Re: Sugar & XFCE (melting treacle)

[John Gilmore]

> That doesn't change the fact that using the XO is like walking neck deep
> in treacle.  ...  The real problem there is it's
> hard to isolate the slowness, I think largely due to the fact that the
> problems aren't isolated.
> 
> Is there any central repository for information about where the speed is
> going?

Nope.  You could create one in the Wiki trivially, though.

The team has been working so hard to just get the major bugs out of
the XO's features, that it hasn't had much time to work on performance.

Many of the XO's performance problems appear to be caused by system-level
impacts of how local technical choices combine.  For example, using a
compressed filesystem makes it expensive in CPU cyles to page in
executables -- yet the limited RAM and lack of swap space causes a
lot of memory pressure, so the VM throws away read-only executable pages
because it knows it can page them in again later.

If I was working on this, I'd try:

  *  Putting a swap partition on an SD card and seeing what it does
 for performance
  *  Building an un-compressed JFFS2 filesystem (it's trivial with the
 tools used) and seeing what it does for performance
  *  Running "prelink" to avoid dirtying pages for shared libraries
 (reducing memory pressure) and see what it does for performance
  *  Working on glibc and other popular libraries in the XO to reduce
 their dirty memory page footprint (it's huge and doesn't need to be)
  *  Fixing bug #4680 in PyGTK+, which causes every multithreaded Python GTK+
 program to uselessly poll ten times a second.
  *  Replacing Sugar with Gnome, KDE, or other GUIs and seeing what it does for
 performance.

Each of these are independent actions that can probably combine
synergistically.  Each takes different expertise and effort.  And the
hardest effort of all is the "seeing what it does for performance" --
making a test framework that can be used to evaluate proposed
improvements, to see if they really DO improve things.  Tools that
watch /proc/*/smaps would be useful in this -- but also, tools that
just run a standard set of activities and feed them test input, and measure
how long it all takes (and whether the right answers come out!).

(This leaves aside network performance issues -- like what makes it
impossible to run 30 XO's in a room on a mesh channel -- but this
msg is too long already.)

John
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New joyride build 2575

[Build Announcer v2]

http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2575

Changes in build 2575 from build: 2574

Size delta: -0.13M

-sugar-evince-python 2.24.1-1.fc9
+sugar-evince-python 2.24.1-1.olpc4
-dbus-x11 1.2.4-1.fc10
+dbus-x11 1.2.6-1.fc10
-db4 4.7.25-5.fc10
+db4 4.7.25-6.fc10
-dbus 1.2.4-1.fc10
+dbus 1.2.6-1.fc10
-dbus-libs 1.2.4-1.fc10
+dbus-libs 1.2.6-1.fc10
-dhclient 12:4.0.0-30.fc10
+dhclient 12:4.0.0-32.fc10
-hal-info 20081022-1.fc10
+hal-info 20081022-2.fc10
-libdhcp4client 12:4.0.0-30.fc10
+libdhcp4client 12:4.0.0-32.fc10
-libglade2 2.6.3-1.fc10
+libglade2 2.6.3-2.fc10
-libgnomecanvas 2.20.1.1-2.fc9
+libgnomecanvas 2.20.1.1-4.fc10
-libraw1394 2.0.0-3.fc10
+libraw1394 2.0.0-4.fc10
-libsoup 2.24.1-1.fc10
+libsoup 2.24.2.1-1.fc10
-libv4l 0.5.6-1.fc10
+libv4l 0.5.7-1.fc10
-libwnck 2.24.1-1.fc10
+libwnck 2.24.2-1.fc10
-pango 1.22.1-1.fc10
+pango 1.22.3-1.fc10
-perl 4:5.10.0-49.fc10
+perl 4:5.10.0-51.fc10
-perl-Module-Pluggable 1:3.60-49.fc10
+perl-Module-Pluggable 1:3.60-51.fc10
-perl-Pod-Escapes 1:1.04-49.fc10
+perl-Pod-Escapes 1:1.04-51.fc10
-perl-Pod-Simple 1:3.07-49.fc10
+perl-Pod-Simple 1:3.07-51.fc10
-perl-libs 4:5.10.0-49.fc10
+perl-libs 4:5.10.0-51.fc10
-perl-version 3:0.74-49.fc10
+perl-version 3:0.74-51.fc10
-rpm 4.6.0-0.rc1.7
+rpm 4.6.0-0.rc1.8
-rpm-libs 4.6.0-0.rc1.7
+rpm-libs 4.6.0-0.rc1.8
-rpm-python 4.6.0-0.rc1.7
+rpm-python 4.6.0-0.rc1.8
-sugar-evince 2.24.1-1.fc9
+sugar-evince 2.24.1-1.olpc4

--- Changes for sugar-evince-python 2.24.1-1.olpc4 from 2.24.1-1.fc9 ---
  + Add support for links in the python bindings

--- Changes for libgnomecanvas 2.20.1.1-4.fc10 from 2.20.1.1-2.fc9 ---
  + Use 'Requires: libglade2 >= 2.6.3-2' to prevent unowned
  + Disown %{_libdir}/libglade and %{_libdir}/libglade/2.0, and add

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Re: Sugar & XFCE

[Neil Graham]

On Fri, 2008-12-05 at 19:37 +0800, Carlos Nazareno wrote:
> These days, 433MHz may seem unusable to the average Moore's
> law-spoiled user, but it was more than enough for me who grew up on a
> 4.77MHz 8088 as a kid (yeah, that's nothing to you guys over here who
> are older :P), a Pentium 166 MMX with 64MB RAM in college during the
> late 90s, and then an AMD K6-2 500 w/ 256MB RAM as my primary
> workstation during the early 2000's.
> 
> That K6-2 500 w/ 256MB RAM's specs are practically the same as the
> XO's and performs more or less the same as proven by this circa 2003
> experiment of mine: http://www.object404.com/lab/aquarium.php -- it
> runs at practically the same speed on the XO as my aforementioned K6-2
> Win98 rig


That doesn't change the fact that using the XO is like walking neck deep
in treacle. 

I absolutely agree that the machine is up to doing good performance.  It
dismays me to see things like the scrolling of a static web page in
browse can't keep up with keypresses.  The real problem there is it's
hard to isolate the slowness, I think largely due to the fact that the
problems aren't isolated.

Is there any central repository for information about where the speed is
going?

I'd like to help out here, and I've tried, but it has been very
difficult.  When looking at things I have encountered things like "Why
don't you use [thing], that should do it the best way" only to find
[thing] needs help from an experienced [thing] hacker to work
efficiently in this case.

Much of the time [thing] has been cairo or X. but I think that's only
because of the areas I've tried to work.

I'm still reminded of using GEOworks Ensemble on a 286. It could do so
much with so little and the XO seems to do so little with so much more.

Not blaming anyone in particular, but I've been trying to work on this
stuff and I have to vent my frustration every six months or so.


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Re: Fedora 10 on XO

[Sebastian Silva]

+1
In fact, to be specific, here in Perú, the former president of APESOL
(Peruvian Free Software Association) is sometimes quoted as saying
OLPC is pretty cool except for Sugar. I've seen this attitude among
many geeks here. That is fine, for it was not designed with them in
mind. Still, if a simple nice .xfce4/ is all it takes for a fair
comparison, sounds like a simple task any geek can do (thus the
serious proposal to ask OLPCNews).

2008/12/4 Jameson Quinn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I'm in xubuntu (xfce) right now, and it is noticeably faster on my 1.2 GHz
> machine than Gnome (same kernel and everything). It also has network
> manager, automount, graphical control panels, all the mod cons. I'd say that
> if we could get something roughly nearing this level, then XFCE is probably
> the best choice, for speed.
>
> A good fraction of this work would be perfect for a newbie volunteer.
> Getting the volume control working, choosing how to trim the fat from F10,
> most of that kind of stuff is the kind of linux install fiddling that many
> people who aren't even ultra-hackers have been doing for decades now. If we
> got something working well and looking good, even using a handmade install
> that was well documented in somebody's blog, it would be a good first step.
>
> I bet if we posted to OLPCNews with the truth - there are definitely going
> to be, and probably already are, some countries that are scared of pure
> sugar, and are considering dual boot, but would be mollified by a nice
> polished XFCE/sugar dual-desktop - we would have new volunteers aplenty.
> I'll let the discussion run and hope someone else will do the honors of
> writing a page on the wiki and a call-out to OLPCNews, but I can do it if
> others agree it's a good idea.
>
> Jameson
>
> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 9:28 PM, Chris Ball <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>>   > debxo manages to fit a gnome build in a small enough space to fit
>>   > on the NAND
>>
>> I agree that there exist smaller distributions than Fedora 10, but that
>> doesn't make F10 one of them (yet).  Still, it's nice to have a proof of
>> concept, and the delta of debxo's gnome.img - sugar.img (80M) tells us
>> that we might be able to get something acceptable, perhaps requiring
>> some package rework.
>>
>> Then we'd just need to turn Scott's Sugar+XFCE into a Sugar+GNOME,
>> and work out how much space we can use for GNOME apps..
>>
>> - Chris.
>> --
>> Chris Ball   <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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>



-- 
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Iniciativa FuenteLibre
http://blog.sebastiansilva.com/
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Re: Emulating 8.2-767

[Joshua Minor]

This is great.  Thank you so much for making this work in VMWare  
again.  Most of the stuff I tried worked just like on my XO.  Record  
sort of works with the iSight on my iMac (the full preview is black,  
but it still records video).  Also, olpcgames seems confused about the  
screen size, so Maze is rendered too large.  I'll see if I can track  
this down.

It would be great if VMware hosted this image on their Virtual  
Appliance Marketplace http://www.vmware.com/appliances/index.html   
They already have pre-made images for Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE,  
OpenSolaris, etc.  I didn't see a way to upload new images, but maybe  
I missed it.

-josh

On Dec 3, 2008, at 8:43 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> even with XOs readily available now there are quite a lot of reasons
> why one would want to emulate it on another machine. One being to hook
> up a projector. Unfortunately there are quite a number of hoops (*)
> one has to jump through to make it work.
>
> Anyway, I made a virtual machine that allows me to emulate the XO on
> my Mac, running Sugar in the XO's native 1200x900 resolution, scaled
> down to a nice physical size in a window an my regular screen
> (fullscreen works too). Sound works (even Tam Tam), Browse works (so
> networking is good, although I don't see anyone in the neighborhood).
> Camera and mic are not working (Measure crashes, Record shows blank
> picture), and a "Sugar restart" does not actually restart Sugar, but
> apart from that it seems fully functional, and much nicer than the
> emulations I had used to date.
>
> These are live-sized screenshots (calibrated using the Ruler  
> activity):
>
> http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/Ruler-emulated.png
> http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/Home-emulated.png
> http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/Journal-emulated.png
> http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/TamTamMini-emulated.png
>
> And here you can get that virtual machine (665 MB, 2 GB unzipped):
>
> http://dev.laptop.org/~bert/VMWare-Fusion-8.2-767-bf.zip
>
> This is for VMWare Fusion on the Mac, which I found to be much better
> at running Linux clients than Parallels (I had been using that for 2
> years). Give it a try, it's free as in beer for 30 days. No I don't
> get paid if you buy it.
>
> If you extract the disk image from the zip file it might work in
> VMWare on Windows. Maybe someone can make an appliance from that.
>
> (*)
> Now to the hoops:
>
> * I started with the 767/ext3 image from
>   http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/
> * extended to 2 GB by appending /dev/zero
>   (jffs2 compression gives roughly 2 GB too)
> * enlarged the partition to full 2 GB
>   (using fdisk and ext2resize)
> * mounted that in a Fedora 10 virtual machine
> * copied over the F10 kernel, initrd, and modules
>   (olpc kernel wanted AMD instructions)
> * edited grub.conf to use that kernel
> * and appended a root=/dev/sda1 kernel arg
>   (the fedora kernel wants to use LVM otherwise)
> * unmounted
> * created new virtual machine
>   (that disk, 1 CPU, 256 MB RAM, NAT networking)
> * booted into that new system
> * installed Perl
>   (for vmware tools installer)
> * installed vmware tools
>   (to get the X driver)
>   (but none of the kernel modules, would need make/gcc/etc.)
> * deleted Perl
>   (to restore the default sw environment)
> * copied the existing xorg-vmware.conf to xorg.conf
>   (to get 1200x900 resolution w/ 200 dpi)
> * booted into Sugar
>   (looks really nice so scaled down)
> * installed activities
>   (took a long time, maybe it's my DSL)
> * tested a bit
> * rm -r ~olpc/.sugar
>   (to remove my personal data)
> * should have deleted sshd host keys, too, but didn't
> * shut down
> * zip
> * upload
> * ...
> * ...
> * ...
> * still no profit? ;)
>
> Enjoy.
>
> And maybe remove some of the obstacles in future releases (a disk
> image with headroom and a standard kernel would be simple to do and go
> a long way).
>
> - Bert -
>
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Re: Sugar & XFCE

[Carlos Nazareno]

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 4:35 AM, Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Hi Edward!

>> 1) The Journal / lack of a real file manager:
> Simple remedy/workaround:
> In Terminal,
> yum install mc

Yes, I know about running midnight commander from the terminal and
have been using it for months now, but it is a "workaround". It is not
a replacement for a more modern file manager like that windows-like
UIs provide. It is neither a remedy nor a workaround because it
requires the user to drop to the terminal instead of it being just
launched from the Sugar UI.

Besides, doing "outside Sugar" file manipulation wreaks havoc on the
file indices the journal builds on local NAND and USB/sticks/memory
cards so this is very much problematic.

>> a) accumulation of too many no longer needed journal entries over time
>> which makes usage difficult
> Known issue. Alternatives in development.

Yeah, I gather from my Journal feedback a couple of months back. Just
mentioned these issues again as a refresher as to why the journal
needs more improvement in practice.

>> c) the difficulty in transferring multiple files, requiring the
>> terminal or MC to do extensive file transferring
> See file system workaround above.

Again it's a hacky-workaround but not a solution since it fails at
usability and built-in system integration.

>> 2) Apps need to be sugarized.
> Known issue. Alternatives in development.

News to me. Fantastic! :)

> This is not the purpose of the program. It is an education project,
> not a laptop or Linux marketing project. But there are workarounds for
> you. Just install one of the standard Linux distributions as an
> alternate boot on your XO. Or run Sugar on some other Linux system.

I'm afraid those are not an options for me as I signed on to test and
help develop edugames and to do a study on how to best author/develop
apps in Flash to run on the XO, and so I need to work within
"officially supported" OLPC frameworks on the XO as much as possible.

Our project proposal got approved by 1CC and we received 3 XO units towards it:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Projects/Flash_As_EduGaming_Platform

I'm still currently doing the rounds coordinating with fellow Flash
Actionscript developers here in the Philippines and doing testing and
investigation, after which, we'll invite other Flash developers
worldwide to contribute to the project.

> No Ministry of Education can put unsecured laptops in the hands of all
> of the children of a country. It is politically impossible. It is
> impossible to teach regular Linux to first-graders.
Regular Linux = terminal.

Gnome/KDE/XFCE = not regular linux! = noob friendlier than regular linux

With regards to traditional desktops, you'd be surprised at what young
kids are capable of.

Have proper extensive comparative usability studies been done on how
the XO's target demographic copes with Sugar and other traditional
GUIs?

> Software for elementary schools must be specially written regardless. Case 
> closed.

Precisely! And that's why we need to make writing software content for
the XO much easier than the current process.

> We need to get Ministries of Education to contract with textbook
> writers and software developers for materials that meet their needs.
> We have had this problem since the beginnings of Computer Literacy in
> the 1970s, that everybody thinks they can pay for computers, and
> nothing else is needed--no teacher training, no specifically
> educational software, no integration with curriculum, no new
> textbooks--nothing. But they go right on paying print publishers for
> textbooks that completely fail to meet the children's needs.

Spot-on! THIS is the bigger and more relevant concern I see facing
OLPC and any other e/i/m-learning initiative.

I've begun talking with some of my old professors at Ateneo de Manila
University (http://www.ateneo.edu) and maybe coordinate with the other
top Universities about possible creation of content/open courseware
that can freely be distributed (copyright concerns: we can't just scan
existing textbooks and slap them onto the XO as PDFs) in the context
of the Philippine education setting.

>> The main difference was that back then in 2003 on my K6-2 Win98 rig, I
>> was running the Flash MX IDE, a text editor, the Opera 6 browser with
>> about 20 browser tabs open, Winamp and that CPU & Memory hog: Norton
>> Internet Security (antivirus + firewall) simultaneously.
>>
>> Barring virtual memory/swap space I don't see any reason why can't we
>> get similar performance out of the XO.
>
> You have hit on the essence of the problem. We are not going to run
> swap from flash memory. %-[ We may need to have a word with that
> fellow Moore about a $10 hard drive that draws less than a watt. ^_^

SD-cards are pretty affordable these days to the point that it becomes
trivial compared to the price of an XO (well, at least over here,
where we're near to Taiwan and China :P).

Any chance work can be done on the core OS using additional

Re: [Localization] [sugar] [Proposal] .xot bundles for translations

[Alexander Dupuy]

Martin Langhoff wrote:
> Using rpm or apt Sugar would getting a bit further away from Windows
> (does cygwin carry either?) - a bit less so on OSX (where the fink
> toolchain will probably work alright, specially with translation pkgs,
> which are by definition "noarch").
>   

I don't think that this necessarily prevents the possibility of OSX 
support via fink, but it's worth remembering that translation packages 
are not 'by definition "noarch"' - if the packages contain compiled 
gettext .mo files, those files may be machine-specific.  As noted in 
http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/gettext/MO-Files.html

> The first two words serve the identification of the file. The magic 
> number will always signal GNU MO files. The number is stored in the 
> byte order of the generating machine, so the magic number really is 
> two numbers: |0x950412de| and |0xde120495|. 
> The |msgfmt| program has an option selecting the alignment for MO file 
> strings. With this option, each string is separately aligned so it 
> starts at an offset which is a multiple of the alignment value. On 
> some RISC machines, a correct alignment will speed things up.

In practice, it seems that the GNU gettext utils will support either 
endianness, and generate little-endian .mo files regardless of host 
byte-order (the discussion thread at 
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=468209 is informative 
here) so that you can get away with treating .mo files as noarch, but 
you might not want to do so in some cases (notably, for the discussion 
in that bug report, on slow-CPU (e.g. embedded) big-endian devices).

If for some reason you were wanting to support non-GNU libc based 
operating systems (like Solaris, which I realize is pretty irrelevant in 
this context) their gettext() implementation does not support automatic 
conversion of .mo files, and therefore packages containing them would 
not be architecture independent.

@alex

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Re: Fedora 10 on XO

[Jameson Quinn]

I'm in xubuntu (xfce) right now, and it is noticeably faster on my 1.2 GHz
machine than Gnome (same kernel and everything). It also has network
manager, automount, graphical control panels, all the mod cons. I'd say that
if we could get something roughly nearing this level, then XFCE is probably
the best choice, for speed.

A good fraction of this work would be perfect for a newbie volunteer.
Getting the volume control working, choosing how to trim the fat from F10,
most of that kind of stuff is the kind of linux install fiddling that many
people who aren't even ultra-hackers have been doing for decades now. If we
got something working well and looking good, even using a handmade install
that was well documented in somebody's blog, it would be a good first step.

I bet if we posted to OLPCNews with the truth - there are definitely going
to be, and probably already are, some countries that are scared of pure
sugar, and are considering dual boot, but would be mollified by a nice
polished XFCE/sugar dual-desktop - we would have new volunteers aplenty.
I'll let the discussion run and hope someone else will do the honors of
writing a page on the wiki and a call-out to OLPCNews, but I can do it if
others agree it's a good idea.

Jameson

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 9:28 PM, Chris Ball <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>   > debxo manages to fit a gnome build in a small enough space to fit
>   > on the NAND
>
> I agree that there exist smaller distributions than Fedora 10, but that
> doesn't make F10 one of them (yet).  Still, it's nice to have a proof of
> concept, and the delta of debxo's gnome.img - sugar.img (80M) tells us
> that we might be able to get something acceptable, perhaps requiring
> some package rework.
>
> Then we'd just need to turn Scott's Sugar+XFCE into a Sugar+GNOME,
> and work out how much space we can use for GNOME apps..
>
> - Chris.
> --
> Chris Ball   <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Re: support for more traditional UIs/apps

[Carlos Nazareno]

> I am going to
> make the assumption that an user sophisticated enough to use XFCE
> will be sophisticated enough not to need the simplified GUI that
> sugarization provides.

Hi Mikus! Precisely. And I think 9-year olds and up fall in this
category. And besides, re: XFCE, GNOME, KDEI mean how hard can it be
to run programs if you simply place "applications shortcuts" on the
desktop? It's a no-brainer.

I Sugar's advantage in this space is that it protects untrained users
from inadvertently damaging the system when given access to the
underlying filesystem and saves new users from being overwhelmed by
too many UI choices.

> I myself have had reasonable success installing Linux applications
> on my XO, then launching them from the command line.  [And launching
> from Terminal bypasses Rainbow's restrictions on applications.]

Yes, same here, but isn't installing and launching applications
completely defeating the purpose a GUI and the improved usability it
provides? Our target demographic here is the same (gradeschool
students) and requiring the use of the command line requires orders of
sophistication greater than clicking on icons or menus and launching
programs.

Users (including kids from pilot programs in South America from what
I've read here) have been switching to the command line in order to
achieve desired functionality that they couldn't obtain from the Sugar
desktop.

Don't you think that when users are forced to use the command line,
it's indicative of a failure of the primary GUI system?

b) Unless we want the kids to need to actively learn unix commands and
grok things the way we used to (yay! :D), users should be protected
from having to use the terminal, especially it's so easy to go
super-user on the XO OS -- a lot of damage can easily be caused by the
user to the filesystem if improperly supervised.

c) IMHO, simplifying the UI to meet the needs of precocious youngsters
because "they're not sophisticated enough" and then saying "they can
just use the command line if they need more" or expecting them to play
with Python are mind-boggling contradictions.

> I keep wondering, considering Moore's Law and the availability of
> netbooks, why shoehorn specifically Sugar (and the XO) into
> competing for the "traditional_Linux_interface" laptop role ?

This is because:

a) These "traditional_Linux_interface" laptops like Intel's Classmate
PC have started to compete on OLPC's turf and threaten the XO's
relevancy. 
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080929-classmate-pc-gets-a-boost-with-million-unit-venezuelan-order.html

b) This is not about shoehorning the XO into role it wasn't meant for,
it's about expanding and unleashing the XO's potential because the
hardware is more than capable of more tasks than the currently
available activities. In fact, I'd say it was the polar opposite of
"shoehorning specifically" and that the XO and the current software
environment has shoehorned it into a smaller role than it could be
playing.

c) Rainbow and sugarizing aside, specially written educational
software like XO's activities and learning goals aren't mutually
exclusive with traditional linux/windows applications like office
software. On the contrary, I say "legacy apps" would broaden older XO
users' horizons and would increase the attractiveness of the XO with
governments/entities looking to have their students gain the ability
to interact with current IT systems.

d) This is also about attracting developers to create content for the
XO because as with any platform, it's all about content, content,
content, content. I believe the need for esoteric tools and arcane
hoop-jumping in order to develop apps and content for the XO is
detrimental to OLPC's cause.

Sure, you can say "If contributors are really committed to
volunteering, then should be willing to go through all these steps",
but don't you think we should be lowering the barrier to content
contribution and that every little bit counts?

e) Despite the XO's CPU, memory and disk space limitations, I say to
the many naysayers the XO is still relevant in modern IT space. It's
all about proper optimization, picking the right software, and knowing
its limitations.

In fact, despite its limited horsepower, I'd say the XO is superior to
all these other machines because of many features like ruggedization,
low power consumption and the ability to run in areas without power
infrastructure, e-book and sunlight-readability mode, mesh networking,
etc etc etc.

A trend I've been extremely disappointed with in IT and ordinary
consumers over the years is the upward-spiraling Moore's law -
software bloat - need for speed cycle. I'm thrilled that OLPC had
bucked this trend and has instead gone with power efficiency over
blistering yet unnecessary speed.

Oh, btw, I hope I don't horrify you guys with this question, but is
there any possiblity we can flip Sugarization on its head and give
Sugar activities the ability to run outside of Sugar on other systems,
eve

Re: [Localization] [sugar] [Proposal] .xot bundles for translations

[Martin Langhoff]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 7:56 PM, Alexander Dupuy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> via fink, but it's worth remembering that translation packages are not 'by
> definition "noarch"' - if the packages contain compiled gettext .mo files,
> those files may be machine-specific.  As noted in
> http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/gettext/MO-Files.html

Interesting, thanks! ... I never considered gettext a speed demon,
perhaps it is. I've only ever benchmarked the php extension which was
quite disappointing performance-wise for whatever reasons, some 4
years ago.

Probably (hopefully!) fixed these days.



m
-- 
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 - ask interesting questions
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Re: Sugar & XFCE

[Sebastian Silva]

Ok, so my point is this:
If this is the quickest / simplest / best way to get a XFCE system as 
tightly integrated to the XO, then this should be in a very visible 
place and spread around. As much as I love sugar, I'd vehemently prefer 
to have XFCE + GNU than Sugar + Windows.

Sebastian

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Sebastian Silva wrote:
>
>> But now that you mentioned it, bonus points for getting a tightly 
>> integrated Debian based XFCE4 (with as little trouble as possible). 
>> Only thing I dont like about this is losing the native and standard 
>> sugar... but oh well its just to compare and make adults feel more at 
>> home.
>
> take a look at the debxo scripts. they use a config file to define 
> what packages are installed in the build, and the project is 
> maintaining configs for XFCE, KDE, GNOME, and Sugar.
>
> I haven't had a chance to try the 0.4 build, but the 0.3 build was 
> very close to working (it didn't have the key mappings needed, but 
> that's one of the things they worked on for the 0.4 release)
>
> David Lang
>
>> Sebastian
>>
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>>> On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Sebastian Silva wrote:
>>>
 Here's a delicate scenario that I see:
 Inevitably, when comparing the XOs running Sugar to those running
 Windows for evaluation (this is happening *right now*) - MMSs (that
 is, Microsoft&Ministries) will argue not only on GNU+Linux vs. Windows
 technical merits, but also the GUI will come up as a possible fatal
 comparison.
 So techies will then install XFCE for comparison, perhaps they'll
 request F10 for that...
 Only XFCE is currently vanilla on the repositories and fancy
 integration like volume and brightness, DPI, etc isnt well integrated
 at all by default, as well as many useful separate widgets for
 networking, battery status and so on.
 Its funny: In this scenario, you can actually share more on windows
 (via file sharing) than on linux (at least with the gui).
 So here's an idea Homunq gave us yesterday:
 This is the perfect project for a G1G1 hacker. Probably one already
 did it. Lets challenge them, via OLPCNews, to release "pimp up xfce on
 F9" procedures (maybe even scripts and themepacks) - so that it is as
 simple and as trouble free to install a working, beautiful, lean and
 mean XFCE4 on the NAND that we can proudly compare with sluggish
 windows on the SD.
 Please could we request this to wayan and spread it?
>>>
>>> the biggest problem has been in getting started (getting a system 
>>> image that could boot and use the normal distro tools)
>>>
>>> debxo is a good example of a bootstrap for debian, it is a set of 
>>> scripts that use the standard distro package tools to create a 
>>> system image that they can boot into and start tweaking. what it's 
>>> missing is a good way to let the users extract the results of their 
>>> tweaks to submit upstream.
>>>
>>> if you want the type of work you are looking for to happen on Fedora 
>>> someone needs to package up a similar set of scripts.
>>>
>>>
>>>
 2008/12/5 Mikus Grinbergs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Carlos wrote (regarding Sugar on an XO):
>>
>> Apps need to be sugarized.
>
> This is true when Sugar is the primary interface of the target user
> population.  But the "Subject" of this topic is XFCE.  I am going to
> make the assumption that an user sophisticated enough to use XFCE
> will be sophisticated enough not to need the simplified GUI that
> sugarization provides.
>
> I myself have had reasonable success installing Linux applications
> on my XO, then launching them from the command line.  [And launching
> from Terminal bypasses Rainbow's restrictions on applications.]
>
> I keep wondering, considering Moore's Law and the availability of
> netbooks, why shoehorn specifically Sugar (and the XO) into
> competing for the "traditional_Linux_interface" laptop role ?
>
> mikus
>
> ___
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> Devel@lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>




>>
>>

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Re: [Server-devel] XS 0.5 Second Attempt at eth1

[Martin Langhoff]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Raúl Gutiérrez Segalés
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I was hit by the same problem last week.. ARP works but no ping nor IP
> messages seem to get through.  I am far away from the server now but I
> think the NIC was a CNet.

I hate to be away from my test machines.

Can't do much today on this track, apologies, but I'll definitely get
my hands on a couple of test machines and alternative NICs on Monday
and test the hell out of this.

cheers,



m
-- 
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Re: Sugar & XFCE

[pgf]

sebastian wrote:
 > Or you can just yum install xfce* and work your way to nirvana from there.
 > 
 > Sebastian

indeed.  this is how i run my G1G1.  A simple "Do you want to run
sugar?" dialog that runs from .xsession determines which manager
i run.  what i've never done is make XFCE "nice" -- and it's kind
of clunky feeling right out of the box.

paul

 > 
 > 
 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 > > On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Sebastian Silva wrote:
 > >
 > >> Here's a delicate scenario that I see:
 > >> Inevitably, when comparing the XOs running Sugar to those running
 > >> Windows for evaluation (this is happening *right now*) - MMSs (that
 > >> is, Microsoft&Ministries) will argue not only on GNU+Linux vs. Windows
 > >> technical merits, but also the GUI will come up as a possible fatal
 > >> comparison.
 > >> So techies will then install XFCE for comparison, perhaps they'll
 > >> request F10 for that...
 > >> Only XFCE is currently vanilla on the repositories and fancy
 > >> integration like volume and brightness, DPI, etc isnt well integrated
 > >> at all by default, as well as many useful separate widgets for
 > >> networking, battery status and so on.
 > >> Its funny: In this scenario, you can actually share more on windows
 > >> (via file sharing) than on linux (at least with the gui).
 > >> So here's an idea Homunq gave us yesterday:
 > >> This is the perfect project for a G1G1 hacker. Probably one already
 > >> did it. Lets challenge them, via OLPCNews, to release "pimp up xfce on
 > >> F9" procedures (maybe even scripts and themepacks) - so that it is as
 > >> simple and as trouble free to install a working, beautiful, lean and
 > >> mean XFCE4 on the NAND that we can proudly compare with sluggish
 > >> windows on the SD.
 > >> Please could we request this to wayan and spread it?
 > >
 > > the biggest problem has been in getting started (getting a system 
 > > image that could boot and use the normal distro tools)
 > >
 > > debxo is a good example of a bootstrap for debian, it is a set of 
 > > scripts that use the standard distro package tools to create a system 
 > > image that they can boot into and start tweaking. what it's missing is 
 > > a good way to let the users extract the results of their tweaks to 
 > > submit upstream.
 > >
 > > if you want the type of work you are looking for to happen on Fedora 
 > > someone needs to package up a similar set of scripts.
 > >
 > >
 > >
 > >> 2008/12/5 Mikus Grinbergs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
 > >>> Carlos wrote (regarding Sugar on an XO):
 > 
 >  Apps need to be sugarized.
 > >>>
 > >>> This is true when Sugar is the primary interface of the target user
 > >>> population.  But the "Subject" of this topic is XFCE.  I am going to
 > >>> make the assumption that an user sophisticated enough to use XFCE
 > >>> will be sophisticated enough not to need the simplified GUI that
 > >>> sugarization provides.
 > >>>
 > >>> I myself have had reasonable success installing Linux applications
 > >>> on my XO, then launching them from the command line.  [And launching
 > >>> from Terminal bypasses Rainbow's restrictions on applications.]
 > >>>
 > >>> I keep wondering, considering Moore's Law and the availability of
 > >>> netbooks, why shoehorn specifically Sugar (and the XO) into
 > >>> competing for the "traditional_Linux_interface" laptop role ?
 > >>>
 > >>> mikus
 > >>>
 > >>> ___
 > >>> 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

=-
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Re: Sugar & XFCE

[david]

On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Sebastian Silva wrote:

> But now that you mentioned it, bonus points for getting a tightly integrated 
> Debian based XFCE4 (with as little trouble as possible). Only thing I dont 
> like about this is losing the native and standard sugar... but oh well its 
> just to compare and make adults feel more at home.

take a look at the debxo scripts. they use a config file to define what 
packages are installed in the build, and the project is maintaining 
configs for XFCE, KDE, GNOME, and Sugar.

I haven't had a chance to try the 0.4 build, but the 0.3 build was very 
close to working (it didn't have the key mappings needed, but that's one 
of the things they worked on for the 0.4 release)

David Lang

> Sebastian
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>> On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Sebastian Silva wrote:
>> 
>>> Here's a delicate scenario that I see:
>>> Inevitably, when comparing the XOs running Sugar to those running
>>> Windows for evaluation (this is happening *right now*) - MMSs (that
>>> is, Microsoft&Ministries) will argue not only on GNU+Linux vs. Windows
>>> technical merits, but also the GUI will come up as a possible fatal
>>> comparison.
>>> So techies will then install XFCE for comparison, perhaps they'll
>>> request F10 for that...
>>> Only XFCE is currently vanilla on the repositories and fancy
>>> integration like volume and brightness, DPI, etc isnt well integrated
>>> at all by default, as well as many useful separate widgets for
>>> networking, battery status and so on.
>>> Its funny: In this scenario, you can actually share more on windows
>>> (via file sharing) than on linux (at least with the gui).
>>> So here's an idea Homunq gave us yesterday:
>>> This is the perfect project for a G1G1 hacker. Probably one already
>>> did it. Lets challenge them, via OLPCNews, to release "pimp up xfce on
>>> F9" procedures (maybe even scripts and themepacks) - so that it is as
>>> simple and as trouble free to install a working, beautiful, lean and
>>> mean XFCE4 on the NAND that we can proudly compare with sluggish
>>> windows on the SD.
>>> Please could we request this to wayan and spread it?
>> 
>> the biggest problem has been in getting started (getting a system image 
>> that could boot and use the normal distro tools)
>> 
>> debxo is a good example of a bootstrap for debian, it is a set of scripts 
>> that use the standard distro package tools to create a system image that 
>> they can boot into and start tweaking. what it's missing is a good way to 
>> let the users extract the results of their tweaks to submit upstream.
>> 
>> if you want the type of work you are looking for to happen on Fedora 
>> someone needs to package up a similar set of scripts.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> 2008/12/5 Mikus Grinbergs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
 Carlos wrote (regarding Sugar on an XO):
> 
> Apps need to be sugarized.
 
 This is true when Sugar is the primary interface of the target user
 population.  But the "Subject" of this topic is XFCE.  I am going to
 make the assumption that an user sophisticated enough to use XFCE
 will be sophisticated enough not to need the simplified GUI that
 sugarization provides.
 
 I myself have had reasonable success installing Linux applications
 on my XO, then launching them from the command line.  [And launching
 from Terminal bypasses Rainbow's restrictions on applications.]
 
 I keep wondering, considering Moore's Law and the availability of
 netbooks, why shoehorn specifically Sugar (and the XO) into
 competing for the "traditional_Linux_interface" laptop role ?
 
 mikus
 
 ___
 Devel mailing list
 Devel@lists.laptop.org
 http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>
>
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Re: Sugar & XFCE

[Sebastian Silva]

But now that you mentioned it, bonus points for getting a tightly 
integrated Debian based XFCE4 (with as little trouble as possible). Only 
thing I dont like about this is losing the native and standard sugar... 
but oh well its just to compare and make adults feel more at home.

Sebastian

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Sebastian Silva wrote:
>
>> Here's a delicate scenario that I see:
>> Inevitably, when comparing the XOs running Sugar to those running
>> Windows for evaluation (this is happening *right now*) - MMSs (that
>> is, Microsoft&Ministries) will argue not only on GNU+Linux vs. Windows
>> technical merits, but also the GUI will come up as a possible fatal
>> comparison.
>> So techies will then install XFCE for comparison, perhaps they'll
>> request F10 for that...
>> Only XFCE is currently vanilla on the repositories and fancy
>> integration like volume and brightness, DPI, etc isnt well integrated
>> at all by default, as well as many useful separate widgets for
>> networking, battery status and so on.
>> Its funny: In this scenario, you can actually share more on windows
>> (via file sharing) than on linux (at least with the gui).
>> So here's an idea Homunq gave us yesterday:
>> This is the perfect project for a G1G1 hacker. Probably one already
>> did it. Lets challenge them, via OLPCNews, to release "pimp up xfce on
>> F9" procedures (maybe even scripts and themepacks) - so that it is as
>> simple and as trouble free to install a working, beautiful, lean and
>> mean XFCE4 on the NAND that we can proudly compare with sluggish
>> windows on the SD.
>> Please could we request this to wayan and spread it?
>
> the biggest problem has been in getting started (getting a system 
> image that could boot and use the normal distro tools)
>
> debxo is a good example of a bootstrap for debian, it is a set of 
> scripts that use the standard distro package tools to create a system 
> image that they can boot into and start tweaking. what it's missing is 
> a good way to let the users extract the results of their tweaks to 
> submit upstream.
>
> if you want the type of work you are looking for to happen on Fedora 
> someone needs to package up a similar set of scripts.
>
>
>
>> 2008/12/5 Mikus Grinbergs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>>> Carlos wrote (regarding Sugar on an XO):

 Apps need to be sugarized.
>>>
>>> This is true when Sugar is the primary interface of the target user
>>> population.  But the "Subject" of this topic is XFCE.  I am going to
>>> make the assumption that an user sophisticated enough to use XFCE
>>> will be sophisticated enough not to need the simplified GUI that
>>> sugarization provides.
>>>
>>> I myself have had reasonable success installing Linux applications
>>> on my XO, then launching them from the command line.  [And launching
>>> from Terminal bypasses Rainbow's restrictions on applications.]
>>>
>>> I keep wondering, considering Moore's Law and the availability of
>>> netbooks, why shoehorn specifically Sugar (and the XO) into
>>> competing for the "traditional_Linux_interface" laptop role ?
>>>
>>> mikus
>>>
>>> ___
>>> Devel mailing list
>>> Devel@lists.laptop.org
>>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>

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Re: Sugar & XFCE

[Sebastian Silva]

Or you can just yum install xfce* and work your way to nirvana from there.

Sebastian


[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Sebastian Silva wrote:
>
>> Here's a delicate scenario that I see:
>> Inevitably, when comparing the XOs running Sugar to those running
>> Windows for evaluation (this is happening *right now*) - MMSs (that
>> is, Microsoft&Ministries) will argue not only on GNU+Linux vs. Windows
>> technical merits, but also the GUI will come up as a possible fatal
>> comparison.
>> So techies will then install XFCE for comparison, perhaps they'll
>> request F10 for that...
>> Only XFCE is currently vanilla on the repositories and fancy
>> integration like volume and brightness, DPI, etc isnt well integrated
>> at all by default, as well as many useful separate widgets for
>> networking, battery status and so on.
>> Its funny: In this scenario, you can actually share more on windows
>> (via file sharing) than on linux (at least with the gui).
>> So here's an idea Homunq gave us yesterday:
>> This is the perfect project for a G1G1 hacker. Probably one already
>> did it. Lets challenge them, via OLPCNews, to release "pimp up xfce on
>> F9" procedures (maybe even scripts and themepacks) - so that it is as
>> simple and as trouble free to install a working, beautiful, lean and
>> mean XFCE4 on the NAND that we can proudly compare with sluggish
>> windows on the SD.
>> Please could we request this to wayan and spread it?
>
> the biggest problem has been in getting started (getting a system 
> image that could boot and use the normal distro tools)
>
> debxo is a good example of a bootstrap for debian, it is a set of 
> scripts that use the standard distro package tools to create a system 
> image that they can boot into and start tweaking. what it's missing is 
> a good way to let the users extract the results of their tweaks to 
> submit upstream.
>
> if you want the type of work you are looking for to happen on Fedora 
> someone needs to package up a similar set of scripts.
>
>
>
>> 2008/12/5 Mikus Grinbergs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>>> Carlos wrote (regarding Sugar on an XO):

 Apps need to be sugarized.
>>>
>>> This is true when Sugar is the primary interface of the target user
>>> population.  But the "Subject" of this topic is XFCE.  I am going to
>>> make the assumption that an user sophisticated enough to use XFCE
>>> will be sophisticated enough not to need the simplified GUI that
>>> sugarization provides.
>>>
>>> I myself have had reasonable success installing Linux applications
>>> on my XO, then launching them from the command line.  [And launching
>>> from Terminal bypasses Rainbow's restrictions on applications.]
>>>
>>> I keep wondering, considering Moore's Law and the availability of
>>> netbooks, why shoehorn specifically Sugar (and the XO) into
>>> competing for the "traditional_Linux_interface" laptop role ?
>>>
>>> mikus
>>>
>>> ___
>>> Devel mailing list
>>> Devel@lists.laptop.org
>>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>

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Re: Sugar & XFCE

[david]

On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Sebastian Silva wrote:

> Here's a delicate scenario that I see:
> Inevitably, when comparing the XOs running Sugar to those running
> Windows for evaluation (this is happening *right now*) - MMSs (that
> is, Microsoft&Ministries) will argue not only on GNU+Linux vs. Windows
> technical merits, but also the GUI will come up as a possible fatal
> comparison.
> So techies will then install XFCE for comparison, perhaps they'll
> request F10 for that...
> Only XFCE is currently vanilla on the repositories and fancy
> integration like volume and brightness, DPI, etc isnt well integrated
> at all by default, as well as many useful separate widgets for
> networking, battery status and so on.
> Its funny: In this scenario, you can actually share more on windows
> (via file sharing) than on linux (at least with the gui).
> So here's an idea Homunq gave us yesterday:
> This is the perfect project for a G1G1 hacker. Probably one already
> did it. Lets challenge them, via OLPCNews, to release "pimp up xfce on
> F9" procedures (maybe even scripts and themepacks) - so that it is as
> simple and as trouble free to install a working, beautiful, lean and
> mean XFCE4 on the NAND that we can proudly compare with sluggish
> windows on the SD.
> Please could we request this to wayan and spread it?

the biggest problem has been in getting started (getting a system image 
that could boot and use the normal distro tools)

debxo is a good example of a bootstrap for debian, it is a set of scripts 
that use the standard distro package tools to create a system image that 
they can boot into and start tweaking. what it's missing is a good way to 
let the users extract the results of their tweaks to submit upstream.

if you want the type of work you are looking for to happen on Fedora 
someone needs to package up a similar set of scripts.



> 2008/12/5 Mikus Grinbergs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>> Carlos wrote (regarding Sugar on an XO):
>>>
>>> Apps need to be sugarized.
>>
>> This is true when Sugar is the primary interface of the target user
>> population.  But the "Subject" of this topic is XFCE.  I am going to
>> make the assumption that an user sophisticated enough to use XFCE
>> will be sophisticated enough not to need the simplified GUI that
>> sugarization provides.
>>
>> I myself have had reasonable success installing Linux applications
>> on my XO, then launching them from the command line.  [And launching
>> from Terminal bypasses Rainbow's restrictions on applications.]
>>
>> I keep wondering, considering Moore's Law and the availability of
>> netbooks, why shoehorn specifically Sugar (and the XO) into
>> competing for the "traditional_Linux_interface" laptop role ?
>>
>> mikus
>>
>> ___
>> Devel mailing list
>> Devel@lists.laptop.org
>> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>>
>
>
>
>
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Re: Sugar & XFCE

[Sebastian Silva]

Here's a delicate scenario that I see:
Inevitably, when comparing the XOs running Sugar to those running
Windows for evaluation (this is happening *right now*) - MMSs (that
is, Microsoft&Ministries) will argue not only on GNU+Linux vs. Windows
technical merits, but also the GUI will come up as a possible fatal
comparison.
So techies will then install XFCE for comparison, perhaps they'll
request F10 for that...
Only XFCE is currently vanilla on the repositories and fancy
integration like volume and brightness, DPI, etc isnt well integrated
at all by default, as well as many useful separate widgets for
networking, battery status and so on.
Its funny: In this scenario, you can actually share more on windows
(via file sharing) than on linux (at least with the gui).
So here's an idea Homunq gave us yesterday:
This is the perfect project for a G1G1 hacker. Probably one already
did it. Lets challenge them, via OLPCNews, to release "pimp up xfce on
F9" procedures (maybe even scripts and themepacks) - so that it is as
simple and as trouble free to install a working, beautiful, lean and
mean XFCE4 on the NAND that we can proudly compare with sluggish
windows on the SD.
Please could we request this to wayan and spread it?

2008/12/5 Mikus Grinbergs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Carlos wrote (regarding Sugar on an XO):
>>
>> Apps need to be sugarized.
>
> This is true when Sugar is the primary interface of the target user
> population.  But the "Subject" of this topic is XFCE.  I am going to
> make the assumption that an user sophisticated enough to use XFCE
> will be sophisticated enough not to need the simplified GUI that
> sugarization provides.
>
> I myself have had reasonable success installing Linux applications
> on my XO, then launching them from the command line.  [And launching
> from Terminal bypasses Rainbow's restrictions on applications.]
>
> I keep wondering, considering Moore's Law and the availability of
> netbooks, why shoehorn specifically Sugar (and the XO) into
> competing for the "traditional_Linux_interface" laptop role ?
>
> mikus
>
> ___
> Devel mailing list
> Devel@lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>



-- 
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http://blog.sebastiansilva.com/
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New joyride build 2574

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+libasyncns 0.7-1.fc10

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New joyride build 2574

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http://xs-dev.laptop.org/~cscott/olpc/streams/joyride/build2574

Changes in build 2574 from build: 2573

Size delta: 0.13M

-libasyncns 0.7-1.olpc3
+libasyncns 0.7-1.fc10

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Re: XO identity shared via Browse

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi Luke,
>
> If you're interested in Sugar on XO, I believe that Tomeu et al want you
> on devel... Anyway I'll try to copy you on this thread.

Well, as long as there's a chance what is discussed here will interest
Sugar on other platforms, I think you are welcome to cc sugar-devel.

I personally don't see any problem with cc'ing both lists in case of
doubt, olpc and sugar are very closely related as of today.

Tomeu

> It would be useful to have a generic solution which works with many
> types of server software and many network configurations.
>
> However, this is where I need to separate "must have" from "nice to have".
>
> We must allow the XS to know which XO it is talking to when there is an
> XS and XO on the same protected network (AKA XS doing NAT and acting as
> gateway to Internet).
>
> I can't wait for the "nice to have" piece if there is no agreement on
> technical implementation. I want the "must have" piece by March, no
> matter what.
>
> I'll take both too but I wont settle for none of the above :-)
>
> Thanks,
>
> Greg S
>
> Luke Faraone wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 19:17, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm copying in Devel and will drop the sugar list on further replies
>>> (hope that's the right netiquette in this case...).
>>
>> (note: I'm not on devel, so please keep me CC'd)
>>
>>
>>>  > security)   who are the principals?
>>>  >   what are their goals?
>>>  >   what attacks concern us?
>>>
>>> GS - In general I don't want any other devices to be able to appear to
>>> be the XO. We can assume that the XS <-> XO is a secure network not
>>> visible to the outside workd (whether that is true in practice is
>>> another story). So I moved the encryption and stringent security
>>> requirements to the optional case where the XO is talking to a non-XS
>>> server.
>>>
>>
>> I'd rather not make that assumption. Some schools may not have a _local_
>> school server (even dispite our best wishes) or a student may want to access
>> the server from a non-local connection. The XS, IMHO, should support the
>> "road warrior" use case (at least for post-registration)
>>
>>
>> -lf
>>
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Re: XO identity shared via Browse

[Greg Smith]

Hi Luke,

If you're interested in Sugar on XO, I believe that Tomeu et al want you 
on devel... Anyway I'll try to copy you on this thread.

It would be useful to have a generic solution which works with many 
types of server software and many network configurations.

However, this is where I need to separate "must have" from "nice to have".

We must allow the XS to know which XO it is talking to when there is an 
XS and XO on the same protected network (AKA XS doing NAT and acting as 
gateway to Internet).

I can't wait for the "nice to have" piece if there is no agreement on 
technical implementation. I want the "must have" piece by March, no 
matter what.

I'll take both too but I wont settle for none of the above :-)

Thanks,

Greg S

Luke Faraone wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 19:17, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
>> I'm copying in Devel and will drop the sugar list on further replies
>> (hope that's the right netiquette in this case...).
> 
> (note: I'm not on devel, so please keep me CC'd)
> 
> 
>>  > security)   who are the principals?
>>  >   what are their goals?
>>  >   what attacks concern us?
>>
>> GS - In general I don't want any other devices to be able to appear to
>> be the XO. We can assume that the XS <-> XO is a secure network not
>> visible to the outside workd (whether that is true in practice is
>> another story). So I moved the encryption and stringent security
>> requirements to the optional case where the XO is talking to a non-XS
>> server.
>>
> 
> I'd rather not make that assumption. Some schools may not have a _local_
> school server (even dispite our best wishes) or a student may want to access
> the server from a non-local connection. The XS, IMHO, should support the
> "road warrior" use case (at least for post-registration)
> 
> 
> -lf
> 
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Re: Fedora 10 on XO

[Sameer Verma]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 4:22 AM, Ed McNierney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Chris -
>
> Thanks; I think your thoughts are rather similar to mine and I am trying to
> get information on what the actual user need (or perceived need) is.

This is a very important point from the adoption perspective. User
adoption is largely driven by perception, as tied to their
environment.  This is the demand side of the equation. GNOME, XFCE,
Fluxbox, etc are on the supply side and RAM disk space, processor etc.
are our constraints. I'm going with the assumptions that 1) most G1G1
users already have a primary computer and 2) given that Windows has a
large market share, G1G1'ers are Windows users.

The problem is to assess the needs of G1G1 users and *then* try to fit
GNOME, XFCE etc. all within the constraints mentioned above. IMO
starting with the supply side will be problematic.

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/

> While
> there are obvious storage and RAM constraints involved, we need to be sure
> we're providing what most users will want (users of this desktop, of
> course).
>
> Thanks to everyone else, too, who is contributing to this discussion, as
> it's very important to move this topic into the real world of "what is
> possible, what would it look like, and what compromises would we have to
> make?"
>
>- Ed
>
>
> On 12/4/08 10:08 PM, "Chris Ball" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> I agree that the choice is yet to be made and isn't totally obvious.
>>
>> I prefer using GNOME, but our current answer for "How much disk space
>> does it require to run Fedora 10 and GNOME and apps?" is "a 4GB SD card
>> and 256M of swap", so it seems hard to get there from here.  Maybe we
>> can run GNOME and some tiny set of apps without blowing the NAND budget,
>> though..
>>
>> - Chris.
>
>
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Re: Fedora 10 on XO

[Eben Eliason]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 11:16 AM, Erik Garrison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 06:36:53PM -0500, Greg Smith wrote:
>> * Will it stop us from being able to hold two SugarOS builds on the NAND
>>   at the same time after olpc-update, as we do now?
>> GS - Possibly depending on space needed. I think we would consider
>> losing that feature if needed. tbd.
>
> I'm curious if anyone knows how commonly used this feature is in
> deployments.

I think we'd all hope that it hasn't been necessary very often, but as
with any backup feature, its the presence of the capability that's
important, right?  I do think it serves an important purpose in
conveying and facilitating the ideals of Sugar.

- Eben


> Erik
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Re: Fedora 10 on XO

[Greg Smith]

Hi Chris,

That sounds good! Please call up Dr. Frankenstein and resurrect the 
beast for inspection :-)

Can you also put a link to any description of it (or to the code, 
relevant e-mail threads or whatever is available) in the specifications 
section of the feature?

Thanks,

Greg S

Chris Ball wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>> I meant that we would ship a Sugar interface and a "standard"
>> Fedora X-Window interface (e.g. XFCE) on the same NAND. I should
>> have said "desktop environments" as Martin notes.
> 
> Okay, I see, that sounds good.  If we're comfortable with Xfce, it
> sounds like we should resurrect Scott's work from about six months
> ago on Xfce-and-Sugar in the "faster" builds.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> - Chris.
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Re: Fedora 10 on XO

[Greg Smith]

Hi Erik,

My general impression is that its not used that often. Mostly because 
very few deployments have upgraded and some may choose to clean install 
when they do.

The main value of it is for Beta testers and technical people who work 
on validating the new releases. Hopefully this feature is not needed by 
the time an image is qualified for deployment in the schools...

Thanks,

Greg S

Erik Garrison wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 06:36:53PM -0500, Greg Smith wrote:
>> * Will it stop us from being able to hold two SugarOS builds on the NAND
>>   at the same time after olpc-update, as we do now?
>> GS - Possibly depending on space needed. I think we would consider  
>> losing that feature if needed. tbd.
> 
> I'm curious if anyone knows how commonly used this feature is in
> deployments.
> 
> Erik
> 
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Re: Sugar & XFCE

[Mikus Grinbergs]

Carlos wrote (regarding Sugar on an XO):
>
> Apps need to be sugarized.

This is true when Sugar is the primary interface of the target user 
population.  But the "Subject" of this topic is XFCE.  I am going to 
make the assumption that an user sophisticated enough to use XFCE 
will be sophisticated enough not to need the simplified GUI that 
sugarization provides.

I myself have had reasonable success installing Linux applications 
on my XO, then launching them from the command line.  [And launching 
from Terminal bypasses Rainbow's restrictions on applications.]

I keep wondering, considering Moore's Law and the availability of 
netbooks, why shoehorn specifically Sugar (and the XO) into 
competing for the "traditional_Linux_interface" laptop role ?

mikus

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Re: Fedora 10 on XO

[Erik Garrison]

On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 06:36:53PM -0500, Greg Smith wrote:
> * Will it stop us from being able to hold two SugarOS builds on the NAND
>   at the same time after olpc-update, as we do now?
> GS - Possibly depending on space needed. I think we would consider  
> losing that feature if needed. tbd.

I'm curious if anyone knows how commonly used this feature is in
deployments.

Erik
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Re: wiki.laptop.org upgrade

[Michael Stone]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 07:11:04AM -0500, Ed McNierney wrote:
>Michael -
>
>Thanks; welcome back!  I have been working on the request you made last
>week, and on trying to have something out this week as I said I would.  

Good to hear.

>It's been important to me to ensure I'm reflecting OLPC's position as much as
>possible rather than simply my own personal opinion, and I've been having
>conversations to that effect.  

Absolutely! However, as David rightly points out, if it's going to be a
joint statement then it needs to be developed jointly at some point.

I'd like to see this happen by circulating a series of progressively
better drafts until we're satisfied (or to until we give up). When can
we expect a second draft from you?

(I wrote a first draft last week and circulated it privately under
'distribute to anyone who should read this' terms.)

>Thanks again for the help.

My (long-term) pleasure.

Michael
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Re: [Server-devel] XS 0.5 Second Attempt at eth1

[Reuben K. Caron]

Now that I have DHCPD running on a clean install. I can report that it
still does not hand out IPs. When I assign my laptop ethernet adapter as
172.18.96.1 and 172.18.0.1 I do get an ARP error from the server;
however, when I bump it up one address 172.18.0.2 it still does not ping.



Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 12:06 AM, Jerry Vonau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>   
>> Anna wrote:
>> 
>>> So, what are the repercussions of this?
>>>   
>> Not sure... Martin?
>> 
>
> Good sleuthing! Bonding-related errors was the last thing I'd
> imagined, and with the e1000 driver too -- it's widely used and
> generally well maintained.
>
> Anna, what's your NIC? Ideally, we want to know the marketing
> make/name/model and what lspci reports for it. Perhaps I can get my
> hands on the same hw you have.
>
> Googling a bit for e1000 and bonding to see if there are any known
> issues I see quite a bit of traffic back in 2006/2007 with e1000
> devices coming up / powering up late and confusing the bond drivers
> and sometimes bad performance. But nothing current, it looks like it
> got sorted out.
>
> What's your other NIC? If you run xs-swapnics (and swap the cables
> too), do things work better with the bonding configuration we're
> shipping?
>
> Also - I'm trying to think this through - I am fairly certain that one
> of the test machines in Wellington has an e1000 and it worked
> correctly for me (with a crossover cable to the AP).
>
> cheers,
>
>
>
> m
>   

-- 
Reuben K. Caron
Country Support Engineer
One Laptop per Child
Mobile: +1-617-230-3893
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Deployments Support 
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Re: [Server-devel] XS 0.5 Second Attempt at eth1

[Reuben K. Caron]

After doing a clean install 4 times and dhcpd not starting I
investigated a bit more and I found:

When I

cd /etc/sysconfig/olpc-scripts
./domain_config xs5.org

It creates the xs_domain_name file in /etc/sysconfig/olpc-scripts/

However, /etc/sysconfig/dhcpd looks for this file in /etc/sysconfig/

When I copy /etc/sysconfig/olpc-scripts/xs_domain_name to
/etc/sysconfig/xs_domain_name; then start dhcpd it correctly generates
the config files and starts up.

For completeness I then deleted
/etc/sysconfig/olpc-scripts/xs_domain_name and
/etc/sysconfig/xs_domain_name.

Then ran: /etc/sysconfig/olpc-scripts/domain_config xs5.org ; this does
generate xs_domain_name in the correct /etc/sysconfig directory.

Reuben




Anna wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 2:00 PM, Reuben K. Caron <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>   
>> Actually, I just tried a clean install and DHCP doesn't come up. When I
>> check status it continues to tell me that I must run network-config and
>> domain-config before DHPCd can start; even though I have run those
>> repeatedly.
>>
>> Reuben
>> 
>
>
> I did the 0.5 clean install on both machines and dhcpd came up on each one
> after domain_config.  I noticed it worked before I ran network_config, too,
> for whatever reason.
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]# service dhcpd status
> /etc /
> make: `dhcpd-xs.conf' is up to date.
> /
> dhcpd (pid 3451) is running...
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]# service dhcpd status
> /etc /
> make: `dhcpd-xs.conf' is up to date.
> /
> dhcpd (pid 3176) is running...
>
> On the first machine, I had to manually set the hostname back to
> alabamaxo.org for the time being so jabber would work, but that's another
> issue for later.
>
> Anna
>
>   
> 
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] File transfer in Telepathy

[Eben Eliason]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Greg Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi Guillaume,
>
> Thanks for reading it over and commenting.
>
> I dropped the sugar list and moved this to devel. If someone (Tomeu?)
> thinks it should be back on Sugar devel, forward as needed.
>
> See original threads here:
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-December/010122.html
> and here:
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-December/010096.html
>
> FYI Requirements with "should" are nice to have but not critical (AKA do
> the "must" ones first and the "should" ones only if there is time).
> There was a request to follow RFC guidelines
> (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_Collaboration_Requirements#Requirements_Definition)
>  but I'm not that formal yet.
>
> Can you link to any documentation on your plans in the specifications
> section? Links to the code itself are OK or whatever you have available
> without too much added work. I added a link to your GIT sample script
> already.
>
> More comments inline below.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Greg S
>
> Guillaume Desmottes wrote:
>> Le jeudi 04 décembre 2008 à 13:42 -0500, Greg Smith a écrit :
>>> Hi Guillaume,
>>>
>>> Thanks for following up on this!
>>>
>>> I collected all the known requirements on this here:
>>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#File_sharing
>>>
>>> [...]
>>> Comments and questions welcome.
>>
>> Few comments then.
>>
>>
>> "Should allow moving an object to any XO visible over the network (AKA
>> pingable) regardless of whether they are visible in the Neighborhood
>> (due to bugs in collaboration or someone not collaborating or any other
>> barrier which does not prevent ping)."
>>
>> I'm wondering how would be the UI for this? How can I send a file/object
>> to someone that I'm not seeing?
>>>From a Telepathy pov, you have to see the contact (as online) to send
>> him a file. One of the improvement I suggested during my Sugar Camp talk
>> was to add UI allowing users to add buddy based on their JID (like you
>> do with your classic IM client). Then if he accepts you, you'll see it
>> in your neighbourhood view when he's online. That means you can
>> potentially add any one even if you are not seeing him atm (because of a
>> bugged shared roster for example).
>> If that what you mean or am I totally missing the point of this
>> requirement?
>
> GS - I like that idea of naming the other XO and seeing them every time.
> I like it a lot! Should I create a new requirement for it? We should
> definitely do that if possible. Let me know how close we are.
>
> I put this requirement in to try and have a fall back in case other XOs
> are not visible in the Neighborhood. One of the oddities of our
> "presence" concept is that the users are usually sitting right next to
> each other. That's different than the typical corporate collaboration
> where people are in different offices.
>
> Its frustrating when you can see the kid next to you but your computer
> can't :-(
>
> If others can't solve all our problems of "presence" I want to have a
> fall back. The foolish, worst case is to ask kids to open terminal find
> their IP address, then ping each other then type that IP in to the GUI
> to share files or otherwise collaborate.
>
> Anything we can do to make that happen in the GUI (e.g. your idea above)
> would be great, as a fall back in case file transfer by existing
> "presence" mechanisms is not working.
>
> Eben,
>
> Can you comment on GUI options and let me know if you have any questions?

I don't think I have many questions, but maybe Scott and I should
catch up on this topic soon.  I recall that he had a few concerns for
me to take into account, so I want to be sure I have the whole picture
before I work on a mockup.

>> "Should support queuing a file for transfer later. That is, add support
>> for asynchronous sharing over time : the sharing of an effort should not
>> require everyone to be online at once."
>>
>> Do you want a "send this file to Bob as soon he's online" button? Then
>> it's a pure UI thing, Telepathy (obviously) requiers the contact to be
>> online when sending the file to him.
>
> GS - I think this was SJ's idea. Its clever but not critical. If Eben
> can design (and code?) the UI for it and its otherwise free with your
> code, we can consider it. I would definitely put it below the above
> items. I downgraded it to "may".

This is an interesting idea, though I agree it's not critical.  It
might have great usefulness once we add groups, since we'd like to
support an action such as "send this file...to my class".  In such an
instance, Alice might not be in class the day I attempt to send it,
and it could be queued until later; or, she could simply miss out on
the transfer requiring manual intervention next time she's around.

It amounts to showing "everyone" (for some definition of everyone) in
the list when initiating a transfer, instead of just those who are
online, and then setting up some code when we get the buddy-on

Re: [Sugar-devel] File transfer in Telepathy

[Greg Smith]

Hi Guillaume,

Thanks for reading it over and commenting.

I dropped the sugar list and moved this to devel. If someone (Tomeu?) 
thinks it should be back on Sugar devel, forward as needed.

See original threads here:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-December/010122.html
and here:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2008-December/010096.html

FYI Requirements with "should" are nice to have but not critical (AKA do 
the "must" ones first and the "should" ones only if there is time). 
There was a request to follow RFC guidelines 
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/9.1.0_Collaboration_Requirements#Requirements_Definition)
 
  but I'm not that formal yet.

Can you link to any documentation on your plans in the specifications 
section? Links to the code itself are OK or whatever you have available 
without too much added work. I added a link to your GIT sample script 
already.

More comments inline below.

Thanks,

Greg S

Guillaume Desmottes wrote:
> Le jeudi 04 décembre 2008 à 13:42 -0500, Greg Smith a écrit :
>> Hi Guillaume,
>>
>> Thanks for following up on this!
>>
>> I collected all the known requirements on this here:
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#File_sharing
>>
>> [...]
>> Comments and questions welcome.
> 
> Few comments then.
> 
> 
> "Should allow moving an object to any XO visible over the network (AKA
> pingable) regardless of whether they are visible in the Neighborhood
> (due to bugs in collaboration or someone not collaborating or any other
> barrier which does not prevent ping)."
> 
> I'm wondering how would be the UI for this? How can I send a file/object
> to someone that I'm not seeing?
>>From a Telepathy pov, you have to see the contact (as online) to send
> him a file. One of the improvement I suggested during my Sugar Camp talk
> was to add UI allowing users to add buddy based on their JID (like you
> do with your classic IM client). Then if he accepts you, you'll see it
> in your neighbourhood view when he's online. That means you can
> potentially add any one even if you are not seeing him atm (because of a
> bugged shared roster for example).
> If that what you mean or am I totally missing the point of this
> requirement?

GS - I like that idea of naming the other XO and seeing them every time. 
I like it a lot! Should I create a new requirement for it? We should 
definitely do that if possible. Let me know how close we are.

I put this requirement in to try and have a fall back in case other XOs 
are not visible in the Neighborhood. One of the oddities of our 
"presence" concept is that the users are usually sitting right next to 
each other. That's different than the typical corporate collaboration 
where people are in different offices.

Its frustrating when you can see the kid next to you but your computer 
can't :-(

If others can't solve all our problems of "presence" I want to have a 
fall back. The foolish, worst case is to ask kids to open terminal find 
their IP address, then ping each other then type that IP in to the GUI 
to share files or otherwise collaborate.

Anything we can do to make that happen in the GUI (e.g. your idea above) 
would be great, as a fall back in case file transfer by existing 
"presence" mechanisms is not working.

Eben,

Can you comment on GUI options and let me know if you have any questions?
> 
> 
> "Should support queuing a file for transfer later. That is, add support
> for asynchronous sharing over time : the sharing of an effort should not
> require everyone to be online at once."
> 
> Do you want a "send this file to Bob as soon he's online" button? Then
> it's a pure UI thing, Telepathy (obviously) requiers the contact to be
> online when sending the file to him.

GS - I think this was SJ's idea. Its clever but not critical. If Eben 
can design (and code?) the UI for it and its otherwise free with your 
code, we can consider it. I would definitely put it below the above 
items. I downgraded it to "may".

> 
> 
> "Enable automatic activity downloading for shared activities that aren't
> installed on the joining machine".
> 
> This would need some design work but should be possible I think.
> Basically we need a way for the joiner to say to the initiator "I'd like
> to join this activity but I don't have it. Could you send it to me
> please?".

GS - Another SJ idea. Sorry I left out the priority. I marked it "may" 
to mean its lower than "should". USeful but not critical right now.

> 
> 
> I'd like to know exactly which meta data should be available when we
> receive an incoming file transfer.
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Specifications/Object_Transfers#Information_to_show
> contains some.
> Especially, I think we should distinct mandatory and optional
> informations.

GS - I added that URL to the specifications section.

Eben, can you get Guillaume the details he needs ASAP or let me know who 
to follow up with?

> 
> 
> All the others points seems perfectly reasonable and should be doable.
> 
GS - Awesome

Re: Announcing the NANDblaster

[Ed McNierney]

Thanks, Mitch!  Nice stuff.

- Ed


On 12/5/08 3:53 AM, "Mitch Bradley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> The multicast NAND reflasher - AKA NANDblaster - is ready for serious
> testing.
> 
> See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Multicast_NAND_FLASH_Update for instructions.
> 
> Mitch
> 
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Re: Fedora 10 on XO

[Ed McNierney]

Chris -

Thanks; I think your thoughts are rather similar to mine and I am trying to
get information on what the actual user need (or perceived need) is.  While
there are obvious storage and RAM constraints involved, we need to be sure
we're providing what most users will want (users of this desktop, of
course).

Thanks to everyone else, too, who is contributing to this discussion, as
it's very important to move this topic into the real world of "what is
possible, what would it look like, and what compromises would we have to
make?"

- Ed


On 12/4/08 10:08 PM, "Chris Ball" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> I agree that the choice is yet to be made and isn't totally obvious.
> 
> I prefer using GNOME, but our current answer for "How much disk space
> does it require to run Fedora 10 and GNOME and apps?" is "a 4GB SD card
> and 256M of swap", so it seems hard to get there from here.  Maybe we
> can run GNOME and some tiny set of apps without blowing the NAND budget,
> though..
> 
> - Chris.


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Re: wiki.laptop.org upgrade

[Ed McNierney]

Mikus -

I'd be happy to help, but I'm not sure I understand your suggestion.  I
don't understand what legal consequences you're thinking about - if you can
give me more details I can try to investigate.

But your statement sounds like what I was trying to say: the community of
people who rely on wiki.laptop.org is quite large and since OLPC has taken
on the responsibility of creating and hosting the infrastructure supporting
it we just need to be sure we keep that community in mind, as it has grown
considerably over time (as Bernie pointed out).

- Ed


On 12/5/08 1:15 AM, "Mikus Grinbergs" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>> Wiki.laptop.org is a public-facing Web site used by many, many people who
>> are not on devel@ or hunt for RT tickets or listen in on VIG meetings.  Our
>> public services - especially during our G1G1 period - are mission-critical
>> and we cannot treat them casually.
> 
> While I sympathize with the use of wiki.laptop.org as an "official"
> interface from the OLPC project to the public, that website is where
> to date important information has appeared regarding *what* (e.g.,
> /go/Designs) and *how* (e.g., /go/Feature_roadmap).
> 
> There needs to be a place where such topics can be posted that is
> not so "mission-critical" as to invite legal consequences to the
> project, or to those contributing to the posted content.
> 
> mikus
> 


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Re: wiki.laptop.org upgrade

[Ed McNierney]

Michael -

Thanks; welcome back!  I have been working on the request you made last
week, and on trying to have something out this week as I said I would.  It's
been important to me to ensure I'm reflecting OLPC's position as much as
possible rather than simply my own personal opinion, and I've been having
conversations to that effect.  Given the rather high priority on G1G1
activities that's been difficult but certainly not impossible.  I will
follow up on the details and work with you to complete this important task.
Thanks again for the help.

- Ed


On 12/5/08 12:55 AM, "Michael Stone" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 01:47:02PM +1800, David Farning wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 10:41 AM, Ed McNierney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>> David -
>>> 
>>> I don't understand that comment.  What "several efforts" are you talking
>>> about?  I don't think there were several efforts to publicize this outage -
>>> if so, the scope of those efforts wasn't sufficient IMHO.
>> 
>> I was speaking of larger communication issues.
>> 
>> Two week ago you said that a statement would be forthcoming about the
>> relationship between Sugar Labs and OLPC.  If you had _only_ failed to
>> follow though, that would have been one thing.
> 
>> Instead, you asked one of your employees to to say that a statement
>> would be coming.  Thereby putting his reputation, not yours, on the
>> line.
> 
> For the record, I was the one who asked Ed and Kim to assent to
> participating in a joint statement; not the other way around.
> 
> I requested this boon because I think that it's really quite important
> for the representatives of OLPC and SugarLabs who need to work together
> on a daily basis to be able to do so under mutually agreeable and
> agreed-upon terms.
> 
> Now that I'm back from my visits with friends and family, I'll naturally
> do what I can to see that this is put to rest as I hoped was going to
> take place in my absence.
> 
> Michael
> 
> P.S. - Ed -- do you have any suggestions or edits that you'd like to
> make before I start more broadly circulating, in draft form, the points
> that I suggested to you last week?


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Re: Sugar & XFCE

[Carlos Nazareno]

Hi all.

OLPC dev considering the support of XFCE in future builds is music to my ears.

After getting to experience hands on an actual XO machine running
Sugar a few months ago, I encountered the following issues:

1) The Journal / lack of a real file manager:
a) accumulation of too many no longer needed journal entries over time
which makes usage difficult
b) the flat file/listing heirarchy, which makes organization a bit
unwieldy -> resulting in hundreds of "unreadable/unusable" entries if
you stick in an SD card with browser-based content containing hundreds
of HTML
c) the difficulty in transferring multiple files, requiring the
terminal or MC to do extensive file transferring

2) Apps need to be sugarized.
Before I was able to actually try an XO hands-on, I had it in my mind
that OLPC was going to show the world how fantastic linux was
especially because there were thousands of fantastic apps already out
there that could be run by just downloading and slapping them onto the
XO.

Sadly, this is not the case because of the need for everything to be Sugarized.

It's difficult enough finding enough linux-based content
contributors/authors/developers on the same scale as for platforms
like windows. The added step of needing to sugarize applications and
not conflicting with rainbow security is a double-whammy. Add to the
fact that a lot of the authors contribute on a volunteer basis, and
not as paid developers.

We have to make the process of developing apps/content for the XO much
friendlier.

3) Vector graphics and the animated frame transitions cannot be kind
on the processor.
>From my experience as a flash developer, I know that rastering vector
graphics is more processor intensive than painting bitmap sprites
onscreen. Couple that with the XO's high resolution and you have more
work cut out for the CPU.

These days, 433MHz may seem unusable to the average Moore's
law-spoiled user, but it was more than enough for me who grew up on a
4.77MHz 8088 as a kid (yeah, that's nothing to you guys over here who
are older :P), a Pentium 166 MMX with 64MB RAM in college during the
late 90s, and then an AMD K6-2 500 w/ 256MB RAM as my primary
workstation during the early 2000's.

That K6-2 500 w/ 256MB RAM's specs are practically the same as the
XO's and performs more or less the same as proven by this circa 2003
experiment of mine: http://www.object404.com/lab/aquarium.php -- it
runs at practically the same speed on the XO as my aforementioned K6-2
Win98 rig

The main difference was that back then in 2003 on my K6-2 Win98 rig, I
was running the Flash MX IDE, a text editor, the Opera 6 browser with
about 20 browser tabs open, Winamp and that CPU & Memory hog: Norton
Internet Security (antivirus + firewall) simultaneously.

Barring virtual memory/swap space I don't see any reason why can't we
get similar performance out of the XO.

*

Back on topic, I'm really thrilled that OLPC core is considering the
mainstream support/usage of environments like XFCE on the XO, as
opposed to it being relegated to unsupported hacking.

Sugar is fantastic, but I feel that the XO is not being used to its
full potential because Sugar is meant to be used in a specific context
with a much narrower scope than normal laptops and targeted towards a
very low age demographic.

Anyway, really I hope this proposal to support an alternative UI like
XFCE pushes through.

I really believe that with more traditonal desktop environments on the
XO, entities that previously required the the support the Windows
environment as a precondition for ordering XO units can be shown that
the same functionality that they require from windows can be fully
achieved by a linux environment (firefox, thunderbird, open office,
etc), and thus deliver the linux adoption coup that so many people
hoped OLPC would provide.

Now that alternative systems like the Deep Blue UMPC
http://www.ilikeblue.net/products/umpc.htm (1GHz Via processor, 1GB
ram, 40GB HD)
can be had for about $200 ($240 with WinXP) brand new in places like
here in the Philippines, I think OLPC needs to re-evaluate its current
direction in order to stay relevant in places where access to
electricity is readily available.

Delivering laptops to less-privileged students in more developed urban
areas (where efficient power usage is less of a concern) may not sound
as romantic as deploying them to infrastructure-poor remote rural
environments, but these places are no less relevant and laptops can
serve as an even more effective force multiplier because proper
support and infrastructure is more readily available.

Best regards,

-Naz

-- 
Carlos Nazareno
http://www.object404.com

interactive media specialist
zen graffiti studios
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: Announcing the NANDblaster

[quozl]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 11:28:45AM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> Wow, that's great! With that reflashing many laptops might even be  
> fun, just watching the blinkenlights ;)

The wireless LEDs are not enabled, you have to watch the screen instead.
(Not a complaint, merely an observation, as the blinkenlights don't).

-- 
James Cameronmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://quozl.netrek.org/
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RE: Music Keyboard for TamTam?

[Mr frÿffffffffffe9dÿffffffffffe9ric pouchal]

Hello

It seems that you need "jack" in order to connect your usb-midi keyboard to 
your application

http://jackaudio.org/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bristol

a nice keyboard could be , I dont know if linux supports this keyboard

KORG nanoKEY 25-Key USB MIDI Controller Keyboard
$49.00
http://www.amazon.com/KORG-nanoKEY-25-Key-Controller-Keyboard/dp/B001H2X192/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=musical-instruments&qid=1228472814&sr=8-1

Fred

--- On Thu, 12/4/08, Caryl Bigenho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> From: Caryl Bigenho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: RE: Music Keyboard for TamTam?
> To: "Edward Cherlin OLPC" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Gary Martin" <[EMAIL 
> PROTECTED]>
> Cc: "Developers List" 
> Date: Thursday, December 4, 2008, 8:55 AM
> Thanks for all your efforts!
> 
> The last time I used a midi keyboard with a Mac (it was a
> G3) it had to have a special "midi interface" and
> then was just "plug and play" from there using
> Finale as a program. In looking over your discussion below,
> it looks like you did manage to get a midi keyboard to work
> with the XO, but with great difficulty. Some questions...
> 
> Will it work with all of the TamTam Activities?
> 
> Is it likely that all midi keyboards would work?
> 
> Would it be possible to put the instructions into language
> that the less technically inclined could easily follow to
> get started on this?
> 
> Does anything have to be changed in the software/hardware
> to make this easily used by teachers everywhere?
> 
> Do you know of any source of very simple, inexpensive midi
> keyboards? No bells and whistles needed, they are already in
> the XO in the TamTam Activities.
> 
> Could easier use of a midi keyboard be incorporated into a
> change in the Sugar OS (like 9.1.0)?
> 
> Or is there an easy way to make the current set-up easier?
> 
> Thanks again for your interest and efforts!
> 
> Caryl
> 
> 
> 
> > Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 20:37:59 -0800
> > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: Re: Music Keyboard for TamTam?
> > CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; devel@lists.laptop.org
> > 
> > See also
> > 
> > http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/189728345/
> > 
> > Walter and Simon demonstrate MIDI keyboard input into
> the A-TEST board
> > Taken on July 14, 2006, uploaded July 14, 2006
> > 
> > On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 9:16 PM, Gary C Martin
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > On 1 Dec 2008, at 04:01, Gary C Martin wrote:
> > >
> > >> On 30 Nov 2008, at 22:16, Erik Garrison
> wrote:
> > >>
> > >>> On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 12:20 AM, Gary C
> Martin
> > >>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >  On 30 Nov 2008, at 01:29, Erik
> Garrison wrote:
> > 
> > > On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 8:23 AM, 
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> ignacio wrote:
> > >>>
> > >>> On Mon, 2008-11-17 at
> 04:24 +, Gary C Martin wrote:
> > 
> >  On a more
> disappointing note I found this ticket "G1G1 tamtam
> >  suite
> >  should respond to
> MIDI keyboard input" from 10 months ago.
> >  Closed.
> >  Wont fix :-(
> > 
> > 
> https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6031
> > >>>
> > >>> All "wontfix"
> means is that they're waiting for someone with a
> > >>> stronger
> > >>> itch to scratch it ;)
> > >>
> > >> i really have no idea how
> such devices are normally presented to
> > >> the systems, but is it
> possible that the keyboard is consists of
> > >> more than one USB device
> (i.e., via a built-in hub) and that not
> > >> all the drivers are present
> on the XO?
> > >>
> > >
> > > FWIW, The M-audio systems abide
> by open midi specifications and are
> > > platform-independent.  I
> don't know about the driver situation.
> > >
> > > There is a program which can be
> used to dump midi signals to
> > > stdout.
> > > It might be a good test as
> it's very simple to configure and its
> > > results are very clear, unlike
> the audio programs you'll want to
> > > use.
> > 
> >  ... and it's called??? Gah! ;-)
> > >>
> > >> Just for reference, after connecting the USB
> Midi keyboard amidi -l
> > >> gives me:
> > >>
> > >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~]$ amidi -l
> > >> Dir DeviceName
> > >> IO  hw:1,0,0  Keystation 49e MIDI 1
> > >>
> > >>> I'm not at an XO or my development
> machine now, but looked around the
> > >>> web to try to find some information to
> help.
> > >>>
> > >>> See:
> http://www.4front-tech.com/pguide/midi.html
> > >>
> > >> Will go read.
> > >>
> > >>> Does the system have a /dev/midi* when
> you plug the device in?
> > >>
> > >> Yep, I get a /dev/midi1
> > >>
> > >>> Do you see anything interesting in the
> kernel logs returned with
> > >>> dmesg?
> > >>>
> > >>> Unfortunately our kernel configs
> aren't online anywhere i can find...
> > >>> but I'll check to see if it's
> enabled.  My guess would be not, but
> > >>> perhaps I'm mistaken.
> > >>>
> >  I'm trying to hack my way through
> cod

Re: Announcing the NANDblaster

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 05.12.2008, at 09:53, Mitch Bradley wrote:

> The multicast NAND reflasher - AKA NANDblaster - is ready for serious
> testing.
>
> See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Multicast_NAND_FLASH_Update for  
> instructions.
>
> Mitch


Wow, that's great! With that reflashing many laptops might even be  
fun, just watching the blinkenlights ;)

- Bert -


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Re: Fedora 10 on XO

[Peter Robinson]

>>> is xfce the right choice?  i know it's "easy", but we should be
>>> sure it's correct.  (i've been using it on my own xo, in a
>>> relatively unsophisticated way, but in the end that only makes it
>>> feel like an unsophisticated interface, so i may not be the best
>>> judge.  :-)
>>
>> I agree that the choice is yet to be made and isn't totally obvious.
>>
>> I prefer using GNOME, but our current answer for "How much disk space
>> does it require to run Fedora 10 and GNOME and apps?" is "a 4GB SD card
>> and 256M of swap", so it seems hard to get there from here.  Maybe we
>> can run GNOME and some tiny set of apps without blowing the NAND budget,
>> though..
>>
>> - Chris.
>
> Well, in the early days of the "Fedora on XO" project, I was working
> with Jim on evaluating the possibility of reducing Fedora's image size
> heavily to make it e.g. fit on the NAND or a SD card. To give you an
> idea where we landed: The latest tries with XFCE resulted in an 300 MB
> image. Using GNOME didn't change a lot, but if I remember correctly, it
> was a few MBs bigger...

I don't think it would be too much bigger than the current joyride
image (dependant on what apps you want to add) gnome is quite
dependant on e-d-s but we already have the likes of xulrunner,
abiword, totem etc for apps. The foot print to add their "standard"
interfaces isn't massive. Then you need a windows manager, nautilus
and gnome-panel. The question is then what deps they pull in and
filing bugs to get them as slimmed down as possible. Some of the new
deps will be pulled in anyway because Sugar wants to add support for
things like printing.

Peter
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Re: Fedora 10 on XO

[Peter Robinson]

>   > is xfce the right choice?  i know it's "easy", but we should be
>   > sure it's correct.  (i've been using it on my own xo, in a
>   > relatively unsophisticated way, but in the end that only makes it
>   > feel like an unsophisticated interface, so i may not be the best
>   > judge.  :-)
>
> I agree that the choice is yet to be made and isn't totally obvious.
>
> I prefer using GNOME, but our current answer for "How much disk space
> does it require to run Fedora 10 and GNOME and apps?" is "a 4GB SD card
> and 256M of swap", so it seems hard to get there from here.  Maybe we
> can run GNOME and some tiny set of apps without blowing the NAND budget,
> though..

I think it should be more achievable once libgnome and friends are
gone along with some splitting of some of the 'extra' features in some
main packages out into sub packages. This ties quite nicely in with a
NetBook "Fedora Mini" spin I've been looking at, which is how I got
side tracked into OLPC :-)

Peter
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Announcing the NANDblaster

[Mitch Bradley]

The multicast NAND reflasher - AKA NANDblaster - is ready for serious 
testing.

See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Multicast_NAND_FLASH_Update for instructions.

Mitch

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