State of Fedora spin

[Jim Gettys]

Sebastian Dziallas and I have been investigating a OLPC Fedora spin for
OLPC; as not everything is upstream in Fedora (we keep trying!), it is
not logical to call this a spin of Fedora, but of an OLPC load of
software derived from Fedora.

Goals
 o minimize differences from stock Fedora, so that everyone can help.
 o small footprint, ideally so small that olpc-update
 o "culturally" compatible with those expecting a conventional laptop
experience, as typified by Give One Get One donors, supporting a
selection of "conventional" applications (e.g. web browser, mail client,
editor, etc.).

Where are we:

 o Build machine has been established at 1cc; if you want access to it,
send an SSH key to me.
 o a 520 megabyte spin was pretty easy to make; but that is using
Squashfs, which is more efficient than JFFS2, so it is still not small
enough to fit allowing olpc-update to be used for an in-place upgrade.
Said spin booted fine on conventional systems, though since it lacked a
kernel for OLPC, could not be booted on the XO.
 o the olpc kernel lacks the squashfs patch; we created a RPM adding it,
which would be necessary to use the Fedora live-cd-tools.
 o Some experiments have been made with Puritan, another build system
done by Michael Stone, though nothing bootable as yet.
 o I've spent some time looking through Sebastian's spin: it is clear we
can make a small enough image, without too much grief...

Additionally, Daniel Drake and Bobby Powers have documented how to
install Fedora 9 onto an SD card.  Initial notes can be found from this
message:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2008-August/msg00070.html
Note that a gnome environment runs decently, which is something lots of
end users would find acceptable; note we avoid some notable memory pigs:
e.g. evolution.  On first blush, XFCE is (probably) not necessary.  Note
that this is a pretty full fedora install, on a 4 gig SD card; something
much smaller as a starting point is needed.

Problems right now:
 o live-cd-tools doesn't seem to find the initrd, when Sebastian tries
to build a spin with an OLPC kernel.  We don't understand this. Anyone
familiar with the live-cd-tools who can help is greatly appreciated...
 o Note that there is tons of other fat to nuke; some unneeded
dependencies (e.g. libgweather), icons at a bunch of
sizes, /usr/share/doc is accumulates to several hundred megabytes
(uncompressed).  Note that this is several hundred megabytes larger than
the OLPC Sugar only build.  We'll need lots of help here; some of it is
very easy; for example, nuking post install (most of) what is
in /usr/share/doc.
 o what the manifest of the system should be is something well worth
serious discussion: there are questions such as claws versus
thunderbird, versus other mail possibilities.
 o sorting through backgrounds and icons in /usr/share (which,
uncompressed, approaches 1GB) to define a minimal set, and dealing with
the packaging issues that arise would also be a big help.
 o Once a spin exists, some modifications would be needed to the
installation program to install the spin onto jffs2.

We hope that by the time this all is ready to go, conventional packages
for Sugar for Fedora will make it possible for a simple sugar
installation as well; but only time will tell.

So any help folks care to give, please jump in...
                       - Jim



--
Jim Gettys <jg at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child