Test release of multicast NAND updater
http://dev.laptop.org/~wmb/q2e22a.rom This firmware contains a test version of the multicast NAND update utility. It can clone an XO's NAND image onto any number of other XO's simultaneously. (It can also send NAND images from USB sticks,etc, but I'm not ready for people to begin testing that yet.) It uses the mesh as a fast broadcast medium by setting time-to-live=1 so packets don't get forwarded. You don't need an access point at all, just two or more XOs. The primary use case is for updating a very large number of machines at once, in an dedicated area like a warehouse. Think of a country trying to update 50,000 machines by next week, in time for school to start. The current version only works on unsecure machines, and only for unpartitioned NAND images. Both of those limitations are on my list to fix. I'm also going to improve the user interface a lot. But for now, I'd like to get some feedback on how well the current version works for people in different RF environments. Here's how to use it: a) Pick a wireless channel that is relatively clear (1, 6, or 11), using whatever technique you prefer. b) On the machine whose NAND you want to send, type: ok ether-clone6 (or ether-clone1, or ether-clone11, according to which channel you want to use) c) On the receiving machines, type: ok enand6 (or enand1 or enand11) The sending machine will send continuously, over and over, until you power it off. The receiving machines can be started at any time in any order. It should be possible to have an arbitrary number of receivers, as the data traffic is strictly one-way. When a receiving machine starts, it may say something like: 1083 need 93 1084 need 30 The first number (e.g. 1083) is the block number. The number after need is the number of data packets that are missing for that block. A few - 2 or 3 - such lines is normal because the receiver drops a few packets when it is preparing all its initial data structures. The missing packets will be collected the next time around. After the first few blocks, on my setup (quiet RF environment), packet loss is very rare. I'd be interested to hear your results. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Test release of multicast NAND updater
Test 3, a different place, B4 acting as sender, five C2 as receiver, channel 1, four C2 updated fine in one or two passes. The C2 that I mentioned before is continuing to give trouble. Same symptom occurs, usually between 20 and 200 blocks after starting. Have tried varying position, channel, temperature, battery presence, remove all power, USB load, screen brightness, but no change to symptom. I suspect something wrong with the unit, but I can't pin it down. (This same unit when it arrived last week with a prior G1G1 OS build on it wasn't able to activate wireless. After I had upgraded it to 757 it was able to. That's just additional correlation.) The unit works fine now after I flashed it with 757 from a USB key. -- James Cameronmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://quozl.netrek.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Major differences between releases
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 16:20, Morgan Collett [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 21:43, C. Scott Ananian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think it would be a good idea for everyone (activity authors in particular) to cross-check the changes in what packages are included in the new stable release, in particular what packages are *going away*: http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/update.1-8.2.html That list is slightly misleading, as it includes several cases where two packages were folded into one or a package was renamed. Others changes are inherited from the F7-F9 transition -- does anyone know if Fedora documents API changes between releases of Fedora? Also, is there any chance someone will take on http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4695 (Document API changes between Ship.1 and Update.1 and 8.2) after the release before working on the next one? I did see an email from morgs recently mentioning his interest in documenting sugar API changes? Heh, I did volunteer to broadcast known API changes far and wide, but I'll take a look at Sugar API changes as I'm aware of a few of those. (Don't let that stop anyone else from looking into other APIs though!) I've started http://wiki.laptop.org/go/API_changes to track Sugar and system API changes between releases. It's not very comprehensive so far - contributions welcome. Regards Morgan ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Wrapping Sugar activities for other desktops
On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 5:00 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sounds good, it's on the list of the things I'd really like to do but I'm too swamped to put focus on :( Ah, great to hear I'm not so lost in the woods! - journal behaviour - though it might be relatively simple Not sure about this one... Do we want to make a journal activity available or to provide compatibility with posix? Well, our journal use model says that the document is picked before the app is called, so if we support $ sugar-wrapper Write.xo mydocument.rtf then we're done. (Again, I might be extraordinarily naive about this :-) ). - naming documents that the user hasn't named explicitly Depends on what we want to do for the previous point. We can keep this part super-simple - save to a predefined directory - add something unique (timestamp? random string?) to the generic name if the user hasn't put a name in WRT random strings, one thing I've done in the past is to have a dictionary of safe words in the local language. Names of fruits, colours, simple nouns and adjectives, etc. And grab from there instead of using a fullblown random string. It is still random, but enormously more user-friendly :-) - the initial steps of sharing a collaborative activity (announcement, invites, etc) Maybe make the mesh view available as a standalone application? Yeah - perhaps something that looks and smells a lot like an IM window + desktop panel widget that knows how to blink and jump when you get an invite... - cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- 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: Test release of multicast NAND updater
Worked great. Test 1, C2 as sender, channel 1, B4 as receiver, C2 copy-nand'd from os757.img, broadcast update worked fine, only three lost packets, and that was as I was handling the receiving unit. On the next run through the sequence numbers the missing packets were picked up, the NAND was updated, and the B4 booted normally, and did first-boot sugar name prompting. Test 2, same C2 as sender, but restarted, four C2 units as receiver, all receivers started first, then sender started. Three units captured the whole stream in two passes, wrote NAND. One unit stalled with this on display: ok enand1 Boot device: /dropin-fs:mcastnand Arguments: ether: 1 /nandflash Waiting for server Expecting 2389 blocks, 236511 total packets (99 ppb) need 24 0002 need 12 0003_ (where _ represents the block cursor) It did not budge despite (a) the sender cycling through block 3 again, and (b) the unit being moved right next to the sender. No keyboard input did anything. I power cycled, and did the enand1 again, and it worked fine. Can Q2E22A be used on B2? ;-) General comment ... starting an enand1 while a broadcast is already in progress ... seems to generate two three need responses. Tried this five times. Feels like a settling issue. You did mention it. It makes a single-pass problematic, but since the sender loops, no biggie. -- James Cameronmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://quozl.netrek.org/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
new journal
Hi Scott, do you have any news for us about the work on your journal+datastore replacement? Thanks, Tomeu ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [sugar] Wrapping Sugar activities for other desktops
On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 7:32 AM, Martin Langhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thinking about how to extend the appeal (and long term viability!) of sugar activities, one thing that appears as a clear opportunity is to create a wrapper that allows to run sugar activities in a conventional gnome/kde/xfce/awesome desktop. Sounds good, it's on the list of the things I'd really like to do but I'm too swamped to put focus on :( It could open a regular window (instead of the root window), and mimick the minimal set of Sugar facilities that activities depend on. An activity is a regular window already. It's just the wm which displays it fullscreen. So we should be fine there. Perhaps a thinner, lighter set of classes providing the sugar api (add the path to these shim libraries early in the python path to mask the full blown sugar libs). Right now, if I install on ubuntu sugar-activities, I get turteart, but I can only use it inside sugar-emulator. If we had such a shim so that $ sugar-wrapper turtleart would start turtleart in a regular window, then that command can be given an icon in my gnome menu, kde's kickstart menu, etc. Yeah, you would need a little script to bridge to our non-standard activity launching stuff. Another approach might be to make it more standard or to brige it directly with desktop files. Of course there are some hard things - clipboard support probably needs glue You should be fine here, we use standard X stuff. - journal behaviour - though it might be relatively simple Not sure about this one... Do we want to make a journal activity available or to provide compatibility with posix? - naming documents that the user hasn't named explicitly Depends on what we want to do for the previous point. - the initial steps of sharing a collaborative activity (announcement, invites, etc) Maybe make the mesh view available as a standalone application? Marco ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
[Server-devel] A moodle rpm postinst issue with Pg
One thing I discovered -- and will have to fix -- is that the Moodle rpm assumed that postgres is running during postinst. This is clearly not the case when we're installing/upgrading via anaconda, so I'll have to move that to the init script. Nothing major -- we're getting close :-) m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] Anaconda installs OOM with selinux-policy-targeted rpm from F9 updates
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Martin Langhoff wrote: One the last rounds of testing the new release of OLPCXS, I rebuilt it with fresh packages from F9 update and started testing the installer. Funny thing, the install did not complete -- instead, the machine would switch off after spending a few minutes trying to install selinux-policy-targeted. After a few attempts to diagnose the problem, I managed to see vmstat go all the way down to almost 0 memory just before the machine turned itself off. This particular machine has ~980MB RAM available to the OS. Tested on another machine with a proper 1GB memory, vmstat hit bottom at ~10MB free while installing selinux-policy-targeted but quickly recovered. I know I've installed earlier F9 based spins on machines with 512 MB of physical RAM so this seems like a fairly bad regression, specially considering that I'll soon need to install this on a machine with 256MB RAM. So I suspect we have 2 problems - Selinux-policy-targeted instalation seems to have balooned into a memory hog between f9-release and f9-updates - Anaconda OOMs without a warning or useful message to the user Has anyone else seen this? Diagnostics to recommend? I can successfully log anything to disk until moments before the OOM shutdown. Will post version numbers of the selinux rpm tomorrow when I get back in front of the offending machine and installer image. Apologies for the vagueness :-) cheers, m selinux-policy-targeted is a memory hog, but it should not have changed that drastically in updates. Is this repeatable? -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkkUVZQACgkQrlYvE4MpobNfJQCgkYO4qEHY74KbRuTHrM16FgNg F7MAn2IK03lRzhhBO4RfMSs57ysHfY/L =QegF -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
Re: [Server-devel] Anaconda installs OOM with selinux-policy-targeted rpm from F9 updates
On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 01:13:38AM -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote: One the last rounds of testing the new release of OLPCXS, I rebuilt it with fresh packages from F9 update and started testing the installer. Funny thing, the install did not complete -- instead, the machine would switch off after spending a few minutes trying to install selinux-policy-targeted. After a few attempts to diagnose the problem, I managed to see vmstat go all the way down to almost 0 memory just before the machine turned itself off. This particular machine has ~980MB RAM available to the OS. Tested on another machine with a proper 1GB memory, vmstat hit bottom at ~10MB free while installing selinux-policy-targeted but quickly recovered. I know I've installed earlier F9 based spins on machines with 512 MB of physical RAM so this seems like a fairly bad regression, specially considering that I'll soon need to install this on a machine with 256MB RAM. So I suspect we have 2 problems - Selinux-policy-targeted instalation seems to have balooned into a memory hog between f9-release and f9-updates - Anaconda OOMs without a warning or useful message to the user Has anyone else seen this? Diagnostics to recommend? I can successfully log anything to disk until moments before the OOM shutdown. Did you configure any swap ? If no, then there's really not much that we can do if something uses more than available system RAM. If you did, it might be interesting to try (from tty2) echo 1 /proc/sys/vm/would_have_oomkilled That will prevent the actually 'killing', but will still log all the same output that the oomkiller would have spewed. It might be interesting to see that output. If you're drastically low enough on memory to invoke an OOM kill though, setting that sysctl may just mean the system livelocks. Dave -- http://www.codemonkey.org.uk ___ Server-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
MPP with two XOs and a pppd via GPRS
I have two XOs (XO#1 and XO#2) with build 767. XO#1 is connected using wvdial (pppd) over GPRS. I am using Vodafone's service in India. By itself, XO#1 gets online. I do have to add the nameserver to /etc/resolv.conf but other than that, it works. When I try to set XO#1 as a MPP using the mpp.py script from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Modem#How_to_share_internet_among_other_XOs I get an error related to iptables the first time. On a second attempt, I get no errors and the mpp.py script seems to do its magic. olpc-netstatus reveals that XO#1 is in MPP mode. XO#2 cycles through the 3 channels and finally settles at mesh 1 (same as the MPP XO#1) but does not say XO Mesh. XO#2 says Simple mesh and fails to get online via XO#1. Adding the nameserver t0 XO#2 does not help. Any pointers? Sameer -- Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Systems San Francisco State University San Francisco CA 94132 USA http://verma.sfsu.edu/ http://opensource.sfsu.edu/ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
