[sugar] Development environment for newcomers

[drew einhorn]

On 3/11/07, Mike C. Fletcher <mcfletch at vrplumber.com> wrote:
>
>  <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnionFS>
> I'm not enough a sysadmin to know whether the approach is a good one.
> I'd rather not have to maintain a central server with hundreds of users
> (I'm not a sysadmin by trade, after all), but maybe that's no biggie for
> some people.


First of all, let me describe the scenario I was thinking about, and
the problems I am trying to avoid.  Then I'll proceed to this morning's
ideas for solutions.

Assume we are out making a presentation, introducing OLPC to folks
who have maybe read some articles about it, maybe not.  We are
hoping to recruit them as developers.  We have an hour or so.  We
have asked them to bring their laptops for some hands on experience.

We don't have time for any complicated installation, and they have
a random assortment of hardware, and operating systems.
Most of them have environments that are difficult, if not nearly
impossible to work with.

We can't expect them to pre-install anything before they come
to the session.

Ian, who started this thread, has suggested a live cd (or dvd).
The problem I see here is that all the live cds I have used,
have two layers.  The  read only information only on the cd/dvd.
And a ramdisk or unionfs in memory.  When the system is
rebooted all the user's work disappears, unless the user
remembered to copy it to a remote server on the network.

Mike's project would require them to have 10 gig or so of
free space.  I know he said 8 gig, but we want to have room
for growth, etc.  I certainly would not want to be resizing
their partitions to make room to install Mike's stuff.  The
danger of trashing the user's system, and alienating the
folks we are trying to recruit is just to great.  It would be too
much toexpect them to have a giant usb drive, or enough
suitable free hard drive space for this approach.

Devil Linux inspires an approach.  See:

    http://www.devil-linux.org/home/index.php

It boots from cd, either a vanilla distribution cd,
or one that may have some local customizations.
It then probes the local hardware, it could even probe
the local network, looking for a readable filesystem
containing a suitable configuration file.  Typically the
configuration is put on a usb drive.  They really like
usb drives with a write protect switch, so they can
have an easily configurable system with no writable
memory that can compromised by an attacker.

We want a writable filesystem where we can allocate
a directory for each user to store their own persistent
code and data.  It could be on a local hard drive, or
on a network server we bring to the session.  If it
does not find a suitable filesystem with a proper
configuration file, it could prompt for the hostname
or ip number of a more remote system.  We would
not need anything more complex that a vanilla
installation of a network filesystem, containing
a single configuration file.

I would be wary of attempting to store information
on a local NTFS filesystem.  Last I heard they were
readable, but writing was not reliable.  Although I
have heard rumors of a linux ntfs-ng driver that
can reliably write to a ntfs filesystem, I have not
actually seen one.

I would not be offended I some youngster, with
more energy, and knowledge about what I am
talking about, grabbed this idea and ran with it.
I'd prefer to see something like this available
sooner, rather than later (if I implement it).

We also need presentation materials for introducing
OLPC to beginners.  I really enjoyed Ivan's keynote
at PyCon.  And maybe there is already suitable
material somewhere on laptop.org, that I have not
yet found, if not lets start another thread on this topic.

-- 
Drew Einhorn
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