Developers manual
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For Developers
This is a quick intro to working on activities for the XO, and other code for OLPC. Feel free to add to and update the manual; it is a work in progress.
This manual tries to provide you with the answers you need to get started either by contributing to existing projects or starting your own. Although it focuses on the software development side of the process, we are also very interested in encouraging other contributions.
Quickstart
- See the Contributors program page.
- Play with the OLPC environment (aka "Sugar"). Hopefully you've played with one yourself!
- You can emulate it too!
- Get familiar with the Python language. Much OLPC development happens in Python.
- If you're familiar with other aspects of the Developers/Stack, then you can focus on those aspects
- Set up sugar-jhbuild - this will likely be your primary development environment.
Overview
- Developers/Getting Started
- First steps: developer keys, getting connected with the community, finding a project, reporting bugs.
- Developers/Setup
- Describes how to set up a Sugar development environment on your PC or workstation. It discusses emulation, running Sugar OS natively or in a virtual machine, cross compiling, and some configuration options. It also includes a discussion of which approach is likely to be the most appropriate for you
- Test Config Notes
- If you have an XO, this page has many useful configuration tips for testing your application.
- Developers/Stack
- Describes the choices of programming languages and "software stacks" for developing code on the OLPC. It details the base stack of hardware, firmware, operating system and the Sugar environment. It then gives options for programming in Python, Squeak, C/C++ and other languages or activities.
- Developers/Issues
- Describes the special considerations required for working on the OLPC project, particularly those driven by our target hardware and deployment environments
- 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
- Developers/Fedora
- Discusses how to join the Fedora development community on top of which OLPC is based.
Release Schedule
See the Plan of Record-2008 and Release Process Home for discussion of how OLPC presently makes releases.
Related docs and manuals
- Tutorials
- Getting Started
- Activity Handbook -- a somewhat slower, more detailed tutorial-style presentation, assumes less knowledge of the project's background
- Application Development for the OLPC Laptop (Tim Jones, IBM developerWorks article)
- Instructions for getting a Developer Key
- The Sugar Almanac -- Start here for API use tips