freezing DCON for insecure boot

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 08:34 -0400, Kim Quirk wrote:
> Bernie,
> It is really, really important that we don't encourage countries to
> have their own images if they are not developers participating in
> active development of our code base.

Turkey is going to be a big deployment, but as you say it
seems they have no plans to participate in development with
us at this time.


> We've had some good discussions around this recently as it has become
> very difficult to support Uruguay. This is why we separated out
> activities and content from the rest of the image. So that we CAN
> encourage countries to choose activities and content (and a few other
> things), but to try not to do any customization that requires their
> own image.

This helps for most customizations I can think of, except
things such as "I want mpeg", which are very straightforward
to do, but require changes to the (see my other post).

Italy also asked us for a build with better Italian support.
They know how to work with Pootle, and they actually have
already done most of the work.  But this work will certainly
not make it for Update.1, and they can't wait for Update.2
to deploy.

They asked me if they could create a custom build and reflash
all laptops with it.  I said it's certainly possible and not
even that hard to do, but they will have to perform this work
and support it on their own, because we certainly lack
engineering resources at this time.


> I'm hopeful that what you are talking about is something that CAN go
> on the customization stick after the latest build has been installed.
> I just wanted to make sure you were up to speed with some of the more
> recent discussions we've had about customization.

Yes, they just want the Istanbul logo on the boot animation,
but the only XOs I have here for the demos are my development
laptops and as such they are unsecured.

I'm looking for a short term solution.  Long term, this
hack won't be needed.


> Once a country has agreed to send some developers to Cambridge to go
> through a build side by side with us, then they will have a better
> chance at successfully being able to support their own builds. We want
> to encourage them to get their changes into our builds so they won't
> have to manage their own streams forever. 

Yesterday I mentioned the possibility for Turkey's research
institutions to collaborate with MIT and OLPC, but for now there
are no contacts between the associations that supports us and
universities.

They said they could hire one programmer to handle the
customizations that their government will request as a
temporary solution.

As we have often observed, it takes some time for a new country
to "digest" the full potential of the international cooperation
enabled by OLPC.  Initially, they tend to see us as one of many
laptop resellers.

-- 
  \___/
  |___|  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
   \___\ CTO OLPC Europe  - http://www.laptop.org/