[sugar] Development environment for newcomers

[Mike C. Fletcher]

Ian Bicking wrote:
...
> One idea Michael has been working on is to do a complete build in a 
> virtual environment, and then people can use that environment; either 
> with something like VMWare, or potentially produce a live CD.  I don't 
> think the CD that is produced from the builds really makes sense -- 
> doing stuff like hardware detection is really out of the scope of what 
> OLPC should be concerned with.
...
> That still won't give people the environment they are used to, unless 
> they happen to be used to what we produce.  (I think Michael is using 
> Ubuntu?)
I used Gentoo, as it was the only system on which we were able to get a 
build to run to completion during the sprint (it's also the one with 
which I am most familiar) but it looks basically the same for users as 
an Ubuntu desktop.  I've finished the build and have an image 
ready-to-go, btw.

Still working on how to distribute the image.  Being a full Gentoo Gnome 
desktop plus Sugar it's quite large (3GB compressed) and I haven't got 
the bandwidth on my web-host to provide downloads.  cshields (who I 
*think* works for Open Source Labs) suggested they may be able to 
distribute it as a simple download.  I'm also going to look into getting 
a .torrent up on LinuxTracker.org with the image.

I've also updated the Sugar on Gentoo page on the wiki with a 
Gentoo-style (i.e. reasonably exhaustive, step-by-step) description of 
how to build Sugar using the system libraries approach.  With that and 
the binary packages directory I have it should be possible for a 
developer to install on a Gentoo system without much effort or 
compilation (other than that done by sugar-jhbuild itself).

The environment is a regular (somewhat minimalist) Gnome desktop.  It 
has Firefox 2.0.0.2, Eric3, and Inkscape, as well as a launcher button 
to start Sugar using sugar-jhbuild run.  From the image the developer 
can keep up-to-bleeding-edge should they wish (using sugar-jhbuild), or 
just use the image as built. I haven't got squeak or etoys built due to 
a sugar-jhbuild glitch yesterday.  Keeping the whole system up-to-date 
(if a developer wishes to do so) will require some command-line work 
(sugar-jhbuild being command line, as is portage), but nothing that 
can't be documented fairly easily.

Regarding the image:

    * Gentoo (up to date stable build with just the required ~x86
      packages, based off a 2006.1 (latest) profile)
    * Disk: 3GB compressed, 7GB uncompressed, 8GB sparse, 4GB of that
      used as far as the embedded OS is concerned
    * 256MB RAM allocated in the image
    * Performance is quite reasonable for editing code and testing Sugar
      on a host with reasonable (1GB) ram and processor (2GHz Athlon64)
    * Gnome desktop incl. Firefox 2.0.0.2
    * Sugar built and ready-to-run
    * Common developer's tools installed (source code control systems,
      gcc, vim, Eric3, Inkscape)
    * Networking works reasonably well (uses nonstandard NetworkManager
      for the networking system, as in Sugar)

The target market for this image is developers on Win32 or Linux who 
just want to start working on Sugar, but who don't want to spend weeks 
mucking about trying to get a build to work.  It trades a very large 
download (or a burned DVD with the compressed image, I suppose) for the 
ability to simply unpack, run and start working with Sugar in a 
reasonable development environment with mature tools available.

Have fun all,
Mike

-- 
________________________________________________
  Mike C. Fletcher
  Designer, VR Plumber, Coder
  http://www.vrplumber.com
  http://blog.vrplumber.com