Fwd: [Sugar-devel] Announce: OLPC software strategy.

Hi Marketing, I thought you'd be interested in the Fedora related news in this announcement especially as I believe it'll be the first large use/deployment of a Fedora Secondary Architecture. Regards, Peter ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Chris Ball <cjb(a)laptop.org&gt; Date: Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 11:01 PM Subject: [Sugar-devel] Announce: OLPC software strategy. To: devel(a)lists.laptop.org Cc: olpc(a)lists.fedoraproject.org, iaep(a)lists.sugarlabs.org, sugar-devel(a)lists.sugarlabs.org Hi, Now that the 10.1.1 release for XO-1.5 is out, it's a good time to talk about OLPC's software strategy for the future.  We've got a few announcements to make: XO-1: ===== OLPC wasn't planning to make a Fedora 11 release of the XO-1 OS, but a group of volunteers including Steven Parrish, Bernie Innocenti, Paraguay Educa and Daniel Drake stepped up and produced Fedora 11 XO-1 builds that follow the OLPC 10.1.1 work.  I'm happy to announce that we're planning on releasing an OLPC-signed version of that work, and that this release will happen alongside the next XO-1.5 point release in the coming weeks.  So, OLPC release 10.1.2 will be available for both XO-1 and XO-1.5 at the same time, and will contain Sugar 0.84, GNOME 2.26 and Fedora 11.  We think that offering this fully interoperable software stack between XO-1 and XO-1.5 laptops will greatly aid deployments, and we're very thankful to everyone who has enabled us to be able to turn this XO-1 work into a supported release! To prepare for this XO-1 release, we've started working on fixing some of the remaining bugs in the community F11/XO-1 builds.  Paul Fox recently solved a problem with suspend/resume and wifi in the F11/XO-1 kernel, which was the largest blocker for a supported release.  We'll continue to work on the remaining bugs, particularly the ones that OLPC is uniquely positioned to help with. The first development builds for this release will be published later this week. XO-1.5: ======= We'll be continuing to work on XO-1.5 improvements, incorporating fixes to the "Known Problems" section of the 10.1.1 release notes¹ into the 10.1.2 release. XO-1.75 and beyond: =================== XO-1.75 software development is underway.  Today we're announcing that we're planning on using Fedora as the base distribution for the XO-1.75.  This wasn't an obvious decision -- ARM is not a release architecture in Fedora, and so we're committing to help out with that port.  Our reasons for choosing Fedora even though ARM work is needed were that we don't want to force our deployments to learn a new distribution and re-write any customizations they've written, we want to reuse the packaging work that's already been done in Fedora for OLPC and Sugar packages, and we want to continue our collaboration with the Fedora community who we're getting to know and work with well. We've started to help with Fedora ARM by adding five new build machines (lent to OLPC by Marvell; thanks!) to the Fedora ARM koji build farm, and we have Fedora 12 and Sugar 0.86 running on early 1.75 development boards.  We'd prefer to use Fedora 13 for the XO-1.75, but it hasn't been built for ARM yet -- if anyone's interested in helping out with this or other Fedora ARM work, please check out the Fedora ARM page on the Fedora Wiki².  We're also interested in hiring ARM and Fedora developers to help with this; if you're interested in learning more, please send an e-mail to jobs-engineering(a)laptop.org. We'll also be continuing to use Open Firmware on the XO-1.75, and Mitch Bradley has an ARM port of OFW running on our development boards already. EC-1.75 open source EC code: ============================ OLPC is proud to announce that the XO-1.75 embedded controller will have an open codebase (with a small exception, see below).  After much behind-the-scenes effort, EnE has agreed to provide us with a public version of the KB3930 datasheet and is allowing our new code to be made public. The code is not available yet due to a few chunks of proprietary code that need to be purged and some other reformatting.  A much more detailed announcement will be provided once the new code is pushed to a public repository.  The code will be licensed under the GPL with a special exception for OLPC use. The exception is because EnE has not released the low-level details on the PS/2 interface in the KB3930, so there will be some code that is not available -- relative to the codebase this is a very small amount of code.  The GPL licensing exception will allow for linking against this closed code.  We're going to investigate ways to move away from this code in the future.  (As far as we're aware, this will make the XO-1.75 the first laptop with open embedded controller code!) Multi-touch Sugar: ================== We've begun working on modifications to Sugar to enable touchscreen and multitouch use (the XO-1.75 will have a touchscreen, as will future OLPC tablets based on its design), and we'll continue to do so. The first outcome from this work is Sayamindu Dasgupta's port of the Meego Virtual Keyboard³ to Sugar -- you can see a screencast of it in action here⁴. It's an exciting time for software development at OLPC.  Many thanks for all of your support and efforts! - Chris, on behalf of the OLPC Engineering team. Footnotes:  ¹:  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/10.1.1  ²:  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM  ³:  http://gitorious.org/fvkbd  ⁴:  http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/sugar_vkbd_multi.ogv -- Chris Ball   <cjb(a)laptop.org&gt; One Laptop Per Child _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel(a)lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel