[sugar] Development environment for newcomers

[drew einhorn]

Boy, was I barking up the wrong tree in the last message.
Think I've found the right tree this time.  :-)

See:

    http://www.linux-live.org/

Needs some embellishments for our purposes.

Let's recap the scenario.

Assume we are out making a presentation,

introducing OLPC to folks who have maybe read
some articles about it, maybe not.

We arehoping to recruit them as developers.

We have an hour or so.

For some hands on experience
We have asked them to bring
     their laptops,
     and a usb flash drive

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.

In case they don't have enough free disk
space, or there is some other problem installing
an image on their hard drive

we bring a plain vanilla sever with a
open shared network readonly filesystem.

In case of difficulty with their usb drive, or if
they just forgot it.

We have available
1 GB usb flash $20-$30 from a reputable source
they can borrow or purchase.

We give them LiveCd/Dvd
    / is a unionfs of
        rw filesystem on usbdrive
        ro Mike's image ported to FC6, or
            just about any OS image for that matter
            but we don't care about that.

Mikes image might fit on compressed LiveDvd
but won't fit on LiveCd

faster access to bigger images
from readonly filesystem
     on harddrive, or
     network drive,

readonly
     last I heard linux did not reliably write to nfts
     we just don't want to risk it even with the
     ntfs-ng driver.   Some of the users may have
     extra fragile filesystem on odd vintage os.

Image on local file system
for performance and independence

Image can be network filesystem
if necessary.

After they go home they can
solve the problems that required
them to use the network filesystem

cryptographic signature verifies validity of image will verify
lack of subtle problems case insensitive filenames,
corrupted files, etc.  if it's a PKI signature it fits the
security model.

-- 
Drew Einhorn
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