OSS Unconference

Things feel like they have been moving a little more over the past week, and with Andy’s return to the project from his camp away, we should hopefully be able to produce some useful work!

Following on from where I left you, aside from our results celebrations, last week Day 18 (2009.07.08) Day 19 (2009.07.09) and Day 20 (2009.07.10) continued with getting Sugar JHbuild to work, and after some discussions with the developers, I finally found myself pulling, updating and building a version of the latest Sugar JHbuild successfully onto the laptop.

This then allowed me to correctly get the sugar emulator working from the build, meaning I should now be able to mess around with the build code for Sugar, and hopefully learn how to introduce my own activities. It is possible to do very useful things with the emulator, such as run multiple profile instances in order to test XO collaboration etc.

During the build I had found myself with more errors, which when I asked the developers, was able to be guided onto the correct course of action, along with asking me to actively contribute by raising a ticket over at Sugar Labs Development, in order to allow the developers to diagnose and fix the problem.

After further talks with Sebastian over what I can do to contribute, I soon found myself writing some basic tutorials for anyone else who might be new and come along attempting to get Sugar JH build working.
These were uploaded to the Education Spin Wiki which were made in order to allow access to the Education Spin, allowing members to build their own version.

The Education Spin Wiki can be found here, along with the Getting Started Page with some tutorials here. The idea for the tutorials is to allow anyone who might be new to Linux, OLPC or Open Source projects in general to get involved as easily as possible by stepping them through the start up processes required to for example, get Sugar JH build working.

This also prompted me to create accounts with Fedora and Sugar Labs Git in order to allow me to contribute to the Wiki and hopefully Sugar Project. Along with this I managed to finally create my own SSH Key to develop with.

Day 21 (2009.07.13) and Day 22 (2009.07.14) saw Andy return to the project, and allowed for Cornelia, Andy and I to have an informal meet on how the project is going and where we would like to head.

With the date of the Nottingham Unconference looming and its day Programme released, we also planned out what materials we would need, and so after registering that we would attended, agreed that we would be bringing a handout along with demonstration of the Codex project, in order to hype interest about OLPC and the Sugar project to other Conference attendees.
We plan to update the Codex Wiki created last year, using it as a portal for those who want to follow on from our leaflet.

Finally we also got a link to the missing puzzle pieces of last years Git Codex Sample along with Tutorial Content, meaning we can hopefully adapt some content that was created last year, carrying on the cycle. – Over and out!

Links:

Well its been 7 days now (I decided not to count the weekends) working on the project and things have slumped a little in comparison to last weeks shotgun start.

Unfortunately it doesn’t feel like we have made any huge amounts of progress since my last update, but I think that must come with the territory of a task where there arnt any hard line “go here, write this, produce x”. Essentially the time has been spent reading into the deep knowledgebase of the subjects; have also made some personalisations to the blog!

Day 5 (2009.06.19) Friday was mostly spent ghosting the lab computers, and getting my machine sorted from earlier in the week, everything seems to scan clean now so fingers crossed I no longer have an infection on any drives / machines. Also went over the documentation that was produced last year for the project wiki, many thanks to James again.

I also made a (small) start on learning Python which is a very interesting programming language, following on from some suggestions to start with “A Byte of Python”, hopefully it wont take me long to work through the material provided.

This week (Day 6) started off getting used to more IRC Channels where the Sugar developers hang out in order to get an more of an idea on how things work and what we are doing, along side signing up to more mailing lists; below it is possible to see where in the IRC world you can get connected to the project! The mailing lists are very active, so its hard to digest all the discussions that are being carried out at one.

irc://irc.freenode.net (Web version – http://webchat.freenode.net/)

#sugar
#fedora-edu
#fedora-olpc
#olpc-uk

Currently I am looking into the details around what the developers are discussing; turning a kick-start into a live-media, which we can then test how the development spin is turning out. This links in with new areas for me like the Linux Package management system etc, so there are lots of usefull links about.

Lastly an item of interest that Cornelia has suggested is for us to attend the Open Source Schools Unconference 09 in Nottingham on July 20th;
“Teachers and technical staff who use, or are interested in, open source software are invited to participate in a friendly, informal day of sharing enthusiasm, experience, and expertise at NCSL’s Conference Centre.”

It should be a good way for us to further get actively involved in the open source communist and also promote the OLPC project, see you there!

Links:

The Codex 2 Project

A summer project researching OLPC

Day 22: Progress

Day 7: Getting Stuck In