OLPC's XO-1.5 software plan.

[Chris Ball]

We have some good news:  OLPC has decided to base its software release
for the new XO-1.5 laptop on Fedora 11.  Unlike previous releases, we
plan to use a full Fedora desktop build, booting into Sugar but giving
users the option to switch into a standard GNOME install instead.
(This will mostly be useful for older kids in high school.)

I'm particularly happy about this plan because it will allow us to
catch up with the awesome work present in the Sugar community's most
recent release, Sugar 0.84, as well as merging the latest Fedora work
and including GNOME into the mix for the first time.  The new machines
will have 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash, so we have enough room for both
environments at once.

We think we'll need to use our own kernel and initrd, but the other
base packages we expect to need are present in Fedora already,
including Sugar; in fact, we already have an F11+Sugar+GNOME build
for the XO-1 using pure Fedora packages.  That build will get better
as a result of this work (although OLPC's focus will be on getting
the XO-1.5 running) and it will form the basis for the XO-1.5 build.

If you're interested in contributing, we'd certainly love your help,
and you can find us on the fedora-olpc mailing list¹, and freenode
IRC's #fedora-olpc channel.  Our existing F11 build images for the
XO-1 are here², and we'll soon begin publishing images for the XO-1.5
too.  XO-1.5 beta machines will start to be manufactured over the next
few months, and will be available to contributors as part of our
Contributors Program³ once the hardware's up and running.

Finally, thanks are due to the volunteer Fedora packagers and testers
who helped us get to the point of being able to commit to Fedora 11
for this new build, in particular: Fabian Affolter, Kushal Das, Greg
DeKoenigsberg, Martin Dengler, Scott Douglass, Sebastian Dziallas,
Mikus Grinbergs, Bryan Kearney, Gary C. Martin, Steven M. Parrish,
and Peter Robinson.  Thanks!

- Chris, for the OLPC techteam.

¹:  http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-olpc-list
²:  http://dev.laptop.org/~cjb/rawhide-xo/
³:  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program

-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>