F11 for XO-1

OLPC is developing a new XO operating system (a new Fedora spin, see F11 for 1.5) for the XO-1.5 hardware revision. It includes various improvements and modernizations over the last released version (release 8.2.1 on 2009-05-13) for the XO-1 hardware shipped to many deployments and G1G1 donors.

Unfortunately, due to time pressures and limited resources, these new software builds are only available for the under-development XO-1.5 hardware. However, it would be relatively easy for a community member to make builds available for XO-1, based on the efforts for XO-1.5. Ideally this would be an ongoing process where a few people work together, publishing a new build every few days, acting on as much user feedback as possible, etc. It would also be beneficial to keep a close eye on the XO-1.5 efforts to learn about the changes being made.

Here's how you might do it:

Prerequisites: Fedora 11 system, with sudo access and a decent amount of disk space.

yum install git livecd-tools

As your regular user, check out fedora-xo:

git clone git://dev.laptop.org/projects/fedora-xo

In this git tree:

• master branch is currently unused.
• xo-1.5 branch contains all build scripts for the new OS release for the XO-1.5.
• xo-1 branch is the result of an experiment of an OLPC developer who did a one-off backport to XO-1 in his spare time. This is your starting point.

git checkout --track -b xo-1 origin/xo-1

As a quick summary of the most important files,

olpc-base.ks and olpc-desktop.ks 

the kickstart files used to make the core software image.

livecd-creator 

processes the core software files to create a .iso image.

livecd-iso-to-xo.sh 

converts that .iso into an image that can be flashed onto XOs.

Makefile 

wraps up the whole process.

The ongoing process will be to synchronize the xo-1 branch with any new changes made to the xo-1.5 branch. Really, there are only a few differences that must be maintained between the 2 branches. You can see these differences with this command:

git diff 38951c7..xo-1

The above command shows the state of the XO-1.5 branch at the point of last synchronization compared to the XO-1 branch. The differences that have to be maintained (for example, geode video driver, jffs2 file-system) can be seen here, but even this was an unclean synchronization and could be made cleaner (there is some "noise" in the diff).

The next step is to look at all of the recent changes that have been made to xo-1.5 and merge them into xo-1. I would do this by comparing the 2 trees as follows:

git diff xo-1..xo-1.5

Your task is to apply all the hunks of this diff (excluding ones that are specific to the XO-1.5 hardware) so that the output of this command looks similar to (or better than) the output of the earlier diff - i.e. so that the only differences between the 2 branches are the handful of changes that account for the differences in hardware.

Even in current state (before merging any new changes), the xo-1 branch is ready for building and should produce a bootable build. Here's how you kick off a build:

mkdir output cache
cd output
make -f ../Makefile os1.img

After some time, the output file "os1.img" will be ready for flashing onto your unlocked XO.

If you're happy with this process, the next steps are to publish your build by uploading it to a webhost, and then announcing it on the OLPC devel and Fedora-OLPC mailing lists.

If you are a known community member, OLPC would probably be happy to give you access to machines where you can run these builds from and host the downloads. Otherwise, this is still a possibility but you'd probably first be expected to make and publish a couple of builds on your own. Similarly, it should be possible to get you direct access to commit to the main fedora-xo repository. Once usable builds are being published regularly, you could also take over this wiki page.

I may have forgotten a few considerations in the above braindump, but if you're interested then the next step is to give it a try and write about any troubles on the devel@lists.laptop.org mailing list, and we'll help you figure it out. -- User:DanielDrake 2009-07-14