[Dextrose] Py roadmap: updater

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Tue, 2010-12-14 at 16:02 +0000, Gary Martin wrote:

> Just wanted to check that nand blasting has been investigated?
> Excluding the backup of Journal and subsequent restore process, you
> can nand blast a fresh build image to room full of XO's in little more
> than the time it takes to flash one.
> 
>     http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Nandblaster

We tried nandblasting the very first time we upgraded all the laptops in
Caacupe.

Nandblasting required too much time of qualified personal, too much
preparation and caused too much disruption in the school.

The logistics of upgrades done with USB sticks are a lot simpler: just
give a bunch of them to the teachers (or to the children, in higher
grades) and come back the next day! If there's a concern that not all
laptops would be updated diligently, come back a few days later to check
all laptops and fix the ones that have been missed.

To help users visualize what versions they're using, change something in
the boot animation. My idea was to vary the colors of the Dextrose logo.

We're talking about a simple procedure that can be taught to a 5th
grader in 5 minutes. Decentralizing software upgrades is imho an
important step for the technical emancipation of users and scalability
of a deployment.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/