[IAEP] Sunflower for Science on XO

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 17:16, Danny Kodicek
<danny at sunflowerlearning.com> wrote:
> Hi there
>
> I just wanted to write to let people know we've been experimenting with some
> success with getting our Sunflower for Science product
> (www.sunflowerlearning.com) running on an XO. It's a Windows/Mac product but
> I've got it running through SugaredWine and it's looking very promising.
>
> I have a few questions that I wondered if anyone might be able to help with:
>
> 1) Screen resolution
> The biggest problem we have is that the screen res of the XO seems
> unnecessarily high and can't be changed. This leads to two big problems, one
> of readibility (which we can fix with a bit of work) and one of performance.
> Given the low spec of the machines, running full-screen animations, some of
> them in 3d, is pretty hard work for them at that resolution. Does anyone
> have any suggestions for ways to get round this issue? For example, I've
> been thinking about whether we could run the software at half-res and then
> use a screen magnifier app to bring it back to fullscreen

That approach has been discussed and I think that someone got it to
work up to some point, I recommend you to search in the
devel at lists.laptop.org archives for the keyword "scaling", "zoom",
etc. I'm cc'ing that list in the hope that someone will reply.

> 2) Launching and packaging
> Although SugaredWine is great, it would seem that a more sensible option
> would be to package the software together with Wine as a single activity
> that can be launched directly from a stick or installed as a .xo. Our
> product doesn't have an installer, although it does write to the Registry -
> anyone tried anything like this?

I recommend you to make an .xo that contains both wine and you binary,
when the activity is launched, wine would be called with your binary
as an argument. I think there was a good example running around some
time ago, which did just that with an excel viewer or similar.

> I'm afraid I'm a total Linux novice, so any advice would be welcome, but if
> you could talk to me like a small child that would be very helpful :)

Sorry I cannot give you more precise instructions, I'm really short of
time these days. I would suggest you to google around, patiently ask
here and in other fora, and go step by step towards your goal,
learning on the way. That's what small children do, right? :p

Regards and good luck,

Tomeu

> Thanks
> Danny
>
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