Developers/Setup
The OLPC's software environment is a heavily modified Fedora 7 Linux system running a custom GUI shell (Sugar). To develop for the platform you will eventually need access to a platform which runs in a manner substantially similar to the OLPC environment. Luckily there are many available options.
Contents
Option 1 - Emulated XO
An emulated XO laptop is the recommended platform for "checking out" the Sugar environment, testing activities and for initial development of new activities. By installing an emulation package on your (reasonably powerful) host desktop, you can run an emulated version of the Sugar environment which is essentially the same code as runs on the real laptops.
An emulated XO does not provide tools such as SVG editors or Integrated Development Environments. You will normally run such software on your host machine and push the results onto the emulated machine.
The emulated XO has certain limitations with regard to the specialized hardware in the XO. See the Developer's FAQ below for some pointers on how to simulate the special hardware.
Option 2 - sugar-jhbuild
This is what the core development team uses and is one of the most pleasant ways to work. Compared with using an Emulated XO, installing sugar takes more time and space to set up, and can be difficult to maintain, but results in a more flexible better environment. If you are intending to work on the core system/activities you will likely need to use sugar-jhbuild to set up your environment. See Sugar with sugar-jhbuild to get going. The 'native' environment for sugar-jhbuild is Fedora 7 and Ubuntu (feisty or gutsy).
This approach also works nicely under emulation (Qemu, Parallels, VirtualBox or VMWare) on Linux, Windows or Mac OS host operating systems. This allows you to work without rebooting even when using sugar-jhbuild, and without risk of corrupting your host operating system.
On 32-bit Linux
To get a working Sugar using jhbuild you will need to be running an OS that provides compatible versions of the various libraries that Sugar requires (basically a very up-to-date Linux platform).
As of 2007-12-13 the distributions known to be able to support sugar-jhbuild are:
- Fedora 7
- Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (or Greater).
- Gentoo (with a trivial work-around)
At the moment, a Fedora 7 install with sugar-jhbuild is probably the most "sure" approach to getting a working full-speed (non-emulated) working environment for developing on Sugar with the latest libraries and solid upgrade path. As most of the core developers are working on Fedora boxes with sugar-jhbuild it is the most likely environment to be supported and continue to receive support.
On 64-bit Linux
As of 2007-12-13 it is possible to build Sugar on 64-bit Linux with trivial workarounds/fixes. This has been confirmed on Gentoo amd64 and Debian Lenny (with the caveats below).
Sugar seems to be working on Debian Lenny (2007-11-05), though Python 2.5, even when installed, is not detected. Comment out the line jhbuild.commands.run('sanitycheck', config, []), line 95, to get it to install.
Option 3 - Native Sugar Packages on Linux
As Sugar stabilizes and is ported to more distributions, it should be possible to use your Linux distribution's package management system to install Sugar. Distributions with ports so far:
- Ubuntu Gutsy -- Note that we need more testing of this package-set, please let us know your experiences
If you don't see your distribution here, ask your distribution maintainers, or if you have the skills, create the packages yourself and submit them.
Option 4 - A real XO laptop
Hardware Developer's Program - while there are only a small number of test units being produced, developers can submit proposals to receive one of those units for testing and development.
You can also, if you live in the US or Canada, and have sufficient funds, until Dec 31, 2007 use the Give 1 Get 1 program to acquire a production-run machine (and donate one to a child).
