[Sugar-devel] Collaboration woes

[Sascha Silbe]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 10:31:14AM -0600, Jim Simmons wrote:


> It seems to me that setting up a test environment for collaboration 
> has always been a source of frustration but I don't remember a time 
> when I had this many things not work at the same time.
Let's take it apart one issue / environment at a time.


> 1).  When I attempt to run multiple copies of sugar-emulator in Fedora
> 11 using this command line:
[...]
Given that you talk about sugar-jhbuild later, I guess this is with 
native Fedora packages?
As others have already explained the behaviour you're seeing in this 
case is probably because the native Fedora Sugar packages are not using 
GConf-DBus, so you'll need to go to some length to run multiple sessions 
in parallel (I don't know how to do that, but maybe someone else does). 
You could also create a new user (Unix account) for each session instead 
of using the SUGAR_PROFILE feature. Users are isolated from each other, 
so it should work fine.


> sugar-jhbuild on Fedora 11 is even worse.  If I do something like
>
> SUGAR_PROFILE=jane ./sugar-jhbuild run
>
> it will prompt me to change my colors but NOT my name.

sugar-jhbuild is just a tool to build the packages, i.e. an alternative 
to install Sugar via native distro packages. "sugar-jhbuild run" is a 
shortcut for "sugar-jhbuild run sugar-emulator" - maybe we should remove 
that alias to reduce confusion.
Do you have native Sugar packages installed on the same machine you're 
running sugar-jhbuild on? Have you updated sugar-jhbuild recently? Does 
"./sugar-jhbuild depscheck" report any missing dependency?

As for not asking you for a name, that's a new "feature" [1]: It's 
taking your real name (GECOS field) from /etc/passwd by default. To 
change that you need to set some GConf setting (others might explain 
how). You can always change your name in the Control Panel afterwards, 
though.


> The documentation says that if there is no
> Jabber server configured then Sugar will automatically look for other
> Sugar users on the same network segment.
Yes, that's correct and has been tested by me recently, at least on 
Debian.


[On Fedora 10]
> It would figure that two copies of sugar-emulator running on the same 
> damned box would be able to find each other but no.
Since this is Fedora 10, you must be running the native Fedora packages 
(sugar-jhbuild doesn't support Fedora 10 for quite some time). I'm not 
sure if those packages depend on avahi-daemon. Is it running? If not, 
please install it as it's required for link-local collaboration 
("Salut").
Also check that there's no firewall intervening. ISTR something about 
Fedora installing a fascist firewall by default that blocks Salut 
traffic.


> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_Jabber_Servers
I'm not sure about the other servers on that list, but I'm using 
jabber.sugarlabs.org and it's working fine most of the time. Since it 
uses Gadget it takes some time to show some buddies, though. Just wait a 
minute or two.

> No, that would be too much to hope for.  But in ONE copy of
> sugar-emulator I see ONE other user.  The other copy sees nobody.
Try running it again. I remember some issue about not seeing buddies 
that have just been registered (i.e. connected for the first time). Not 
sure it has been fixed and if so in which version of Sugar.


[1] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1497

CU Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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