Re: [outreach] OS software for newcomers sessions at Boston Summit

[Emily Gonyer <emilyyrose gmail com>]

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> outreach-list mailing list
> outreach-list gnome org
> https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/outreach-list

There's also a beta of Ubuntu 12.04 GNOME Remix out with gnome 3.6
which works quite well (mostly), and can be run as live session from
CD/DVD or a bootable SD Card or USB thumb drive. I have images of both
the 32bit and 64bit downloaded and can burn cds/dvds/etc as needed.
I'm not sure when I'll be there - possibly late-ish on Friday but
certainly by Saturday.

Emily

-- 
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius,
power and magic in it. -  Goethe

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't
matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr.Seuss

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that
counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein