Wellington testers + Activities vs 8.2-759

[Martin Langhoff]

As 8.2 is stabilising, and we read from Morgan's survey that not all
activity authors are testing on 8.2, it seemed an interesting track to
play with as many possible activities as we could on 8.2 .

So we did :-) Adopt an activity today was the motto.

Overall 8.2 is looking fairly good. Networking and sharing proved to
be a challenge - see notes at the end.

Couple of notes
 - most of these have no 'component' in trac, we filed them as
other-activity, and added the name of the activity as a keyword
 - very hard to find the email addresses of the authors! how do we
show love to them? why do we have in the wiki "maintainer unknown" for
so many activities where the maintainer is well known?

Wikipedia / Journal
 - Worked very well and it's fantastic to have the content on the XO.
But installation of large activities shows UI problems with the
Journal. The Journal UI locks up while copying and unzipping with no
user feedback.

Colors-3
- Worked well
-,Very high CPU usage even when we weren't painting, empty canvas.
- Does not close (#8335) apparently due to a bad interaction withe the
snapshot that Sugar takes when 'stop' is requested.

Implode-4
- works well an 3 XOs tried!
- The first ("easy"?) puzzle is not one you can use so it's fairly confusing.
- Loading a large puzzle is also quite slow. (Is it trying to compute
whether it's "winnable"?)

X2O-5
 - Worked very well
 - A bit slow sometimes

Doom
 - worked well on 3 separate machines.
 -The key bindings however mask the Sugar keybindings. Bug...?

Mini vMac
 - Works well, and gives the Mac fans little jumps
 - No sound?
 - No network?
 - Display is very small, could it be done with a 2x zoom?
 - Shutdown process is mildly awkward

Conozco Uruguay
 - Fails to start #8334

Frotz
- works well - had fun playing it!

PlayGo-3
 - launches and collaborates successfully,
 - the Activities page  in the Wiki only offers PlayGo-1 which doesn't
work on 8.2! (Andrés has already fixed this, thanks!)

Speak-7
 - Worked well
 - Can we teach it Spanish?

Horsegame
 - works well! - you can indeed haz a pony
 - Carrots!
 - Apples!

Asteroids
 - fails to start
 - No module named ImageLoad (#8333)

FiftyTwo-2
 - launches and seems to offer collaboration, but this in practice
does not work. The player always plays against the computer, even if
the activity has been "shared" successfully.

Abalone-080601
 - starts and works well.

SliderPuzzle-5
 - successful launch
 - crashed on one XO (out of 2 tried) but we did not get a log of that
(Alastair - do you think you can try to repro it and file a bug)

JigsawPuzzle-3
 - successful launch and play

Jump-1
 - successful launch and play

Mimic-1
 - failed to launch, illegal instruction in mmxCombineAddU (#8336)
 - how to contact the maintainer...?

Implode
 - successful play on two separate XOs

Calculator
- successful play
- Does not display an error on divide by zero - even though it does
display error msgs in some other instances
- If fed a large calculation, it locks up trying to resolve it, UI is
no longer responsive, does not respond to "stop". (Grant, can you file
a detailed bug on this?)

Simcity
- Successful play
- Tiny fonts

Maze
- Successful play

Sudoku
 - Successful play

Notes on collaboration and networking

Collaboration and networking...

 ...Oh so much trouble.

 - Collaboration over simple mesh mostly works.

 - Associating to an AP using WPA is extremely unreliable. Some
laptops do, some after a few tries, some never. Likely to be the
timing bug that has been discussed before.

 - Network manager is _not _ happy when an AP goes from WPA encryption
to no encryption. iwlist can see the AP with no encryption but
ccording to nm-tool, the AP is still requesting "WEP". The fix:

    /etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop
    rm /home/olpc/.sugar/default/nm/networks.cfg
    *cold reboot* (does the Libertas driver preserve any state?)

 - Collaboration over unencrypted AP + Schoolserver running ejabberd
did *not* work at all. I did not have a chance to debug this
thoroughly, but odd things happen. olpc-netstatus errors out because
session.info is missing. The client side never tries to register to
ejabberd apparently. !?

Credits... a ton of testing and debugging today, thanks to

 all those activity authors!
 Alastair Munro
 Grant Patterson
 Tabitha Roder

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff