[Olpc-philippines] Introduction

[James Shields]

Well, I'm up and emulating the XO fairly easily on my WinXP box ... QEMU,
KQEMU and the latest build from the XO devs.

Regarding the spare partition, by "what's that" I meant "leave drive space
unallocated, are you nuts?"  I'll setup a spare machine (I hate dual boot)
here in a while once I get my feet wet with Sugar and start to see where I
could best spend my time.

I'm afraid that my QA and testing experience is limited to making QA techs
scream and bleed out their ears (at one job, I interpreted "code freeze" to
mean "only implement that which was truly cool" ... QA hated me, management
tolerated me, and the CEO invited me to go wind surfing with him).  I can
test and possibly even produce testing plans.  But, I have no formal
training.

Can you point me to where I can download and install any extra activities
that we might have?  Or, are we to that point yet?

James Shields


-----Original Message-----
From: Mel Chua [mailto:mel at melchua.com]
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 12:49 AM
To: James Shields
Cc: olpc-philippines at lists.laptop.org
Subject: Re: [Olpc-philippines] Introduction


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