[olpc-community-support] testing collaboration

[Matt Price]

hi folks,

just signed up to this list & hoping it's not a bad place for my
question.  

My daughter is getting an xo-1 for xmas via g1g1.  I really want this to
be the best possible experience for her, so i've been experimenting with
various emulators running on my own dell d820 laptop, running a mostly
up-to-date Ubuntu Gutsy.  In particular, I want to fool around with
collaboration to see how that will work, and also to be sure that when
the machine shows up, there will be someone else for Mika to collaborate
with.  It's in collaboration that I've had the most trouble and that's
what I want to talk about.

I've tried a bunch of different methods for pretending to be an xo-1;
none work perfectly, but i'm hoping that someone else outthere has had
better luck.  here's what I've seen:

1) use jani monoses' package archive for ubuntu,
https://edge.launchpad.net/~jani/+archive .  This mostly works great --
follow instructions on jani's blog, http://janimo.blogspot.com/ .  I can
pretty easily get two xo-1 instances running side-by-side; they can
recognize each other and make friends, and also chat, but no other
collaborative activities work -- e.g., not in paint  or write, the two
most important i'd think.  I especially want write colaboration to work,
and jani suggested the problem might lie with the fact that the
collaboration code is not included in the ubuntu packages of abiword.
So I tried other methods...  


2) use the standard downloadable qemu images from laptop.org.  Images
downloaded fine, and after fiddling a bit to get kqemu to work I cna
load the images pretty easily with :
qemu -m 256 -kernel-kqemu -soundhw es1370 -net user -net \
nic,model=rtl8139 -hda olpc-qemu-image-mika.img 

however, there's no networking, so there's no way for me to test
collaboration.  There are various guides for getting qemu networking to
work, but I haven't had any luck with any of them so far.  they all also
tend to extend beyond the reach of my competence.  If someone can guide
me through that process, i'd probably be pretty happy...

3) use VMWare instead.  I followed the olpc wiki instructions on using
vmware and managed to get that working as well using the mostrecent
vmware server 1.0.4 -- sort of.  After fiddling around a bit to get
vmware working, I downloaded the relevant vmware image, but couldn't
make it boot into x -- several xorg modules were missing, among them dri
and glx, i believe.  Anyway, figured that might be an issue with the
particular image version, so I tried converting the functional qemu
image to vmdk using 
qemu-img convert my-image.img -O vmdk my-image.vmdk
but attempts to add this image to my virtual machine merely caused
vmware to crash.  so again, i wasn't able to test the collaboration
facilities.  

So all this leaves me a little discouraged, and i'm hoping for a little
guidance from the community.  Is there anyone out there who has a really
solidly-working xo-1 emulation working on a ubuntu system?  if so, would
you be willing to share your secrets with me? Also, do other folks have
a sense of the current status of collaboration in the core activities?

thaks very mch,

Matt
-- 
Matt Price
matt.price at utoronto.ca