Porting Sugar to Classmate

[Edward Cherlin]

On Nov 26, 2007 9:26 AM, Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Nov 2007, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:
>
> > Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> >> On 11/25/07 18:58, Mike C. Fletcher wrote:
> >>
> >>>         * we should port to the other inexpensive laptops, if a country
> >>>           decides to go with EEEs or Classmates, we should be in there
> >>>           offering an EEE or Classmate-optimised Sugar + Activities +
> >>>           Content that they can load onto those machines
> >>>               o we should also port to the thin-client-style setups seen
> >>>                 in e.g. Canonical's deployments of computing labs in the
> >>>                 developing world
> >>
> >> That would be a good idea, but we clearly lack internal resources.
> > Yup.
>
> For a lot of things.
>
> >> All the code is out there and I bet everybody in the Sugar team would
> >> be glad to help whoever wants to port it to the Classmate or any other
> >> laptop.
> >
> > Which is where I come in, I suppose.  I need to find someone who wants
> > to do the port.  Ellis has suggested they're willing to donate an EEE
> > and maybe even do some "load it and see if it runs" tests for us once we
> > produce an image for them.  I just need to find some Fedora Guru who
> > wants to help change the world to do the work.  I unfortunately don't
> > know all that many Fedora Gurus (just one, actually, and he's already
> > working on the project).  If people know a sysadmin Fedora Guru who they
> > think would be interested, let me know.
>
> Well, as it happens, I know a whole bunch of Fedora gurus.  :)
>
> If you'd like for me to put out the call, I'll be happy to do so.

Could you get a Fedora guru or two to write down what OLPC has done to
Fedora on the XO, so that I can try to put it into documentation? As
is ever the case, the engineers have been too busy on the release to
even talk to documentation people. And not just the engineers.

> >> AFAIK, both the mainstream desktops were far too bloated to
> >> be usable on the XO.  I can easily believe it, as the latest
> >> versions are almost unusable on my 1GHz iBook G4, too.
> >>
> >> Porting Gnome or KDE to the laptop would require help from the
> >> respective teams to further optimize them and stripping down
> >> some advanced features and some configurability.
> >
> > I seem to have confused a lot of people on that point, I was referring
> > to running Sugar on other machines that normally run Gnome/KDE, not
> > running Gnome/KDE on the XO.
> >>
> >>>         * we need to get our installation requirements on non-Fedora
> >>>           Linux down to a package-level installation
> >>>               o (and have this be supported and maintained (preferably
> >>>                 internally))
> >>>               o (also very useful for encouraging developers)
> >>
> >> I wonder what's the status of Debian and Ubuntu for running
> >> on the OLPC.  Once the platform part works well out of the
> >> box, installing sugar should be just a matter of using alien.
> > Debian and Ubuntu are the farthest along here AFAIK.  They have
> > packages.  The packages don't seem to like living alongside a jhbuild
> > installation (hosed my laptop when I tried that), but they seemed to run
> > the packaged apps fine.  I need a few days I don't have to sit down and
> > test that further.
> >> At this point, not even Fedora officially supports the OLPC
> >> out of the box!  I'd like to see our kernel and platform bits
> >> go upstream and appear in all mainstream Linux distros.

A lot of people would like to see a Linux that could do proper suspend
and resume on Geode products generally.

> >> Even if we cannot afford to put resources on this, I'm sure
> >> the core developers would be glad to answer questions on IRC
> >> and on this list.
> > Yes, again, we need sysadmin-guru people to do this kind of work.  We
> > need to see supporting such people as important, but the core team is
> > likely too busy to do much work on it.
>
> Yep.  When I visit the OLPC offices next month, this will be one of the
> most important topics to discuss.
>
> >>>     If we are serious about educating children, and we truly believe
> >>>     that the software and content we are creating is key to allowing
> >>>     children to learn well, then we need to make that software and
> >>>     content available for all of the projects that are sending computers
> >>>     out in the service of educating children.
> >>
> >> I couldn't agree more on the general principle, but operating systems
> >> and desktops are just a small subset of "educational content", and
> >> not even a very interesting one for teaching to little children.

That's like saying that roads and gas stations aren't of interest to
drivers. Not in themselves, OK, but as the enablers for what you
actually want to do, they have their place.

> >> We shouldn't let ourselves (as OLPC) get distracted in porting
> >> 20 different Linux distros to the laptop when we're missing
> >> a good astronomy and chemisrtry activity.

What we need is a good Sugarizing factory. I know some people who want
to work on that. If I could get the lowdown on the glue code needed
for non-Python code, I would test it, write it up on the Wiki, and
open up a scheduling process to my friends.

> OLPC needs to focus, sure -- but there needs to be some investment in
> community.  Right now, OLPC isn't even spending the time to meet people in
> various communities who want to help, if only they knew what help OLPC
> needed.

I can help with that. I would like to hear from or about every such
community. Even if we can't meet them in person, there are many things
we can do to encourage and assist them.

> OLPC cannot survive without a strong community.  From where I sit, OLPC
> engineering is in a classic trap right now -- all work on production, but
> almost no work on capacity.  Community building is capacity building;
> that's why it's so important.

I believe that part of the theory is that the children will form the
community. That's fine for when it happens, but I'm with you on
starting where we are and bringing in everybody we can.

> > I'm not suggesting that we need to core developers to do this work.
> > For any given Linux distribution, porting should be just a matter of
> > getting someone from the distro who is interested in porting.  Most of
> > the work will be quite mechanical I would think, just a matter of
> > figuring out how your distribution deals with SRPMs as foreign packages
> > and using those to build your native packages.  Then all the fun of
> > conflict negotiation and the like, of course.
>
> Yep.

and documenting how to do it for the next group. Send your files my way, please.

> > What we might need from the Core devs is a way to kick off a Sugar
> > session as a desktop shell from GDM/KDM/XDM (i.e. the multi-user stuff),
> > and some thought on whether running in a multi-user environment is going
> > to cause problems somewhere.  I don't know the mechanics of that
> > interaction all that well, but I'm guessing it's a pretty trivial amount
> > of code in the core.
>
> Yep.
>
> Underlying all of these discussions is the same key question, over and
> over:
>
> Who is going to do the work... and *why*?

Whoever wants to, usually because they can't *not* do it. They are out
there, if we take the trouble to make our children's needs known to
them.

> --g
>
> --
> Greg DeKoenigsberg
> Community Development Manager
> Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
> "To whomsoever much hath been given...
> ...from him much shall be asked"

Indeed.

-- 
Edward Cherlin
Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Earth_Treasury
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay