Re: Karna on XO
Bryan Berry
> Hello Pablo,
>
> I'll reply to you as best I can, but I've only run karma activities in
> firefox 3.6 and chrome.
>
> On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 9:07 AM, Pablo Moleri <pmo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm Pablo Moleri member of ceibalJAM! / Uruguay. We're very interested in
>> Karma, in particular we are evaluating it for a project that includes
>> lessons, Pablo Flores talk about it some time ago with Bryan Berry and he
>> pointed us to you.
>>
>> Here is the problem, in Uruguay all the XO laptops run Fedora Core 9 with
>> Firefox 3.0.0, which lacks html5 support. I looked at the karma2.xo, with
>> firefox 3.5 bundled, but it even removing the examples its size is more than
>> 10MB. We can't afford to have this base size.
I don't know if the latest version of Browse is based on Firefox 3.5
or 3.6. You should be able to update to a newer version of Browse in
order to run the Karma lessons. There may be a way to invoke the
installed Browse to launch the Karma lessons but I am not sure exactly
how.
Tomeu Vizoso (cc'd) should know how to do that.
Launching karma lessons using the installed version of Browse would
require reorganizing the Karma bundle
> That is a bummer. Here are some things you could try:
>
> Is there any chance that it would be possible to upgrade to a more
> recent version of Fedora (they are at version 13)? You will probably
> have more and more problems in the future that software you want to
> use is no longer running on Fedora core 9. I know it is only 2 years
> old, but that is a long time in the browser world.
>
> Can you replace Firefox 3.0.0 with Firefox 3.6 on Fedora 9?
I imagine so but haven't tested it
> You could probably reduce the size of firefox a bit more by building a
> custom version from source, without e.g. upgrader, plugin support
> etc., but I have no experience with that.
>
> You could try chrome, but I don't know if it will be any smaller.
It would be more than small amount of work to get chrome running on
the XO. I do know that Lucian lastname? is working on a webkit-based
Browse as a GSoC project
>> Then I looked at Surf activity and managed to bundle the required libraries
>> in less than 5MB, but I couldn't run all the demos. I suppose some karma
>> features require more html5 support than others. Is there any documentation
>> about which features are runnable in older browsers and which ones requires
>> more modern engines?
Surf isn't stable
Anything w/ animation or audio won't work w/ anything less than firefox 3.5
> There is no documentation on which features require html5 support: I
> can think of the support for canvas, video and svg, but I'm not sure.
> The best way is to try it and see what works and what doesn't. In the
> future we want to start supporting more dynamic content with
> animations and that will probably also require a recent
> standards-compliant browser.
>
>> Do you think it could be any other way to run Karma in our XOs?
>
> I don't immediately see any other way. Maybe Bryan has some ideas...
>
> Regards,
> Peter
>
Pablo Moleri
Upgrading Fedora isn't a desicion we can make, but we know that CITS (former Ceibal) is working to upgrade to Fedora 11 following Paraguay's initiative. The problem is that we are not sure how soon will this be. We don't expect anything to be backported to FC9, I was just asking for tips about what can we do.
> Can you replace Firefox 3.0.0 with Firefox 3.6 on Fedora 9?
I imagine so but haven't tested it
> You could try chrome, but I don't know if it will be any smaller.
It would be more than small amount of work to get chrome running on
the XO. I do know that Lucian lastname? is working on a webkit-based
Browse as a GSoC project
That's great news. I'm trying to build WebKit for FC9, if that succeeds it could be another solution. Webkit is smaller and faster than Firefox.
Anything w/ animation or audio won't work w/ anything less than firefox 3.5
Sorry about my poor English.
Regards,
Pablo Moleri
Pablo Moleri
> You could try chrome, but I don't know if it will be any smaller.It would be more than small amount of work to get chrome running on
the XO. I do know that Lucian lastname? is working on a webkit-based
Browse as a GSoC project
That's great news. I'm trying to build WebKit for FC9, if that succeeds it could be another solution. Webkit is smaller and faster than Firefox.
graphics manipulation in particular are much faster in webkit
This is important. ¿What about Webkit / Chromium? ¿Are there any restrictions?Anything w/ animation or audio won't work w/ anything less than firefox 3.5
I don't know which particular build # of webkit or chromium where the features we need are implemented. Every version of chromium I have ever used supports html5 audio and <canvas>. I have been using chromium for about 18 months
That's good news. I tried several of the karma examples, with different browsers, Firefox, Chromium and other Webkit based browsers and I think Chromium is the most reliable.
When I tried Karma demos (from website) with Webkit (2.1.0) browsers in mi Ubuntu 10.04, some of the demos hung, but with Chromium they worked ok. Then I tried the demos from git repository and those worked ok in most browsers.
Regards,
Pablo Moleri
Pablo Moleri
As an aside, I know it's nothing that will help you in the immediate
future, but if you could file bugs to webkit and firefox for the
examples that don't work, it will help a lot the future of educational
content in html5.
Regards,
Pablo