List of packages in XO SW and not in Fedora 10
by Greg Smith
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
15 years, 3 months
Fwd: [nylug-talk] Thoughts on the XO
by Jon Stanley
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
15 years, 4 months
Re: [Server-devel] stability of XS 0.5
by Martin Langhoff
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...
>
> 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
15 years, 4 months
Booting F9 on XO?
by Martin Langhoff
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
15 years, 4 months
re: Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO
by Greg Smith
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.f10b6...
> (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
***********************************************
15 years, 4 months
Re: Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO (was Fedora 10 on XO)
by Peter Robinson
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.f10b6...
> (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/
15 years, 4 months
Re: Slimmed Down Fedora 10 on XO (was Fedora 10 on XO)
by Peter Robinson
>> 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
15 years, 4 months
