OLPC 'upstream'

[Peter Robinson]

> Are these "JFFS2 image" figures, after the JFFS2 compression?  Just some
> example numbers, busybox on my Arm9 here is 606KB and allows you to
> throw away bash (it has ash), vi, coreutils, rpm (a weaker
> implementation, but still), cpio, tar, procps, etc, etc, even networking
> stuff like dhcpd and dhcpc are all in there.  If you accept some small
> restrictions and losses of non-core functionality you can perform a
> massive reduction in distro size and packagecount with busybox with or
> without an alternative libc.

But while not throwing away core functionality you add extra unneeded
things like extra development and testing time (and a reduced audience
for testing) by using things like uclibc in a fedora based distro and
hence increasing the developments costs and time to market with very
little gain in size. Things like maemo already prove that you can
shoehorn all core functionality that you have in a modern desktop
environment (I have a browser, abiword, gaim, gnumeric, evince and
other stuff installed on the standard 128M on the Nokia 770 along with
the standard browser/autio/video etc that comes default) into less
than 256 without having to resort to using cut down libraries like
uclib which may produce other issues. The advantage of using the core
fedora libraries is that you have economies of scale when it comes to
testing and bug hunting.

Peter