Activity Testing: PLEASE READ
Calling all activity developers! We need more testing on activities. We also need more volunteers. I'm working on a project that, with luck, will help us with both. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_Testing_Project The goals: * Welcome new participants to OLPC * For each activity, identify clear owners for development and testing * Provide new volunteers with clear, simple, rewarding tasks A lot of this is repackaging of work that's already been done, but I think this repackaging is crucial: it focuses on optimizing the time of new volunteers -- and in my experience in open source development, new volunteers are the most important resource. Developers, I'm asking you to help by filling out the Activity Testing Matrix. Once we've got enough information collected, enough so that well-meaning newbie testers can get started, I'm going to start aggressively recruiting people to help. = WHAT YOU NEED TO DO: 1. Follow the testing guide for activity developers. It's very brief: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_Testing_Developer_Guide 2. Go to the activity matrix and add your activity: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activity_Testing_Matrix 3. Join the Testing mailing list: http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/testing 4. If you IRC, come hang out on the #olpc-qa channel on freenode. If you've already built your activity and it's ready for testing, this shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, tops -- but it's absolutely crucial. Also, note: this is a work in progress. If you don't understand what's being asked, or if you think there's a better way to do something, please email me and let me know. Or better yet, join the Testing list and send email there. :) Thanks for your help! --g -- Greg DeKoenigsberg Community Development Manager Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255 To whomsoever much hath been given... ...from him much shall be asked ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [OLPC library] MATLAB for OLPC?
On Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Marcus Leech wrote: I was just about to say the same thing. There's also R (The open-source replacement for 'S'). I know someone who would be more than happy to help bring R and OLPC together. /me looks meaningfully at Mr. Michael Tiemann... --g -- Greg DeKoenigsberg Community Development Manager Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255 To whomsoever much hath been given... ...from him much shall be asked ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Alternative power/recharging source?
On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Richard A. Smith wrote: Where did you see that the XO uses only 2 Watts? Thats only when suspended. Suspended: 2W Running: 5-7W Charging the battery: 16W Doesn't it only use 2W-ish when it's in monochrome, screen refresh-only mode? --g -- Greg DeKoenigsberg Community Development Manager Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255 To whomsoever much hath been given... ...from him much shall be asked ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Testing] Automated testing, OLPC, code+screencasts.
On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, Charles Merriam wrote:
I just glanced at DogTail:
+ GUI testing written in Python
+ Allows some querying/setting of actual fields.
- Not maintained for past couple years
- Most documentation and examples missing
- Test cases appear verbose, but hard to tell with all examples missing.
- Testing uses 'tree' approach requiring manaully setting focus and such.
- Relies on all sorts of stuff, including the disability libraries and
CORBA of all things to send messages.
Here's a good document:
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/020jun06/features/dogtail/
Here's a sample test script:
# Focus gedit's text buffer.
25 focus.text()
26
27 # Load the UTF-8 demo file. Use codecs.open() instead of open().
28 from codecs import open
29 from sys import path
30 utfdemo = open(path[0] + '/data/UTF-8-demo.txt')
31
32 # Load the UTF-8 demo file into the text buffer.
33 focus.widget.text = utfdemo.read()
34
35 # Click gedit's Save button.
36 click('Save')
37
38 # Focus gedit's Save As... dialog
39 focus.dialog('Save as...')
40
41 # click the Browse for other folders widget
42 activate('Browse for other folders')
43
44 # Click the Desktop widget
45 activate('Desktop', roleName = 'table cell')
Overall, DogTail spends most of its effort getting around the PyGTK
limitations about exposing the entire tree. It uses the accessibility
UI as a substitute for having an API into PyGTK. Most of the test
script is mucking around getting focus, etc.
Anyone actually use DogTail still?
If you guys want some help with Dogtail, I should be able to put you in
touch with some knowledgeable folks.
--g
--
Greg DeKoenigsberg
Community Development Manager
Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255
To whomsoever much hath been given...
...from him much shall be asked
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Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model
On Tue, 6 May 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ubuntu takes packages maintaned externally and picks what version of each of those packages to put in the main distro. the versions of these seperate packages are almost entirely independant of each other. they then do a lot of testing and some development of adminitrative tools and ship the result. unfortunantly much of the OLPC development has seemed to be against the idea of having external software run unmodified on sugar, and the resulting work to get anything running will hurt this model. Again: what makes Sugar different from Linux? The ability to interact *everywhere*, and to share *every activity* by default. That interactivity basically defines what an activity *is*. Yes, this severely restricts the amount of software that can run on Sugar. But again: the whole world of FLOSS educational software can run on Linux just fine. If we're just (badly) reinventing a new WM, what's the point? --g -- Greg DeKoenigsberg Community Development Manager Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255 To whomsoever much hath been given... ...from him much shall be asked ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Its.an.education.project] An OLPC Development Model
On Fri, 9 May 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, 9 May 2008, Bert Freudenberg wrote: On 09.05.2008, at 09:56, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: which is why I fail to see the big point of Sugar. [...] a perfect example was the suggeation to make the sugarized activities use a standard file picker call so that it could go to the journal on the XO machine, or to a normal file selecteor window on other desktops. Your example indicates that you indeed fail to see the big point of Sugar. The point is to not have a document-centric environment, but an activity-centric one. Verbs rather than nouns. Yes it gets philosophical here. And I'm not the best to explain it. Maybe an analogy helps. Many developers fail to see the big point of object-oriented programming. For them, it's just that structs have function pointers now, so what's the big deal? But that misses the point completely, oo is all about decoupling and encapsulating concepts, it's a philosophy rather than an implementation technique. Or maybe the analogy does not help, depending on which camp one is in. Back to your example: even if all the world thinks applications with file dialogs are normal that does not imply it has to be that way. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas. -- Alan Kay We do want to create something better than the status-quo. We may fail for a gazillion of reasons, but we're trying anyway. Children deserve the best, our future is in their hands. Bert, if you try and say that the entire world is wrong in how it writes software, and only software specifically written for the Sugar environment should be available to the children, you are doing them a great dis-service. Not at all. The fact is that *lots* of software is *already* available to many children, in all kinds of different forms. There can and will be other efforts around low-cost laptops. Many of these can and will rely upon open source to one degree or another. There are certainly enough applications in the world to come up with a respectable children's computer that isn't half bad. But the goal of Sugar isn't not half bad. The goal of Sugar is fundamental change of a 30-year-old computing metaphor, to take advantage of connectedness that simply did not exist when Windows first came to be. Some of these changes might be easily retrofit to existing applications. Many of them won't be. But the focus must be on creating the right interface experience, or the whole exercise is pointless. it's fine to produce an alternate approach, but to bet-the-business on that approach with no fallback is betting that you know better then the rest of the world. it's possible that you are right, but not very likely. The very nature of the Sugar idea *requires* a bet-the-business approach. Some changes can be evolutionary. Others must be revolutionary. In order for Sugar to have any point at all, it must represent a revolutionary change. Which is fine. If it fails, it fails. There are *plenty* of people working on evolving the current Linux desktop towards education. It's not an either/or proposition. Again, my $0.02, nothing more. --g -- Greg DeKoenigsberg Community Development Manager Red Hat, Inc. :: 1-919-754-4255 To whomsoever much hath been given... ...from him much shall be asked ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Help! Summarizing the xulrunner situation in OLPC
So today I had a meeting with Christopher Aillon, the maintainer of all things Mozilla in Fedora, and it helped greatly to shape my understanding of the issues around xulrunner for OLPC and/or Sugar and/or Fedora. My proposed goal is to maintain a xulrunner package in Fedora that meets the needs of OLPC. Why? So that (a) the Browse activity (which imho is the most important activity in Sugar with the possible exception of Journal) can run natively in Fedora without forcing naive users to figure out how to resolve package conflicts; and (b) OLPC is not forced to carry a forked xulrunner, and the maintenance headaches that go along with it. So here's the current situation, as I understand it; caillon and others, please correct me if I go astray: 1. xulrunner, with all dependencies, takes up a lot of space on the target system, for some definition of a lot. Printing support, for instance, brings a whole chain of dependencies along with it. 2. In an effort to cut down on space, OLPC has built its own xulrunner that breaks these dependencies. 3. These dependencies will be coming back someday in the upstream, when Mozilla makes these hard dependencies instead of soft dependencies. If this analysis is correct, it forces us to answer some key questions. 1. Space. What are the real space requirements for the xulrunner dependencies? Do we have any hard numbers that we can analyze? Is it reasonable to carry all of the dependencies along in OLPC? How were the decisions made to leave out certain pieces of the xulrunner dependency chain, and can those decisions be revisited? 2. Future. My understanding of how the dependencies will move in the future from soft to hard is incomplete. When these changes happen, what will be the exact impact on people who are trying to maintain a slimmed-down xulrunner that breaks these dependencies? --g ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fedora Desktop on XO
On Tue, 6 Jan 2009, Erik Garrison wrote: On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 01:31:12PM -0500, Chris Ball wrote: Hi Peter, How did you go with this? Did you have any luck? I also realised that if you drop gnome-user-share you'll drop all the httpd requirements. Yep, it worked! I had RPM conflicts in GConf2 (against GConf2-dbus, both ship the same .mo files) and evince (against sugar-evince, both ship the same evince backend shared libraries). Also, it turns out that evince-dvi is responsible for bringing in texlive, via kpathsea. Here's the command I'm using now: -bash-3.2# yum -y install NetworkManager-gnome alacarte at-spi bug-buddy control-center eog file-roller gcalctool gdm gdm-user-switch-applet gedit gnome-applets gnome-audio gnome-backgrounds gnome-media gnome-panel gnome-power-manager gnome-screensaver gnome-session gnome-system-monitor gnome-terminal gnome-user-docs gnome-utils gok gthumb gucharmap gvfs-archive gvfs-fuse gvfs-gphoto2 gvfs-smb libcanberra-gtk2 metacity mousetweaks nautilus orca pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-module-gconf pulseaudio-module-x11 scim-bridge-gtk xdg-user-dirs-gtk yelp zenity Total size: 152 M After that completes, you can put exec gnome-session in ~/.xsession and restart X to land in a very normal looking F10 GNOME desktop. (I haven't tried to do much with it yet. Sound works, at least.) Thanks! - Chris. Sweet. Now, the question I have is why we would chose GNOME over XFCE. I think there are significant differences in system resource consumption. A fine question indeed. I ask because the impression I had from informal tests was that a system booting into GNOME was consuming about 3x as much RAM on boot (read via ps_mem.py). My impression was that the benefit was not eaten up the moment the I started running GTK applications; it seemed that under XFCE I could open a fair number more Firefox tabs without running into lockup than under GNOME. I know these aren't great metrics so I'll run some more rigorous tests after we have two systems side-by-side for comparison. Even though XFCE is not a Fedora-supported desktop environment... Note that this does *not* mean that Xfce is not available in Fedora. There are Xfce spins built for Fedora that you can download and run right now, and I'm sure they're comparable, and Sebastian Dziallas is working on making a more official spin right now. It's all a question of what official means, and that changes in direct proportion to number of users. ...it is readily supported in other distributions. We could easily borrow the polish that XUbuntu has applied to its distribution and get a system equally usable as GNOME. --g -- Got an OLPC that you're not using? Loan it to a needy developer! [[ http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Exchange_Registry ]] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Joyide on Fedora 11/rawhide
After a brief discussion with Jeremy, it appears that Fedora 11 in rawhide has had many boot issues on many platforms, and they're tackling them one by one. He promises to have a look at OLPC specifically on Friday. --g -- Got an XO that you're not using? Loan it to a needy developer! [[ http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Exchange_Registry ]] On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Jerry Vonau wrote: On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 20:47 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote: Hi Chris, I wanted to put it to the lists and get some feedback, with the plans on basing the 9.1.0 release on Fedora 11 I think we need to have a testing stream based on rawhide so that we can start testing core OS related bits and dealing with them sooner rather than later. Totally agreed. The reason I haven't pushed to set up nightly builds is that right now Rawhide *doesn't boot* on the XO. I think energy should probably be aimed at fixing that before we start setting up nightlies. I pinged Jeremy earlier in the week, he didn't have any strong ideas about what's wrong. I should retry with latest Rawhide in case something's been fixed recently.. Oh! I wasn't aware of that as I don't currently have an XO to test (although that should be sorted soon) not that I know enough about the boot/kernel of the XO to be of much help fixing it. I wonder if any of the 50 odd people on fedora-devel that got an XO in the lead up to the F-10 release could help with that? Greg, do you know of someone that isn't as busy as Jeremy that could help shed some light on XO boot issues? Peter I've been playing with booting fedora on the XO, mostly with anaconda (F9/F10) to be able to run an install on the XO itself for the XS. I'll try to boot the F11 kernel/installer when one is available, it looks like there are issues building anaconda atm, there is no isolinux directory on the mirrors... Perhaps someone could shed some light on the issues with rawhide that were uncovered thus far. Is there a tracker somewhere? Jerry ___ 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: Joyide on Fedora 11/rawhide
On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Peter Robinson wrote: Hi Greg, Thanks for poking :) After a brief discussion with Jeremy, it appears that Fedora 11 in rawhide has had many boot issues on many platforms, and they're tackling them one by one. He promises to have a look at OLPC specifically on Friday. Excellent news. In the mean time, even with boot issues, there's nothing wrong with getting a rawhide based stream in progress so that various other issues that will undoubtedly show up so that when the boot problem is fixed we're already on the ground and can start running. After all there will no doubt be other deps and composing issues that need to be resolved. too. Either way, ping me on or off list for any heavy lifting I can help with. cjb, it was my understanding that you were already essentially doing nightly builds from rawhide using livecd-tools. Am I mistaken? --g -- Got an XO that you're not using? Loan it to a needy developer! [[ http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Exchange_Registry ]] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Joyide on Fedora 11/rawhide
On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Chris Ball wrote: Hi Greg, cjb, it was my understanding that you were already essentially doing nightly builds from rawhide using livecd-tools. Am I mistaken? I was doing manual builds from rawhide using livecd-tools, trying to get them to boot. Haven't got around to nightly yet, since it didn't seem like there was much point when they aren't booting. Which is still true, apparently, so there you are. Although nightlies may be required at some point -- perhaps this process is what Peter is volunteering to help get off the ground? --g -- Got an XO that you're not using? Loan it to a needy developer! [[ http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Exchange_Registry ]] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Future of Rainbow + Sugar?
On Tue, 24 Feb 2009, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: Martin Langhoff wrote: Maybe my ignorance on matters selinux is showing? ;-) You are not alone. Sugar/OLPC simply never had SELinux experts who volunteered to work on Rainbow. We still don't (raise your hand if you consider yourself proficient at writing SELinux policy!). So does anyone want to become expert at writing SELinux policy? Someone who might benefit from a Red Hat internship in Westford at the feet of the master of SELinux, Dan Walsh? http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/26904.html --g -- Got an XO that you're not using? Loan it to a needy developer! [[ http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Exchange_Registry ]] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: move to rawhide update
On Tue, 7 Apr 2009, p...@laptop.org wrote: as mikus said, his applications all worked before. this is a regression, plain an simple, *with respect to the previous XO releases*. now, to the extent that fedora doesn't really care about any specific piece of hardware, especially one which wasn't running fedora when these things last worked, then i suppose it's appropriate to ignore the issues. i think this, and the fact that no one is sure what's broken in the current fedora-on-XO releases, points to huge holes in the OLPC plan of record for ongoing support of this product. unless some energetic entity is willing to own the actual XO distribution(s), and be responsible for maintaining a bug list, and issuing even minimal release notes, i fear for the project. (or, rather, i fear that the project will be running 8.2 until the laptops die. which wouldn't be the worst possible outcome, i suppose... :-/ ) This is what happens when the 95% of the developers working on the project get canned. The unenviable choice becomes: * Get a community to work from an 8.2 branch that will become more and more outdated over time; or * Get a community to work from a moving target that has a greater chance of supporting new features once they're integrated, but is inherently less stable for large chunks of the development cycle. Whichever way you go, strong leadership, patience, and many hands are required to fight through the problems. If the community cares enough and develops the necessary leadership, the project moves forward. But it's never easy. It is my hope that people continue to use the tracking bug here, and align bugs to it, and use it to assess fitness of the current release: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=461806hide_resolved=1 It may not be the perfect tool, but it's the best we have. --g -- Got an XO that you're not using? Loan it to a needy developer! [[ http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Exchange_Registry ]] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: move to rawhide update
On Tue, 7 Apr 2009, p...@laptop.org wrote: peter, and greg -- greg wrote: Whichever way you go, strong leadership, patience, and many hands are required to fight through the problems. If the community cares enough and develops the necessary leadership, the project moves forward. But it's never easy. It is my hope that people continue to use the tracking bug here, and align bugs to it, and use it to assess fitness of the current release: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=461806hide_resolved=1 of course. but the whole thing feels a lot like telling someone that their local dealership has closed, and they should write to the car's manufacturer for information about oil changes. the scale of the solution doesn't match the needs of the problem. (the analogy is shaky, i agree.) but as an example -- if bugs filed against the XO will be summarily closed by the developers because it's not our problem, file it upstream, the larger OLPC community will be ill-served. s/larger OLPC community/larger open source community/ Because, of course, this is not a problem experienced only by OLPC. This painful problem is central to every distro provider. The answer is a comprehensive ecosystem-wide mechanism for distributed defect tracking, and we are years away from that solution, I suspect. users of the XO are not typical open-source enthusiasts, and they're not the audience that current linux distributions are used to targeting. the XO isn't a general purpose laptop, and was never intended to be. it's better considered a device, with special needs, and as such i think it will be under-served by the new generic release and support scheme. while i agree that the current plan is probably the best we can come up with, i remain frustrated. Yeah, me too. The hope continues to be that we can stabilize and maintain the base, and then focus on the deltas that set the device apart. But it's a hard problem, made harder by a lack of resources. thanks. and sorry for the non-technical venting... believe me, the real target of my rant is not the folks like you two who are continuing the mission. I know, dude. It's okay. If you have any suggestions, believe me, I'm happy to hear them. :) --g -- Got an XO that you're not using? Loan it to a needy developer! [[ http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Exchange_Registry ]] ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Debugging booting problems with F9 on SD card...
On Wed, 15 Apr 2009, Sameer Verma wrote: On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 2:41 AM, Martin Langhoff martin.langh...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 11:08 AM, Peter Robinson pbrobin...@gmail.com wrote: What would it take to move the next XS Server release to either F10 or F11 as F9 will be EOL as soon as F11 comes out in a month or so (one month after F11 is out F9 will be EOL). It's a bit of a recurring question. I am swamped with feature development for a while. My hope is to port to F11 or even F12 when I can. Help is welcome and Jerry is doing a lot of work on F10/11. But qualifiying something as an XS release is a sizable workload t is to do all the testing to ensure it is stable, installs/upgrades and works as desired. It takes quite a bit of effort and gear. And I want to limit how many Fedora releases I have to support. (My plan is to transition to a stable RHEL/Centos asap, hence my F11/F12 targets.) +1 Fedora releases are too fast a moving target. I personally use Ubuntu LTS or Debian Stable for my servers for this very reason. Choose CentOS. The workflow for managing development atop Centos and Fedora are essentially the same. --g -- Computer Science professors should be teaching open source. Help make it happen. Visit http://teachingopensource.org. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Debugging booting problems with F9 on SD card...
On Wed, 15 Apr 2009, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Greg Dekoenigsberg g...@redhat.com wrote: Choose CentOS. The workflow for managing development atop Centos and Fedora are essentially the same. That's the plan for the XS (I'm sure gregdek knows it, but it's good to broadcast the msg) :-) In the meantime, about that initrd brokenness... any takers? Is there a bug I can herd people towards? --g -- Computer Science professors should be teaching open source. Help make it happen. Visit http://teachingopensource.org. ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Server-devel] Debugging booting problems with F9 on SD card...
On Wed, 15 Apr 2009, Martin Langhoff wrote: On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Greg Dekoenigsberg g...@redhat.com wrote: Choose CentOS. The workflow for managing development atop Centos and Fedora are essentially the same. That's the plan for the XS (I'm sure gregdek knows it, but it's good to broadcast the msg) :-) In the meantime, about that initrd brokenness... any takers? Is there a bug I can herd people towards? --g -- Computer Science professors should be teaching open source. Help make it happen. Visit http://teachingopensource.org. ___ Server-devel mailing list Server-devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/server-devel
