For the last couple of months people inside of Red Hat have been working hard to build out the required infrastructure to build the OLPC operating system based on all of the good code that we have in Fedora. We’ve got a page up on the fedoraproject.org wiki as well as a mailing list set up for people that want to participate in the project.
I’d like to talk for a while about what this really means to people who might be interested in helping out. Note that I didn’t say that this would be “Fedora for OLPC” because that’s not really what we’re trying to do. It’s more correct to say that this will be “OLPC based on Fedora” because we expect that the end result of the project will be something that looks and acts very different than what people get when they download Fedora today. While we expect a large percentage of the packages that make up the OLPC operating system to be unmodified from the base Fedora packages, there will be changes especially at the bottom (in the kernel) and the top (in the applications and environment.)
Our focus will be on simplicity and on the specific tasks that kids need to be able to perform in the schools. Communication, collaboration and reading – that will be our mantra. In the service of that, you should read our goals. You will notice that we’re pretty focused on making systems that are hard to break and easy to fix, which means making some changes to the basic assumptions that almost all linux distributions are based on. So it’s important that when you come on board with this project that you keep an open mind. We’re trying to do some cool stuff here, but it’s going to require resetting your assumptions about what Linux looks like and how we approach our user base.
So if you’re willing to help out and solve some of the hard problems and you’ve got an open mind you are more than welcome. Join our mailing list and read through the Fedora Project OLPC site. We’re itching to get started.
