XS 0.9 Proposal

A Cooperative XS development Effort

• Background:

At the San Francisco OLPC Summit, October 2011, Tony Anderson offered to guide and advise me in re-issuing the XS school server based upon a more recent build of Fedora Core. Abhishek Singh of OLE Nepal offered to help, as did Jerry Vonau of laptop.org.au.

Then at the SCale (Southern California Linux Expo) Kenneth Wyrick offered to involve his friends in the local Linux User Groups in the XS rebuild project, if only there was a specification (spec) available.

I've spent the last month, feeling a little over my head, trying to get up to speed about what was really needed. Here is my best shot at such a set of requirements:

My Proposal:

1. develop a build process that facilitates 64 bit as well as 32 bit architectures
2. Think of building an XS school server like the process of booting linux -- start out with minimal capability, passing along essential environmental information to a set of configurable next steps.
3. based upon CentOS, because of the slower release cycle, longer lifetime, and hopefully more proven reliability (stay in the Fedora family to take advantage of expertise already developed within the OLPC community).
4. fit the initial core XS functionality within the 700MB available on an install CD
5. make the first core install phase headless -- not requiring monitor, keyboard

Comparison

Who	Version	Base	Documentation	Kickstart Config	ISO
XS-0.6	0.6	FC9	ks	doc	iso
NEXS	0.48	FC9	ks	doc	iso
XS-AU	0.6-au1	FC9	ks	doc	iso
XS-AU	1.0	FC11	ks	doc	iso