Ian Bicking wrote:
...
One idea Michael has been working on is to do a complete build in a
virtual environment, and then people can use that environment; either
with something like VMWare, or potentially produce a live CD. I don't
think the CD that is produced from the builds really makes sense --
doing stuff like hardware detection is really out of the scope of what
OLPC should be concerned with.
...
That still won't give people the environment they are used to, unless
they happen to be used to what we produce. (I think Michael is using
Ubuntu?)
I used Gentoo, as it was the only system on which we were able to get a
build to run to completion during the sprint (it's also the one with
which I am most familiar) but it looks basically the same for users as
an Ubuntu desktop. I've finished the build and have an image
ready-to-go, btw.
Still working on how to distribute the image. Being a full Gentoo Gnome
desktop plus Sugar it's quite large (3GB compressed) and I haven't got
the bandwidth on my web-host to provide downloads. cshields (who I
*think* works for Open Source Labs) suggested they may be able to
distribute it as a simple download. I'm also going to look into getting
a .torrent up on LinuxTracker.org with the image.
I've also updated the Sugar on Gentoo page on the wiki with a
Gentoo-style (i.e. reasonably exhaustive, step-by-step) description of
how to build Sugar using the system libraries approach. With that and
the binary packages directory I have it should be possible for a
developer to install on a Gentoo system without much effort or
compilation (other than that done by sugar-jhbuild itself).
The environment is a regular (somewhat minimalist) Gnome desktop. It
has Firefox 2.0.0.2, Eric3, and Inkscape, as well as a launcher button
to start Sugar using sugar-jhbuild run. From the image the developer
can keep up-to-bleeding-edge should they wish (using sugar-jhbuild), or
just use the image as built. I haven't got squeak or etoys built due to
a sugar-jhbuild glitch yesterday. Keeping the whole system up-to-date
(if a developer wishes to do so) will require some command-line work
(sugar-jhbuild being command line, as is portage), but nothing that
can't be documented fairly easily.
Regarding the image:
* Gentoo (up to date stable build with just the required ~x86
packages, based off a 2006.1 (latest) profile)
* Disk: 3GB compressed, 7GB uncompressed, 8GB sparse, 4GB of that
used as far as the embedded OS is concerned
* 256MB RAM allocated in the image
* Performance is quite reasonable for editing code and testing Sugar
on a host with reasonable (1GB) ram and processor (2GHz Athlon64)
* Gnome desktop incl. Firefox 2.0.0.2
* Sugar built and ready-to-run
* Common developer's tools installed (source code control systems,
gcc, vim, Eric3, Inkscape)
* Networking works reasonably well (uses nonstandard NetworkManager
for the networking system, as in Sugar)
The target market for this image is developers on Win32 or Linux who
just want to start working on Sugar, but who don't want to spend weeks
mucking about trying to get a build to work. It trades a very large
download (or a burned DVD with the compressed image, I suppose) for the
ability to simply unpack, run and start working with Sugar in a
reasonable development environment with mature tools available.
Have fun all,
Mike
--
________________________________________________
Mike C. Fletcher
Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
http://www.vrplumber.com
http://blog.vrplumber.com
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