[Sugar-devel] Sugar Activity testing, GTK

[James Cameron]

Someone asked how to test changes to a Sugar GTK activity if all they
have is a macOS computer.

macOS with an intel processor is easy, install a hypervisor and run a
virtual machine.  macOS on ARM is less easy, install an emulator and
run a virtual machine.  Use the virtual machine either as is, or with
SSH, remote desktop, or VNC.

On both types of hardware you can run remote desktop or VNC to other
hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi or cloud virtual machine.

When you get to choice of operating system inside the virtual machine,
the best options are probably Ubuntu or Fedora.

On my desktops I run Ubuntu Linux.  Then I run guest virtual machines
under KVM or LXC.  Then I use either spice, remote desktop, VNC, or
SSH to reach into the virtual machines.

I use entr with rsync to copy activity sources from my usual
integrated development environment into the target system, which will
be either a virtual machine or lab hardware.

As the Speak activity is part of the Sugar desktop environment, to
test it I have to start Sugar (e.g. from .xsession or lightdm), then
start Speak from the Home View.

Some other sort of tests (e.g. valgrind) require starting Terminal
activity, then cd to the activity directory and run the activity
directly with sugar-activity3.

Tests of the collaboration feature are more complex; there has to be
two or three instances of Sugar with different IPv4 addresses that can
see each other on a real or virtual network.  This is only required if
your change is to code in an activity relating to collaboration.

Hope that helps!