fedora-olpc meeting notes and transcript, 8/15

[David Farning]

On Fri, 2008-08-15 at 14:31 -0400, Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote:
> First, the summary:
> 
> We spent the hour trying to figure out the goals of "Fedora on XO," and 
> how to get there.
> 
> The problem: Fedora does not yet boot directly on the XO without 
> siginificant modification to kernel and initramfs.
> 
> The proposal: Have as many people as possible working on creating a small 
> bootable Fedora, and then have dsd continue his excellent work on a tool 
> that takes such an image and hacks it into something that will boot on an 
> XO.
> 
> The downsides:
> 
> * Possibly discourages OLPC folks from pushing stuff upsteam into Fedora.
> 
> * Tools to create Fedora spins are not necessarily the best possible tool.
> 
> * Concerns that a standard Fedora desktop for the XO weakens the case for 
> Sugar.

Running Fedora as the desktop enhances the case for Sugar by reducing
the perception of vendor lock in.

We are asking potential investors to take a significant risk by
deploying the XO.  Allowing decision makers to effortlessly opt-out of
the Sugar desktop if they are not happy, significantly mitigates that
risk.  

As we ramp up the Sugar ecosystem, I feel confident that we can make
Sugar the Learning environment of 'choice' for XO deployments.  

> * Will not integrate with Sugar-based filesystem at this time.
> 
> The upsides:
> 
> * Can take the repetitive work of cranking through package profiles and 
> place it on the shoulders of Fedora folks (like Sebastian and others)
> 
> * Lowest risk approach to getting something working quickly
> 
> * Once dsd's conversion script works, should make it trivial for anyone in 
> Fedora-land to create and maintain their own XO-compatible image
> 


Thanks
dfarning