1. Montevideo: We've only just begun!! The first deployment machines
were handed out in Escuela No. 109 in Florida, a rural department of
Uruguay. The second batch was handed out in Escuela No. 24 in Villa
Cardal, which has been a pilot site since May of this year. In Cardal,
we gave children production XOs and collecting their old Beta-2 units.
The OLPC deployment in Uruguay is being run by Miguel Brechner as part
of Proyecto Ceibal (Ceibo is the national flower of Uruguay), a
presidential initiative to equip each child with a laptop. The Ceibal
offices are housed in a Montevideo complex called LATU, or Laboratorio
Tecnológico del Uruguay, which is a public/private sector cooperative
technical lab now responsible for much of Uruguay's technical
certification and quality control programs, as well as serving an
incubator role for various engineering and technical projects. The
OLPC team has put all of their blood, sweat and code into the project
over the past three years because of the unshaken belief that it is
the right thing to do. Now it is real. You can read more about our
first deployment on Ivan Krstić's blog (See
http://radian.org/notebook/first-deployment).
2. Changshu: Mass Production is now very stable. We are using our line at 100%
capacity. Congratulations to Quanta for stabilizing
production just three weeks after MP start.
3. G1G1: Every "Day 1" Give One Get One participant (those that
donated on November 12, the
first day of our campaign) received email on Wednesday informing them to
expect their "Get" laptops between December 14 and 24. Delivery windows for
other G1G1 participants were calculated and posted: "Get" laptops
ordered thus far will be arriving, at the latest, by mid-January 2008.
Brightstar and OLPC have been working closely to determine when the
complicated logistics of laptop delivery can be promised.
4. AC adapters: There has been a request for AC adapters that are
rotated ninety degrees from the current configuration. In order to
rotate the orientation of the prongs, the
width of the adapter must be extended (to satisfy the safety requirement).
As a result, six reoriented AC adapters will not fit abreast in the
standard spacing
of a six-plug power strip. Mary Lou Jepsen and Fuse are investigating
further; if we can not resolve the issue, we will not make AC adapters
with a
rotated prong orientation.
5. Schedules:
This was the week to release "Ship.2", a build to improve upon
network upgrades, wireless problems, and our ability to connect to
T-mobile services. Although the week had its ups and downs, it ended
with successes on all of these fronts and we have Release 649 as the
candidate, barring any last-minute problems in testing this weekend.
The Ship.2 Build connects successfully to many different access
points; we believe we have fixed the "lazyWDS" issue (which could have
potentially caused problems in multi-access-point environments with
other 802.11b/g laptops and XOs); and we are successfully connecting
to T-mobile services after setting an appropriate configuration for
the browser.
The Roadmap has been updated (http://dev.laptop.org/roadmap); please
send Kim Quirk any new feature/product ideas so they can be scheduled
into upcoming releases.
The release candidate for the G1G1 program is Build 649 and will be
called Ship.2. Final testing is underway, specifically for network
issues that have been reported. The wireless team of Ricardo Carrano,
Michail Bletsas, Javiar Cardona, Ashish Shukla, David Woodhouse,
Marcelo
Tosatti, Ronak Chokshi of OLPC, Marvell, RedHat, and Cozybit worked hard
on these issues of both the Linux driver and the Marvell wireless
firmware and worked out a solution, which is now in final test, under
great pressure. Ship.2 has most of the user visible features of the
planned Update.1 release, but has Bitfrost security turned off and
lacking the advanced OHM-based power management with aggressive suspend
and resume and ebook mode. Both of these major features are now
operating in our Joyride test builds, but there were too many open
issues to enable Bitfrost or to ship OHM power management.
6. Testing:
This weekend Michail Bletsas and Ricardo Carrano are testing 40+ XOs
with a number of access points and traditional 802.11b/g laptops to
"prove" the fix for the WDS problems that have been plaguing us for a
while. Thanks to Marvell for their debugging and test builds to find a
good work around; and special thanks to the volunteers in the office
who activated and upgraded all the laptops in preparation for this
testing: Andriani Ferti, Danny Clark, Adam Holt, Alex Latham, and Eben
Eliason.
7. Support:
Adam Holt joined OLPC this week as our Support Engineer focused on
tracking, debugging and follow up of customer problems from the field.
He is an MIT graduate who has worked in software development,
support, and systems integration. Most recently he comes from Jenzabar
in Boston. He was a great help in his first week as
