Hi folks - There doesn't seem to be a place to talk about the RH OLPC project yet. I mailed the olpc@xxxxxxxxxx address last week but didn't hear anything yet. It seems that Fedora and the OLPC development effort would have a lot in common. I wanted to make some suggestions which are a little radical but hopefully can make some interesting discussion before things are set in stone. My core starting assumption is that the box cannot be made for the price suggested and that triage will be needed. Therefore the software must get ahead of the game by assuming a weaker processor and half the flash. Please understand though that these are just suggestions for thinking about, not demands, complaints, etc. Hardware Seems hard to believe that with such a low price point, AMD will deliver optimal pricing and that the target CPU throughput is not excessive with x86. Isn't it better for the longer term to only weakly couple the concept of the cheap laptop to a processor arch? Isn't it better if it's more of a virtual specification that, say, random Chinese companies can compete with each other to provide at the lowest possible price, without encumbered CPU designs even like Arm? It's great to tout it around Large American Corporations, but it would be a big win if the final specification was buildable by anyone. - AMD x86 -> OpenRISC 1200 (Has working GNU toolchain) http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/or1k/openrisc_1200 - ??? expensive patented video --> Opencores VGA/LCD controller http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/vga_lcd/overview - Sound -> Cheap SPI codec, eg, http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/tlv320aic23b.html or AC97 interface to external mixer http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/ac97/overview Software - Linux 2.6 with hardware-optimized .config - glibc -> uclibc http://www.uclibc.org/ or newlib http://sources.redhat.com/newlib/ - coreutils + bash + a ton of other stuff -> busybox http://www.busybox.net - ssh -> dropbear (http://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html ) - apache -> lighttpd (http://lighttpd.net ) - firefox -> Opera? Used in Nokia 770... thought it was OSS now but couldn't find link on site. - various media players / codecs -> Ogg Vorbis + Theora only What will the new modular X do faced with linking to something other than glibc? What about Gnome? - Although I am a KDE man, Gnome really impressed me for the first time on the Nokia 770. The KISS vibe actually worked in that context. The 770 would be a good model for what's needed generally in fact (http://maemo.org , http://maemo.org/platform/docs/maemo_exec_whitepaper.html ) - Ext3 root filesystem -> JFFS2 NAND root filesystem - Grub -> u-boot (http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=65938 ) .. can pull a bzImage out of JFFS2 directly in <100K Well I'm sure these ideas and more are already floating around, it would be cool if these can be dual-purposed into a uber lightweight "Fedora Beanie" version. Ultimately a lot of package specfiles will have to have the configure options revisited anyway... -Andy
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