Newbie Learning Group for Open Cobalt

[Friend]

Hi,

I'm new to Open Cobalt and I really want to understand how Open Cobalt
works. Since there is not much documentation around, I want to invite
all interested persons to join me in the effort to master Open Cobalt:

- How to use the software and create new worlds
- Understanding the software coding
- Learning to manipulate the code to contribute to the project

If you are interested, please get in contact with me:
loveol...@googlemail.com

It would be of great help, if also some experienced Open Cobalt
wizards come forward to help us a little. I say thank you to all who
consider it :)

You all take care,
Friend

[dav0]

Hello Friend,

I just sent you email to find out how you did in uncovering the secrets of this technology.

I too am very interested in learning more about Open Cobalt, as well as Croquet, Squeak, and Smalltalk-80 and I am hoping to stuff my brain with as much as it can absorb in the next few days as I finish out my vacation.

Let me know how I can help :

a. Learn
b. Build
c. Promote

This seemingly awesome technology!

Thanks all,

-dav0

[Carlos Crosetti]

Hi, the answer depends on how each one from the community learnt about Smalltalk.

 

If you are new to Open Cobatlt, I would suggest going first with Squeak by either dowloading Squeak or Pharo and reading the PDF available boook Squeak by Example. So you can learn the Smalltalk langage basics.

 

I would recommend buying Godberg-Robson Smalltalk 80 The Language "blue"¨book.

 

Then read the Croquet documentation from the CroquetConsortium.org website.

 

Finally, dowmload and hack OpenCobalt, regards, Carlos 

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[David McLure]

Thanks Carlos,

I am totally diving in on Squeak at the moment - reading the Squeak By Example book and installing Squeak everywhere.

Thanks for the tip on the "blue" book, this one escaped my Smalltalk radar.

I'll also visit CroquetConsortium.org, and then, when I'm ready, Open Cobalt.

I am finding it very easy to get distracted by all of the other neat tools out there as well, like Seaside and Aida/Web for web applications, and Scratch for games, etc.  Hopefully I can stay focussed on the prime directive!

Thanks!

-dav0

[Alan Grimes]

I've wanted to build a 3D chess set for years. However, I haven't been
able to figure out how to create content for Cobalt, yet. =(

Last time I checked, a few months ago, it still wasn't possible to do
much at all except load some models into the world. I couldn't figure
out how to program something complex and interactive. =\



--
E T F
N H E
D E D

Powers are not rights.

[Carlos Crosetti]

Yes, Seaseide is probably the most successful Smalltalk-based framework for building web applications, no hands on expericnce with AidaWeb but heard is very good too.

 

Seaside itself may fulfill anyone's whole energy, so do not feel bad if Seaside eclipse your ambition to get started with Open Cobalt. I am a big fan of Seaside too...

[Carlos Crosetti]

When I started looking to Open Cobalt, I had in my mind implementing
backgammon in 3D.

But later on I was inclined to understand how to run 2d Morpjic apps from
inside a Cobalt world.

I ended up with a Scrum tool that is basically a 2D Morphic app running
inside Cobalt.
http://code.google.com/p/scrum-wing-3d/

So for your �D chess, I suggest you looking into Andras Raab's Squeak Chess
, then create a MVC reflection of the chess game in 3D Cobalt.

Regards, Carlos

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Grimes" <agr...@speakeasy.net>
To: <openc...@googlegroups.com>

[David McLure]

Interesting.  Do you know whether there is any sort of integration between Seaside and Open Cobalt?

As it is, I normally use either PHP (Drupal) or one of several Java frameworks for the server side of the website framework, but I would love to be able to consolidate around something that is really designed with both OO and VR in mind.

[John McKeon]

Nikolai Suslov did a fine experiment with Seaside and Croquet. He also put a OpenQwaq server out there, another Croquet based system.

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 6:32 PM, David McLure <da...@mclures.net> wrote:

Interesting.  Do you know whether there is any sort of integration between Seaside and Open Cobalt?

As it is, I normally use either PHP (Drupal) or one of several Java frameworks for the server side of the website framework, but I would love to be able to consolidate around something that is really designed with both OO and VR in mind.

 

Pier is a complete CMS written in Seaside you might want to look at. 

I would say more but its mostly off-topic and you only have a couple of days...

[Carlos Crosetti]

I recomend this vook about Smaltalk

 

http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Smalltalk-Programming-Techniques-Volume/dp/B002PSKAKU

 

 

and this one once you feel you got the idea behind Smalltalk

 

http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-Best-Practice-Patterns-Kent/dp/013476904X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345606735&sr=1-1&keywords=kent+beck+smalltalk+best+practices

[David McLure]

On order.  I figure I should be ready to start on these books by the time they arrive.

Thanks!

[Carlos Crosetti]

I am pretty sure you will enjoy reading these books!

[David McLure]

Hi John,

Funny you should mention CMS because Squeak seems very much like a CMS too.  In fact, my whole impression of Smalltalk so far is very CMS like - everything is an object - even the programming code and environment - very efficient in terms of encapsulating unneeded baggage and fun to learn and use.

Anyway, thanks for more interesting tidbits to check out.  I downloaded Nicolai's Krestianstvo SDK2 and plan to play with that too.

[David McLure]

Actually, after unzipping the Krestianstvo2.0.6a.zip I realize that this looks like it is intended for Windoze and/or Mac only, and it also contains way more than I need in terms of it's own packaged Squeak, etc., so I will need to wait until I reboot to Windoze to  try this (either that, or try and locate the bits I need out of this and try them on my own Squeak vm on my Linux Fedora).

Enough distractions for now, back to Squeak By Example (SBE).

[Francisco A. Lizarralde]

Hi David,

As probably you know, Open Cobalt derives from Croquet and both are
based on Squeak. If you want to learn about Squeak I recommend you
"Squeak by Example" http://squeakbyexample.org/ is a nice book with you
can follow the examples easily.

I have certain background with Small Talk and I'll be very glad to help
you as much as I can.


I'm very interested in learning-experimenting with Open Cobalt too,
preferently running on Linux Platforms.

Please let me know if I can help you in any way.

Best Regards,

Francisco

[David McLure]

Hello Francisco,

Thanks for the tips!  I have also been studying the SqueakByExample tutorial and have begun to be an active poster on the Beginner Squeak mailing list for my Squeak-specific questions & issues (see http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.beginners ).

I have two recommended Smalltalk books on order and I am eagerly awaiting their arrival ( 

http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Smalltalk-Programming-Techniques-Volume/dp/B002PSKAKU

 

and 

http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-Best-Practice-Patterns-Kent/dp/013476904X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345606735&sr=1-1&keywords=kent+beck+smalltalk+best+practices

).

More to come...

Thanks again!

[Francisco A. Lizarralde]

Hi David,

I have these books and both are really good, although the examples are
not based on Squeak, but on a generic Smalltalk (Basically VW and
Smalltalk-80).

Another books I can recommend are,

http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-Objects-Design-Chamond-Liu/dp/1583484906/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1345930685&sr=8-3&keywords=smalltalk+design

and

http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/WithStyle/SmalltalkWithStyle.pdf

the last is available in .pdf for free.

Please take a look at this page,
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html

Enjoy !!!

Cheers,

Francisco

[David McLure]

Very cool!  Thank you!

[Eric Atkinson]

If you could let me know if how to get OpenCobalt installed on Fedora I'd appreciate it.  Currently, I get: [atki4564@localhost opencobalt-1.0alpha21]$ bash cobalt.sh

I cannot find any usable libGL.so.{0123} library. Giving up

Many thanks for you time and consideration, sincerely,

Eric Atkinson

Board Science Secretary

Strategic International Systems LLC

[David McLure]

This is actually something I have been trying to figure out myself.  This kind of seems to work for me, but I am getting a slightly different results.  No apparent errors, and the squeak cobalt.image does seem to come up ok, but nothing seems to work - the entire window seems unresponsive and I end up having to control-c to kill it.  Here are the steps I tried on my Fedora 14 environment :

1. Install the squeak-vm:

$ yum install squeak-vm

2. Download & Unzip the cobalt zip (from http://www.duke.edu/~jd135/downloads/opencobalt-1.0alpha21.zip).

3. cd into the resulting opencobalt-1.0alpha21 directory.

4. Run the cobalt image from squeak:

$ squeak cobalt.image

This is the same basic method I have been successfully using to run the SqueakByExample tutorial, so I am a little surprised that it does not seem to work.  I get the same results on both my Fedora 14, as well as my Fedora 17 systems (both of which run SqueakByExample).

Dave

[John Dougan]

OC does a version check on image startup and if the version web server is down it hangs until the tcp connection attempt times out (I think the timer is 5 minutes). I'll have to look and see why it's down at the moment.

Cheers,

  -- John  

John Dougan
jdo...@acm.org

[John Dougan]

Back up again.

--
John Dougan
jdo...@acm.org

[David McLure]

Still seems to hang the same way when I run it.  I get a dark grey colored squeak box with all of the usual tabs on each side, and a purple colored croquet ball in the lower left corner, but nothing works.

[John Dougan]

Hmmmm....how is OpenGL/Mesa configured?  (and is OpenAL installed?)  It's supposed to detect missing libraries, but Linux distro's differ so much .  Eric? Do you have any idea?

Cheers,

  -- John

[David McLure]

Yeah, not sure I have OpenAL installed yet.. let me try and figure out what this would be in yum-speak.

[David McLure]

I was able to install openal which seemed promising, but alas - still stuck with the same symptoms.

$ yum install openal

[John Dougan]

Can you run any other OpenGl apps?

[David McLure]

I am not sure - I successfully use Gimp all the time, KiCad on occasion, what are some others?

I am currently looking for some sort of opengl test utility to see what I might be missing...

[John Dougan]

I used to use TuxRacer (with HW accel turned on), but that was a long time ago. Eric Gillespie is much more up to date on Linux issues than I am.

Cheers,

  -- John

[David McLure]

I found this opengl test : http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/linux%20opengl%20benchmarks.htm

./videogl64 

./videogl64: error while loading shared libraries: libglut.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Then I tried this link : http://ijayeola.blogspot.com/2011/03/mplayer-issues-libglut.html

yum search glut

yum install freeglut.i686

yum install freeglut

Now I can at least run the ./videogl64 test, although it fails opening the opengl.bmp file (and still no luck with cobalt) :

./videogl64 

  ####################################################

  getDetails and MHz

  Assembler CPUID and RDTSC      

  CPU AuthenticAMD, Features Code 178BFBFF, Model Code 00100F53

  AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 635 Processor

  Measured - Minimum 2900 MHz, Maximum 2900 MHz

  Linux Functions

  get_nprocs() - CPUs 4, Configured CPUs 4

  get_phys_pages() and size - RAM Size  5.60 GB, Page Size 4096 Bytes

  uname() - Linux, skye, 2.6.35.14-106.fc14.x86_64

  #1 SMP Wed Nov 23 13:07:52 UTC 2011, x86_64

  Graphics (command - lspci | grep -i vga > vga.txt)

  VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS880 [Radeon HD 4200]

 ##########################################

 Linux OpenGL Benchmark 64 Bit Version 1, Tue Aug 28 01:18:49 2012

          Running Time Approximately 5 Seconds Each Test

 Window Size  Coloured Objects  Textured Objects  WireFrm  Texture

    Pixels        Few      All      Few      All  Kitchen  Kitchen

  Wide  High      FPS      FPS      FPS      FPS      FPS      FPS

  1920  1080

 Cannot open opengl.bmp file 

 Press Enter

[Eric Atkinson]

I switched to LinuxMint because you don't have to constantly do admin tasks from the admin root terminal like you do in Fedora. I'm still evaluating various alternatives for what I want to do which is create an OpenCobalt "on a stick" P2P-Office-Programming-Commerce-Environment that a 6-year-old can understand how to operate per my software specification here (which most adults can't understand although the math is solid, socioeconomically speaking, so I want to reduce to 6-year-old thinking)  For that, there are two alternatives that I've identified so far, such as etoys (using Squeak-Croquet-OpenCobalt) or possibly Sugarlabs.org (in PHP).  Thanks for the info.

[Eric Gillespie]

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 9:12 PM, David McLure <da...@mclures.net> wrote:

This is actually something I have been trying to figure out myself.  This kind of seems to work for me, but I am getting a slightly different results.  No apparent errors, and the squeak cobalt.image does seem to come up ok, but nothing seems to work - the entire window seems unresponsive and I end up having to control-c to kill it.  Here are the steps I tried on my Fedora 14 environment :

1. Install the squeak-vm:

$ yum install squeak-vm

2. Download & Unzip the cobalt zip (from http://www.duke.edu/~jd135/downloads/opencobalt-1.0alpha21.zip).

3. cd into the resulting opencobalt-1.0alpha21 directory.

4. Run the cobalt image from squeak:

$ squeak cobalt.image

This is the same basic method I have been successfully using to run the SqueakByExample tutorial, so I am a little surprised that it does not seem to work.  I get the same results on both my Fedora 14, as well as my Fedora 17 systems (both of which run SqueakByExample).

Dave

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Eric Atkinson <eric.a...@strategicinternationalsystems.com> wrote:

If you could let me know if how to get OpenCobalt installed on Fedora I'd appreciate it.  Currently, I get: [atki4564@localhost opencobalt-1.0alpha21]$ bash cobalt.sh

I cannot find any usable libGL.so.{0123} library. Giving up

--

Many thanks for you time and consideration, sincerely,

Eric Atkinson

Board Science Secretary

Strategic International Systems LLC

-- 
Many thanks for you time and consideration, sincerely,

Eric Atkinson

Board Science Secretary

Strategic International Systems LLC

Okay, sorry I got onto the bandwagon a bit late with this one. I'm running 64-bit Fedora 17 here, and I note I had to load some 32-bit libraries in addition to my normal 64-bit installs of same. For example, yum install openal-soft.i686 for OpenAL, the same may be true for the OpenGL libraries. I included alsa-lib, pulseaudio, and seemingly quite a few of the common X libraries too. That will probably address most (if not all) of the Open Cobalt loading issues. I got Open Cobalt running mostly fine on 64-bit once I'd done this work.

In reply to David starting up Open Cobalt using Fedora's squeak - good luck with that. I've no idea if the native squeak is actually 64-bit, nor do I know if the platform you execute on is 64-bit or 32-bit. It's also the reason why we ship a VM with the Open Cobalt release. It's just unfortunate that this VM is 32-bit only, at least for Linux.

So. What versions of Fedora are you dealing with, and what are your machine specifications? 64-bit? 32-bit? What video card? What Xorg driver are you using? If you're able to answer all these questions, that'll allow us to see just where things are breaking down.

Regards, The Viking (Dr Smokey)

[David McLure]

Hello Dr.,

Thanks for joining in.  I have two different machines - one running Fedora 14 and one running Fedora 17.  Both are AMD64 based HP boxes with ATI graphics cards.  Their specs are as follows:

Fedora 14:

Model: HP p6677c (desktop)

Processor: AMD Athlon II 635 Quad Core

Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 4200

Fedora 17:

Model: HP p6-2120 (desktop)

Processor: AMD Quad Core A6-3620

Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6530D

I actually started out by trying to run the cobalt.sh in the all in one zip file, but recursively setting chmod +x on the directory, it still dies looking for X11:

./cobalt.sh

Creating libGL.so link in ./bin/i686-pc-linux-gnu using /lib/libGL.so.1

Creating libopenal.so link in ./bin/i686-pc-linux-gnu using /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1

could not find module vm-display-X11

Aborted (core dumped)

Because of this, I resorted early on to yum installing squeak-vm and I am able to run the SqueakByExample just fine on both systems.  Cobalt is another story.  I tried installing a few more things based on your email (still no luck - same hanging symptoms):

yum install freeglut.i686

yum install freeglut

yum install openal-soft.i686

yum install openal

yum install alsa-lib.i686

yum install alsa-lib

yum install pulseaudio (already installed on both)

It seems like maybe I might need to install a 32 bit version of X11 or something - not sure what package(s) that would involve though?  I tried this:

yum whatprovides vm-display-X11

Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit

Adding en_US to language list

Warning: 3.0.x versions of yum would erroneously match against filenames.

 You can use "*/vm-display-X11" and/or "*bin/vm-display-X11" to get that behaviour

No Matches found

[David McLure]

I guess the vm-display-x11 is included in the cobalt zip here:

./bin/i686-pc-linux-gnu/vm-display-X11

...and I can also see the vm-display-X11 which was apparently installed by squeak (trying to hack the cobalt.sh to use this instead with no luck so far):

yum whatprovides */vm-display-X11

Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit

Adding en_US to language list

squeak-vm-3.10.5-5.fc14.x86_64 : The Squeak virtual machine

Repo        : fedora

Matched from:

Filename    : /usr/lib64/squeak/3.10-5/vm-display-X11

squeak-vm-3.10.5-5.fc14.x86_64 : The Squeak virtual machine

Repo        : installed

Matched from:

Filename    : /usr/lib64/squeak/3.10-5/vm-display-X11

[David McLure]

Ha!  Got a little father using the cobalt.sh script.

I noticed that I was "ignoring" some error on libpulsedsp.so, so I did a:

yum whatprovides libpulsedsp.so

...and found that libpulsedsp.so is provided by pulseaudio-utils-0.9.21-7.fc14.i686, so :

yum install pulseaudio-utils-0.9.21-7.fc14.i686

...then I was able to get beyond the hanging on the initial squeak box and made it to an "OpenCobalt Alpha" splash page where I get:

 "Error connecting to OpenAL.  You will not have sound."

So OK, I Continue, then after a wait, I get a red box with a yellow X on it,

I also see a fair number of other "MessageNotUnderstood: UndefinedObject" errors in a popup console, but it looks as though the menus are all basically working now.

I am seeing a lot of these errors in the terminal window where I am running the program:

/home/dav0/vr/oc/opencobalt-1.0alpha21/bin/i686-pc-linux-gnu/SqueakFFIPrims: cannot enable executable stack as shared object requires: Permission denied

..which is odd, since my user unzipped the files into his own directory, so it owns them all already.

[Eric Gillespie]

On 29 August 2012 13:32, David McLure <da...@mclures.net> wrote:

Ha!  Got a little father using the cobalt.sh script.

I noticed that I was "ignoring" some error on libpulsedsp.so, so I did a:

yum whatprovides libpulsedsp.so

...and found that libpulsedsp.so is provided by pulseaudio-utils-0.9.21-7.fc14.i686, so :

yum install pulseaudio-utils-0.9.21-7.fc14.i686

Good. That at least gets audio working, mostly.

 

...then I was able to get beyond the hanging on the initial squeak box and made it to an "OpenCobalt Alpha" splash page where I get:

 "Error connecting to OpenAL.  You will not have sound."

Hm. Weird. Okay.

 

So OK, I Continue, then after a wait, I get a red box with a yellow X on it,

You're seeing the red box with a yellow X in it because Open Cobalt can't open a 3D window... which requires you to also install i686 3d-related libraries. Do you know if you're using the fglrx driver for Fedora 14? I've already found out fglrx is unlikely to work with F17, at least until ATI upgrade the package.

 

I'm called Dr Smokey because I smoke-test releases of Open Cobalt. If there's smoke, it failed. If there's no smoke, I simply haven't kicked it hard enough.

So. I need to get back to my computer in about eight hours time and generate a list of the files I installed to get this working on F17.

Cheers, The Viking (Dr Smokey)

[Eric Atkinson]

I realize this isn't java (the language I'm most familiar with), but in java we have something called WebStart, which when clicked as a web page link, automatically downloads all necessary files regardless of what OS you are using because it downloads the proper VM (for that OS), plus whatever else is needed, and then automatically updates the app every time you run it (assuming an internet connection). Is there anything like this in the OpenCobalt-Croquet-Squeak-Smalltalk world? 

I only ask because I intend to use my specification here to organize children for e-commerce as their parent's "consumption purchasing officer" (that is, for a simple $80 weekly grocery purchase, like bread, etc, on their parent's behalf, but at wholesale prices in virtual market combination, using OpenCobalt, with 50,000 other children locally). Why? Because a neighborhood of parents can't say "no" to their children if, for example, their 6-year-old is offering wholesale groceries at lower prices than their parent can get at the local grocery store, plus free home delivery, right? 

However, since it will possibly be a 6-years-old doing an OpenCobalt install, then I'll need something like WebStart for OpenCobalt because giving them "install instructions" for a million different OSs (these days) is a non-starter. 

So, what I want to create first is an OpenCobalt OS; that is, a "fork" off a "stable and good" OS, like Linux Mint, and then whenever somebody says, I'd like OpenCobalt, please, (such as 50,000 6-year-olds), we can say to the child (or non-tech adult): "Save whatever files you want to keep on your "USB stick" first, and then do our one-click install of the OpenCobalt OS (which includes everything pre-configured). That way, if I've got 50,000 kids who need an install, it's a one-click deal on your OpenCobalt OS install web page, right? So, I don't think there is an OpenCobalt OS yet, but is there a WebStart somewhere in the OpenCobalt-Croquet-Squeak-Smalltalk world as a starting point?

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[Carlos Crosetti]

Eric, I am familiar with Java WebStart. i dont think thet at this time OC has a feature like that, but I recall that a "lightweight OC" with such a feature was mentioned in this forum some time ago.

 

I suggest you to go the squeakland.org Etoys (specialized Squeak VM) that has something similar to Java WebStart, demanding a preloaded Etoys VM install, so projects are loaded on demand by clicking them from a web page.

 

Regards, Carlos

----- Original Message -----

From: Eric Atkinson

To: openc...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2012 7:17 PM

Subject: Re: [Open Cobalt Group] Re: Newbie Learning Group for Open Cobalt

[David McLure]

That's an interesting idea Eric.  A preconfigured thumbdrive would be easy enough to physically distribute - assuming you are able to provide enough variations on there to cover all of the possible hardware configurations out there.

I have actually been trying a slightly different approach which is in some ways a kind of throwback to the 1980's: getting the OpenCobalt environment running on one server, and then running remote X11 sessions to that server.  Running it this way, all I need to do is to get Cobalt running on the central (and/or Cloud) server(s), and then all I need on the user's machine is an X11 server and Openssh.

Here are the two configurations I have been successfully using so far for Squeak anyway (I am still fine tuning OpenCobalt on my server, but once I get that working on my server, this too should work for all of my users the same way): 

Server (ocserver with two user accounts: user1 and user2 - each with their own OC images)

User1 running on Linux

$ export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0

$ xhost +ocserver

$ ssh -XC user1@ocserver /bin/squeak /home/user1/vr/oc/opencobalt-1.0alpha21/cobalt.image

User2 running on Windows (needs Cygwin installed with X11 and Openssh)

Start Programs-> Run Cygwin

$ startx

$ export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0

$ xhost +ocserver

$ ssh -YC user2@ocserver /bin/squeak /home/user2/vr/oc/opencobalt-1.0alpha21/cobalt.image

I have yet to test running this from a Mac client, but that will be my next experiment.

[Francisco A. Lizarralde]

Hi All,

I'm using OC on Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bits) and Windows 7.

Since yesterday I'm trying the new alpha21 version and 3D acceleration
and OpenAl sound, works great in boths platforms.

I wonder if there are some people using OC on Linux too who want to
share their experiences.

I'll try to help as much as I can.

Cheers,

Francisco

[David McLure]

I have a couple of corrections to my previous instructions (I realized that my earlier instructions included the obsolete -insecure-  DISPLAY setting.  Also, I wanted to  use the 'Y' instead of 'X' switch on the Linux command).  Plus, I have now successfully tested a MAC client, so I can add this as well to the mix.

Here once again, is the setup for three client users running remotely to a single  server (ocserver) which is configured to run various OpenCobalt images.

1. OpenCobalt Server (hostname = "ocserver") with three user accounts: user1, user2, and user3 - each with their own working OC images.

2. Client User1 running on Linux

(needs X11Forwarding turned on in /etc/ssh/ssh_config)

$ xhost +ocserver
$ ssh -XC user1@ocserver /bin/squeak /home/user1/vr/oc/opencobalt-1.0alpha21/cobalt.image

3. Client User2 running on Windows

(using Cygwin installed with X11, Openssh, and X11Forwarding turned on)

Start Programs-> Run Cygwin

$ startx

$ xhost +ocserver

$ ssh -YC user2@ocserver /bin/squeak /home/user2/vr/oc/opencobalt-1.0alpha21/cobalt.image

4. Client User3 running on MAC OS X
(needs X11Forwarding turned on in /private/etc/sshd_config)

Run X11 application (in Utilities folder)
$ xhost +ocserver

$ ssh -YC user3@ocserver /bin/squeak /home/user3/vr/oc/opencobalt-1.0alpha21/cobalt.image

-----

Note: this only demonstrates how to get three different types of users up and running an OpenCobalt image quickly using X11Forwarding - further steps would be needed to allow them to actually interact with each other in virtual reality.

More info on X11Forwarding:

1. on Linux:
See http://www.linux-tip.net/cms/content/view/302/26/

2. on Windows/Cygwin:
See http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/cygwin-x-faq.html#q-ssh-no-x11forwarding

3. on MAC OS X:
See http://dyhr.com/2009/09/05/how-to-enable-x11-forwarding-with-ssh-on-mac-os-x-leopard

[Darius Clarke]

Hi Eric, 

Keep in mind that the 3D part of OpenCobalt depends on OpenGL which depends on the graphics card for accelerating the 3D graphics to an acceptable speed, of which a server only has one graphics card. I'm not sure if you'll be sharing just one perspective, but I imagine you'd really want to leverage every client's graphics engine. OpenCobal/OpenCroquet's strength is really in how it's designed to be peer to peer. Or, are you having one server per one client, with servers peer to peer?

Cheers, 
Darius

________________

[Francisco A. Lizarralde]

Hi David,

I think that one main distinction of Open Cobalt from other 3D-Virtual
Environments like Second Life or OpenSim is that Open Cobalt is
decentralized, because it uses a Peer to Peer communication protocol.

If you use OC only like a server to serve remote machines using X11
sessions, I think this feature would be wasted.

Cheers,

Francisco

[Eric Atkinson]

I'm currently at the "squeak by example" stage of understanding OpenCobalt programming. However, yes, definitely want "to leverage" not only "every client's graphics engine" but processor as well. Why? Because my specification envisions generational internet legislatures of 50,000 friends (or virtual towns), beginning with 6-year-old children as the "lead-salesperson-students". Consequently, the system needs to distribute data, processing, and communications (plus back-up) across all 50,000 clients using a 14-step chain of command (defined in spec above). That's a lot of clients even when divided into a chain of command; which, in turn, is why I'm evaluating OpenCobalt, because it's "peer-to-peer power" (as you put it) seems to be the only software can handle the P2P collaboration of 50,000 "young" clients running a real-time town e-market. Most importantly, they need to do this massive collaboration in an inexpensive non-central-server way (except for some very limited e-collaboration between towns, cities, states, nations, regions, and the world); all of which OpenCobalt seems to provide (from my current very limited understanding)

As for hardware, ideally, OpenCobalt would need to be fine-tuned to run on the "one laptop per child" XO-3 (which currently costs less than $100). Given various public/private charities, XO-3 would then be distributed to 50,000 child users at a time as the "minimum" hardware needed to run OpenCobalt OS, similar to the "sugar on a stick" application; that is, on the previous XO laptops running fedora) However, I don't like fedora's "no-non-free" mantra because that doesn't work well for a child e-commerce environment). In any event, I don't know if the XO-3 hardware can handle OpenCobalt, but it's probably can; if not, I need to figure out an upgraded XO-3 (or XO-3-OC) for a price still under $100. In turn, if OpenCobalt can be fine-tuned to run on an XO-3-OC without a problem, then all other higher-grade hardware (for adults, including whatever higher-grade graphics cards they're running) should be a snap, right?

[Eric Gillespie]

On 31 August 2012 06:40, Eric Atkinson <eric.a...@strategicinternationalsystems.com> wrote:

I'm currently at the "squeak by example" stage of understanding OpenCobalt programming. However, yes, definitely want "to leverage" not only "every client's graphics engine" but processor as well. Why? Because my specification envisions generational internet legislatures of 50,000 friends (or virtual towns), beginning with 6-year-old children as the "lead-salesperson-students". Consequently, the system needs to distribute data, processing, and communications (plus back-up) across all 50,000 clients using a 14-step chain of command (defined in spec above). That's a lot of clients even when divided into a chain of command; which, in turn, is why I'm evaluating OpenCobalt, because it's "peer-to-peer power" (as you put it) seems to be the only software can handle the P2P collaboration of 50,000 "young" clients running a real-time town e-market. Most importantly, they need to do this massive collaboration in an inexpensive non-central-server way (except for some very limited e-collaboration between towns, cities, states, nations, regions, and the world); all of which OpenCobalt seems to provide (from my current very limited understanding)

As for hardware, ideally, OpenCobalt would need to be fine-tuned to run on the "one laptop per child" XO-3 (which currently costs less than $100). Given various public/private charities, XO-3 would then be distributed to 50,000 child users at a time as the "minimum" hardware needed to run OpenCobalt OS, similar to the "sugar on a stick" application; that is, on the previous XO laptops running fedora) However, I don't like fedora's "no-non-free" mantra because that doesn't work well for a child e-commerce environment). In any event, I don't know if the XO-3 hardware can handle OpenCobalt, but it's probably can; if not, I need to figure out an upgraded XO-3 (or XO-3-OC) for a price still under $100. In turn, if OpenCobalt can be fine-tuned to run on an XO-3-OC without a problem, then all other higher-grade hardware (for adults, including whatever higher-grade graphics cards they're running) should be a snap, right?

The XO-3 seems to use an ARM SoC (System-on-Chip) setup. The 3D component of Open Cobalt  requires a OpenGL-1.4 (preferably 2.x) to talk to. Roughly speaking, you'd probably need to tick off the following options:

• Is there a squeak binary for the platform, or can one be compiled for it?
• Can the Armada 610 provide the level of OpenGL compliance that Open Cobalt uses? From preliminary reading, it seems to tick this box.
• Is 512 Mb or 1 Gb of memory enough to load in a collaborative environment such as Open Cobalt, with its higher memory requirements for 3d representations of objects, and still run the core functions of the device?

Be aware I'm uninformed on many of the other features of the XO-3, I'm only working off what I've read in product docs so far.

[Carlos Crosetti]

David, this is a cool recipe, I vote for sending this srecipe into the OC website.

 

Carlos

 

----- Original Message -----

From: David McLure

To: openc...@googlegroups.com

[David McLure]

Darius and Francisco,

Thanks for pointing out that the heavy OpenGL driver, as well as the peer to peer architecture of OpenCobalt is not necessarily going to work very well with the X11Forwarding strategy I am using.

I had found that the X11Forwarding strategy primarily seemed useful for my SqueakByExample setup - simply because I would only need to monkey around with getting one system configured with all of the various software pieces I needed to run the environment - then I could just connect to it "in the cloud" from whereever on whatever client system I happened to be working on at the time.

It was based around this ease of installation motivator that got me trying to extend the same philosophy to my OC setup as well, but now I am finding that what kind of works locally for OC doesn't necessarily work remotely the same way - probably because of OpenGL driver issues over the X11Forwarding.  Meanwhile, SqueakByExample still works fine remotely, so I will continue to at least use it for that if nothing else and I assume there are also other Squeak use cases which might also benefit from this X11Forwarding strategy; it never hurts to tinker.

Carlos, feel free to share this recipe if you want, but look for the more recent email I sent out with the corrections (let me know if you can't find it and I can resend it to you directly).

Thanks,

Dave

[arko]

Hi,
I need help too, I have to make lesson plan( what object is not important): "How the Open Cobalt helps at school"
Best wishes,
Aron

On Friday, February 24, 2012 1:00:12 PM UTC+1, Friend wrote:

Hi,

I'm new to Open Cobalt and I really want to understand how Open Cobalt
works. Since there is not much documentation around, I want to invite
all interested persons to join me in the effort to master Open Cobalt:

- How to use the software and create new worlds
- Understanding the software coding
- Learning to manipulate the code to contribute to the project

If you are interested, please get in contact with me:
loveol...@googlemail.com

It would be of great help, if also some experienced Open Cobalt
wizards come forward to help us a little. I say thank you to all who
consider it :)

You all take care,
Friend

[Francisco A. Lizarralde]

Hi all,

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bits) and when I tried to run openCobalt, I
got this message


/usr/bin/padsp: 88: exec: ./bin/i686-pc-linux-gnu/squeak: not found


Previously I create the necesary links to OpenGl and OpenAl, I think
this could be related with "padsp", but I can't figure why squeak-vm is
not found.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Francisco

[anthony astor leaman]

Hi,
 
Mission control informs me that ..
 
Countdown has begun..

Thanks for all your help.

Just to let you know ..if you don't hear from me ever again ..

 http://hihowru.com/the-virtual-universe-grid/

Best Wishes,

Tony leaman.
 

---

From: soci...@gmail.com
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2012 09:57:10 -0700

Subject: Re: [Open Cobalt Group] Re: Newbie Learning Group for Open Cobalt

To: openc...@googlegroups.com

[Carlos Crosetti]

Whay I se from the link in the latest message is a blog, Tony, pleaase can you elaborate your message further? What do you mean with "countdown"? Thanks, Carlos

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[anthony astor leaman]

Hi ! Carlos,

So sorry, message intended for other ..please ignore or click the link..

Tony leaman.

---

Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 18:02:04 -0300
Subject: Re: [Open Cobalt Group] RE: Mission to the Moon !!Group for Open Cobalt
From: carlos....@gmail.com
To: openc...@googlegroups.com