[Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:21 AM, Samuel Greenfeld <samuel at greenfeld.org> wrote:
> The obvious counterargument would be that a deployment might want to deploy
> your XO-Next (whatever it is) alongside existing XO laptops, allowing all of
> them to have the same configuration.

>From my memory of olpc-os-builder it was very modular and wouldn't be
hard to add dozens of different devices support to it.

> There's plenty of blame to go around in terms of re-inventing the wheel and
> lack of communication.

Yep!

> There simply (and correct me if I'm wrong) are not the resources inside of
> OLPC, outside, or combined at this time to maintain and update two separate
> builds & build systems.
>
> It amazes me how far we bend over backwards to avoid saying "end of life"
> and "end of support".
>
>
> I have seen a fair amount of interest, both publicly and privately, for
> newer XO laptop builds.  But I don't think the requesters realize how much
> work it takes to make one.

The big one here is kernel kernel kernel.

> And I do not forsee anyone stepping up to get the XO-1.75 and XO-4 kernel &
> drivers into a state they can be upstreamed or upgraded for newer Fedoras
> unless a deployment really wants this instead of newer equipment.

Or even the 1.5, I believe most of the XO-1 support is upsteream.

> Newer operating systems tend to require more disk space and RAM than the
> predecessors.  We have seen this even within Fedora's lineage.

Yes, and no. I mean 1Gb of the original XO-1 is tight, but SoaS still
happily fits in 4Gb with a bunch of space to spare. Looking at my
current SoaS VM the used space is around 1.9Gb. Amusingly the various
cloud/container enterprise initiatives actively help us here because
for once they care about dependency bloat too :-)

The two things that add bloat to the current SoaS image are:
* Browse needs to be converted to the new WebKitGtk APIs so we don't
ship two copies of WebKitGtk.
* Conversion of remaining gstreamer 0.10 to 1.0 to allow us not to ship that.

Ultimately I think you could with a little development effort get it
down to 1.5Gb used space which would make a 2Gb filesystem quite
usable.

> Since OLPC already appears to be going the Ubuntu LTS route, I would argue
> it would be easiest to take everything that way, porting utilities as
> required, and make that the final image & build system for XOs.

Personally I have no interest in that. I wish you luck.

> I only have a limited number of hours per week I can look into OLPC things,
> but I'm tempted to take a look.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 10:50 PM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 09:29:46PM -0400, Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
>> > It might be possible for this new builder to be eventually taught to
>> > handle XOs.
>>
>> There was no significant interest in my previous builder uxo, which
>> already knows how to handle XOs.  The recent posts on devel@ of people
>> trying something similar without looking at uxo is further evidence of
>> that.
>>
>> So for the moment, there seems to be no need for my new builder to
>> handle XO-1, XO-1.5, XO-1.75 or XO-4 laptops.  The Fedora based
>> builder is working fine for those laptops.
>>
>> --
>> James Cameron
>> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
>
>
>
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