I’m a firm believer in the “release early, release often” mantra. And in that capacity, I would like to share some of the work that Red Hat has done on some of the base software for the OLPC hardware platform. We’ve been focused on a couple of things so far:
o Building an emulator so that people can have a playpen for testing and feel some of the experience
o Building tools to generate system images from existing Fedora packages.
We haven’t been focusing that much on the base desktop experience, instead we’ve been largely focused on getting some of the base tools in place so that we can build a stable, maintainable distribution. So when you fire this thing up it’s going to look funny, but you have to understand that it’s just a test bed. We’ll be focusing on base look and feel for the unique properties of the OLPC display in upcoming releases, and it’s something we’re hoping to have some participation from people in the community.
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be launching a site for collaboration on the OLPC base software as well as tools for people to build their own images and help out with the project. There’s a huge amount of work to do on the base system, including fixing power management, driving the best possible performance out of what is a small system and fixing the huge number of memory problems that exist. Red Hat will be making the investments in tools to enable people to participate in fixing those problems and we should be able to see tangible results. We’re looking forward to the challenge.
The link to the emulator and instructions are available on Daniel Berrange’s people page. A couple of technical notes: this was done on FC4, and we haven’t tested it widely on other systems. I had to rebuild a bunch of these packages on my FC5t3 machine and make some minor changes to the spec files. The other two things I had to do were to
1. make sure to restart dbus to get the services recognized properly and
2. make sure that when I pointed the simulator to the disk image (the olpc-simulator create command) I had to make sure I used the full path to the disk image, otherwise the olpc-simulator start would just silently exit. Other people I talked to stumbled over these issues as well, so I figured I would pass them along.
Anyway, keep an eye on this space for more information. I’ll post as we make more progress.
