[Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Samuel Greenfeld]

I will try to answer some questions.  But my last two points will only
raise new ones.


   1. There are a few purposes for the community build.  The first is that
   for a while, all the OLPC builds announced seemed to be private ones
   available upon request.  It therefore was necessary to see if builds were
   still possible without the private extensions, and how well they worked.

   A second is that I actually build against a local mirror.  This mirror
   was created back when it was uncertain if OLPC would keep the MIT servers,
   and expanded when said servers started running into problems.  (These
   issues have since been resolved.)

   OLPC has and may still have an automatic backup; but I recall others
   having to stop it from accidentally pulling corrupted data in the past.

   Although it only has a subset of the public OLPC content available
   anonymously, building against my mirror makes sure that it still works and
   that it is periodically made up to date.


   2. I have uploaded the .ini files I use to
   http://www.greenfeld.org/xo/community/builds/14.1.0/olpc-os-builder/ .
   But there is nothing in them that you could not derive from the
   olpc-14.1.0*.ini files already in olpc-os-builder.

   The .zd SD card image for XO-1 build 2 is next to it's .img file.

   I added a pause at the end of kspost.75.install_bundles.inc so I can
   tweak the XO-1 image and remove some of the larger activities.  But this is
   temporary for debugging only.


   3. Since I am based in the US, I cannot generate images with the
   multimedia items due to patents.  At best I could give you instructions
   similar to how OLPC already does.

   I vaguely recall all XO-4's might be licensed for many multimedia codecs
   but it would be up to OLPC to make those images more widely available.


   4. Personally I would argue that a CentOS or another long-term build may
   be the best approach for XOs.  Sugar is in EPEL 6, and likely could be
   added to EPEL 7.

   It should surprise no one at this point that the list of personnel on
   OLPC's web site is years out of date.  There may be more people working on
   XSCE at the moment than XO laptop software.

   Given the lack of personnel and resources I believe it would be best to
   do one final build for XO-1 through XO-4 based on a LTS distribution
   supported to at least 2020, and then only minor security/fixes after that.


   5. OLPC already is looking beyond the XO, and beyond Fedora.  If you
   look at dev.laptop.org closely, you might notice a bunch of tickets
   targeted for "su-15.1" as well as a new olpc-ubuntu-sugar-builder git tree
   meant for standard PCs.

   This appears to be an Sugar 0.104/Ubuntu 14.04 LTS build with anti-theft
   provided by a secure-boot-based EFI bootloader, not Open Firmware.

   While I am not thrilled that this has been done without the historical
   community's involvement, it likely matches the need of the XO Infinity or
   another client who currently pays the bills.

   It might be possible for this new builder to be eventually taught to
   handle XOs.

   But if OLPC is looking beyond the XO-4, perhaps it's time that Sugar do
   so as well.

   More information can be found at http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/12881





On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 7:18 PM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:

> On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 10:49:47AM -0400, Adam Holt wrote:
> > They all seem to want a better browser and better codec support to
> > view various+sundry videos, within Sugar ideally, but if that's not
> > possible then within Gnome.  One group per week asks me for the
> > above, above all else (often more than one deployment/group per
> > week).
>
> Why isn't this reaching me and the people who would do something about
> it?  Please count these requests, deidentify and aggregate them, and
> report them monthly on devel@ or sugar-devel@
>
> > But if CentOS is not realistically achievable, F22 might be more
> > appropriate, given it's final freeze is supposed to be less than 1
> > week away?
>
> The size of this task (F22) has not yet been estimated, but based on
> Samuel's write up, my guess is between 10 and 50 engineer hours.
>
> There may be other problems lurking.
>
> The Fedora 20 port just on XO-4 has consumed way more than this.
>
> --
> James Cameron
> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
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