Testing Fedora on the OLPC
In preparation for this year's version of the Give One, Get One (G1G1) promotion of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO, the Fedora OLPC special interest group (SIG) has undertaken a rather large testing effort. With the assistance of 80 mostly-free XOs, the group has been running Fedora 10 on the hardware, trying to shake out Fedora and OLPC bugs. The idea is to help lift some of the burden from the OLPC developers, while also providing some distribution testing focused on areas specific to the OLPC hardware.
G1G1 participants can optionally purchase an SD card pre-loaded with a Fedora 10 live distribution, so that they can run a full Fedora desktop on the XO. Normally, it runs a stripped-down version of Fedora 9 with the Sugar interface as the only desktop available. Part of the Fedora OLPC effort is to help reduce the operating system burden for the OLPC folks. Fedora OLPC liaison (and Red Hat Senior Community Architect) Greg DeKoenigsberg describes where the project is headed:
Back in September, DeKoenigsberg put out a call for folks interested
in testing, with the incentive of a "mostly" free XO. Participants
needed to be willing to buy an SD card to put Fedora on and to spend 20
hours testing Fedora on the XO. There were more volunteers than laptops,
as would be expected, but 80 XOs—most refurbished returns from the
original G1G1 last year—got into the hands of many "experienced
Fedora community members
". The XOs were provided by the OLPC
project through its developer
program.
The testing has already "found and resolved a number of potential
release blockers
", according to DeKoenigsberg. There is an
extensive test
plan that outlines the different testing areas as well as the
methodology of testing and reporting bugs found. In many ways, this is
just a test of Fedora on a new hardware platform, with the focus on things
that set the XO apart: power management, networking, the built-in camera,
display, performance, etc.
But there is more to the SIG than just testing the XO. The task list has a number of different activities that are currently underway. Getting a developer key to each person who chooses the Fedora 10 option in G1G1 is an important piece of the puzzle—the XO security policy will not allow it to boot from SD without it. Various Sugar tasks are high on the list as well.
One of those is the Fedora Sugar spin, a Live CD that allows running the Sugar environment on any computer. So far, there are just a few Sugar "activities"—roughly equivalent to applications for things like web browsing or word processing—available for the spin, but that is another of the tasks that Fedora OLPC will be working on. There is currently a bit of an awkward debate on the fedora-advisory-board mailing list about how "official" the Sugar spin really is—as it missed the deadline for the Fedora 10 freeze—but it would seem that many are in favor of granting it a waiver.
The Fedora OLPC SIG's mission statement—"To provide the OLPC
project with a strong, sustainable, scalable, community-driven base
platform for innovation
"—makes it clear it sees a big role in
assisting OLPC going forward. The testing effort is just one facet of that,
as DeKoenigsberg notes:
The OLPC project is one with great promise. It has suffered at times from the mixed message that it gives regarding free vs. proprietary software, but it could, clearly, be a marvelous example of free software in action. In order for that to happen, though, there will need to be a concerted effort by the free software community to assist. The Fedora OLPC SIG looks to be an excellent step in that direction.