Demonstration build

Demo Laptop Description

There are many capabilities of the XO that aren't easy to demonstrate on a standard build. The idea for this project is to set up an XO that can show off some of the features described below.

1. Dual-boot
   • with a Fedora/Gnome or Edubuntu setup (via SD card)
   • with any simple hacks to speed up launch -- perhaps a dual-boot OpenWRT?
2. Video (full screen)
   • ogg
   • m.youtube / kaltura
   • the best that can be done with mpeg & rm
     • has been done using a completely separate build which was stripped of absolutely everything but the ability to play video (No "OS"/GUI at all), and uses proprietary codecs
3. Audio
   • Stereo sound to show off speakers range
   • multichannel audio from creative activity (tamtam)
   • streaming audio from an online source
4. Book Readers
   • pdf (evince)
   • js (flipbook, ICDL, jresig)
5. Flash
   • smooth Flash animation with gnash
   • the best that can be done with Adobe Flash
6. text-to-speech
   • Speak
7. videochat or at least audiochat
8. drawing w/ stylus
   • phun / elements / crayon physics
9. Browsers
   • Full-fledged firefox
   • Opera
10. New Sugar UI and config screen
11. Faster load time (now in joyride)
12. a plot of battery strength/usage over time, however crude, like what the Prius offers for gas conservation
13. a compressed view for the Journal (or a way to link directly to a compressed view)

There are also a number of activities whose demos should be focused down to a couple of minutes, whose components could all be set up in advance; I'm thinking about how to effectively walk through them, without waiting to long for each one to load and set up, but without having more than one in memory at a given time. Is there some way to launch an activity while simultaneously demanding/reserving a block of memory, potentially killing other processes when starting up to improve the repeatability of demo length?

Progress

Here is what is done (from the list above)

• full-screen full-motion video
  • Ogg / mpeg / many other proprietary codecs all fully supported via mplayer
    • In full screen mode game keys are used for control
    • Usage: mpalyer filename
    • Media: Elephants Dream
• Audio
  • Stereo mp3 playback working via mplayer
• Flash
  • gnash installed + working
  • Adobe Flash player installed + working (does not support youtube yet)
• Text-to-Speech
  • Speak installed + working
• Browsers
  • Full-fledged firefox installed + working
    • Works well for the most part, it is not the ideal browser for the XO.
    • Designed for a windowed GUI, full of features that are not helpful in the XO enviornment
  • Opera
    • Works very well, definitely the happy medium between Browse and Firefox
• New Sugar UI and Config screen
  • integrated into the joyride-1914 build used
• Faster startup
  • integrated into the joyride-1914 build used

Difficulties

• Playing youtube video
  • Gnash not compatible via youtubes website
  • Adobe Flash loads the first 2 or 3 frames but cannon play video via website
  • Mplayer can't seem to play the rtsp stream from m.youtube.com