[olpc-community-support] testing collaboration

[Mitchell N Charity]

Hi Matt.
 > 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,

I suspect raw networking is working (does the web Browse'r work?), but that
"presence service", which enables collaboration, and populates the mesh view
with peoples' xo's, is not working.

Recent joyride's changed the configured (.sugar/default/config) jabber 
server,
which provides presence service, to ship2.jabber.laptop.org.  Which 
simply doesn't
yet exist.  This makes some sense, as joyride is a prototype for a 
future release.
At which time, it will exist.  But that doesn't help us now, running in 
emulation.

The old server configuration was jabber.laptop.org.  It is currently a 
bit overloaded
(a performance problem being worked on), and thus sometimes crashes, but is
currently your best bet.  Running
  sugar-control-panel -s jabber jabber.laptop.org
should make the change.

I've updated
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO#Build_recommendations
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Emulating_the_XO/Help_and_tips#Network_startup

One could also hypothetically try running one's own presence service,
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Jabber_server , but this is still rather 
difficult, and is
very much overkill given your objectives.  I mention it only for 
completeness.

The #5163 ticket mentioned previously (getting 1200x900 in qemu, without
having to use Xephyr), is not related to your problem.

Please let me know if you have any questions.
Mitchell


Holt wrote:
> The work described in ticket http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5163 (which 
> currently applies to OLPC's experimental "joyride" builds) will 
> improve emulation for both VMWare and development versions of QEMU.
>
> For more detail, see if you might have a chat with user "mncharity" on 
> irc channel #olpc on irc.freenode.org (he's been working hard on 
> improving emulation...)
>
> For other support options, please see our many other mailing lists 
> etc, at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Support
>
> Thanks,
> --Holt
>
> Matt Price wrote:
>> 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
>>   
>