[Server-devel] New XS release very soon

[Daniel Drake]

Hi,

To avoid leaving the other threads dangling:

I have been working on a new XS release in collaboration with the
Zamora Teran Foundation (http://www.fundacionzt.org/). The underlying
goal here is to move the XS to a new OS base, which supports new
hardware. The foundation has recently had a fair amount of trouble
finding hardware that is compatible with the dated Fedora 9 release.

As agreed and directed by Martin this will become the next OLPC XS release.

There are 3 major changes compared to XS-0.6:

1. CentOS 6.2 is the base (which is equivalent to Fedora 13/14), but
we have included Linux 3.2 from Fedora 15 for maximum hardware
compatibility.

2. It will be released as both a traditional install CD only requiring
a couple of commands after the install to get up and running, but also
as a set of packages that can be added to an existing CentOS
installation (which probably also works with RHEL/Scientific
Linux/etc). Some steps have been taken for these packages to be easier
to install and run on existing networks (e.g. you can now run parts of
the XS without the requirement that you surrender your networking
setup and layout to the strange configuration that the XS ships). The
usual "take over my network" option will still be there though.

3. If you choose to let the XS take over your network: Networking
setup is reworked and greatly simplified. No more bonding, no more
mesh support. eth0 is now the LAN, and eth1 is now the WAN (based on
the thinking that if you only have 1 interface, you're going to want
LAN, not WAN). eth0 runs on a single subnet (not 3) and all the
services bind to 0.0.0.0, and we rely on iptables to drop traffic from
the WAN to the school-internal services.


Here in Nicaragua, the Zamora Teran Foundation has the task *this
month* of deploying One Laptop per Child to every child on the
mythical and beautiful island of Ometepe
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ometepe). Unfortunately the hardware
received for these 32 school servers is not compatible with XS-0.6, so
we are under pressure to deploy this very very soon. This means the
plan is to release this as an official XS release *next week* to be
installed on servers immediately shipped to the island. Any help
testing this before we ship it off will be greatly appreciated.

I'll post installation instructions and some test media within a day
or two - there are just a couple of obvious bugs remaining that need
to be washed out first.

cheers
Daniel