olpc February 2009

olpc@lists.fedoraproject.org

28 participants
44 discussions

Announce: first bootable Rawhide build
by Chris Ball 01 Mar '09

01 Mar '09

Hi, Today's (unmodified) Rawhide build boots into X on the XO, so I made some disk images for it. They contain both Sugar and GNOME, and you can choose between the two in GDM. Sebastian Dziallas made the kickstart file that we're using. http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/20090217/ Installation instructions: * Get a developer key, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activation_and_Developer_Keys * Upgrade to latest OFW, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_q2e32 NAND: * put 20090217.img and .crc on a USB key * in OFW: copy-nand u:\20090217.img USB/SD: * insert a USB key that is at least 2G, and: zcat 20090217.bootable.gz > /dev/sdX * SD should work, but we're seeing a problem with the kernel SD driver qemu: * sudo qemu-kvm -cdrom 20090217.iso Known problems: * wireless crashes the machine on boot, so it is disabled. * fonts are tiny in Sugar * The tty framebuffer is corrupted; fix sent upstream, not made it back to Fedora yet Steps to reproduce the build: git clone git://dev.laptop.org/projects/fedora-xo sudo livecd-creator --cache=cache -c ~/fedora-xo/olpc-desktop.ks (this produces the ISO) sudo sh livecd-iso-to-xo.sh 20090217.iso 20090217.img (produces NAND image and CRC) sudo /usr/bin/livecd-iso-to-disk --format --xo --xo-no-home 20090217.iso /dev/sdX1 (produces a bootable disk or SD card) sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=20090217.bootable && gzip 20090217.bootable (produces a raw image of the created disk) Please report any problems you find to the list, thanks, - Chris. -- Chris Ball <cjb(a)laptop.org>

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Today's daily build
by Chris Ball 28 Feb '09

28 Feb '09

Hi, Today's build (http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/20090227/) looks pretty good, thanks to Sebastian Dziallas hacking on the kickstart file some more: * wireless works * Sugar font size problems are fixed * Firefox is replaced with Midori, which is more usable with little RAM * we included the Fedora 10 kernel to see if we get the 25M of missing RAM back, but we don't. Feedback and bugs welcome, - Chris. -- Chris Ball <cjb(a)laptop.org>

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Ed Tech Day Ithaca College in NY
by Karlie Robinson 27 Feb '09

27 Feb '09

Forgive the cross posting as this is sort of crossing over between an Ambassador Event and an OLPC SIG item. I just got off the phone with EdTech Day[1] organizers at Ithaca College and they will be giving me a speakers slot in their program to talk about the XO - after all you can't get much more edtech than that. I want the focus to be on what I know about - obviously - Fedora/OLPC together in harmony and changing the world one line of code at a time - specifically what's going on today at Fedora to propel the OLPC Mission. So most likely 4th grade math curriculum and the massive amount of work being done regarding packages. More importantly, this is your opportunity to fill me full of talking points. Of course I'm happy to wing it, but I'd really love it if you could tell me more about what's important to you. If you were giving the talk, what should be said? ~Karlie [1] http://www.ithaca.edu/edtechday/

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Sugar on Rawhide
by Bryan Kearney 27 Feb '09

27 Feb '09

I am trying to compose a pure rawhide Sugar destktop to run in a virtual machine. I have used both my own kicksarts and those from [1] with the livecd post stuff yanked out. I can get to the login screen (either gnome or the swanky one from [1]), and I can log into GNOME. However, when I attmept to access sugar I can get as far as selecting my sugar-dude's color and then I get an X restart and am pushed back to the login screen. Is this a known issue right now? -- bk [1] http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/soas/repos/mainline/trees/master

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Re: Meeting today?
by Mikus Grinbergs 26 Feb '09

26 Feb '09

> The agenda: assessment of the current state of rawhide on the XO, what > gaps need to be filled, and how that matches the time we have left before > release. If the intent is to be able to say "rawhide runs on the XO" (e.g., with GNOME), then talking about "the time we have left before release" makes sense. I've been running Sugar on rawhide on the XO, and it is not clear to me that "what's not currently working" can be conveniently matched against "the time we have left". What if the first thing added doesn't do the fix (or takes longer than planned) ? Some of the serious things that currently impact the usability of Sugar on rawhide on the XO (the list is longer, these are examples): - tiny text - no wireless - no collaboration (empty Neighborhood View) - no power management - no working Browser - difficulty installing Activities - no XO-keyboard "extra key" support - (a hurdle for me) SD card operations take too much time - some tools not usable (e.g., sugar-launch, olpc-log) mikus

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Meeting today?
by Karlie Robinson 26 Feb '09

26 Feb '09

Just trying to figure out my schedule for the rest of the day. Thanks, Karlie

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Re: first bootable Rawhide build
by Mikus Grinbergs 21 Feb '09

21 Feb '09

> > I did a copy-nand of your image to my XO - but it would only come > > up in GNOME. Having done so, what do I need to do to choose Sugar ? > > When you first boot, there's a small "Session: " dropdown that you can > choose Sugar from. It looks like it doesn't show up again when you log > out for some reason. When I was originally booting, I was not seeing the dropdown on the 'Session:' button. Just now I booted again (with less external stuff plugged in), and saw the dropdown from which I chose Sugar. BTW, with 20090220.img, the XO 'Frame' key seems to do nothing. Also, some of the text is way too small (including in Terminal). Also, at least on ethernet I can ping other nodes. > http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/livecd-iso-to-xo.sh Thank you for making it accessible. Please add read permissions. Thanks, mikus

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Daily builds set up
by Chris Ball 21 Feb '09

21 Feb '09

Hi, We have a new build for today: http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/20090218/ and a Makefile that automates the build process: http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/fedora-xo;a=blob;f=Makefile;hb=HEAD and a script to run the Makefile via cron: STAMP=$(date +%Y%m%d) mkdir -p $STAMP && cd $STAMP && make -f ../Makefile $STAMP.done && cd .. && scp -r $STAMP dev.laptop.org:public_html/rawhide-xo/ Good news: * the libertas-dev list thinks they have a fix for wifi coming soon. Bad news coming up for suspend/resume: * the code we need to go into suspend isn't upstream; maybe it's time to start a new effort to push it there. No more news on the 25M loss in total RAM when running the Fedora kernel. If anyone wants to help investigate, here are dmesgs from the two kernels: OLPC build 656: http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/656-dmesg F11: http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/f11-boot Daniel Drake reports that he thinks our crash when booting from SD would go away if we had the sdhci module built-in rather than =m. Thanks, - Chris. -- Chris Ball <cjb(a)laptop.org>

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video dust
by Mikus Grinbergs 21 Feb '09

21 Feb '09

Installed the SugarLabs xoimages/soas3.img on my XO. I'm a 'Terminal session' user. When I leave this XO sit unattended for a while, the screen content gets replaced by "dust" - similar to the video corruption that eventually shows up in the text console (ctl-alt-F2) of an OLPC build (except that with the OLPC build the screen background is dark, but here the screen background is lit). When I press a key the correct Terminal screen content gets shown. mikus

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RFC: Supporting olpc-ish Deployments - Draft 1
by Michael Stone 19 Feb '09

19 Feb '09

Folks, Pia Waugh (greebo) and I have spent a fair bit of time in the last month talking and thinking about what we can do in the next few months to best support present and future olpc-ish deployments (typically with XOs, typically running Sugar) and we'd like to share some of our thoughts with you. These thoughts are presented in draft form in order to solicit your feedback, which is eagerly awaited, and will likely be incorporated into future drafts. Regards, Michael ------------------------------ 1. Motivation We think that many deployment-related needs are not being adequately met, particularly in the areas of: * knowledge-sharing and the ability to benefit from others' mistakes. * volume and quality of aid available for conducting deployments. * bandwidth, latency, and SNR of channels to other communities which work with deployments; e.g. other deployments, educators, software teams, distributions, researchers, consultants, and volunteers 2. Use Cases We're particularly interested in addressing these situations and needs: D1) I'm running a deployment... a) ...and I need help! Who shares my problem? Who can help me? b) ...and I want to do more! Who/what can I work with? c) ...and I want to share! Where do I go? What is needed? D2) I need to talk to people deploying XOs. a) Where do I go? b) What can I expect? D3) I'm working on a deployment plan. a) Where to I start? b) What have I forgotten? c) Am I using best practices? d) Can I get a review? D4) I need to know... a) real deployment numbers, b) maps, c) examples, d) photos, e) techniques, f) contact info, ... 3. Existing Resources for Use Cases Before we started, there were three basic mechanisms for addressing these use cases: 1) read the Deployment Guide and the Deployments page(s): http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_Guide http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments_support 2) ask olpc-techsupport(a)laptop.org. (Only available to large deployments?) 3) poke people on IRC. These three mechanisms are problematic because none of them can be relied upon, alone or in combination, to adequately address any of the use cases listed above. 4. New Resources for Use Cases So far, we've created two new resources which help bridge the gap: 4) weekly deployment support meetings, with minutes at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_meetings#Meeting_notes which get aggregated each month into 5) a Deployment FAQ, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_FAQ similar in form and spirit to the G1G1 http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support_FAQ We think that these two new resources, in combination with the pre-existing resources, will help us provide the next level of support for our use cases. 4. Projects We presently have several ongoing (interrelated) projects which you might like to become (more deeply) involved in: P1) Keep improving the deployment support meetings -- so far, so good! -- your participation in these meetings is our best current source of new content for the Deployment FAQ and for... P2) Organize material captured in the meetings as FAQ entries -- the meeting minutes are chronological, which is good for minutes, but not particularly helpful for random-access reads. -- FAQ entries seem like a good compromise between maintenance cost, timeliness, and satsifaction of the use cases P3) Update the Deployment Guide -- The Guide is now ~1 year out of date -- and it leaves too much to the imagination: just look at its advice on critical areas like connectivity, content acquisition, and means of participation in the larger community of 1-1 educational laptop programs in general and XO deployments in specific. 5. Status Project P1 (meetings) is rolling along quite happily only one month after its inception but it could use your help in order to become even more vibrant, dense, and ingrained in the olpc-psyche. Project P2 (FAQ) is just beginning -- we've done a first rough-cut which you should review for us and help us edit down into something awesome! Project P3 (Guide updates) is just a twinkle in our eyes -- and it needs your help to fly! In particular, three different mechanisms have been tentatively proposed for how to accomplish the update(s): a) By sprints, like the FLOSS Manuals sprints that created the XO and Sugar manuals. b) By accretion, like the rest of the wiki, performed on a piecemeal basis by participants in the deployment support meetings. c) By issue-tracking, like software releases. 6. Questions: * Does this analysis hold water? * Is there anything we could spend our time on which would yield a greater return on investment? * Are there any fixable roadblocks which prevent group ____ from participating? (e.g., pervasive use of IRC for meetings?) * <your question here>

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olpc February 2009