Fedora 11

Day 12: Another Day at the Office

Karl L OLPC, SUGAR , , , , , , , ,

I thought id take a snapshot of our mock “Office” today, just to prove to the non believers that we really do have our own XO to play with (two infact!), and an incline into how I’m working (Multitasking) in the very humid labs on these lovely British summer days!

Left to right you can see; The newly released SoaS Strawberry running off a pen drive, the laptop donated to our cause running Feodra 11, our very own XO-Laptop, and lastly a newly created Feodra Spin running off a pen drive.

Day 10 (2009.06.26) ended the week having to help Andy move out of his house and a very rushed jog down to the train station, seconds before it was leaving, I’m also now the proud owner of a guitar and Bonsai Tree to look after for the next couple of weeks!

Day 11 (2009.06.29) started the week off with the help of Sebastian in teaching me how to use kickstart files in order to create a custom Fedora spin ISO, in all honesty it was more me following instructions, but we all have to start somewhere.
Once it was done (the poor little laptop takes a while) I was easily able to get it running on a pen drive using the fedora live USB creator and soon found myself sitting infront of the first snap shot of the Fedora Edu Spin (see picture above), fun stuff!

I also spent some time reading more of the many materials online, and in particular finding out some online resources for sugar Activity development; The suggestion is to build activities in python first on a stand alone format and then import them into Sugar later on, allowing users to test their activities more robustly.
The two main wiki’s OLPC and Sugar Labs websites have a wealth of knowledge that goes very deep, its easy to get lost in all the information.

Today found me having trouble still with getting the Sugar-Jhbuild to work on the machines in the Lab, the firewall at the Uni seems to have blocked the ports, and although I can clone the Git repository using an HTTP connection, subsequent commands wont work as they still use the GIT connection.

After some further discussions in IRC I was linked on how to use the Git protocol though an HTTP connect proxy, but unfortunately we aren’t running from a proxy in the labs. The next idea was to change the GIT Config as suggested here using the “insteadOf“ command.

I must say that I am very thankful for the patience that everyone on IRC gives me in trying to learn my way through this, however my inexperience with Unix was starting to show, and a very helpful developer pointed me to some useful materials that I can use to start learning Unix from.

I did mention before I started that I wasn’t an experience Linux user, however this is starting to get the better of me in doing basic things on the linux terminal, and the first step is admitting you have a problem! (AA anyone?)

The 6 step program I was recommended included the following:

  1. For humor read “The Jargon File”, “The Unix Haters Handbook” and “The Bastard Operator from hell”.
  2. Skim the Bash Users Guide.
  3. Get a sugerlabs shell account, run “Screen”.
  4. Read about Unix Pipes.
  5. Learn Unix Shell Keyboard Shortcuts.
  6. Read about “Man Bash”.

I did start to think last week that should probably spend some time learning my way around Linux better, and as explained by one of the developers  “ill probably spend most of my time trying not be confused, but eventually ill learn the amazing power bash has to offer”, so included with the python learning ill be spending tomorrow on some new Unix material.

When I do eventually get the Sugar-JHbuild working ill post up some more details!

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Day 9: Broken Arrow

Karl L OLPC, SUGAR , , , , ,

With the end of week 2 nearing, I thought it would be time to update. The first bit of news is that as of tomorrow, Andy will be away for 2 weeks (hence the title) leaving me all alone to get on with the project; although from the sounds of things I wont be alone for long, as news has come through of a couple more people being interested in the Codex project!

As it stands ill be working alone next week, but if we do have some new recruits we could be looking at up to 4 people working on the project by the end of next month, what a team that would make!

So far the week has mainly been spent in close contact with the developers and generally trying to soak up all the information available (there’s enough of it).

Day 8 (2009.06.24) started with an article from the Online BBC News site: “OLPC software to power aging PCs” which is part of the buzz from the new Sugar On a Stick release “Strawberry” which we tested out today.
The new version is much smoother and loads quicker than the beta version I origionally linked too. This is exciting news as it means Sugar On A Stick is alive and well and will work with a 1GB USB Drive upwards (in size) on very old machines, even those which wont boot from a USB (with the help of a CD you can create).
The new strawberry release includes new activities such as “Physics” which Andy and I had a lot of fun playing with. The SugarLabs website has a host of useful information regarding a number of areas such as getting up and running or downloading new activities.

Today however we managed to get our hands on a university laptop which we have complete access too, meaning we were able to officially format and install Fedora 11 which will be useful in trying to create the development environments needed for Sugar. The Edu Spin I discussed earlier will require Fedora which is the main reason we chose to use it as the laptops instillation, however we still have access (and are using) the multitude of linux distros we have installed on the USB’s lying around from last week.

Having walked into the project not being very adept to using Linux, im slowley starting to make my way around the different distros and getting used to the terminal etc, the terminology for alot linux is what seems to throw me off most, but I guess this must be natural from a born and bread windows user.

Currently we are still waiting on a Kickstart file from one of the developers which should be released soon, meaning we will be able to attempt to compile our own environment based on what we can learn from this, mixed up from last years Live CD; along with this we might be able to get our hands on an early snapshot of the Edu spin and play around with it in order to see how well it will work with the Codex project requirments.

In the mean time I have tried to get what I think is the developers version of Sugar; “Jhbuild” running, which is available from the SugarLabs Git and is also supported by Fedora along with a few other distros; however access to the repository from the labs looks like it might be restricted (Connection refused on clone),  so ill try again using the new laptop from home, hopefully it wont use up all of the little monthly usage we are allowed where I live!

Tomorrow (Friday 2009.06.26) I will probably be spending the day helping Andy move house as he is in limbo at the moment before he shoots off for 2 weeks; however next week I will make a start on the current to do list Andy has posted along with getting my teeth firmly into Python and trying to produce something more than print:”Hello World”. Wish me luck!

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