Deployment wishlist

Please add your name to your wishlist item(s) for if followup is needed. Thanks!

Deployment tools

Post-flash auto-customization+modification

I want a way to easily and automatically push changes/updates/new applications to laptops - Pia

Options

• Puppet - I'm going to be getting some funded work to add Puppet to the server and client. Anyone interested in contributing please contact me on greebo at pipka dot org and add any suggestions here.
• radmind? - I always like pull better then push, but I think you are looking for something similar to radmind: http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/
• Spacewalk
• LATU's updater, and Martin's makefile system
• mass olpc-update and Software updater.

Perhaps we could write a good list of requirements after spending a few minutes considering each of these examples?

Would one of these existing systems suffice if only better documentation were available?

--Michael Stone 18:19, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

XS wishlist

XS release management

Currently the release management is being done by a small team, perhaps it would make sense to push the OLPC specific foo into the Skolelinux project and use that for deployments? -- Kevix Or possibly edubuntu -- Nubae

Less XS configuration

It's a pain to have to configure the jabber and squid servers on XS installations, especially the part of having to go to a web interface to configure shared roster! Why can't all this be automated? Granted it is not that much work, but when you are installing 10 servers and are extremely time limited, it is frustrating.

-DanielDrake 22:23, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

• If we ran a Puppet server that people could use for configuring XS servers, that could help :)

Sugar/XO wishlist

Content for the XO

Easier readability and access of books on XO

Right now is a little hard to read and find xol content.

Customisation of browse homepage

It's not very friendly in the shipped version, and is not internationalised. Currently it can be modified by deployments by changing the template in the image, but this is not a very pleasant way for a deployment to have to make customisations.

-DanielDrake 22:23, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Journal backup and restore

The XS backup/restore system is not really usable by deployments because:

• Everyone can access everyone's data, so deployments will want to password protect this (meaning that kids can't use it)
• There is no way to restore more than one file at once.

There are several situations when we require ourselves to perform proper journal restores, e.g.

• when upgrading teacher's laptops from an early build that was used during training, to the one that we are shipping to the kids 2 months after training started
• when kids or teachers uninstall activities (this functionality is quite a misfeature for deployments)
• when we are reflashing due to problems (common, but currently undiagnosed) where sound stops working, or where sugar stops seeing APs making infrastructure connectivity impossible.

We are using some scripts for backup and restore, but they are ugly and could not realistically be used by teachers or children.

-DanielDrake

Delete registration info

We registered all teachers to one XS during training, but now we have another (e.g. for the schools). We need to delete the registration info from sugar so that they can register to the new one. Obviously the best solution for this would be to have sugar support registrations to multiple servers, but in the mean time, could we not hook up the "Discard network history" button to the currently-unused sugar.shell.controlpanel.model.network.clear_registration() function?

-DanielDrake 13:16, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Content

Easy way of installing wikipediaES snapshot on XS

Preferably 1 command. Maybe 1gb of data. To be accessed over http. Current instructions at http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/wikireader/2009-February/000064.html

-DanielDrake

Teacher tools

Monitoring of children's activities

If there is a schoolserver deployed, then all the XO laptops are backed up and can be browsed by going to http://schoolserver/ds-restore from any XO laptop connected to the server. This however doesn't help a teacher see exactly what the student is doing simultaneously. Also, the current (0.5) journal view is pretty awful and needs work to make it more usef friendly. Also, content needs to be browseable from a normal computer.

http://italc.sourceforge.net/ is a tool that we could potentially implement as a way for teachers to have visibility to the screens of students in the classroom. just a though, suggested by nubae from Austria.