[sugar] Programming environments on the XO

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

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J.M. Maurer wrote:
|> Have you used Gobby?  It's the shared editor that people at OLPC
|> _actually_ use, and having per-user background colors is among its key
|> features.
|
| Not sure if I read this correctly, but are you implying that Write's
| collaboration is not used, but Gobby's is?

Yes.  OLPC developers may have been using Write for collaborative document
authoring, but I am not aware of it.  I am aware of several occasions on
which Gobby has been used for this purpose, for example for preparing
minutes for a meeting on IRC.

| If so, is there any
| particular collaboration issue/bug that needs my attention?

Not a bug.  There are two issues:
1. To the best of my knowledge, Write's collaboration system does not
interoperate with any application that is available on non-Sugar desktops.
~ Thus, in order to make use of Write, all participants must have an XO,
emulator, or sugar-jhbuild running.  I do not see this as a significant
obstacle in a Rwandan elementary school, but in the diverse environments
of OLPC volunteers, we cannot assume that everyone has easy access to a
Sugar instance.

In my view, the ultimate solution to this is to push our Telepathy-based
collaboration stack upstream into the standard Linux desktop environments.
~ Until then, we should come up with a streamlined Sugar emulator that
makes it easy to run an Activity like Write under any standard Linux desktop.

2. Sugar collaboration over the internet requires a specialized Jabber
server.  It has proven difficult to set up such a server at all, and
impossible to set up a server that can be made public without collapsing
under the load.  Hopefully, after the Gadget work is complete, we will
begin to see reliable public collaboration servers appear.

- --Ben
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