Community OS 14.1.0 Version 1

[Samuel Greenfeld]

I spent a few hours this past weekend looking into if third-party XO OS
builds were still possible.

The result is a set of unsigned XO laptop images for XO-1/1.5/1.75/4 I have
uploaded to http://www.greenfeld.org/xo/community/builds/14/1/

This is the first time images may have been made for certain models this
release cycle.   So this release has bugs, and is meant only for testing.
The XO-1 image in particular should be avoided unless you are trying to
solve its performance problems.

These images were created independently of OLPC and are not supported by
OLPC.

Bug reports about these images can be filed in dev.laptop.org with the
"commbuild" keyword.  However other members of the community are needed to
help fix problems as my skills are limited.


If you would prefer to use the latest OLPC-provided open-source build, it
can be found at http://build.laptop.org/14.1.0/os8/


Known improvements (from usage/researching changelogs):

   - All: The GNOME desktop has been replaced by MATE.
   - All: Wikipedia EN and ES have been replaced by the Simple English
   Wikipedia activity.
   - All: The latest Open Firmware for each platform.
   - All: Based on Fedora 20 & Sugar 0.103.2 with most Fedora updates as of
   early February 2015.
   - All (userland)/XO-4(OFW): Brightness adjustments for an upcoming
   manufacturing backlight LED change.  Laptops with new backlights will be
   identified by a "BL" manufacturing tag.   Routines to handle earlier
   backlights exist.  Note there may be some more backlight tweaks in the next
   version of powerd.
   - XO-4: Support for newer and larger eMMC internal storage options.
   - XO-4: LiPoly battery support (instead of NiMH).
   - XO-4: Dual core CPU Support.

Known issues:

   - All: This is not a "restricted" build, and does not have any licensed
   codec/binaries/video drivers some deployments may want.
   - All: Sugar asks for a user's grade and gender.  If this is sent over
   the Internet, this may not be legal in many countries without the
   appropriate parent/school permissions.

   These images therefore probably should not be given to children until we
   have a better understanding of what is going on.
   - All: The Sugar Language control panel appears to be broken.
   - All: MATE has the same large text/dpi display problems GNOME had if
   not worse.
   - All: Originally a private RPM repository was created for several x86
   RPMs where only ARM ones existed.  The relevant x86 ones have since been
   built and the last RPM I'm told isn't needed, so a private repository
   should not be required going forward.

   - XO-1: NetworkManager and systemd-journald use up most of the CPU
   logging repeated failed actions against the mesh(?) network adapter,
   leaving too little CPU for Sugar to work with.

   Some other services may also be using CPU, but these seem to be the most
   persistent (OLPC #12860).
   - XO-1: MATE, Simple English Wikipedia, and Physics were removed to
   conserve space while debugging the above.  There may only be room for
   either MATE or Simple Wikipedia with a more complete build, as this only
   leaves ~100 MB free.
   - XO-1: There is no "G1G1Lite"-style activity set at this time.

   - XO-1.5: Camera and/or video overlay support appears to be broken (OLPC
   #12858).
   - XO-1.5: Automatic suspend is disabled in this build due to the DCON
   freezing the text console instead of the graphical UI (OLPC #12859).
   - XO-1.5: This build may be too large for 2 GB SD cards (not tested, but
   observed).

   - XO-1.75: If you have one of the rare XO-1.75s with a touchscreen, the
   latest versions of OFW do not have "test /touchscreen" support (and may not
   have for some time).

   - XO-4: Programs may randomly crash due to OLPC #12837.  So building
   14.1.0 on an XO-4 using 14.1.0 currently is not supported.
   - XO-4: Due to Open Firmware and EC updates to support LiPoly batteries,
   XO-4s with newer firmware no longer are compatible with NiMH batteries
   (rare and should only affect users with pre-release SKUs).
   - XO-4: If you wish to downgrade from this OS to 13.2.2 or prior, you
   need to reinstall an Open Firmware version in the Q7B* series, such as
   Q7B44 or earlier (Q7B40 or earlier with NiMH).
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