Announce: first bootable Rawhide build
by Chris Ball
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>
15 years, 1 month
Today's daily build
by Chris Ball
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>
15 years, 1 month
Ed Tech Day Ithaca College in NY
by Karlie Robinson
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/
15 years, 2 months
Sugar on Rawhide
by Bryan Kearney
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
15 years, 2 months
Re: Meeting today?
by Mikus Grinbergs
> 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
15 years, 2 months
Meeting today?
by Karlie Robinson
Just trying to figure out my schedule for the rest of the day.
Thanks,
Karlie
15 years, 2 months
Re: first bootable Rawhide build
by Mikus Grinbergs
> > 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
15 years, 2 months
Daily builds set up
by Chris Ball
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>
15 years, 2 months
video dust
by Mikus Grinbergs
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
15 years, 2 months
RFC: Supporting olpc-ish Deployments - Draft 1
by Michael Stone
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>
15 years, 2 months
