[OLPC-AU] [Server-devel] Regarding my OLPC XS Wishlist

Sat Nov 19 09:43:56 EST 2011

There's OBS (build packages for multiple distros) and suse studio, the
latter builds isos, and if I understand it correctly not just suse isos,
its kind of a drag and drop tool where you choose what your iso should
contain....

And I would hardly say openSUSE is a minor distro... next to Ubuntu and
Fedora, probably the most known and used... though I guess much more so
outside the US, seeing as its German in origin...

kind regards,
David Van Assche

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at activitycentral.org>wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 06:29:51PM +1000, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> > On 28 May 2011 08:31, Aleksey Lim <alsroot at activitycentral.org> wrote:
> > > On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:39:54AM -0400, Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> > >> On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 21:14 +0545, Abhishek Singh wrote:
> > >> > Dear All,
> > >> > I've put down my OLPC XS wishlist at
> > >> > http://asingh.com.np/blog/olpc-xs-my-wishlist/ . Please comment
> upon it.
> > >> >
> > >> > Thank You.
> > >>
> > >> Thank you! Forwarding this to the Dextrose list as well.
> > >
> > > I've also CCed guys who do XS work in .au
> > >
> > > Abhishek: thanks for sharing your wishlist.
> > >
> > > From my side, I see the whole picture in case of school server like
> having:
> > >
> > > * sugar-server[1], the base of any school server. it doesn't provide
> > >  stuff like moodle (too complicated to be basic) or puppet (useless on
> > >  this level, since configuring sugar-server should be just install
> > >  packages/iso and do some automatic work, the higher levels might user
> > >  puppet or so)
> > > * any additional services that might be useful in some deployments but
> > >  are not basic, eg, moodle or wiki.
> > >  sugar-server should provide needed info via reliable API for these
> > >  services.
> > >  in my mind, such services might be formed as separate projects (like
> > >  sugar-server-moodle) to make it possible to attach it on purpose
> > >  (there might be useful configuration tool that is being used in
> > >  sugar-server, mace[2]).
> > > * final products that include components on purpose (but sugar-server
> is
> > >  a required one). It is entirely depends on local needs.
> >
> > We are looking to make our XS-AU[0] more modular to suit different use
> > cases. Our initial goal
>
> > (completed over a year ago)
> If I got it right, it is still the same OLPC XS code base but w/ tweaks?
> sugar-server in that case is a new project w/ more tough and localized
> design.
>
> > work on a single interface to integrate well into existing networks.
> > Installation is via USB and fully scriptable via kickstart files.
> >
> > The current XS is very monolithic and bureaucratic. It requires
> > moderate sysadmin skills to install and maintain. Maintaining the
> > presence service is cumbersome and impractical in our schools. The
> > turnover of teachers and students is far too high to ensure that
> > anything gets managed properly.
>
> > We're looking to slim down the XS-AU such that we can have a simple
> > collaboration server (which we currently call "XS Lite") that is
> > installable in a classroom as a drop-in appliance.
>
> ie, just having jabber server and somehow let students know where it is?
>
> > is an ejabberd.
>
> btw, I'm planing to use Prosody instead of ejabberd. I have really bad
> experiance w/ ejabberd - on jabber.sugarlabs.org it eats too many
> resources for regular 10-30 online users. Prosody is slim and light app
> and it alsready works fine w/ sugar-0.88.
>
> > Registration, Moodle, Squid, backups and so on are
> > unnecessary. Each teacher can run their own server for their own
> > class. Conveniently, this could easily run on an XO (XS-on-XO).
>
> in other workds there is no need in sugar specific stuff at all - just
> install jabber server from packages (maybe w/ sugar specific patches) and
> write its url on studensts' boxes.
>
> > > My own running though your wishlist keeping in mind sugar-server plans:
> > >
> > > 1) Porting XS to new version of Fedora
> > >   sugar-server will be build on OBS[3] for distros that are being used
> > >   in the field (deb or/and rpm based).
> > >   So, downstream can just use these packages, add new one and create
> > >   the final product (there is an idea to teach OBS to create isos for
> > >   not only SUSE, obs is designed originally)
> >
> > You're using SuSE as a base? That sounds like an awful lot of work
> > porting to a distribution that isn't widely used. Why not stick with
> > the current platform, which benefits from Red Hat engineering and has
> > a much larger developer, installation and user base? Not to mention
> > that the XOs use the same platform, meaning that skills can be shared
> > across client and server.
>
> OBS is not only suse (in fact, they renamed it from openSuse Build
> Service to Open Build System recently). In other words, it can create
> package for any rpm/deb based distro, but, afaik, it can create iso only
> for opensuse for now (and plan is looking how it might be done for other
> distros, but anyway using obs as a packages farm is good w/o having
> isos).
>
> > The XS-AU has been working pretty well on Fedora 11 for quite some
> > time. We've reconfigured it so that it runs as a set of packages on
> > top of Fedora 11[1] rather than being a fork. We're quire confident
> > that it'll work on Fedora 13 without much effort. Fedora 14 will need
> > a bit of work since it has a newer version of Python.
> >
> >
> > Sridhar
> >
> >
> > [0] http://dev.laptop.org.au/projects/xs-au/wiki
> > [1]
> http://dev.laptop.org.au/projects/xs-au/wiki/Install_on_an_existing_Fedora_installation
> >
> >
> >
> > Sridhar Dhanapalan
> > Technical Manager
> > One Laptop per Child Australia
> > M: +61 425 239 701
> > E: sridhar at laptop.org.au
> > A: G.P.O. Box 731
> >      Sydney, NSW 2001
> > W: www.laptop.org.au
> >
>
> --
> Aleksey
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>
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