[Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 12:04 AM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:28:06AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Yes, it would be straightforward to add commodity hardware support to
> olpc-os-builder.  Add kernel and boot loader.  Add some sort of
> installer.
>
> But we have SoaS, and SoaS works fine on commodity hardware, so why
> bother with olpc-os-builder?

Because same process for any and every device. A single process is a
good thing, it makes it easier to understand and get a consistent
configuration everywhere.

> Because olpc-update?  Nobody uses it.

The interesting thing here is that Atomic on Fedora would provide
everything that olpc-update was designed to do and it could make
upgrades between Fedora releases much easier and less of an issue with
regards to TLS. Plus probably a bunch of things that it currently
doesn't and it's upstream being actively developed, instead of home
brew, would likely ease the security updates issues mentioned
previously and easy pushing out of updates, caching updates for
bandwidth etc.

> Because preinstalled activities?  SoaS can do that too.
>
>> > 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.
>
> Yes.
>
>> > 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.
>
> --
> James Cameron
> http://quozl.linux.org.au/