Release notes/11.2.0
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NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... |
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EXTREMELY EARLY DRAFT!
Purpose
Installation
New features
Sugar 0.92
The 10.1 release series included Sugar 0.84. This release includes Sugar 0.92 including a variety of improvements and fixes. For more information, see the following release note pages, denoting all of the individual releases that have been made since 0.84:
GNOME 2.32
This release includes GNOME version 2.32, compared to the previous 10.1 release series which included GNOME 2.26. Many improvements and fixes are included. For more information, refer to the following release notes pages, covering the releases that have been made since 2.26:
- GNOME 2.28 release notes
- GNOME 2.30 release notes
- GNOME 2.32 release notes
- Note that OLPC continues to ship a slimmed down version of GNOME, so not all features discussed may be relevant
Previous OLPC OS releases included batterymon as the battery monitor applet within GNOME. Due to lack of maintainership and deprecation of batterymon, this release replaces batterymon with batti. There are some visual differences but the functionality is the same.
Base system updates
Various behind-the-scenes improvements in underlying open source technologies are included through newer versions of the base system. This release is built on top of Fedora 14 and Linux 2.6.35.13.
Even though we now exert greater control over the selection of software packages included in the release, the move from Fedora 11 to Fedora 14 has resulted in a small increase in the on-disk size of the base system. We will work to improve on this for future releases.
New XO-1.5 video driver
A new "chrome" video driver for the XO-1.5 provides performance improvements, a hardware-accelerated mouse cursor, multiple Xv surfaces (should be useful for some applications e.g. Skype), and means that graphics in rotated screen modes are just as fast as non-rotated modes.
New filesystems
XO-1
The underlying filesystem for XO-1 has switched from JFFS2 to UBIFS. This solves various long-term problems such as huge system slowdown when the flash was nearly full.
The flash is now partitioned, with a small JFFS2 boot partition used by the firmware and the rest of the flash occupied by a UBIFS partition.
XO-1.5
The XO-1.5 software images have switched from ext3 to ext4, an incremental improvement offering various minor performance enhancements.
Faster installation for XO-1.5
Previously, installation of software images on the XO-1.5 laptop wrote to every sector of the disk, even ones where no data was actually stored. As of this release, installation images are now sparse, meaning that data is only written to disk during the flashing process at the point which data actually resides. The result is that installation time is now more than twice as quick.
Faster boot
The early-boot code (initramfs) has been tweaked and slimmed to boot faster, and bootup time of the XO-1 is greatly decreased thanks to the switch to the UBIFS filesystem and the partitioned disk layout.
olpc-update improvements
olpc-update, OLPC's specialised software update system, previously had usability issues in that after performing an upgrade, it did not delete the previous operating system version or offer a user interface so that it could be cleaned up. The result was that a lot of disk space was wasted. This is solved as of this release: old software versions are automatically deleted soon after the new version has been installed and booted.
In the 10.1 release series, olpc-update faced an inefficiency of always updating many binaries and libraries that were technically unchanged; this resulted in increased disk space requirements for the update process. This has been fixed for 11.2 by no longer prelinking binaries and libraries, which was shown to only have a very minor performance impact.
Build system improvements
- default timezone can be specified in build system