[Server-devel] pushing activities to XOs

[Jerry Vonau]

On Wed, 2012-09-05 at 10:28 -0600, Daniel Drake wrote: 
> On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:
> > Jerry,
> >
> > I had to manually add "http://schoolserver/activities" to the "Group"
> > under "Software Update" in the Control Panel. Then, when I run the
> > update, it pings the XS and grabs new activities. Is this expected
> > behavior?
> 
> Yes. For a deployment you would use olpc-os-builder to preset that address.
> 
> And yes, there is a missing link in that this currently must be
> user-invoked; theres no fully automated way of pushing activities yet.
> I hope to be a part of solving that in a future release cycle.
> 
> Daniel

Hi All:

I've cc'd other that may have some interest in this and may be able to
chime in on the subject.

I'd prefer to call ""Software Update" in the Control Panel" "Activity
Updater from OLPC". You're able to call "Activity Updater from OLPC"
from the cli in a terminal with ./model.py and get a listing but need
something the equivalent to view.py for use from the cli to be useful
for blind installation. 

We've in OLPCAU have been using sugar-client[1] to run yum in the
background, so I've been thinking that we could maybe extend
sugar-client to run "Activity Updater" in the same way. Think the
additions to sugar-client and sugar-update-control might be of some
interest to those who use sugar-client to push updates to the XO's. 

This is also related to patches[2] sent to the mailing-list altering the
behaviour in that only pre-existing activities would be selected for
updates, here is the use case for improvements suggested. This has
opened up an avenue in which we can offer bundles that are not installed
on the image but can be user installed on demand[3]. This requires a
minor change to OOB to use a different url[4] for the update. We have
deployed this in the field and have received positive feed.

Jerry

1. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Platform_Team/Server_Kit/sugar-client
2. http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2011-December/034022.html
3. https://sugardextrose.org/issues/383
4. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/OLPCAU/11.3.1/Addons