Alternatives of Sugar development environment

[Tony Veijalainen]

Isn't http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Google_Summer_of_Code 
<https://webmail.omnia.fi/horde/util/go.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwiki.laptop.org%2Fgo%2FOLPC_Google_Summer_of_Code&Horde=78ed4e297e052ca0798e4ea32ee69d57> 

modified Xephyr usable for base of development for screen emulation?
Has somebody checked the emulation side by side with final hardware 
realization?

1) I am now checking if it is possible to do Sugar-jhbuild in andLinux
environment which runs inside Windows and is used for gp2x linux game 
console
development. (http://wiki.gp2x.org/wiki/AndLinux 
<https://webmail.omnia.fi/horde/util/go.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwiki.gp2x.org%2Fwiki%2FAndLinux&Horde=78ed4e297e052ca0798e4ea32ee69d57>).
 It uses esd daemon listening in Windows side.
There maybe also possibility to have Csound listening in
Windows environment as version of Csound exist for Windows
in addition to Linux 
(http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=81968&package_id=120482)

Notice that Sugar-jhbuild.is very hungry for disk space. Now I have 4GB 
(after trying with 1 GB and 2 GB)
disk space reserved for it. After compilation and starting the Avahi 
service I finally
got the Sugar running in Xephyr inside AndLinux (CoLinux) in Windows XP 
Home machine.

2) I would think that one Qemu qcow (compressed) file image could be
automatically be built from each image (adding  kernel source with all 
hardware support to support general installation
and the cross compilation package).
This could then be run as hdb in Qemu+Kqemu to have sufficient space for 
development.

3) I do not know if chroot environment in Linux could emulate the 
environment sufficiently. Sugar looks like having sugar-emulator command 
(using Xephyr or Xnest). There should be an option for installing sugar 
with systems own
libraries to avoid building source for everything. Maybe binary option 
for sugar-jhbuild is possible?
Less wasting of space and time. I can not imagine a teacher in Nepal 
waiting through the sugar-jhbuild process even if everything could be 
automatic.

4) I do understand the problem of versions of dependencies. Mayby an 
automatic
script could be made to produce rpm and deb packages from the  olpc images
binaries. Installing that package would then turn Fedora or Ubuntu 
distribution
for development environment. Same time they could automate the depencies 
lists from wiki.
(http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_on_Ubuntu_Linux)

5) Maybe tree version of Sugar image could be installed inside a Linux
development environment and could accomplish the same?

6) Maybe standard kernel could be added to OLPC images to boot sugar 
environment
 from hard disk partion natively with proper grub setup (The ISO image 
has only
native hardware boot option and does not even work from QEMU)

7...) Then there is the Xen and UML alternatives...

Does anybody have experience with these things and could advice which is 
most viable road to solution?
Would many people need to do the development in non-linux environment?

     Tony Veijalainen, Finland

> Subject: Re: Questions about virtualization
> Chris Ball wrote:
>   
>>    > 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.
>>
>> I don't know of a way to emulate a 1200x900 resolution screen in an
>> emulator (because there's no such VESA mode?), which seems like a 
>> non-starter for developing applications to me.  Does anyone know 
>> how we could get around this?
>>     
>
> Adding Matthew Allum, author of Xephyr, to CC. Matthew, any thoughts?
>