OLPC XS 0.5 Released

[Martin Langhoff]

OLPC XS 0.5 is ready! -- the release was quietly made available about
a week ago now but the week was insanely busy, so the announcement was
held a bit.

So if you haven'tdownloaded it yet, go now to

  http://xs-dev.laptop.org/xs/

This release includes a lot of additional functionality. Overall, the
School Server is still an 'early adopter' tool, and not a complete
product. Some features are partially implemented; work continues fast
and furious towards a 1.0 . The core functionality is well tested and
reliable, however, and can support early deployments and pilots.

Highlights of this release:

    *  Major improvements in installation and upgrade infrastructure
    * Major improvements in the network configuration -- allowing up
to 8192 devices on the LAN
    * Now based on Fedora 9, which brings major overall improvements
and better security support
    * An install and upgrade service for activities, complementing the
OS upgrade service
    * Simple One Time Password (SOTP) scheme for administrator
password management
    * A cryptographic signing scheme to ensure the XS only accepts
trusted content and configuration
    * A newer eJabberd Jabber server for better scalability in the
presence service
    * Significantly tighter security
    * A simple Moodle installation

 More at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_Release_Notes

Credits -

this release was a huge leap, and we are hoping that the releases
following will be significantly easier thanks to the work invested
here. Enormous thanks go to Jerry Vonau, Rahul Sundaram, Robin
Norwood, Jeroen van Meeuwen, Seth Vidal and many others in the Fedora
community that helped with their expertise over the trickiest bits of
Fedora. Thanks to all the early testers, who kindly and patiently
posted detailed bugreports.  Special thanks to Guillaume who saw XS
0.4 eat his HD and decided to not murder the XS team. And thanks to
Douglas Bagnall for major feature work.

Many others have helped -- a wide thanks goes out to the wider FOSS community.

cheers,



martin
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff