Ad-hoc wireless networks in Sugar

During the Sugar Camp in Paris a couple of weeks ago, Gary C. Martin and me played with ad-hoc networking between OSX and GNOME. It turned out to work flawlessly and we thought that it could be a good substitute for OLPC's mesh network, as Bonjour traffic won't saturate the spectrum if using plain ad-hoc. And it has the great advantages of being able to work on most wifi cards and not requiring any changes to NetworkManager.

So a few hours of hacking brought these results:



The user called tomeu-soas, running Sugar on a stick on a SD card on a Eee PC, creates new adhoc network.



We can see in the neighborhood view that a new network appears, called "tomeu-soas's network".



On a OLPC's XO running as well SoaS, we can see the new network appear in its neighborhood view. Eventually the colors of the network should match the colors of the user that created it.



Once we connect to this network, telepathy-salut kicks in and shows the presence of the other people connected to this same ad-hoc network.



A GNOME desktop can also join the network and interact with Sugar clients if it has Bonjour-enabled clients. In this case it's Pidgin, but any applications that implement some kind of sharing via telepathy-salut will be able to collaborate with Sugar activities that implement the same protocol, like for example Abiword.



And this is how the Chat window looks in the XO.

So I hope that this new feature will make easier for children to collaborate across the network, chat and exchange files without their government having to buy a minimum of 100k XO laptops.

Thanks go to Gary for his brain cells, Dan Williams for some troubleshooting help (and writing the awesomer-than-most-people-say NetworkManager) and to Simon Schampijer who wrote the current NM client code in Sugar in such a way that my patch is really tiny. And also to Collabora for having contributed the code that allows normal bonjour and jabber clients interact with Sugar.