Colin Charles Agenda

There was a request to take a gander at the $100 Laptop: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and reading Fedora People recently made me want to snap up the opportunity to give it a go. Here are my first impressions on the emulator, known as the OLPC SDK, by Daniel Berrange.

Installation, if instructions are followed on FC-4 work fine. There are spec files to rebuild for FC-5. During the bootup sequence, I noticed that LVM was starting up, and finding no volume groups – can’t this be disabled? There doesn’t seem to be a use for LVM on the OLPC.

Once you get past the fairly slow emulator startup (its qemu based), you’ll notice that at the heart of it, you’ve got FC-5 sitting there. Very sexy.

Looking for a terminal? While gnome-terminal isn’t supplied (and probably will never be), xterm is there for the moment. Alt+F2, xterm, and you’re on your way. The root user has no password, so su – shouldn’t be a problem.

What doesn’t work with the olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3 firmware image is networking. Try modprobing for ne2k-pci, and it’ll fail, mainly because 8390.ko is missing. This should be fixed with the next firmware image.

All’s not lost however. If you run file on the .ext3 firmware image, you’ll notice that it contains an x86 boot sector, code offset 0x48. A little fdisk, will show that there are 63 sectors/track, with each sector size being 512 bytes. Multiply that, get 32256, and that should be the offset to mounting the image.

sudo /sbin/losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3
sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/loop0/mnt
merrily going on making changes
sudo umount /mnt
sudo /sbin/losetup -d /dev/loop0

Its well worthwhile to not have QEMU running with the disk image – make sure it isn’t, otherwise corruption is likely. Once that happened, it was fairly trivial to get MySQL installed. So I did.

MySQL running on the OLPC

The question is… do we want 61MB of a package sitting there? It can probably be reduced in size tremendously. So can removal of /var/log and /etc/yum.repos.d/ and so on…

From reading the software task list, it doesn’t seem like there’s a focus on teaching IT to the owners of the OLPC. Does MySQL pass off as educational software, covering a database component? I don’t see OpenOffice.org being listed as something that will be on the OLPC, and the GNOME Office (Abiword and Gnumeric) don’t have a front-end for database connectivity.

I’d like to thank davidz and Daniel Berrange for assistance when needed! Oh and read his blog for little tips – the simulator debugging did come in handy.

In the last minute life of Colin, I managed to get a flight on Tuesday to head to Singapore for Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu Asian Business Tour, pretty much in the nick of time. It was a complete rush from getting the tickets, to reaching the hotel, and getting to the Singapore Management University (arrived only five minutes past!). The LUGS meets are large – going by the numbers, it seemed larger than what we have at LUV in Melbourne, and definitely greater than the MYOSS meetups.

Mark is an excellent speaker, who told us about Ubuntu’s place in the market, and all the cool things Canonical is doing to extend its reach. Being on a tight schedule, he didn’t stick around for after-talk discussions, but quite a number of other folk did. Harish Pillay (RH’s CTA in Singapore) had a couple of boxes of Fedora Core 4 giveaways, which a lot were pleased to snap up!

So I stuck around to have some dinner, and realised something interesting. The Singapore Management University (SMU), one of the four largest and renowned universities in Singapore, teach second year Computer Science database students, MySQL instead of MS SQL, commencing the year 2006.

I thought that was absolutely great news. Even Monash, a university deeply rooted in telling students that open source is better to use, where gcc is preferred over Visual Studio, still use Oracle for all their database teaching. Does anyone know of any other university using MySQL in their database teaching? I’d like to know (either comment here, or drop me e-mail).

(written a few weeks ago, without the Publish button being hit, mainly because photos weren’t uploaded yet. They’re now at: photos tagged SLUG)

I arrived in India today, after spending most of the day flying, and in the lounge at the Mumbai/Chennai airport. Generally, all the travel time was useful – I managed to get most of my presentation done, and during flights, I got to catch up on much needed sleep.

At Mumbai, where I cleared customs, I got hassled right after going through immigration, but right before walking out the green lane. The bloke sitting at the x-ray machine decided that I could only carry one laptop, as opposed to two. He wanted to tax me. I refused, and said that it’s all coming back with me, and while they may impose this on Indian nationals, I’m a foreigner. After much arguing, he let me through, without any cost.

The Habitat World at the Indian Habitat Center is not too bad a hotel. Minus a fridge, and a working Internet connection, its a great place to be. Big room, CNN and HBO on the television, pricey food, but everything self-contained within the center. Haven’t seen any sign of LinuxAsia folk (lack of Penguin label-based t-shirts), but am all excited to see what’s shaking tomorrow.

I also remember what it was like to be on dialup. The silly system here costs lots of rupees to be online, so I picked up a 2-hour prepaid card, that lasts for 24 hours. I can’t use both laptops at the same time (lacking a cable to do proper NAT), so I’m learning to be more resourceful.

As Kaj has mentioned, I’ll be at Linux Asia 2006, from the 8th till the 10th of February 2006. FUDCon Delhi 2006 is happening on the 9th, and I’ll be speaking on MySQL and Fedora: A Developer’s Overview. I think this fits well with the “developer, developer, developer!” theme thats going around these days…

David Axmark is also going to be around at the main conference, both at the Intellectual Property & Open Source panel, and giving us a conference keynote on Friday.

Plan on meeting a lot of people, have a few MySQL-related meetings and am generally excited to see Greg and the rest of the Fedora crew again (we saw each other this time last year for the first time in Boston for our very first FUDCon!).

So if you want to catch up, drop me a line!

Yet another Valentine’s Day spent abroad!

Red Hat Magazine this month (well, okay, last month, I’m clearing out my tabs), has a feature on Linux and Asia. Of interest were:

• What does open source mean in India? – an interview with Javed Tapia (Director, Red Hat India), showing why India finds OSS important (software costs too much), how localisation works, and a bit about Red Hat India.
• Asia, the questions we ask – a great read, written by Michael Tiemann about his experiences in Asia. A question of interest: “What will be Singapore’s role in the technology industry of the 21st century?” I think thats the question most countries want the answer to, be it Malaysia or Australia. Its interesting to see what he has to mention about Sri Lanka (a place thats great for outsourcing, and has heaps of OSS contributors – look at the Apache project).
• Open source for non-profits – by Matt Frye, Fedora contributor, and NGO saviour. He talks about making the Healing Place of Wake County, a place for homeless people with alcohol and drug addictions to recover and rehabilitate, running Red Hat Linux, Apache and MySQL, with a PHP based web interface.
• The open source movement in Malaysia – </shameless plug> Written by me, it is a positive overview of the Malaysian OSS movement. At some stage, we’ll concentrate on business use of it, possibly in the following month or two.
• Red Hat Interns – this was actually a pretty cool video. If time permits, take a gander, just a little disappointed I didn’t get to see the Fedora contributors Luke Macken and Jack Aboutboul, who both interned at Red Hat last summer (?).