[Olpc-philippines] Introduction

[Mel Chua]

Hi, James! Just left a welcome on your user talk page 
(wiki.laptop.org/go/User_talk:fozzbozz). If you're new to the wiki 
world, wikieducator's got a great tutorial; I linked to it on the 
welcome message. If you've roamed around Wikipedia before, you already 
know the ropes.

Questions are good. Please keep asking them! I'm copying this email to 
the list in case it's helpful to other folks getting started.

> Spare partition ... what's that?  :)  I need to create some space and plop
> down another machine.  Gah, not looking forward really to learning enough
> about Linux to get it onto a network.  Multiple learning curves going
> forward.

By "spare partition*" I meant "you might want to dual-boot your 
computer, or use an extra computer, so you can have an installation of 
fedora core 7 running to do development on." It's the environment that 
the vast majority of OLPC developers are working in because the XO 
itself runs a (super-slimmed-down) version of Fedora Core 7.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

The good folks over at the Fedora community (fedoraproject.org) have 
lots of resources to make it super-easy to get started with Fedora. Once 
you have that up and running and are comfy poking around the system (a 
day or two, tops) then it's time to start thinking about sugar-jhbuild. 
Folks on the IRC channel (see [[IRC]] if you're new to this) can help 
you get rolling.

> I Googled patintero and it looks to be a game of tag ... not sure how one
> would translate that into a computer game.

Me neither. Probably a simple arcade thing... good way to learn pygame 
and pipes. This is a pretty vague descript that's probably confusing 
newcomers horribly right now, so I'm going to put the idea on hold until 
there's someone who wants to pick it up.

> How does emulation need more help?

Short answer: in every possible way imaginable.

Longer answer: James, you're actually a perfect test case, because the 
issue with emulation is not that it doesn't work at all, but that it's 
horribly tricky to get to work right now and assumes linux wizardry and 
requires some weird black magic to set up. So the primary needs for 
emulation are to

(1) come up with a well-documented, easy-to-follow method for emulating 
the XO on a(ny) computer that... isn't the XO. This will soon need to 
involve a lot of testing by patient, willing people who aren't 
experienced with linux, the XO, or emulation, and are willing to tell us 
exactly which parts of the directions are made of black magic. There's 
some scattered work being done on this; in particular, Mitchell Charity 
and myself are chipping away at various combinations of qemu and the 
Ubuntu LiveCD - but that's not quite ready for testing yet.

(2) find someone to be a sort of "project manager" for emulation and 
make sure it's maintained, field questions, spearhead development on the 
"let's make life easier for new coders getting started and testers who 
don't have laptops!" front. Note that this is not for the Philippines 
specifically, this is an OLPC need in general.

Another area of dire need is QA and testing - unfortunately, the stuff 
they need done requires experience. People with QA/test backgrounds are 
needed to help with the massive amount of testing that has to happen 
before mass production, so if you have a QA/test background *please* let 
me (or somebody) know.

-Mel