Introduction... (and OLPC Fedora spin).

[Jim Gettys]

Hi,

I'm Jim Gettys, and I worry about much of OLPC's software and how it
fits together....

This instant, I've been investigating with Gregdec and Sebastian
Dziallas the feasibility of a more "conventional" fedora desktop to run
on the OLPC.  The observed problem is that many people who get OLPC's as
part of G1G1 often don't read our warnings, and end up unhappy that they
get only Sugar, no email program, etc....  Since it is called a "laptop"
they have preconceptions kids don't.

Sebastian has done a spin that is only 550 megabytes (squashfs, so in
jffs2 it would be somewhat bigger) for a small set of western languages.
This isn't runnable yet (on the OLPC), but shows something useful can
easily fit.  It turns out that several hundred megabytes are just fonts
and other localization files for Japanese, Chinese, etc.  And yes, the
intent would be sugar would be included in this spin (whether all common
activities will fit, is much less clear).

If we go ahead with this, we'll need all the help we can get from fedora
folks....
 
In the fullness of time, nirvana would be that fedora might be
configured small enough (in a simple way) to at least match the size of
the minimal OLPC load (which is several hundred megabytes smaller).
This space is needed so that flash can be used mostly for books and
other content on 1 gig systems.  If so, the OLPC software for the XO
could become just a fedora spin.  Whether nirvana can be reached isn't
yet clear; lots of people are very sloppy about dependencies, and some
essential pieces are currently huge for bad reasons (like all glibc
locales live in the same file...).
                                  - Jim
-- 
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child