Writing Sugar activities with PyQt

At David Boddie's suggestion, have dedicated part of this weekend to explore how well PyQt can be used to write Sugar activities. The results have been very satisfying, I would say thanks to python's flexibility and to the Sugar activity architecture, an excellent work of Marco Pesenti Gritti.

So I got something that looks and behaves similarly to activities compliant to the Sugar Human Interface Guidelines, with the following exceptions:

* No combobox for selecting the sharing mode.

* Some theme quirks were fixed with a custom stylesheet, I think these should be treated as bugs in either QGtkStyle or the Sugar Gtk theme. Or if QGtkStyle is not up to this job, we would need to implement a new QStyle. Couldn't workaround all of the issues in the stylesheet.

* No palettes at all. Hope implementing them in Qt will be much less work than it has been in Gtk+.

* The XCursor theme is not picked up, need to investigate further.

* Some Gtk stuff is still used, I think PyQt activities shouldn't use Gtk+ at all for better memory usage and startup performance.

Good news is that I have reimplemented good part of the activity API in PyQt quite quickly, but we may want to design a better API learning from the mistakes of the past.

Now, let's let the Sugar platform get flooded of KDE Edu activities :)

Update:

Code: http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/hellow-world-qt/repos/mainline

Screenshot:

On Negroponte's omelettes

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.

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!

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?

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:

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

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:

• 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:

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.