Earlier I reported about BibleDesktop running on an OLPC. Since then I have been trying out 3 other SWORD alternatives.
GnomeSword - Bottom line: not very workable. I encountered several problems. First, while the laptop is based on Fedora 7 and has GTK it is very light on what packages it has available. I enabled yum to look at the fedora 7 repository. I then installed GnomeSword. It required 54M of download and by the time the packages were installed there was only about 30% of the 1G available. That is, it took up about 1/3 of the available flash. I was surprised at what it installed, such as perl. I don't think everything it needed got installed, either. There were diagnostics as to some missing items when starting the program. When I ran the program, I was impressed that the fonts were appropriate for the screen's size. The screen is 1200x900 with 200DPI. It appears that GnomeSword uses resolution independent font size. Super! However, the program at 6" x 4.5" was squished. There was only enough room to see a verse or two at a time. The controls at the top of the window overlapped. But the biggest problem that I ran into was constant out of memory errors. Not so much when running GnomeSword, but when doing anything, whether or not I had run GnomeSword after reboot. It seems that the OLPC needs a lot more of the 1G flash available to run programs. Don't know. Anyway the machine wouldn't run any two programs at the same time. The second would hang and not die gracefully. So essentially the machine was unstable and I had to re-image it. Sword Read - Bottom line: Great first start. This program is custom built for the OLPC and is very simple. The interface has an input box where one can input a reference and the chapter containing that reference is shown below. It is not at all clear what English Bible translation is being used. I think this is being done via the Python wrapper for SWORD. This is fast and light and takes up very little of the machine. And this is the only solution that is integrated into the desktop and available directly from the OLPC activity list. However, while it is a published activity it doesn't seem to be not very OLPC like. I didn't see any way to share the activity with another. And personally, I think that the large amount of text is a bit much for a child. Bible Tool - Bottom Line: very usable. The Bible Tool can be reached from the "Browse" activity. Like GnomeSword, it appears that Browse uses resolution independent font size. This made it very readable. In the parallel tab, having two texts is reasonably the most one could have. But over half of the screen was taken up with the list of Bibles on the left and the list of Commentaries on the right. What would be cool would be to have a simplified UI that could be used on small devices (iPhone, PDA, OLPC, ...) that have real browser capabilities. And for the OLPC, to have a Browse Bible activity which would bring up the website in Browse. As to developing for the OLPC, I think most development will be done via emulators. If you want to develop for the OLPC see: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developers Working together in Christ, DM Smith _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
