XS Conf 08 MAR 25 Notes
Tuesday, 11 AM EST March 25th 2008
About
Carlos Rios - crosvera Carol Lerche Aaron Huslage Sameer Verma John Watlington Marten Vijn Holger sp? Stefan Reitz Michael Stone Dan Poltawski, uses Moodle in UK, K-12 Ben Schwartz Arjun Sarwal - OLPC India Bryan Berry
Martin's talk
following Ubuntu-style release cycles
incremental bug fixes and feature additions up to 1.0
1.0 release the long term support releases
need to be disciplined and not focus on fancy things
2009 - adding more interesting features and polish
Expectation that XS will be only visited periodically by technician
Marten: packaging and automation will be his mantra for the next several month
Aaron: Need to consider hardware platform
Wad: not looking at custom hardware but recommending certain specs. Don't want to point countries to a particular vendor
Marten: Would still be nice to have a reference hardware set
Wad: will work on wiki to improve
Wad: have trouble supporting small pilots. Recommends traditional access points
for now for more than 100 kids rather than active antennas
Marten:
update mechanism to update content and systems on XS w/ signed scripts
and content on USB key
NOC - central technical team that manages technical process
Talking about Taxonomy:
Martin: hard to subdivide taxonomies, lots of variance w/in countries
Carol: many places in US also have connectivity problems
Arjun (India) need to transfer content w/out Internet Connectivity
Wad: bandwidth limitations an issue in a lot of countries. Need to be able to throttle bandwidth issues. Need to be able to better share bandwidth across XO's
Martin: Eventually countries will need regional XS - file servers
Bryan: feature request, make students' data portable across grades
Technology Choices:
Ml_xsa seriously considering moving to Debian, but not ready yet.
Not Ubuntu, because it changes every 6 months. Debian has longer long-term support releases. Don't need newest versions of dependencies. Would use Debian stable version.
XS 1.0 has to be supported for at least 1-2 years
XS will not be sexy, the XO is sexy enough. The XS will be very unsexy
Carol: may be problematic having different distro on XS from XO
Wad: most of config in current XS is in the networking
mlxsa: Administration Interface: web-based interface that covers basic usage scenarios, not too sophisticated because we don't assume we will have admins so sophisticated at the local level. Won't be as sophisticated as webmin. Will likely reuse back-end from things like VHCS or E-Box. Will be done before 1.0, near end.
Mlxsa: trying to contact folks involved w/ Moodle for k-6. Will send us resources to look at.
Carol: Drupal should be considered. Easier to build simple interfaces
Bryan: Regardless of drupal vs. Moodle, need very simple interfaces
Mlxsa: Moodle can do most of the things drupal can, and better group management. Either way, won't have time to work on moodle and MediaWiki for at least one month.
Need Mediawiki to display Mediawiki content
wiki pages that start w/ XS are more current. Pages that don't start w/ XS are often out of date
Mlxsa will start drafting new blueprints for features and planning in Trac
Working Modality: May have monthly conference on phone or IRC, depending on size of team. Conferences should be attached to release cycle. Discuss bug fixing, stability, and features.
- How do we
- Teleconference prior to each new release?
Questions: IPv6 support?
Wad: Intend to use IPv6. Committed to IPv6. Having problem using IPv6 in the mesh. Requires a man-month of development
Moodle in Pootle: Moodle already has its own translation framework
Arjun: Need XS from scratch wiki page or pointers to resources
Martin thanks all for their participation
