I'm somewhat excited about the new gnome-shell stuff that has been blogged about a few times by various people since the GNOME summit a few weeks ago. And so when Owen posted that there was some initial code available, I had to check it out, even if it was pretty retro GNOME 0.9 at the moment. There was, though, one important piece missing…
Wanda!
(Click the link for the movie)
Not what I intended to work on today. But it was fun and gave me a chance to try out writing a tiny bit of code using both Javascript and Clutter, neither of which I'd used before. The takeaway is that it's really simple to do simple things with what is being worked on. Still not sure about anything more complicated at this point
Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, gnome
Thanks to a pointer from warren, I've just pushed a workaround to the spins-kickstart repo to help some of the graphical glitches that have been seen on on the OLPC. This includes the blacked out buttons and also the cut-off text. Unfortunately, this probably won't make the Fedora 10 Preview release next week, although it will be in the final release. If you'd like to test it yourself, you can edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add a line
Option “MigrationHeuristic” “greedy”
below the EXA line.
Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, olpc
As an update to my post last week, Snapshot 2 of Fedora 10 should be available via bittorrent now. (I had intended to post this update on Friday, but then my main laptop decided to start randomly and regularly dying on me :-/)
Again if you ensure that you have the latest livecd-iso-to-disk script, there are a few changes and improvements with Snap2
- If you pass –swap-size-mb to the script, you'll get a swap file set up which gets automatically activated on boot. As mentioned by others, having some swap makes a huge difference.
- We set up the inernal nand (flash) to be used for /home. We don't reuse the homedir from the main XO OS but the data is written there so you can update images without losing changes
- Related to that, we now reset the overlay on every boot. This means the only saved bits are the things in /home. But this lets us worry (less) about filling the overlay and causing things to crash.
On the other hand, from my quick reading of mailing lists so far, there may also be some other performance regressions vs Snap1. Testing and details from people appreciated as always.
Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, olpc
As the Fedora 10 release cycle moves forward, we are now in the stage where there are regular “snapshot” releases planned for every week. These snapshots are just a 'point in time' test of rawhide and released based on whether they work and if not, then we end up just waiting for the next week. The intent is to keep the required effort level relatively low but still give a basis for testing between the beta and the preview release.
On Friday, the first of these post-beta snapshots was released. This includes a set of live images which can run without modifications on the OLPC. This is nice as it will make me not have to do builds of images and host them on fedorapeople anymore 
With this image plus the updated livecd-iso-to-disk, the performance of the image on the XO is much better. How is this achieved? The single biggest thing that helps is changing to putting the ext3fs on the SD card as opposed to the squashfs. This means we're not paying the penalty of decompression. The downside is that this requires a 4 GB (or more) SD card as opposed to a 2 GB one.
A second thing which helps (significantly) is not using a RAM based overlay and instead putting the overlay on the SD card. There are some upsides and some downsides to doing this, but at this point, the upsides seem to outweigh the downsides. This will even more be the case for this week's snapshot with a few of the things I'm planning to have ready for that (more details below…).
So that said, what is the invocation of livecd-iso-to-disk that I'm using (and thus would recommend to testers)? Presently, it's
~/src/fedora/livecd-tools/tools/livecd-iso-to-disk.sh –force –xo –overlay-size-mb 512 – ~/Desktop/Live/F10-Snap1-i686-Live.iso /dev/mmcblk0p1
This sets up a 512 MB (persistent) overlay on the SD card and with –xo, we set up a boot/olpc.fth as well as moving over the embedded ext3fs instead of the squashfs.
So the obvious question is what's next/on my plate to make sure is in better shape for this week's snapshot?
- Fix up handling so that we can easily set up having some swap on the SD card. This again feels like a situation where we're better off doing than not. Most of the mechanism should be present in Snap1, but for some reason, I'm not seeing /mnt/live being properly mounted from the live initscript. This should be a pretty straight-forward thing if someone wanted to take a look and send me a patch The live initscript itself lives in the spin-kickstarts repo
- Non-persistent, disk-based overlay. The “persistence” is kind of kludgey in that it can pretty easily fill up and cause problems. Unfortunately, with dm-snapshot, there's not a lot we can do about that. Hopefully we'll get some form of unionfs in the future, but that definitely won't land for F10. This should just be a matter of changing the initrd to recognize a flag and recreate the snapshot store on the SD card when requested. The initrd is created from mkliveinitrd in the mkinitrd package.
- Persistent /home on the internal nand (mtd0). Again, this should be mostly ready to go with Snap1, but was acting weird the end of last week for me. Should get mounted within the live initscript
- Start making a dent in some of the reported bugs
- Investigate the question which was asked of just sticking the ext3fs on the SD card directly and not doing the “normal” live image bits for the overlay. While this is interesting to explore, I have a sinking suspicion that it's not something that's really doable in the timeframe of Fedora 10, although it is certainly one that bears looking at more for Fedora 11.
Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, olpc
Took a long weekend from pretty much everything work related (although I had to do some school work) and then got back this evening and spent way too much time on some homework for System Architecture. This process was made more frustrating by OpenOffice deciding to crash and corrupt its own backup file in the process. I'm so glad that office software really hasn't improved :-/
So if you've sent an email and expected to see a response from me, hopefully I'll get to it tomorrow. Direct mail looks quiet, but I see there are some 800 messages on various Fedora related lists for me to get through…
For those chomping at the bit about Fedora on OLPC, the new snapshot images that went up on Friday should work better on the XO and integrate everything that's needed without requiring a special OLPC build. You'll also want the updated
Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, olpc
So, you just got your XO to do some testing of Fedora on OLPC. You update the software that was on there, get a developer key, wait a day, and then get all ready to boot your Fedora image off of the SD card ….
And it boots. But it's slow. Very very slow. Some slowness is to be expected… this isn't a fast machine. But it should probably be a little bit speedier than it is. So want to try out a few experiments to try to help pin down the cause of the slowness? Then read on, pick a case and leave comments about your results.
- Try using a persistent overlay instead of the in-memory one. Add –overlay-size-mb to your livecd-iso-to-disk invocation. Amount should be relative to the size of your SD card.
- See if/how much having swap available helps. You can create a file on the SD card with dd, run mkswap against the file and then enable it on the XO. The best test for this would probably be to boot the XO single-user and run swapon from there and then do telinit 5.
- Try disabling some services from the live image. Again boot to single-user, chkconfig some services and then telinit 5
- … your idea here. Hopefully other people have some ideas of things to try as well. Try them out and let us know how it goes.
Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, olpc
Made some more progress today with running Fedora on the XO. Until I manage to go and pick up the right SD card, I figured I'd give performance a little bit of a rest and so instead focused on seeing which bits of the hardware appeared to work (or not). So I booted up into run-level 3 with the image I posted last night and started poking.
- Wireless: First thing to check was the wireless to see if it worked. And it does, the driver gets loaded, we have the firmware and it managed to find the access point at my house and associate without problems. Haven't really looked at mesh at all, and also haven't dived into making sure wpa works, but at least for the basics, it seems okay.
- Camera: From the quick test of “does the driver load” and “does the driver give data”, this looks okay too. Doing cat < /dev/video0 as a user turns on the LED for the camera and prints garbage to the screen.
- Sound: Driver loads and the mixer shows elements, but playing sound isn't looking like it's working. Needs more investigation
- Internal Flash (NAND): Driver seems to load and with a couple of pointers from dwmw2, is mountable without having to do any more module loads. Went ahead and did the next obvious step and changed things so that we can use that for the persistent /home.
- Special keys: Most of the keys on the keyboard seem to be appropriately mapped, but there are some that will need mapping via hal. Should be straight-forward to sit down and do as it's just writing some fdi file bits (hint: if someone wants to volunteer to do this, I can point you in the right direction
- Power management: Suspend to RAM isn't showing up as available at all right now. I suspect some kernel bits that haven't been upstreamed need to be pulled out. Will probably look closer at this tomorrow
And now, I think it is time to go watch some tv
Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, olpc
A new image for testing Fedora on the XO is now available. This image runs quite a bit slower than the previous one in X and I haven't gotten to why yet, so if you try it, I recommend quite a bit of patience. But I wanted to get something up in the near-term so that people would see some sort of progress
Changes and improvements in this image…:
- Updated packages to match those that are included in the Fedora 10 beta that was released yesterday
- Slightly newer kernel (the one that davej built last night) which has debugging disabled. Sadly, this wasn't the help I hoped it would be.
Booting to runlevel 3 is okay for at least some testing, though. So be sure to add –extra-kernel-args 3 to your invocation of livecd-iso-to-disk in addition to passing –xo. And hopefully we'll have a new image up shortly that fixes some of the slowness and makes things more reasonable for general use “soon”
Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, olpc
This was the last weekend of summer and on Saturday, it actually felt a bit like fall was already here. I went out with the MIT cycling club on their ride to Dover (MA). Was a nice route and largely in areas that I had never been before, which was good. Relaxed pace and a good opportunity to talk with and start to get to know some of the other people riding. Was glad that I had picked up some knee warmers, though, as they were pretty much the perfect extra layer. Yesterday, though, felt more like summer again as I went out on the Quad ride. Again a beautiful day, though, and nice to get some more good riding in.
Today brought the actual beginning of autumn and waking up to it being kind of dull, gray and cool was not the way I had hoped to start the morning. But I dragged myself out of bed and headed to the office for a day that I had somewhat booked already with meetings.
Between them, managed to get the serial cable hooked up to the OLPC in the office and started with trying to track down kernel things again. And finally started getting somewhere. After a week (plus) of dead ends, I happened upon the right avenue and was able to confirm that the problem was OpenFirmware loading the initrd into RAM where it shouldn't have been. Wrote up a good description of what was going wrong, sent it off, and Mitch Bradley (aka OFW Ninja) had me a fix in about an hour. I didn't see it for a while longer due to other meetings, but it was in my inbox.
So, after getting home and having dinner, I tried it out and was greeted with success. So modulo fixing some more “normal” kernel problems, it looks like we should be well on our way to having the XO able to boot with the regular Fedora kernel. And this means that having an XO run just any old Fedora live image is now a very big step closer to reality…
Cycling, Fedora, Livejournal Imports cycling, fedora, mitcycling, olpc
About this time last week, I came to the realization that I had a ton of pending work to get done. Luckily, I'm now starting to feel more like I'm on track and not behind. But it was less than fun, so I'm definitely going to try to be better about staying on top of things, especially the system architecture “opportunity sets” for the rest of the semester. Otherwise, classes are going good. Given the amount of time getting sucked up, I decided to not actually be a listener for the Software Systems Engineering course, which is too bad. But this way, I should have some time to just to a few more random talks around MIT. Which is probably going to be more interesting and helpful.
On other fronts, the Fedora on OLPC and Sugar on Fedora efforts are picking up steam a bit. Hopefully we'll have some more useful milestones for both in the next week or so. But due to work there, I haven't had much time to spend on getting a SIG for other smaller form factor machines (including netbooks, the XO and more) underway. Luckily, Peter Robinson has volunteered on fedora-devel-list to help get this off the ground, so hopefully we can get that going to.
Never a dull day…
Fedora, Livejournal Imports, MIT SDM fedora, sdm