[Olpc-open] Yum Repos for XO-4?

[James Cameron]

G'day Veronica,

Thanks for letting me know.  I've no idea why the repodata directory
was missing, but I've re-run our dropbox script and the directory is
back in place.

Yes, there's hope, but it is slim.

The many web pages inaccessible is not intentional, it's caused by
deprecated SSL algorithms or keys.

OLPC was mentioned in the newcomers talk at linux.conf.au and a few
others, so I made a summary of the technical debt for sharing.

--

OLPC has a "Technical debt" and software entropy due to
underfunding.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

However, we do not have funding to work on this technical debt, nor do
we have metrics of usage and impact.

For the OLPC XO-1, technical debt is the kernel, device drivers, and
graphics drivers.  Made more difficult by the limited Geode CPU
instructions, and the 32-bit arch.

For the OLPC XO-1.5, technical debt is the kernel and device drivers.
Made more difficult by the 32-bit arch.

For the OLPC XO-1.75 and XO-4, technical debt is the firmware, device
tree, kernel, and device drivers.

Impact of technical debt above is we're stuck on Fedora 18, so (a)
security vulnerabilities are left open, potentially leading to
infections, (b) YouTube does not work, (c) many web sites do not work
due to requiring new cryptographic algorithms, or new features of
JavaScript client-side.

For the NL3 and future laptops, technical debt is Bluetooth peripheral
support, automatic login support, activity library service, Python 3
support, and soon GTK 4 support.  Part of Sugar Labs mission.

For our anti-theft activation server, technical debt is a Django web
application.  An old version is being used.  Risks of intrusion.

For our infrastructure servers, technical debt is an instance of
MediaWiki.  Again, risks of intrusion.  We have very few users.

Let me know if there's anything you would like to help with, and if
you require funding.  We could add it to our crowd funding goal list.

On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 02:24:28PM +1100, Veronica Brandt wrote:
> Hi,
> I bought five XO-4s a few years back from ebay and managed to get TeX
> working on one. I wrote about it here:
> https://www.brandt.id.au/post/cute-lil-green-alien-olpc-xo-4-laptops/
> Just recently I went to install the updated OS, thinking I could follow
> those instructions again, but yum doesn't seem to pick up the old
> repositories at all.
> Looking at the repos, some of the packages are still there, but not the
> xml index files which yum looks for.
> I can't email from the xo-4, so I have to type out the message
> 
> I tried "sudo yum install vim"
> 
> http://rpmdropbox.laptop.org/f18/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14]
> curl#22 - "The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found"
> Trying other mirror.
> Error: failure: repodata/repomd.xml from olpc-f18: [Errno 256] No more
> mirrors to try.
> http://rpmdropbox.laptop.org/f18/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno 14]
> curl#22 - "The requested URL returned error: 404 Not Found"
> 
> I tried looking for other repos, but it looks like they've all closed
> down.
> 
> Any hope for these machinces?
> 
> Veronica Brandt
> 
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> Olpc-open at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open

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