[Sugar-devel] XO on Fedora 20 (was Re: [GSoC] Porting To Python3)

[Peter Robinson]

> to  be honest I haven't even evaluated alternative distributions because I
> don't think we would have enough resources to do it anyway. We are making
> minor changes to olpc-os-builder, rewriting it for another distribution
> would be a lot of work.

Sorry to be late in replying to this thread but it's been a week of travel.

So I've had a number of people ping me about bringing support for the
XO-* devices into Fedora as a supported platform. I think it's
reasonably achievable but will likely need some assistance. I think
it's probably worth starting a separate thread but I'll put some quick
points here, if people generally think it's worthwhile I'll kick off a
more detailed thread.

The new Fedora structure for F-21 and moving forward is likely a
better candidate for longer term support for things like a XO-*
distro. There is planned a number of improvements from both a
technical and procedural PoV but it's still a little in flux.

>From a tech PoV specifically discussing the various XO-* as a HW
platform here's some bullet points:
- Need to rebase to a newer kernel from a supportability PoV (wifi
stability etc)
- ARM wise there's people working to upstream the MMP2/3 platforms the
ARM XOs are based on.
- The etna_viv is likely the best driver for the ARM devices and in
the F-21 timeframe should support even gnome3/mesa

Not sure of the x86 kernel staus, I seem to remember dsd had kernel
status documented on the wiki.

OOB should be relatively easy to support moving forward, not sure
about olpc-update but I suspect that with decent OOB support most
deployments actually spin their own custom releases so I'm unconvinced
of it's importance.

>> > things are looking good so far, we already have all the models booting
>> > into
>> > sugar 0.101 with wif apparentlyi working. I would like to take a step
>> > back
>> > and understand a bit better where we want to go with this. Some random
>> > thoughts and questions.
>> >
>> > * To really understand how much work is left I think we need some good
>> > testing, especially on the hardware related bits. I expect there will be
>> > lots of small things to fix, but it would be good to understand as early
>> > as
>> > possible if there are roadblocks. I'm a bad tester and I've never used
>> > the
>> > XO much, so I'm often not sure what is a regression and what is not...
>> > thus
>> > helping with this would be particularly appreciated.
>> > * Which deployments are planning to ship 0.102 soon and hence are
>> > interested
>> > in this work? I know of AU. Maybe Uruguay?
>> > * Do we need to support all the XO models?
>> > * Should we contribute the olpc-os-builder changes back to OLPC or fork
>> > it?
>> > I don't know if OLPC will do any active development on the linux side of
>> > things, if not maybe better to turn this into a sugarlabs thing.
>> > * Are interested deployments using olpc-update? If I'm not mistake AU is
>> > not.
>> > * Do we care about maintaining the GNOME "dual boot"? I'm afraid we do,
>> > but
>> > I want to make sure.
>> > * As I mentioned in some other thread I'm interested in setting up
>> > automated
>> > builds from sugar master. I have some vague plan of what it would look
>> > like
>> > and wrote bits of it. The basic idea is that you would push changes to
>> > github and get images automatically built. I think this is good for
>> > upstream
>> > testing but the same infrastructure could be used by deployments. Are
>> > people
>> > interested in using this?
>>
>> Why is all this work being put into Fedora 20?  The maintenance window
>> is limited and as of the next release they won't even support non-KMS
>> drivers by default.  Wouldn't make sense to look into a distribution
>> that provides and LTS release?  Resources already seem to be limited
>> so having to chase after Fedora every 6 months to a year seems like a
>> waste of resources.  The GTK3 and GNOME teams obviously have their
>> eyes on a different class of hardware than what is being used by
>> deployments.

Well F-20 will be supported for quite some time due to the extended
release cycle of F-21 so I suspect it'll be supported until the end of
2015 given that F-21 isn't due until October and most of the work will
translate directly into F-21 with little effort.

The thing to remember is that Sugar and the userspace in Fedora is in
good shape for Sugar which means that it's really only HW support and
specific use cases that needs to be dealt with. I'm not sure what the
state of Sugar is in other distros.

Peter