[xotoaster:14] May 4th Update on Toaster project

[Grant Bowman]

Alex, Sameer and I are finding a good time to meet every week to keep
things moving forward. 6:00 today we are meeting in IRC initially in
a friend's freenode.net IRC channel and perhaps later in a channel we
register. Once we agree on a regular time and channel I'll reply with
those details. The learning curves are fairly steep for development
of this type but we'll help each other out in climbing them.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Toaster has links to all other
project related resources.

My initial thought is to focus on the UI code and basic install and
uninstall code going. There are significant learning curves we need
to climb just to get our development and test environments setup. The
UI development has some documentation and will help us understand the
sugar environment and development requirements. I looked at the code
of other activities to come up with the python code now in the git
repository but it doesn't install or run yet. Work on the UI will
allow anyone with an emulated sugar environment to help out. An icon
better than the one I borrowed from http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ruler
aka. http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon-4192/ will need
to be created. Translations need to get started at some point though
we probably won't have a large number of strings to worry about.

There are many hardware and packaging issues we will have to deal with
since Sugar Activities do not allow the use of yum to install packages
like the CD burner software wodim. We can't even assume we are
running on XO hardware though that is our primary target hardware
platform since Toaster may be used with Sugar on a Stick! We will
soon have to get into the issues of installing Toaster on F9 and F11
based XO builds. Install and uninstall of Activities is all done via
the Browse activity. We will probably have to package and distribute
at least one wodim binary and any other software we need with the
Toaster activity. Testing is more difficult due to the need for
compatible USB CD-ROM burners and USB sticks. Work on these items can
be done in parallel with the UI development.

So it's early going but we are getting started. Many thanks to OLPC
for approving the project and providing three XO 1.5 laptops to test
with.

Happy early Cinco de Mayo,

Grant