[SoaS] Using SoaS Blueberry to emulate OLPC F11 builds

[Martin Langhoff]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 10:53 PM, Sebastian Dziallas <sebastian at when.com> wrote:
>> Besides the obvious indications that they pre-test the hw they'll run
>> it on, and the "shut down SoaS carefully" recommendation, I drafted a
>> plan for them to make Blueberry more like OLPC's F11:
>
> Mhm, I'm not entirely sure I understand why this would be needed.

Mainly so that they can see "switch to gnome", play with gnomeland
(and switch back ;-) ).

Some of them are *very* first-time computer users.

> The major issue you'll run into here is that the XO images contain a number
> of non-Fedora repositories. So attempting to install the packages these
> repos provide will just fail on SoaS, unless you add them manually.

> Also, some of the packages might affect how SoaS works on "normal" machines
> (thinking of olpc-utils here).

Good points. Not so easy then.

> I think the olpc-switch-desktop package in Fedora should do the trick.
> However, I heard some time ago (might be wrong, though) that it was
> dependent on olpc-dm, which is in the olpc-utils package and contains the
> hardcoded olpc username.

Ah, pain all around :-/

> This is certainly a good step to do. I'm not so sure about SSH keys and
> stuff, which might be another thing you don't necessarily want to copy all
> over.

This is for a very limited use case. Of course, all of these "hosts"
will end up with identical ssh host identity keys, but it's really low
pri.

> Yeah... well, I'd advise to try a line like this on a modified and rebuilt
> image: livecd-iso-to-disk --overlay-size-mb xxx /dev/sr0 /dev/sdc1

That requires to build a new iso with the build toolchain. The local
team is getting up to speed with Fedora, XOs and a ton of other
things, in a super-short time.

> It might work. But it could very well break. I'm still curious about the
> reasoning behind adding all these olpc-* packages. Instead, you might want
> to consider just adding the @gnome-desktop group and the olpc-switch-desktop

"Reasoning" might be too much to apply to a draft plan. What your
propose is better.. OTOH, I don't know if what OLPC does is
@gnome-desktop, maybe it's a subset, so I'd have to hunt that list
down.

> I guess it's really about time to think about how to make the customization
> process easier.

Revisor makes it reasonably easy, and even has a gui. Don't know if it
works on "runnable" isos.

cheers,


m
-- 
 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