Sugar on Fedora 10 Alpha - how to I run it?
by Jerry Williams
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
15 years, 7 months
RFH - xs-rsync on F9 fails with an odd error
by Martin Langhoff
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
15 years, 8 months
State of Fedora spin
by Jim Gettys
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
15 years, 8 months
RFH: Anaconda install with alternative default disk layout (kickstart?)
by Martin Langhoff
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
15 years, 8 months
RFH: Script to make installable USB stick
by Martin Langhoff
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
15 years, 8 months
IRC meeting
by Marco Pesenti Gritti
Are we going to have an irc meeting tomorrow? Not sure if those are
supposed to be weekly or not...
Marco
15 years, 8 months
Sugar people traveling to FUDCon Brno
by Tomeu Vizoso
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
15 years, 8 months
Pungi minimal installer, comps.xml trick
by Martin Langhoff
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
15 years, 8 months
