[Sugar-devel] [support-gang] Collaboration woes

[Jim Simmons]

Thanks to everyone who responded.  I learned some things about Sugar
that don't seem to be written up anywhere,  Since I am writing a
manual I will write up what I've learned.

First, now that I understand that the SUGAR_PROFILE doesn't work after
F10 I've started running sugar-emulator under two different user id's
on F11, one as myself and one using su to my wife's id.  I've changed
both to use jabber.sugarlabs.org and they're both seeing lots of
neighbors now.  Of course they still can't see each other, but I feel
that I've made progress in any case.

On F10 i've changed the jabber server to jabber.sugarlabs.org and it
sees NOBODY in the neighborhood.  I've verified that the avahi demon
is running and I've disabled the firewall and still nothing.  There is
no particular need to use F10 for testing.  If I can get it working on
F11 I should be OK for purposes of finishing the chapter.

I've also learned about the Analyze Activity.  I might write that up too.

The names I'm trying to use for my IDs are James, James Simmons, and
Annie.  None of these three can see another at the moment.  I'd be
surprised if anyone else could see them.

James Simmons


On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 10:53 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> On 23.01.2010, at 17:31, Jim Simmons wrote:
>>
>> Last night I attempted to begin the chapter in my book on
>> collaboration in Sugar.  Some of my Activities do file transfers so I
>> have had some experience with it before.  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.
>>
>> 1).  When I attempt to run multiple copies of sugar-emulator in Fedora
>> 11 using this command line:
>>
>> SUGAR_PROFILE=mark sugar-emulator
>>
>> it creates a directory "mark" under ~/.sugar and prompts me for name
>> and color selection as it should.  If I then do
>>
>> SUGAR_PROFILE=jane sugar-emulator
>>
>> it creates a directory "jane" and prompts for name and colors.  Now if
>> I go back and do
>>
>> SUGAR_PROFILE=mark sugar-emulator
>>
>> again I get Jane's name and colors, or whoever I did the most
>> recently.  It looks like you can create new profiles for having
>> multiple sugar-emulators running but you can't RETURN to any profile
>> but the latest one you created.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> It looks to me like there is no way to run two copies of
>> sugar-emulator or sugar-jhbuild on Fedora 11.  What am I missing here?
>
> I guess this got broken with the switch to using gconf in newer Sugar versions. There is only one config per user, instead of separate profiles.
>
>> The situation on Fedora 10 is better.  There I CAN run two copies of
>> sugar-emulator using SUGAR_PROFILE and it seems to work the way it
>> ought to.
>
> It uses an older Sugar version.
>
>> Now I attempt to go to the Neighborhood pane in both sugar-emulators
>> on F10 to see who's there.  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.  It would figure that two
>> copies of sugar-emulator running on the same damned box would be able
>> to find each other but no.  They are both alone in their
>> neighborhoods.  This doesn't bug me all that much because frankly the
>> no Jabber option has NEVER worked for me.  Not once.  Not on Xubuntu,
>> not on SUSE, not on Fedora 10, not on Fedora 11.
>
> You have to set a non-existing Jabber server. This used to work.
>
>> So I try various Jabber servers from this page:
>>
>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Community_Jabber_Servers
>>
>> Of all of them only jabber.laptop.org lets me see other users in the
>> Neighborhood.  Not the other copy of sugar-emulator I have running.
>> 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.
>>
>> I've let both copies of sugar-emulator run for awhile and now they can
>> both see the same set of users.  Needless to say they still can't see
>> EACH OTHER.
>>
>> I also have sugar-jhbuild running on my F11 box, and it can see the
>> same three users but nobody else.
>>
>> I just wish I knew how to deal with this situation, or that Sugar
>> could do something to at least give me a hint if something is wrong
>> with my setup.  If I can't get around it then the "Make Your Own Sugar
>> Activities!" book will have no chapter on collaboration.
>>
>> Sorry for all the venting.
>
> I think many (if not all) of these issues do also even happen in deployment situations. Collaboration does not work reliably yet. Another item on the way to Sugar 1.0 ...
>
> - Bert -
>
>
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