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[Karlie]

OLPC and Fedora are teaming up to create a sanctioned OS Alternative for the XO

Adults who may not find Sugar practical for daily use, Fedora 10 allows the XO to behave in a more familiar way. 

In this sense, the XO is on-par with any small form factor laptop except your purchase of an XO during the Give One Get One promotion directly effects the lives of children.

There are lots of people out there who will stand in line for days waiting to buy electronics and this is their chance to have something 'exclusive' since the XO isn't something you can buy at your local electronics store.

Again, thinking about all those people who don't think twice about buying smart phones, game systems, and the like - there's no corporate profit with the XO, just a chance to better the lives of children all over the world.

You may also consider that Fedora has always been the base for the XO's operating system, so this is a logical step. 

~Karlie Robinson

PS F10 for the XO will be on the Fedora mirrors on November 25 with the release of Fedora 10.  You can preorder an SD card loaded with F10 at On-Disk.com or at Amazon.com when you order an XO

[BeckyJ]

F10 for the XO will be on the Fedora mirrors on November 25 with the release of Fedora 10.  You can preorder an SD card loaded with F10 at On-Disk.com or at Amazon.com when you order an XO

Karlie,

How do you determine / set performance and stability criteria for F10 on SD before releasing it for the XO?

Curious.

[Karlie]

How do you determine / set performance and stability criteria for F10 on SD before releasing it for the XO?

The Short Answer - Everything we can. 

Now, forgive me for such a long post, but I'm hoping to show that a lot of people have put a lot of thought and time into this card in an effort to boost G1G1.

I touched on this a bit in a previous post

The short version is that OLPC and the Fedora Project have been working together to ensure that the Fedora Spin for the XO is up to standards. 

Heck, just a quick peek at the teams will give you an idea of how many people are contributing to the stability and performance of the spin. 

Those teams then fit into the Quality Assurance plan for Fedora on the XO as well as the QA plans for Fedora as a whole. 

Now as far as QA on the SD cards manufactured by On-Disk, we're working with SanDisk and Arrow Electronics to ensure that we have an OEM SD Card. 

Why is OEM important?  When any sort of flash memory is produced there are minute differences with the internal structure.  For this project we'll need to use an OEM part which ensures that we have the same card structure with every SD we send through the duplicator.  Retail packaged cards do not have a consistent internal structure which can cause quality issues with a duplication run.

It's not that retail is inferior quality, but for day to day use (in a camera, phone or other application) write tolerances don't need to be as precise.

On top of that, we have two XO's here for further QA testing and of course our Replacement Guarantee should there be any issues with a card that's delivered. 

~Karlie Robinson

[anna]

The Fedora 10 team sure has their work cut out for them.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=FedoraOnXO

[mavrothal]

The Fedora 10 team sure has their work cut out for them.

Might not even be necessary if what I think is happening is true...
Joyride 2541 got a whopping 143MB size increase that includes among others
+fedora-gnome-theme.noarch 0:8.0.0-7.fc10
+fedora-icon-theme.noarch 0:1.0.0-4.fc10
+fedora-release.noarch 0:10-1
+fedora-release-notes.noarch 0:10.0.0-0.2
+gnome-desktop.i386 0:2.24.1-5.fc10
+gnome-icon-theme.noarch 0:2.24.0-1.fc10
+gnome-keyring.i386 0:2.24.1-1.fc10
+gnome-themes.noarch 0:2.24.1-1.fc10
+libgnomecanvas.i386 0:2.20.1.1-2.fc9
+libgnomecups.i386 0:0.2.3-4.fc10
+libgnome.i386 0:2.24.1-7.fc10
+libgnomeprint22.i386 0:2.18.5-1.fc10
+libgnomeprintui22.i386 0:2.18.3-1.fc10
+libgnomeui.i386 0:2.24.0-2.fc10
and many more...
Too bad it does not run. The bz2 etx3 image that I downloaded was corrupted and what I salvaged would not mount. 

[Jordan]

Might not even be necessary if what I think is happening is true...
Joyride 2541 got a whopping 143MB size increase that includes among others

I noticed that a lot of the packages are labelled as fc10, while packages in prior Joyride builds were labelled as fc9.  This suggests, in my mind, that they are transitioning from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10 as the base but they haven't sorted out the dependency issues yet.  So it's probably a safe bet that those Gnome and CUPS packages will disappear in the very near future.

(I've noticed a lot of dependency issues when trying to install packages from the repositories.  They seem to err on the side of adding bloat, which doesn't work out that well for a machine that is resource constrained.  For example, a lot of programs seem to depend upon Perl even though they don't depend upon Perl.)

[markhadman]

I'm cautiously excited about this. A mainstream, easy to install distro with custom hardware support and updates?  Imagine an XO with the best of all worlds:

- No more waiting for a python-based environment that takes 5 seconds just to launch the default terminal emulator.
- Support for pre-pango/gtk font rendering, allowing use of  xterm/emacs/ratpoison etc
- No more looking through journal files named 01omgffs6s-3help4mee because the camera app is sugarized but your ftp client isn't
- Full support for brightness, volume and rotate buttons, camera and mic
- Fully configurable suspend and resume
- A 'bloated' kernel with SMB/CIFS and USB->VGA support (any others missing?)
- A 'real-time' kernel option for signal processing.
- 5 second boot time (  http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ )

This is all do-able if there is a talented and dedicated team putting together an adult XO distro with the right balance of flexibility and small footprint - and the willingness to patch up a new kernel or two. With the XO finally 'working' for adults, G1G1 mk III could do more for OLPC's goals than any government contract.

[morgs]

The Fedora 10 team sure has their work cut out for them.

Might not even be necessary if what I think is happening is true...
Joyride 2541 got a whopping 143MB size increase that includes among others
+fedora-gnome-theme.noarch 0:8.0.0-7.fc10
+fedora-icon-theme.noarch 0:1.0.0-4.fc10
+fedora-release.noarch 0:10-1
+fedora-release-notes.noarch 0:10.0.0-0.2
+gnome-desktop.i386 0:2.24.1-5.fc10
+gnome-icon-theme.noarch 0:2.24.0-1.fc10
+gnome-keyring.i386 0:2.24.1-1.fc10
+gnome-themes.noarch 0:2.24.1-1.fc10
+libgnomecanvas.i386 0:2.20.1.1-2.fc9
+libgnomecups.i386 0:0.2.3-4.fc10
+libgnome.i386 0:2.24.1-7.fc10
+libgnomeprint22.i386 0:2.18.5-1.fc10
+libgnomeprintui22.i386 0:2.18.3-1.fc10
+libgnomeui.i386 0:2.24.0-2.fc10
and many more...
Too bad it does not run. The bz2 etx3 image that I downloaded was corrupted and what I salvaged would not mount. 

This is purely due to OLPC starting to rebase the OLPC "distro" on F-10 instead of F-9. This is part of the work that will lead to a new release of Sugar, on OLPC release 9.1.0 due out next year. This has got nothing to do with the work that Fedora is doing to make F-10 itself run on the XO.

[morgs]

Might not even be necessary if what I think is happening is true...
Joyride 2541 got a whopping 143MB size increase that includes among others

I noticed that a lot of the packages are labelled as fc10, while packages in prior Joyride builds were labelled as fc9.  This suggests, in my mind, that they are transitioning from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10 as the base but they haven't sorted out the dependency issues yet.  So it's probably a safe bet that those Gnome and CUPS packages will disappear in the very near future.

(I've noticed a lot of dependency issues when trying to install packages from the repositories.  They seem to err on the side of adding bloat, which doesn't work out that well for a machine that is resource constrained.  For example, a lot of programs seem to depend upon Perl even though they don't depend upon Perl.)

Yes, every time we rebase we have to remove a lot of bloat like Perl. This involves producing custom versions of packages to remove dependencies, and you'll see .olpc3 or .olpc4 instead of .fc9 or .fc10 with these packages.

This version of joyride doesn't even boot, which is the same as we had when we moved from F-7 to F-9. Please wait for some more iterations while our build guys figure out which bits are necessary to get it booting again. Joyride should be regarded as highly experimental at this stage of the OLPC development cycle.

[mavrothal]

This is purely due to OLPC starting to rebase the OLPC "distro" on F-10 instead of F-9. This is part of the work that will lead to a new release of Sugar, on OLPC release 9.1.0 due out next year. This has got nothing to do with the work that Fedora is doing to make F-10 itself run on the XO.

Thanks for clearing this up. Was good while it lasted...

[Jordan]

Just out of curiousity, is the Fedora 10 release going to be signed so that people don't need a developer key?

Also, I've seen a few distributions where the user uses a USB flash disk or SD card.  Why hasn't anyone (that I've seen) tried to put the distribution on the internal NAND memory?  The SD solution is okay-ish since it tucks nicely into the machine and offers a lot more flash memory for the file system, but I could easily imagine someone wanting to keep the SD slot free to swap media between the XO and a digital camera (for example).  Done properly, it would also be quite easy to reflash the NAND -- even for inexperienced users: dump a couple of files onto a USB drive, then hold down a few buttons while powering the machine on.

[Karlie]

Just out of curiousity, is the Fedora 10 release going to be signed so that people don't need a developer key?

The developer key will be needed this time around, but the team, is hoping to be able to do away with that requirement. 

Also, I've seen a few distributions where the user uses a USB flash disk or SD card.  Why hasn't anyone (that I've seen) tried to put the distribution on the internal NAND memory? 

I can't say that anyone hasn't. 

Remember, Fedora releases every 6 months so while we're on a deadline with F10, we'll be able to do an even better job for the F11 Release in the spring. 

I can say for sure, that anyone with good ideas and/or a willingness to help should visit http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OLPC. 

After all, isn't that the beauty of Open Source?  That it can change and become what users need it to be? 

... I could easily imagine someone wanting to keep the SD slot free to swap media between the XO and a digital camera (for example).

Forgive me for taking a perfectly on-topic remark and taking it off topic, but I've had great luck with USB Card Readers.  They're small and some are pretty cheap.  So an adapter would allow you to swap cards and such while there's something in the XO's card slot. 

~Karlie

[quickboot]

- 5 second boot time (  http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ )

Why hasn't anyone been able to do this for the OLPC?

All we need is a simple, alternate boot that Rapidly boots up with Wifi access and a browser.
That's it. Let's make this "Toy" practical for G1G1 participants.

Yes, there are those that want the full Ubuntu flexibility and features. The "full" Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora installs have already been successfully implemented, and those willing to wait minutes for their OLPCs to boot up with them are happy.

However many G1G1 participants, such as myself, may not be as interested in the plethora of functionality that these builds have to offer, and only want rapid, basic functionality:

1. Quick boot time (Yes, ideally 5-10 seconds)
2. Basic wifi access and webbrowsing.
3. Business applications such as: Spreadsheet, Word Processor, PDF viewer, PPT Presentation viewer would be nice.

What do we need to do to make this a reality?