Christopher Blizzard at OLPC Analyst Meeting
Posted in Christopher Blizzard
On Thursday, April 26, One Laptop Per Child held a three-hour analyst meeting at their headquarters in Cambridge, MA. The OLPC Leadership spoke on several key aspects of the Children's Machine XO architecture and the program's overall production strategy.
OLPC Talks received exclusive audio tapes of the meeting, transcribed below. Please reference OLPC Talks if you use any quotes or information from the transcripts.
Christopher Blizzard, Lead Developer, RedHat - One Laptop Per Child
So... That stuff is already out there...
Another thing I will say is that we've benefited from the work of other corporations who are in the open source program like Nokia, work on the N800 and the N770, originally, we've reaped tremendous benefit from that and we're able to keep a patch at that, so Nokia and Redhat and through PC are working on entirely different products but we're benefiting from each other's work because we're working in an open source platform
We're talking a little about how Linux usually does updates and Windows usually does updates, and Mac usually does updates. Linux usually has a one-size-fits all, if you want to do an update you usually get everything from an upstream distribution you get it from hard drive. We're taking huge pattern and we're trying to create a very simple small core operating system. This hundred megabytes, if you wanted to do that you have to make a choice – which means we can't include 3 different wizard libraries, we include one, we don't include 3 different office programs, we include – none, to give you an idea.
We're going to try to maintain a very small core, we'll do updates as single bundles, sort of the way the Mac does, if you've used a Mac and you've updated the software on it, it basically says “You haven't updated, available, would you like to install?” And that's it. So software installation will actually be done by the user in their directory at the user level, in bundles, we're going to do RPMs, Systems, mostly because we want to make sure the platform stays small and people are able to build on top of it as a stable system.
Questioner: “Is RedHat itself doing the updates or you using some RedHat network?
Christopher Blizzard: We will be doing the updates, yes.
Questioner2: The structure of it, you compare it to the Mac, and this is my understanding of how the mac does it, obviously in Linux it's very centralized and there's a very central core of the operating system that does that, is that still the case here or you going to rely on individual applications to know when they need to be updated themselves?
OLPC Talks received exclusive audio tapes of the meeting, transcribed below. Please reference OLPC Talks if you use any quotes or information from the transcripts.
Christopher Blizzard, Lead Developer, RedHat - One Laptop Per Child
So... That stuff is already out there...
Another thing I will say is that we've benefited from the work of other corporations who are in the open source program like Nokia, work on the N800 and the N770, originally, we've reaped tremendous benefit from that and we're able to keep a patch at that, so Nokia and Redhat and through PC are working on entirely different products but we're benefiting from each other's work because we're working in an open source platform
We're talking a little about how Linux usually does updates and Windows usually does updates, and Mac usually does updates. Linux usually has a one-size-fits all, if you want to do an update you usually get everything from an upstream distribution you get it from hard drive. We're taking huge pattern and we're trying to create a very simple small core operating system. This hundred megabytes, if you wanted to do that you have to make a choice – which means we can't include 3 different wizard libraries, we include one, we don't include 3 different office programs, we include – none, to give you an idea.
We're going to try to maintain a very small core, we'll do updates as single bundles, sort of the way the Mac does, if you've used a Mac and you've updated the software on it, it basically says “You haven't updated, available, would you like to install?” And that's it. So software installation will actually be done by the user in their directory at the user level, in bundles, we're going to do RPMs, Systems, mostly because we want to make sure the platform stays small and people are able to build on top of it as a stable system.
Questioner: “Is RedHat itself doing the updates or you using some RedHat network?
Christopher Blizzard: We will be doing the updates, yes.
Questioner2: The structure of it, you compare it to the Mac, and this is my understanding of how the mac does it, obviously in Linux it's very centralized and there's a very central core of the operating system that does that, is that still the case here or you going to rely on individual applications to know when they need to be updated themselves?
Continue reading "Christopher Blizzard at OLPC Analyst Meeting"
