OLPC Hosting Application: Fedora on XO

[Jim Gettys]

Robert,

It isn't clear (yet) if something gnomeish or xfce is best, given the
target audience (G1G1 users, rather than kids). We'll see.  Hackers are
a different audience than most G1G1 users we've had; certainly xfce is
fine for most of us.  Only experimentation will tell if a more full
fledged Gnome is feasible for RAM footprint reasons or not. 

But most of the point of this is to make installation really easy: to do
that, we'd like a customized fedora spin that can fit in flash
(co-resident with our usual software), so that installation will not
require external media. Most G1G1 end users who get systems can't handle
a long set of instructions such as your page outlines; by making a
fedora spin, we can get the installation down to "olpc-update fedora" or
some such one line command with in place installation.  Sebastian has
shown that we can make a spin that is small enough.

Our other goal is, until nirvana arrives (praying it does) and the OLPC
distro is a proper subset of fedora without any broken dependencies,
that it be a fedora spin, so that what a user gets is exactly a version
of fedora, rather than something that may have brokenness if various
software is installed on top of the 8.2.0 release. It's too late in that
release cycle to try to get to nirvana for 8.2.0, and is probably 9.1
fodder.  This is for support reasons: we don't want to have to deal with
thousands of support calls


The discussion of this is taking place on the fedora-olpc-list at redhat
com list.

In any case, thanks for all your help!

Best regards,
                         - Jim

On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 11:22 -0500, Robert Myers wrote:
> Sebastian,
> 
> > 4. Longer description       : we're going to provide a Fedora-based
> >                              : "traditional linux desktop" environment
> >                              : for the XO. if we can, we'd like in allow
> >                              : a parallel installation of this and sugar.
> > 
> 
> Sorry, but I don't understand the need for this repository. XFCE is 
> already in common use to provide a more traditional windowing desktop 
> for the XO. Its use is covered on the Wiki "http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Xfce".
> 
> XFCE seems to be a good fit for the XO, full featured enough to support 
> most traditional applications, conventional enough to suit the desire 
> for a non-Sugar solution, and light enough to install easily.  Gnome or 
> KDE seem like too much, and the other lightweight environments look a 
> little strange to me.
> 
> The XFCE page suffers from some poor editing, competing solutions, and a 
> failure of the instructions to keep up with changes on the XO, but that 
> would seem to be able to be handled there.
> 
> Bob
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-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child