Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi, What is the command to start Sugar in 20090519.iso? There is no 'sugar-emulator', and 'sugar' fails. On the first login screen, choose Sugar instead of GNOME on the Session dropdown at the bottom of the screen. Got it. So obvious once you know. [sigh] I guess the menu is just in alphabetical order. Thanks. I'll add this to the Wiki. Is there an installer on the image? It doesn't make itself obvious. No, better to just copy-nand u:\the.img. We'll work on making installed rather than live images for the NAND as one of the first build system priorities. I was just wondering whether someone could install it in regular Fedora. - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
What is the command to start Sugar in 20090519.iso? There is no 'sugar-emulator', and 'sugar' fails. Is their an installer on the image? It doesn't make itself obvious. On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: We have some good news: OLPC has decided to base its software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. (This will mostly be useful for older kids in high school.) I'm particularly happy about this plan because it will allow us to catch up with the awesome work present in the Sugar community's most recent release, Sugar 0.84, as well as merging the latest Fedora work and including GNOME into the mix for the first time. The new machines will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough room for both environments at once. We think we'll need to use our own kernel and initrd, but the other base packages we expect to need are present in Fedora already, including Sugar; in fact, we already have an F11+Sugar+GNOME build for the XO-1 using pure Fedora packages. That build will get better as a result of this work (although OLPC's focus will be on getting the XO-1.5 running) and it will form the basis for the XO-1.5 build. If you're interested in contributing, we'd certainly love your help, and you can find us on the fedora-olpc mailing list¹, and freenode IRC's #fedora-olpc channel. Our existing F11 build images for the XO-1 are here², and we'll soon begin publishing images for the XO-1.5 too. XO-1.5 beta machines will start to be manufactured over the next few months, and will be available to contributors as part of our Contributors Program³ once the hardware's up and running. Finally, thanks are due to the volunteer Fedora packagers and testers who helped us get to the point of being able to commit to Fedora 11 for this new build, in particular: Fabian Affolter, Kushal Das, Greg DeKoenigsberg, Martin Dengler, Scott Douglass, Sebastian Dziallas, Mikus Grinbergs, Bryan Kearney, Gary C. Martin, Steven M. Parrish, and Peter Robinson. Thanks! - Chris, for the OLPC techteam. ¹: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-olpc-list ²: http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/ ³: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
Hi, What is the command to start Sugar in 20090519.iso? There is no 'sugar-emulator', and 'sugar' fails. On the first login screen, choose Sugar instead of GNOME on the Session dropdown at the bottom of the screen. Is their an installer on the image? It doesn't make itself obvious. No, better to just copy-nand u:\the.img. We'll work on making installed rather than live images for the NAND as one of the first build system priorities. - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 10:17 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: We think we'll need to use our own kernel and initrd, but the other base packages we expect to need are present in Fedora already, One area we'll also need help with is the under a tree networking scenario. If you've used an XO, you know what it works like: by default the OS automatically forms an ad-hoc network between the machines present using wifi but not relying on an AP. People refer to this as 'mesh' colloquially but it doesn't actually require 802.11s (as long as all the XOs are nearby). In theory at least. In practice, the ad-hoc network facility is tied to our use of a patched NM and our 'msh0' devices. The current plans don't include using 802.11s, and there are hopes to ship a more vanilla NM. This means that the 'under a tree' scenario needs help in NM integration and a bit of elbow grease. Ad-hoc networks can work pretty well for small numbers of nodes -- I suspect that that Fedora users (specially laptop users) would benefit from an easy way to run an ad-hoc network amongst machines, without the need of a 'hostap'-able driver. Cerebro has interesting code in this area -- a more ambitious goal would be to integrate it into our stack, as it can mimic some of the 802.11s mesh behaviour. But even without magic routing and path discovery, small ad hoc networks can and do work. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
We think we'll need to use our own kernel and initrd, but the other base packages we expect to need are present in Fedora already, One area we'll also need help with is the under a tree networking scenario. If you've used an XO, you know what it works like: by default the OS automatically forms an ad-hoc network between the machines present using wifi but not relying on an AP. People refer to this as 'mesh' colloquially but it doesn't actually require 802.11s (as long as all the XOs are nearby). In theory at least. In practice, the ad-hoc network facility is tied to our use of a patched NM and our 'msh0' devices. The current plans don't include using 802.11s, and there are hopes to ship a more vanilla NM. This means that the 'under a tree' scenario needs help in NM integration and a bit of elbow grease. Ad-hoc networks can work pretty well for small numbers of nodes -- I suspect that that Fedora users (specially laptop users) would benefit from an easy way to run an ad-hoc network amongst machines, without the need of a 'hostap'-able driver. NetworkManager 0.7 supports Ad-hoc wifi networks quite well. I've used it on a number of occasions to share my 3G dongle between a number of users. In that regard I suspect all that's needed is to be able to have some form of gui for it. Cerebro has interesting code in this area -- a more ambitious goal would be to integrate it into our stack, as it can mimic some of the 802.11s mesh behaviour. But even without magic routing and path discovery, small ad hoc networks can and do work. Do you have a link for Cerebro? Peter ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 16:05, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: We think we'll need to use our own kernel and initrd, but the other base packages we expect to need are present in Fedora already, One area we'll also need help with is the under a tree networking scenario. If you've used an XO, you know what it works like: by default the OS automatically forms an ad-hoc network between the machines present using wifi but not relying on an AP. People refer to this as 'mesh' colloquially but it doesn't actually require 802.11s (as long as all the XOs are nearby). In theory at least. In practice, the ad-hoc network facility is tied to our use of a patched NM and our 'msh0' devices. The current plans don't include using 802.11s, and there are hopes to ship a more vanilla NM. This means that the 'under a tree' scenario needs help in NM integration and a bit of elbow grease. Ad-hoc networks can work pretty well for small numbers of nodes -- I suspect that that Fedora users (specially laptop users) would benefit from an easy way to run an ad-hoc network amongst machines, without the need of a 'hostap'-able driver. NetworkManager 0.7 supports Ad-hoc wifi networks quite well. I've used it on a number of occasions to share my 3G dongle between a number of users. In that regard I suspect all that's needed is to be able to have some form of gui for it. My experience as well, just the other day formed an ad-hoc network and used salut over it with a machine running OSX. NetworkManager itself is already ready for this use case, we only need to add the UI bits. Regards, Tomeu Cerebro has interesting code in this area -- a more ambitious goal would be to integrate it into our stack, as it can mimic some of the 802.11s mesh behaviour. But even without magic routing and path discovery, small ad hoc networks can and do work. Do you have a link for Cerebro? Peter ___ Fedora-olpc-list mailing list fedora-olpc-l...@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-olpc-list ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 5:54 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi Ben, Of course, this equation gets still more complicated depending on whether we have MTD or FTL flash. Choosing a filesystem will be an interesting exercise. I think it's clear that we'll be using an FTL of some kind. (Which kind in particular will depend on more testing with the new A-Test board.) So, as a strawman, I'll suggest uncompressed ext2. Depending on the FTL, something else may be more reasonable instead. FWIW, Ubuntu and others which shall remain nameless use a unionfs combining a read-only squashfs for the system code with a writeable uncompressed ext2 filesystem. This seems to combine the best of both worlds, and upgrades just involve swapping out the squashfs file. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
On Sun, 2009-05-17 at 13:54 +0200, Martin Langhoff wrote: Work on getting a top-notch polished $desktop on it, and continued mantainership behind it, and it'll definitely be an option. It's reasonably easy to get desktops going, but good polish making it suitable for end users takes a ton of detailed, subtle work. +1 that +1. I've been working on a ROX setup. It's quite a good fit since it follows the application-directory model so doesn't need to muck with the underlying OS or have extras installed as an even scattering of files throughout the fileSystem. It's been working a while but there's a heap of work to do to make it nice. I'll advocate people using it if and when it's good enough that people go 'Hey! Can I run that too' Things to make it nice for XO usage 4 paged desktops using the Square, Dot, DotDotDot and DotDotDotDotDotDotDotDotDot buttons. Contents of desktops divided by interaction style. (the division is not forced, but guided) A) computer - brain (web browser/ book reader/ videos/ help documentation for (B) ) B) brain - computer (word processor/ Paint/ Coding/ C) Stuff I have(Apps to run, File views) D) quick utilities (things that the user interacts with on a short-term basis, calculator, network view, clock, battery monitor etc.) The frame button has been appropriated to toggle the active window into(and from) fullscreen-undecorated. This works a treat when you want to get down to work. I'm playing with screenlets as system that can aid Desktop (D), My daughter likes the fact that she has a clock with her name on it that she can move around. Screenlets have the potential to be quite kid friendly. Performance wise they are ok on an XO-1, because most don't do a lot of hard work. Hard to day when it comes to memory. Python is already floating around. A lot of this stuff becomes a lot easier with an XO-1.5, but as I expressed when it was first announced, I'm concerned that it has the potential to reduce support for the XO-1. This seems to have happened with the announced software plan. I'd be OK with this if there was a firm line drawn to say that the 1.5 spec was fixed, and a long term solution, there are not yet too many XO-1s out there that they could in-time upgrade. As it stands, it is quite easy to envisage in 5 years time there being little support for the XO-1. ...but why support the 1.5 if XO-2 does the same thing again? Upgrading the base spec every few years leads to the depreciation of the system as support for the older spec declines. Ultimately that means you are asking(whether you realise it or not) for people to buy a new system every few years. Incidentally, Does anyone have a cost breakdown of the XO-1.5, Cheaper, the same, more expensive? I assume someone knows this. Is it something us mere mortals are allowed to know? [well that was a post of two halves] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
On Sun, 2009-05-17 at 13:54 +0200, Martin Langhoff wrote: Work on getting a top-notch polished $desktop on it, and continued mantainership behind it, and it'll definitely be an option. It's reasonably easy to get desktops going, but good polish making it suitable for end users takes a ton of detailed, subtle work. +1 that +1. I've been working on a ROX setup. It's quite a good fit since it follows the application-directory model so doesn't need to muck with the underlying OS or have extras installed as an even scattering of files throughout the fileSystem. It's been working a while but there's a heap of work to do to make it nice. I'll advocate people using it if and when it's good enough that people go 'Hey! Can I run that too' Things to make it nice for XO usage 4 paged desktops using the Square, Dot, DotDotDot and DotDotDotDotDotDotDotDotDot buttons. Contents of desktops divided by interaction style. (the division is not forced, but guided) A) computer - brain (web browser/ book reader/ videos/ help documentation for (B) ) B) brain - computer (word processor/ Paint/ Coding/ C) Stuff I have(Apps to run, File views) D) quick utilities (things that the user interacts with on a short-term basis, calculator, network view, clock, battery monitor etc.) The frame button has been appropriated to toggle the active window into(and from) fullscreen-undecorated. This works a treat when you want to get down to work. I'm playing with screenlets as system that can aid Desktop (D), My daughter likes the fact that she has a clock with her name on it that she can move around. Screenlets have the potential to be quite kid friendly. Performance wise they are ok on an XO-1, because most don't do a lot of hard work. Hard to day when it comes to memory. Python is already floating around. A lot of this stuff becomes a lot easier with an XO-1.5, but as I expressed when it was first announced, I'm concerned that it has the potential to reduce support for the XO-1. This seems to have happened with the announced software plan. I'd be OK with this if there was a firm line drawn to say that the 1.5 spec was fixed, and a long term solution, there are not yet too many XO-1s out there that they could in-time upgrade. As it stands, it is quite easy to envisage in 5 years time there being little support for the XO-1. ...but why support the 1.5 if XO-2 does the same thing again? Upgrading the base spec every few years leads to the depreciation of the system as support for the older spec declines. Ultimately that means you are asking(whether you realise it or not) for people to buy a new system every few years. Incidentally, Does anyone have a cost breakdown of the XO-1.5, Cheaper, the same, more expensive? I assume someone knows this. Is it something us mere mortals are allowed to know? [well that was a post of two halves] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
Hi Ben, Of course, this equation gets still more complicated depending on whether we have MTD or FTL flash. Choosing a filesystem will be an interesting exercise. I think it's clear that we'll be using an FTL of some kind. (Which kind in particular will depend on more testing with the new A-Test board.) So, as a strawman, I'll suggest uncompressed ext2. Depending on the FTL, something else may be more reasonable instead. ext4 has the option to run without a journal now so you'd probably be better using, or as least exploring, that over ext2 as its had quite a few tweaks for SSD etc. Peter ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 7:18 PM, Mitch Bradley w...@laptop.org wrote: Within OLPC, there are proponents/enthusiasts for other distros and window managers (your humble correspondent being one). So it's not like it was a Fedora/Gnome juggernaut. But the people within OLPC who are doing the actual work - and whose butts are on the line for delivering the result on schedule - decided that the F11/Gnome approach had the highest probability of getting us from where we are now +1. This also means that people advocating XFCE and KDE have the door wide open to switch from advocating to building a highly polished spin for 1.5 integrating their desktop of choice. Right now, the shortage of hands to do things is a major factor. If Fedora generally works on 1.5, Gnome will Just Work with no (or minimal) additional effort or QA from us. Work on getting a top-notch polished $desktop on it, and continued mantainership behind it, and it'll definitely be an option. It's reasonably easy to get desktops going, but good polish making it suitable for end users takes a ton of detailed, subtle work. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
On Saturday 16 May 2009 10:48:18 pm Mitch Bradley wrote: The reason why people haven't seen a public discussion about the F11/Gnome thing is because the decision was made internally within OLPC (the hardware organization - not Sugar Labs). OLPC has to ship something on the hardware that we deliver to our volume customers. By far our largest volume comes from the large scale deployments in some South American countries, so those customers influence us far more than anybody else, and especially more than the diffuse community Thanks for the clarification. The choice for pre-load for S-A market makes good sense. I suppose once we get enough machines out and the form factor spreads to more countries, more options will emerge. Subbu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
On Saturday 16 May 2009 01:47:49 am Chris Ball wrote: We have some good news: OLPC has decided to base its software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. (This will mostly be useful for older kids in high school.) I would like to put in a word for KDE desktop given our long term mission, focus on kids' education, and need for small form-factor machines. My intention is not to trigger a Gnome-vs-KDE war. I help many remote rural schools in my locality work with computers and my choice of KDE was purely pragmatic. E.g. - KDE has a much wider target than Gnome including an interest group for K-12 education (see edu.kde.org). Why not work together? - KDE is highly customizable by users (no programming required). It is easy for teachers to use a restrictive profiles (themes) for young children and liberal profiles for elder children. - Sugar can be run as a container Plasmoid (see http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Plasma/Vocabulary). There is no need to switch desktop sessions. Zooming and resolution independence are two bonuses. - Qt (basic toolkit for KDE) is multiplatform and is available even on mobile form factors. It already comes with support for SVG, OpenGL, multilingual support that can help keep suites like Sugar small and clean. - KDE needs lesser RAM leaving more room for apps. All our systems run on 1.6GHz/256MB RAM. Low base RAM becomes important for swapless systems. If the decision has already been locked down, please ignore this mail. Subbu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
Am Freitag, den 15.05.2009, 16:17 -0400 schrieb Chris Ball: We have some good news: OLPC has decided to base its software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. If you say OLPC has decided I wonder who exactly made this decision and when/if it was discussed in public. Can you please point us to the relevant mails, meeting minutes, irc logs or whatever? After Subbu threw his head into the ring for KDE I'd like to do the same for Xfce. * First of all both Gnome and KDE are horribly slow on the XO, Xfce on the other hand is much more lightweight and therefore runs much better. * Xfce already runs on the XO and it's well documented in the OLPC wiki. * Xfce uses much less disk space. For example, with Fedora's base-x group installed the normal Xfce groupinstall will only take ~22 MB while Gnome is ~ 180MB. * Xfce has a kiosk mode to lock down certain desktop settings. This might become very useful. * Xfce has far less strings to translate than other desktop environments. Also they use transifex for translations, which enables many people participate in localization. Transifex also has a cli, so people in countries with slow internet connection don't need to run the full blown web interface. * Xfce uses gtk2, so it fits well with Sugar and killer apps like Firefox, OOo or Gimp. * Xfce 4.6 has a nice release schedule. I have to admit they are not always on time, but it's predictable and won't cause us so much work so we can focus on other things * Xfce has a short dependency chain, so the sugar users don't need to carry a big stack of libs they don't use anyway. Ok, I'll stop here. I'm sure I missed some arguments and I'm also aware of the fact that Xfce may have downsides compared to Gnome or KDE, but I think it's at least worth giving it a try. I'd like to invite all of you to try Xfce 4.6.1 in Fedora 11. Kind regards, Christoph ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
We have some good news: OLPC has decided to base its software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. If you say OLPC has decided I wonder who exactly made this decision and when/if it was discussed in public. Can you please point us to the relevant mails, meeting minutes, irc logs or whatever? I suspect (and the same goes for the post about KDE) that it was/is being discussed at the SugarCamp currently taking place in France. The good thing about it being based on Fedora 11 it will be easy to install XFCE/KDE or what ever each specific deployment wish to use with a simple yum command. I suspect the reason for the choice of gnome is due to the massive cross over of sub systems between gnome and sugar. Many of the underlying systems used in sugar are also components of gnome. Some of these include empathy/gstreamer/evince/abiword/totem etc which will reduce the duplication of duplicate packages required to support both UIs and hence the amount of engineering required by smaller OLPC/sugar teams. Peter ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
Am Samstag, den 16.05.2009, 12:05 +0100 schrieb Peter Robinson: We have some good news: OLPC has decided to base its software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. If you say OLPC has decided I wonder who exactly made this decision and when/if it was discussed in public. Can you please point us to the relevant mails, meeting minutes, irc logs or whatever? I suspect (and the same goes for the post about KDE) that it was/is being discussed at the SugarCamp currently taking place in France. I have to admit that face to face conversations are often more productive than mailing lists, but the downside is that decisions are harder to comprehend. The good thing about it being based on Fedora 11 it will be easy to install XFCE/KDE or what ever each specific deployment wish to use with a simple yum command. I'm afraid with Gnome installed by default there won't be much space left to install anything else. I suspect the reason for the choice of gnome is due to the massive cross over of sub systems between gnome and sugar. Many of the underlying systems used in sugar are also components of gnome. Some of these include empathy/gstreamer/evince/abiword/totem etc which will reduce the duplication of duplicate packages required to support both UIs and hence the amount of engineering required by smaller OLPC/sugar teams. Same goes for Xfce. gstreamer for example is not a Gnome thing. It started that way but the gstreamer devs always point out that it's a generic framework. Abiword or gnumeric are not really Gnome ether, they only use some Gnome libs but don't need a Gnome desktop. So if this really was the line of thought, IMHO it's a little weak. Peter Regards, Christoph ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
We have some good news: OLPC has decided to base its software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. If you say OLPC has decided I wonder who exactly made this decision and when/if it was discussed in public. Can you please point us to the relevant mails, meeting minutes, irc logs or whatever? I suspect (and the same goes for the post about KDE) that it was/is being discussed at the SugarCamp currently taking place in France. I have to admit that face to face conversations are often more productive than mailing lists, but the downside is that decisions are harder to comprehend. The good thing about it being based on Fedora 11 it will be easy to install XFCE/KDE or what ever each specific deployment wish to use with a simple yum command. I'm afraid with Gnome installed by default there won't be much space left to install anything else. I suspect the reason for the choice of gnome is due to the massive cross over of sub systems between gnome and sugar. Many of the underlying systems used in sugar are also components of gnome. Some of these include empathy/gstreamer/evince/abiword/totem etc which will reduce the duplication of duplicate packages required to support both UIs and hence the amount of engineering required by smaller OLPC/sugar teams. Same goes for Xfce. gstreamer for example is not a Gnome thing. It started that way but the gstreamer devs always point out that it's a generic framework. Abiword or gnumeric are not really Gnome ether, they only use some Gnome libs but don't need a Gnome desktop. So if this really was the line of thought, IMHO it's a little weak. I wasn't part of the discussions, nor am I interested in a flame war about the pros and cons of the various desktop environments. I'm also well aware that gstreamer is a generic framework. I have no idea what media framework XFCE uses, I know KDE doesn't use gstreamer which in the KDE case would require having 2 multimedia frameworks installed. Same goes for a word processing package etc etc. My point wasn't whether any of the packages were GNOME or not my point was that both Sugar and GNOME share a number of underlying components such as gstreamer/glib/gtk etc which means its easier to support the two platforms by not needing the time to ship/QA/deal with bugs going forward multiple underlying frameworks and libraries. But again I make the point I'm not part of the discussions of the choice, but was merely making an observation as to what might have been one of the factors of making the choice. Peter ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Christoph Wickert christoph.wick...@googlemail.com wrote: Am Samstag, den 16.05.2009, 12:58 +0100 schrieb Peter Robinson: We have some good news: OLPC has decided to base its software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. If you say OLPC has decided I wonder who exactly made this decision and when/if it was discussed in public. Can you please point us to the relevant mails, meeting minutes, irc logs or whatever? I suspect (and the same goes for the post about KDE) that it was/is being discussed at the SugarCamp currently taking place in France. FWIW, this decision was made through an OLPC-driven process. Those of us attending Sugar Camp read about it and while some of us have participated in discussions on IRC and mailing lists, it is not being discussed/decided here. BTW, it is great to have occasional face-to-face meetings. It is a high-bandwidth medium of exchange. But our decisions are made in public forums. -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
Am Samstag, den 16.05.2009, 08:48 -0400 schrieb Walter Bender: On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Christoph Wickert christoph.wick...@googlemail.com wrote: Am Samstag, den 16.05.2009, 12:58 +0100 schrieb Peter Robinson: We have some good news: OLPC has decided to base its software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. If you say OLPC has decided I wonder who exactly made this decision and when/if it was discussed in public. Can you please point us to the relevant mails, meeting minutes, irc logs or whatever? I suspect (and the same goes for the post about KDE) that it was/is being discussed at the SugarCamp currently taking place in France. FWIW, this decision was made through an OLPC-driven process. Those of us attending Sugar Camp read about it and while some of us have participated in discussions on IRC and mailing lists, it is not being discussed/decided here. So where then? What mailing lists? What OLPC-driven process? This all sounds mysterious to me. BTW, it is great to have occasional face-to-face meetings. It is a high-bandwidth medium of exchange. But our decisions are made in public forums. Great, but I still don't know where these forums are and how I can follow the process of decision-making. -walter Regards, Christoph ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
I'll ask Adam, the OLPC employee who is at the meeting. He may know. -walter On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Christoph Wickert christoph.wick...@googlemail.com wrote: Am Samstag, den 16.05.2009, 08:48 -0400 schrieb Walter Bender: On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 8:08 AM, Christoph Wickert christoph.wick...@googlemail.com wrote: Am Samstag, den 16.05.2009, 12:58 +0100 schrieb Peter Robinson: We have some good news: OLPC has decided to base its software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. If you say OLPC has decided I wonder who exactly made this decision and when/if it was discussed in public. Can you please point us to the relevant mails, meeting minutes, irc logs or whatever? I suspect (and the same goes for the post about KDE) that it was/is being discussed at the SugarCamp currently taking place in France. FWIW, this decision was made through an OLPC-driven process. Those of us attending Sugar Camp read about it and while some of us have participated in discussions on IRC and mailing lists, it is not being discussed/decided here. So where then? What mailing lists? What OLPC-driven process? This all sounds mysterious to me. BTW, it is great to have occasional face-to-face meetings. It is a high-bandwidth medium of exchange. But our decisions are made in public forums. Great, but I still don't know where these forums are and how I can follow the process of decision-making. -walter Regards, Christoph ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Why not Xfce? (was: Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.)
On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Christoph Wickert christoph.wick...@googlemail.com wrote: I'm afraid with Gnome installed by default there won't be much space left to install anything else. The DebXO Gnome install size is ~ 1.5 GB, which would leave 2.5 GB or ~ 60% free disk space. (Remember this whole discussion is about the XO 1.5) bp ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Chris Ball wrote: We have some good news: OLPC has decided to base its software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. (This will mostly be useful for older kids in high school.) I'm particularly happy about this plan because it will allow us to catch up with the awesome work present in the Sugar community's most recent release, Sugar 0.84, as well as merging the latest Fedora work and including GNOME into the mix for the first time. The new machines will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough room for both environments at once. This raises an interesting question: should we still be using a compressed filesystem? On the XO-1, an uncompressed FS was essentially not an option. There would be almost no space left for users' files after the uncompressed system files. Unfortunately, this causes tremendous slowdowns all over the system, as it causes reads from flash to (a) be CPU-limited, and (b) compete with the rest of the system for CPU time. Writes are even worse. On the 1.5, we will have more space (so less need for compression), but more system files, and also more CPU to handle it. I think we should remember to test the final images both with and without compression. Of course, this equation gets still more complicated depending on whether we have MTD or FTL flash. Choosing a filesystem will be an interesting exercise. - --Ben -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.11 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkoO7LkACgkQUJT6e6HFtqTH/QCfYUitcwLq8bTF2E1g+rbwyfa8 t1sAoIcQ0FXXm16GlFriJ1A2n+Bv4Fe1 =v9fu -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: We have some good news: OLPC has decided to base its software release for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11. Unlike previous releases, we plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead. (This will mostly be useful for older kids in high school.) We shall see at what age it becomes practical to introduce children to Gnome. I'm looking forward to the experiment. I'm particularly happy about this plan because it will allow us to catch up with the awesome work present in the Sugar community's most recent release, Sugar 0.84, as well as merging the latest Fedora work and including GNOME into the mix for the first time. The new machines will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough room for both environments at once. We think we'll need to use our own kernel and initrd, but the other base packages we expect to need are present in Fedora already, including Sugar; in fact, we already have an F11+Sugar+GNOME build for the XO-1 using pure Fedora packages. That build will get better as a result of this work (although OLPC's focus will be on getting the XO-1.5 running) and it will form the basis for the XO-1.5 build. If you're interested in contributing, we'd certainly love your help, and you can find us on the fedora-olpc mailing list¹, and freenode IRC's #fedora-olpc channel. Our existing F11 build images for the XO-1 are here², and we'll soon begin publishing images for the XO-1.5 too. XO-1.5 beta machines will start to be manufactured over the next few months, and will be available to contributors as part of our Contributors Program³ once the hardware's up and running. In the meantime, are there instructions anywhere for setting up these builds in VirtualBox? Finally, thanks are due to the volunteer Fedora packagers and testers who helped us get to the point of being able to commit to Fedora 11 for this new build, in particular: Fabian Affolter, Kushal Das, Greg DeKoenigsberg, Martin Dengler, Scott Douglass, Sebastian Dziallas, Mikus Grinbergs, Bryan Kearney, Gary C. Martin, Steven M. Parrish, and Peter Robinson. Thanks! +1 - Chris, for the OLPC techteam. ¹: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-olpc-list ²: http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/ ³: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
If you're interested in contributing, we'd certainly love your help, and you can find us on the fedora-olpc mailing list¹, and freenode IRC's #fedora-olpc channel. Our existing F11 build images for the XO-1 are here², and we'll soon begin publishing images for the XO-1.5 too. XO-1.5 beta machines will start to be manufactured over the next few months, and will be available to contributors as part of our Contributors Program³ once the hardware's up and running. In the meantime, are there instructions anywhere for setting up these builds in VirtualBox? probably the best place to start is the sugar on a stick liveCD or Chris's rawhide-xo builds. In a week or so (May 25th from memory) Fedora 11 will be out and an install of that with the gnome and sugar desktops installed will be a good start. Peter ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 11:21 AM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: If you're interested in contributing, we'd certainly love your help, and you can find us on the fedora-olpc mailing list¹, and freenode IRC's #fedora-olpc channel. Our existing F11 build images for the XO-1 are here², and we'll soon begin publishing images for the XO-1.5 too. XO-1.5 beta machines will start to be manufactured over the next few months, and will be available to contributors as part of our Contributors Program³ once the hardware's up and running. In the meantime, are there instructions anywhere for setting up these builds in VirtualBox? probably the best place to start is the sugar on a stick liveCD or Chris's rawhide-xo builds. In a week or so (May 25th from memory) Fedora 11 will be out and an install of that with the gnome and sugar desktops installed will be a good start. Peter On checking further at http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/, I saw the instructions for qemu, sudo qemu-kvm -cdrom 20090217.iso so I can start in VirtualBox in the same way. -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
Hi Ben, Of course, this equation gets still more complicated depending on whether we have MTD or FTL flash. Choosing a filesystem will be an interesting exercise. I think it's clear that we'll be using an FTL of some kind. (Which kind in particular will depend on more testing with the new A-Test board.) So, as a strawman, I'll suggest uncompressed ext2. Depending on the FTL, something else may be more reasonable instead. - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: The XO-1.5 software plan.
On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 10:54 PM, Chris Ball c...@laptop.org wrote: Hi Ben, Of course, this equation gets still more complicated depending on whether we have MTD or FTL flash. Choosing a filesystem will be an interesting exercise. I think it's clear that we'll be using an FTL of some kind. (Which kind in particular will depend on more testing with the new A-Test board.) So, as a strawman, I'll suggest uncompressed ext2. Depending on the FTL, something else may be more reasonable instead. This is what I've been using on SD cards, USB drives, etc, with some success. Seems stable enough, while helping out with wear. Ext3 might be used with some tweaks: http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/01/ssds-journaling-and-noatimerelatime/ From my experience XFS is more efficient for filesystems of only 4GB but would completely wear out flash a lot faster. Depending on the number of files you have, you may run out of inodes or space with ext2/3, while XFS, for instance, can make a better use of each block and dynamically allocate inodes. I had a particular Gentoo install of about 2.8GB that couldn't fit in a 4GB USB drive with ext3 due to the number of files used (especially due to portage, lack of inodes IIRC). XFS saved me about 300-400MB of space and managed to fit everything there. It was slower as it was constantly optimizing the usage of blocks and was unusable on this particular drive due to the low random writes. Had to switch to an 8GB device with ext2, which was at least an order of magnitude faster. I have no idea if ext4 or something else are a better fit for this kind of applications. My current XO is running a Gentoo install with portage read-only as a squashfs image, which takes up only 40MB, easily fitting the install in the 4GB SD card with ext2. No problems until now, haven't noticed any corruption although it does get rather slow when it needs to write many files at once. Best regards, Tiago Marques - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
