For the people who aren't following closely the Sugar project (specially my GNOME friends), if you read in certain media that Negroponte thinks that Sugar is OLPC's biggest mistake, you may want to know that some confusion has arisen from his badly-chosen words.
Negroponte is referring by the name Sugar to the whole OS image that ships in their machines, something different to what everybody else refers by Sugar, even OLPC's own Support FAQ.
No need to extend on this myself because others have explained better the gory details:
http://radian.org/notebook/nonsense-omelet
http://gregdek.livejournal.com/52052.html
Something I can add to those posts though is that OLPC management tried once before to refer to the whole software they made as "Sugar" at one occasion before. It was when the community was outraged at the company's approximation to MS, they announced that their commitment to Sugar was still strong and proof of that was that they had doubled the resources available to Sugar.
What in fact happened was that they hired several people to work on the base system, but the people working on the real Sugar were still the same, sad, 2 and a half people.
Given that the Sugar community is working in the benefit of OLPC's customers, I wonder why Negroponte cannot think a bit more before making such "courageous" statements.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Telepathy Developer's Manual
I'm skimming through it right now and this is REALLY good stuff:
http://people.collabora.co.uk/~davyd/telepathy-book/
Ideally, 90% of Sugar activity authors shouldn't need to get to work much with telepathy directly, because they most likely only want to share a data structure and interchange some messages or signals.
But for the people doing activities such as Chat or VideoChat, implementing collaboration frameworks such as Groupthink or messing with the presence service in Sugar, this will be invaluable and will hopefully lower the floor for new contributors.
Thanks, Collabora!
http://people.collabora.co.uk/~davyd/telepathy-book/
Ideally, 90% of Sugar activity authors shouldn't need to get to work much with telepathy directly, because they most likely only want to share a data structure and interchange some messages or signals.
But for the people doing activities such as Chat or VideoChat, implementing collaboration frameworks such as Groupthink or messing with the presence service in Sugar, this will be invaluable and will hopefully lower the floor for new contributors.
Thanks, Collabora!
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Sugar, usando Software libre para aprender
Por casualidad tropece con este articulo excelentemente escrito por Maria del Pilar Saenz Rodriguez: Sugar, usando Software libre para aprender. Explica muy bien la importancia del software libre en educacion y como encaja Sugar ahi.
Desafortunadamente se necesita Flash para acceder al pdf, esta disponible en la caja "My shared files" en la misma pagina. Y claro, seria muy bueno que Pilar alias befana sindicara su blog en planet.sugarlabs.org.
Tambien seria estupendo tener una traduccion al ingles para la gente de Sugar Labs que lo promueve a nivel internacional, voluntarios?
Desafortunadamente se necesita Flash para acceder al pdf, esta disponible en la caja "My shared files" en la misma pagina. Y claro, seria muy bueno que Pilar alias befana sindicara su blog en planet.sugarlabs.org.
Tambien seria estupendo tener una traduccion al ingles para la gente de Sugar Labs que lo promueve a nivel internacional, voluntarios?
Monday, June 15, 2009
Progress on Sugar activities with SWF content
Following the work I did some months ago, Rob Savoye has been kind enough to update the rpm spec of Gnash to also produce rpms for the SDK and for the python bindings for embedding the player.
This will allow us to run activities that use Flash content in the next release of Sugar, 0.86. Rob has also updated the .deb control files so this work is well under its way to be in the next releases of all the major distros.
If you want to try it today, you can install some rpms in the Fedora 11-based Sugar on a Stick and run EatBoom, a sample activity that contains a flash game developed by Innovations for Learning. It is a simple game for practising additions that is part of their TeacherMate product. IFL has released this activity as GPL and I hope they will find value in releasing more of their work so it can be used by children in Sugar or in other platforms.
Step 1: download the last SoaS snapshot from here.
Step 2: install it to a USB stick following this instructions and boot it in your computer.
Step 3: start the terminal activity and run the commands below:
Step 4: start Browse and type the following URL: http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~tomeu/EatBoom-1.xo The EatBoom activity will be downloaded and installed.
Step 5: Run EatBoom!
Here you have the source for the activity, which can be changed to load a different SWF movie by changing just a single line of code: http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/eatboom
This will allow us to run activities that use Flash content in the next release of Sugar, 0.86. Rob has also updated the .deb control files so this work is well under its way to be in the next releases of all the major distros.
If you want to try it today, you can install some rpms in the Fedora 11-based Sugar on a Stick and run EatBoom, a sample activity that contains a flash game developed by Innovations for Learning. It is a simple game for practising additions that is part of their TeacherMate product. IFL has released this activity as GPL and I hope they will find value in releasing more of their work so it can be used by children in Sugar or in other platforms.
Step 1: download the last SoaS snapshot from here.
Step 2: install it to a USB stick following this instructions and boot it in your computer.
Step 3: start the terminal activity and run the commands below:
su -
curl -O http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~tomeu/gnash/gnash-0.8.5-4.20090615bzr11113.fc11.i586.rpm
curl -O http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~tomeu/gnash/gnash-plugin-0.8.5-4.20090615bzr11113.fc11.i586.rpm
curl -O http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~tomeu/gnash/gnash-widget-0.8.5-4.20090615bzr11113.fc11.i586.rpm
rpm -U *.rpm
Step 4: start Browse and type the following URL: http://shell.sugarlabs.org/~tomeu/EatBoom-1.xo The EatBoom activity will be downloaded and installed.
Step 5: Run EatBoom!
Here you have the source for the activity, which can be changed to load a different SWF movie by changing just a single line of code: http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/eatboom
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Installing Mozilla addons in Sugar's Browse
Lucian Branescu thinks it would be useful for his Webified project if Browse could run Google Gears.
Browse is unfortunately unable to install and directly use .xpi files, even if it's based on Mozilla. Maybe adding support for this doesn't depend on too much stuff only in Firefox and it could be quite easy. If someone would like to investigate a bit, would be very nice. But for now we can do some dirty tricks to get it up and running.
Steps:
That would be enough, but unfortunately Gears will be of little use for now until this bug gets fixed in Mozilla, because the security dialog will be too small and you won't be able to authorize web sites to use Gears. Let's hope this gets fixed soon!
And now for the obligatory screenshot:
Browse is unfortunately unable to install and directly use .xpi files, even if it's based on Mozilla. Maybe adding support for this doesn't depend on too much stuff only in Firefox and it could be quite easy. If someone would like to investigate a bit, would be very nice. But for now we can do some dirty tricks to get it up and running.
Steps:
- expand gears-linux-opt.xpi with unzip,
- move the files inside the components dir (bootstrap.js, gears.xpt, libgears_ff2.so and libgears.so) to $(prefix)/lib/hulahop/components,
- move the file inside the lib dir (update.js) to $(prefix)/lib/hulahop/lib,
- move the dirs inside the chrome/chromeFiles dir (content and locale) to a new dir called $(prefix)/share/hulahop/chrome/gears,
- copy the file chrome.manifest to $(prefix)/share/hulahop/chrome/gears.manifest, mind the file name change. Also make this change to the file contents:
--- chrome.manifest 2009-05-19 20:34:46.000000000 +0200
+++ ../../install/share/hulahop/chrome/gears.manifest 2009-05-29 12:26:36.000000000 +0200
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-content gears chrome/chromeFiles/content/
+content gears gears/content/
overlay chrome://browser/content/browser.xul chrome://gears/content/browser-overlay.xul
locale gears en-US chrome/chromeFiles/locale/en-US/
locale gears ar chrome/chromeFiles/locale/ar/
That would be enough, but unfortunately Gears will be of little use for now until this bug gets fixed in Mozilla, because the security dialog will be too small and you won't be able to authorize web sites to use Gears. Let's hope this gets fixed soon!
And now for the obligatory screenshot:
Saturday, May 30, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Reducing Sugar's memory usage
One of the biggest performance problems of Sugar is caused because we use a lot of python modules. This is worst in python than in C or other languages because the bindings for these libraries need to initialize a big bunch of stuff when they are loaded and that takes quite a bit of cpu time and of memory that never gets released.
The visible effects of this are slow startup of activities and occasional system crashes on systems with little memory and no swap as the OLPC's XO.
In the past weeks I have been working on improvements to PyBank so it can run Sugar. PyBank will allow us to use any library based in GObject without having to load a bindings module. I have measured a reduction of memory usage of more than 4MB (from a total of 22MB) for the shell, though I haven't managed yet to run it with all its functionality due to missing pieces in gobject-introspection and PyBank. Each other process that previously used pygtk (almost every base activity) will show a similar reduction in 4-5MB.
I have big hopes for this because we'll get these additional benefits:
- we'll be able to run more activities simultaneously,
- we'll be able to run on systems with less memory,
- we'll be able trade some of the memory savings for compositing some windows so less redraws will happen, leading to a more responsive UI,
- the shell and activities will start much faster,
- by moving the sugar toolkit from python to a GObject library with introspection support, we can completely drop several python modules thus reducing further the footprint. Also activity authors will be able to use the toolkit from languages other than python.
Now, the bad news is that though we have made great advances in this plan, we have only a few months until the next release. My current estimation is that I would need most of that time in order to bring the needed infrastructure to the needed level of maturity, and even then we'll face most probably issues regarding the packaging of the various pieces in all the distros where we want Sugar to be well supported.
So right now my opinion is that we should put this effort to rest for a few months while the base components mature and get packaged for distros and then come back to it after 0.86 is released. Hopefully by 0.88 we'll have a much leaner and faster Sugar leading to more learning for children like this:
If someone wants to hack further on this, you will need to checkout and install the following modules in sugar-jhbuild:
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/glib
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/pygobject/
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gobject-introspection/
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gir-repository/
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/pybank/repos/mainline
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar/repos/sugar-pybank
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar-toolkit/repos/sugar-toolkit-pybank
Then you will need to convert the sources in sugar-pybank and sugar-toolkit-pybank with the sed script in sugar-pybank called pybank-convert.sh .
Johan Dahlin has been of great help during this time, his deep knowledge of pygobject has been invaluable. Also go thanks to Simon Schampijer, Marco Pesenti Gritti and Bernie Innocenti for their moral support. We'll get there, eventually! ;)
The visible effects of this are slow startup of activities and occasional system crashes on systems with little memory and no swap as the OLPC's XO.
In the past weeks I have been working on improvements to PyBank so it can run Sugar. PyBank will allow us to use any library based in GObject without having to load a bindings module. I have measured a reduction of memory usage of more than 4MB (from a total of 22MB) for the shell, though I haven't managed yet to run it with all its functionality due to missing pieces in gobject-introspection and PyBank. Each other process that previously used pygtk (almost every base activity) will show a similar reduction in 4-5MB.
I have big hopes for this because we'll get these additional benefits:
- we'll be able to run more activities simultaneously,
- we'll be able to run on systems with less memory,
- we'll be able trade some of the memory savings for compositing some windows so less redraws will happen, leading to a more responsive UI,
- the shell and activities will start much faster,
- by moving the sugar toolkit from python to a GObject library with introspection support, we can completely drop several python modules thus reducing further the footprint. Also activity authors will be able to use the toolkit from languages other than python.
Now, the bad news is that though we have made great advances in this plan, we have only a few months until the next release. My current estimation is that I would need most of that time in order to bring the needed infrastructure to the needed level of maturity, and even then we'll face most probably issues regarding the packaging of the various pieces in all the distros where we want Sugar to be well supported.
So right now my opinion is that we should put this effort to rest for a few months while the base components mature and get packaged for distros and then come back to it after 0.86 is released. Hopefully by 0.88 we'll have a much leaner and faster Sugar leading to more learning for children like this:
If someone wants to hack further on this, you will need to checkout and install the following modules in sugar-jhbuild:
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/glib
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/pygobject/
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gobject-introspection/
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gir-repository/
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/pybank/repos/mainline
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar/repos/sugar-pybank
http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar-toolkit/repos/sugar-toolkit-pybank
Then you will need to convert the sources in sugar-pybank and sugar-toolkit-pybank with the sed script in sugar-pybank called pybank-convert.sh .
Johan Dahlin has been of great help during this time, his deep knowledge of pygobject has been invaluable. Also go thanks to Simon Schampijer, Marco Pesenti Gritti and Bernie Innocenti for their moral support. We'll get there, eventually! ;)
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