[Server-devel] Centos as a base for sugar-Dextrose? and/or XSCE

[David Farning]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 11:45 AM, Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org> wrote:
> On 08/01/2013 10:55 AM, Thomas Gilliard wrote:
>> On 08/01/2013 07:52 AM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
>> Hi Guys,
>>
>> Let me introduce Johnny Hughes Jr to everyone on the olpc server list.
>>
>> I spoke to him about this thread, and he has shown interest in
>> attempting to scope up and then execute the work needed to make this
>> happen. Where this = look at sugar, and the gtk stack and attempt the
>> backports.
>>
>> As Walter mentioned Sebastian Dziallas has already done some of the
>> work, I have tried to track it down and failed to find anything in a
>> bit of google time and looking at Sebastian's fedora pages/work - can
>> you please point us in the right direction ?
>> > Maybe this?
>> >
>> http://pkgs.org/centos-6-rhel-6/epel-i386/sugar-0.88.1-1.el6.noarch.rpm.html
>>
>
> That already seems to work on EL6 ... so I assume we need a newer
> version or something else.
>
>>
>> If we are able to get this piece of work done, we will try and
>> maintain the entire stack from .centos.org if there is value in doing so.
>>
>> regards
>>
>> - KB
>>
>> On 07/28/2013 11:42 PM, David Farning wrote:
>> >>> We are mixing our channels abit here.
>> >>>
>> >>> A Sugar based desktop on CentOS is pretty unlikely. As Peter
>> >>> noticed, there are many dependencies necessary for a recent Sugar
>> >>> which are not present in CentOS. CentOS intentionally lagges fedora
>> >>> by several releases for stability. If someone wanted to do it badly
>> >>> enough, it would be possible to backport the fedora 18 GTK stack to
>> >>> CentSO
>> >>>
>> >>> A school server based on CentOS or Ubuntu LTS is more likely. The
>> >>> challenge is remaining compatible with XOs. For hardware
>> >>> compatibility, a XO requires recent OLPC-OS versions which are
>> >>> based on recent fedora version.
>> >>>
>> >>> The step necessary to make XSCE on CentOS run on _Commodity_X86_
>> >>> hardware are not that great. The problem is that it would require
>> >>> maintain a non-XO branch in parallel with the XO compatible
>> >>> branch.. Anyone have the time, energy, and flame retardant skin to
>> >>> tackle that? :)
>> >>>

It seems we lost the list somewhere along the way :(

Johnny,

Thanks for looking into this.

> I see that there is a list that discusses XSCE here:
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
>
> What I do not see is any documentation on any of it and what our targets
> are.
>
> So, there are 2 possible things I see.  One is to make sugar work on
> CentOS-6.  I assume that sugar is what runs on the actual laptop device
> ... what kind of device, what kind of architecture, etc.
>
> Second is to run a server, something called XSCE, on CentOS-6.  What
> architecture is that and where can I find a version that we need to make
> work?

You can see the project specifications for the upcoming release at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition/0.4/Project_Specifications
. The project site is at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Holt/XS_Community_Edition . The git
repo is at https://sugardextrose.org/projects/xsce/repository/show?rev=master
.

One interesting we thing we are working on it rewriting the bash code
in XSCE to ansible. (  http://www.ansibleworks.com/ ) Please see the
code at https://bitbucket.org/migonzalvar/xsce-playbooks .

The goal of the ansible is to see how effective it is to use a
provisioning system to maintain multiple branches. As this thread has
shown, some deployments want to use XOs running a recent OLPC-OS and
others want i386 on CentOS.


> Assume I know nothing and help me get up to speed :D
>



-- 
David Farning
Activity Central: http://www.activitycentral.com