OLPC + Fedora = ?

David Zeuthen david at fubar.dk
Wed Feb 8 03:32:53 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 21:17 +0000, Andy Green wrote:
> David Zeuthen wrote:
> 
> > Hi, thanks for your email. We (Red Hat) are in the process of setting up
> > mailing lists, documentation, web-sites and code repositories for the
> > OLPC project. It will be ready in a few weeks! Stay tuned!
> 
> Hi David -
> 
> Well glad to hear it, I hope these rather fundamental questions will
> still be in scope by then.

Yes, things are definitely not set in stone yet. To comment on the list
in your original mail.. it seems pretty good and thoughtful though it's
probably a bit premature to discuss this at such a great detail. Indulge
some rambling...

Our current thinking (and code) revolves partly around making it easier
to build derived lean distributions based on Fedora Core. All this
includes fixing a few obvious and not-so-obvious things in Core; it
includes lots of thinking about distribution and updates in scenarios
that the OLPC project targets (e.g. millions of users, extremely low
admin/user ratios, think appliance); it includes thoughts about how lock
down and provide a secure OS out of the box; it includes thinking about
how to fit this in almost no space with very limited RAM and worse.. no
swap; it includes thinking about how to easily enable application
developers and other stake holders to participate... and a whole bunch
of other stuff too..

It's also useful to keep in mind that the software side of the OLPC
project is larger than the bits Red Hat will provide - there's a bunch
of smart people thinking about... not so much how we provide the bits in
a sane way to users (all the stuff in the paragraph above)... but what
bits we should be providing... for example, it's not at all a given to
me that we want the target users (they are kids!) to sit down and learn
a difficult program like openoffice.org Writer.. (this doesn't mean that
I don't like oo.o)

Anyway, it's probably not useful to start a huge thread here about these
high-level thoughts (read: no need to reply)... First of all we need a
dedicated mailing list and other infrastructure since a) this is sort of
off-topic for f-d-l; and b) the S/N ratio here is simply too huge to
have a constructive discussion. Second, and more important probably, we
want to provide some bits you can try out along with some written-down
thoughts. We want future contributors have a good starting point so
we're all on the same page. And we're there pretty soon. Stay tuned!

Thanks,
David





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