Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Sean DALY]

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 8:18 AM, Samuel Greenfeld 
wrote:

> You might laugh but when the OLPC Association was actively answering bids
> for laptops, this dance happened all the time.



Also known as "sales calls", never a strong point with FLOSS projects, and
one of the reasons so many Intel Classmates were deployed.

Sean.
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Gonzalo Odiard]

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 7:49 PM, James Cameron  wrote:

> On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 11:28:42AM -0300, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
> > When I talked with deployments and they ask for Ubuntu,
> > and I ask why, what they really want is Long Time Support.
> > No deployment change their image more than once a year.
> > In fact, change a image is a logistic challenge for most of
> > the big/middle size deployments.
>
> This continues to puzzle me.  LTS is a stream of security updates, and
> you say the deployments do not apply them until the next year?
>
> And yet they want them?
>
> They want something they don't use?
>
> If a vulnerability is reported just after they make their image, the
> children are exposed to the vulnerability for the rest of the year.
>
> It seems more likely that the meaning of LTS is not understood.
>
> Fedora continues with security updates for a similar time period, but
> if the deployment uses our builder unchanged they won't get them.  I'm
> expecting that if a deployment needs LTS on Fedora they will assume
> the responsibility to apply the updates when they make a build.
>
>
All valid points. I sent a email to the deployment to ask for more
information.
I will report when have a reply.

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 12:04 AM, James Cameron  wrote:
> On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:28:06AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
>> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:21 AM, Samuel Greenfeld  
>> wrote:
>> > The obvious counterargument would be that a deployment might want
>> > to deploy your XO-Next (whatever it is) alongside existing XO
>> > laptops, allowing all of them to have the same configuration.
>>
>> From my memory of olpc-os-builder it was very modular and wouldn't be
>> hard to add dozens of different devices support to it.
>
> Yes, it would be straightforward to add commodity hardware support to
> olpc-os-builder.  Add kernel and boot loader.  Add some sort of
> installer.
>
> But we have SoaS, and SoaS works fine on commodity hardware, so why
> bother with olpc-os-builder?

Because same process for any and every device. A single process is a
good thing, it makes it easier to understand and get a consistent
configuration everywhere.

> Because olpc-update?  Nobody uses it.

The interesting thing here is that Atomic on Fedora would provide
everything that olpc-update was designed to do and it could make
upgrades between Fedora releases much easier and less of an issue with
regards to TLS. Plus probably a bunch of things that it currently
doesn't and it's upstream being actively developed, instead of home
brew, would likely ease the security updates issues mentioned
previously and easy pushing out of updates, caching updates for
bandwidth etc.

> Because preinstalled activities?  SoaS can do that too.
>
>> > There's plenty of blame to go around in terms of re-inventing the wheel and
>> > lack of communication.
>>
>> Yep!
>>
>> > There simply (and correct me if I'm wrong) are not the resources inside of
>> > OLPC, outside, or combined at this time to maintain and update two separate
>> > builds & build systems.
>> >
>> > It amazes me how far we bend over backwards to avoid saying "end of life"
>> > and "end of support".
>> >
>> >
>> > I have seen a fair amount of interest, both publicly and privately, for
>> > newer XO laptop builds.  But I don't think the requesters realize how much
>> > work it takes to make one.
>>
>> The big one here is kernel kernel kernel.
>
> Yes.
>
>> > And I do not forsee anyone stepping up to get the XO-1.75 and XO-4 kernel &
>> > drivers into a state they can be upstreamed or upgraded for newer Fedoras
>> > unless a deployment really wants this instead of newer equipment.
>>
>> Or even the 1.5, I believe most of the XO-1 support is upsteream.
>>
>> > Newer operating systems tend to require more disk space and RAM than the
>> > predecessors.  We have seen this even within Fedora's lineage.
>>
>> Yes, and no. I mean 1Gb of the original XO-1 is tight, but SoaS still
>> happily fits in 4Gb with a bunch of space to spare. Looking at my
>> current SoaS VM the used space is around 1.9Gb. Amusingly the various
>> cloud/container enterprise initiatives actively help us here because
>> for once they care about dependency bloat too :-)
>>
>> The two things that add bloat to the current SoaS image are:
>> * Browse needs to be converted to the new WebKitGtk APIs so we don't
>> ship two copies of WebKitGtk.
>> * Conversion of remaining gstreamer 0.10 to 1.0 to allow us not to ship that.
>>
>> Ultimately I think you could with a little development effort get it
>> down to 1.5Gb used space which would make a 2Gb filesystem quite
>> usable.
>>
>> > Since OLPC already appears to be going the Ubuntu LTS route, I would argue
>> > it would be easiest to take everything that way, porting utilities as
>> > required, and make that the final image & build system for XOs.
>>
>> Personally I have no interest in that. I wish you luck.
>
> --
> James Cameron
> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Samuel Greenfeld]

There are at least two types of "deployments"/"customers" that Sugar has.

The first is the small, volunteer group.  To them, it doesn't matter what
OS they actually are using, or (to some extent) how well tested things
are.  They just want to come in, try something with their students, and if
they need to tweak something or something breaks, it's no big deal.

The second is the large deployment.  And large deployments, like large
corporations, do not want to deploy Sugar widely unless they have a chance
to thoroughly check it out.


First, they might investigate a bit to see who currently uses Sugar, and if
there are any other users they can get recommendations from.  Then they
might look into Sugar Labs, asking about Sugar's history, what warranties
were available, the future roadmap for features, etc.  They may insist on
having a face-to-face meeting with a Sugar representative, where they could
ask detailed questions.

You might laugh but when the OLPC Association was actively answering bids
for laptops, this dance happened all the time.

When large corporations sell things to each other, support can be
everything.  It doesn't mean that they are going to use it.  But if they
need a patch for critical bug on the President's laptop, or the latest
Shellshock or Heartbleed that their bosses' boss' saw in the news, they
want to have something or someone they can point to definitely get support.

Very few deployments have invested in the resources to internally make
their own OS images at that level of detail.


I don't want to go into it too much in this email, but dealing with large
organizations can be a very different thing.



On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:37 AM, Tony Anderson  wrote:

> I don't know what is puzzling. I can understand a deployment wanting
> assurance of long-term support for Sugar. I doubt there are many
> deployments that even know what Fedora or Ubuntu means. Even fewer that
> understand the difference between SugarLabs and Red Hat or Canonical as
> sources of this support.
>
> The word deployment may be a puzzle, In some cases it as a national
> ministry or OLPC Australia. For most of us, it is a school or other
> institution which has acquired OLPC laptops and is attempting to make use
> of them.
>
> There are many deployments which have never updated their image. In
> general, an update to an XO requires someone to come to the school
> with the technical expertise to do so. I am sure there are schools which
> have never seen such a visitor since they received their laptops.
> The positive element is that the laptops work as they always have. The
> downside, of course, is that the users have no chance to benefit from
> the new capabilities available from current releases.
>
> Finally, what urgent security fixes are required by a deployment with no
> access to the internet?
>
> Tony
>
>
> On 05/08/2015 12:55 AM, sugar-devel-requ...@lists.sugarlabs.org wrote:
>
>> When I talked with deployments and they ask for Ubuntu,
>>> >and I ask why, what they really want is Long Time Support.
>>> >No deployment change their image more than once a year.
>>> >In fact, change a image is a logistic challenge for most of
>>> >the big/middle size deployments.?
>>>
>> This continues to puzzle me.  LTS is a stream of security updates, and
>> you say the deployments do not apply them until the next year?
>>
>> And yet they want them?
>>
>> They want something they don't use?
>>
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Tony Anderson]

I don't know what is puzzling. I can understand a deployment wanting 
assurance of long-term support for Sugar. I doubt there are many 
deployments that even know what Fedora or Ubuntu means. Even fewer that 
understand the difference between SugarLabs and Red Hat or Canonical as 
sources of this support.


The word deployment may be a puzzle, In some cases it as a national 
ministry or OLPC Australia. For most of us, it is a school or other 
institution which has acquired OLPC laptops and is attempting to make 
use of them.


There are many deployments which have never updated their image. In 
general, an update to an XO requires someone to come to the school
with the technical expertise to do so. I am sure there are schools which 
have never seen such a visitor since they received their laptops.
The positive element is that the laptops work as they always have. The 
downside, of course, is that the users have no chance to benefit from

the new capabilities available from current releases.

Finally, what urgent security fixes are required by a deployment with no 
access to the internet?


Tony


On 05/08/2015 12:55 AM, sugar-devel-requ...@lists.sugarlabs.org wrote:

When I talked with deployments and they ask for Ubuntu,
>and I ask why, what they really want is Long Time Support.
>No deployment change their image more than once a year.
>In fact, change a image is a logistic challenge for most of
>the big/middle size deployments.?

This continues to puzzle me.  LTS is a stream of security updates, and
you say the deployments do not apply them until the next year?

And yet they want them?

They want something they don't use?


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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[James Cameron]

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:28:06AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:21 AM, Samuel Greenfeld  wrote:
> > The obvious counterargument would be that a deployment might want
> > to deploy your XO-Next (whatever it is) alongside existing XO
> > laptops, allowing all of them to have the same configuration.
> 
> From my memory of olpc-os-builder it was very modular and wouldn't be
> hard to add dozens of different devices support to it.

Yes, it would be straightforward to add commodity hardware support to
olpc-os-builder.  Add kernel and boot loader.  Add some sort of
installer.

But we have SoaS, and SoaS works fine on commodity hardware, so why
bother with olpc-os-builder?

Because olpc-update?  Nobody uses it.

Because preinstalled activities?  SoaS can do that too.

> > There's plenty of blame to go around in terms of re-inventing the wheel and
> > lack of communication.
> 
> Yep!
> 
> > There simply (and correct me if I'm wrong) are not the resources inside of
> > OLPC, outside, or combined at this time to maintain and update two separate
> > builds & build systems.
> >
> > It amazes me how far we bend over backwards to avoid saying "end of life"
> > and "end of support".
> >
> >
> > I have seen a fair amount of interest, both publicly and privately, for
> > newer XO laptop builds.  But I don't think the requesters realize how much
> > work it takes to make one.
> 
> The big one here is kernel kernel kernel.

Yes.

> > And I do not forsee anyone stepping up to get the XO-1.75 and XO-4 kernel &
> > drivers into a state they can be upstreamed or upgraded for newer Fedoras
> > unless a deployment really wants this instead of newer equipment.
> 
> Or even the 1.5, I believe most of the XO-1 support is upsteream.
> 
> > Newer operating systems tend to require more disk space and RAM than the
> > predecessors.  We have seen this even within Fedora's lineage.
> 
> Yes, and no. I mean 1Gb of the original XO-1 is tight, but SoaS still
> happily fits in 4Gb with a bunch of space to spare. Looking at my
> current SoaS VM the used space is around 1.9Gb. Amusingly the various
> cloud/container enterprise initiatives actively help us here because
> for once they care about dependency bloat too :-)
> 
> The two things that add bloat to the current SoaS image are:
> * Browse needs to be converted to the new WebKitGtk APIs so we don't
> ship two copies of WebKitGtk.
> * Conversion of remaining gstreamer 0.10 to 1.0 to allow us not to ship that.
> 
> Ultimately I think you could with a little development effort get it
> down to 1.5Gb used space which would make a 2Gb filesystem quite
> usable.
> 
> > Since OLPC already appears to be going the Ubuntu LTS route, I would argue
> > it would be easiest to take everything that way, porting utilities as
> > required, and make that the final image & build system for XOs.
> 
> Personally I have no interest in that. I wish you luck.

-- 
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[James Cameron]

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 03:59:10PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> Has anyone actually booted the latest Ubuntu LTS on any/all the XOs?

I've tried it on XO-1.5, and it was doable, but lots of missing
things.  My estimate to fix is greater than the size of work to
stabilise Fedora 20 or Fedora 22.

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[James Cameron]

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 11:28:42AM -0300, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
> When I talked with deployments and they ask for Ubuntu,
> and I ask why, what they really want is Long Time Support.
> No deployment change their image more than once a year.
> In fact, change a image is a logistic challenge for most of
> the big/middle size deployments. 

This continues to puzzle me.  LTS is a stream of security updates, and
you say the deployments do not apply them until the next year?

And yet they want them?

They want something they don't use?

If a vulnerability is reported just after they make their image, the
children are exposed to the vulnerability for the rest of the year.

It seems more likely that the meaning of LTS is not understood.

Fedora continues with security updates for a similar time period, but
if the deployment uses our builder unchanged they won't get them.  I'm
expecting that if a deployment needs LTS on Fedora they will assume
the responsibility to apply the updates when they make a build.

-- 
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http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[James Cameron]

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:16:42AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 12:10 AM, James Cameron  wrote:
> > On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 09:19:45AM -0300, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
> >> I think we should try make a build using CentOS. I don't know if
> >> have all the packages we need, but the rate of change in Fedora was
> >> difficult to follow when OLPC had a team dedicated and now is almost
> >> impossible. The true is we didn't finished to solve the problems we
> >> found in F20, and Fedora is working in F22.
> >
> > I do not think we should switch from Fedora to CentOS, because;
> >
> > 1.  our installed base express interest in Fedora or Ubuntu,
> 
> Daniel Drake, myself and others put in a lot of effort back in the
> F-14/15 days to get everything upstream into Fedora. I continue to
> maintain that and produce a Sugar on a Stick release with every Fedora
> release.

Agreed, and my continued thanks.

> In the last release Daniel and I was involved in the delta between
> Fedora and the OLPC release was very minimal. Basically kernel,
> firmware, and some minor changes to a couple of Sugar packages for XO
> HW and patches that weren't yet upstream.
> 
> > 2.  there are missing desktop packages, which means we are taking on
> > maintenance of those packages on CentOS,
> 
> Having tried and failed to do this back when EL6 was new I believe
> this is a dead end. It turned out to be _WAY_ more effort than
> actually keeping Fedora up to date. The upstream RHEL releases are
> every 6 months but if you need a fix for a package in the core 2500
> odd packages and it's not easy you might be waiting a lot longer for a
> fix.
> 
> In Fedora if you know the right people (like me) you can get a fix
> into update-testing in a day. Also there's a much much wider QA group
> across the packages we use and care about.
> 
> I can go on and on about the details required for this but basically I
> suspect eyes have glazed over already.
> 
> > 3.  we would delay necessary work until the next release of CentOS, or
> > if the work is too large we may never upgrade.
> 
> I suspect it would be never.
> 
> > Let me explain that last point.
> >
> > There is a continuous flow of changes into Fedora.  These changes
> > eventually flow into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and thus into CentOS.
> >
> > The most cost effective way to handle this flow was for developers to
> > test changes on our builds, every week.  This gaves us awareness of
> > the change and kept us involved to resist changes that cause damage.
> > We were there once.  It required a low but continuous engineering
> > effort.
> 
> It use to take around an hour to cut a release from Fedora/Sugar
> repos. Quite often the delta from a patch for a fix being created and
> a new OS was in the hours timeframe. It's the usual story of a little
> bit of effort regularly stops it from being a major issue.
> 
> Kernel and olpc-os-builder aside I think you could probably produce a
> working image of Fedora 22 now. I think all the userspace bits are
> likely there and working due to my SoaS work.

Agreed.  I've not tried Fedora 22 yet.  Time poor.

> It's actually the thing that annoys me most about the sugar community.
> IMO we have a great working Sugar release that works pretty much
> everywhere plus is a great proven base for XO releases yet so many
> core developers have told me "if only you'd focus on Ubuntu we'd use
> it" yet Ubuntu for _YEARS_ have shown that they couldn't given a shit
> and even actively remove core bits needed (remember the Browse on
> Mozilla years anyone??) to make it even harder.

Yes.  Mostly I think the calls for Ubuntu spring from familiarity with
it, and an unwillingness to engage in the process for fixing problems
with Fedora (OLPC and SoaS).  The Ubuntu LTS doesn't cover Sugar, so
it is wrong to expect value from it.

> > The next most cost effective way is to do this work only when a new
> > release of Fedora occurs.  This results in lots of head scratching and
> > bug fixing, and new builds, until the bugs are mostly gone.  We are
> > here now.  It requires bursts of engineering effort.
> 
> Actually it needs work _BEFORE_ a new release happens, any work now
> IMO should be focused on Fedora 23. That way you have everything in
> place in time for Fedora 23 GA in October and you get the longest
> value out of the release.
> 
> > The least cost effective way is to hold off doing that work for three
> > years until the next CentOS release.  This would be a lot more work in
> > a much shorter burst.
> 
> And you'll likely end up in a very disparate stability across devices.
> Both ARMv7 and i686 is community supported in CentOS which means you
> get likely dubious quality of work and I suspect due to toolchain
> config choices for i686 it won't even run on the XO-1. Has anyone
> actually tried booting CentOS-7 on a XO1? From what I've seen of the
> ARMv7 efforts I see it as half arsed at best.

No, nobody has tried booting CentOS-7 on an XO-

Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Gonzalo Odiard]

No official announcements yet.

Samuel was looking at the bug database,
because he knows where to look :)

Gonzalo

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 7:45 AM, Martin Dengler 
wrote:

> On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 11:21:35PM -0400, Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
> > OLPC already appears to be going the Ubuntu LTS route
>
> When/where can I read more about what OLPC is doing with Ubuntu LTS?
> Apologies
> for the lazyweb request.
>
> Martin
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Peter Robinson]

> Ok. I didn't know that.
>
> When I talked with deployments and they ask for Ubuntu,
> and I ask why, what they really want is Long Time Support.
> No deployment change their image more than once a year.
> In fact, change a image is a logistic challenge for most of
> the big/middle size deployments.

Yes, but in the Ubuntu case it's a one way street, there's never been
any love from Ubuntu. You could get it from Canonical if someone put
up a large amount of cash. They don't support gnome in the core so
even then I suspect you'll have similar issues.

> Then, I was thinking in CentOS as a LTS version of Fedora.

Nope, never has been never will be. It's a _DOWNSTREAM_ of RHEL, and
in v7 RHEL only supports 64 bit architectures. The i686 support is
community driven as is the ARMv7 support. No guarantee either will
ever be in sync.

Has anyone actually booted the latest Ubuntu LTS on any/all the XOs?

>> In Fedora if you know the right people (like me) you can get a fix
>> into update-testing in a day. Also there's a much much wider QA group
>> across the packages we use and care about.
>>
>> I can go on and on about the details required for this but basically I
>> suspect eyes have glazed over already.
>>
>
> This is true, and I know that.
> But also is true, that keep the pace of changes in Fedora is not easy.
> In fact, is not Fedora fault, mostly is Gtk ([1], [2], [3]) or libraries
> (the last was vte [4],
> but I can find more).

Yes, I'm aware of that. There's a number of other bits I'm aware of.
Be aware it's not all rosy in the LTS world either.

>> > 3.  we would delay necessary work until the next release of CentOS, or
>> > if the work is too large we may never upgrade.
>>
>> I suspect it would be never.
>
>
> Ok. But Let me explain my reasons.
>
> Right now, the only "stable" images are based on F18.
> We don't have images in a good shape for the deployments for F20,
> we missed F21 (where Gtk theme change in a subtle way again,
> and toggle toolbar buttons don't change the background color),
> and we should start to work in F22. With the hands we have today,
> I am sure we will not solve all the problems we already have before F23 is
> released.

Yes, but then there will be a bunch of issues with the CentOS 7
release, or even the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release which would require a
bunch of work ongoing and a MASSIVE effort to begin with to get it to
the point you can even start to look at stabilising. It too and will
be ongoing and you get to the end of it and you've got a bunch of
awesome support for an ancient release and by then you're basically
screwed.

Ultimately no one will put up that time either. Someone needs to pay
some how whether it be in development or money.

The fact is we are in this situation because OLPC the organisation has
zero interest in the project now and the organisations around the
globe want everything provided to them on a plate with everything the
want provided for free with the click of a finger.

The fact if they all provided a little bit of development resources to
the upstream project there wouldn't be this problem. Many hands and
all that...

> That is my concern. If we would had one dsd involved,
> the conversation would be completely different,
> But as Samuel said in a previous mail in this thread "I have seen a fair
> amount of interest,
> both publicly and privately, for newer XO laptop builds.  But I don't think
> the requesters
> realize how much work it takes to make one."

Exactly! Nor do they want to pay for the effort.

There's is a HUGE amount of initial work to get everything moved to a
LTS platform. CentOS would be easier in that in a lot of cases it
would be recompiling packages. But there would also need to be kernel
and other work which ever route you go.

It would be months of work to get a distro working then you need
to QA etc. Who is going to do the work, who is going to pay. No one
will come out publicly and say it but they all want a polished LTS
release without having to contribute any resources themselves. "Please
may I have a rainbow pooing unicorn"

In Fedora there is work but it's small work packages on going. I'll
send a different email outlining the work I think there is there.

>> > Let me explain that last point.
>> >
>> > There is a continuous flow of changes into Fedora.  These changes
>> > eventually flow into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and thus into CentOS.
>> >
>> > The most cost effective way to handle this flow was for developers to
>> > test changes on our builds, every week.  This gaves us awareness of
>> > the change and kept us involved to resist changes that cause damage.
>> > We were there once.  It required a low but continuous engineering
>> > effort.
>>
>> It use to take around an hour to cut a release from Fedora/Sugar
>> repos. Quite often the delta from a patch for a fix being created and
>> a new OS was in the hours timeframe. It's the usual story of a little
>> bit of effort regularly stops it from being a major i

Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Gonzalo Odiard]

Hi Peter,

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 6:16 AM, Peter Robinson  wrote:

> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 12:10 AM, James Cameron  wrote:
> > On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 09:19:45AM -0300, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
> >> I think we should try make a build using CentOS. I don't know if
> >> have all the packages we need, but the rate of change in Fedora was
> >> difficult to follow when OLPC had a team dedicated and now is almost
> >> impossible. The true is we didn't finished to solve the problems we
> >> found in F20, and Fedora is working in F22.
> >
>

Let make my comment clear. My proposal was not a criticize Fedora
or the Fedora community. Fedora has been very supportive and responsive.


> > I do not think we should switch from Fedora to CentOS, because;
> >
> > 1.  our installed base express interest in Fedora or Ubuntu,
>
> Daniel Drake, myself and others put in a lot of effort back in the
> F-14/15 days to get everything upstream into Fedora. I continue to
> maintain that and produce a Sugar on a Stick release with every Fedora
> release.
>
> In the last release Daniel and I was involved in the delta between
> Fedora and the OLPC release was very minimal. Basically kernel,
> firmware, and some minor changes to a couple of Sugar packages for XO
> HW and patches that weren't yet upstream.
>
> > 2.  there are missing desktop packages, which means we are taking on
> > maintenance of those packages on CentOS,
>
> Having tried and failed to do this back when EL6 was new I believe
> this is a dead end. It turned out to be _WAY_ more effort than
> actually keeping Fedora up to date. The upstream RHEL releases are
> every 6 months but if you need a fix for a package in the core 2500
> odd packages and it's not easy you might be waiting a lot longer for a
> fix.
>
>
Ok. I didn't know that.

When I talked with deployments and they ask for Ubuntu,
and I ask why, what they really want is Long Time Support.
No deployment change their image more than once a year.
In fact, change a image is a logistic challenge for most of
the big/middle size deployments.

Then, I was thinking in CentOS as a LTS version of Fedora.


> In Fedora if you know the right people (like me) you can get a fix
> into update-testing in a day. Also there's a much much wider QA group
> across the packages we use and care about.
>
> I can go on and on about the details required for this but basically I
> suspect eyes have glazed over already.
>
>
This is true, and I know that.
But also is true, that keep the pace of changes in Fedora is not easy.
In fact, is not Fedora fault, mostly is Gtk ([1], [2], [3]) or libraries
(the last was vte [4],
but I can find more).

[1]
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-artwork/commit/27fac30cb028a7461f40da6765db13c017ad6f13
[2]
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-artwork/commit/f87d4b05a2b2db55dc4a8dddc9321ac8fbe33f3e
[3]
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-artwork/commit/e6f3c4430477176750b4ae4a007e98837a877080
[4]
https://github.com/godiard/terminal-activity/commit/074f11cc37c6fa1035e32bc4132c6371254fa0f8


> 3.  we would delay necessary work until the next release of CentOS, or
> > if the work is too large we may never upgrade.
>
> I suspect it would be never.
>

Ok. But Let me explain my reasons.

Right now, the only "stable" images are based on F18.
We don't have images in a good shape for the deployments for F20,
we missed F21 (where Gtk theme change in a subtle way again,
and toggle toolbar buttons don't change the background color),
and we should start to work in F22. With the hands we have today,
I am sure we will not solve all the problems we already have before F23 is
released.

That is my concern. If we would had one dsd involved,
the conversation would be completely different,
But as Samuel said in a previous mail in this thread "I have seen a fair
amount of interest,
both publicly and privately, for newer XO laptop builds.  But I don't think
the requesters
realize how much work it takes to make one."



>
> > Let me explain that last point.
> >
> > There is a continuous flow of changes into Fedora.  These changes
> > eventually flow into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and thus into CentOS.
> >
> > The most cost effective way to handle this flow was for developers to
> > test changes on our builds, every week.  This gaves us awareness of
> > the change and kept us involved to resist changes that cause damage.
> > We were there once.  It required a low but continuous engineering
> > effort.
>
> It use to take around an hour to cut a release from Fedora/Sugar
> repos. Quite often the delta from a patch for a fix being created and
> a new OS was in the hours timeframe. It's the usual story of a little
> bit of effort regularly stops it from being a major issue.
>
> Kernel and olpc-os-builder aside I think you could probably produce a
> working image of Fedora 22 now. I think all the userspace bits are
> likely there and working due to my SoaS work.
>
>
I am sure we could produce a _almost_working_ image for Fedora 22.
The problem i

Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Martin Dengler]

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 11:21:35PM -0400, Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
> OLPC already appears to be going the Ubuntu LTS route

When/where can I read more about what OLPC is doing with Ubuntu LTS?  Apologies
for the lazyweb request.

Martin


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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Martin Dengler]

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 10:16:42AM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 12:10 AM, James Cameron  wrote:
> > 2.  there are missing desktop packages, which means we are taking on
> > maintenance of those packages on CentOS,
> 
> Having tried and failed to do this back when EL6 was new I believe
> this is a dead end. It turned out to be _WAY_ more effort than
> actually keeping Fedora up to date. The upstream RHEL releases are
> every 6 months but if you need a fix for a package in the core 2500
> odd packages and it's not easy you might be waiting a lot longer for a
> fix.
> 
> In Fedora if you know the right people (like me) you can get a fix
> into update-testing in a day. Also there's a much much wider QA group
> across the packages we use and care about.

I'm sure core people get it, but I think it's hard to over-emphasize to
everyone else that there are two places where you get the most bang for your
buck: 1) you stay with the latest (Fedora); or 2) you *never* change anything,
ever.  Everything in-between seems like it might be a better tradeoff, but
really all that's happening is you're giving your paid devops staff time to
work around their holidays and internally-driven priorities.

Have no paid devops staff or worldwide priority list?  You need to be on Fedora
or *never* ever change.

SugarLabs being in that place, with people like you to take forward Sugar
packages on the popular, RHEL-upstream (in practice) Fedora, there is no good
reason to accept a slower security fix process and a much more time-expensive
release process.

> And I've been trying as hard with Fedora as possible. The core Sugar
> stack is in pretty good shape. There's some work needed on some
> Activies but most of the work it to update them to the latest upstream
> bits.

This rings true to me too.

> Peter

Martin


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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 4:21 AM, Samuel Greenfeld  wrote:
> The obvious counterargument would be that a deployment might want to deploy
> your XO-Next (whatever it is) alongside existing XO laptops, allowing all of
> them to have the same configuration.

>From my memory of olpc-os-builder it was very modular and wouldn't be
hard to add dozens of different devices support to it.

> There's plenty of blame to go around in terms of re-inventing the wheel and
> lack of communication.

Yep!

> There simply (and correct me if I'm wrong) are not the resources inside of
> OLPC, outside, or combined at this time to maintain and update two separate
> builds & build systems.
>
> It amazes me how far we bend over backwards to avoid saying "end of life"
> and "end of support".
>
>
> I have seen a fair amount of interest, both publicly and privately, for
> newer XO laptop builds.  But I don't think the requesters realize how much
> work it takes to make one.

The big one here is kernel kernel kernel.

> And I do not forsee anyone stepping up to get the XO-1.75 and XO-4 kernel &
> drivers into a state they can be upstreamed or upgraded for newer Fedoras
> unless a deployment really wants this instead of newer equipment.

Or even the 1.5, I believe most of the XO-1 support is upsteream.

> Newer operating systems tend to require more disk space and RAM than the
> predecessors.  We have seen this even within Fedora's lineage.

Yes, and no. I mean 1Gb of the original XO-1 is tight, but SoaS still
happily fits in 4Gb with a bunch of space to spare. Looking at my
current SoaS VM the used space is around 1.9Gb. Amusingly the various
cloud/container enterprise initiatives actively help us here because
for once they care about dependency bloat too :-)

The two things that add bloat to the current SoaS image are:
* Browse needs to be converted to the new WebKitGtk APIs so we don't
ship two copies of WebKitGtk.
* Conversion of remaining gstreamer 0.10 to 1.0 to allow us not to ship that.

Ultimately I think you could with a little development effort get it
down to 1.5Gb used space which would make a 2Gb filesystem quite
usable.

> Since OLPC already appears to be going the Ubuntu LTS route, I would argue
> it would be easiest to take everything that way, porting utilities as
> required, and make that the final image & build system for XOs.

Personally I have no interest in that. I wish you luck.

> I only have a limited number of hours per week I can look into OLPC things,
> but I'm tempted to take a look.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 10:50 PM, James Cameron  wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 09:29:46PM -0400, Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
>> > It might be possible for this new builder to be eventually taught to
>> > handle XOs.
>>
>> There was no significant interest in my previous builder uxo, which
>> already knows how to handle XOs.  The recent posts on devel@ of people
>> trying something similar without looking at uxo is further evidence of
>> that.
>>
>> So for the moment, there seems to be no need for my new builder to
>> handle XO-1, XO-1.5, XO-1.75 or XO-4 laptops.  The Fedora based
>> builder is working fine for those laptops.
>>
>> --
>> James Cameron
>> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
>
>
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Tony Anderson]

Hi, Sean

Thanks, this looks to be exactly what we need. So far I have downloaded 
a 'worst' video from the Nottingham sixty symbols collection. It plays 
'worst' on my

laptop. Worst is .3gp for a mobile phone.  I'll give it a try on an XO-1.

Tony

On 05/07/2015 08:53 AM, Sean DALY wrote:

Hi Tony

not sure if this is helpful, but the Python script youtube-dl 
(http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/) is very useful for downloading vids 
from YouTube (curent/playlist/batch), and offers options such as 
--age-limit, --max-filesize, --rate-limit, --max-quality, and in 
particular --format worstvideo, which could eliminate a subsequent 
transcoding step by downloading the minimal quality available.


Sean


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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 12:10 AM, James Cameron  wrote:
> On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 09:19:45AM -0300, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
>> I think we should try make a build using CentOS. I don't know if
>> have all the packages we need, but the rate of change in Fedora was
>> difficult to follow when OLPC had a team dedicated and now is almost
>> impossible. The true is we didn't finished to solve the problems we
>> found in F20, and Fedora is working in F22.
>
> I do not think we should switch from Fedora to CentOS, because;
>
> 1.  our installed base express interest in Fedora or Ubuntu,

Daniel Drake, myself and others put in a lot of effort back in the
F-14/15 days to get everything upstream into Fedora. I continue to
maintain that and produce a Sugar on a Stick release with every Fedora
release.

In the last release Daniel and I was involved in the delta between
Fedora and the OLPC release was very minimal. Basically kernel,
firmware, and some minor changes to a couple of Sugar packages for XO
HW and patches that weren't yet upstream.

> 2.  there are missing desktop packages, which means we are taking on
> maintenance of those packages on CentOS,

Having tried and failed to do this back when EL6 was new I believe
this is a dead end. It turned out to be _WAY_ more effort than
actually keeping Fedora up to date. The upstream RHEL releases are
every 6 months but if you need a fix for a package in the core 2500
odd packages and it's not easy you might be waiting a lot longer for a
fix.

In Fedora if you know the right people (like me) you can get a fix
into update-testing in a day. Also there's a much much wider QA group
across the packages we use and care about.

I can go on and on about the details required for this but basically I
suspect eyes have glazed over already.

> 3.  we would delay necessary work until the next release of CentOS, or
> if the work is too large we may never upgrade.

I suspect it would be never.

> Let me explain that last point.
>
> There is a continuous flow of changes into Fedora.  These changes
> eventually flow into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and thus into CentOS.
>
> The most cost effective way to handle this flow was for developers to
> test changes on our builds, every week.  This gaves us awareness of
> the change and kept us involved to resist changes that cause damage.
> We were there once.  It required a low but continuous engineering
> effort.

It use to take around an hour to cut a release from Fedora/Sugar
repos. Quite often the delta from a patch for a fix being created and
a new OS was in the hours timeframe. It's the usual story of a little
bit of effort regularly stops it from being a major issue.

Kernel and olpc-os-builder aside I think you could probably produce a
working image of Fedora 22 now. I think all the userspace bits are
likely there and working due to my SoaS work.

It's actually the thing that annoys me most about the sugar community.
IMO we have a great working Sugar release that works pretty much
everywhere plus is a great proven base for XO releases yet so many
core developers have told me "if only you'd focus on Ubuntu we'd use
it" yet Ubuntu for _YEARS_ have shown that they couldn't given a shit
and even actively remove core bits needed (remember the Browse on
Mozilla years anyone??) to make it even harder.

> The next most cost effective way is to do this work only when a new
> release of Fedora occurs.  This results in lots of head scratching and
> bug fixing, and new builds, until the bugs are mostly gone.  We are
> here now.  It requires bursts of engineering effort.

Actually it needs work _BEFORE_ a new release happens, any work now
IMO should be focused on Fedora 23. That way you have everything in
place in time for Fedora 23 GA in October and you get the longest
value out of the release.

> The least cost effective way is to hold off doing that work for three
> years until the next CentOS release.  This would be a lot more work in
> a much shorter burst.

And you'll likely end up in a very disparate stability across devices.
Both ARMv7 and i686 is community supported in CentOS which means you
get likely dubious quality of work and I suspect due to toolchain
config choices for i686 it won't even run on the XO-1. Has anyone
actually tried booting CentOS-7 on a XO1? From what I've seen of the
ARMv7 efforts I see it as half arsed at best.

People ask me if I can help with CentOS. The answer is no. I have no
personal interest in CentOS. I have enough to do with personal
projects on Fedora.

> Delaying effort until a future time hasn't worked, and I don't think
> it will.  Meanwhile, I'm trying as hard as I can with what I'm doing.

And I've been trying as hard with Fedora as possible. The core Sugar
stack is in pretty good shape. There's some work needed on some
Activies but most of the work it to update them to the latest upstream
bits.

Peter

https://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/22_TC2/Images/armhfp/Fedora-SoaS-armhfp-22-TC2-sda.raw.xz
https:

Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Sean DALY]

Hi Tony

not sure if this is helpful, but the Python script youtube-dl (
http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/) is very useful for downloading vids from
YouTube (curent/playlist/batch), and offers options such as --age-limit,
--max-filesize, --rate-limit, --max-quality, and in particular --format
worstvideo, which could eliminate a subsequent transcoding step by
downloading the minimal quality available.

Sean


On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 8:41 AM, Tony Anderson  wrote:

> It would be helpful to have more specifics.
>
> The problem with videos on the XO-1 is the speed of the processor and the
> bit-rate of the videos. As with all Linux distributions, the codecs are
> available for installation by the user. The process for doing this for the
> XO has been documented many times on these lists. Installation of the
> codecs does not require a local repository or an os-builder. It can be done
> with a simple bash script (and the necessary files).
>
> The only solution I can see is to reprocess videos to reduce the bit-rate.
> It would be valuable if someone would experiment with videos from YouTube
> to determine a realistic processing capability for the XO (should differ by
> model), and to publish the conversion parameters to produce videos within
> those limits (e.g for ffmpeg).
>
> Naturally, this solution does not work for casual browsing of YouTube.
> However, I believe our primary goal to provide better educational
> opporunities on the other side of the digital divide - where this routine
> access to the internet is not available.  This means the deployment has a
> fixed set of available videos which could be reprocessed to play smoothly.
>
> I am not aware of any reported problems with Browse, which as the gateway
> to the schoolserver is the most-used activity in the deployments which I
> support. Naturally, the users at these deployments do not have experience
> with the internet or with other browsers. I can't imagine anyone at these
> deployments being aware of the switch to Webkit, for example. They accept
> that the home page consists of a set of non-working links to the internet
> and that the only relevant one for them is the 'local schoolserver'. (an
> obvious challenge for web confusion is to design a more interesting and
> useful page).
>
> OLE Nepal continues to use Firefox for E-Paath based on the inability of
> Browse with Gnash to provide adequate support for Flash activities. The
> Webkit version of Browse supports the E-Paath activities but there is no
> compelling advantage to change from Firefox. So, the deployments which are
> unhappy with Browse could install Firefox.
>
> Tony
>
>
> On 05/07/2015 05:22 AM, sugar-devel-requ...@lists.sugarlabs.org wrote:
>
>> They all seem to want a better browser and better codec support to
>> >view various+sundry videos, within Sugar ideally, but if that's not
>> >possible then within Gnome.  One group per week asks me for the
>> >above, above all else (often more than one deployment/group per
>> >week).
>>
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Tony Anderson]

It would be helpful to have more specifics.

The problem with videos on the XO-1 is the speed of the processor and 
the bit-rate of the videos. As with all Linux distributions, the codecs 
are available for installation by the user. The process for doing this 
for the XO has been documented many times on these lists. Installation 
of the codecs does not require a local repository or an os-builder. It 
can be done with a simple bash script (and the necessary files).


The only solution I can see is to reprocess videos to reduce the 
bit-rate. It would be valuable if someone would experiment with videos 
from YouTube to determine a realistic processing capability for the XO 
(should differ by model), and to publish the conversion parameters to 
produce videos within those limits (e.g for ffmpeg).


Naturally, this solution does not work for casual browsing of YouTube. 
However, I believe our primary goal to provide better educational 
opporunities on the other side of the digital divide - where this 
routine access to the internet is not available.  This means the 
deployment has a fixed set of available videos which could be 
reprocessed to play smoothly.


I am not aware of any reported problems with Browse, which as the 
gateway to the schoolserver is the most-used activity in the deployments 
which I support. Naturally, the users at these deployments do not have 
experience with the internet or with other browsers. I can't imagine 
anyone at these deployments being aware of the switch to Webkit, for 
example. They accept that the home page consists of a set of non-working 
links to the internet and that the only relevant one for them is the 
'local schoolserver'. (an obvious challenge for web confusion is to 
design a more interesting and useful page).


OLE Nepal continues to use Firefox for E-Paath based on the inability of 
Browse with Gnash to provide adequate support for Flash activities. The 
Webkit version of Browse supports the E-Paath activities but there is no 
compelling advantage to change from Firefox. So, the deployments which 
are unhappy with Browse could install Firefox.


Tony


On 05/07/2015 05:22 AM, sugar-devel-requ...@lists.sugarlabs.org wrote:

They all seem to want a better browser and better codec support to
>view various+sundry videos, within Sugar ideally, but if that's not
>possible then within Gnome.  One group per week asks me for the
>above, above all else (often more than one deployment/group per
>week).


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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[James Cameron]

On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 12:56:32AM -0500, Sebastian Silva wrote:
> 
> On 06/05/15 18:10, James Cameron wrote:
> > 1.  our installed base express interest in Fedora or Ubuntu,
> 
> I wonder how accurate this is?

No idea.

> Many times "upstream", or suppliers, tend to lump entire deployments
> into one person or group.
> Did you mean administrators, technicians, teachers, or users?

Yes.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Sebastian Silva]

On 06/05/15 18:10, James Cameron wrote:
> 1.  our installed base express interest in Fedora or Ubuntu,

I wonder how accurate this is?

Many times "upstream", or suppliers, tend to lump entire deployments
into one person or group.
Did you mean administrators, technicians, teachers, or users?

-- 
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"icarito" #somosazucar en Freenode IRC
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comunión" - P. Freire

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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[James Cameron]

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 11:21:35PM -0400, Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
> The obvious counterargument would be that a deployment might want to
> deploy your XO-Next (whatever it is) alongside existing XO laptops,
> allowing all of them to have the same configuration.

I don't think that's likely.  And if it is required, the same set of
Sugar activities or the same user level desktop will suffice.  The
software layers are well isolated; there's no reason to have the same
things all the way down to the kernel.

> Since OLPC already appears to be going the Ubuntu LTS route, I would
> argue it would be easiest to take everything that way, porting
> utilities as required, and make that the final image & build system
> for XOs.

We'll see.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Samuel Greenfeld]

The obvious counterargument would be that a deployment might want to deploy
your XO-Next (whatever it is) alongside existing XO laptops, allowing all
of them to have the same configuration.

There's plenty of blame to go around in terms of re-inventing the wheel and
lack of communication.

There simply (and correct me if I'm wrong) are not the resources inside of
OLPC, outside, or combined at this time to maintain and update two separate
builds & build systems.

It amazes me how far we bend over backwards to avoid saying "end of life"
and "end of support".


I have seen a fair amount of interest, both publicly and privately, for
newer XO laptop builds.  But I don't think the requesters realize how much
work it takes to make one.

And I do not forsee anyone stepping up to get the XO-1.75 and XO-4 kernel &
drivers into a state they can be upstreamed or upgraded for newer Fedoras
unless a deployment really wants this instead of newer equipment.

Newer operating systems tend to require more disk space and RAM than the
predecessors.  We have seen this even within Fedora's lineage.


Since OLPC already appears to be going the Ubuntu LTS route, I would argue
it would be easiest to take everything that way, porting utilities as
required, and make that the final image & build system for XOs.

I only have a limited number of hours per week I can look into OLPC things,
but I'm tempted to take a look.






On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 10:50 PM, James Cameron  wrote:

> On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 09:29:46PM -0400, Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
> > It might be possible for this new builder to be eventually taught to
> > handle XOs.
>
> There was no significant interest in my previous builder uxo, which
> already knows how to handle XOs.  The recent posts on devel@ of people
> trying something similar without looking at uxo is further evidence of
> that.
>
> So for the moment, there seems to be no need for my new builder to
> handle XO-1, XO-1.5, XO-1.75 or XO-4 laptops.  The Fedora based
> builder is working fine for those laptops.
>
> --
> James Cameron
> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[James Cameron]

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 09:29:46PM -0400, Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
> It might be possible for this new builder to be eventually taught to
> handle XOs.

There was no significant interest in my previous builder uxo, which
already knows how to handle XOs.  The recent posts on devel@ of people
trying something similar without looking at uxo is further evidence of
that.

So for the moment, there seems to be no need for my new builder to
handle XO-1, XO-1.5, XO-1.75 or XO-4 laptops.  The Fedora based
builder is working fine for those laptops.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Samuel Greenfeld]

I will try to answer some questions.  But my last two points will only
raise new ones.


   1. There are a few purposes for the community build.  The first is that
   for a while, all the OLPC builds announced seemed to be private ones
   available upon request.  It therefore was necessary to see if builds were
   still possible without the private extensions, and how well they worked.

   A second is that I actually build against a local mirror.  This mirror
   was created back when it was uncertain if OLPC would keep the MIT servers,
   and expanded when said servers started running into problems.  (These
   issues have since been resolved.)

   OLPC has and may still have an automatic backup; but I recall others
   having to stop it from accidentally pulling corrupted data in the past.

   Although it only has a subset of the public OLPC content available
   anonymously, building against my mirror makes sure that it still works and
   that it is periodically made up to date.


   2. I have uploaded the .ini files I use to
   http://www.greenfeld.org/xo/community/builds/14.1.0/olpc-os-builder/ .
   But there is nothing in them that you could not derive from the
   olpc-14.1.0*.ini files already in olpc-os-builder.

   The .zd SD card image for XO-1 build 2 is next to it's .img file.

   I added a pause at the end of kspost.75.install_bundles.inc so I can
   tweak the XO-1 image and remove some of the larger activities.  But this is
   temporary for debugging only.


   3. Since I am based in the US, I cannot generate images with the
   multimedia items due to patents.  At best I could give you instructions
   similar to how OLPC already does.

   I vaguely recall all XO-4's might be licensed for many multimedia codecs
   but it would be up to OLPC to make those images more widely available.


   4. Personally I would argue that a CentOS or another long-term build may
   be the best approach for XOs.  Sugar is in EPEL 6, and likely could be
   added to EPEL 7.

   It should surprise no one at this point that the list of personnel on
   OLPC's web site is years out of date.  There may be more people working on
   XSCE at the moment than XO laptop software.

   Given the lack of personnel and resources I believe it would be best to
   do one final build for XO-1 through XO-4 based on a LTS distribution
   supported to at least 2020, and then only minor security/fixes after that.


   5. OLPC already is looking beyond the XO, and beyond Fedora.  If you
   look at dev.laptop.org closely, you might notice a bunch of tickets
   targeted for "su-15.1" as well as a new olpc-ubuntu-sugar-builder git tree
   meant for standard PCs.

   This appears to be an Sugar 0.104/Ubuntu 14.04 LTS build with anti-theft
   provided by a secure-boot-based EFI bootloader, not Open Firmware.

   While I am not thrilled that this has been done without the historical
   community's involvement, it likely matches the need of the XO Infinity or
   another client who currently pays the bills.

   It might be possible for this new builder to be eventually taught to
   handle XOs.

   But if OLPC is looking beyond the XO-4, perhaps it's time that Sugar do
   so as well.

   More information can be found at http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/12881





On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 7:18 PM, James Cameron  wrote:

> On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 10:49:47AM -0400, Adam Holt wrote:
> > They all seem to want a better browser and better codec support to
> > view various+sundry videos, within Sugar ideally, but if that's not
> > possible then within Gnome.  One group per week asks me for the
> > above, above all else (often more than one deployment/group per
> > week).
>
> Why isn't this reaching me and the people who would do something about
> it?  Please count these requests, deidentify and aggregate them, and
> report them monthly on devel@ or sugar-devel@
>
> > But if CentOS is not realistically achievable, F22 might be more
> > appropriate, given it's final freeze is supposed to be less than 1
> > week away?
>
> The size of this task (F22) has not yet been estimated, but based on
> Samuel's write up, my guess is between 10 and 50 engineer hours.
>
> There may be other problems lurking.
>
> The Fedora 20 port just on XO-4 has consumed way more than this.
>
> --
> James Cameron
> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[James Cameron]

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 10:49:47AM -0400, Adam Holt wrote:
> They all seem to want a better browser and better codec support to
> view various+sundry videos, within Sugar ideally, but if that's not
> possible then within Gnome.  One group per week asks me for the
> above, above all else (often more than one deployment/group per
> week).

Why isn't this reaching me and the people who would do something about
it?  Please count these requests, deidentify and aggregate them, and
report them monthly on devel@ or sugar-devel@

> But if CentOS is not realistically achievable, F22 might be more
> appropriate, given it's final freeze is supposed to be less than 1
> week away?

The size of this task (F22) has not yet been estimated, but based on
Samuel's write up, my guess is between 10 and 50 engineer hours.

There may be other problems lurking.

The Fedora 20 port just on XO-4 has consumed way more than this.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[James Cameron]

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 09:19:45AM -0300, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
> I think we should try make a build using CentOS. I don't know if
> have all the packages we need, but the rate of change in Fedora was
> difficult to follow when OLPC had a team dedicated and now is almost
> impossible. The true is we didn't finished to solve the problems we
> found in F20, and Fedora is working in F22.

I do not think we should switch from Fedora to CentOS, because;

1.  our installed base express interest in Fedora or Ubuntu,

2.  there are missing desktop packages, which means we are taking on
maintenance of those packages on CentOS,

3.  we would delay necessary work until the next release of CentOS, or
if the work is too large we may never upgrade.

Let me explain that last point.

There is a continuous flow of changes into Fedora.  These changes
eventually flow into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and thus into CentOS.

The most cost effective way to handle this flow was for developers to
test changes on our builds, every week.  This gaves us awareness of
the change and kept us involved to resist changes that cause damage.
We were there once.  It required a low but continuous engineering
effort.

The next most cost effective way is to do this work only when a new
release of Fedora occurs.  This results in lots of head scratching and
bug fixing, and new builds, until the bugs are mostly gone.  We are
here now.  It requires bursts of engineering effort.

The least cost effective way is to hold off doing that work for three
years until the next CentOS release.  This would be a lot more work in
a much shorter burst.

Delaying effort until a future time hasn't worked, and I don't think
it will.  Meanwhile, I'm trying as hard as I can with what I'm doing.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Adam Holt]

On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 12:54 AM, Samuel Greenfeld 
wrote:

> I saw some discussion last week about the community XO software builds.
>
> This seems to be something which gets many people excited.
>
> However according to my web server, there have not been very many
> downloads of them.
>
> If I may ask:
>
>- Who actually is using/testing these images?
>
>
I have asked quite a number of deployments to try
http://www.greenfeld.org/xo/community/builds/ but they are very resistant
to try until others have documented first.  Breaking this Vicious Cycle
won't happen overnight, but a Virtuous Cycle is possible, if we build
tight/participatory documentation around key builds-


>- Why?
>
>
They all seem to want a better browser and better codec support to view
various+sundry videos, within Sugar ideally, but if that's not possible
then within Gnome.  One group per week asks me for the above, above all
else (often more than one deployment/group per week).


>
>- Is there a reason you are not looking into using an official (OLPC
>or deployment) build?
>
>
James Cameron and Nathan Riddle have made tremendous progress with SD cards
improving XO-1 builds, but this is not financially viable in most all
impoverished countries where we work.


>- Have you engaged OLPC or another party to work on changes?
>
>
In the past: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/HaitiOS is a derivative of OLPC
Release 12.1.0 widely deployed starting in early 2014 thanks to the
volunteer work of James Cameron, George Hunt and many others.

While it's not financially or logistically viable to rebase every year,
OLPC or Community OS 15.x.x in the coming year (if such an OS arises with
better codec support, better browser support, sufficiently stable Sugar
and/or sufficient speed) will affect MANY thousands of people, inside Haiti
and far outside Haiti.  (On XO-1s especially; the 3 other more modern XO
laptops always crop up too).


>- What direction do you believe the builds should go?
>
>
Reliability.  Impoverished countries are very accustomed to dealing with
broken leftovers + electronic waste shipped to them by rich countries, so
don't ask for perfection, but do ask for "basic sanitation..."

If it's truly achievable, Gonzalo is right to push for CentOS durability
rather the Fedora treadmill which creates many quite unintended
casualties.  The world has become a more dangerous place that 2007 when XO
mass production began: we are now almost a decade later with intermittent
2G/3G nearly ubiquitous across the 3rd World (no matter how pricy+tenuous,
I no longer run into communities that can say with a straight face they are
"completely offline").  Sneakernet is to be encouraged, but the consequence
is that schools' inability to easily patch F18-based XO's against
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_%28software_bug%29 and the drumroll
of similar security holes, is emerging as an existential threat to their XO
learning environments.

But if CentOS is not realistically achievable, F22 might be more
appropriate, given it's final freeze is supposed to be less than 1 week
away?

Building XO builds by repacking existing work is relatively trivial.
>
> But the low-level kernel, driver, and OS work necessary to support XOs
> with newer operating systems (as well as newer XO batteries) is something I
> cannot do, and where we really need help.
>
> Without guidance from OLPC or others, I could build thousands of XO-#
> laptop images.  But unless it looks like a significant number of
> deployments/children actually would benefit, there really is no point.
>
> ---
> SJG
>
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> --
> 
> 
> Unsung Heroes of OLPC, interviewed live @
> http://unleashkids.org !
>
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Gonzalo Odiard]

Hi Sam,

>
>- Who actually is using/testing these images?
>
> I downloaded it (XO-1 and XO-4 versions).

>
>- Why?
>
> To test if all is working in a new Fedora, and to try find a solution
for the Browse problems in the XO-1. Sadly wifi connectivity
is not working ok in the F20 images.


>
>- Is there a reason you are not looking into using an official (OLPC
>or deployment) build?
>
> For distribution, today is more stable the F18 version. But we need move
then we need solve the problems we find in newer versions.

>
>- Have you engaged OLPC or another party to work on changes?
>
> Yes.

>
>- What direction do you believe the builds should go?
>
> I think we should try make a build using CentOS. I don't know
if have all the packages we need, but the rate of change in Fedora
was difficult to follow when OLPC had a team dedicated and now
is almost impossible. The true is we didn't finished to solve
the problems we found in F20, and Fedora is working in F22.

Building XO builds by repacking existing work is relatively trivial.
>
> But the low-level kernel, driver, and OS work necessary to support XOs
> with newer operating systems (as well as newer XO batteries) is something I
> cannot do, and where we really need help.
>
+1

> Without guidance from OLPC or others, I could build thousands of XO-#
> laptop images.  But unless it looks like a significant number of
> deployments/children actually would benefit, there really is no point.
>
> I think the benefit is provide a environment where we can test, fill bugs,
etc.
But if there are no people with the knowledge and the time to work
in the low level stuff, will be difficult.

Gonzalo
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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[tkkang]

> Who actually is using/testing these images? Why?

I am as I try to to see if I could still get some life out of XO with whatever 
development that is going forward with upgrades.  

> Is there a reason you are not looking into using an official (OLPC or 
> deployment) build?

Use that also but community driven images may be a good way to test things for 
feedback before things get official.

> - Have you engaged OLPC or another party to work on changes?

I try to and the best things is I get some help along the way for a little DIY 
with my limited technical skills. 

> - What direction do you believe the builds should go?

1. To make the XO multi-media ready :-)  or provide scripts that we can just 
run to for enabling multi-media experience with the XO. Hate to see spinning 
"wheels without images :-(

2. Have builds that target specific age groups with the right activities loaded 
or displayed.

>Building XO builds by repacking existing work is relatively trivial.
>But the low-level kernel, driver, and OS work necessary to support XOs >with 
>newer operating systems (as well as newer XO batteries) is something >I cannot 
>do, and where we really need help.

Yes and I hope OLPC is still providing the necessary financial support for 
things to happen. 
>
>Without guidance from OLPC or others, I could build thousands of XO-#
>laptop images.  But unless it looks like a significant number of
>deployments/children actually would benefit, there really is no point.

Build and they may come.  

Thanks.






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Re: [Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Sebastian Silva]

Hi Samuel,

I think your volunteer work is important.

It is not clear to me exactly what the focus is of your images, nor
where the repositories with the ini files for the builder, or the
download link for the ready images.
This is probably the reason you have so few downloads logged.

Perhaps we should put all of this in a Wiki page?

I am interested, but haven't been able to test because when I asked last
time for the SD card images you told me you would build them but never
let me know when/where I could get them.

I understand it may be frustrating to work without feedback but it's
simply the way it works at this point, unless you are in the field.

Also, keep in mind that deployments are interested in updating OS images
once every one or two years.

Thanks, in the name of the children, for the work you do.
I'll try to respond your questions inline below.

Regards,
Sebastian


On 05/05/15 23:54, Samuel Greenfeld wrote:
> I saw some discussion last week about the community XO software builds.
>
> This seems to be something which gets many people excited.
>
> However according to my web server, there have not been very many
> downloads of them.
>
> If I may ask:
>
>   * Who actually is using/testing these images?
>
Not me, yet.
>
>   * Why?
>
I maintained in the past official images for Peru.
>
>   * Is there a reason you are not looking into using an official (OLPC
> or deployment) build?
>
Yes we like to roll our own to include native languages, features (e.g.
Sugar Network), etc.
>
>   * Have you engaged OLPC or another party to work on changes?
>
I try to work upstream.
>
>   * What direction do you believe the builds should go?
>
The best possible experience for end users. Basically, on XO, means
performance tuning.
>
> Building XO builds by repacking existing work is relatively trivial.
>
> But the low-level kernel, driver, and OS work necessary to support XOs
> with newer operating systems (as well as newer XO batteries) is
> something I cannot do, and where we really need help.
>
> Without guidance from OLPC or others, I could build thousands of XO-#
> laptop images.  But unless it looks like a significant number of
> deployments/children actually would benefit, there really is no point.
>
> ---
> SJG
>
>
>
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[Sugar-devel] Community XO software builds

[Samuel Greenfeld]

I saw some discussion last week about the community XO software builds.

This seems to be something which gets many people excited.

However according to my web server, there have not been very many downloads
of them.

If I may ask:

   - Who actually is using/testing these images?
   - Why?
   - Is there a reason you are not looking into using an official (OLPC or
   deployment) build?
   - Have you engaged OLPC or another party to work on changes?
   - What direction do you believe the builds should go?

Building XO builds by repacking existing work is relatively trivial.

But the low-level kernel, driver, and OS work necessary to support XOs with
newer operating systems (as well as newer XO batteries) is something I
cannot do, and where we really need help.

Without guidance from OLPC or others, I could build thousands of XO-#
laptop images.  But unless it looks like a significant number of
deployments/children actually would benefit, there really is no point.

---
SJG
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