OLPC

From STOC

Project Coordinator: Nirav Patel

The OLPC software development project will resume soon.

Projects

Bridge

Bridge is an existing Activity with a load of bugs and problems preventing it from being deployable. It is our first project, and should be a good way to get everyone familiar with development in Python, Sugar, and Pygame.

Development Environment

This is basically a summary of the setup info on the OLPC Wiki, listed in order of preference. There is also information here.

Use an OLPC XO

Two members have personal XOs, and we have a third one that will be available to borrow if anyone wants to do some development and testing outside of the meeting times. TechBridgeWorld will also be loaning us their two XOs, which can be used during the meetings.

Also, if you really want to get involved, OLPC is running the Give One Get One program again, in which you can purchase two XOs, and one will be sent to you and the other to a child in a developing country. The cost is $399 and they are shipping rather quickly from Amazon: G1G1.

Linux - the preferred way

Linux is by far the simplest platform to develop for OLPC on.

The preferred development environment is to have Sugar running natively on your computer. On most common linux distributions, there are packages available. See Ubuntu, Fedora, or others. Make sure you get Sugar 0.82. If you prefer a bleeding edge version and want to compile from source, use sugar-jhbuild.

Use a LiveCD - the easiest way

This is a way to get a full Sugar environment running live off of a burned CD. This is fine as long as you have a thumbdrive or an available partition to store data you want to keep on. This is the latest LiveCD, as of 11/07/08.

Emulate

If you have to run Windows or OS X, you can emulate. It will be perfectly accurate, but it can be a pain to get files in and out of, and it could be slow, depending on your hardware.