Fedora on XO

This page describes two projects from 2009:

• OLPC releases should be Fedora "spins", closely based on a Fedora release;
• offer a Fedora desktop for the XO OLPC in addition to the Sugar UI.

Both came to fruition with release 10.1.0, which is based on Fedora 11 and offers a Gnome desktop option.

The next-generation OLPC software will be a Fedora spin

See Future releases. Early development work progressed in F11 for 1.5 and "Rawhide-XO"

A Fedora desktop for the XO

The goal of this project is to create a alternate environment for the XO based on Fedora, giving the users a "traditional linux desktop" instead of or in addition to the Sugar environment (which we'll also include if we can make it all fit). But it won't be as small as the OLPC distro, and is intended at a different audience than the kids in schools. Productive use of this environment on SD cards or USB flash drives will be quite desirable.

See Greg DeKoenigsberg's blog post for further details: http://gregdek.livejournal.com/34038.html

The Fedora wiki has a section for Fedora on XO.

Ideas

Roadmap

This spin will be based on the Fedora Education Spin, but we are going to heavily modify it to fit the needs of OLPC.

The next steps will be:

• selecting packages
• creation of a kickstart file
• trying to get the spin boot on a XO

Here is our GIT repository: http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=projects/fedora-xo

It currently contains only kickstart files, but we're experimenting with several solutions, including Fedora's tools and Michael's puritan.

Packages

Those applications might be included, so here is a list among with some alternatives.

type of application	name of application	name of alternative
desktop environment	gnome	xfce
web browser	firefox	opera
flash implementation	gnash	swfdec
java implementation	openjdk
word processor	abiword
spreadsheets	gnumeric
pdf viewer	evince	epdfviewer
internet messenger	empathy	pidgin
media player	totem	helix
child games	gcompris	childsplay
geometry software	drgeo

Other kinds of applications, which might be included:

• news reader
• graphics & painting
  • gimp
  • inkscape
  • tuxpaint
• audio recording
  • audacity
  • jokosher
• games
  • micropolis
• typing tutor
  • tuxtype2
• e-mail programm
  • thunderbird
  • claws-mail

See also

• Installing Debian as an upgrade
• you can run the XFCE window manager on top of a regular XO OS image to get some of the features of a Linux desktop environment.
• http://sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick is a project to create a "live" bootable image that presents the Sugar UI of the OLPC on top of Fedora. It's designed to run off a USB flash drive and boot on most x86 PCs. Since the XO-1 is an x86 PC this can run on the XO-1 as well.