[IAEP] How to upgrade XOs to Sugar 0.84?

[Chris Ball]

Hi Christoph,

   > Off the top of my head I'm wondering whether there's a chance to
   > get the Sugar 0.84 release signed so it can be run on XOs without
   > having to request a developer key?

I think you should go the devkey route.  OLPC can't sign any builds that
don't contain its security infrastructure (if it did, an attacker in a
deployment with security enabled could just reflash to this new build,
escaping the security) and Sugar Labs is unlikely to produce a build
with all the OLPC stuff in.

I should mention that the olpcfriends gang is considering the idea of
conducting community XO releases for a release following 8.2.x; if one
of those is created with OLPC's security work in, I can imagine it being
signed.  OLPC's trying to phase out its centralized security, though, so
I still recommend getting the devkeys.

   > Thinking of copy-nand I realize that this would also wipe the
   > Journal with everything the children have created so far... Is
   > there any way to avoid that and do some sort of olpc-update that
   > actually downloads the Sugar 0.84 release?

The "Sugar 0.84 release" won't be something that's bootable on an XO,
it's just Sugar.  Once you know which OS release that contains Sugar
0.84 you'd like to use, though, it's possible to do what you describe;
olpc-update takes a --server flag to allow you to specify your own
update server, and you can run your own olpc-update daemon on an XS
server (which can be somewhere out on the public net, if you like).

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>