Android, OLPC, and native hosting

[Martin Langhoff]

On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 9:56 PM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:
>>             I would argue that an operating system that doesn't
>> natively host its development tools is not appropriate for OLPC's
>> target audience.
>
> Does the XO-1 host its own development tools?  I don't think anyone
> has ever rebuilt the system from source code on an XO-1.  I don't even
> know anyone outside the OLPC office who *has* the source code for an
> XO-1 software release.

Ahem! I call BS on that. I have rebuilt all sorts of parts of the
8.2.1 release, from publicly available SRPMs (I am not physically at
OLPC's offices, and I don't have access to "hidden" servers).

I will grant you that it might be a bit disorganized. I've had to
google around a few times -- some specific RPMs are in Koji for
example, and it's not always easy to find them unless you know they
are there (Google doesn't crawl Koji very deeply, probably a
reasonable defence against a crawler DoS). But all the source is out
there.

If there is something you are missining, ask about it, it might take
some digging but it'll be found. (With the exception of the libertas
firmware -- but that's a different battle altogether.)

Rebuilding all the component rpms on an XO is entirely possible given
some swap and an external disk.  Running an anaconda compose
(anaconda/rpm are big memory hogs) to make an installable jffs2 image
is also quite likely to succeed -- though there are a few kinks that
are not safe to take for granted.

cheers,


m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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