[Commotion-dev] Agenda, priorities, collaboration, and other such things

[Chris Ritzo]

Hey all, just wanted to say first how awesome it is to have some new
folks interested in hacking about on mesh wifi.
Thanks to Brian I have the reading group time on my calendar, so I'll
plan to talk more with you all there, but here are some initial
thoughts to some of the recent discussion.

First things first, in addition to the git repo, we have some online
docs that we'd like you to have access to, read, and eventually edit.
To give you group access to the wiki, please create an account on
http://plexus.chambana.net - It's the frontend for requesting an LDAP
account on chambana.net servers. More info on that later.

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 12:58 AM, Erich Heine <sophacles at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> Just want to get a discussion going on-list about stuff related to the
> actual work at hand.  What is the agenda? What is done, and what needs
> doing?

These are not in any sort of priority order...
- *finish* a commotion image with the basic services running and
deploy a test bed mesh within the IMC. Thanks to Brian's work this is
almost done. The test bed will be our internal testing ground for
whatever needs tested: bandwidth tests, distributed services,
whatever. We also have access to outdoor hardware and could then
expand that test mesh into downtown Urbana.
- new WRT theme. write a new frontend theme (programmed in Lua/Luci
http://luci.subsignal.org/ ) and application hooks for openwrt,
customized for commotion firmware. This isn't a huge priority, but
ties into the next item.
- write a 1-2-3 setup Lua/Luci based init script that allows easy
setup. one of the big goals that we have is a GUI frontend for the
init scripts that Josh has worked on. This would need to be simple,
allow a series of choices for a person with no technical knowledge to
fill in some details (perhaps given to them by us or someone else
technical who is deploying a mesh) that configs their device to joint
the mesh, share bandwidth, etc.
- Some talk on the list about Batman, Batman Advanced, and OpenMesh.
These are great technologies and we could certainly use them. In fact,
OTi would like to roll all of them into commotion so that the user or
group deploying a mesh could choose which protocol they want to use.
The OpenMesh dashboard is nice, and Josh has planed to roll it into
the commotion firmware.
- Why not just go with OpenMesh? I dunno, you tell me. What I've been
told is that OLSR is simply a better routing protocol, just doesn't
have the non-techie frontend yet. We're on the bleeding edge here
folks, so any direction is fine. I could see us putting together a
small OpenMesh test bed and do comparison tests with the OLSR test
bed.
- Windows OLSR client. There are old binaries on the olsr site, so we
need to build an updated one from source. this involves installing
cygwin, bison, flex, and any other dependencies, building the source
and then putting together a gui wrapper for it. The build should be
straightforward. Putting a GUI together is another. This needs to be
done.

> Im aware that getting the commotion distro up and working is part of it. As
> is  getting the windows olsr client working. What in detail does this
> entail? What other parts are needed?

- Language support as a user preference would be great. It's supported
in OpenWRT I believe. Remember that config script idea? Language
option as a choice. There's also translation to think about for any
new interface pages we write.

That's enough for now. Hope to see you all Thursday evening.

Chris Ritzo

> Has anyone considered various language issues? So far everyone I've
> encountered in this venture seems to be a native (or darn close) english
> speaker, which is good for our work and coordination, but can we be sure to
> get the appropriate level of understanding into Egypt on a proper timeline?
> Speaking of timelines, what sort of timeline are we working on here? Any
> thoughts/speculation on how long this may last before the gov't of egypt
> backs down? I know there is negotiation for satellite bandwidth to be made
> available... but that is out of (most of) our control. So should this just
> be a sprint?
> Hopefully this will get a discussion going!
> Regards,
> Erich
> (sophacles on irc)
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