[Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[James Cameron]

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:28:06AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:21 AM, Samuel Greenfeld <samuel at greenfeld.org> wrote:
> > The obvious counterargument would be that a deployment might want
> > to deploy your XO-Next (whatever it is) alongside existing XO
> > laptops, allowing all of them to have the same configuration.
> 
> From my memory of olpc-os-builder it was very modular and wouldn't be
> hard to add dozens of different devices support to it.

Yes, it would be straightforward to add commodity hardware support to
olpc-os-builder.  Add kernel and boot loader.  Add some sort of
installer.

But we have SoaS, and SoaS works fine on commodity hardware, so why
bother with olpc-os-builder?

Because olpc-update?  Nobody uses it.

Because preinstalled activities?  SoaS can do that too.

> > There's plenty of blame to go around in terms of re-inventing the wheel and
> > lack of communication.
> 
> Yep!
> 
> > There simply (and correct me if I'm wrong) are not the resources inside of
> > OLPC, outside, or combined at this time to maintain and update two separate
> > builds & build systems.
> >
> > It amazes me how far we bend over backwards to avoid saying "end of life"
> > and "end of support".
> >
> >
> > I have seen a fair amount of interest, both publicly and privately, for
> > newer XO laptop builds.  But I don't think the requesters realize how much
> > work it takes to make one.
> 
> The big one here is kernel kernel kernel.

Yes.

> > And I do not forsee anyone stepping up to get the XO-1.75 and XO-4 kernel &
> > drivers into a state they can be upstreamed or upgraded for newer Fedoras
> > unless a deployment really wants this instead of newer equipment.
> 
> Or even the 1.5, I believe most of the XO-1 support is upsteream.
> 
> > Newer operating systems tend to require more disk space and RAM than the
> > predecessors.  We have seen this even within Fedora's lineage.
> 
> Yes, and no. I mean 1Gb of the original XO-1 is tight, but SoaS still
> happily fits in 4Gb with a bunch of space to spare. Looking at my
> current SoaS VM the used space is around 1.9Gb. Amusingly the various
> cloud/container enterprise initiatives actively help us here because
> for once they care about dependency bloat too :-)
> 
> The two things that add bloat to the current SoaS image are:
> * Browse needs to be converted to the new WebKitGtk APIs so we don't
> ship two copies of WebKitGtk.
> * Conversion of remaining gstreamer 0.10 to 1.0 to allow us not to ship that.
> 
> Ultimately I think you could with a little development effort get it
> down to 1.5Gb used space which would make a 2Gb filesystem quite
> usable.
> 
> > Since OLPC already appears to be going the Ubuntu LTS route, I would argue
> > it would be easiest to take everything that way, porting utilities as
> > required, and make that the final image & build system for XOs.
> 
> Personally I have no interest in that. I wish you luck.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/