Developers manual

  For Developers

+	Software
XO
	13.2.11	2020-01-29
XS
	xs-0.7	2012-02-20

Developing user software

OLPC ships user-level software primarily produced by external communities. We do also contribute to their development, but our contributions go "upstream" through their community rather than our own.

If you're looking to get involved in development of anything that the user sees, you should consult the developer documentation for the upstream project in question. For example, if you want to develop Sugar or a Sugar activity, see the Sugar developer resources. For the GNOME platform or applications, refer to the GNOME developer community.

Developing at the system level

If you're interested in developing OLPC software at the system-level, the important backend stuff that the user doesn't really see, you can find documentation here.

OLPC builds upon Fedora as much as possible - meaning that many system-level developments would be more appropriately done within the Fedora developer community, which will then be automatically included in OLPC's software at a later date.

Quickstart

• See the Contributors program page.
• Get familiar with the Python language. Much OLPC development happens in Python.
  • If you're familiar with other aspects of the Developers/Stack, then you can focus on those aspects
• Sign up for the devel mailing list, become a lurker
• If you do IRC, join #olpc on irc.freenode.net, and #olpc-devel on irc.oftc.net

Overview

• Developers/Getting Started
  • First steps: developer keys, getting connected with the community, finding a project, reporting bugs.
• Developers/Setup
  • Describes how to set up a Sugar development environment on your PC or workstation. It discusses emulation, running Sugar OS natively or in a virtual machine, cross compiling, and some configuration options. It also includes a discussion of which approach is likely to be the most appropriate for you
• Test Config Notes
  • If you have an XO, this page has many useful configuration tips for testing your application.
• Developers/Stack
  • Describes the choices of programming languages and "software stacks" for developing code on the OLPC. It details the base stack of hardware, firmware, operating system and the Sugar environment. It then gives options for programming in Python, Squeak, C/C++ and other languages or activities.
• Developers/Issues
  • Describes the special considerations required for working on the OLPC project, particularly those driven by our target hardware and deployment environments
• Developers/Projects
  • Suggests ways to choose a particular project, whether one that already exists, or one of your own, and how to start working on the project once you have chosen it
• Developers/Communication
  • Describes the various support and communications channels used by the project, including how to get help with problems, and how to set up your own per-project communications channels
• Developers/Documentation
  • Collects pointers to the various sources of documentation available for the project. Helping us better document our code is always a welcome contribution.
• Developers/FAQ
  • Collects and attempts to answer common questions that developers have when working on the Sugar platform
• Developers/Fedora
  • Discusses how to join the Fedora development community on top of which OLPC is based.

Release Schedule

See Release Process Home for discussion of how OLPC presently makes releases.

Related docs and manuals

• Tutorials
• Instructions for getting a Developer Key