T2-target Honey

From Olpcaustria

1 Introduction
2 Goal
3 Project name
4 Platforms
5 Systems
6 T2
- 6.1 Puppy Linux
7 Packages
8 Sources
9 involved

Introduction

"It's an education project - not a laptop project. The goal is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves."

So the basic idea makes use of a laptop to *educate*.

The laptop shall be used to connect to others through a wireless mesh network. The desktop Sugar and the activities are made for interactive usage in a group.

The XO has a x86 processor, so the code would run on other x86 hardware, too, provided that you adjust the configuration files and use the hardware which is supported by the kernel.

However, after optimization of the system it might be that some of the hardware is not supported any longer and therefore the system image might run only on the XO alone.

The XO happens to be the first laptop to run the software of the OLPC project. However, the OLPC idea should not be limited to the XO alone.

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Goal

"OLPC - everywhere!"

We want to make use of the OLPC on as many hardware as possible, so that people with existing hardware can also join the OLPC activities.

So - we want the "target" OLPC to run on PowerPC, on Sparc, embedded systems, on Playstations and more.

We want to use T2 to automatically create system images for arbitrary hardware - by defining OLPC as a "target".

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Project name

It is mainly the desktop "Sugar" and the activities the kids will see. A sweet and healthy Name for the target is "Honey". Any objections?

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Platforms

Currently there is only one OLPC system. The OLPC system is based on Fedora. The system image is built such that it can be loaded and run from within the system emulator 'qemu'.

So the OLPC system is *not* cross-platform. However, it would be nice to have a cross-platform OLPC system. The OLPC system should be able to run on other small hardware such as handheld devices.

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Systems

Fedora may not be the best choice to develop an embedded system. Fedora as a distribution is big, needs a lot of RAM and flash on embedded systems.

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T2

T2 allows the creation of custom distributions with bleeding edge technology, up-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation.

Rene Rebe from T2 has announced support for the OLPC target [2007-07-27 on #t2].

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Puppy Linux

Puppy Linux uses T2 to compile all the needed packages. Additionally there is done a lot of work by hand. Puppy Linux has a lot of fine features and is very small and fast.

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Packages

The logfile of the daily build is available from RedHat and the list of packages can be extracted from the latest build.log:

wget -c http://olpc.download.redhat.com/olpc/streams/development/latest/devel_ext3/build.log
sed -n '/Dependencies Resolved/,/Transaction Summary/p' build.log > packages.txt

(TODO: Who is maintaining the builds? Add a contact.)

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