[outreach] OS software for newcomers sessions at Boston Summit

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

To review the session setup, the plan is to have two sessions:
 
Friday - Newcomers Tutorial - try out GNOME, learn some git
  commands, fix a bug in the newcomers-tutorial module and
  upload a patch to bugzilla.

Sunday - Fix your first (real) bug day. People find a GNOME
  love bug and try to fix it.

Originally we were thinking about standard means to get people working -
if they don't have recent enough Linux, help them install it. If they
do, help them jhbuild. But that seemed like an enormous hurdle. So,
the current plan is to instead offer two paths:

 If you have a distribution with GNOME 3.4 (or Ubuntu 12.04/12.10),
 the newcomers-tutorial module will work out of the box, and if you
 want to attend the Sunday session, we'll help you on Saturday
 get a working jhbuild.
  
 If you have anything else, we offer a VirtualBox VM image all
 set up, and you can install that on your system, and immediately
 participate. 

(We'll also have some Fedora 17 Live USB sticks available there - we can
distribute them as install media to anybody who is bold and wants to try
installing GNOME on their system at home before Sunday.)

Status
======

I set up a Fedora 17 based image in VirtualBox - the performance is
pretty good using llvmpipe as soon as I turned on "IO APIC" and is
excellent using the VirtualBox 3D acceleration. I didn't immediately see
issues using the VirtualBox 3D acceleration, but there likely are a few,
possibly depending on the details of the host system.

I then tried doing a JHbuild in there - once I cleaned up .o files and
other build artifacts, the size of the VM Image was about 8GB and the
size of the exported "appliance" (compressed image) was about 3.3GB.

The jhbuild went pretty smooth - I came up with a few fixes that I
pushed into the modulesets and gnome-shell-build-setup.sh.

I'm going to redo the image build today as a 32-bit image, and polish it
a bit more, then I'll put it up for anybody who wants to test it. My
testing so far has been on a Windows 7 machine.

Questions
=========

Fedora 17 versus Fedora 18 or another GNOME 3.6 distribution -

  It seems odd, shortly after releasing GNOME 3.6, to be giving people
  3.4 to try out and work with. I don't feel comfortable telling people
  to install Fedora 18 pre-beta, but for an image, maybe it's OK?

Do we want to set up login-to-jhbuild?

  It's probably confusing to give people a version of GNOME that's set
  up for hacking, but then have to explain that what they are using
  isn't hackable, and they can just test individual components.

  Login-to-jhbuild can sometimes be unreliable, and of course, if you
  break something, you may have to switch sessions to recover.

Do we want a smaller no-jhbuild version of the image?

  The image with the jhbuild tree is about 8GB installed. Hard drives
  are big these days, but it's quite possible that some participants
  on Friday won't have 8GB free.

32 bit vs. 64 bit?

  I did my experiment with a 64-bit VM but probably we want to default
  to offering a 32 bit image to reduce memory usage and disk footprint.