laptops

Hi volunteers

A reminder about testing this Saturday:

* Auckland - the Windsor, 144 Parnell Road
* Wellington - The Cross, 35 Abel Smith St

We have test requests for XO-1.0 and XO-1.5 laptops:

XO-1.0 - please test 802b6

* Martin thanks the NZ testers and advises these changes based on their feedback:

o Write has been fixed, by rolling back the libxml2 upgrade. This breaks "modern" versions of GCompris -- use only the GCompris version indicated for 802 builds...
o Chat is back to v9 - Behind the scenes -- signing kernels and initramfs works properly now. Some preexisting changes might be worth of additional testing...
o Colors 13 -> 15
o Record 59 -> 64

XO-1.5 - please test build 125

* Description of changes in this build:
o Record: Another attempt to fix Record sync, this time by writing intermediate files to a tmpfs, to avoid jitter due to slow SD writes.
o powerd: inhibit idle suspend for 1 min after waking from sleep
o usb_modeswitch, tcl: include for GSM modem support (#9684)
o Pull F11 updates.

I hope to start collating a repository of ideas for teaching using the XOs - if you know a teacher that might like to help, invite them along to a Saturday session.

Note that the Sugar translation pages are up on pootle for many Pacific languages. If you speak another language and want to help translate, it is easy using pootle, you just need to create yourself a login. Here is a link to Maori: http://translate.sugarlabs.org/mi/

See you at testing (or virtually for the other cities)

Team One Beep, made up of fourth year undergraduates Vinny Jeet, Steve Ward, Kayo Lakadia and Chanyeol Yoo, worked through the summer break to prove their idea could work. Their proposal was to send streams of data across the readily available FM/AM frequencies to impoverished communities.

Their project addresses a common problem encountered by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) charity. The charity makes education more available to third world countries by delivering low cost laptops to remote and poor communities. They have distributed 1.2 million laptops already, and the number is growing. However a lack of infrastructure, such as broadband or even telephone lines, makes it nearly impossible to update the educational materials on the laptops.

Read the full article here.

Team One Beep intend running field trials in Australia and the Pacific Islands. Solomon Island OLPC deployment has made contact and is interested in collaborating with Team One Beep.

Rwanda has a plan to prevent any return to the genocide of 1994: connect 100,000 children to the outside world with their own laptops

Source and full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/mar/28/rwanda-laptop-revolution

Who: Alastair, Rebecca, Fabiana, Helen, Grant, Tim

Not much software testing this time around.

Had a quick look over the new XO 1.5 laptops one of which is going back to Auckland with Fabiana, Updated all the old XO-1.5s with build 116 and all the XO-1s with build os802b5.

We also updated the wiki page at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_New_Zealand with all the correct details of firmware, OS being tested and also who has the laptop for all the Wellington machines.

Sugar Labs has released Sugar on a Stick v2 Blueberry - the platform agnostic version of the Sugar Learning Platform.

Sugar is the educational software used on One Laptop PEer Child XO laptops. It's an entire operating system, and there are zillions of educational activities for Sugar.

"Sugar On a Stick" is the same educational environment, bundled up onto a bootable USB memory stick. Simply plug in the "Sugar on a Stick" to almost any PC's usb port, and reboot. Children's files and lesson progress is saved to the same usb memory stick so it's all kept for next time, and the USB memory stick can be used at home and at school.

This latest version of Sugar offers simpler navigation, improved wireless networking, streamlined updating of Activities for children, easier keyboard configuration, better Gnash support for Adobe Flash content, and more. New Activities such as Physics and OOo4Kids join updated favorites such as Browse and Read, suitable for reading e-books.

So what are you waiting for? Download Sugar today!

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Blueberry

They've cleared customs, and arrived in Wellington: Grant unpacking 5 of the new XO1.5 Laptops

We're still working through the Peru activities list, and the Australian activities list. We've been asked to test on sugar 0.82 - but if you have something a little later that's useful too. We'd like to report back on what versions an activity will happily run on.

The shiny new XO 1.5 laptops are in Wellington, waiting to clear customs. - maybe they'll be this saturday's meetup, maybe they won't.

Our "foodforce" testing from last week is recorded here:
http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/9490
and has been assigned to a developer. We'll put back on our testing list in the coming weeks.

Foodforce was developed with funding from the World Food Programme - it's also available for windows and mac (and brenda reports it works great in Linux undre wine).

Vik's Open Source 3d printer, that prints many things including spare parts for OLPC XO Laptops, featured in Makezine's blog this week.

The NZ OLPC "Friends in Testing" meets every saturday in Wellington. This saturday will be the first meeting after a very successful Software Freedom Day here.
http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/wellington

This saturday is also the first ever meeting of the Auckland group.

What's involved is: brunch, coffee, conversation, intro to the green XO laptops, how the OS works, how to install an activity, and then you test your chosen activity, try to find some bugs. If we find bugs we send a test report back to the project.

If we don't find any bugs we also send a report saying how awesome the project is. Those that know python may wish to track down and destroy the bug, but for the most part we don't.

We've been ask to test the list of activities that are being deployed to kids in Peru soon

We're meeting at 10:30am, and tying the two locations together via irc (we're a bit bandwidth constrained in cafes.

Wellington is at the southern Cross http://thecross.co.nz
Auckland group is at Ironique, 448 Mt Eden Rd, Mt Eden.

Please join us - there will be many newcomers at both events.

p.s. People hacking on other projects are also welcome - we like "cross pollination". I know there are some koha, statusnet and drupal hackers coming.
p.p.s. If you have your own laptop, whatever flavour, bring that along too. The "sugar" software project that powers the OLPC laptops should run on most anything, and if it doesn't work on yours, we'd like to know that too.

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Aucklanders are meeting this Saturday, to have the first OLPC test fest in the city.

There will be spare XO laptops, so if you're interested come along and join us. The coffee is good and there is wifi.

Location: Ironique, 448 Mt Eden Rd, Mt Eden, Auckland. 10:30am on Saturday.

There will be a simultaneous OLPC testfest in Wellington