Contributors program archive

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HowTo [ID# 136965]  +/-

  For Developers

<< Developer's Setup

The OLPC Contributors Program' (aka the Developer's Program) provides contributors with access to resources, primarily hardware that OLPC produces such as the XO (Development Laptops), Active antennas, serial adapters and other peripherals, and spare parts. The program also provideds and Project Hosting facilities to make the process of working on Software/Hardware for the OLPC project easier for external developers.

Please also see the Developer's Handbook for a general introduction to the process of developing for the OLPC platform and the API reference. To apply for hardware, visit our projectdb and submit an application.

Project Hosting

If your interest is primarily on doing some systems level or on applications level coding, then join one of the projects on our Hosting Wiki. We have much more flexibility, bandwidth and CPU available than alternatives like SourceForge, and your project won't be as lost among thousands of other projects unrelated to OLPC. If your project has aspects related to OLPC, but is primarily part of some other project (e.g. GTK+, X11), we're also happy to provide more limited OLPC related facilities, such as bug tracking and our wiki.

See:

• Project hosting -- describes the process of applying to have your project hosted

Hardware Access Program

There are a significant number of OLPC laptops available as part of our contributors program. This page talks specifically about access for software developers, support and testing. While these laptops are useful for some testing, they are not necessary for developing software for the OLPC platform.

Most development work done by traditional developers (as distinct from children who are actually using the OLPC-XOs in the field) for software takes place within either a sugar-jhbuild environment or an emulated XO on a traditional desktop or laptop. See Developers/Setup for a lengthy discussion of how to set up your development environment.

We will give preference for hardware to proposals that require access to the OLPC hardware to make progress.

Qualifications

We're looking for people able and interested in helping in development. The qualifications needed depend strongly upon where you are interested in working: for example, people working on BIOS/boot paths should be seriously "friends of the electrons", and not scared of JTAG and similar kinds of debugging.

Most driver work takes normal driver debugging skills, though getting power management right can be more challenging than most driver development.

Window system development requires X experience, and so on; applications, experience in developing those or similar applications, and so on.

Expectations of Recipients

We would appreciate Bug Reports for any hardware or software issues you encounter, even if they are not in your own area of interest. Being technically capable, you are more likely to be able to help us isolate and fix bugs than non-technical users.

We would also appreciate it if you would read the Developer's Manual and join the community's communication's channels, the Support or Testing community.

How to apply for an XO

If you have tried working with sugar-jhbuild and/or an emulator and have found that you really need a physical XO to develop on, please use this url to request a laptop: http://projectdb.olpc.at/

Applying for an Active Antenna

If you need an Active Antenna for development purposes, please send mail to the developer at laptop dot org email alias with the following information:

1. Name
2. Email address
3. Employer (if any), University/College
4. Shipping address and instructions 
 - name, 
 - address, (cannot be a post office box)
 - city, 
 - postal code, 
 - country, 
 -telephone number, (we need this for the shipping companies)
5. Quantity of Active Antennae desired
6. Description of your plans for the Antenna(s). Concrete proposals with defined 
   outcomes are much more likely to result in an Antenna than "it would be cool to play 
   with these and demo them".
7. Description of your experience, both with hardware and software

Presuming your request is approved, a mail message will be sent to you with shipping information, or a regret. Note that some requests may be more feasible and applicable later in the project, when we have more antennae available.