[Marketing] [IAEP] OLPC rules out Windows for XO-3

[Ian Thomson]

Guys,

I have been an avid follower of IAEP for over a year now. I was, and still am, very attracted to the theme of the list serve.

But I find increasingly, I delete 90% of the emails as they hold no interest to me as a regional coordinator of OLPC projects in the Pacific Islands.

I am sorry, but this stream of ARM processors and SCIM/M17N/IBus/etc holds no interest to me and I really can't see how it adds value to the IAEP theme. I find the list serve has been taken over by technical developers and it is no longer helpful in delivering educational information to me.

I guess I must be having a bad morning, but this time I just had to make a comment.

Ian Thomson 
PacRICS and OLPC Coordinator
SPC
Phone +687 26 01 44


-----Original Message-----
From: iaep-bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org [mailto:iaep-bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of Sayamindu Dasgupta
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 4:35 AM
To: Peter Robinson
Cc: Rafael Enrique Ortiz Guerrero; marketing; bens at alum.mit.edu; iaep
Subject: Re: [IAEP] [Marketing] OLPC rules out Windows for XO-3

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 9:23 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 7:52 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Chris Ball <cjb at laptop.org> wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>>   > Linux has been running well on ARM for a long long time.
>>>>
>>>> Yeah.  In specific, today I got Sugar running on the ARM SoC we'll be
>>>> using for XO-1.75 and XO-3, and it didn't require any porting at all.
>>>> It would have happened yesterday, but I had to work out how to get
>>>> past the Sugar intro/login screen without a keyboard.  :-)
>>>
>>> That's cool! A couple of questions....
>>>
>>> What's the plan for the boot loader, is it planned to use OF still and
>>> port it to the ARM platform or is it planned to use one of the more
>>> mainline ARM bootloaders such as uboot or the like.
>>>
>>> Also what's the plan with the virtual keyboard support in sugar. It
>>> might be worth looking at the MeeGo/Moblin based VKB stuff as a basis.
>>> Its skinnable and supported various inputs via scim and integrates
>>> with that. Let me know if you need more info as I've been packaging
>>> some of this up in Fedora as part of my work with the aforementioned
>>> UIs in Fedora.
>>>
>>
>> At one point I had tried to evaluate the possible virtual/on-screen
>> keyboards that could be used for Sugar, and at that time it looked
>> like each used their own keyboard layout data format. Something which
>> leverages existing mechanisms like SCIM/M17N/IBus/etc would certainly
>> be an improvement. Could you point me to the source code repo of VKB -
>> I would love to take a look.
>
> I'm not sure if this is the the best current upstream because of the
> changes in the Moblin/MeeGo side of things but the git here is
> relatively recent
>
> fvkbd is the actual virtual keyboard. This is also in Fedora.
> http://git.moblin.org/cgit.cgi/fvkbd/
>
> scim-panel-vkb-gtk is the scim overlay stuff. It will be in Fedora 14
> and likely pushed back to F-12/F13.
> http://git.moblin.org/cgit.cgi/scim-panel-vkb-gtk/
>

Thanks for the links. This also seems to use its own data format¹ for
defining the keyboards, but it looks like it is much more
mature/flexible than the other options I have seen so far.

FWIW, I had written a tool² which could parse XKB layout definitions
(symbol files) and produce the corresponding SCIM layouts, and I have
used it to generate OFW keytables as well³. I think that this tool
(with some modifications) will be able to migrate our existing
keyboard layouts to the format required by fvkbd.

Thanks,
Sayamindu


[1] http://git.moblin.org/cgit.cgi/fvkbd/tree/layout
[2] http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/sayamindu/xkb2scim/
[3] http://dev.laptop.org/git/projects/xkb2ofw/

-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
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