[Sugar-devel] Maintaining the sugar-live-build

[Chihurumnaya Ibiam]

-- 

Ibiam Chihurumnaya
ibiamchihurumnaya at gmail.com



On Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 11:28 PM Martin Guy <martinwguy at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all, first post here. Old Unix hack, new to live-build and Sugar.
>
> Short version: The cheapest used laptops are 32-bit but all Sugar Live
> images require a 64-bit CPU. Only sugar-live-build can easily be
> rebuilt without much technical knowledge, but when built suffers from
> a metacity bug which makes it unusable unless you know the F3 trick.
> Manpower is lacking to maintain it fully, and I am looking at stepping
> up to do this.
>
> Long version:
>
> I'd like to be able to make cheap OLPC-clones for kids here out of the
> cheapest and most plentiful used laptops, which are mostly 32-bit
> WinXP systems, but all the live images I've found (sugar-live-build,
> OLPC OS 20.04.0, Fedora Sugar on a Stick) are built for 64-bit
> processors and none of them boot into an immediately working system,
> which is what I want.
>
> Fedora Soas boots into a lightdm login screen without ever telling you
> that the required username is "liveuser". Also, Fedora SoaS seems to
> give no source code or build instructions, just a binary 64-bit blob
> (isn't that against the GPL?) and Fedora doesn't have a 32-bit kernel
> any more, just 32-bit rpms.
>

Yes there's a discussion for the bug here
<https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/test@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/RBGA5YLXU52LAFTVAIWWGXWQQQ2GEYZA/>,
I don't know how to build SOAS images yet but you
can find F29 SOAS here
<https://archive.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora-secondary/releases/29/Spins/i386/iso/>,
which supports 32-bit as you said Fedora no longer supports 32-bit.

>
> OLPC OS unpacks an Ubuntu ISO image, injects sugar into it (in
> solution presumably :) and repacks it, but it doesn't start Sugar
> automatically.
>
> The sugar-live-build distribution images work properly, but it turns
> out that they are not build from vanilla sugar-live-build, but with
> some magic to work around a bug in Debian-buster's version of
> metacity, which makes the Journal open up full-screen instead of
> iconified, thereby obscuring the Activities page, with no apparent way
> out (unless you can guess to press F3). I'm seeing with quozl about
> making a fix to this, but he's already up to his eyes in other work
> (though very generously with help for my technical questions, bless!)
>
> So, as I'm a retired Unix wizard with spare time, I'm looking at the
> idea of offering to maintain SLB.
>
> The directions I'd like to go in are:
> - to modify SLB to update metacity to a working version (3.34 instead
> of Debian buster's 3.30), probably by downloading it from
> snapshot.debian.org, which should be as secure as the rest of the
> Debian that it downloads
> - to make a 32-bit images of it available as well as the 64-bit one.
> Or just make a 32-bit one as that would work on 64-bit CPUs and I
> can't see Sugar making much use of more than 4GB of RAM as the XO's
> are 1 or 2GB machines.
> - to include more Activities in the default build than just the base
> and demos, to make it more appetizing, in the style of Fedora SoaS for
> example, with Maze and other trinkets.
>
> I'd be interested to know what other users/developers think about
> this, and how to proceed if it seems like a good idea
>

I like the idea but I think that if you want to make 32-bit images it'll be
for your own use as
I doubt they're a lot of people who have need for them anymore as most of
our downstream don't support it anymore.
You can also upload your images on sunjammer for anyone who needs them.

I agree with James re including more activities, you can but it'll be for
your own use and you can share with whoever needs it.

Thanks for your contributions, welcome to the community.

>
> Best wishes & thanks for a wonderful alternative to the ubiquitous
> 1970's desktop
>
>     M
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