API reference: Difference between revisions

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* [[Forth Lessons]] -- Series of tutorial-style lessons on the Forth language and the [[Open Firmware]] bios-replacement system on the laptop
* [[Forth Lessons]] -- Series of tutorial-style lessons on the Forth language and the [[Open Firmware]] bios-replacement system on the laptop
* [http://firmworks.com/QuickRef.html Open Firmware Quick Reference]
* [[Hardware specification]] -- general description of the hardware on the laptops
* [[Hardware specification]] -- general description of the hardware on the laptops
** [[DCON]] -- the display controller ASIC and its interface (note that normally you would use the HardwareManager D-BUS interface to manipulate the DCON)
** [[DCON]] -- the display controller ASIC and its interface (note that normally you would use the HardwareManager D-BUS interface to manipulate the DCON)

Revision as of 10:09, 2 September 2007

The OLPC platform includes a large number of libraries and services. This page attempts to gather links to reference works which can be used when programming the XO laptops. This reference is primarily intended for Software Developers. You may want to try out a few Tutorials before diving into these documents.

Platform Requirements

  • Software components is a somewhat old document describing the various pieces of software and libraries involved in the system.

Python Libraries

Where official reference documentation isn't available, PyDoc-generated documentation is provided. You can generate local copies of the PyDoc-generated documentation from a running official image. Script is available via bzr branch http://www.vrplumber.com/bzr/autodoc

GUI Libraries

Libraries for creating standard Windows-Icon-Menu-Pointer (WIMP) GUI applications.

High-Level Widgets

GUI (GTK) controls which expose the functionality of entire complex applications for use by other projects.

  • Abiword -- GTK widget embedding the Abiword Word-Processor
  • HulaHop -- embeds a Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 3.0 ocore) rendering widget XXX confirm that's what it really is
  • Evince -- PDF (and similar) document viewer as a GTK widget

Multimedia Libraries

Libraries that deal with multimedia and gaming functionality.

  • GStreamer (PyDoc) -- multimedia streaming library
  • CSound -- the CSound audio-generation library
  • OLPC Games -- PyGame wrapper that makes working within the OLPC-XO environment relatively straightforward (Strongly recommended for PyGame usage on the XO!)
  • PyGame -- GUI library suitable for Sprite-based 2D game development

Communications and Networking

Libraries for connecting to other processes, either on the local machine or across the network

  • D-BUS (PyDoc) -- desktop messaging (Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and Asynchronous Signalling) engine
  • Telepathy -- buddy and connection management including cross-machine RPC over D-BUS
  • PyXPCOM -- Library for controlling XPCOM applications (currently just XULRunner on the XO) XXX Should be available, but doesn't appear to be (that is, import xpcom doesn't work)

Support Libraries

Libraries which aren't neither GUI nor multi-media

  • SECore -- search engine implementation
  • JSON -- Javascript Object Notation parser/linearisation library
  • UrlGrabber -- url downloading library
  • OLPC -- the data-store implementation
  • Unicode -- the laptop must provide internationalized software, as a result you will need to use Python's Unicode support

Extraneous Libraries

Libraries which are present in the current builds, but not particularly "part" of the Sugar environment and which may be removed eventually.

  • Yum -- package manager for RPM-based distributions
  • RPM -- RPM manipulation library

Smalltalk Libraries

D-BUS Services

  • Avahi -- local service discovery, e.g. for finding particular services provided on the mesh network
  • NetworkManager -- network management service
  • Hardware Abstraction Layer Daemon (hald) -- control of standard hardware functionality
  • Presence Service -- friend discovery and collaboration primitives, including a description of the Telepathy API
    • Telepathy Connection Manager
    • Telepathy StreamEngine
  • Activity DBus API -- Describes the API an activity must implement on D-BUS in order to interact with the Sugar desktop
    • Activity Service (Python implementation of the Activity DBus API)
    • Activity Factory Service (Python implementation of the Activity-launching Factory DBus API)
  • Data Store Service (Journal) -- the core data-storage operation of the laptop
  • Clipboard Service -- manages cross-activity sharing of data and files
  • Hardware Manager Service -- provides access to the OLPC-specific hardware on the laptop
  • Activity Registry Service -- registry of installed activity bundles on the laptop
  • Object Type Registry Service -- MIME-type registry service
  • Sugar Console Service

System Services/Hardware

  • Forth Lessons -- Series of tutorial-style lessons on the Forth language and the Open Firmware bios-replacement system on the laptop
  • Open Firmware Quick Reference
  • Hardware specification -- general description of the hardware on the laptops
    • DCON -- the display controller ASIC and its interface (note that normally you would use the HardwareManager D-BUS interface to manipulate the DCON)
    • Geode -- the Geode CPU (assembly-language optimization guide, links to data-sheets)
    • Power Domains -- description of which parts of the hardware are kept live in what situations
  • Kernel
    • Rebuilding OLPC kernel -- describes how to rebuild the OLPC kernel, which is sometimes necessary if you need to support otherwise unsupported hardware