Developers manual

  For Developers

Thank you for considering working on the One Laptop Per Child project. Getting started is not yet as easy as we would like it to be (OLPC growing pains) - helping improve the situation is one of many ways you might contribute.

This manual tries to provide you with the answers you need to get started either by contributing to existing projects or starting your own development project. Although this Developer's Manual focuses mostly on the software development side of the process, we are also very interested in encouraging the contributions of:

• Artists
• Educators
• Testers
• Documenters
• Translators

Much of the material in the Developer's manual, particularly the Setup and Communications sections will be applicable to you as well.

• Developers/Setup
  • Describes how to set up a Sugar development environment, with a discussion of which approach is likely to be the most appropriate for you
• Developers/Stack
  • Describes the "operating stack" of the OLPC Sugar environment, the combination of hardware, operating system, services, libraries and activities that combine to form the environment in which you will be programming
• 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

Current release schedule

2006-11-18   Factory.1 (Build 185; Firmware Q2B11)
2007-04-31   Factory.2 (Build 386; Firmware Q2C09)
2007-05-08   Factory.3 (Build 406; Firmware Q2C11)
2007-08-04   Factory.4 (Build 542; Firmware Q2C22)
2007-10-26   Factory.5 (Build 622; Firmware Q2D02)
2007-10-30   Ship.1 (Build 623; Firmware Q2D03)
2007-11-02   Feature freeze for Update.1
2007-12-01   Update.1 (==Ship.2)

We expect to be doing updates monthly through the first quarter of 2008. After that, we will likely adopt a three-month update cycle. Eventually we will adopt a six-month update cycle.

It should also be noted that we will be—when time permits—moving to a build environment that enables individual activity developers to maintain their own build cycles.

Again, thank-you for your interest in helping the One Laptop Per Child project help educate the children of the world.

See Also:

• Creating an activity -- an older document that takes a tutorial-style approach to creating a PyGTK activity