[Sugar-devel] advice or direction on sugar development project

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hello,

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 1:15 AM, Scotty Auble<scottymon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm hoping this will be a good place to get connected with some people
> who can help me with a Sugar/OLPC development project. Mainly looking
> for advice and answers to specific questions, not necessarily
> development work, but any help is welcome. Recommended to check out
> this list by "sj". I don't know this person personally but one of my
> team members (Becky Malamud ) does.
> Anyway, our team (Rural Design Collective 2009) is working on a
> project to bundle children's books from the Internet Archive into a
> collection and make it available on the XO/OLPC platform in a friendly
> and accessible way. There are 2900 books in the target collection, and
> we estimate roughly 7 or 8 Gb of djvu files, about 2x that for pdfs.
> In brief, our strategy along with issues we're trying to solve is as
> follows:
>  1.create an autodownloader that will take a list of books (file) as
> input and pull them into an “organized” directory structure off the
> archive servers. We have already done this part.
>  2.Make a bundle(s) (or collection(s)) of these books and make it
> easily distributable on the XOs. Here's where we could use some
> direction, specifically:
>  2.1.we're thinking of putting the bundle on a flash drive, since the
> XO can't store it. Are there any limits on size of bundles or
> accessing flash drives that could be an issue?
>  2.2.With regard to “sharing” the collection: we're assuming that many
> schools/users don't have access to a server or the internet, so how
> best to make our bundle accessible to everyone?
>  a)Can the bundle stick be installed on one XO and accessed by others
> via the mesh? Are there performance issues? -OR-
>  b)will each XO need its own stick? -OR-
>  c)is there a better way?
>  2.3.Select a format or formats to support. Pdf is supported out of
> the box, but:
>  a)From a recent posting by sj, et al, we understand that pdf
> performance in the read activity is very slow compared to djvu. Is
> this true? From a “friendliness” perspective we want to maximize
> performance and minimize file size. But the issue with going to djvu
> is: it's not supported in read activity w/ sugar < 8.4? (is this
> true?). Most XOs out there running < 8.4? (also true?). Thus, upgrade
> needed to Sugar/Read, so:
> can do sugar upgrade off of flash drive? Can automate upgrade to be
> very user friendly/transparent? How? Is this even practical? -OR-
> Could we just upgrade the read activity to support djvu? Same as above
> – transparent upgrade off of flash drive, howto.

The latest stable build of the OLPC XO OS (8.2.1) usually comes with
an activity bundle which has Read with proper DJVU support. You can
probably also include the latest Read Activity bundle in the flash
drive you are planning to compose. The bundle can be downloaded from
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/G1G1
It is true that most XOs out there are running 8.2.x builds, or even
older, in some cases. The version of Read
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/G1G1 will work properly on all
8.2.x builds.

>  b)We're considering doing an ePub format experiment as well. This
> would allow the books to be viewed in a web browser using AJAX
> technology – eliminating the read activity compatibility issues (we
> think). Right now we don't have books in ePub format, but that will be
> coming soon. Thoughts on this as a direction?

I am working on Read to support Epubs - I think we will have a beta
release of that very soon. The advantage of using Read for Epubs would
having a single UI for most (if not all) major book formats, easy
sharing of books, and the other features that I plan to put into Read
during the next 2-3 months (better bookmarks support, and better
fullscreen mode/handheld mode support are in my immediate roadmap)

>  3.Once we have the bundle and a way to distribute it, provide a
> friendly interface to find the books and select them for reading.
> Although they could be accessed from the Journal, we think a library
> browser page would be nicer, so users could see book's cover
> thumbnails, maybe a synopsis, and of course allow search by keyword
> for titles/authors. Ideally, we'd distribute the browser page on the
> same flash drive and it would be available to the browse activity. Is
> there a method to access the library page and follow links to book
> files on a flash drive?

I have long term plans about extending Library bundles to support
exposing their book collections via OPDS (Open Publication
Distribution System), which is a draft standard at the moment. This
will allow for easy browsing of the books - I have a screenshot of
what will probably go into Read at some point :
http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/opdsview_1.png (This is data from an
online source, but we can definitely make library bundles expose this
kind of data as well) The issue right now is that the OPDS standard is
in draft state, and I expect it to change/mature considerably during
the next few months. So I am holding off working on this for the
moment, but I'll definitely take this up as soon as I see some signs
of stability in the standard.

Thanks,
Sayamindu




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