[olpc-help] Sugar on Ubuntu Linux

[chuck418 at cox.net]

no guru here, but setting up an Ubuntu box, and may try to load Sugar on it once I get it up and running (optimist!) as my daughter's 3rd Graders love their Xo and she doesn't want to bring it home.
They love their XO, and try to behave well so they get a chance to use it. The Photo/Video and music functions are a big hit, with these kids who for the most part cannot read or speak English.

For others interested, see
http://planet.ubuntu.com/          - or his page
http://janimo.blogspot.com/search/label/en

I started moving Sugar (the GUI for the children's XO laptop) from the PPA into the main archives. It is aimed at people willing to try out or develop for Sugar but would rather not spend too much time with jhbuild and also a good way to set up a Sugar environment to collaborate with laptops already in your range. With Xubuntu already running on the Asus EEE these packages can be used to turn that laptop into a reasonable child's toy :)
If polished enough by release it could be installed on Edubuntu boxes that are used by younger children.

The core Sugar and a few activities are already there and testable if you run Hardy and have universe enabled:

$apt-get install sugar-emulator sugar-calculate-activity sugar-chat-activity sugar-connect-activity sugar-journal-activity sugar-logviewer-activity sugar-memorize-activity sugar-pippy-activity sugar-terminal-activity sugar-turtleart-activity sugar-web-activity

Then run sugar-emulator and try out the existing activities. Use F1 through F4 to switch between the four views, use Alt-q to quit.
To try out the collaboration facilities connect, chat and memorize at least work. You can run two or more emulators on the same machine by setting different SUGAR_PROFILE envvars for each for example
$SUGAR_PROFILE=pig sugar-emulator

To see other people on the net, those either with a similar emulator setup or actual XO hardware, you'll need to set the default jabber server on which to meet. Unfortunately the ones used for development are down right now, and others too are being swamped by existing users from the Give One Get One program.

The server can be set using the sugar-control-panel command. For the enterprising ones willing to set up your own ejabberd server the OLPC wiki has details. It involves patching ejabberd from svn, Ubuntu packages of it would be nice :)

Things that need work and help from existing MOTUs and packagers:

* the write activity needs Abiword 2.6 for its collaborative editing features and python bindings. I was told 2.6 is to be released by the end of February so hopefully it will get packaged by Debian or us before April.

* the etoys activity requires the Squeak Smalltalk environment. AFAIK Jordan Mantha is working on getting that into shape for Edubuntu 8.04.

* the TamTam sound editing activities and sound in general depend on Csound 5 . It was released in 2005 but Debian and Ubuntu still carry Csound 4 . It is a serious packaging task but it would me most welcome

* the read activity is based on a modified Evince, those patches would be nice to be upstreamed so no duplication occurs.

* there are also smaller tasks of packaging more activities. Some are in the NEW queue, some not yet uploaded and some not packaged properly but the above ones are more critical, as activities can be installed even without .debs by just unpacking the bundles under ~/Activities.

These are all tasks that take time to talk to upstreams and plenty of work but if you want to help let me know which part you're interested in.


Best,
chuck 2.0