olpc August 2008

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Reminder: Fedora OLPC meeting at 1pm Eastern US time today
by Greg DeKoenigsberg 05 Sep '08

05 Sep '08

On freenode, #fedora-olpc. In about an hour. --g

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Sugar on Fedora 10 Alpha - how to I run it?
by Jerry Williams 03 Sep '08

03 Sep '08

I noticed that there is a sugar-desktop group on Fedora 10 Alpha. How do I run it? I tried running sugar-shell and it kind of works, but not like it is suppose to. Any help would be appreciated, Jerry Williams

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RFH - xs-rsync on F9 fails with an odd error
by Martin Langhoff 31 Aug '08

31 Aug '08

More fun to be had debugging! Rsync and xinetd - those two old friends - are not playing ball, and there error is not something I've ever seen before. So if you have an F9 machine and want to debug something (and hopefully help craft a patch). To start, add a repo to your F9 box pointing to http://fedora.laptop.org/xs/testing/olpc/7/i386 - keep it disabled by default - I don't want a yum update to switch your desktop machine into a school server. Not yet at least. Notes: - that repo contains a single dangerous package. Do NOT dare install xs-config - it will reconfigure your machine in unexpected ways. Everything else is pretty sane. - even if harmless, the packages here will create a directory called /library - assuming you don't have a /library dir you use, all is safe... 1 - From that repo, install xs-rsync, most dependencies are harmless, (see cleanup notes later). 2 - xs-rsync by default binds to an odd address, edit the bind address in /etc/xinet.d/xs-rsync so that it listens on localhost 3 - ah, magic moment: run `rsync rsync://localhost/` - normally, it should list one directory: 'builds' (this is from /library/xs-rsync/pub feel free to put something there). On my system, it errors out, and /var/log/messages talks about getpeeraddr errors, which I've never seen before. Nor has google :-/ 4 - ??? 5 - patch! Cleanup: - You will probably want to remove xinetd, incron, and usbmount if you are not otherwise using them. - rm /library if there is no content of yours there. 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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State of Fedora spin
by Jim Gettys 29 Aug '08

29 Aug '08

Sebastian Dziallas and I have been investigating a OLPC Fedora spin for OLPC; as not everything is upstream in Fedora (we keep trying!), it is not logical to call this a spin of Fedora, but of an OLPC load of software derived from Fedora. Goals o minimize differences from stock Fedora, so that everyone can help. o small footprint, ideally so small that olpc-update o "culturally" compatible with those expecting a conventional laptop experience, as typified by Give One Get One donors, supporting a selection of "conventional" applications (e.g. web browser, mail client, editor, etc.). Where are we: o Build machine has been established at 1cc; if you want access to it, send an SSH key to me. o a 520 megabyte spin was pretty easy to make; but that is using Squashfs, which is more efficient than JFFS2, so it is still not small enough to fit allowing olpc-update to be used for an in-place upgrade. Said spin booted fine on conventional systems, though since it lacked a kernel for OLPC, could not be booted on the XO. o the olpc kernel lacks the squashfs patch; we created a RPM adding it, which would be necessary to use the Fedora live-cd-tools. o Some experiments have been made with Puritan, another build system done by Michael Stone, though nothing bootable as yet. o I've spent some time looking through Sebastian's spin: it is clear we can make a small enough image, without too much grief... Additionally, Daniel Drake and Bobby Powers have documented how to install Fedora 9 onto an SD card. Initial notes can be found from this message: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-August/msg00070.html Note that a gnome environment runs decently, which is something lots of end users would find acceptable; note we avoid some notable memory pigs: e.g. evolution. On first blush, XFCE is (probably) not necessary. Note that this is a pretty full fedora install, on a 4 gig SD card; something much smaller as a starting point is needed. Problems right now: o live-cd-tools doesn't seem to find the initrd, when Sebastian tries to build a spin with an OLPC kernel. We don't understand this. Anyone familiar with the live-cd-tools who can help is greatly appreciated... o Note that there is tons of other fat to nuke; some unneeded dependencies (e.g. libgweather), icons at a bunch of sizes, /usr/share/doc is accumulates to several hundred megabytes (uncompressed). Note that this is several hundred megabytes larger than the OLPC Sugar only build. We'll need lots of help here; some of it is very easy; for example, nuking post install (most of) what is in /usr/share/doc. o what the manifest of the system should be is something well worth serious discussion: there are questions such as claws versus thunderbird, versus other mail possibilities. o sorting through backgrounds and icons in /usr/share (which, uncompressed, approaches 1GB) to define a minimal set, and dealing with the packaging issues that arise would also be a big help. o Once a spin exists, some modifications would be needed to the installation program to install the spin onto jffs2. We hope that by the time this all is ready to go, conventional packages for Sugar for Fedora will make it possible for a simple sugar installation as well; but only time will tell. So any help folks care to give, please jump in... - Jim -- Jim Gettys <jg(a)laptop.org> One Laptop Per Child

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RFH: Anaconda install with alternative default disk layout (kickstart?)
by Martin Langhoff 28 Aug '08

28 Aug '08

I suspect this is trivial for kickstart/anaconda experts -- and help would be appreciated with this. What I am after is a kickstart file to drive XS installs to have a default disk layout that is _different_ from the F9 default disk layout, and yet can be overriden by the user. I've seen kickstart scripts that force-change the screen to a specific console to ask interactive questions. Looked scary to my untrained eye... 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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RFH: Script to make installable USB stick
by Martin Langhoff 28 Aug '08

28 Aug '08

As part of porting the XS to F9 I am moving from using live CDs to anaconda-based installer CDs. This has a fundamental benefit - that you can now upgrade from the CD as well as installing - but a downside: there are not easy tools to turn an installer CD into a bootble installer USB stick that "just works". A couple of weeks ago I started an attempt at it, based on livecd-iso-to-disk. It mostly worked - anaconda did get bootstrapped, but it failed to find the RPMs directory. I haven't had a change to look at it further. Help with it would be appreciated (and probably useful to Fedora users in general). Earlier discussion and patch: http://marc.info/?l=fedora-buildsys-list&m=121740636925259&w=2 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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IRC meeting
by Marco Pesenti Gritti 28 Aug '08

28 Aug '08

Are we going to have an irc meeting tomorrow? Not sure if those are supposed to be weekly or not... Marco

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REMINDER: fedora-olpc meeting tomorrow at 1pm Eastern US time
by Greg DeKoenigsberg 28 Aug '08

28 Aug '08

Just want to catch up and find out what everyone's doing. :) #fedora-olpc, irc.freenode.net. See you there. --g

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Sugar people traveling to FUDCon Brno
by Tomeu Vizoso 28 Aug '08

28 Aug '08

Hi all, some of the Sugar developers will come out from their honeycombs and fly to Brno, Czech Republic to meet at the FUDCon Brno 2008 the September 5 - 7, 2008. The plan is to explain to whoever listens to us in which way Fedora has been good for Sugar and how good Sugar could be for Fedora. We are starting to plan this meeting in [1] and we should soon move things to [2]. [1] http://www.sugarlabs.org/go/Events/FUDCon_Brno_2008 [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon/FUDConBrno2008 Although this meeting will be a bit restricted in scope because it's about Fedora, we'd like to ask everybody for help in creating material that can be used in conferences. One example is an activity tutorial (or perhaps several depending on the audience and format). One pretty ambitious possibility would be to show how to do a gobby-like activity with pieces from Write and XOIrc? Eben, would you like to do a simple mockup of how this could look like? Any comments, suggestions, etc will be most welcome. And if anyone feels like passing by there and saying hello, would be great! Thanks, Tomeu

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Pungi minimal installer, comps.xml trick
by Martin Langhoff 27 Aug '08

27 Aug '08

Playing with a minimal Pungi kickstart file I get an install CD of about 500MB. If I add the xs-pkgs dependencies, things balloon to 759MB, no longer fitting in a CD. My guess is that a good 1/3 of that is related to the graphical installer and related dependencies which we don't want on the installed CD. It's not a complete deal breaker, but I prefer to distribute images that are small, and ideally fit on 1 CD. Jerry, you mentioned that fiddling with comps.xml was an option? How do you do that? ;-) This is how I am building the F9 XS images - sudo pungi -c kickstarts/pungi-f9-minimal.ks --nosource --name XS --ver=0.5dev --force --discs=1 --nosplitmedia And pungi-f9-minimal.ks contains... ## These are public repos repo --name=release --mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-9&arch=$basearch repo --name=olpc7 --baseurl=ttp://fedora.laptop.org/xs/testing/olpc/7/i386 repo --name=olpc9 --baseurl=http://fedora.laptop.org/xs/testing/olpc/9/i386 ## I actually use these local copies :-) #repo --name=fedora --baseurl=file:///media/disk/xs/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os/ #repo --name=everything --baseurl=file:///media/disk/xs/releases/9/Everything/i386/os/ #repo --name=olpc7 --baseurl=file:///xsrepos/testing/olpc/7/i386/ #repo --name=olpc9 --baseurl=http://fedora.laptop.org/xs/testing/olpc/9/i386 %packages --nobase #@core bash kernel passwd policycoreutils chkconfig authconfig rootfiles anaconda-runtime #-gnome* #-cairo #-xorg-x11-server-Xorg xs-config xs-pkgs %end 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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olpc August 2008