XS Community Edition/0.4/Services/Activity Update
I have never tested or even looked at this before, but today on the call, George made sure I saw this link which has all the details regarding the Activity Update service for the XSCE: http://dev.laptop.org/git/users/martin/xs-activity-server/tree/README
But if you're sitting there with a USB drive, some activities you'd like to include, you've got an XSCE, and you want some simple instructions, here's a digest.
Unfortunately I'm going to assume you're on a Linux box, apologies to the Windows people.
First, insert your USB drive into your computer (I used my regular FAT32 formatted drive that I also use for flashing XOs) and create a directory named xs-activity-server
Navigate into the xs-activity-server dir and download some activities.
This isn't necessary, but it's quite nice. Write a "blurb" for the activity that will show up on the entry for the activity in http://schoolserver/activities
First, get the bundle_id for the Activity. In Linux, it's simply:
zipgrep bundle_id activityname.xo
It should return something like:
JAMediaTube.activity/activity/activity.info:bundle_id = org.laptop.JAMediaTube
You want the bit at the end.
Now, create an .info file in the xs-activity-server dir. It doesn't matter what it's named, just do activities.info or something.
For every activity you would like to write a "blurb" for, put an entry for that in the activities.info file. For example:
[org.laptop.JAMediaTube] description = Watch YouTube! It's really fun!
[org.laptop.FakeActivity] description = This is a placeholder for documentation purposes
Notice the bundle_id value we grepped for earlier? That's in brackets in the .info file with the description directly underneath.
You've got your .xo files, set up your activities.info file, it's all on a USB drive in a dir named xs-activity-server, and now that you've got all the ingredients, the last order of business is to create a manifest for the XSCE to read.
While in the xs-activity-server dir on your USB drive, run this command:
sha1sum *.xo *.info > manifest.sha1
Eject the USB drive and plug it into the XSCE. And then magic happens! The activities you put on the USB drive in the xs-activity-server dir will just "automagically" show up on http://schoolserver/activities with the "blurbs" you wrote in the activities.info file.
I don't know how the USB drive gets ejected by novice users from the XSCE. Which could be a concern?
At any rate, this probably needs a wiki entry.