Chasing Nuts

I Learned a many cool things at the MUG meeting last night where Ivan Krstić presented on OLPC.

He gave some background and started talking about to technology. First the rotating antennas are more then just a marketing gimic, you get a 3db gain by getting them up and away from the electronics. Also in testing they are getting 2km range in the out doors.
The system only uses a scant 1-2 watts running and 4-5 watts peak. The display adapter/screen sits on a separate power rale so that the machine can go to sleep and keep the frame on the screen locked. DCON is the magic hardware frame buffer that makes this all happen. The systems goes to sleep and wakes up in ~100ms. The project is not all the way there yet with the suspend/awake time but hope to get there soon. The screen is a dual mode screen: 1200×900 mono (no back light), 692×520 color (back light on), 200 dpi dual-mode, 7.5 screen. You can charge the OLPC with just about anything as it takes 8-32 volts DC will power it. The camera on the system is very good it can do 30 fps VGA and Ivan thinks the OLPC camera is better then a MacBook camera. The system has a SD card for more memory, the OLPC project helped drive large SD card support in Linux. The system has a way cool battery: LiFePO4 technology, half the weight it LioN and a lot safer. You can use the audio input to watch just DC voltage, I wonder if there is a oscilloscope application? Last there is social network and presence built in to the OS, developers use a simple API to use it. The tools to make this happen are avahi, NM, XMPP, Jabber and mesh extrusion.

Next Ivan talked about the development tools and code. To help make it open they wanted to avoid the normal hell that can often be such a joy in development. The hell of of trying to get libs, compilers, and all the other fun versions of the right stuff. This is why the project chose to do as much as they could in Python. There is a really cool ‘gear’ key to show code and it is context sensitive so in a web browser it shows HTML source and in a application it can bring up the pyton. Everything that can be resonably be done in python will be done in python. There are some exceptions X.org, mDNS, sound daemon and a few others.

Security Requirements

• prevent hardware damaged by software
• provide recoverability and openess
• prevent user data loss
• protect the user’s privacy
• prevent the laptops from being a platform for attacks
• keep the laptop under control of its owner

Goals that go along with security

• no user passwords
• can’t assume the user can read
• out of the box security
• open design
• no lockdown

Ivan built a new platform called bitfrost to do all this. With bitfrost the theory is instead of keeping the system from executing bad code, protect the system while is runs untrusted code.

Some challenges with the project other then security

• python is memory hungry
• more python edit/reload in the core
• even more python: more standardized plugins, plugin security?

To learn more

• http://dev.laptop.org
• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar
• http://ln-s.net/ctF
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitfrost

After seeing this presentation I am WAY excited to get my hands on my OLPC! Now I just need to wait a month or two.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 11:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.