[sugar] Sugar on the DCON chip

[Federico Mena Quintero]

Hi,

I'm mentoring Manu Cornet <manu.cornet at gmail.com> for the Summer of
Code.  He's doing a bunch of work on GTK+ for OLPC:

- Making the text cursor stop blinking after a few seconds in GtkEntry
and GtkTextView

- Creating a torture test for theme engines so that we can see that they
don't crash, don't leak, and so that we can profile them for
performance.

The original task specified for the SoC was to write a theme engine for
the laptop.  Diana and Marco (and Dave?) have been working on this
already, so I want Manu to finish the work.

The DCON-based display in the laptop has some very particular
requirements.  It does not display three channels per pixel like normal
LCDs, but rather it picks one of the R/G/B channels alternately for
every pixel.  So, several things do not look quite right:  thin lines,
lines which match the RGB diagonals, very small GUI elements, small
fonts.  We need to make sure that the theme engine looks good with these
constraints.

Also, the display can be switched to grayscale for viewing in plain
sunlight.  The theme engine needs to know about that.

I'll have Manu start poking at the current state of the theme engine.
The first part is to run it through the torturer to ensure that it is
robust.  The second part is to actually modify the theme engine to make
it suitable for the laptop's funky display.

We had several questions:

- How set in stone is the visual appearance of the theme?  Diana's
"green" theme is beautiful, although I'm sure we'll need to make changes
to make it look good on the DCON display.

- We need write access to the GIT repository, so that Manu can put his
patches in a branch (or whatever the GIT terminology is for that).
Could someone please help us with this?

- Do you have a list of missing features and other things that you want
done in the theme engine?

Thanks,
 
  Federico