[Debian-olpc-devel] Running Debian on an XO

[James Cameron]

On Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 01:23:39PM +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> So I expect that it is easy to reproduce the problem by simply being
> up-to-date before trying.

Thanks.  I may get time to try to reproduce the problem, but if I can
confirm it then I'll probably remove the "olpc-update debian" build and
the Wiki page if nobody will step up to maintain it.  I don't like the
idea of people stumbling on things that are now broken.

> >DebXO has replaced the "olpc-update debian" method.
> >http://wiki.laptop.org/go/DebXO
> 
> How do you mean "replaced"?

There are active maintainers.

> DebXO is not Debian, so it does not make sense to me if OLPC intends
> to have the "olpc-update debian" command install DebXO instead of
> plain Debian.

OLPC has no plans to provide Debian on XO that I'm aware of.

I've not heard whether Debian plans to provide Debian on XO.

> I would like to understand better the actual tweaks needed, so that
> I can make a qualified choice on whether to be lazy and run DebXO or
> instead apply stuff manually on top of a plain Debian to be able to
> inspect each part myself more closely.

DebXO contains several changes to compensate for change to the XO
firmware since "olpc-update debian" was created.

> Maybe just point us to some public URLs to documentation on - and
> sources for - those boot-related stuff you mention above.

I don't know any off-hand.

> Perhaps, if possible, provide details on *all* code changes between
> plain Fedora and the XO-1 distribution.

I don't have this available yet.

> Oh, and a minor detail that I just stumbled across earlier today:
> Did the older XO-1 releases really use yaird for the ramdisk images?

I recall a mention of it, yes.   I don't recall who did that, but the
reasons were rather special and unlikely to be portable to general
systems.

If you'd like to explore the initrd's of the various builds around the
2006 and 2007 timeframe, you might find how it was used.  I don't know
what is used at the moment for the F11 builds.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/