Sugar window managing UI (was: Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting)
On Tue, Jan 05, 2010 at 06:18:47PM -0500, C. Scott Ananian wrote: I think there's room for solid innovation here, especially since the window manager of sugar was *my* personal roadblock to productive on-XO activity development. Interesting. What exactly about the window manager crippled your productivity? I myself am using full-screen workspaces (using ion3) on my desktop (with 24 TFT attached to it) most of the time. What I hate about the Sugar window managing UI is: a) _very_ long switching time b) there's no way to switch to a specific window (=activity instance), I need to cycle through all of them with Alt+Tab/Alt+Shift+Tab (the latter being somewhat difficult to type on the XO-1). b) is probably easy enough to fix (just add some key bindings to metacity). a) is harder as every window switch currently involves saving current state to the DS (which resides on an abysmally slow SD card in my case), usually done synchronously. CU Sascha -- http://sascha.silbe.org/ http://www.infra-silbe.de/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Sugar window managing UI (was: Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting)
On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 11:49 +0100, Sascha Silbe wrote: a) is harder as every window switch currently involves saving current state to the DS (which resides on an abysmally slow SD card in my case), usually done synchronously. It also generates log messages, right? In which case, a fix for http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/9924 would help significantly. Daniel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Mikus Grinbergs mi...@bga.com wrote: Speaking of android, has anyone heard anything about google's other OS, chrome OS? Installed Chrome OS on my XO-1.5 when I was using os64 - the install pulled in a whole barnful of dependencies. Did not find Chrome impressive - but it probably is the most capable HTML5 implementation currently available. What I noticed most was that the Menu Bar was rudimentary, with the entire screen sometimes being used instead of palettes. This was a beta - performance quite humdrum. On the XO, Opera is noticeably faster. I've installed Chrome OS, and wasn't terribly impressed by either its performance or its feature set. Again, it was a beta, and the build I used from from some random site, maybe wasn't a good build. What *I* was interested to see is that all the webbooks (Chrome, Android, Litl) are using the one full screen window model which OLPC got such grief for. Chrome OS has a slight variation, with floating detachable subwindows, I think. I think there's room for solid innovation here, especially since the window manager of sugar was *my* personal roadblock to productive on-XO activity development. I think this thread has wandered off into non-productivity. I encourage anyone interested to port Android to XO hardware and/or try to get good education tools working on Android. I'll also plug Google Wave here, since I think it's a good start at a robust and standardized infrastructure for the collaborative model Sugar aspires to. Happy hacking! --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
Speaking of android, has anyone heard anything about google's other OS, chrome OS? kind regards, David On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 7:31 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: NoiseEHC, I think your arguments would be more convincing if you didn't respond to every email, especially when you'd made that point before in the same thread :-) On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 6:40 AM, NoiseEHC noise...@freemail.hu wrote: The software is designed for learning. *That* is what Sugar was created for, which is not at all what Android was created for, as you claimed when starting this discussion. Another Straw Man argument. What I said was Android OS solves exactly the same *problems* Sugar has been created to solve. You know while you have noticed correctly that Android was created to be a phone OS and Sugar was created to be a learning OS (not too that hard to notice though), they had almost the same *problems* to solve. Because they had different goals they did not solve exactly the same problem set (it was an exaggeration in my sentence) but close (self hosting dev tools and local communication are the main differences). That said, I find Noise's line of reasoning here compelling. What are specific features of the current Sugar experience that people think would be hard to port to Android [porting Etoys might in fact be hard]? SJ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Mike Ditka http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mike_ditka.html - If God had wanted man to play soccer, he wouldn't have given us arms. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
NoiseEHC, I think your arguments would be more convincing if you didn't respond to every email, especially when you'd made that point before in the same thread :-) On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 6:40 AM, NoiseEHC noise...@freemail.hu wrote: The software is designed for learning. *That* is what Sugar was created for, which is not at all what Android was created for, as you claimed when starting this discussion. Another Straw Man argument. What I said was Android OS solves exactly the same *problems* Sugar has been created to solve. You know while you have noticed correctly that Android was created to be a phone OS and Sugar was created to be a learning OS (not too that hard to notice though), they had almost the same *problems* to solve. Because they had different goals they did not solve exactly the same problem set (it was an exaggeration in my sentence) but close (self hosting dev tools and local communication are the main differences). That said, I find Noise's line of reasoning here compelling. What are specific features of the current Sugar experience that people think would be hard to port to Android [porting Etoys might in fact be hard]? SJ ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 1:47 AM, NoiseEHC noise...@freemail.hu wrote: For the other people talking about IDEs: an usable IDE is not a text editor. Of course. What I do (and most other productive programmers I know do) is use the window manager (gnome, kde, awesome...), xterms, a webbrowser, etc, to make a LIDE: loosely integrated dev environment. I've led various large programming teams -- all the top-quality and top-productivity programmers had long since abandoned Eclipse and similar TIDEs (tightly integrated DE). I've used varios TIDEs over the last 10 years, Eclipse one of them. They have all been inferior to the gnome/emacs/xterms/gitk setup I use now. world records on the c64 I started on the C64 too, and you'll find others on this list have similar and deeper chops than that. The point stands, however, TIDEs are not needed, and in many many cases not optimal. You may try to call them a valid stepping-stone in the learning, but you will need to bring some solid proof. BTW, when I program for the XO, I do it on an XO, with additional rpms (git, emacs...). My only cheat is that I use an external keyboard. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
Are you aware the XO ships a full Smalltalk IDE? You know, like VisualAge which later became Eclipse? It's hidden in the Etoys activity, but (surprise!) it's a kids laptop. Because someone will break your arms if you port Etoys to Android. Now I understand. The software is designed for learning. *That* is what Sugar was created for, which is not at all what Android was created for, as you claimed when starting this discussion. Another Straw Man argument. What I said was Android OS solves exactly the same *problems* Sugar has been created to solve. You know while you have noticed correctly that Android was created to be a phone OS and Sugar was created to be a learning OS (not too that hard to notice though), they had almost the same *problems* to solve. Because they had different goals they did not solve exactly the same problem set (it was an exaggeration in my sentence) but close (self hosting dev tools and local communication are the main differences). ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
For the other people talking about IDEs: an usable IDE is not a text editor. Of course. What I do (and most other productive programmers I know do) is use the window manager (gnome, kde, awesome...), xterms, a webbrowser, etc, to make a LIDE: loosely integrated dev environment. I've led various large programming teams -- all the top-quality and top-productivity programmers had long since abandoned Eclipse and similar TIDEs (tightly integrated DE). I've used varios TIDEs over the last 10 years, Eclipse one of them. They have all been inferior to the gnome/emacs/xterms/gitk setup I use now. Yeah, the Real Men Do Not Debug argument... Have you considered the possibility that those top-quality programmers abandoned IDEs because they do not play well with UNIX makefiles and mixed language projects or because they just love emacs macros or because debugging on UNIX sux? How is it applicable for developing a simple Activity is beyond me so please enlighten me. Another (optional) question is why did you left out gdb from the list? All your code is perfect because you are a top-quality programmer who do not make mistakes because of emacs or what? I started on the C64 too, and you'll find others on this list have similar and deeper chops than that. The point stands, however, TIDEs are not needed, and in many many cases not optimal. You may try to call them a valid stepping-stone in the learning, but you will need to bring some solid proof. BTW, when I program for the XO, I do it on an XO, with additional rpms (git, emacs...). My only cheat is that I use an external keyboard. You know I do not argue that IDEs are an absolute necessity to develop code because even I can develop without IDEs, like the endless suffering I had to enjoy while fixing some kernel bugs. What I am saying is that I *do not want* to develop without IDEs. Probably because I am not a member of the Real Men Do Not Debug Club or I am not one of the top-quality and top-productivity programmers, I do not care. What I do care is that because of the lack of IDEs for Sugar development you can only choose from the members of the very exclusive Real Men Do Not Debug Club. Of course if we limit ourselves to the people who can be productive without IDEs then of course IDEs are not a necessity. You really did not had to type so much to show this tautology to me. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
2009/12/29 NoiseEHC noise...@freemail.hu: me. Another (optional) question is why did you left out gdb from the list? All sorts of things run on the 3/4 xterms i use. valgrind, gdb, python -m pdb, tail -f /path/to/log, ipython, ps_mem.py, psql, git commands... All your code is perfect because you are a top-quality programmer who do not make mistakes because of emacs or what? You seem to be reading things that I do not write. My code is not perfect. I debug plenty with various mechanisms. There is no problem here. like the endless suffering I had to enjoy while fixing some kernel bugs. What I am saying is that I *do not want* to develop without IDEs. Ok, then that is *your personal preference*. Not The End of the World, not the Betrayal Of The Children. Bottom line: small-form-factor laptops are rather limited for full blown TIDEs, mainly because of limited screen real state. XO is one of them. You like TIDEs, you might feel such small-form-factor laptops a bit limiting. That applies to the XO and to a number of other netbooks. Real men use tools that work well for the task at hand. And we have plenty of those. m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
2009/12/29 NoiseEHC noise...@freemail.hu: me. Another (optional) question is why did you left out gdb from the list? All sorts of things run on the 3/4 xterms i use. valgrind, gdb, python -m pdb, tail -f /path/to/log, ipython, ps_mem.py, psql, git commands... And if all those tools would be integrated into an IDE then it would be bad is not it? Or do you think that it is impossible to do? All your code is perfect because you are a top-quality programmer who do not make mistakes because of emacs or what? You seem to be reading things that I do not write. My code is not perfect. I debug plenty with various mechanisms. There is no problem here. Okay, next time I will write sarcasm/sarcasm tags. like the endless suffering I had to enjoy while fixing some kernel bugs. What I am saying is that I *do not want* to develop without IDEs. Ok, then that is *your personal preference*. Not The End of the World, not the Betrayal Of The Children. See, finally we are on the same page. First, it can be the personal preferences of a lot of people but because you have excluded them you will never know. (And simply *that is my point*!!!). Second, the End of the World, Betrayal Of The Children (I like this wording) argument was yours in that sarcasm Android kills children by not allowing to develop core applications on the XO /sarcasm thread. (BTW it was not yours personally, the *plural you* was intended here.) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
On Tue, 29 Dec 2009, NoiseEHC wrote: 2009/12/29 NoiseEHC noise...@freemail.hu: me. Another (optional) question is why did you left out gdb from the list? All sorts of things run on the 3/4 xterms i use. valgrind, gdb, python -m pdb, tail -f /path/to/log, ipython, ps_mem.py, psql, git commands... And if all those tools would be integrated into an IDE then it would be bad is not it? Or do you think that it is impossible to do? to do this you would have to declare one specific variation of these tools as the 'One True Way' and eliminate all the others. the advantage of a loosly coupled IDE is that one component can be replaced by something else without having to change/loose all the other things. David Lang All your code is perfect because you are a top-quality programmer who do not make mistakes because of emacs or what? You seem to be reading things that I do not write. My code is not perfect. I debug plenty with various mechanisms. There is no problem here. Okay, next time I will write sarcasm/sarcasm tags. like the endless suffering I had to enjoy while fixing some kernel bugs. What I am saying is that I *do not want* to develop without IDEs. Ok, then that is *your personal preference*. Not The End of the World, not the Betrayal Of The Children. See, finally we are on the same page. First, it can be the personal preferences of a lot of people but because you have excluded them you will never know. (And simply *that is my point*!!!). Second, the End of the World, Betrayal Of The Children (I like this wording) argument was yours in that sarcasm Android kills children by not allowing to develop core applications on the XO /sarcasm thread. (BTW it was not yours personally, the *plural you* was intended here.) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 7:15 PM, da...@lang.hm wrote: the advantage of a loosly coupled IDE is that one component can be replaced by something else without having to change/loose all the other things. Bingo! As soon as git was working, I switched fulltime to it (and dragged my team with me ;-) ). When valgrind is of use, I use it. When one of the weirdo PHP debuggers is needed, I use it. If I need git (*), I am not going to sit here waiting for the Eclipse developers to get a git integration going. I would lose about 4 years of productive programming. * - And trust me, we needed it. Anyone curious to ask can google for my posts on the topic... cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
to do this you would have to declare one specific variation of these tools as the 'One True Way' and eliminate all the others. the advantage of a loosly coupled IDE is that one component can be replaced by something else without having to change/loose all the other things. and the advantage of a loosly coupled IDE is that one component can be replaced by something else without having to change/loose all the other things. Bingo! As soon as git was working, I switched fulltime to it (and dragged my team with me ;-) ). When valgrind is of use, I use it. When one of the weirdo PHP debuggers is needed, I use it. You are wrong. The advantage of LIDE is that you do not have to create those TIDE components (like the one for git what you used for the example). You know writing all those integrated components takes a lot of time and requires GUI designer skills so usually no Open Source Software makes this last step (as the git people did not do it). So your mutual back patting fails because of the following (but it is not that interesting, just here for completeness): 1. Usually IDEs are modularized so there is no 'One True Way' just swappable components. 2. Even if you has to replace something (for example drop CVS for GIT) then you can just continue to use your IDE and only use the command line just for GIT. 3. The simple fact that you have to develop from the command line just shows how *pathetic* *the* *tooling* is in the OSS world, not that how powerful your LIDE is. Now, as I said the above was not that interesting. What is interesting to me is this: 1. I have started the subthread by proposing that *maybe* it would be a good thing to use an operating system which has good tooling. 2. Somehow you managed to turn this thread into a quest against IDEs in general. 3. You use the fact that the tooling is just pathetic in the OSS world to show that it would be a bad thing to use an operating system which has good tooling. Got it. Wait! Can it be that I missed something about this 3. item? Or this IDE thing is maybe the biggest Red Herring in this thread? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
NoiseEHC wrote: What you do not want to recognize is that you are excluding a lot of developers who do not want to waste their time because of the lack of IDEs. We are trying to provide stepping stones. One of those steps is the Develop activity [1], which is a Sugar-oriented IDE for Activity development. Develop has been part of the Sugar plan from the very beginning, with the first references in 2006 [2]. In my view, Develop is by far the most important missing feature in Sugar. I don't know much about Develop's current functionality, and I can't test it this week. I do think it's important that we get it working, polished, and included by default. --Ben [1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Develop [2] http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Old_Develop_activityoldid=18516 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 9:56 PM, John Gilmore g...@toad.com wrote: I would argue that an operating system that doesn't natively host its development tools is not appropriate for OLPC's target audience. Does the XO-1 host its own development tools? I don't think anyone has ever rebuilt the system from source code on an XO-1. I don't even know anyone outside the OLPC office who *has* the source code for an XO-1 software release. Ahem! I call BS on that. I have rebuilt all sorts of parts of the 8.2.1 release, from publicly available SRPMs (I am not physically at OLPC's offices, and I don't have access to hidden servers). I will grant you that it might be a bit disorganized. I've had to google around a few times -- some specific RPMs are in Koji for example, and it's not always easy to find them unless you know they are there (Google doesn't crawl Koji very deeply, probably a reasonable defence against a crawler DoS). But all the source is out there. If there is something you are missining, ask about it, it might take some digging but it'll be found. (With the exception of the libertas firmware -- but that's a different battle altogether.) Rebuilding all the component rpms on an XO is entirely possible given some swap and an external disk. Running an anaconda compose (anaconda/rpm are big memory hogs) to make an installable jffs2 image is also quite likely to succeed -- though there are a few kinks that are not safe to take for granted. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
Actually, no. The .class - .dex compiler consumes an enormous amount of memory, so it is out of the question at least for now. How much is enormous ? A laptop/tablet is likely to have more than a smartphone... With hundreds of classes in a .jar to convert it uses some 256M, with thousands it uses more than 1GB... (Likely it will be optimized in the future though.) Another problem is that those development tools use such native APIs which are not supported by the Android NDK (Native DevKit). So either those tools (like the java runtime or the make program) should be ported to the NDK (but why waste so much effort on this?) or the development environment should be installed in the system image. The latter one just wastes flash and probably opens up some nice security holes. However what I do not get is why would it be good for an education project if it would be self hosting at all? As I see an education project's main goal is to support creating quality educational resources (like curricula) cheaply, is not it? You can't deny kids the ability to create their own activities (applications, whatever) Pippy is an example of a simple way to introduce kids to activity programming in python, allowing them to easily create and share activities. You can still create applications with http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ With the existing tools it is true that children cannot create the same quality applications what is possible with the Android SDK environment (even if we include a ported Etoys, TurtleArt and Karma), but they could create and share applications with the currently existing tools so what is the problem? The problem with self hosted activity development is the nonexistent development environment rather than the limited functionality. Even if the compilers will be ported to the Android NDK, Eclipse will never be ported so programming Android on the XO-3 (or XO-1.7) will be just as painful as programming Sugar with Pippy today. A much more simple solution would be just shipping a full fledged Linux PC to every school and let children log into it with VNC. So the ~3% of children who can become programmers would be able to develop the same applications (with Eclipse) what we can and the rest of the children would just use some simplified environment like scripting... ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
On Dec 28, 2009, at 8:54 AM, NoiseEHC wrote: You can still create applications with http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ With the existing tools it is true that children cannot create the same quality applications what is possible with the Android SDK environment (even if we include a ported Etoys, TurtleArt and Karma), but they could create and share applications with the currently existing tools so what is the problem? The problem with self hosted activity development is the nonexistent development environment rather than the limited functionality. Even if the compilers will be ported to the Android NDK, Eclipse will never be ported so programming Android on the XO-3 (or XO-1.7) will be just as painful as programming Sugar with Pippy today. A much more simple solution would be just shipping a full fledged Linux PC to every school and let children log into it with VNC. Ahem. With XO-1.5, I feel that I AM shipping a full-fledged Linux PC to every child. Since when did it take more than a GB of RAM and 4GB of disk to host an IDE ? My point still stands: until Android supports its own development tools, you are turning it's users into second class citizens. Cheers, wad ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
I just installed Fedora Eclipse on an XO-1.5 and launched it under Gnome.Granted, I ran into #9927 (/var/cache/yum too small)... Cheers, wad ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 10:07 AM, John Watlington w...@laptop.org wrote: Ahem. With XO-1.5, I feel that I AM shipping a full-fledged Linux PC to every child. Since when did it take more than a GB of RAM and 4GB of disk to host an IDE ? I think that was Emacs 23. j/k. ;-) --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 7:25 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote: j/k. ;-) emacs is what I am using on both XO-1 and XO-1.5 so pretty good going ;-) (Along with vim! Peace!) Lots of people here want to claim we need Eclipse to have an IDE. Of all the developers involved in the whole Linux kernel+Fedora+Sugar+OLPC custom bits, the incidence of Eclipse usage is vanishingly small. You don't need Eclipse to create this software stack, and it is clearly not particularly desirable or ideal for most of the developers that actually built it. cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
martin wrote: On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 7:25 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote: j/k. ;-) emacs is what I am using on both XO-1 and XO-1.5 so pretty good going ;-) (Along with vim! Peace!) Lots of people here want to claim we need Eclipse to have an IDE. Of all the developers involved in the whole Linux kernel+Fedora+Sugar+OLPC custom bits, the incidence of Eclipse usage is vanishingly small. You don't need Eclipse to create this software stack, and it is clearly not particularly desirable or ideal for most of the developers that actually built it. sure. but it's not the current developers that are at issue -- they're almost by definition happy with the tools at hand. (did i really just say that? where's my 3D data structure visualizer when i need it??) it's the ability of kids to explore and learn about programming that we're talking about. never having used eclipse, i can't say its suitable. but it has to be more discoverable than vi, id-utils, and gdb. paul =- paul fox, p...@laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
On Dec 28, 2009, at 1:53 PM, Paul Fox wrote: martin wrote: On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 7:25 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote: j/k. ;-) emacs is what I am using on both XO-1 and XO-1.5 so pretty good going ;-) (Along with vim! Peace!) Lots of people here want to claim we need Eclipse to have an IDE. Of all the developers involved in the whole Linux kernel+Fedora+Sugar+OLPC custom bits, the incidence of Eclipse usage is vanishingly small. You don't need Eclipse to create this software stack, and it is clearly not particularly desirable or ideal for most of the developers that actually built it. sure. but it's not the current developers that are at issue -- they're almost by definition happy with the tools at hand. (did i really just say that? where's my 3D data structure visualizer when i need it??) it's the ability of kids to explore and learn about programming that we're talking about. never having used eclipse, i can't say its suitable. but it has to be more discoverable than vi, id-utils, and gdb. Exactly why I wanted to see if it could be installed and used. Emacs forever ! (although it has gotten huge) wad ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
wad wrote: Emacs forever ! (although it has gotten huge) hmm. how's its Flash player? :-) =- paul fox, p...@laptop.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
Since when did it take more than a GB of RAM and 4GB of disk to host an IDE ? I think that was Emacs 23. No, that was Eight Megs and Continuously Swapping. I.e. in an amazingly large and expensive Sun Workstation with 8 *megabytes* of RAM, emacs would still make the system page-fault at a high rate. Those young 2nd-graders just don't know what they're missing... Why in my day, we had to disassemble 6502 machine language just to peek and poke the screen into high-resolution character graphics mode. We had to put little pieces of tape over the holes in our punch-cards to save paper. Solar powered gigabyte WiFi Linux machines? Our school's calculators had neon NIXIE tube displays! John ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
On Mon, 2009-12-28 at 19:38 +0100, Martin Langhoff wrote: emacs is what I am using on both XO-1 and XO-1.5 so pretty good going ;-) (Along with vim! Peace!) Lots of people here want to claim we need Eclipse to have an IDE. Of all the developers involved in the whole Linux kernel+Fedora+Sugar+OLPC custom bits, the incidence of Eclipse usage is vanishingly small. I have tried to do the bulk of my development actually on an XO (well until I got retina problems anyway, the screen gives me a bit of trouble now). It may not be up to running behemoths like Eclipse, but I've considered that to be Eclipse's problem more than the XO's. I do Pascal development mainly, Which suits the XO nicely for compile times and execution speed. On the XO I use MSEIDE which does a reasonably good. See here for a demo of the IDE and easy project creation, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMtleAzJ3AE That clip makes a new Window and buttons style program, and a new animated game style program. That clip was not actually running on the XO, I run it on my Ubuntu box for screen capture purposes. To see the same system running on my XO (recorded with a crappy camera), watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD95e9G1SiQ I did a Ludum Dare 48 hour game competition on the XO, Doing all programming on the XO itself screenshot -- http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/compo2/6952/20-shot0.jpg So a good level of development is possible on the system, I'm ok if the operating system itself gets built on a more powerful system, but I'd really prefer most applications that specifically target the XO be developed on the XO hardware. This I'd consider especially true for sugar apps. They should be developed in sugar, on an XO wherever possible. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
Ahem. With XO-1.5, I feel that I AM shipping a full-fledged Linux PC to every child. Since when did it take more than a GB of RAM and 4GB of disk to host an IDE ? My point still stands: until Android supports its own development tools, you are turning it's users into second class citizens. Ahem. So you have installed Eclipse under Sugar and somehow developed and debugged a Sugar application what is nice... Wait! You did not! So if we just ignore your Straw Man argument (you know what I have said that you need GBs or RAM to run the dx optimizer tool, not the IDE), the problem is still there that you only can run an usable development environment on a full Linux distro and you cannot even develop Sugar applications with it. For the other people talking about IDEs: an usable IDE is not a text editor. The whole problem stems from the simple fact that you think that an IDE is just a text editor. While it is possible to develop applications even with ed (I used mcedit myself), I would rather poke my eyes out than to try to develop anything with Pippy again. What you do not want to recognize is that you are excluding a lot of developers who do not want to waste their time because of the lack of IDEs. In other words: because of resource constraints you have not made contributing code easy so you have resource constraints now. ps: And please stop this who started developing code in more painful environments race. I myself created several world records on the c64 some 15+ years ago so I know exactly what was the norm at that time. But somehow I do not think that I can waste 10x the required time just because there were not more productive development environments existing then. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
On 29.12.2009, at 01:47, NoiseEHC wrote: Ahem. With XO-1.5, I feel that I AM shipping a full-fledged Linux PC to every child. Since when did it take more than a GB of RAM and 4GB of disk to host an IDE ? My point still stands: until Android supports its own development tools, you are turning it's users into second class citizens. Ahem. So you have installed Eclipse under Sugar and somehow developed and debugged a Sugar application what is nice... Wait! You did not! So if we just ignore your Straw Man argument (you know what I have said that you need GBs or RAM to run the dx optimizer tool, not the IDE), the problem is still there that you only can run an usable development environment on a full Linux distro and you cannot even develop Sugar applications with it. For the other people talking about IDEs: an usable IDE is not a text editor. The whole problem stems from the simple fact that you think that an IDE is just a text editor. While it is possible to develop applications even with ed (I used mcedit myself), I would rather poke my eyes out than to try to develop anything with Pippy again. What you do not want to recognize is that you are excluding a lot of developers who do not want to waste their time because of the lack of IDEs. In other words: because of resource constraints you have not made contributing code easy so you have resource constraints now. Are you aware the XO ships a full Smalltalk IDE? You know, like VisualAge which later became Eclipse? It's hidden in the Etoys activity, but (surprise!) it's a kids laptop. The software is designed for learning. *That* is what Sugar was created for, which is not at all what Android was created for, as you claimed when starting this discussion. - Bert - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
I would argue that an operating system that doesn't natively host its development tools is not appropriate for OLPC's target audience. Does the XO-1 host its own development tools? I don't think anyone has ever rebuilt the system from source code on an XO-1. I don't even know anyone outside the OLPC office who *has* the source code for an XO-1 software release. (At least Fedora and Ubuntu and Debian cut a source release to match each of their binary releases, and hundreds or thousands of people download it.) Could the XO-1.5 host its own development tools? More likely, but again I don't think anyone ever has. Perhaps someone rebuilt a few packages from source, natively, while debugging. Must have been someone with great Internet access to download compilers and such, and great knowledge of where to *find* the source code in the wilds of the Internet. Still that's a step forward. Does Android not host its development tools because it doesn't run the X Window System? Since X already runs on most of the hardware that Android does, that wouldn't be too hard to remedy -- and would benefit the whole Android community. John ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
Does the XO-1 host its own development tools? For all practical purposes, it does not. First, as you have noted, it takes quite a bit of bandwidth to install the toolchain and development headers. (And you have to know what they're called.) Second, to get anything done with C, you really need easy access to the man pages and you need to know quite a bit about how the system is put together. Third, you quickly run out of disk space when you try to compile things locally. I actually got as far as linking vmlinux before I ran out of space on my on-XO kernel compile. (Nevermind how long it took to get that far with no swap space! :) I don't think anyone has ever rebuilt the system from source code on an XO-1. I don't even know anyone outside the OLPC office who *has* the source code for an XO-1 software release. The source is available from Fedora CVS and from mock.laptop.org. Michael ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Android, OLPC, and native hosting
Does Android not host its development tools because it doesn't run the X Window System? Since X already runs on most of the hardware that Android does, that wouldn't be too hard to remedy -- and would benefit the whole Android community. Actually, no. The .class - .dex compiler consumes an enormous amount of memory, so it is out of the question at least for now. However what I do not get is why would it be good for an education project if it would be self hosting at all? As I see an education project's main goal is to support creating quality educational resources (like curricula) cheaply, is not it? ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
