Deployment image customization

[Morgan Collett]

On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 18:29, Daniel Drake <dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Greg Smith <gregsmitholpc at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Your suggestion that we allow
>> addition of RPMs and get those built into a signed image via "pilgrim or
>> puritan" is certainly valuable and part of the requirement.
>>
>> However, it doesn't cover a few added things (language settings was
>> specifically requested by Mongolia and others):
>>
>> - Updated language packs (I believe we are trying to make this an RPM which
>> may solve it)
>> - Starting language
>> - Date, time and timezone
>> - Network settings
>
> Well, my suggestion of pilgrim and puritan was only for customising
> RPM packages. For the other things, I wrote:
> "As for other customisations, the current method (customization key)
> works fine for the limited customisations that it allows, so that
> simply needs to be expanded. "
>
> I could have probably worded that better. In other words, my opinion
> is that the existing customisation stick system should be expanded to
> also allow customisation of timezone, language settings, translation
> installation, etc.
>
>> The biggest challenge I see is to find those things which you do not want to
>> "clone" from the source XO. The only things that come to mind are Name and
>> Color. We could even pre-fill them as long as those dialog boxes come up at
>> start up.
>
> There is a lot more than that - it's things that are invisible to the
> user, technical details of the system, which are the bits we don't
> have a good answer for. For example (an easy one), keys are generated
> on first boot, but it is potentially bad news down the line if
> multiple XOs have the same keys. The hard part is tracking these
> things, which are not specified anywhere and there's no one place you
> can look to find them. I wish I could find a link to Michael's mail,
> where he investigated some of these things for an old build, and some
> of the findings were surprising even to us who hack on the system
> level all day...

I believe the mail from Michael that you were looking for is
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-March/012200.html - and
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/012957.html is
probably also relevant.

The keys generated in ~/.sugar/default/ are AFAIK not used for crypto,
but are used to generate the unique Jabber ID (JID). If two XOs (or
Sugar clients) have the same keys, Strange Bad Things happen to
presence and collaboration.

>> In short, I like your proposal but I still want a little more :-)
>
> If you're looking for initial high-level action items:
> 1. The discussions on lease delegation / allowing countries to sign
> their builds / providing customised builds for countries need to be
> finished. The outcome would be someone implementing whatever method
> allows country A to say "we want OLPC build B with added RPMs C,D,E"
> 2. Someone needs to implement the customization stick enhancements
> (and surrounding projects, such as xot bundles). Will require some
> modifications on the sugar-level too.
>
> Daniel

Regards
Morgan