[Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 94

[Daniel Drake]

2009/9/17 Jim Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com>:
> So the real answer to your question is, how will the other kids
> upgrade and when will they be able to do it?

In the majority of cases (i.e. large deployments) it will be done as a
coordinated effort by the overseeing deployment team. The deployment
team will make the decisions of when to upgrade, which release to
upgrade to, and how it will be rolled out.

After getting past any applicable barriers imposed by OLPC's security
system (not used in all deployments), deployments are free to choose
to install any software they like. But I predict that they will stay
with sugar even if other options become available.

I don't know much about the direction or purpose of soasXO but I did
notice it seems to have jumped to F12, so maybe it is taking on the
role of being experimental/cutting edge.

At least one realistic deployment option is slowly emerging -- OLPC is
developing a F11-based OS (with Sugar as default desktop) for the
XO-1.5, and is porting all the important deployment technologies like
theft deterrence, customization key, olpc-update, etc. Community
members are working to backport this to XO-1, which is a relatively
easy thing to do. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/F11_for_XO-1

There are still holes and bugs, most of which are also seen on the
XO-1.5 so will hopefully be fixed in the near future. I should
hopefully be back working on that side of things later this year.

However for the XO-1 there is still uncertainty, even though we have
code - who's going to do QA? Who's going to champion a release based
on the builds we have already? or maybe none of that will happen in
any capacity but at some point it will mature to the stage where a
subset of deployments feel happy to start shipping it anyway.

The XO-1 stuff depends heavily on the community so you should
definitely be reporting any issues that you find, and if possible,
doing anything you can to help fix them. We don't yet have a place on
the OLPC trac for this but I'll work on getting that created...

Daniel