also expand amount on onboard NAND),
> or limit Windows to the storage on the SD card (probably necessitating
> an increase in the size of the SD card).  None of this has been
> decided yet.
>

Did I miss something?  I was under the impression that the XO uses JFFS2 on
the NAND.  If we're worried about Windows malware messing with files on the
NAND, won't they have to be able to mount the volume first?  I only did a
quick google search, but I didn't find any Windows JFFS2 implementation.

Bobby


>
> * It is worth separating out the various bitfrost protections.
> Initial activation security is implemented by OFW; it doesn't matter
> whether windows or linux is running after the firmware cedes control.
> Other bitfrost protections are OS-dependent, and you are likely to
> give up at least some security when you install Windows on the XO.
>  --scott
>
> --
>  ( http://cscott.net/ )
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Re: touchpad issues on 2072

[Bobby Powers]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Mark Bauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I upgraded my G1G1 as I have many times to the latest joyride build
> (2072).  The touchpad is almost impossible to use, about 0.5" of
> movement will send the pointer all the way across the display.  Then
> it locks up the pointer for 20 or 30 seconds.  The rest of the
> machine is still running, and the keyboard is fine.  I have attempted
> to olpc-update -r -f -v joyride-2076, but that seems to have a
> problem with one of the libraries (libicui18n.so.36).  Anyone else
> having this problem, or do I need to reflash my machine back to
> a known good state.

as mentioned in the first ticket,
xset m 1 0

works well for me in the latest joyride.  its not perfect but its usable

bobby

> Mark
>
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Re: [sugar] [Announcement] - speech-dispatcher package now available

[Bobby Powers]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 7:30 AM, Hemant Goyal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Hemant Goyal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>>
>> Sorry for the Repost - *slightly more formatted email*
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Fedora and OLPC developers can now download the speech-dispatcher RPM
>> packages for testing/development of speech enabled activities.
>>
>> RPMs - OLPC Branch
>>
>> speech-dispatcher-0.6.6-13.olpc2.i386.rpm -
>> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/speech-dispatcher/0.6.6/13.olpc2/i386/speech-dispatcher-0.6.6-13.olpc2.i386.rpm
>> speech-dispatcher-0.6.6-13.olpc2.src.rpm-
>> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/speech-dispatcher/0.6.6/13.olpc2/src/speech-dispatcher-0.6.6-13.olpc2.src.rpm
>> speech-dispatcher-debuginfo-0.6.6-13.olpc2.i386.rpm -
>> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/speech-dispatcher/0.6.6/13.olpc2/i386/speech-dispatcher-debuginfo-0.6.6-13.olpc2.i386.rpm
>> speech-dispatcher-devel-0.6.6-13.olpc2.i386.rpm  -
>> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/speech-dispatcher/0.6.6/13.olpc2/i386/speech-dispatcher-devel-0.6.6-13.olpc2.i386.rpm
>> speech-dispatcher-doc-0.6.6-13.olpc2.i386.rpm -
>> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/speech-dispatcher/0.6.6/13.olpc2/i386/speech-dispatcher-doc-0.6.6-13.olpc2.i386.rpm
>> speech-dispatcher-python-0.6.6-13.olpc2.i386.rpm -
>> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/packages/speech-dispatcher/0.6.6/13.olpc2/i386/speech-dispatcher-python-0.6.6-13.olpc2.i386.rpm
>>
>> Packages for the F-7, F-8 branch will be soon available too.

I assume you mean F9 will be coming soon ;)

Bobby

>>
>> Best,
>> Hemant
>
>
> --
> Hemant Goyal | http://www.nsitonline.in/hemant
>
> Student Advisor, CSI NSIT Students Branch |
> http://societies.nsitonline.in/csi
> Founding Member and Student Mentor | NSITonline Webteam |
> http://www.nsitonline.in
> Member, Databases Group, CSE, IIT Delhi
> Undergraduate Student, IT Department NSIT, Delhi University, India
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Re: Questions, OLPC-Caldas

[Bobby Powers]

2008/6/30 Carlos Dario Isaza Zamudio <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Hello

Hello!

> I 'm working with the OLPC Caldas project and i have a few questions about
> the sugar system.
>
> 1) What's the equivalent command for "man" in the XO?

man pages are not installed to save some space on the machines.  I
suppose the equivolent command would be to type 'man your_command'
into Google in Browse ;)

> 2) What's the password when i try to access the XO through SSH?

you need to set the root password before you can do this.  if you're
in the Terminal activity:
sudo passwd

should give you a prompt to set the new root password.  I've heard
that changing the user olpc's password can have unintended
consequences.  (not sure where this is documented, tho I think its on
the wiki somewhere

> 3) What's the equivalent command for "ifconfig" or where can i see the
> configuration of the Mesh Network?

ifconfig works for me, or is there more you want to see?
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ifconfig

> To sum it up I'm having some problems with the shell commands on the XO
> laptop, is there a link or do you guys have a document of the sugar
> components or configuration files? I've been looking around the wiki for
> some answers but so far no good results about my doubts.



> I appreciate your help. i guess i'll be bugging you guys from now on, thank
> you very much

good luck and enjoy!


bobby

> --
> Carlos Dario Isaza Zamudio::ConTi
> Ingeniero Electronico
> Universidad Nacional de Colombia - Sede Manizales
> Linux Registered User #465475
> eSSuX - Usuarios y Desarrolladores GNU/Linux UNAL Manizales
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xorg.conf for VGA?

[Bobby Powers]

Hello,

I've got a B3 here with a VGA connector I soldered on, and output
works fine from the terminal or mplayer (with the fbdev driver).  X,
however, doesn't like it and just shows a black screen.  The monitor
still has a signal, but doesn't display anything.

Jordan, I heard you might know the magic I need in xorg.conf to get
this working.  Do you have any ideas?

yours,
Bobby Powers
(summer intern at 1CC)
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(another) WebKit port of Browse

[Bobby Powers]

Hi Folks,

I spent a couple hours yesterday taking out Gecko from Browse, and
putting in WebKit.  Luckily, this was made easy by some PyWebKitGtk
bindings from Jan Alonzo (cc'ed).  The example included with the
bindings is actually based off WebKit ;).

Some initial documentation is here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse/WebKit

things work pretty well in general, but gmail chokes, possibly due to gnash.

if you just want to try it (on an F9 based joyride), the bundle is:
http://dev.laptop.org/~bobbyp/Browse-92.xo

yours,
Bobby Powers
Intern Extroadinare
(irc: nteon)
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Re: (another) WebKit port of Browse

[Bobby Powers]

2008/7/7 Carol Lerche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Client certs can be used for authentication with no changes to a Firefox
> browser or an Apache server.  GTK based as well as web based software to
> create certs also already exists.   What sort of patch are you looking for?
> I could certainly provide a page running in an apache server to validate a
> request for and implant a client cert in a Firefox browser.   The issue of
> certificate creation needs a little more discussion, not because it is
> difficult or requires a lot of new software to execute, but because it is
> important to be clear about the requirements.  When you describe the
> overhead, do you mean the overhead of creating the certs?  Examining them
> when someone first logs on?
>
> I raised this alternative because you said that a bespoke browser was a
> requirement to have automatic authentication with the school server.  To me,
> the benefits of running a standard browser are so substantial that this
> trade off should be considered.

Can you explain these benefits?  Both Gecko and WebKit are standard
browser engines.  I don't see much to be gained from a UI perspective
(which presumably is what you're taking about?) by switching to FF3.
Performance is the only compelling reason I see.

Bobby

> On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 3:39 PM, Martin Langhoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 7:20 PM, Carol Lerche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> > Why does automatic authentication require a custom browser?  Client
>> > certificates work well for this function in ordinary web applications
>> > (assuming a properly configured server).
>>
>> I haven't delved into this deeply yet, but I suspect that, while I am
>> fond of client certs, they won't work - SSL network and CPU overhead
>> and sidestepping PKI madness for server certs. More on this when I get
>> to implement it.
>>
>> Now, anyone who wants to have a strong say on how I am developing this
>> is free to start implementing it ahead of me, and showing me some
>> fantastic patches :-)
>>
>> 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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> roof and gets stuck -- George Carlin
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Re: (another) WebKit port of Browse

[Bobby Powers]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 7:06 PM, Carol Lerche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The UI seems pretty important to me, but obviously that's a matter of
> taste.  Not everyone likes tabbed browsing.  Correct operation of websites
> that fail with the extant browser.  Direct availability of plugins and
> addons.  One example:  scrapbook, a superb research tool.  Another example
> Google Gears (according to a recent mail being ported, presumably  because
> the browser is not standard).  I am not familiar with the Firefox codebase,
> and perhaps all these things are directly available so long as the Firefox 3
> engine is there, but if so, there desperately needs to be a detailed body of
> documentation telling how to access these capabilities.

Carol -

I created a page on the wiki to list these problem sites.  Can you
please record these sites there?
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse/ProblemSites

And, to be fair, Gears is not (only) a website, its a browser plug-in
that allows you to interact with certain websites offline. (and I do
think someone is working on porting it as you said).

Bobby

> On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Bobby Powers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> 2008/7/7 Carol Lerche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>> > Client certs can be used for authentication with no changes to a Firefox
>> > browser or an Apache server.  GTK based as well as web based software to
>> > create certs also already exists.   What sort of patch are you looking
>> > for?
>> > I could certainly provide a page running in an apache server to validate
>> > a
>> > request for and implant a client cert in a Firefox browser.   The issue
>> > of
>> > certificate creation needs a little more discussion, not because it is
>> > difficult or requires a lot of new software to execute, but because it
>> > is
>> > important to be clear about the requirements.  When you describe the
>> > overhead, do you mean the overhead of creating the certs?  Examining
>> > them
>> > when someone first logs on?
>> >
>> > I raised this alternative because you said that a bespoke browser was a
>> > requirement to have automatic authentication with the school server.  To
>> > me,
>> > the benefits of running a standard browser are so substantial that this
>> > trade off should be considered.
>>
>> Can you explain these benefits?  Both Gecko and WebKit are standard
>> browser engines.  I don't see much to be gained from a UI perspective
>> (which presumably is what you're taking about?) by switching to FF3.
>> Performance is the only compelling reason I see.
>>
>> Bobby
>>
>> > On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 3:39 PM, Martin Langhoff
>> > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 7:20 PM, Carol Lerche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> >> > Why does automatic authentication require a custom browser?  Client
>> >> > certificates work well for this function in ordinary web applications
>> >> > (assuming a properly configured server).
>> >>
>> >> I haven't delved into this deeply yet, but I suspect that, while I am
>> >> fond of client certs, they won't work - SSL network and CPU overhead
>> >> and sidestepping PKI madness for server certs. More on this when I get
>> >> to implement it.
>> >>
>> >> Now, anyone who wants to have a strong say on how I am developing this
>> >> is free to start implementing it ahead of me, and showing me some
>> >> fantastic patches :-)
>> >>
>> >> 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
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on
>> > the
>> > roof and gets stuck -- George Carlin
>> > ___
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>> >
>> >
>
>
>
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Re: (another) WebKit port of Browse

[Bobby Powers]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 7:58 PM, Eben Eliason <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 2008/7/7 Carol Lerche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>> The UI seems pretty important to me, but obviously that's a matter of
>> taste.  Not everyone likes tabbed browsing.  Correct operation of websites
>> that fail with the extant browser.  Direct availability of plugins and
>> addons.  One example:  scrapbook, a superb research tool.  Another example
>> Google Gears (according to a recent mail being ported, presumably  because
>> the browser is not standard).  I am not familiar with the Firefox codebase,
>> and perhaps all these things are directly available so long as the Firefox 3
>> engine is there, but if so, there desperately needs to be a detailed body of
>> documentation telling how to access these capabilities.
>
> I certainly acknowledge that a) the sparse UI isn't for everyone and
> b) the UI is young and still needs some more work (and more features).
>  It started out bare bones, and is slowly gaining important features
> as we go (recently URI autocompletion, find in page text, foundational
> support for global bookmarks, and other features appeared!).  It
> should also be noted that tabs were part of the initial design, and
> were taken out both to prevent abuse of RAM and because we thought
> that it might be confused adjacent to the link sharing feature, which
> we felt was a really important addition for our target audience and
> collaborative learning.  I'd consider adding them in light of recent
> engine improvements, assuming we can prove that kids navigate them
> naturally.
>
> Additionally, I'd love to see other individuals with interest porting
> other browsers to the XO.  I think someone was working on this with
> Opera.  Perhaps a more full featured Firefox could also be Sugarized.
> However, we designed the current Browse as is to be purposely sparse,
> to give kids the basics without overloading them with things that
> could get in the way. I think there's a place for Browse as a default
> browser, especially for kids under 8 or so, even if other more complex
> browsers appear as viable alternatives.

+1

> - Eben
>
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Re: (another) WebKit port of Browse

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 1:03 PM, Jim Gettys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 00:17 -0400, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:
>> > Not everyone likes tabbed browsing.
>>
>> That may be true - but what if the user needs to reference two (or
>> more) separate pages of information.  If while looking at one page
>> he can't remember *exactly* what the other page said, he may want to
>> switch between pages.  What are the alternatives to tabbed browsing?
>>
>> [To me, it is more logical to select a tab created under my control,
>> than to select from the "previously-seen" list as presented by the
>> Browse 'Back' button.  And to open several instances of the existing
>> Activity seems wasteful.]
>
>
> Patches gratefully accepted.  Note that due to memory usage, even tabs
> have their limits (though it may be the recent improvements in Gecko
> obviate this problem somewhat; it frees pixmap storage unused in finite
> time).
>
> Note the WebKit I would hope are now similarly motivated (competition is
> a wonderful thing ;-)).
>  - Jim

I updated the WebKit Browse to use the latest GIT WebKit, merge in the
latest mainline changes in Browse, and do fullpage zoom.

http://dev.laptop.org/~bobbyp/Browse-93.xo

Bobby
(I've been watching youtube videos in WebKit/Browse a day.  its a
little choppy, but thats probably gstreamer/ffmpeg)

> --
>>
>> Jim Gettys <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> One Laptop Per Child
>
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Re: Incidental notes.

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 8:40 PM, Michael Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I worked on a couple of things over the weekend that may be of interest
> to random passers-by. They include:
>
> * new rainbow ('cli' branch of users/mstone/security) and nss-rainbow
>  source code which lets you use rainbow from the command line and which
>  permits rainbow to add accounts to the system without touching
>  /etc/passwd or /etc/group
>
> * updates to the puritan UI and the f9 compilation which make combine to
>  deliver a bootable image. (As of this instant, you'll need to start X
>  manually with /
>
> Both are quite raw and are certainly buggy; hence, I don't really
> recommend them for the faint-of-heart. However, both do let you do some
> cool things that are difficult to achieve with other technology.
>
> These will each make their way into testing packages "someday soon".
> Poke me if you want to see them sooner.

cool!  keep up the good work :)  I've got so much I'm suppose to be
doing but its hard not to want to play with these...

Bobby

> Michael
>
> P.S. - Is sugar supposed to crash if the PS is unavailable on startup?
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Re: New joyride build 2134

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Build Announcer v2 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2134
>
> Changes in build 2134 from build: 2131
>
> Size delta: 2.10M
>
> -sugar 0.81.6-1.olpc3
> ...
> +xorg-x11-server-Xephyr 1.4.99.902-3.20080612.olpc3.1

awesome! I assume this is the first step towards bundling a whole
jhbuild environment in joyride, right?

> --- Changes for sugar 0.81.6-2.20080709git8f4819a62e.fc9 from 0.81.6-1.olpc3 
> ---
>  + git snapshot
>  + 7430 Preserve the favorites layout across reboots
>  + 7434 Add power section to the control panel
>
> --- Changes for sugar-artwork 0.81.1-2.20080709gitc77b345c02.fc9 from 
> 0.81.1-1.olpc3 ---
>  + git snapshot
>  + 7385 Add view-freeform icon (eben)
>
> --- Changes for sugar-toolkit 0.81.6-2.20080709git92ef9d298a.fc9 from 
> 0.81.6-1.olpc3 ---
>  + git snapshot
>  + 7430 Preserve the favorites layout across reboots
>  + 7434 Add power section to the control panel
>
> --- Included xorg-x11-server-Xephyr version 1.4.99.902-3.20080612.olpc3.1 ---
>
> --
> This mail was automatically generated
> 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 
> comparison
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Re: New 8.2 Stream

[Bobby Powers]

2008/7/10 Dennis Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> in preparation for 8.2  we  have a new 8.2 stream  it can be found at
> http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/xo-1/streams/8.2/
> Please test and file bugs against it. This is the stream intended for the 8.2
> test builds.

This sounds good.  Can you please explain how this differs from
joyride, both at the moment and in the future?   Is this based off of
Joyride 21XX, what kind of sync will there be, etc.

Thanks!

yours,
bobby

> --
> Dennis Gilmore
>
>
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Re: Easiest way to run the latest activities

[Bobby Powers]

2008/7/11 Ixo X oxI <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> FYI,
>   I believe there's also  'Xo-get'  which contains a very frequently
> updated  list of 'released' activities and activity packs.
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Xo-get

yes I have used this, it is very good and in addition allows you to
uninstall applications (from the command line).  do you know who is
responsible for it?  how often are its updates?  is it automatic or
does someone toll around devel listening for updates? :)

bobby

> -iXo
>
> On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 10:41, Sayamindu Dasgupta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>> The easiest way, perhaps, to run the bleeding edge version of Sugar on
>> an XO is to run the latest joyride. Is there a similar way to run the
>> latest activities on an XO ? I am a bit concerned that many people who
>> are playing with the latest joyrides still have older activities from
>> a pack like the G1G1 one or the Peru installed, and consequently the
>> latest activities are not getting as much exposure/testing as
>> possible.
>> Thanks,
>> Sayamindu
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sayamindu Dasgupta
>> [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
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Re: Activity Backward Compatibility (was re: Re: joyride 2128 smoketest)

[Bobby Powers]

On 7/12/08, Morgan Collett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 00:56, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  > Hi Guys,
>  >
>  > We should definitely have backward compatibility for activities!
>
>
> In my opinion, there should be compatibility from one release to the
>  next. APIs should not break from release to release unless critically
>  necessary. If there is a new way of doing things which is better, the
>  old way should still work - but it should warn in the log files that a
>  deprecated API is being used.

Problems arise independently of API when libraries not part of the
base system are used.  For example, I have an activity that uses
goocanvas and the glibmm libaries, which I package in the activity
bundle.  I tried first using glibmm from F9, but it didn't work on
F7-based builds.  I then substituted glibmm from F7, and it works on
656, 703/8, and all the recent joyrides.

I don't know the best way to handle this generally, I suppose it is up
to individual activity owners to make sure their stuff works all over.

bobby

>  We should announce API deprecations - and API breaks where necessary -
>  in advance of a new release (as well as release notes) so that
>  activity authors are well aware of what is happening. This is done for
>  Python releases, for example, giving people details on how to update
>  python code from one version to another.
>
>  Indefinite support of backwards compatibility certainly has been a
>  major cause of platforms deteriorating (I'm thinking of Windows here).
>
>
>  > That is, activities that used to work (maybe starting at 656) must
>  > continue to work. If a new release requires that all activity authors
>  > have to recode some of their work, that will be a major deterrent to
>  > working with us.
>
>
> 65x releases did not have Rainbow running, so activities could access
>  and write to places on the filesystem which are no longer possible.
>  For that reason we can only really focus on activities which already
>  run on Rainbow.
>
>
>  > Its also a deterrent to deployments upgrading, assuming they find out
>  > their activities are broken before they upgrade.
>  >
>  > I understand that we do not have backward compatibility in 8.2.0 as it
>  > currently stands.
>
>
> My understanding is that we made no particular guarantees, and while
>  we did not intentionally break APIs, some things may have broken along
>  the way.
>
>  I think our development process should include some sort of
>  compatibility management - perhaps as I mentioned above with API
>  support between two consecutive releases - and this could be enforced
>  or monitored with some sort of test activity (or test suite) that uses
>  the various Sugar APIs and reports on failures.
>
>
>  > Can we bound the test problem by saying that all "well behaved"
>  > activities will continue to work?
>
>
> Unfortunately I think our APIs are insufficiently documented (or have
>  been) so that even core activities are not guaranteed to be "well
>  behaved".
>
>
>  > If we can define "well behaved" and not test activities that meet that
>  > criteria it will save us a lot of test time.
>
>
> I think a better criteria would be "responsive activity authors" who
>  make some kind of commitment to keep their activities up to date from
>  release to release. I don't think we should spend resources testing
>  arbitrary third party activities, but where we can maintain a
>  responsive developer community we can include them in the process.
>
>
>  > Any other suggestions on how to bound this test challenge appreciated!
>  >
>  > e.g. can we say that all activities not listed on this page:
>  > http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam/Releases/Sucrose/0.81.4 will
>  > work the same in 8.2.0 as they did in previous releases?
>
>
> Not all activities were updated in Sucrose release 0.81.4 - some were
>  updated in previous Sucrose releases. The activities listed in
>  http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Modules are ones where the maintainers
>  have agreed to use the Sucrose release cycle (and other conditions
>  listed in http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/ReleaseTeam#New_activities).
>  These are activities which the Sugar project lists as demo activities,
>  and may or may not coincide with OLPC's deployed activities (in the
>  long term, as other users of Sugar emerge) - but they are certainly
>  candidates for OLPC's use.
>
>  Thus I would say that activities *not* on that list are the ones that
>  are *not* guaranteed to work with 8.2.0, because the authors did not
>  step up and take an interest in the new release.
>
>
>  > In the future if some piece of core code will cause previously supported
>  > activities to no longer work, I hope we can discuss and accept or reject
>  > that in advance (sorry if I missed that debate on this round).
>
>
> API breaks should be discussed during a development cycle as the need
>  for them emerges, hopefully as early as possible in the cycle so there
>  are no surprises.

Re: Java

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Robert Myers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> David,
>
>> Just been browsing the Java pages on the wiki and confirming to myself the
>> Sun Java version installs but the plugin does not load. A pity, as I have
>> installed on a school server an excellent UNESCO CD of educational materials
>> "Strengthening ICTs in Schools and Schoolnet Project in the ASEAN Setting"
>> which has hundreds of nice educational applets. Seems the last recorded
>> activity on getting Java to work was about 5 months ago... or can anyone
>> update me?
>
> You have it right. The Java plugin does not work in the current Browse
> activity. This is apparently a case of compilation mismatches, and my
> understanding is that it won't go away until Browse is recompiled with a
> different library base. This bug still exists with Joyride and the
> latest Browse build.

what library base are you referring to?

> However, Java applications do run under Sugar if you install Java. The
> plugin does run with a separately installed browser.
>
> There is a lot of educational content available on the Internet that
> depends on the plugin. I realize that Java doesn't meet OLPC's
> definition of 'free', but it should be supported.
>
> An interesting sidenote in Joyride -- it used to be that Firefox was
> excluded in the OLPC yum repository. It no longer is, and 'yum install
> firefox' now gets you Firefox 3. I wonder when the Browse activity will
>  be built on this core.

Browse is currently based on Xulrunner 1.9, which is the same
rendering engine as Firefox 3.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Browse#Summary

bobby

> I feel your pain,
>
> Bob
>
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Re: New joyride build 2171

[Bobby Powers]

thank you guys (and girls?  probably just guys...) for the informative
ChangeLogs!!!

bobby

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 5:52 PM, Build Announcer v2 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2171
>
> Changes in build 2171 from build: 2169
>
> Size delta: 0.13M
>
> -sugar-journal 94-1.fc9
> +sugar-journal 94-2.200807015git814c37616b.fc9
> -cerebro 2.9.2-1.olpc3
> +cerebro 2.9.4-1.olpc3
> -kernel 2.6.25-20080715.2.olpc.ef92c83e1c0d23a
> +kernel 2.6.25-20080716.3.olpc.08ad05ca80e789b
> -sugar 0.81.6-2.20080709git8f4819a62e.fc9
> +sugar 0.81.6-3.20080715git8137d5c37f.fc9
> -sugar-toolkit 0.81.6-2.20080709git92ef9d298a.fc9
> +sugar-toolkit 0.81.6-3.20080715gitd17347cc19.fc9
>
> --- Changes for sugar-journal 94-2.200807015git814c37616b.fc9 from 94-1.fc9 
> ---
>  + New git snapshot
>
> --- Changes for cerebro 2.9.4-1.olpc3 from 2.9.2-1.olpc3 ---
>  + 2.9.4: Minor fixes, improved UI application (added bidding game)
>
> --- Changes for sugar 0.81.6-3.20080715git8137d5c37f.fc9 from 
> 0.81.6-2.20080709git8f4819a62e.fc9 ---
>  + 7071 Add an option for uninstalling activities from the home view
>  + 7476 Order control panel modules logically
>  + 4208 battery icon consistency fix
>  + 7354 Maintain correct zoom level after activity launch
>
> --- Changes for sugar-toolkit 0.81.6-3.20080715gitd17347cc19.fc9 from 
> 0.81.6-2.20080709git92ef9d298a.fc9 ---
>  + git snapshot
>  + 7523 fix content bundle installation
>  + 5079 simplify sharing code
>  + 4208 get_icon_state accepts negative step kwarg
>  + 7444 Fix crash in get_joined_buddies when a buddy disappears uncleanly
>
> --
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Re: [sugar] Programming environments on the XO

[Bobby Powers]

Hello Martin -


On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 12:54 AM, Martin Sevior <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi Samuel,
>  Marc Maurer has done 95% of the work required to do
> multi-programming language syntax highlighting in libabiword. The
> advantage of using libabiword is that you get collaboration for free. It
> is easy enough to embed this in your own canvas and hook up the controls
> you need or want, just as we've done for Write.

that sounds great!

> Marc is a bit of a perfectionist so I'm not sure how usable "95%" of the
> work is and whether it could be finished by simply using it and
> providing bug reports as needed would be.

Is this something the community could help with?  I know myself and
maybe another person or two who would be willing to help if it was
clear what else needed to be done.


yours,
Bobby


> Hopefully, Marc will chime in soon.
>
> Cheers
>
> Martin
>
>
> On Thu, 2008-07-17 at 00:39 -0400, Samuel Klein wrote:
>> There has been talk about expanding Pippy to support a variety of
>> programming languages, perhaps as plugins; to add syntax highlighting;
>> and general interest in seeing Develop proceed.  Syntax highlighting
>> in Write has been brought up as well.  C and Javascript environments
>> have been specifically highlighted, since C is used for a fair bit of
>> code that we ship; but enthusiasts of Ruby and many other languages
>> have considered providing an intro dev environment as a standalone
>> activity, one per language.  And HTML creation is possible in Write
>> but without highlighting, and it is not obvious how to put this to
>> good use.
>>
>> Finally, we now have activities for Etoys (Squeak), Scratch, and
>> Turtle Art, but not yet a Logo activity; though a few people are
>> working on the latter.
>>
>> Where are we with these developments?  What plans are there to
>> complete any of the above this year?  What specific features should we
>> schedule to support the above, and which is most important?
>>
>> SJ
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Re: Network manager 0.7 for Joyride

[Bobby Powers]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:56 AM, Morgan Collett
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 16:50, Daniel Drake <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> The functionality is actually part of NetworkManager 0.6 upstream, so
>> they are not patches in the usual sense. The problem is that the
>> functionality was not carried forward upstream to 0.7.
>>
>> Anyway, Sjoerd has apparently completed the work porting the mesh
>> functionality from 0.6 to 0.7. No more attention is needed in that area.
>>
>> What we need now is for someone to port the sugar components to use the
>> new NetworkManager D-Bus API. NM 0.7 introduces a new D-Bus API and no
>> longer supports the old one, which is what we use in sugar.

I would love to work on this, but can't until the 28th.  so if anyone
wants to tackle it first I'm sure I could find SOMETHING else to work
on then...

bobby

> ... without breaking the existing use of 0.6, where that is available...
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Re: New joyride build 2178

[Bobby Powers]

Joyride is down to 302 MB, awesome job Dan!

bobby

On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Build Announcer v2 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2178
>
> Changes in build 2178 from build: 2177
>
> Size delta: -12.98M
>
> -cpio 2.9-7.fc9
> +cpio 2.9-8.fc9
> -gnome-python2 2.22.1-4.olpc3
> +gnome-python2 2.22.1-5.olpc3
> -gnome-python2-gnomevfs 2.22.1-4.olpc3
> +gnome-python2-gnomevfs 2.22.1-5.olpc3
> -libbonobo 2.22.0-2.fc9
> -perl 4:5.10.0-30.fc9
> -perl-Module-Pluggable 1:3.60-30.fc9
> -perl-Pod-Escapes 1:1.04-30.fc9
> -perl-Pod-Simple 1:3.05-30.fc9
> -perl-libs 4:5.10.0-30.fc9
> -perl-version 3:0.74-30.fc9
>
> --- Changes for cpio 2.9-8.fc9 from 2.9-7.fc9 ---
>  + Support major/minor device numbers over 127 (bz#450109)
>
> --- Changes for gnome-python2 2.22.1-5.olpc3 from 2.22.1-4.olpc3 ---
>  + Really kill dependency on libbonobo
>  + Kill dependency on libbonobo
>
> --- Changes for gnome-python2-gnomevfs 2.22.1-5.olpc3 from 2.22.1-4.olpc3 ---
>  + Really kill dependency on libbonobo
>
> --
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Re: electricity table (Google Docs)

[Bobby Powers]

hi Mia

this sounds really interesting, how can I find out what the different
scenarios are?  I don't use google docs a lot, is there just a link
I'm forgetting to click?

thanks!

Bobby

2008/7/18  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I've shared a document with you called "electricity table":
> http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p6DRYWvC0_wbHL1-bzt-3Mw&[EMAIL 
> PROTECTED]&t=808765302247483981&guest
>
> It's not an attachment -- it's stored online at Google Docs. To open this
> document, just click the link above.
>
> Hi guys!
> I was also wondering if you could give me feedback on this table. The
> table shows how much kWh is needed a year to power a xo based on
> different scenarios. If you think I should add or change anything
> please let me know.
> Thanks a lot!
> Mia
>
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Re: New joyride build 2216

[Bobby Powers]

if packages are included or updated from people using their
public_rpms directory on dev.laptop.org, they have to update a
changelog file references the new rpm.  it is _recommended_ they list
the changes, but not mandatory.  that is my understanding anyway.  I
don't think updates pulled in from F9 have changelog information
available for buildannouncer.

bobby

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 2:54 PM,  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> i think i saw the reason for this at some point, but why do
> some joyride announcements have changelog messages included,
> and some (like this one) do not?
>
> paul
>
> build announcer v2 wrote:
>  > http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2216
>  >
>  > Changes in build 2216 from build: 2214
>  >
>  > Size delta: 0.00M
>  >
>  > -xkeyboard-config 1.3-1.olpc3
>  > +xkeyboard-config 1.3-2.olpc3
>  >
>  > --
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> logs
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>  > comparison
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> =-
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Re: electricity table (Google Docs)

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 3:49 PM, Richard A. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> I was also wondering if you could give me feedback on this table. The
>> table shows how much kWh is needed a year to power a xo based on
>> different scenarios. If you think I should add or change anything
>
> As I often state in my discussions on laptop power, calculations like
> this are actually pretty complex and the simplistic approach while good
> for ballpark estimations can have a large amount of error.
>
> First as others pointed out you units are wrong.  You need to substitute
>  Watts every where you have kW.
>
> The next issue is that you are assuming a perfect conversion on the
> recharge half of your cycle.  Which is not correct.  The avg power draw
> of 5-7 watts for the XO is measured internally either via the battery
> sensor or by our instrumented XO.  It does not take into account the
> efficiency of the DC/DC converter when recharging the XO from external
> power.
> It also does not take into consideration the charge efficiency of the
> battery.  It takes more power charge a battery than just the usable
> capacity of the battery.
>
> The DC/DC converter's efficiency is affected by the difference between
> the input voltage and the output voltage.  We don't really have any
> numbers on the exact range of efficiency for the XO @ 12V but typically
> your average DC/DC converter is around 85%. The 88% number pops into
> mind from when I was last looking at such things.
>
> Then there is the charge efficiency.  Which is more complex because its
> actually 2 numbers. One for constant current (CC) charge mode and then
> another for constant voltage (CV) charge.  The batteries start off in CC
> mode and then switch to CV mode after certain criteria are reached the
> criteria happens around the same time but is a bit different for each
> battery and much more different between the 2 types of batteries.
>
> I don't have numbers for these efficiencies.  The EC code has comments
> with magical constants that suggest certain numbers for these values but
> I've learned that a lot of those comments may be wrong or apply to
> earlier versions of the batteries.   The range suggested is 80 - 90%.

would (somehow) updating these magical constants for current batteries
(depending on LiFe or NiCad chemistries) improve anything?

bobby

> The only way to know exactly what a good average for charge efficiency
> is would be to measure and compare the power in with power out across
> several batteries of each type (remember we have 2 chemistries).
>
> Thats possible in the case where the XO is powered up and you can read
> the battery sensor, but when the XO is off its not so easy.  Guess what?
>  Your %'s will be different in the 2 cases because the charge rate is
> much faster when the XO is off.
>
> Buts lets just say for a quick ball park that DC/DC is 88% and average
> battery CE is 85%.  Now your recharge numbers are off by about 25%.
>
> Listing things in "cranking hours" may also be problematic.   If you
> really were cranking some human power device your output would be so
> variable that the only way to get meaningful data is to measure it and
> develop some sort of profile for what the average person can really do.
>
> --
> Richard Smith  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> One Laptop Per Child
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Re: [sugar] specifying what services Activities may use

[Bobby Powers]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 10:03 PM, Bastien <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> "Benjamin M. Schwartz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>> Jerry Williams wrote:
>> | Seems like this problem for linux was solved with RPM.
>> | With rpm if something is missing for something you want to install, it
>> | complains and won't let you install it.
>>
>> That's not really the problem we're discussing.  We're talking about the
>> case in which you try to install an old bundle onto a new build, or vice
>> versa.
>
> Another reason why each build should come with a default bundle.
>
> If countries develop their bundles independantly from Sugar evolution,
> then the problem will just be more painful.  If countries have a default
> bundle to refer to when developing their own, it could help solving
> dependancy issues indirectly.
>
> The default activities could be selected so that 90% of the dependancies
> for other (known) activities are satisfied.
>
> At least, a default bundle combined with a nice GUI for xo-get.py would
> discourage installation of old bundles on newer builds.

recent joyrides include an activity updater which should help with this.

> And you guys could get rid of the scary red warning on the wiki :)

on which page?

bobby

> --
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Re: specifying what services Activities may use

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 3:10 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> A DECISION NEEDS TO BE MADE !!!
>
> I've been randomly launching Activities on 2226.  __Far too many__
> of them fail -- because csound was changed, numeric was changed,
> mixer was changed, etc., etc., etc.
>
>
> Given that there *are* Activities out in the hands of users (both
> with G1G1 and with country distributions), the question becomes:
>
>   HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO AVOID USER-PERCEIVED REGRESSIONS ?
>
>
> For what it's worth, my opinion is that if users who *had* been able
> to run many different Activities were to be offered 2226, they would
> be better off staying with what they have.

did these work in 708?  how about in joyrides before we started
slimming things down?

>
> mikus
>
>
>
> p.s.  I started this topic to point out that "slimming down the
> build" could inhibit Activities *yet to be developed*.  But it turns
> out that "slimming down the build" is killing *existing* Activities.

slimming down the build WONT inhibit activities yet to be developed -
those activities can include libraries in the XO bundles.  My activity
(Model) does that, so does Physics, so does Develop, and a number of
other ones do too.

yours,
bobby

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

[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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Re: New joyride build 2246

[Bobby Powers]

hello,

I believe this is the type of stuff Upstart was designed for, and my
limited testing shows that adding the line
stop on stopping prefdm

to the rainbow upstart job sufficiently links rainbow with X.

yours,
Bobby

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 1:45 AM, James Cameron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 03, 2008 at 12:00:18AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
>> If anyone knows how to get rainbow to stop when X dies; please speak
>> up!
>
> Yes, up!
>
> I've looked at rainbow on 2228 and 2246.
>
> I've looked at the process with strace and lsof, and at the source on
> the XO, and it appears that rainbow has no connection to the X server,
> but rather one to dbus, ...
>
> ... now I don't think there is a notification of X server stop that one
> can get via dbus, but if someone else knows of one speak up ...
>
> ... and you can't XOpenDisplay or initialise Gtk, because the X
> disconnection handling is a one-time thing, not repeatable ... (I seem
> to remember we were in this boat with ohm a long time ago?), ...
>
> What I've briefly prototyped is a slightly hackish way for the rainbow
> process to have a method called when the X server stops, as part of a
> Control/Alt/Backspace, death, or shutdown.  Here's a shell equivalent:
>
># telnet 0 6000 || kill `cat /var/run/rainbow.pid`
>
> However, I've not finished including it in the rainbow source, because I
> don't yet understand the gobject event loop.  I ran out of time.
>
> Here is the technique ...
>
> 1.  open a TCP connection to port 6000 on 127.0.0.1,
>
> or
>
> 1.  open the UNIX domain X socket, e.g. /tmp/.X11-unix/X0,
>
> 2.  send no data,
>
> 3.  receive no data, (discard any data that arrives),
>
> 4.  include the file descriptor in the poll(2) call made by rainbow,
> presumably by adding it as an event source to the gobject mainloop in
> service.py,
>
> 5.  expect the X server to shutdown the socket when it shuts down,
>
> 6.  handle the gobject.IO_HUP (a guess) by terminating rainbow.
>
> I've not yet tested to my satisfaction how long the X server is willing
> to maintain a silent TCP connection.  So far the answer seems to be
> forever.
>
> Another alternative might be to take the connection management parts of
> python-xlib, and reduce them down.  There doesn't seem to be any keep
> alive or timeout stuff in it.
>
> --
> James Cameronmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://quozl.netrek.org/
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Re: New faster build 2250

[Bobby Powers]

I'm running 2249, are there suppose to be access points in the network
view? aside from that, awesome job so far!

bobby

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 11:21 PM, Build Announcer v2 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/faster/build2250
>
> Changes in build 2250 from build: 2249
>
> Size delta: 0.00M
>
> -sugar-xfce-control 0.1-1
> +sugar-xfce-control 0.2-1
>
> --- Changes for sugar-xfce-control 0.2-1 from 0.1-1 ---
>  + Fix unfreeze after pretty boot.
>
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Re: Project Name: olpc-bundler has been set up

[Bobby Powers]

what will olpc bundler do?

bobby

2008/8/13 Henry Edward Hardy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:48:10 -0400, Erik Garrison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> May we please have a shared git repo named "olpc-bundler" for me (erik),
> sj, and mako?
>
> Done. Your tree is here:
> git+ssh://[EMAIL PROTECTED]/git/projects/olpc-bundler
>
> Please follow instructions here for importing your project:
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Importing_your_project
>
> Let us know if you have any problems with your tree. Happy hacking.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Henry Edward Hardy
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
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Re: Breaks yum also? (Was: Missing critical dependency, Koji)

[Bobby Powers]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Martin Langhoff
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 3:31 AM, Gary C Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Just a quick double check – I take it that all yum attempted installs
>> will also be failing at the moment? Having re-flashed my XO last night
>> I was trying to pull in some additional system monitoring tools for
>> tests. Yom gives the error:
>
> I'm not sure about the Koji repo, but the release version scheme on
> the XO is breaking yum when it comes to vanilla Fedora packages,
> whiich is a shame.
>
> Workaround - with the example of installing lsof and gdb from the
> vanilla fedora repo:
>
>  - replace $releasever with 9 in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
>  - run yum --disablerepo=olpc_devel --enablerepo=fedora install lsof gdb
>
> Disabling olpc_devel only makes sense als long as the koji repo is down.
>
> Time to split "fedorareleasever" from "olpcreleasever"? They are 2
> different beasts...

I reported this a while ago, it messes up Livna as well
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7398

Bobby

> 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: Village Hosting request

[Bobby Powers]

I generally agree with Ed on this point, although I think it would be
even better if players could choose to cooperate and collaborate or
not, and when they choose to work together the outcome is clearly and
noticeably better.  That is, make it a game that teaches collaboration
at the community, village and societal level is usually the best
option.  Bonus points for making it behave that way AND making it
believable :)

yours,
Bobby

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 5:54 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Can we adapt the game to fully collaborative play, where players try
> to maximize community and total wealth rather than trying to get ahead
> of everybody else? A focus on getting ahead leads to the moral hazard
> of the familiar beggar-thy-neighbor strategies, that is, keeping the
> riff-raff down and gaming the system in various ways to get special
> favors while denying them to others. Like defining wage increases to
> be inflation, and bringing the full power of government to bear to
> prevent them. Collaboration, as in microfinance or the Sarvodaya
> Movement, is the actually effective development strategy in practice.
>
> See also Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation.
>
> On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Robert Myers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> 1. Project name : Village
>> 2. Existing website, if any : http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Rmyers/Village
>> 3. One-line description : economics simulation game
>>
>> 4. Longer description   : game simulating simple economic activity.
>> Buying, selling, trading, developing resources, competing and colluding.
>> The player tries to maximize his wealth, but the village as a whole also
>> has to succeed.
>> :
>> :
>> :
>>
>> 5. URLs of similar projects :
>>
>> 6. Committer list
>>Please list the maintainer (lead developer) as the first entry. Only
>> list
>>developers who need to be given accounts so that they can commit to your
>>project's code repository, or push their own. There is no need to list
>>non-committer developers.
>>
>>   Username   Full name SSH2 key URL
>> E-mail
>>      - 
>> --
>>#1 Rmyers   Robert Myers
>>#2  Nikki Lee (possible)
>>#3  Andrew Bouchard (possible)
>>   ...
>>
>>If any developers don't have their SSH2 keys on the web, please
>> attach them
>>to the application e-mail.
>>
>> 7. Preferred development model
>>
>>[X] Central tree. Every developer can push his changes directly to the
>>project's git tree. This is the standard model that will be
>> familiar to
>>CVS and Subversion users, and that tends to work well for most
>> projects.
>>
>>[ ] Maintainer-owned tree. Every developer creates his own git tree, or
>>multiple git trees. He periodically asks the maintainer to look
>> at one
>>or more of these trees, and merge changes into the maintainer-owned,
>>"main" tree. This is the model used by the Linux kernel, and is
>>well-suited to projects wishing to maintain a tighter control on
>> code
>>entering the main tree.
>>
>>If you choose the maintainer-owned tree model, but wish to set up some
>>shared trees where all of your project's committers can commit
>> directly,
>>as might be the case with a "discussion" tree, or a tree for an
>> individual
>>feature, you may send us such a request by e-mail, and we will set
>> up the
>>tree for you.
>>
>> 8. Set up a project mailing list:
>>
>>[ ] Yes, named after our project name
>>[ ] Yes, named __
>>[X] No
>>
>>When your project is just getting off the ground, we suggest you eschew
>>a separate mailing list and instead keep discussion about your project
>>on the main OLPC development list. This will give you more input and
>>potentially attract more developers to your project; when the volume of
>>messages related to your project reaches some critical mass, we can
>>trivially create a separate mailing list for you.
>>
>>If you need multiple lists, let us know. We discourage having many
>>mailing lists for smaller projects, as this tends to
>>stunt the growth of your project community. You can always add more
>> lists
>>later.
>>
>> 9. Commit notifications
>>
>>[ ] Notification of commits to the main tree should be e-mailed to
>> the list
>>we chose to create above
>>[ ] A separate mailing list, -git, should be created
>> for commit
>>notifications
>>[X] No commit notifications, please
>>
>> 10. Shell accounts
>>
>>As a general rule, we don't provide shell accounts to developers unless
>>there's a demonstrated need. If you have one, please explain here, and
>>list the usernames of the committers above needing shell access.
>>
>> 11. Translation
>>[X] Set up the la

Re: XO activity bundle .info format

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 7:56 PM, C. Scott Ananian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 6:43 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> ... found that people are using
>>> 'org.laptop' as a prefix incorrectly (if everyone uses org.laptop as a
>>> prefix, then OLPC loses the ability to assign unique names in this domain).
>>
>> Undoubtedly people who are dbus developers understand the proper use
>> of the "organization_namespace".  But suppose someone in a far
>> corner of the world wishes to contribute.  All he knows is that a
>> three-part name-string gets applied to his Activity's interaction
>> with the rest of the system.  Since *he* never tests that name, he
>> may feel free to put anything at all into that name-string.
>>
>> I believe that life ought to be made as easy as possible for people
>> who want to enhance their Sugar systems.  Requiring "correctness" in
>> all parts of name-strings, when to non-insiders those name-strings
>> might seem meaningless, does not make their participation easier.
>
> Some time ago I tried to better document the expectations for
> bundle_id at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_bundles#.info_File_Format.

I found this page very helpful and clear when I was first bundling my
activity back in May, thanks Scott.  I think that requiring
correctness is actually helpful in the long term, if anything we
should try to make the documentation more accessible.

bobby.

> If it were up to me, I'd just chose an opaque 64-bit UUID -- but I
> think most people feel like a human-readable string "makes
> participation easier".
>  --scott
>
> --
>  ( http://cscott.net/ )
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Re: New joyride build 2346

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 2:11 AM, Build Announcer v2 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2346
>
> Changes in build 2346 from build: 2344
>
> Size delta: 0.00M
>
> -libertas-usb8388-firmware 2:5.110.22.p17.1-1.olpc3
> +libertas-usb8388-firmware 2:5.110.22.p18-1.olpc2

is there a [good] reason this is being built for olpc2 and not 3?
probably doesn't matter much for firmware, but...

> --
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Re: New joyride build 2413

[Bobby Powers]

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 7:22 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Intentional?

yup, the monolithic library is being split into content bundles that
can be added with a customization stick, or added to images for e.g.
Peru or G1G1.

bobby

> Marco
>
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Build Announcer v2 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2413
>>
>> Changes in build 2413 from build: 2412
>>
>> Size delta: -70.91M
>>
>> -olpc-library-core 1-26
>>
>> --
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>> comparison
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Re: Flash tests

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 10:14 AM, Walter Bender <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> For consideration in your testing: there are some ways to tune the
> performance of Flash, such as the video playback hack described here:
>
> http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=845.0
>
> I don't know if there are similar hacks for improving general
> performance of Flash (or Gnash) on lesser-powered machines, although I
> am sure Rob has plenty of hints he can share for Gnash.
>
> -walter
>
> 2008/9/16 Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>> Hi All,
>>
>> We need to characterize the performance and support of Flash in release 8.2.
>>
>> Technical people in Uruguay did a tests a while ago on the Flash games at
>> this web site: http://www.minijuegos.com/
>>
>> They used the Gnash shipped with 656 (0.8.1-1) and a Flash plugin
>> (9.0.124-0).

that version of gnash is very old, you get different results running
8.2 or a recent joyride:

>> They tested Castle Wars: http://www.minijuegos.com/juegos/jugar.php?id=5552

loads, but doesn't work right (loops through some intro screens,
animation is slow).  (same behavior on my laptop running F9 + gnash)

>> Freekick Fusion http://www.minijuegos.com/juegos/html/index.php?id=4570

website doesn't load correctly in Browse, complains 'the URL is not
valid and cannot be loaded'. (on F9 it loads, plays an annoying
soundclip saying I've won a nintendo Wii, and gets all the way to the
instruction screen, but doesn't let me hit start)

>> Hulk Central Smahdown http://www.minijuegos.com/juegos/jugar.php?id=6769

gets to main menu, doesn't do anything after that.  (same on F9,
except when the main screen comes up it plays a soundclip saying 'HULK
SMASH')

>>
>> I believe those were chosen as examples of Flash capabilities. They weren't
>> necessarily things the ministry of education wanted to use in class :-)
>>
>> In all three Gnash failed completely and Flash ran slowly.

again, this is not representative of 8.2 (although they still aren't
playable in Gnash)...

>> If anyone has time to try those again with the 8.2 candidate build I would
>> be very interested in the results.
>>
>> Any other comments, URLs or examples about our Flash support are
>> appreciated.

I will file some gnash bugs related to this later, as well as try them
out on Gnash's trunk (its not building for me at the moment).

Bobby

>> Thanks,
>>
>> Greg S
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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Re: Flash tests

[Bobby Powers]

all my comments are directed at Gregs email, so I suppose I should
have replied to him... I hope this doesn't cause too much confusion...

bobby

On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 11:30 AM, Bobby Powers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 10:14 AM, Walter Bender <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> For consideration in your testing: there are some ways to tune the
>> performance of Flash, such as the video playback hack described here:
>>
>> http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=845.0
>>
>> I don't know if there are similar hacks for improving general
>> performance of Flash (or Gnash) on lesser-powered machines, although I
>> am sure Rob has plenty of hints he can share for Gnash.
>>
>> -walter
>>
>> 2008/9/16 Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> We need to characterize the performance and support of Flash in release 8.2.
>>>
>>> Technical people in Uruguay did a tests a while ago on the Flash games at
>>> this web site: http://www.minijuegos.com/
>>>
>>> They used the Gnash shipped with 656 (0.8.1-1) and a Flash plugin
>>> (9.0.124-0).
>
> that version of gnash is very old, you get different results running
> 8.2 or a recent joyride:
>
>>> They tested Castle Wars: http://www.minijuegos.com/juegos/jugar.php?id=5552
>
> loads, but doesn't work right (loops through some intro screens,
> animation is slow).  (same behavior on my laptop running F9 + gnash)
>
>>> Freekick Fusion http://www.minijuegos.com/juegos/html/index.php?id=4570
>
> website doesn't load correctly in Browse, complains 'the URL is not
> valid and cannot be loaded'. (on F9 it loads, plays an annoying
> soundclip saying I've won a nintendo Wii, and gets all the way to the
> instruction screen, but doesn't let me hit start)
>
>>> Hulk Central Smahdown http://www.minijuegos.com/juegos/jugar.php?id=6769
>
> gets to main menu, doesn't do anything after that.  (same on F9,
> except when the main screen comes up it plays a soundclip saying 'HULK
> SMASH')
>
>>>
>>> I believe those were chosen as examples of Flash capabilities. They weren't
>>> necessarily things the ministry of education wanted to use in class :-)
>>>
>>> In all three Gnash failed completely and Flash ran slowly.
>
> again, this is not representative of 8.2 (although they still aren't
> playable in Gnash)...
>
>>> If anyone has time to try those again with the 8.2 candidate build I would
>>> be very interested in the results.
>>>
>>> Any other comments, URLs or examples about our Flash support are
>>> appreciated.
>
> I will file some gnash bugs related to this later, as well as try them
> out on Gnash's trunk (its not building for me at the moment).
>
> Bobby
>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Greg S
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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Re: [sugar] Supporting desktop applications, extending the EWMH spec

[Bobby Powers]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 12:13 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Let's keep thinking about this.  For example, I wonder what Metacity does
>> to a window that is both  _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN and
>> _NET_WM_STATE_BELOW?  Does it stack it below the Frame, if the Frame is
>> _NET_WM_TYPE_DOCK and _NET_WM_STATE_ABOVE?  If not, could we convince the
>> Metacity developers that this is a good idea?
>
> I just thought of a worst problem with the FULLSCREEN approach.
> FULLSCREEN windows are always on the top of NORMAL windows.
>
> I think the general issue is that the meaning of FULLSCREEN type on
> the desktop is very different from our needs, sincethe typical use
> case is a video player. The type is used to mark windows which must
> be:
>
> 1 Always on the top of everything else.
> 2 Maximized/undecorated.
>
> We would need to drop 1.
>
>> What about making Activities run as _NET_WM_TYPE_DESKTOP? How does
>> Metacity handle multiple DESKTOP windows? (It probably isn't happy about
>> them...)
>
> I'm pretty sure it won't handle them as we would like. Also DESKTOP is
> used for the home/group/mesh view already.
>
>> It may be that we can find a way to make this work under stock Metacity if
>> we're creative.  If not, Metacity is under very active development.
>> Perhaps we can find a small change that resolves our problem and is
>> satisfying to upstream Metacity.
>
> It could be done by extending metacity (upstream) to provide an option
> to enable a different handling of FULLSCREEN windows. But what is the
> advantage over defining a new type which is more closely tied to our
> use case? The one I can think of is that existing toolkits has already
> a way to create fullscreen windows without using low level API.

Are we set on moving to metacity?  I remember murmurs of using xmonad,
as well as another wm I can't remember the name of.  Are these
stacking/hinting problems common to all window mangers, or just
metacity?

bobby

> Marco
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Re: Work Required to produce 8.2-761

[Bobby Powers]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 12:58 PM, Michael Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I was hoping to be able to announce the availability of 8.2-761 but it
> does not seem to have been created over the weekend and I am unable to
> locate the required pilgrim and mock commits or changelog in any of
>
>dev.l.o:/git
>mock.l.o:~mock
>mock.l.o:~cscott
>pilgrim.l.o:~cscott
>dev.l.o:~cscott
>
> nor have I been able to reach Scott.
>
> Therefore, in order to try to prevent further loss of time, I shall
> (perhaps with some help from bystanders) recreate this information today
> so that we can commence building 8.2-761.
>
> My apologies for the inconvenience,
>
> Michael

You've been doing a great job Michael (along with Scott, Chris,
Richard, Paul, Daniel, Eric, the Sugar team, Deepak and everyone
else).  I am beyond impressed with how far 8.2 has come since the
beginning of June.

I look forward to 761, whenever it appears.

yours,
Bobby

> Scott - apologies in advance if I simply looked in the wrong places.
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Re: New release8.2 build 762

[Bobby Powers]

I'm curious as to why the olpc specific numpy, python and python-lib
rpms didn't make it into 761/2.  are they too risky?

bobby

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 1:36 AM, C. Scott Ananian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 1:32 AM, Build Announcer v2 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> http://pilgrim.laptop.org/~pilgrim/xo-1/streams/8.2/build762
>
> Full changelog at:
>  http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/pilgrim;a=shortlog;h=8.2
>  http://mock.laptop.org/gitweb/?p=repos;a=shortlog;h=koji.dist-olpc3-testing
>  http://mock.laptop.org/gitweb/?p=repos;a=shortlog;h=local.8.2
>
> Summary changelog from my notes:
>
> #8534   fedora updates
>  alsa-lib.i386 0:1.0.17-2.fc9
>  alsa-utils.i386 0:1.0.17-2.fc9
>  audit-libs.i386 0:1.7.5-1.fc9
>  dhclient.i386 12:4.0.0-17.fc9
>  dhcp.i386 12:4.0.0-17.fc9
>  enchant.i386 1:1.4.2-2.fc9
>  iptables.i386 0:1.4.1.1-2.fc9
>  iptables-ipv6.i386 0:1.4.1.1-2.fc9
>  libcurl.i386 0:7.18.2-5.fc9
>  libxml2.i386 0:2.7.1-1.fc9
>  libxml2-python.i386 0:2.7.1-1.fc9
>  MAKEDEV.i386 0:3.23-5.fc9
>  mpfr.i386 0:2.3.1-1.fc9
>  PolicyKit.i386 0:0.8-3.fc9
>  sqlite.i386 0:3.5.9-1.fc9
>  xorg-x11-drv-evdev.i386 0:2.0.4-1.fc9
>
> #5060 'View Source' key doesn't work in non-US
> #8488 Mongolian character problem
>  xkeyboard-config-1.3-4
>
> #8609 Updated cerebro in stable build
>  cerebro-2.9.16-1.olpc3
>
> --
>  ( http://cscott.net/ )
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Re: [OLPC library] OLPC Manual, Help activity v.8

[Bobby Powers]

it generally looks great seth.

the only thing I don't get is the 'record' shaped button up top that
is labeled home.  It seems to actually be linked to back. is this
intentional, or the case of too much to do, too little time?

yours,
Bobby

2008/9/23 adam hyde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> congrats all!
>
> Seth, can you make sure the following is in the Introduction to the
> manual:
>
>
> About this Manual
> This manual was produced in FLOSS Manuals (  href='http://www.flossmanuals.net'>http://www.flossmanuals.net ).
> 
> 
> This documentation is a result of a collaborative effort. Much of the
> material was written at a 1 week Book Sprint held in Austin Texas (Sept
> 2008) and managed by Adam Hyde (FLOSS Manuals) and Anne Gentle (FLOSS
> Manuals / Just Write Click). Participating on site at the Book Sprint
> were Walter Bender (Sugar), David Farning (Sugar), Adam Holt (OLPC),
> Brian Jordan (OLPC) Mikus Grinbergs, Janet Swisher (janetswisher.com),
> David Cramer (Motive), Anne Gentle and Adam Hyde. There were also many
> remote contributions (please see the credits on each page for details).
> 
> 
> The venue was provided by Motive Inc and the event was funded by
> individual donations including substantial contributions from David
> Farning, RedHat, OLPC, and FLOSS Manuals.
> 
> 
> This community documentation effort started its life as a project with
> Val Scarlata's students at Illinois Institute of Technology and was
> eventually moved to  href='http://www.wiki.laptop.org'>wiki.laptop.org. Much of the
> community writing brought into FLOSS Manuals was completed by Todd
> Kelsey, Emily Kaplan, Anne Gentle, Adam Hyde, with editing work from
> Kelly Holcomb. Translations on the  href='http://www.wiki.laptop.org'>wiki.laptop.org copies were thanks
> to some time-intense translation support, coordinations, and
> introductions by Greg DeKoenigsberg and Micheal Cooper.
> 
> The documentation is in continual development. To contribute to the
> documents, buy a book, or to check for updates please visit the FLOSS
> Manuals website.
> 
> This documentation is free (licensed under the GPL). Please copy,
> change, and share freely.
> 
> [image - attached 200.gif]
> 
> "Free Manuals for Free Software"
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 20:32 -0400, Seth Woodworth wrote:
>> http://dev.laptop.org/~seth/Help-8.xo
>>
>> Version 8 people!  You've been amazing.  The volunteers that are
>> cleaning up the documentation are working really hard.  I've refreshed
>> and exported another version of the help activity today and it's going
>> to be included in the next pre-release build for 8.2: os8.2-761.  This
>> build will be created sometime early tomorrow.  It's very possible
>> that this will be our final release for G1G1.  But remember everyone,
>> the activity can be updated via the activity-updator if people can
>> only get online.  I can't be sure if I will be allowed another
>> revision after this, but I'm going to act is if I can and continue
>> working on the manual.
>>
>> Please test!
>>
>> --Seth
>>
>> ___
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>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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> --
> Adam Hyde
> Founder FLOSS Manuals
> http://www.flossmanuals.net
>
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Re: [sugar] Tagged Journal Proposal

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Eben Eliason <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'm paying attention to this thread, quietly.  I like a lot of this.
> :)  I'll let it continue without interfering, for now, but I wanted to
> point out that the new toolbar design (posted on the wiki) would make
> that "more actions" option much nicer.  For that matter, as Eduardo
> mentions, they don't mean anything until you make a selection, so we
> could reveal them in a toolbar only then, perhaps.

I believe that page for the toolbar design is (correct me if I'm wrong Eben):
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Designs/Toolbars

I also REALLY like this idea.  Perhaps if the journal integrates the
idea of a license icon/tag, content that is backed up to the school
server that is creative commons or similarly licensed could be made
available to other students.  I like the idea of a hierarchy of
aggregation and sharing.  It would also allow a form of non-real-time
collaboration that we currently don't support.

I am a little unsure what the Actions, Objects and Labels tabs do however.

Bobby

> - Eben
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 6:20 PM, Eduardo H. Silva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I also imagine that the Extra options menu would appear in the main
>> toolbar in the Detailed view. And aditionally, like in one of eben's
>> mockup, once a entry is checked in this list view, either the main
>> toolbar changes to provide contextual actions (those you placed in
>> that menu, copy, apply label, etc.), or a new menu appears bellow the
>> main one with these options, so as not too loose the
>> searching/filtering features which can be handy to have for various
>> journal entries and still have handy the search and filtering
>> features.
>>
>> Eduardo
>>
>> 2008/9/23  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>>> c. scott ananian wrote:
>>>  > On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 5:57 PM, Eduardo H. Silva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
>>> wrote:
>>>  > > Ah, so that's why you separate these legacy-hierarchical files with a
>>>  > > light grey slash (/) . So that a kid who only knows the Journal
>>>  > > tagging world can ignore it, and users who have know the hierarchical
>>>  > > world can understand it and make advance usage of that knowledge when
>>>  > > transfering from or browsing hierarchical filesystems.
>>>  >
>>>  > Exactly. =)
>>>
>>> seems like acknowledging the "path form" of these
>>> directory-derived tags might also make working with devices for
>>> which no tag list has been, or can be, created.  i.e., when you
>>> first install a large new USB stick, there will certainly be a
>>> delay before a tag index can or will be built.  the grey slashes
>>> might be black during that time.
>>>
>>> paul
>>> =-
>>>  paul fox, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>> ___
>>> Sugar mailing list
>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
>>>
>> ___
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>>
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Re: idea for running out of RAM

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 3:40 AM, Albert Cahalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> For the zillionth time, my kids brought my XO to a halt. They started
> up two copies of Tux Paint and two copies of Colors! (BTW, boy do I
> hate names with built-in sentence-ending punctuation) The end result
> is that the activities die (unacceptable), usually via power button.
>
> There are a number of different problems here. It's a UI defect that
> the kids lose track of what is running and feel a need to start things
> that are already running. Kids don't think "I **switched** back to the
> home screen". Instead, they seem to think "the activity suddenly died".
> It's another UI defect that they are getting switched away from the
> activity at all; I'm quite sure there is no intent to go to the home
> screen. It just happens randomly, being not very kid-friendly.
>
> Intentional or (more likely) not, the kids get too many things running.
> In theory the kernel will kill things as a last resort, which is awful,
> but it doesn't happen because the user won't wait (hours? days?) for it.
>
> Fully solving the problem is impossible, but we can do a lot better.
> First let's rule some things out:
>
> * the slow hang we have, causing loss of work via power button
> * OOM, causing loss of work via actively killing stuff
> * rlimit, causing loss of work via allocation failure
> * activity grabs RAM up front, leading to one of the above
>
> The commonality here is that, once started, an activity must never
> be bothered with a memory shortage.
>
> We can cover nearly all cases with RAM reservations. Worrying about
> the other cases is not productive. Activities can lie about how much
> RAM they will use. The OS itself may unexpectedly consume RAM. Again,
> a perfect 100% solution is impossible but we can do a decent job.
>
> RAM reservations go in activity.info files. They let sugar know
> when to stop letting the user start new activities.
>
> Suppose we have 256 MB, the OS consumes 176 MB, and 80 MB is left.
> Activity X declares a need for 60 MB, activity Y declares a need
> for 20 MB, and activity Z declares a need for 30 MB. Activities
> P and Q do not declare anything. The user may thus run any of:
>
> X
> X,Y
> Y,Y,Y,Y
> Y,Y,Y
> Y,Y
> Y
> Z
> Z,Z
> Z,Z,Y
> Z,Y,Y
> Z,Y
> P
> Q
> P,...,P,Q,...,Q (unlimited)   <-- optional
>
> If we allow that last option, then activities P and Q are unprotected
> in every way. Any number of them can run at the same time. Crashing is
> far more likely, which is bad, but existing behavior is preserved.
>
> Note that activities which declare a RAM requirement will never run at
> the same time as activities which do not. If this is allowed, then any
> activity that fails to declare a RAM requirement will endanger data in
> the well-behaved activities. It's an option, but a rather awful one.

ugh, I know this is a frustrating area in general, but how
easy/intuitive is it for kids if they are running one activity for
another activity to fail to launch because it has (or doesn't have)
RAM requirements listed?


setting RAM requirements reminds me of classic macos :)

bobby


> To be clear: after starting 4 copies of activity Y, sugar must refuse
> to start any more. It's simply not allowed, since doing so is likely
> to lead to data loss.
>
> Not every activity can declare a RAM requirement. I happen to know that
> Tux Paint is fairly well behaved; it does not grow without bound.
> I strongly doubt that Browse is well-behaved or ever could be.
>
> Determining the RAM requirement for an activity goes something like
> the following:
>
> awk '/Dirty/{x+=$2} END{print x}' < /proc/12345/smaps
>
> (after exercising all functionality)
>
> We can refine that, remembering that it will never be perfect.
> Adding a bit more (5 megabytes?) to avoid the slows is important.
>
> If an activity has lied, there isn't much that can be done. Oh well.
> If the lie is caught before the system gets horribly slow, the OS
> can simply increase the reservation for that activity. (either just
> for that session, or persistently) The OS can log the problem, allowing
> the activity developer to be flamed. Killing the lying activity is not
> a good option, but it could be done, especially if some other activity
> is already running. Once the slows hit, it's back to the power button.
>
> BTW, the alternative is far more harsh yet easier for kids to deal with.
> We just ditch the whole idea of letting activities run concurrently. :-)
> Seriously, consider it. We're really short on RAM, and activity switching
> is not at all easy for kids.
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Re: Project hosting request: xo-lambda

[Bobby Powers]

very cool!

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 7:26 PM, Antoine van Gelder
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 1. Project name : XO-Lambda
> 2. Existing website, if any : http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-Lambda
> 3. One-line description : XO-Lambda is a simple Lisp interpreter
> for the OLPC XO-1
> 4. Longer description   : XO-Lambda is a simple Lisp interpreter
> for the OLPC XO-1
> : which aims to be both fun for the
> beginning programmer as
> : well as simple enough to yield it's
> secrets to the curious
> : student.
>
> 5. URLs of similar projects :
>
> 6. Committer list
>Please list the maintainer (lead developer) as the first entry.
> Only list
>developers who need to be given accounts so that they can commit
> to your
>project's code repository, or push their own. There is no need to
> list
>non-committer developers.
>
>   Username   Full name SSH2 key
> URLE-mail
>      -
> --
>#1 antoine  Antoine van Gelder  
> http://dev.laptop.org/~antoine/id_rsa.pub
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>#2
>#3
>   ...
>
>If any developers don't have their SSH2 keys on the web, please
> attach them
>to the application e-mail.
>
> 7. Preferred development model
>
>[X] Central tree. Every developer can push his changes directly to
> the
>project's git tree. This is the standard model that will be
> familiar to
>CVS and Subversion users, and that tends to work well for most
> projects.
>
>[ ] Maintainer-owned tree. Every developer creates his own git
> tree, or
>multiple git trees. He periodically asks the maintainer to
> look at one
>or more of these trees, and merge changes into the maintainer-
> owned,
>"main" tree. This is the model used by the Linux kernel, and is
>well-suited to projects wishing to maintain a tighter control
> on code
>entering the main tree.
>
>If you choose the maintainer-owned tree model, but wish to set up
> some
>shared trees where all of your project's committers can commit
> directly,
>as might be the case with a "discussion" tree, or a tree for an
> individual
>feature, you may send us such a request by e-mail, and we will set
> up the
>tree for you.
>
> 8. Set up a project mailing list:
>
>[ ] Yes, named after our project name
>[ ] Yes, named __
>[X] No
>
>When your project is just getting off the ground, we suggest you
> eschew
>a separate mailing list and instead keep discussion about your
> project
>on the main OLPC development list. This will give you more input and
>potentially attract more developers to your project; when the
> volume of
>messages related to your project reaches some critical mass, we can
>trivially create a separate mailing list for you.
>
>If you need multiple lists, let us know. We discourage having many
>mailing lists for smaller projects, as this tends to
>stunt the growth of your project community. You can always add
> more lists
>later.
>
> 9. Commit notifications
>
>[ ] Notification of commits to the main tree should be e-mailed to
> the list
>we chose to create above
>[ ] A separate mailing list, -git, should be created
> for commit
>notifications
>[X] No commit notifications, please
>
> 10. Shell accounts
>
>As a general rule, we don't provide shell accounts to developers
> unless
>there's a demonstrated need. If you have one, please explain here,
> and
>list the usernames of the committers above needing shell access.
>
> 11. Translation
>[X] Set up the laptop.org Pootle server to allow translation
> commits to be made
>[ ] Translation arrangements have already been made at
> ___
>
> 12. Notes/comments:
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Re: semantic black ops for Activities? (Re: Greg Smith's Weekly Report)

[Bobby Powers]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 3:47 AM, S Page <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hey activity maintainers,
>
> I shrank the wasteful junky layout slightly and got rid of all the
> warning triangles for empty values.  If you see any yellow triangles
> after updating your activity page, please let me know.

thanks a lot, the wiki has been looking pretty sharp these days :)

bobby

> The Template:Activity_page could omit altogether table rows that have no
> value.  That would shrink it further but you'd lose the reminder to fill
> in Related projects, Contributors, etc.  Speak up if you want empty rows
> omitted.
>
> Gary C Martin wrote:
>> I think the main weird oddity I see now is that every activity page now
>> using the new for has two blocks of apparently duplicate data showing,
>> very confusing. There's a nicely formatted table at the very bottom
>> (Facts about Moon),
>
> That's the "factbox" you see on pages with semantic info.  (Since it
> repeats info that's annotated somewhere else on the page, the newer
> version of Semantic MediaWiki hides it by default.)
>
>>  but before it is a great long ~page screed of the
>> same data in a wasteful junky layout (Activity Summary).
>
> --
> =S Page   user:skierpage
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Re: New joyride build 2497

[Bobby Powers]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Build Announcer v2 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2497
>
> Changes in build 2497 from build: 2495
>
> Size delta: 0.00M
>
> -olpc-library-common 1-29
> +olpc-library-common 1-21

any reason for the large version drop?

> --- Changes for olpc-library-common 1-21 from 1-29 ---
>  + updated common to include wiki searchbar and devkey/release-notes links
>  + removing core from /usr/share, moving to customization key
>  + separated the two searchbars visually and with icons
>  + made the laptop search more useful (all of laptop.org)
>
> --
> This mail was automatically generated
> 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 
> comparison
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Re: Flash Tests

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 4:37 PM, Carlos Nazareno <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi guys! I'm a volunteer for OLPC Philippines and I'm very new here.
>
> Our project, OLPC XO as a Flash gaming/educational gaming platform
> (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/Flash_Gamedev) got approved and we
> just received 3 XO units Monday last week for testing and development.
>
> Anyway:
>
> 1) I recommend Flash 10 RC over Flash 9 because:
> - Flash 10 final should be coming out in a couple of months or so.
> Adobe just announced the launch of the CS4 product line Tue. last week
> (including Flash CS4). I guess that means they'll be shipping within 2
> months or so, so expect Flash player 10 to be finalized by then.
> - Flash 9 has no V4L2 hardware support. The XO comes with a V4L2 webcam.
> Flash apps that use the webcam show nothing in Flash 9 (cam LED will
> light up, but only a black box appears in Flash). In Flash 10, it
> shows red & green static but the static reacts if you wave your hand
> in front of the camera. I reported the cam behavior to Adobe, and
> they're looking into it.
> (tested in update.1 711 -> will test in 766 if cam behavior improves).
>
> Anyway, my point is, we should really make Flash 10 our baseline
> rather than Flash 9, because it'll be coming out of RC soon.
>
> Btw, youtube played in Flash 9.0.124.0, but maybe that was because I
> was using Opera 9.52 in 711...
>
> 2) Gnash behavior: testing the pre-bundled Gnash 8.3 in the Sept.19
> Livecd build 
> (ftp://rohrmoser-engineering.de/pub/XO-LiveCD/XO-LiveCD_080919.iso)
> emulated in Virtualbox showed a lot of sound glitches with Flash 7 & 8
> apps, and no sound at all in Youtube. I'm downloading RC 766 now, and
> will install it in one of the XOs in a while and report back.
> Currently, I only have update.1 711 stable installed in the XO units.

A month or two ago on joyride I had gnash playing youtube videos with
perfect sound, but very slow (.5ish FPS) video.  For sound (and maybe
video) you probably have to install the ffmpeg-gstreamer, and
gstreamer-plugins-bad (and maybe gstreamer-plugins-dirty), all from
the Livna repositories.  The problem is that we've reverted to using
an older version of gstreamer to get correct record behavior, and the
livna gstreamer-plugins want the newer gstreamer.

bobby

> Regarding Flash performance:
>
> I noticed that Flash runs faster in Opera 9.52 (latest desktop linux
> version of Opera runs fine on the XO) than in the Browse activivity
> that comes with 711. I think this is primarily caused by the fact that
> browser contents in the Browse activity are scaled up, and thus, it's
> taxing Flash's engine more.
>
> In general, the bigger the dimensions of the Flash applet, the more
> CPU horsepower it eats. Thus, using the same applet, if you zoom in on
> a page with Flash in Opera, you'll see performance drop and if you
> zoom out a page and thus shrink the flash applet size, you'll see
> performance improve.
>
> Oh, I heard from Ben Schwartz that the Browse activity in 8.2.0 is
> based on Firefox 3. If so, that would be interesting because my
> general experience is that the Flash plugin performs better in Firefox
> 3 than in MS IE or Opera 9.x.
>
> Anyway, am installing 766 and will report back on Flash/Gnash test results.
>
> -Naz
>
> --
> Carlos Nazareno
> http://www.object404.com
>
> interactive media specialist
> zen graffiti studios
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: Flash Tests

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 2:59 AM, Carlos Nazareno <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Ugh.
>
> Okay, in an attempt to get sound working with Gnash 8.3.0
> (preinstalled with build 766), I did the following:
>
> su
> wget http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm
> rpm -vi livna-release-9.rpm
>
> Now livna is part of my repositories.
>
> next I did
> yum install gstreamer-ffmpeg
>
> it installed, so far so good.
>
> No dice with sound in Gnash still.
>
> So I try
> yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly
>
> Doesn't want to install, says I have missing dependencies. Now the
> dependencies are in gstreamer-plugins-good, I believe, but when I try
> to
> yum install gstreamer-plugins-good
> it says already installed.

yup, this is because of our old version of gstreamer.  I don't know if
there will be an easy fix, you might be able to update gstreamer if
you don't care about Record behavior.

> same with yum install gstreamer-plugins-base
>
> Now the worst part is that now I can't
> yum update
>
> says I'm missing network dependencies :-/

might be a temporary problem, but you could try:
sudo yum clean all

(this was suggested to me last time I was having yum trouble by the
nice people of IRC in #fedora on FreeNode)

bobby

>
> :(
>
> -Naz
>
> --
> Carlos Nazareno
> http://www.object404.com
>
> interactive media specialist
> zen graffiti studios
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
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Re: "Walter Bender": Re: devkeys, prettyboot, and G1G1

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 10:35 PM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I don't mind if the G1G1 donors have the option to participate in
> testing secured laptops, but I utterly reject the notion that we can
> jerk customer/donors around like this without their permission in
> advance. They _will_ complain publicly.

While it is a SMALL hassle, I don't understand how it is jerking
customers around before they've even bought a machine.  As long as the
policy (whatever it turns out to be) is clearly stated on the
wiki/amazon site, by purchasing a laptop they are consenting to this.

With that said, I would probably lean towards preferring unsecured
machines (with pretty boot enabled, of course).

bobby

> Engineering and marketing should never have the authority to trump
> customer service or product quality.
>
> On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 7:15 PM, John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Mitch and I have come up with a way to ship G1G1 laptops so that they
>> will pretty-boot, but still come from the factory without any need
>> for developer keys (in the Forth "disable-security" setting).
>>
>> This requires a small edit to /boot/olpc.fth in the OS build,
>> to load the XO child image, freeze the screen, and put the
>> first "progress dot" down just before jumping to Linux.  It's
>> detailed here:
>>
>>  http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/7896
>>
>> I know the support crew would be much happier if G1G1 laptops were
>> shipped able to run test builds and patched software, if users could
>> interact with Forth to diagnose their hardware, if they could run
>> unsigned Forth code from USB collector keys, etc.
>>
>> Unfortunately, an IRC discussion with Scott today revealed that the
>> engineering team has decided that we *must* ship G1G1 laptops with a
>> requirement for development keys.  The reason: because too many kids
>> in the third world will be getting lockdown laptops, and we want the
>> G1G1 recipients to be guinea pigs to debug the laptops, to be sure the
>> laptops work even when locked down (and that they unlock properly when
>> the kid requests a jailbreak key).
>>
>> I see this is utterly backwards.  The countries that want DRM on their
>> laptops should be paying the price in support problems and
>> infrastructure.  Not the donors who sponsor a G1G1 laptop, and not the
>> free software community who donate to help push this project along.
>> As believers in freedom, we shouldn't be defaulting EVERY laptop to
>> being locked by its manufacturer.  Yet that's the argument: because
>> some of them are locked, all of them must be locked.  Or perhaps it's
>> slightly more nuanced: A country that orders thousands can order them
>> without DRM, but G1G1 users can't.  That sounds reasonable, but I've
>> interacted with several country teams (Nepal and South Pacific), who
>> had come away from OLPC with the impression that it would be
>> incredibly dangerous to turn off the "security" of the laptops.  In
>> Nepal's case I was unable to disabuse them of this odd notion.  So no
>> country asks for freedom in their laptop shipments, and no G1G1 is
>> shipped with freedom, and thus every OLPC laptop is jailed, like every
>> iPhone.
>>
>>John
>>
>> Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2008 08:34:09 -0400
>> From: "Walter Bender" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> To: "John Gilmore" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>> Subject: Re: devkeys, prettyboot, and G1G1
>> Cc: "Mitch Bradley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>
>> If Mitch is comfortable with his fix, I cannot see any reason not to
>> ship developer keys with G1G1 machines--it would save everyone
>> headaches, especially on support; but of course I cannot speak for
>> OLPC these days.
>>
>> -walter
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 7:26 PM, John Gilmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 I recall discussing this last time but  don't recall the reasons not
 to do it this way. We did ship them all pre-activated.
>>>
>>> I questioned people after the fateful meeting, and it seemed to me
>>> that the problem was that Nicholas wanted pretty-boot, and Mitch was
>>> unwilling to try to disentangle pretty-boot from secure-boot.  Secure-boot
>>> was already a tangle of ugly Forth code, and he was sure that adding
>>> more complexity there would result in security holes or bugs.
>>>
>>> Since then, he has figured out the one-line circumvention that's
>>> documented in bug #7896.  The circumvention is in the OS (since OFW
>>> keeps no state).
>>>
>>>John
>>
>>
>> --
>> Walter Bender
>> Sugar Labs
>> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>>
>>
>> [gnu: I also cc'd this to support-gang, but that required sending it
>> from a different email address, due to how I am subscribed there.]
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Re: 9.1 Proposal: Web based activities

[Bobby Powers]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:03 PM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Several activities needs a web view and currently duplicate a  lot of
> Browse code to implement one. This is a maintenance nigthmare. I would
> like to provide a trivial way to create such activities using
> sugar-toolkit. I'm looking for feedback about the required
> functionalities of such API and ideas on how it could be used.
> Combining gtk, html and python/javascript could get pretty powerful.

There hasn't been much talk lately, but it would be nice if you could
expose this in a rendering engine neutral way (As much as possible).
If in the future we want to switch to WebKit or something else, it
would be great if it broke as few of these derivative activities as
possible

bobby

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Re: setup for XO development

[Bobby Powers]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 12:12 AM, Michael Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 04:35:30PM -0500, David Farning wrote:
>>On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Michael Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> Actually, for a variety of reasons, I'm working quite hard to make
>>> rainbow usable on stock linux machines like those represented by
>>> Debian and Fedora chroots.
>>>
>>
>>Michael,
>>Could you provide a high level comment on the feasibility of running rainbow
>>as a security mechanism on Sugar on Fedora of Debian machines without the
>>chroot?
>
> Feasible, but it would go faster with some help. (The chroots are just
> for convenience so I can test both platforms in a repeatable fashion on
> a single machine.)
>
> In more detail:
>
>  * I've got a new version of rainbow in the works which sits as an
>exec-wrapper around any program you want to run. I've also got
>tentative sugar patches for making sugar use this rainbow.
>
>  * When invoked, rainbow generates new credentials (e.g. uid, gid) if
>necessary, assumes its new identity, sets any requested rlimits,
>closes filedescriptors, and hands over control to the program of your
>choice.
>
> * The user and group manipulation is accomplished by manipulating
>   some files in a spool directory at the location of your choice; a
>   separate glibc NSS module reads this information and returns it
>   through the standard libc apis on demand.
>
>  * Human operators assume the authority necessary to perform this
>operation by means of a setuid helper, e.g. sudo.
>
> This design makes it eminently feasible to port to any glibc-based Unix
> platform and, with a bit more care, to any POSIX platform on which we
> know how to make new users and groups and are permitted to assume their
> identity.
>
> Caveats:
>
>   a) the implementation is not yet capable of isolating multiple human
>   operators from one another, though I expect to implement this
>   functionality in the not-too-distant-future.
>
>   b) the implementation provides nothing more and nothing less than the
>   isolation provided by running programs under fresh uids and gids. Many
>   sorts of mischief are still possible, particularly on systems which
>   set lax default permissions on user home directories (e.g. Debian).
>
>   c) the implementation is quite new and is hence highly likely to
>   contain bugs, unstable APIs, etc.
>
>   d) rainbow is still written in fairly naive python and it pays the
>   usual speed and memory price for this convenience. (It also uses at
>   least one naive algorithm when selecting new credentials.)
>
>   e) I have removed support for the rainbow dbus daemon since it was
>   needlessly complicating my life. It remains to be seen whether
>   activities' startup procedures can be sped up enough to sustain this
>   change.
>
> For these reasons, the new implementation is still far from 'production
> quality'; however, that's no reason not to start trying it out. (Code is
> available in the 'integration' branch in the users/mstone/security and
> users/mstone/nss-rainbow repos on dev.laptop.org.)

very interesting.  you mentioned working to integrate rainbow with
sugar-jhbuid.  It seems like that should be using this native version.
  If we're not using the d-bus daemon, would we then have to start
jhbuild with 'sudo'?  Do you have any further pointers on what to look
out for when trying to integrate it into jhbuild?

yours,
Bobby
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Re: NetworkManager-0.7

[Bobby Powers]

On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 9:05 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Daniel writes:
>> On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 12:13 AM, Mikus Grinbergs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> genesee writes:
 NetworkManager-0.7 and/or NetworkManager-glib killed my Neigborhood view.
>>>
>>> Same problem here.
>>
>> We're mid-way through the upgrade to sugar-0.83. And even when that's
>> done, there will be mucho breakage (see Tomeu's earlier post).
>>
>> I think joyride will break often over the course of the next few
>> months as development runs in full swing.
>>
>> Thanks for letting us know anyway.
>
> 
>
> I sent in my post to celebrate a milestone -- something *worked*
> (suspend/resume with a wired ethernet) that had not previously.
>
> To then quote a non-positive comment was to mis-read my post.
>
> 
>
> "... joyride will break often over the ... next few months ..."

To imply Dan was saying this in a non-positive way is also to misread
his post.  I think you're jumping the gun here.

Bobby

> I appear to be having difficulties communicating with this list.
> When I ask for advice - it is sparse;  when I don't ask - it is
> offered.  I'm not sure of the purpose of the above sentence - am I
> being advised to leave joyride to "development"?
>
> My original post was merely to describe what I saw.  But now I *am*
> asking for advice - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Network_manager_0.7 is
> not enough for me to figure out how come some things are being shown
> in Neighborhood View but others are not.  Please - those of you who
> have practical experience with NM-0.7 - I would appreciate pointers
> to more information on how to _use_ NM-0.7 (in place of NM-0.6).
>
> Yes, I expect things to break "as development runs in full swing".
> But I think both developers and users will make faster progress if
> hurdles are met with a "here, this might help" attitude.
>
> mikus
>
>
> p.s.  The two principal "helpful hints" I've been using so far with
> NM-0.7 is "if I don't like the IP address it assigns (e.g., an
> IPv6), I manually do 'ifconfig down', then 'ifconfig up' with the
> desired address (e.g., an IPv4)";  and "if I don't like the wireless
> characteristics it assigns (e.g., the channel), I manually do
> 'iwconfig' to set the desired value for that characteristic".
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Re: Info on developer key request page on XO

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 10:06 PM, Ed McNierney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Yes, that's exactly the point.  We currently offer developer keys by
> postal mail for users who do not have Internet access, but users
> without Internet access cannot get the instructions on how to make
> such a request.  The "Getting Started" pamphlet refers users to
> www.laptop.org/source
>  for source code and mentions it is available on media, but without
> Internet access you can't find out how to order the media.


if it refers to that link, are there plans to put some kind of page there?

bobby


>
>- Ed
>
> P.S. And I see that even with Internet access, www.laptop.org/source
> seems to not be there...
>
>
> On Dec 2, 2008, at 3:47 PM, Chris Ball wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> >> Yes.  For example, we can add information about postal-mail
> >> requests to the page, without opening up the 767 build.
> >
> > I think Ed's point is that someone who wants to take advantage of a
> > postal-mail request necessarily can't talk to activation.l.o.  :)
> >
> > - Chris.
> > --
> > Chris Ball   <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
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Re: WPA-PEAP with MSCHAPv2

[Bobby Powers]

(to dig this back up)
I have a similar situation here at my university - WPA2 enterprise w/
PEAP/MSCHAPv2.  My Macbook Pro with F9 couldn't connect, neither can my XO
(running F9, DebXO, or 8.2), but my Macbook Pro with F10 connects fine.

I assume this is due to Network Manager .7 in F10.  Any word on how NM .7
integration into sugar is coming, or what is left to be done?
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Network_manager_0.7 is pretty out of date it seems
(or maybe nothing has really happened lately)

yours,
bobby

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 10:37 PM, Michael Stone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 01:01:11AM -0700, pato wrote:
> Pato,
>
> >We are using a Cisco RADIUS server that implements WPA2 enterprise and
> >WPA-PEAP with MSCHAPv2. The SSID is also hidden.
>
> Glad to hear from you -- PEAP/802.11i/802.1X and hidden SSIDs are not
> yet supported but will probably be supported for the next major release.
> If you're feeling impatient, then you can help get this feature working
> faster by helping to test Sugar as we port it to more recent versions of
> NetworkManager and as we implement support for negotiating network use
> authorization. (If you're a programmer, then you can also help with the
> implementation of these tasks.)
>
> Regards,
>
> Michael
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Re: Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO (was Fedora 10 on XO)

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Erik Garrison  wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 04:42:48PM -0500, Greg Smith wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > Thanks for all the feedback on my questions about what it would take to
> > run a slimmed down Fedora 10 on the XO NAND.
> >
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-December/msg00022.html
> >
> > To reiterate, the goal is one distribution with two Desktop Environments
> > (Sugar and one "standard" one).
>
> What of the case where all the functionality of Sugar can be replicated
> using a properly-configured standard desktop environment?  (Strawman
> this sentence may be, but I think we should be open to this option
> moving forward.)
>
> > I think the main work now is to pick the minimal package list that we
> > need and will fit on the XO NAND.
>
> This is *the* work of making builds.
>
> > Can anyone get a slimmed down Fedora 10 with window manager running on
> > an XO?
>
> Yes.  I have a build tool which does so.  See:
>
>http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/erik/rpmxo;a=summary
>
> or just:
>
>git clone git://dev.laptop.org/users/erik/rpmxo
>
> The build tool depends on the current development version of rinse, a
> rpm bootstrapping utility.  For our testing purposes I have included a
> copy of the rinse mercurial repository in that git tree
> (http://rinse.repository.steve.org.uk/).
>
> Then install rinse by following the instructions in the
> rinse.repository.steve.org.uk directory in the rpmxo repo created by the
> above git command.  You will need perl, rpm, and wget (note the
> dependencies listed at http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/rinse).
> Rinse manages a variety of common issues encountered when build and
> re-building images, such as caching rpms, bootstrapping yum, and running
> post-install scripts.  It does so in a relatively platform-independent
> manner.  The author and I have been working together to update the
> system for Fedora 10 and to increase its configurability.  (Please note
> that I have submitted changes to the author's repo which may not yet be
> reflected in a fresh clone, this is why I have temporarily added the
> repository to the rpmxo git tree.)
>
> To run the build script do:
>
>sudo ./initchroot.sh
>
>  ... in the rpmxo git repository directory yielded by the git clone
> command above.
>
> By default this will make f10.root.  Then generate an image to flash
> onto an unsecured laptop by using:
>
>sudo ./mkjffs2.sh fc10.root fc10.img
>
> This will create the .crc and .img files which are required for OFW to
> flash the image onto the laptop.  Putting these on a USB key and typing:
>
>copy-nand u:\fc10.img
>
>  ... at the OFW prompt on an XO will flash the system onto the internal
> NAND.  Rebooting should yield a prompt
>
> This procedure is still in alpha.  Interested parties should test and
> immediately inform me of any issues encountered.
>
>
> > The hard part will come when we need to pick the bare minimum set of
> > functionality. I especially want to know what additional
> > libraries/RPMs/features we need to install beyond what we alrady have in
> >   XO 8.2.0.
>
> I have been quite frustrated with the Fedora toolset in this regard.
> Getting a bare minimum of functionality is not something which these
> tools are typically used to do.  The experience of building a Fedora
> system from 'scratch' contrasts starkly with what we find in Debian,
> where debootstrapping is a common development pattern which is
> well-supported by the community.
>
> It can be done, and I am going to seek as much help from the Fedora
> community in doing so as possible.  It just isn't easy and I have felt
> like there are a lot of problems in using Fedora in this fashion which
> will have to be resolved to make it easy for deployments to use such a
> build script.
>
> (I sincerely hope someone flames me here as any attention to this issue
> is good attention.)


sure :) why aren't you building off mstone's work on Puritan?  It seems like
a lot of duplication of effort; unless I'm missing something, the biggest
difference seems to be that yours may be more debian-like.

Bobby


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Re: Cerebro v3.0: File sharing and buddy management made easy!

[Bobby Powers]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 1:53 AM, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
 wrote:
> Want to exchange files between your desktop and your XO laptop? It can't
> get any easier!
>
> In the latest version of Cerebro (currently 3.0.3) you will find
> simplified file sharing and buddy management. Just click on the buddy
> you want to send a file to and select a file to send! Screenshots are here:
> http://cerebro.mit.edu/index.php/Documentation#Example_GUI
>
> If you are a developer, there is detailed tutorial to do file sharing
> from Python prompt (!) here:
> http://cerebro.mit.edu/index.php/Documentation#Buddy_management
>
> Enjoy
> Pol

This sounds great, can't wait to play :)

Bobby
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Re: OLPC vs Fedora packages

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 10:31 PM, Peter Robinson  wrote:
> Just thought I'd post my understanding of where the packages are at
> based on the list that was created at FUDCon
>
> For reference see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OLPC/Packages_for_F11
>
> Also there's the OLPCDelta tracking bug in RHBZ 462625 for quick
> tracking of the ones I'm aware of.
>
> KOJI packages
>
> GConf-dbus - Should be able to untag. I think its also used to reduce
> the deps on bonobo etc.
>
> SDL_mixer - see RHBZ 471623 - Need someone to update if my thoughts are 
> correct.
>
> abiword - mostly forked to reduce dependencies on things like
> printing. Probably will be unnecessary with the next major release as
> most of the old deps on libgnome libgnomeprint etc should disappear
>
> hippo-canvas - From my testing bigboard and mugshot compile OK but I
> can't really test so it should be mergeable.
>
> hulahop - OLPC-4 branch merged (and removed) just waiting for the push
> to mainline. Push to testing just happened today. So can essentially
> be removed from this list.
>
> initscripts - I seem to remember the main reason was due to rainbow
> using process number 1 and hence initscripts running as process number
> 2. JKatz is the one in the know here.
>
>  olpc-utils - due to olpcupdate not being in Fedora and its dependant on it.
>
> sugar-evince - Probably need to get evince split into evince-libs and
> evince so that sugar-evince can build against evince-libs. Not sure if
> there's plans to get sugar-evince upstreamed for easy maintenance
>
> telepathy* - no idea but its documented well by others :-)
>
> totem-* - dependency reduction - I think these can probably mostly go
> away with the plans to introduce the ability for multiple desktops to
> run (sugar and something else) as e-d-s will probably be there anyway
>
> upstart - I believe its the same as for initscripts (rainbow). This I
> think is another one for JKatz. I also think there was discussion on
> fedora-olpc back in Sept/Oct timeframe.
>
> JOYRIDE packages
>
> libertas-usb8388-firmware - is in Fedora-10 and rawhide already. I
> thought I'd unlinked the non mainline version as we were shipping the
> same package in F-10 as we are for 9.1.0 and rawhide has the latest
> (or near latest) version.
>
>
> I'll also link the RHBZ bugs if there is one near each of the
> mentioned packages in the wiki.

I haven't followed all the discussion, but I believe Python is also
forked in joyride with a patch for PySignal_SetWakeupFd, and the
regular F10 python with the same release number doesn't have this
included.  maybe its in testing, didn't get a chance to look there.

bobby
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Re: AMD to stop working on Geodes

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 4:57 PM, Carlos Nazareno  wrote:
>> People say they buy computers to work, but by and large they really
>> buy them to play.  And geodes
>> wont run modern games so they aren't selling.
>
> Before the term DDOS came into use, there was only the Slashdot effect
> where entire servers would melt down because of the sheer number of
> geeks a link to the front page of slashdot.org would bring.
>
> foru simple words can save the entirety of OLPC and the AMD, and in
> fact make both filthy rich, rich enough to execute our insane kumbaya
> vision.
>
> military grade hacker toy
>
> say those four magic words, sell the XO via geek online stores, and
> 1CC will be so slashdotted to high heck with orders that the waiting
> list will take years to fill out. At similar price points, the XO-1
> puts the Nintendo DS, Tapwave Zodiac, GP2X, Sony PSP, Chumby and iPods
> + iPhones to shame.
>
> Support? real men don't need no steeenkin manuals or directions! just
> ship em in a plain cardboard box with a power adaptor and all will be
> good to go!
>
> Start selling current batches of 1GB Nand 256MB RAM. These are
> collector's items and will increase in value.
> Move out all existing stocks, and then fix fab to ship next version
> with 512MB RAM + 4-8GB NAND. Moore's law and Windows Vista have

I believe there are technical or supply chain reasons that make it
more difficult than just swapping out the NAND chips.  Not to be rude,
but you're not the first one who has thought of this :)

bobby

> brought down the price of memory to dirt-cheap levels.
>
> Chipmakers produced so much RAM and opened so many factories in
> anticipation of Vista's insanely stupid bloatedness (that was the
> first time I ever saw a software company make bloatedness and
> inefficiency as a prime selling feature) that when it miserably
> failed, they now have so much RAM on their hands they don't know what
> to do with it.
>
> Chipmakers are in deep trouble right now and RAM prices have never
> been so low. Anyone looking to upgrade RAM, now is the time. OLPC?
> Have Quanta start on the XO-1.1 with the increased storage + memory.
>
> My concern with the upped specs is that AFAIK, more ram = increased
> power consumption? Or was that only for desktops and sticking
> additional sticks in empty memory slots?
>
> Also, here's something Jerome Gotangco over at OLPC Ph has noticed
> after sticking in Teapot's Xubuntu XO Intrepid Ibex liveSD: Battery
> life seems to have gone down a lot.
>
> I just recently managed to get the same working on 2 of the developer
> units with me on different kinds of SD Cards, and it seems that using
> the SD for the primary storage/OS cuts the battery life a lot because
> of the increased power draw from having to jump electricity through SD
> cards? (I haven't timed it yet, but I think battery life went down to
> about 2-2.5 hours with an active wifi connection and the screen
> brightness set to black and white sunlight readable mode?)
>
> Will do further tests.
>
> -Naz
>
> P.S. Seriously. Look at the popularity of the homebrew and
> retrogaming/emulation scene. Opening up sales of the XO to the geeks
> of the world will also provide the EXACT OPPOSITE of drawing away
> resources from OLPC. The sheer amount of geekery will give back and
> produce the amazing kinds of stuff you see from the homebrew and
> emulation hacker scene, creating troves of the much needed content the
> XO is lacking.
> P.P.S. Beggars can't be choosers. Asking for donations but putting
> conditions on it is just twisted ethics. Just sell 'em at $200 and
> economies of scale + moore's law will take care of things.
>
> P.P.P.S. Seriously seriously WTF seriously.
> P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. WTF? WTF?WTF WTF?
>
> P.P.S. All snarkiness aside, will post better on why this is really
> extremely ethical and is the proper way to go. I have to sleep. Very
> little sleep since monday. nyt all.
>
> P.P.P.P.S. re: multitouch go for it! MPX, keep the "2nd screen" as a
> real keyboard -> power draw of 2nd screen + lack of haptics is a
> serious functionality problem. thanks to all who replied, such
> incredible starting points and I've done research on those 2 things I
> said even googling, but am tickled pink that the methods I outlined
> are in use :D check out
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQpr3W-YmcQ&NR=1 too :)
>
> nyt
>
> --
> carlos nazareno
> http://twitter.com/object404
> http://www.object404.com
> --
> adobe user group manager
> phlashers: philippine flash actionscripters
> adobe flash/flex/air community
> http://www.phlashers.com
> --
> interactive media specialist
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> http://www.zengraffiti.com
> --
> "if you don't like the way the world is running,
> then change it instead of just complaining."
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Q2E30, Candidate-25 and DebXO don't play nice

[Bobby Powers]

hello all,

I just installed candidate-25 of 8.2.1, and while it works flawlessly
in my limited testing, DebXO doesn't like prettyboot.  I've tried
creating an initscript to echo 0 to /sys/devices/platform/dcon/freeze,
locating it in /etc/init.d, and creating an appropriately named
symlink in /etc/rc5.d, but to no avail.  I then copied
z-disable-bootanim (or some such name) from the 8.2.1 build and
replaced my dcon_off init script with it, but that didn't work either.
 Running either one on its own does the trick.

Workarounds:
1 - hold down the check key when booting to disable prettyboot.
2 - after debxo boots (basically wait 2 minutes), press ctrl-alt-f2,
type 'root', hit enter, then the root password (if one is set) and hit
enter, then carefully type 'echo 0 >
/sys/devices/platform/dcon/freeze', and hope you didn't make any
spelling mistakes.  if it doesn't work, hit ctrl-alt-f3 and try
everything from the login-on again :)

Humble suggestion:
do not freeze the dcon if booting off an SD card.  most non-olpc
distributions won't know to unfreeze the dcon as part of the boot
process.

I have to be up early, so I'm giving up for now.  let me know if I am
just overlooking something simple, that would be wonderful

yours,
Bobby

p.s. there is a small possibility that you have to echo '1', not '0',
it is late, and I'm typing this on my other computer.
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Re: OLPC upgrades

[Bobby Powers]

2009/2/2 Tiago Marques :
> On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 4:03 AM, Mitch Bradley  wrote:
>>
>> Guess what? The people at OLPC, who aren't stupid, already considered
>> every point in the message cited below, a long time ago. So why aren't
>> we doing them? ...* *On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 9:57 PM, Carlos Nazareno
>> wrote:
>
> Nobody's saying anyone is stupid. It is perfectly natural for people to
> complain about things they don't understand. I also wish I could, from time
> to time, to ask this or that, to understand many things I don't comprehend,
> to know what I can do to help. This without getting into any kind of fight

As you note in this email (which reads more like a rant than
constructive criticism, I must say), there is a lot to help with!
What are you areas of interest and expertise?

> with the people involved with the project, who are the only ones who can
> answer those questions.
> As with any critical comment I may issue in this mailing list, please take
> it as something constructive, to help (if it does, in any way) and not to
> criticize the people who are hard at work. That, I think, is what Carlos was
> trying to do.
> I got my XO three weeks ago and there's a lot I was surprised to learn that
> some of the more important features are WIP or simply don't work, especially
> given the news that I've read, already detailing prototypes of a second
> version, when there's still a lot to do with the first one.
> Sugar is a fantastic window manager/desktop/user interface/learning
> tool/whatever. I don't understand how can any government give 6 year olds
> anything that's not Sugar - it is wonderful, it integrates very well with
> the XO and I would like to be able to use it more but it doesn't really
> blend well with the rest of the Linux software ecosystem.

We need a lot of help in this area, interested?

> This, among other things, may be the cause that the G1G1 program wasn't
> successful this year. There are too many better options, for a regular user,
> currently available, and cheaper. Most people don't care for a reflective
> screen if they can't have Youtube. They already can have 5 hours of battery
> life(or more) in some netbooks, a lot more flash memory/HDD, better *color*
> screen. Even then some people claim the performance of netbooks isn't good
> enough - imagine what they would say about an XO.
> I'm surprised how much stuff still doesn't work in the XO. I can't, for as
> much as I think about it, how can you be shipping these things without space
> for swap memory. I can open a PDF and a browser without the XO being
> apparently crashed and this is the most basic stuff. I know why the system
> "crashes" but you can't expect a politician to understand why Intel's
> offering doesn't crash and yours does all the time, it just makes it look
> like crap, which it certainly isn't. Doing SWAP in the embedded flash is a
> bad ideia but there's an SD card slot and having the XO crashing all the
> time is a worst case scenario - it may be a compromise in Africa but not in

I use debXO and haven't had a single crash.  if activities are
crashing, please please please look up or create tickets for the
crashes, with as much info and logs as possible!  (take this as
constructive criticism, on how to make your constructive criticism
reach the right people faster and more constructively :) )

> the least developed country.
> There's no stylus support yet, there's no view source working(AFAIK) and the

The current dual mode touchpad hardware is being discontinued and new
machines are either currently, or will be in short order, being
produced with a 'standard' capacitive touchpad.  IN FACT, the stylus
mode had been implemented and enabled in the driver in previous builds
(joyride, up to the beginning or middle of summer 08), but was
disabled and removed from the driver because having the device in dual
input mode made things worse for a large number of laptops.  The dual
mode hardware is pretty flakey.

I believe view source is implemented to some extent in Sugar 0.83 (the
current development branch).

> wireless range isn't as awsome as announced. My mother has an Acer One
> which, apparently, has a significantly better wireless signal, at least from
> small experiences, I haven't messed with it much, it's an initial impression
> - which for most people is the one that matters.
> Worse is the battery life, I can't get more than 3 hours out of my XO and
> all seems fine with the battery. If I was to heavily depend on the 24 hours
> touted(when not even 24 in suspend), I would be very disappointed, let alone
> 6 hours which I also don't get. Experimental results isn't something that
> the project should be shouting about all the time - that's just vaporware.
> Worse, it makes the OLPC Foundation loose credibility as a whole. No company
> can be constantly over promising and underdelivering, let alone a non-profit
> foundation.

Have any experience with the kernel or suspend/resume issues?  I'm
sure 

Re: OLPC upgrades

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 7:55 PM,   wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Martin Langhoff wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 1:03 PM,   wrote:
>>> Ok, what tools can I use to satisfy you of this 'opinion' that
>>> applications start faster on either KDE or GNOME than on Sugar on the same
>>> hardware.
>>>
>>> by the way, you are the first person I have heard dispute this.
>>
>> Erik has done a few things lately that made me change perspective.
>> Most comparisons have been made against stuff running off the SD-card,
>> and made our Sugar/Fedora look very slow in comparison. Everyone
>> jumped on Python/Sugar.
>>
>> However, our NAND is *slow*, it busy-waits, JFFS2 is slow, and Linux
>> under a bit of mem pressure (and having no swap) starts discarding
>> pages, assuming that disk reads are reasonably fast and
>> non-cpu-blocking. But reading pages from the NAND turns out to be slow
>> and most importantly it pegs the CPU hard.
>>
>> Get the debxo or the vanilla fedoras running on the NAND. The
>> performance delta is not what we thought it would be.
>
> I know that debxo will install on the NAND. I haven't done so on my
> systems yet as I wanted to leave the NAND intact to test the official
> builds. I'll go ahead and do this on one of my boxes.
>
> most of my testing has been via USB, do you have any idea how it compares
> performance wise to the NAND and SD card?
>
> is there any ability to not use JFFS2 on the NAND?

I believe UBIFS is the up and coming JFFS2 killer:
http://www.linux-mtd.infradead.org/doc/ubifs_whitepaper.pdf
I don't know the status of it tho, I believe there was some testing at
1CC recently with mixed results.

bobby

> David Lang
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Re: Treatise on Formatting FLASH Storage Devices

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
 wrote:
> This gives us Linux users a bit of a dilemma if we want to use FTL flash
> for primary storage.  FAT does not provide the file access permissions,
> symlinks, hardlinks, or even case sensitivity, that we desire for most
> filesystems on unixy systems.  However, FTL devices behave as a sort of
> FAT-oriented black box, full of secret proprietary firmware that loves
> FAT.  One obvious proposal, therefore, would be to use FAT for storage,
> but wrap it with a layer that implements all our favorite POSIX stuff.

What about a small script that could do two things:
- determine and dump the factory partitioning data from a device (by
looking at how the FAT filesystem is laid out) to a file (perhaps we
could build up a database for popular FLASH devices, like the SanDisk
Ultra III's?)
- take the factory partitioning data from a device (or dump file) and
create a new partition map and well behaved ext2/3/4/whatever file
system on the device

I'm quite new to this wide world of filesystems and block devices, so
let me know if there are clear or obvious reasons this can't be done,
or why it would be harder than it sounds.

Bobby
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Re: Joyide on Fedora 11/rawhide

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Michael Stone  wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 04, 2009 at 05:53:14PM -0500, Chris Ball wrote:
>>Hi,
>>
>>   > This is Fedora's initramfs, right?
>>
>>Right.
>>
>>   > Peter's suggestion is to use pilgrim to create rawhide builds,
>>   > hence using the olpc initramfs.
>>
>>That's an interesting idea.  I don't like it long-term, because
>>no-one's working on pilgrim or our initramfs, but it could help
>>us get moving.
>
> Two small corrections:
>
> a) the initramfs continues happily under active volunteer development -- it
> received two new features and a bugfix contributed by a deployment support
> volunteer (dsd) in the last two weeks, along with patch review and volunteer
> testing by folks back here in the States.
>
> b) While pilgrim may be a dead-end, the ideas underlying it are not. This 
> week,
> I translated pilgrim's ideas into the simplest form yet achieved, namely, a
> plain old Makefile:
>
>   http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/mstone/puritan;a=tree;hb=make
>
> and used it to produce builds from the olpc4+joyride tree and the
> rawhide+olpc4+joyride tree (with minor edits).
>
> The former booted happily into Sugar and built on both Debian and Fedora. :)
> (The latter, still using the olpc initramfs, dies because upstart 0.5 still
> doesn't know how to run as non-pid-1. olpc4's upstart-0.3.9 has a patch which
> implements this feature.)

I've ported the patch to upstart's bzr trunk (it applies cleanly to
0.5.0), and scratch-built some rpms:
https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1106475

The patch is here, along with the srpm and spec file:
http://dev.laptop.org/~bobbyp/upstart/

Of note, I had to add dbus-devel to BuildRequries, as upstart seems
now to need it.  I haven't had a chance to test the rpms, hopefully
tomorrow.

Hope this helps :)
bobby

>>   > Peter does not have an XO (g...@contrib program extreme slowness!)
>>   > but may be able to help on other issues that surface as the result
>>   > of an available public build...
>>
>>Oh, let's fix that.  Ed, SJ, could one of you take care of sending
>>Peter some XOs ASAP, please?
>
> Good idea.
>
> Michael
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Re: Joyide on Fedora 11/rawhide

[Bobby Powers]

I wrote:
> I've ported the patch to upstart's bzr trunk (it applies cleanly to
> 0.5.0), and scratch-built some rpms:
> https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1106475
>
> The patch is here, along with the srpm and spec file:
> http://dev.laptop.org/~bobbyp/upstart/
>
> Of note, I had to add dbus-devel to BuildRequries, as upstart seems
> now to need it.  I haven't had a chance to test the rpms, hopefully
> tomorrow.

so I've tested and updated the RPMs, spec file and patch, which are
available at:
http://dev.laptop.org/~bobbyp/upstart/

They don't work!  First thing to notice is that I cut down the
olpc-init patch a lot.  The third section of the original patch was
for a file that doesn't exist (and wasn't renamed as far as I can
tell, I've greped a fair amount for its content).  So I originally had
left the first part in, but the image created with it gave the
following error when init was first called:
init: Unhandled Error: Address already in use

Now, with just the pid snarfing part in main.c, Upstart seems to hang
without giving any messages.  None of the other Fedora patches have
been applied (it seems as if the devel branch of upstart in Fedora CVS
is a work in progress, to say the least), so unless anyone here has
insight, getting them to apply seems like the next logical step.

I can make my non-booting rawhide image available if anyone is
interested.  What I did was to run 'sudo make' on the puritan rawhide
branch, wait for it to finish, chroot into
$(CHROOT)/versions/pristine/767 and run 'rpm -Uvh
http://dev.laptop.org/~bobbyp/upstart/upstart-0.5.0-1.fc11.i386.rpm',
delete r/wrap*, then rerun 'sudo make'.

Someone with more knowledge of sockets, upstart and Fedora's patches
to it, and the init process might have better luck or be able to help
me out :)  If we can figure this out, I would be glad to help get as
much of this as possible upstreamed (as well as into the F11 upstart
package).

yours,
Bobby

(I'll be out of town till Tuesday, so I probably won't be able to work
on this again 'till then)
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Re: optimized Geode code (was Re: OLPC upgrades)

[Bobby Powers]

2009/2/7 Tiago Marques :
> On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 12:40 AM, S Page  wrote:
>>
>> Tiago Marques wrote:
>>>
>>> That software is still not compiled for the Geode LX, which further
>>
>> slows it down.
>>>
>>> As you say, everything uses CPU on the Geode. Things like
>>
>> decompressing can be made, probably, a lot faster just by using compiler
>> optimizations. Has this been considered in any way for future releases?
>>>
>>> From my professional experience, compiler optimizations can account
>>
>> for 10-30% (or more) free performance.
>>
>> It seems the binaries in the OLPC OS image are just generic 386 arch
>> binaries.  (Is there a way to definitively tell?  A build log like
>> 
>> is unclear.)
>
> file doesn't say much, everything I have compiled with -march=i686 still
> shows up as i386 binary. I don't know of anything that might tell us that.

well we use standard Fedora repositories, so I think everything is
i386.  It would be interesting to see if it actually made a
difference, if there were real performance increases perhaps Geode can
be added as a supported arch in Koji.

bobby

>>
>> This is the case even in the jffs2 OS images that will never be used on
>> anything but the stable XO hardware (or in emulation, which AIUI already
>> requires AMD CPU emulation because of the tuned kernel).
>>
>> So every OLPC and activity binary should be compiled with -mtune=geode
>> (optimized for Geode, but still runs on any i386), and in jffs2 images they
>> should be compiled with -march=geode (only runs on Geode). ("Should" as in
>> "I'd like a pink pony too" ;-) .)
>
> I've read some reports that indicate that using -mtune should be good enough
> for added performance, although I mostly compile with -march for my systems.
> I never bothered to check but I'll run some tests on the XO to see if it's
> significant and worth the extra effort(if feasible, as you say).
>
>>
>> I assume this is what GentooXO does,
>> http://www.gentooxo.org/features.shtml
>>
>> https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/118 is the tracking ticket,
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Geode_optimization_effort the page.
>
> Thanks!
> Best regards,
> Tiago Marques
>
>>
>> Thanks for all you do,
>> --
>> =S Page
>
>
>
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Re: Opportunity for speedup

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 2:01 AM, Mitch Bradley  wrote:
> I just measured the time taken by the boot animation by the simple
> technique of renaming /usr/bin/rhgb-client so the initscripts can't find it.

how did you measure exactly? stopwatch? I'd like to recreate the
tests.  It sounds like you did this on a freshly flashed system?

> With boot animation, OS build 7 (an older 8.2.1 candidate) takes 60
> seconds from first dot (indicating OFW transfer to Linux) to Sugar
> "prompt for your name".   Without it, 53 seconds.  I repeated the test
> several times with consistent results.
>
> Clearly, it should be possible to display that amount of information in
> much less than 7 seconds.
>
> The boot animation code is in the OLPC domain, not the upstream domain,
> so replacing it should be relatively free of upstream politics.
>
> So if anybody is interested in implementing a relatively simple
> boot-time speedup, I offer this as low-hanging fruit.
>
> I suggest 1 second (differential time between animation and no-animation
> cases) as a reasonable target goal, assuming images of the complexity of
> the current ones.  Arbitrary full-screen graphics might require more
> time, but speeding up the baseline case is a good starting point.
>
> Go wild.

So I've taken a first cut at this, implemented with the following
design considerations (mostly from a conversation with Mitch)
- the Python client/server was reimplemented as several standalone C
programs (boot-anim-start, boot-anim-client, and some cleanup in
boot-anim-stop)
- a client and server was used before because there is state
information that needs to be saved: we need to keep track of where in
the animation we are.  We can keep track of this by using offscreen
memory in the framebuffer (its 16MB in size, and only the first 2ish
MB is used for the onscreen graphics (my terminology might be off
here)).  For state we really only need to keep track of 2 integers,
one for the current frame number and another to store the offset of
the next diff to apply.
- on startup we load an initial image into the framebuffer (the first
1200*900*2 bytes, since we use 2 bytes per pixel for color
information), and then load in a series of changes to the framebuffer
image (<300KB).  This takes the form of a series of diffs
- for each update (a valid call to boot-anim-client) we apply the next
diff in the series to the onscreen image and update our state
information
- after applying the last diff we have (the end in the animation
series), freeze the DCON (when I first attempted to freeze the DCON
when z-boot-anim-stop was called it left the screen in an inconsistent
state, I believe because of X startup)
- its designed to be as light as possible, using syscalls instead of
libc functions as much as possible (the only thing we use libc for is
string comparison, which could be replaced with a local function).
while its written like this, I haven't worked on cutting down the
linking (I need some guidance for that)

comments and suggestions welcome :)

I'd appreciate any testing as well as any code review.  (the shutdown
image appears to be broken, FYI.  i haven't looked at that in depth,
its probably a one line fix.)
rpms (built with mock) are available at
http://dev.laptop.org/~bobbyp/bootanim/
and source is avail at
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/bobbyp/bootanim

-Bobby
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Re: Opportunity for speedup

[Bobby Powers]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 1:22 PM, C. Scott Ananian  wrote:
> I'd suggest just uncompressing the various image files and re-timing
> as a start.  The initial implementation was uncompressed, but people
> complained about space usage on the emulator images (which are
> uncompressed).  The current code supports both uncompressed and
> compressed image formats.  For uncompressed images, putting the bits
> on the screen is an mmap and memcpy, so I can't imagine any
> implementation being faster than that (it's possible, of course, that
> what's stealing CPU is the shell's invocation of the client program;
> recoding just that little part in C should be trivial, since it does
> nothing but write to a socket IIRC.)
>
> Anyway, further benchmarking of the current implementation is probably
> worthwhile before a complete reimplementation is called for.  But if
> you want to reimplement it from scratch, go nuts.
>  --scott

I already re-implemented it - it was a fun optimization project and
introduction to lower level systems programming.  Using Mitch's D565
format to keep track of only the parts of the image that change cut
down the implementation size significantly.  Its now only 2
uncompressed images (frame00.565 and ul-warning.565), and <300KB of
differences for the animation sequence.  I understand reads from video
memory (which I think is what the framebuffer is?) can be extremely
slow, so it could turn out faster to open a D565 file, mmap it and
mcpy the several tens of kilobytes of differences to the framebuffer
than it is to read those differences from one part of video memory to
another.

This is where benchmarking should give some clearer answers.

yours,
Bobby
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Re: Opportunity for speedup

[Bobby Powers]

2009/2/19 Wade Brainerd :
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 1:22 PM, C. Scott Ananian  wrote:
>>
>> I'd suggest just uncompressing the various image files and re-timing
>> as a start.  The initial implementation was uncompressed, but people
>> complained about space usage on the emulator images (which are
>> uncompressed).  The current code supports both uncompressed and
>> compressed image formats.  For uncompressed images, putting the bits
>> on the screen is an mmap and memcpy, so I can't imagine any
>> implementation being faster than that (it's possible, of course, that
>> what's stealing CPU is the shell's invocation of the client program;
>> recoding just that little part in C should be trivial, since it does
>> nothing but write to a socket IIRC.)
>
> I implemented a RLE compressor specifically for these 16bit image files the
> last time this question came up.  This can certainly be faster than memcpy
> since we are talking memory performance.

Can you explain this?  I don't think I have enough knowledge to
evaluate your claim.

bobby
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Re: Opportunity for speedup

[Bobby Powers]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 1:56 PM, Wade Brainerd  wrote:
> RLE (run length encoding) compresses sequences of identical pixels ("runs")
> as value/count pairs.
> So abbccc would be stored as 1a 10b 3c.
> The decompressor looks like:
> while (cur < end)
> {
>unsigned short count = *cur++;
>unsigned short value = *cur++;
>while (count--)
>   *dest++ = value;
> }
> This can be faster than memcpy because you are reading significantly less
> memory than you would with memcpy, thus fewer cache misses are incurred.
> Because the startup images are mostly spans solid colors, this kind of
> compression works very well.  If that were not the case, say if there were a
> left-to-right gradient in the background, RLE would probably make things
> worse, thus you have to be careful when choosing it.
> But the smaller size on disk and in memory would probably improve
> performance in other ways as well.
> Best,
> Wade

thanks, that makes sense
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Re: Opportunity for speedup

[Bobby Powers]

I've fixed a few issues, packaged up bootanim-2.3-1, and (finally)
actually ran some benchmarks.  Results (all times in seconds):

fresh os801, from pressing the power button to appearance of sugar's
prompt for name screen
80
79
78

with rhgb-client renamed so that init can't find it:
69
68

and with bootanim-2.(1-3) rpm installed:
67
67
67
68
67

If anyone is unconvinced, I could run more tests, but this seems
pretty good to me.  Its a 15% overall speedup in the boot process.

Interesting notes:
chkconfig doesn't like binary services - it parses services in
/etc/init.d to look for metadata in comments, and the mechanism to
override this data (sticking a file with the same name in
/etc/chkconfig.d with appropriate comments) doesn't seem to work if
the original script can't be parsed.  So I had to make small wrappers
for ul-warning, boot-anim-start and boot-anim-stop.  This doesn't seem
to affect performance.

I can't seem to get ul-warning to come up properly, so if anyone can
tell me what I'm doing wrong that would be great.  I've got it to work
by manually placing some symlinks in /etc/rc0.d and /etc/rc6.d, but
neither Scott's nor my chkconfig comments seem to work.

source:
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/bobbyp/bootanim
koji-built rpms:
http://dev.laptop.org/~bobbyp/bootanim/
(koji task https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1211738 )

I don't know if this could make it into 8.2.1, or what the process
would be toward getting it at least in the Rawhide/SOAS images, but it
seems pretty low risk (assuming someone can tell me what I'm doing
wrong w.r.t. ul-warning).

yours,
Bobby

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 3:03 AM, Mitch Bradley  wrote:
> Cool!
>
> Bobby Powers wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 2:01 AM, Mitch Bradley  wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I just measured the time taken by the boot animation by the simple
>>> technique of renaming /usr/bin/rhgb-client so the initscripts can't find
>>> it.
>>>
>>
>> how did you measure exactly? stopwatch? I'd like to recreate the
>> tests.  It sounds like you did this on a freshly flashed system?
>>
>
> Yes on both counts.  Stopwatch on freshly-flashed os7.img .
>
>
>>
>>>
>>> With boot animation, OS build 7 (an older 8.2.1 candidate) takes 60
>>> seconds from first dot (indicating OFW transfer to Linux) to Sugar
>>> "prompt for your name".   Without it, 53 seconds.  I repeated the test
>>> several times with consistent results.
>>>
>>> Clearly, it should be possible to display that amount of information in
>>> much less than 7 seconds.
>>>
>>> The boot animation code is in the OLPC domain, not the upstream domain,
>>> so replacing it should be relatively free of upstream politics.
>>>
>>> So if anybody is interested in implementing a relatively simple
>>> boot-time speedup, I offer this as low-hanging fruit.
>>>
>>> I suggest 1 second (differential time between animation and no-animation
>>> cases) as a reasonable target goal, assuming images of the complexity of
>>> the current ones.  Arbitrary full-screen graphics might require more
>>> time, but speeding up the baseline case is a good starting point.
>>>
>>> Go wild.
>>>
>>
>> So I've taken a first cut at this, implemented with the following
>> design considerations (mostly from a conversation with Mitch)
>> - the Python client/server was reimplemented as several standalone C
>> programs (boot-anim-start, boot-anim-client, and some cleanup in
>> boot-anim-stop)
>> - a client and server was used before because there is state
>> information that needs to be saved: we need to keep track of where in
>> the animation we are.  We can keep track of this by using offscreen
>> memory in the framebuffer (its 16MB in size, and only the first 2ish
>> MB is used for the onscreen graphics (my terminology might be off
>> here)).  For state we really only need to keep track of 2 integers,
>> one for the current frame number and another to store the offset of
>> the next diff to apply.
>> - on startup we load an initial image into the framebuffer (the first
>> 1200*900*2 bytes, since we use 2 bytes per pixel for color
>> information), and then load in a series of changes to the framebuffer
>> image (<300KB).  This takes the form of a series of diffs
>> - for each update (a valid call to boot-anim-client) we apply the next
>> diff in the series to the onscreen image and update our state
>> information
>> - after applying the last diff we have (the end in the animation
>> series), freeze the

Re: Opportunity for speedup

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Daniel Drake  wrote:

> 2009/3/1 Bobby Powers :
> > I can't seem to get ul-warning to come up properly, so if anyone can
> > tell me what I'm doing wrong that would be great.  I've got it to work
> > by manually placing some symlinks in /etc/rc0.d and /etc/rc6.d, but
> > neither Scott's nor my chkconfig comments seem to work.
>
> Here's a fixed ul-warning initscript.
>

thanks, the fix is pushed.
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Re: XO Gen 1.5

[Bobby Powers]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 11:04 PM, Neil Graham  wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 15:24 -0400, John Watlington wrote:
>> The design goal is to provide an overall update
>> of the system within the same ID and external appearance.
>>
>> In order to maximize compatibility with existing software, this
>> refresh will continue with an x86 processor, using a chipset from
>> VIA.  The memory will be increased to 1 GB of DDR2 SDRAM, and the
>> built-in storage will be 4 GB of NAND Flash with an option for 8 GB
>> (installed at manufacture).
>>
>> The processor will be a VIA C7-M [1], with plans on using one whose
>> clock ranges from 400 MHz (1.5 W) to 1GHz (5 W).  The clock may be
>> throttled back automatically if necessary to meet thermal constraints.
>
> How much cheaper will the new system be?  I was under the impression
> that the idea was to allow the XO price to drop with technology gains
> rather than spec increase.
>
> Of course I'm happy to accept spec increases if they come as a result of
> cost savings, but wasn't cost supposed to be the priority?

The announcement mentions that the initial price is targeted to remain
roughly comparable, but that the newer components are likely to
decrease in cost over time.  As I understand it, several of the
current components (the SDRAM in particular) are old enough that OLPC
is the primary consumer.  Single suppliers and low demand != reduced
cost over time.

> Does this also mean that people who already own XOs will find that new
> software is going to require a computer more powerful than they
> currently have?  I thought that that was something that was going to be
> specifically avoided.

This is going to be a hard trap not to fall into, although several of
the primary activities (Browse and Write) are based on desktop
products that are not necessarily aimed at low-power or embedded
systems, so I don't know if things will actually be any different.

Bobby
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Re: XO Gen 1.5

[Bobby Powers]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Tiago Marques  wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 6:41 PM, Tomeu Vizoso  wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 19:27, Tiago Marques  wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 8:24 PM, John Watlington  wrote:
>> >>
>> >> OLPC is excited to announce that a refresh of the XO-1 laptop is in
>> >> progress.  In our continued effort to maintain a low price point, OLPC
>> >> is refreshing the hardware to take advantage of the latest component
>> >> technologies.  This refresh (Gen 1.5) is separate from the Gen 2.0
>> >> project, and will continue using the same industrial design and
>> >> batteries as Gen 1.  The design goal is to provide an overall update
>> >> of the system within the same ID and external appearance.
>> >>
>> >> In order to maximize compatibility with existing software, this
>> >> refresh will continue with an x86 processor, using a chipset from
>> >> VIA.  The memory will be increased to 1 GB of DDR2 SDRAM, and the
>> >> built-in storage will be 4 GB of NAND Flash with an option for 8 GB
>> >> (installed at manufacture).
>> >
>> > The best news, probably.
>> >
>> >>
>> >> The processor will be a VIA C7-M [1], with plans on using one whose
>> >> clock ranges from 400 MHz (1.5 W) to 1GHz (5 W).  The clock may be
>> >> throttled back automatically if necessary to meet thermal constraints.
>> >
>> > I'm hoping for a lot closer to 1GHz than 400MHz or it won't be much
>> > different than the current 433MHz Geode LX. It's still a very slow,
>> > in-order
>> > architecture.
>>
>> Not sure about Windows or GNOME, but my IMO improvements in storage
>> (so NAND plus the filesystem used) and graphics hardware (plus it's
>> support by drivers) can improve a lot the performance of Sugar without
>> touching the processing power of the cpu.
>
> Indeed, I wouldn't expect to see a revision with more than 512MB of RAM but

the announcement said they were upping the RAM to 1GB DDR2.

> it sure will be useful. If the distro is able to fit the 4GB without
> compression, while leaving enough free space, that will surely alleviate the
> CPU also. Excellent news for sure!
> Best regards,
>                                Tiago Marques
>
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Tomeu
>>
>>
>> > Best regards
>> >>
>> >> The enabling chipset is hot off the fab line, the VX855 [2].  This
>> >> single chip provides the memory interface, a 3D graphics engine, an HD
>> >> video decoder, USB, SDIO, and other system interface and management
>> >> functions, in a low power and small footprint package.   One change
>> >> induced by the chipset change is a move from AC'97 to HD Audio.
>> >> This brings higher sampling rates and allows an upgrade to a stereo
>> >> external microphone (and DC sensor) input.
>> >>
>> >> The CaFE chip is being retired, and replaced with an external Flash
>> >> management controller, possibly one of the low cost SSD controllers
>> >> currently being tested.  The camera will now be tied directly to the
>> >> VX855's video capture port.
>> >>
>> >> The network interface will be upgraded to an 88W8686, which will halve
>> >> its power dissipation and move it to an SDIO interface (further
>> >> dropping the power consumption).   The current goal is to locate it
>> >> in a removable module, allowing its replacement for repair.   It will
>> >> remain powered while the laptop suspends, waking the laptop if a
>> >> packet addressed to it arrives.   It is likely that early production
>> >> models will not directly support 802.11s (i.e. forwarding mesh packets
>> >> while the interface is asleep), but we are working with Marvell on
>> >> several different 802.11s solutions.
>> >>
>> >> Gen 1.5 will continue with the existing display, although OLPC is
>> >> working with PixelQi to try to improve the brightness and efficiency
>> >> of the screen.   The DCON is retained (even though the VX855 includes
>> >> much of its functionality) as it provides the low power interface and
>> >> the timing controller functions for the existing display.
>> >>
>> >> Overall, the target is to match the Gen 1 XO-1 in power consumption
>> >> while making aggressive suspend easier, and in price (while changing
>> >> to components which are more likely to decrease in price).   It is
>> >> likely that both goals can be met.
>> >>
>> >> We also expect the Gen 1.5 machines to ship with an OLPC 8.2.x
>> >> software release, modified to support Gen 1.5's new hardware but
>> >> otherwise unchanged from the current production software release and
>> >> compatible with our current software in the field.  Gen 1.5 machines
>> >> will be deployed in environments already populated by Gen 1 machines,
>> >> so seamless software interoperability is an important goal.
>> >>
>> >> Early versions of the hardware (bare board) should be available for
>> >> driver development at the end of May.   A larger number of prototype
>> >> laptops (several hundred) for software development and testing will
>> >> become available around the end of 

Re: CL1B power distribution

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 8:36 PM, John Watlington  wrote:
>
> On Apr 28, 2009, at 8:16 PM, da...@lang.hm wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 28 Apr 2009, John Watlington wrote:
>>
>>> On Apr 28, 2009, at 7:31 PM, da...@lang.hm wrote:
>>>
 On Wed, 29 Apr 2009, James Cameron wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 10:15:47AM -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>> I wonder if one could easily support running an LED backwards
>> as an
>> ambient light monitor in Gen 1.5 - it seems that automatically
>> powering off the backlight in bright sunlight would lead to a
>> lot of
>> power savings for most young users.
> I agree that an ambient light detector and automatic adjustment of
> backlight would save power.  It would happen transparently,
> magically.
> But I don't think the LEDs are often specified in terms of their
> ambient
> light detection properties.
> Perhaps it would be better to use a photodiode, or light dependent
> resistor.
> Then there's the spectrum of light being received.
> Then there's reflection from the laptop display itself to consider.
> I recall we also once had a discussion on whether the camera
> could be
> used as an ambient light detector.
 you don't want to have to run the camera to detect the light
 (this will
 eat far more power than you would save)
 the LED trick has the advantage of not requiring a change to the
 case,
 just a single additional drive pin to be able to run it as a
 detector.
>>>
>>> And where would you place said detector LED, without modifying the
>>> case ?
>>>
>>> (I have the pin...)
>>
>> use one of the existing LED's.
>
> I have no intention to use one of the existing LEDs.   They don't run
> off logic level
> voltages for power reasons, and adding switches would be more
> expensive than
> dedicating an LED.
>
> Hence my question...

could you squeeze another LED in right next to the Battery/Charge one?
 we would probably only be interested in checking the ambient light
when unplugged, so the the charge light would most likely be off
except for when the battery is low.

Bobby

>> I would guess probably the power LED as it has the largest opening
>> (and so would probably be the best choice for detecting light)
>>
>> David Lang
>
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Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)

[Bobby Powers]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Christoph Wickert
 wrote:
> I'm afraid with Gnome installed by default there won't be much space
> left to install anything else.

The DebXO Gnome install size is ~ 1.5 GB, which would leave 2.5 GB or
~ 60% free disk space. (Remember this whole discussion is about the XO
1.5)

bp
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Re: XO id transfer to SD OS install

[Bobby Powers]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Chris Marshall
 wrote:
> I would like to upgrade my XO to boot from
> an SD install of the OS.  Is there a way
> to transfer the identity information from
> the original install to the SD boot so that:
>
> (1) XO colors are the same
> (2) Nickname is the same
> (3) Friends are the same
> (4) It stays "Friends" with other XOs transparently
>
> I've been using a different name, hand setting
> the colors and name and re-friending every time
> I upgrade.  It is a pain for me.  For other XO
> users, I would like to give them the upgrade in
> capability transparently.

You should be able to copy the /home/olpc folder to an SD card or USB
stick.  I believe everything you need is actually in /home/olpc/.sugar
, so just recursively copy (cp -r) that folder into your new home
folder, and it should retain all your identity info.  I don't know if
you will run into datastore issues upgrading to a newer version of
sugar (a Sugar dev would know better), so you might want to keep a
backup copy around.

bobby
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Re: VGA questions

[Bobby Powers]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Guylhem Aznar  wrote:
> Hello
>
> "A" boards had CN18 to select the output between VGA and LCD.
> It is no longer presnt on the boards. How can it be implemented?
> (strip wire, software, ... ?)
>
> For the VGA plug, I'd also be interested in a P/N to get one from
> mouser, mousekey etc.
>
> Thanks

all of the mass production boards (C2 and C3) are missing a number of
passive parts, and I've only heard of 1 instance where someone
successfully repopulated a board and got VGA out.  From my experiences
on a B4 (which just needed the VGA connector, no other components),
its virtually impossible to get an image mirrored on VGA and LCD;
external monitors don't play well with 1200x900 resolution and I
couldn't get the LCD to work well outside of 1200x900.  I was able to
drive full screen video on a large LCD from the XO, so its not
useless, but a USB VGA adaptor is probably a much easier solution.  If
you are still interested, you could start with the following
references (although I didn't see any part numbers there).

bobby

http://www.olpcnews.com/hardware/screen/hacking_vga_adapter_xo_laptop.html
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Remote_display#Hacking_into_the_on-board_VGA_output
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Re: XO frequently hangs on shutdown w/ 0.82

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Daniel Drake  wrote:
> 2009/6/3 Tomeu Vizoso :
>> Maybe you are seeing the issue discussed here?
>>
>> http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-May/024414.html
>
> I think so too, but an explanation of what is on the screen at the
> point of the hang would not go amiss.
>
> My tentative plans are to roll Bobby's new graphics work into the
> XO-1.5 OS, and I'll make sure (through avoiding the use of
> VT_WAITACTIVE) that there is no chance for my suspected race condition
> to occur. Hopefully that will then be backported to XO-1 by someone,
> which should not be difficult.

hey Dan,

I tried to summarize the issues here:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bootanim

is there more I should address?  how would you avoid using
VT_WAITACTIVE?  I have some free time, so I can try to fix these over
the next few days.

Bobby

> Daniel
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Re: XO frequently hangs on shutdown w/ 0.82

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Peter Robinson  wrote:
>>  > >> I tried to summarize the issues here:
>>  > >> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bootanim
>>  > >>
>>  > >> is there more I should address?  how would you avoid using
>>  > >> VT_WAITACTIVE?  I have some free time, so I can try to fix these over
>>  > >> the next few days.
>>  > >
>>  > > In similar fashion to this:
>>  > >
>>  > 
>> http://www.brontes3d.com/opensource/dist/v1.2/overlay/sys-apps/kbd/files/kbd-1.1
>>  > 2-chvt-userwait.patch
>>  > >
>>  > > In other words.. use VT_GETSTATE to check the current active console,
>>  > > in a loop, calling VT_ACTIVATE until happy.
>>  > >
>>  > > Not a great solution, but I think we should put it in place and see if
>>  > > it kills this bug. The real solution needs kernel help, and I think
>>  > > the kernel developers would say "lets pencil this in for when we move
>>  > > the console layer into userspace" which is a slow moving effort.
>>  >
>>  > I have a test of the olpc animation running on plymouth that I've been
>>  > working on with the plymouth devs. Its working fine on my eeepc and
>>  > dell laptop. I'm not sure if the bootanim does anything other than
>>  > pretty pictures. No good for XO 8.2.x I know but possibly useful for
>>  > F11 side of things.
>>
>> hi peter --
>>
>> bootanim does both the boot-time animation and the shutdown
>> ul-warning screen.  it does the boot animation in an extremely
>> efficient manner, shaving 10 or 11 seconds off our current boot
>> times:
>
> 10 or 11 seconds off what? the previous bootanim version? text based
> startup without it?
>
>>    http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2009-March/023688.html
>>
>> given the optimization that bobby and mitch put in, i suspect
>> plymouth won't match it, time-wise.  (though i'd love to be proven
>> wrong, of course!)
>
> I wouldn't know off the top of my head but plymouth was designed to do
> two things. Firstly a smooth startup with basically no flash from the
> bios (on a standard PC) through to X, and speed. the old rhgb was
> slow. Would be interesting to see a comparison.

I have yet to play with it, but my understanding was Plymouth was
reliant on kernel mode setting.  The geode doesn't do that, but on XOs
we do seem to have full 1400x900 resolution for the terminals, so I'm
not sure if they will play well together.  I've meant to try out
plymouth, this seems to be pretty good motivation.

Bobby

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Re: New kernel branch for XO-1 and XO-1.5 development

[Bobby Powers]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Deepak Saxena wrote:
>
> I've spent some time merging the XO-1 and XO-1.5 kernels into a new
> branch and made some tweaks to the in-kernel RPM build scripts. From
> now on, all development for both XO-1 and XO-1.5 will be done on the
> olpc-2.6.30 branch of the olpc-2.6 repository [1]. As Linus releases
> new kernels, I will be rebasing [2] the OLPC changes on top of Linus'
> releases and creating new olpc-${kernelversion} branches to make it
> easier to move our code forward and upstream.
>
> Since the kernels for the two generations of XO boards have been
> merged, I've had to change the commands for building RPMs and
> kernels. These are:
>
> make xo_1_defconfig    : configure kernel for OLPC XO-1
> make xo_1.5_defconfig  : configure kernel for OLPC XO-1.5
> make xo_1-kernel-rpm   : build XO-1 kernel RPM
> make xo_1_5-kernel-rpm : build XO-1.5 kernel RPM
> make olpc-kernel-rpm   : build both XO-1 and XO-1.5 kernel RPMs
>
> To differentiate between an XO-1 and XO-1.5 RPM, the generation
> name is now inserted into the RPM name. For example:
>
> kernel-2.6.30_xo1-20090708.1.olpc.1fd3a66.i586.rpm   <- XO-1 RPM
> kernel-2.6.30_xo1.5-20090708.1.olpc.1fd3a66.i586.rpm <- XO-1.5 RPM
>
> Note that currently there is nothing keeping anyone from installing a
> kernel meant for one gen machine on a different gen machine. Just
> don't do that. :)
>
> I've also added the ability to build RPMs from trees that have
> non-commited changes. If this is done, the RPM will be tagged
> as dirty:
>
> kernel-2.6.30_xo1-20090708.1.olpc.1fd3a66_DIRTY.i586.rpm
>
> I will update wiki with this information.

this is great, thanks!  being able to build rpms like that again is
quite handy.  I know its not under your job description Deepak, but do
you know of a similar way to build debs, or documentation on that
process?

bp

> Enjoy,
> ~Deepak
>
> [1] dev.laptop.org:/git/olpc-2.6
>
> [2] http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-rebase.html
>    for manpage, http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/technical/git/git-5.shtml
>    for a quick summary.
>
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Interested in the Google Summer of Code

[Bobby Powers]

Hi, I'm a master's student at the University of Bergen and I'm interested in
bringing System Dynamics to the XO.  Before I start, if there is a better
mailing list for this just let me know (I briefly looked through the other
ones liked from the Wiki, and this seemed the most appropriate).
System Dynamics (SD) [1][2] aims to help people understand the world by
explicitly modeling how pieces of it work and then performing experiments in
these models.  It is used around the world, frequently in majority world
countries, in development planning [3], for example.  More formally, its a
methodology for examining and describing the behavior of complex systems
with an emphasis on the effects that feedback loops and time delays have.
 At a basic level you have to specify the mathematical equations for the
different parts of your system.   The same problems can be solved by writing
code in a programming language (I had a course taught in Fortran a year
ago...), but usually in SD the modeling is done using a visual editor where
you can show causal relationships, stocks and flows graphically.  I
personally think the biggest short-fallings of the discipline are the
barriers to entry: the current software is far from intuitive and all the
major commercial offerings (there are no FLOSS products) [4][5][6] are very
expensive (educational licenses alone are frequently > $500 USD).

Will Wright studied SD and used ideas from it when designing SimCity [7].
 So I have several things I would like to work on:  first is a core
simulator that can transform equations into code (I'm currently working on
this for my master's thesis, but don't have and funding. eesh): I'm using
the JIT library from the LLVM project to be able to do this.  Second I want
to create a Sugar modeling interface that makes it easy and fun to create
models and explore their results (collaboratively, I hope!), and third I
want to hook this into Metropolis.  I think it would just be so cool if you
could click an icon in Metropolis and have the visual model that controls
the Metropolis world pop up (in the aforementioned editor) and be able not
only to fiddle with parameters, but change the structure!  If all of this
goes smoothly and there is more time, I would love to add the ability for
models to interact with and manipulate geospatial data.


I guess I am looking for people's reaction, is this something people like?
 I'm certainly willing to adapt myself to the collective needs and I wanted
to get a discussion started before the application deadline.  Oh I guess a
little more background on me:  I attended RPI in NY, USA for 2 years
studying computer engineering, but transferred because I wanted to do
something more applied.  I studied environmental studies (at SUNY ESF) for a
couple years, and got back into coding through classes on ecological
modeling and GIS.  I've been pretty heavily coding models, algorithms and
interfaces for the past 2 years, mainly in C#, ObjC and some Fortran, but
the past 3 months I've been using C++ for 8 hours a day and Python here and
there.  I've got a Mac with Linux (both FC8 and openSUSE10.3) and Windows,
and I've just started over the past few weeks to pick up GTK, although I've
used Cairo in a project for a couple months.  I've only dabbled with the XO,
but am really looking forward to developing bundles for it.


I'm eager to hear what you think!
yours,
Bobby Powers


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics
[2] http://www.systemdynamics.org/
[3] http://www.millenniuminstitute.net/
[4] http://www.vensim.com/
[5] http://www.powersim.com/
[6] http://www.iseesystems.com/
[7] http://www.futuresalon.org/2004/11/will_wright_kic.html
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Re: Python fh.seek() oddity

[Bobby Powers]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Martin
Langhoff wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 2:02 PM, Martin
> Langhoff wrote:
>> Seems one of my roles in life is to find all the oddities in Python.
>> Hints from truly experienced Pythonistas welcome.
>
> Feels good to blame Python, but after a walk outside I managed to get
> it to seek backwards. And even found the bug in my code.
>
> Now, let me tell you, Perl bugs are *even worse* than this ;-)

Would you mind sharing what the bug was, or posting the updated script?

yours,
Bobby

>
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langh...@gmail.com
>  mar...@laptop.org -- 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: initrd build from lenny -

[Bobby Powers]

I'm still trying to get a handle on initrd myself.  Is it safe to say that
most modern initrd images are actually initramfs images?
bp

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Martin Langhoff
wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:51 PM, Martin
> Langhoff wrote:
> > With these minor changes, we are now building a completely
> > reproduceable, "pure lenny" initrd we can keep track of.
>
> Here is a tested initrd built with the steps in the updated
> Building_initramfsen page
>
>   http://dev.laptop.org/~martin/olpcrd.img-001
>
> My next problem is that epm doesn't work. Looks like it's been broken
> for a while.
>
> I guess we need to build the rpm for pilgrim, right?
>
> cheers,
>
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langh...@gmail.com
>  mar...@laptop.org -- 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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