Questions about virtualization

[Bryan Berry]

Hey guys,

I have bunch of questions about virtualization.  Please bear w/ me as I am a
Linux novice, with only 9 months an Ubuntu user.  Alot of my questions about
virtualizing the XO image may be quite elementary.

As you may recall, I earlier posted an idea about a new distro that OLPC
developers could use to develop for the XO on conventional hardware.  You
guys correctly disabused me of that idea.  A package is the way to go.
Marco noted that Sugar is still in too much flux to provide a stable
development environment.  I think developers here in Nepal and elsewhere
need a learning environment to so they can eventually write great activities
for the XO.  We can encourage developers to learn Python and GTK but nothing
will motivate them like seeing their activity run w/ in the Sugar interface
- even if their activity breaks in two weeks or two days.

For the foreseeable future, we won't be able to hand an XO to all of the
interested developers. We would like to hand them some kind of package that
lets them work on activity development without getting stuck in the details
of qemu configuration.

My friend Jon Sequeira and I discussed this issue and we decided that novice
Sugar developers will need a virtualization package that will mimic the
hardware as closely as possible.  We put some of our ideas down on OLPC
Nepal's wiki -- which should be migrated to the main olpc wiki shortly.
http://wiki.olpcnepal.org/index.php?title=Kantipur

We would like to preconfigure qemu, bochs, vmware player or another emulator
to mimic the XO hardware as closely as possible.  We're thinking of how to
emulate the mesh networking, sound, videocamera, and performance
constraints.  What would be the best way to accomplish this?  According to
Ivan, we can simply load Csound libraries and use qemu's TAP network
interface for the sound and networking features.   I've read up on that on
the "Troubleshooting QEMU" wiki page.



   - Mimicking the videocamera -- perhaps we could just read in a video
   or image file w/ a simple file read?
   - Audio input -- How could we have multiple virtual microphones on the
   same machine? Say we want to stream audio between two qemu XO instances on
   the same machine.

We would like to distribute the emulator and olpc-specific configuration
files to developers here in Nepal.  Ideally we would like to package it w/
reference docs for Python, GTK, Squeak, etc. + a development IDE(s) for
those tools.  Eventually we would love to make that package or a new related
package accessible to non-technical folks, like teachers.  We would love to
distribute tools that will allow teachers to build simple activities w/out
coding, esp. building extensions to Gcompris (www.gcompris.net).  Some kind
of ActivityBuilder program, if there isn't one already in the works.  This
could be a ways down the line but will be really needed.

Let me know what you guys think.  If anyone has already done all or part of
what i have described, please let me know.

Bryan
OLPC Nepal
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