olpc December 2008

olpc@lists.fedoraproject.org

24 participants
33 discussions

List of packages in XO SW and not in Fedora 10
by Greg Smith 16 Jan '09

16 Jan '09

Hi Greg D or Dennis, Can you post a list of packages which are in XO Software but not "upstream" yet? I wrote down "koji latest-pkg dist-olpc4 --all" from our last IRC meeting and documented it here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Rebase_on_Fedora_10 but I don't know where or how to execute that. If you can run it and get a list and post it to that wiki page that would be great. Or you could link to the documentation which shows how anyone can generate that list. I want to have this in hand before I talk to John P at Fudcon January 8 so any help appreciated. Thanks, Greg S

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Fedora Desktop on XO
by Greg Smith 09 Jan '09

09 Jan '09

Hi Peter et al, I'm still looking for help resolving the dependencies Chris found when he tried to install Gnome. The issue and thread are documented in the specifications section here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Run_Fedora_applications_on_XO What do we do next when we get a list of "dependency errors"? Paul, I believe that you got XFCE running. Can you add the description of what you did to make that happen to this page? http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Run_Fedora_applications_on_XO I may have a little time tomorrow to try it out if its not too complicated. Thanks, Greg S

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Fwd: [nylug-talk] Thoughts on the XO
by Jon Stanley 20 Dec '08

20 Dec '08

Well, a successful LUG event with the XO! :) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com> Date: Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 11:58 PM Subject: [nylug-talk] Thoughts on the XO To: NYLUG Talk <nylug-talk(a)nylug.org> Hello! Obviously Matt would want us to believe that we, (or I) would happen to be impressed by his presentation at the meeting and the holiday party for the 17. Well I was. However I found the XO laptop that was presented to us by Jon to be an excellent unit, and certainly worthy of the praise that people are offering it. And I've just completed examining the Amazon page for the unit, I must say I am impressed by their efforts, the photos of the units being used by the young people were well taken. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com "This signature was once found posting rude messages in English in the Moscow subway." _____________________________________________________________________________ Hire expert Linux talent by posting jobs here :: http://jobs.nylug.org The nylug-talk mailing list is at nylug-talk(a)nylug.org The list archive is at http://nylug.org/pipermail/nylug-talk To subscribe or unsubscribe: http://nylug.org/mailman/listinfo/nylug-talk -- Jon Stanley Fedora Bug Wrangler jstanley(a)fedoraproject.org

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Re: [Server-devel] stability of XS 0.5
by Martin Langhoff 19 Dec '08

19 Dec '08

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 8:24 PM, Anna <aschoolf(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 12:07 PM, Martin Langhoff > <martin.langhoff(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I followed the instructions here for Fedora 9, but using the XS 0.5 install > CD instead. > http://www.reactivated.net/weblog/archives/2008/08/regular-linux-desktops-o… > > Also, in the kernel config file in /XO-alt-distro/kernel/2.6.25.15-XOaltF9-1 That's the main thing that worries me - the kernel. I'd like to use a standard F9 kernel -- when I talk about "backporting cleverness", it's about applying some fixes that IIRC Jeremy Katz applied to the initrd that F10 carries. We need a standard Fedora kernel because - we don't need all the latest cleverness in power saving - we need as many drivers for network and usb kit as possible - we don't have easy access to kernel folk - Deepak is kept busy with laptop concerns > I enabled the bonding module before I ran the sd_fixup script. At the end, > it failed to do the chroot thing, so I looked at the chroot.sh script in > /XO-alt-distro/distro/fedora-9 and then manually did: > > sed -i "/VolGroup00/d" /media/disk/etc/fstab > cp olpc.fth /media/disk/boot Alternatively, you can use a more conventional disk partitioning scheme :-) > I don't have a USB to ethernet adaptor, so I downloaded and put the rpm in > /root before I disconnected the 8 GB SD card. I booted up on an XO and did > the usual XS stuff, including installing the rpm, and got what looked like a > working XS, with the exception of failure to load the extra iptables > modules. I booted up a regular XO, got an IP on msh0, and then successfully > registered to the XSXO. Moodle looked like it was working on the XSXO, but > when I go to http://schoolserver/moodle, all I get on the regular XO is a > bunch of error messages related to scorm. Overall, promising results :-) The iptables modules perhaps aren't included. That Moodle's failed is odd! /var/log/moodle/ will have an installation log that probably tells us what went wrong, can you post it. > I haven't tried ejabberd yet, though I suspect the little XSXO might be a > little underpowered to handle that with too many users. It should cope with 20~30 users. Simultaneous use with Moodle might need further tuning, but it can be made to work. > At any rate, this needs testing definitely. But that's a great start :-) > associated with an XS, this might be a solution. Boa does work on a regular > XO, but I don't know if that would work within a simple mesh environment. We're still a bit tied to apache, can boa work with mod_python's low level hooks? > I bet this would even work on an XO with a broken screen if it was otherwise > going to go unused, as you could either ssh in to do stuff or simply swap > the SD card temporarily. Using ssh might be a better idea anyway, as the > console display is very, very small. Yeah. OTOH, I woudn't want to promote cannibalising the XS ;-) we'll see where this leads... cheers, m -- martin.langhoff(a)gmail.com martin(a)laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff

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Booting F9 on XO?
by Martin Langhoff 18 Dec '08

18 Dec '08

Now that we have F10 booting on the XO, and we understand the challenges around that, is it possible to boot a barebones F9, "backporting" whatever cleverness was applied to F10? Is anyone interested in trying? It would open an opportunity to lots of small schools that need a rugged server. The XS is likely to stay on F9 for a couple of minor releases -- until I find a good opportunity for a rebase, being a small team is hard :-/ -- so if F9 can be twisted into booting off and SD card, we get a valuable alternative in the form of XO + SD card + USB drive (for storage). cheers, martin -- martin.langhoff(a)gmail.com martin(a)laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff

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Reminder: meeting today, 1pm
by Greg DeKoenigsberg 18 Dec '08

18 Dec '08

Agenda: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OLPC/Tasks See you all on irc.freenode.net, #fedora-olpc, at 1pm eastern US time. --g -- Got an OLPC that you're not using? Loan it to a needy developer! [[ http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Exchange_Registry ]]

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Announcing: New Fedora Sugar Spin Release
by Sebastian Dziallas 18 Dec '08

18 Dec '08

Hi everybody, here is a new release of our Fedora Sugar Spin! It has been some time since the last release has taken place, so there are some updates to report. * The spin is now F10 based and includes the recent updates * Language support has been dropped for now to save space From now on, sugar-presence-service is also included, which means that you can test the connection features by adding a server to your settings. The procedure is being explained in a blog post here [1]. * A number of new activities has also appeared, such as... - sugar-analyze - sugar-jukebox - sugar-memorize - sugar-turtleart You want to have a look at the latest spin? Here you go! http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/olpc/0.82-2/i686/sugar-spin.iso Finally, the SHA1SUM is available here [2]. --Sebastian [1] http://gregdek.livejournal.com/41616.html [2] http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/olpc/0.82-2/i686/SHA1SUM

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re: Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO
by Greg Smith 17 Dec '08

17 Dec '08

Hi Peter, Thanks a lot for your help! FTI all, I am trying to capture the useful pieces of info from this thread on the feature page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap/Run_Fedora_applications_on_XO Feel free to update that or use it for your reference. Thanks, Greg S **************** Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2008 01:21:32 +0100 From: "Peter Robinson" <pbrobinson(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO (was Fedora 10 on XO) To: "Erik Garrison" <erik(a)laptop.org> Cc: OLPC Development <devel(a)lists.laptop.org>, greg(a)laptop.org, fedora-olpc-list(a)redhat.com Message-ID: <5256d0b0812161621u4acb70cch92250f2606d4bde2(a)mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Hi Erik, >> Fedora has a set of tools now called Appliance-Tools [1] for creating >> this sort of thing. You can use it to specify a minimal build and then >> pull in the extra stuff you want, specify repositories etc. I used it >> to build a joyride VM I could use for slicing and dicing package deps >> and the like the other day in around 15 mins (plus the time it takes >> to construct the actual filesystem etc). I can post the kickstart file >> somewhere if your interested in using it as a base. The image it >> produced has a boot issue that I need to get time to fix (or work out >> why its got root fs issues) but it was a quick demo to see if it >> helped. > > I heard about these (appliance tools) from Reuben. Any documentation > you can post would be highly useful. There are a lot of ways to achieve > a similar result, and a lot of people appear to have duplicated effort > as a result. I think this is good, as it gives us some degree of > selection moving forward. Eventually we need to coalesce effort around > one system if we are going to update OLPC's build infrastructure > successfully. The kick start file can be found on my fedora space [1] and the commands I used were essentially appliance-creator --name OLPC-4 --config olpc-4.ks and if you use virtmanage the following command to import it. virt-image OLPC-4/OLPC-4.xml All these sort of tools are what's used to create fedora. Things like mock and koji from the build system side of things and livecd-tools and appliance-tools and the like to build the livecds etc. So from a development point of view they're probably the direction to be headed. jkatz who is around on fedora-devel (and devel@laptop too I think) would be the one to shed more light in this direction. > FWIW: The boot issue might be related to nash's mount command not > working for jffs2. The quick and dirty way to get around it was to drop > busybox into an initramfs and change the root partition mount line in > the init script to use busybox's mount command instead of nash's. Found > nash extremely unweildy and am curious why it is used in the initramfs. > The initrd I produced is: > http://dev.laptop.org/~erik/rpmxo/initrd.img-2.6.25-20080925.1.olpc.f10b654… > (It is built against the stock 8.2-767 kernel using stock Fedora > initramfs-tools, I just unpacked it and dropped busybox and its library > deps in and made the afformentioned hack to init.) I specified a ext3 fs so it would be easier to deal with on my laptop so it might not be so easy :( but I think it might be the device I used or something. >> I think this is what you are after. There are still some issues with >> packages pulling in too many deps and as time permits I'm trying to >> work through most of these issues while not having to fork half the >> distribution which in turn makes it more work for the OLPC guys. Its a >> fine line. > > Yes. This seems to be endemic, but it appears to be generally a problem > for systems which don't get stretched in this direction (I have seen the > same kind of bloat while testing Ubuntu builds). Its one that quite a few in Fedora are well aware of and people are slowly moving towards. There are a number of SIGs (special interest groups) that are looking to reduce them from different directions. I also hope the push from GNOME to get rid of libgnome/bonobo/gnomevfs etc should settle down and reduce a lot of them before long too. eg most gnome 2.24 now don't depend on gnomevfs but some of the bigger apps like firefox always trail. >> I can help you as much as possible, I'm relatively free for the next >> couple of days but will be then travelling over the next couple of >> weeks so will have limited connectivity. > > Great! Any way you'd like to help. Paring down dependencies is > crucial. 'Minimal' package lists would be also very helpful. I am > hacking mine together and I'm worried I might miss critical things that > would be obvious to a more experienced Fedora developer. Critical packages? They should be auto pulled in by yum. Or do you mean by paring down dependencies in actual packages. If the later let me know what the packages are so I can review changes and see if we can't just get them upstream (in a lot of cases we can split some of the deps out to sub packages in other cases they might be superfluous). Or maybe I've missed the point too :) > One package-level curiosity I've had is how to auto-remove packages > which were automatically installed to satisfy the dependencies of a > manually installed package after said packge is removed. Well in the case of appliance tools that create images on the fly it just won't pull them in. For already installed systems I'm not sure there is for auto remove but there are some tools that identify unused deps. I have a note of some of them somewhere, I'll try and dig details out. Cheers, Peter [1] http://pbrobinson.fedorapeople.org/olpc/ ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Fedora-olpc-list mailing list Fedora-olpc-list(a)redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-olpc-list End of Fedora-olpc-list Digest, Vol 6, Issue 14 ***********************************************

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Re: Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO (was Fedora 10 on XO)
by Peter Robinson 16 Dec '08

16 Dec '08

Hi Erik, >> Fedora has a set of tools now called Appliance-Tools [1] for creating >> this sort of thing. You can use it to specify a minimal build and then >> pull in the extra stuff you want, specify repositories etc. I used it >> to build a joyride VM I could use for slicing and dicing package deps >> and the like the other day in around 15 mins (plus the time it takes >> to construct the actual filesystem etc). I can post the kickstart file >> somewhere if your interested in using it as a base. The image it >> produced has a boot issue that I need to get time to fix (or work out >> why its got root fs issues) but it was a quick demo to see if it >> helped. > > I heard about these (appliance tools) from Reuben. Any documentation > you can post would be highly useful. There are a lot of ways to achieve > a similar result, and a lot of people appear to have duplicated effort > as a result. I think this is good, as it gives us some degree of > selection moving forward. Eventually we need to coalesce effort around > one system if we are going to update OLPC's build infrastructure > successfully. The kick start file can be found on my fedora space [1] and the commands I used were essentially appliance-creator --name OLPC-4 --config olpc-4.ks and if you use virtmanage the following command to import it. virt-image OLPC-4/OLPC-4.xml All these sort of tools are what's used to create fedora. Things like mock and koji from the build system side of things and livecd-tools and appliance-tools and the like to build the livecds etc. So from a development point of view they're probably the direction to be headed. jkatz who is around on fedora-devel (and devel@laptop too I think) would be the one to shed more light in this direction. > FWIW: The boot issue might be related to nash's mount command not > working for jffs2. The quick and dirty way to get around it was to drop > busybox into an initramfs and change the root partition mount line in > the init script to use busybox's mount command instead of nash's. Found > nash extremely unweildy and am curious why it is used in the initramfs. > The initrd I produced is: > http://dev.laptop.org/~erik/rpmxo/initrd.img-2.6.25-20080925.1.olpc.f10b654… > (It is built against the stock 8.2-767 kernel using stock Fedora > initramfs-tools, I just unpacked it and dropped busybox and its library > deps in and made the afformentioned hack to init.) I specified a ext3 fs so it would be easier to deal with on my laptop so it might not be so easy :( but I think it might be the device I used or something. >> I think this is what you are after. There are still some issues with >> packages pulling in too many deps and as time permits I'm trying to >> work through most of these issues while not having to fork half the >> distribution which in turn makes it more work for the OLPC guys. Its a >> fine line. > > Yes. This seems to be endemic, but it appears to be generally a problem > for systems which don't get stretched in this direction (I have seen the > same kind of bloat while testing Ubuntu builds). Its one that quite a few in Fedora are well aware of and people are slowly moving towards. There are a number of SIGs (special interest groups) that are looking to reduce them from different directions. I also hope the push from GNOME to get rid of libgnome/bonobo/gnomevfs etc should settle down and reduce a lot of them before long too. eg most gnome 2.24 now don't depend on gnomevfs but some of the bigger apps like firefox always trail. >> I can help you as much as possible, I'm relatively free for the next >> couple of days but will be then travelling over the next couple of >> weeks so will have limited connectivity. > > Great! Any way you'd like to help. Paring down dependencies is > crucial. 'Minimal' package lists would be also very helpful. I am > hacking mine together and I'm worried I might miss critical things that > would be obvious to a more experienced Fedora developer. Critical packages? They should be auto pulled in by yum. Or do you mean by paring down dependencies in actual packages. If the later let me know what the packages are so I can review changes and see if we can't just get them upstream (in a lot of cases we can split some of the deps out to sub packages in other cases they might be superfluous). Or maybe I've missed the point too :) > One package-level curiosity I've had is how to auto-remove packages > which were automatically installed to satisfy the dependencies of a > manually installed package after said packge is removed. Well in the case of appliance tools that create images on the fly it just won't pull them in. For already installed systems I'm not sure there is for auto remove but there are some tools that identify unused deps. I have a note of some of them somewhere, I'll try and dig details out. Cheers, Peter [1] http://pbrobinson.fedorapeople.org/olpc/

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Re: Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO (was Fedora 10 on XO)
by Peter Robinson 16 Dec '08

16 Dec '08

>> The hard part will come when we need to pick the bare minimum set of >> functionality. I especially want to know what additional >> libraries/RPMs/features we need to install beyond what we alrady have in >> XO 8.2.0. > > I have been quite frustrated with the Fedora toolset in this regard. > Getting a bare minimum of functionality is not something which these > tools are typically used to do. The experience of building a Fedora > system from 'scratch' contrasts starkly with what we find in Debian, > where debootstrapping is a common development pattern which is > well-supported by the community. > > It can be done, and I am going to seek as much help from the Fedora > community in doing so as possible. It just isn't easy and I have felt > like there are a lot of problems in using Fedora in this fashion which > will have to be resolved to make it easy for deployments to use such a > build script. > > (I sincerely hope someone flames me here as any attention to this issue > is good attention.) Fedora has a set of tools now called Appliance-Tools [1] for creating this sort of thing. You can use it to specify a minimal build and then pull in the extra stuff you want, specify repositories etc. I used it to build a joyride VM I could use for slicing and dicing package deps and the like the other day in around 15 mins (plus the time it takes to construct the actual filesystem etc). I can post the kickstart file somewhere if your interested in using it as a base. The image it produced has a boot issue that I need to get time to fix (or work out why its got root fs issues) but it was a quick demo to see if it helped. I think this is what you are after. There are still some issues with packages pulling in too many deps and as time permits I'm trying to work through most of these issues while not having to fork half the distribution which in turn makes it more work for the OLPC guys. Its a fine line. I can help you as much as possible, I'm relatively free for the next couple of days but will be then travelling over the next couple of weeks so will have limited connectivity. I have no issue with the flames, but would much prefer to help you out than flame back :-D Peter [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ApplianceTools https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ApplianceTools

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