Tutorials

These tutorials describe how to get started developing software for the OLPC XO environment.

Sugar Activity Tutorials

• Creating an Activity -- overview of the process of creating a PyGTK-based activity
• Sugar Activity Tutorial - This Hello World activity shows the basics of creating a python activity for Sugar using basic GTK operations. The bulk of the tutorial is focused on setting up the activity directory structure and boilerplate
• Tuquito's Hello World! using GTK+Glade rather than hand-coded GTK
• Tubes Tutorial - Activity sharing using Tubes
• OLPCGames/Pygame
  • Game development HOWTO -- download a zip file, run a command, register the resulting activity, run it, now make it do something fun and run it again
  • OLPCGames Presentation (Openoffice presentation, Powerpoint) - Slides describing how to create a working bundle manually (largely obsoleted by OLPCGames 1.2's skeleton builder)
• Red Hat Magazine Tutorials (Block Party)
  • Introducing Sugar Article describing how to use sugar-jhbuild to set up a development environment
  • Anatomy of an Activity - A more detailed look at Sugar activities (Hello World style introduction to creating a new activity)
  • Converting a PyGTK application to Sugar: Part 1 - Part 1 in a series of tutorials on how to port existing applications to Sugar. This tutorial goes into the internals of the game BlockParty in preparation for converting it into a Sugar activity.
  • Converting a PyGTK application to Sugar: Part 2 - Part 2 in a series of tutorials on how to port existing applications to Sugar. This tutorial goes into converting the BlockParty game into a Sugar actvity (very involved).
• Translation/Internationalization
  • Python i18n -- Python's built-in internationalization services and there use described as applied to a PyGame project
  • Python Unicode -- Python's unicode data-type
  • Translating -- Guide on how to go about doing translations

Hardware

• Programming the camera -- tutorial describing how to program the (video) camera using GStreamer
• Forth Lessons -- How to use Forth and Open Firmware

Further Reading

• API Reference Pointers to reference documentation for the platform.