Guidance sought on collaboration techniques

[James Simmons]

Benjamin,

I had been using two machines to develop my Activities.  One ran Xubuntu 
and used the sugar packages provided with the Sugar Live CD that someone 
made up.  These were not perfect, but it was a simpler way to set up a 
Sugar test environment than anything else available at the time.  My 
second box was running openSUSE 10.2 and I attempted to install 
Sugar-jhbuild on it with middling success.  I had both pointing to the 
Collabora server to test sharing, and what I found was the sharing 
through that server worked OK for small files (like Read Etexts used) 
but took forever for slideshows, and frequently ran out of gas in the 
middle of a transfer.  As for collaboration between two instances of 
Sugar with no jabber server between them, that never worked at all, even 
a little bit.

As of last night both machines have Fedora 10 with the Sugar RPMs 
installed, so this should eliminate lots of problems I had in the past.  
I don't expect it to make large file transfers through the jabber server 
any faster, though.  Plus, in my opinion copying a file from one XO to 
another would be better done as a function of the Journal.  It isn't my 
idea of what real collaboration should be.  The VNC idea, while 
worthwhile, doesn't excite me either.

As an XO user I have no use for collaboration.  I have nobody to play 
with.  I could strip the collaboration code out of both my Activities 
and have something more than adequate for my own use.  My goal is to 
create Activities that will get other kids excited about using them.  My 
idea is a modest step in that direction.  If I get that much working 
other ideas may come.

I would like to stick with API's that are currently available for a 
couple of reasons:

1).  I want to use the Sugar environment in Fedora 10.  Now that I 
finally have a robust test environment I don't want to lose it.
2).  I want to make the Activity available to the largest number of 
users possible.

I think telepathy might do the job for me if I just understood it 
better.  All I'm asking it to do is send some messages to a list of 
buddies and have them initiate some file transfers.  Chat is already 
doing the first part, I think, and the Read code might be persuaded to 
do the second.

Thanks,

James Simmons