Re: [Sugar-devel] [Testing] Fwd: Testing summary - 30 May 2009: Wellington NZ
On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 21:16, Bert Freudenberg b...@freudenbergs.de wrote: On 30.05.2009, at 00:21, Tomeu Vizoso wrote: On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 03:30, Tabitha Roder tabi...@hrdnz.com wrote: There are 3 bridge applications consuming 1/3 of the cpu each: Bert, is this someone you would be interested in looking at? I think your confusing me with someone else ... I have no stake in the bridge activity. Sorry, I confused FreeCell with Bridge =) Regards, Tomeu ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] HTML Canvas performance in the Browse activity
On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 18:48, Mihai Sucan mihai.su...@gmail.com wrote: Hello everyone! I am Mihai Sucan, and I am working over the summer to develop and integrate a paint tool [1] into Moodle. [2] I am also involved in doing performance testing on the XO laptop. Thanks a lot for your nice work untangling this mess. I'm forwarding this email to sugar-devel because I guess you want the Sugar developers be aware of this. Let me ask you a couple of questions: - which version(s) of Sugar targets your project? - already have an idea about how are going to be deployed any modifications that result from this? Thanks, Tomeu HTML 5 [3] has a new Canvas element [4] which provides an API for bitmap drawing operations on a bidimensional surface. Rendering is generally quite fast on desktop Web browsers, and it requires no plugins like Flash or Java. = The problem = On the XO OS 8.2.x, and probably on older versions, HTML Canvas performance is most often very slow because the default Browse activity is configured to scale pages. Typically, pages are rendered using 96 DPI in Web browsers, but on the XO the browser renders the pages using 134 DPI. This ensures the text and images are still readable - otherwise they'd be far too small because the XO display [5] has a high DPI resolution. Nonetheless, scaling images up is quite slow - the high-quality bilinear filter is used. This impacts the overall performance of the browser and moreso the performance of the Canvas element. The Browse activity uses the xulrunner package [6], which contains the Gecko layout engine [7] version 1.9.0 (the same as in Firefox 3.0). Users can change the DPI used for rendering a page by going to about:config, where they can modify the layout.css.dpi value. Yet, Hulahop includes some piece of puzzling code [8] which always resets the layout.css.dpi configuration value to 134. The xulrunner package includes a patch [9] which alters the page scaling logic [10] in Gecko. This patch makes a simple, yet important change to how the DPI config value is used for scaling the page being rendered. A normal Gecko build only scales pages using an integer scaling factor, but on the XO the scaling factor can also be a floating-point number. This means that a normal Gecko build uses a scale factor of 1 for DPI 192, and a scale factor of 2 for 192 = DPI = 288, and so on. = Patches = Gecko 1.9.1 includes a patch [11] which adds a new config option layout.css.devPixelsPerPx. This allows OLPC to configure the browser such that physical units render properly scaled using the correct DPI value, but not the CSS pixel values. CSS pixels could be equal to device pixels - they would all render small, but much faster. Another Gecko patch worth being noted is the CSS image-rendering property support [12]. This would allow Web developers to tell Gecko to use nearest-neighbour instead of bilinear interpolation for the scaling of elements. = Solutions = The XO browser has two problems actually: 1) performance issue caused by scaling everything up; 2) the difference in the scaling logic from a normal Gecko build. Problem 1: Having everything render using 96 DPI is not acceptable - pages would be unreadable. I would suggest that Gecko on the XO scales images using a faster algorithm instead of the bilinear one. It would also be interesting to experiment with the new layout.css.devPixelsPerPx configuration set to 1. Maybe hardware acceleration in newer XOs? Problem 2: Keeping the current 134 DPI value would always require Gecko to be patched, thus making it different from other Gecko builds. Maybe the browser could use 200 DPI? Perhaps pages would render too big. A different line of thought would be: why complain about problem 2? I mean, Web developers are not supposed to be tinkering with DPI in their Web pages - it's the problem of the browser. As a Web developer I do not mind about problem 2 if problem 1 is fixed. Problem 2 is important only when trying to work around problem 1. = Work around = It's simple: you need to scale down the Canvas element such that Gecko cancels the scaling. However, you need to find out the DPI used for rendering the page. You can do this only by using CSS 3 Media Queries [13]. Gecko has support for floating-point pixel values, so there's nothing to worry about values being floating-point numbers. The work around I came up with is described at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/HTML_canvas_performance#Work_around This work-around is not ideal simply because it would be best if the Browse activity would be faster by default. What do you guys think? Is there something that can be done? The performance improvement is far from being marginal when the work-around is used. Sorry for this lengthy email. ;) (I have posted this on the wiki as well for further reference to others who need help with Canvas on the XO) References: [1]
[Sugar-devel] Sugar on suse and virtualised appliances to cheat network connectivity
So, this Sunday marks a special day for us openSUSE folks, as we've now managed to get pretty much every activity behaving, including the underlying journaling and collaboration. We've got more than 50 activities packaged and included in the live cd/usb/dvd/virtual appliance. By using the incredible flexibility and power that oBS gives us, with just 2 people working on this project, we've managed move forwards fast and efficiently. So we are proud to announce that you can download the latest releases here: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Education/images/ As you can see, the main directory contains .vmdk virtual appliances which have been tested to run on both Vitualbox (Sun's free virtual container system) as well as vmware and its host of virtualisation software. Advantages to running an appliance include bypassing wireless/wired network card drivers as the host can really be running pretty much anything from OSX to Windows. This will also be a way to get Sugar running on any Mac regardless, and pretty much and hardware. Its also a good way to run sugar on ed/ubuntu and debian based systems. Though a tad slower than on a native system (running without virtualisation), the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages. In the iso subdirectory you can find pure sugar or the full openSUSE-edu suite, containing a good 2.4 gigs of educational material including an icon to launch sugar directly from the desktop, a live LTSP system, iTalc, and a host of other interesting software. For more information on virtualisation, vmware, virtualbox and how to get sugar working within these environments have a look here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VMware Currently the only application not running is Read, which requires some updated GDK stuff from gnome 2.26, which is currently not entirely working with Sugar on openSUSE, but within the next weeks we should be able to resolve this. We are searching for more activities to include, as well as, seeing what we can do artistically at the different stages such as booting up, session manager, etc. Currently we automatically get the system to join the sugarlabs ejabberd server for collaboration, and after testing quite a few applications we can confidently say this works quite well. So its nice to see openSUSE being one of the more advanced Sugar environments now... seeing as a couple of weeks ago we had a very broken environment kind Regards, David Van Assche www.nubae.com ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Sugar on suse and virtualised appliances to cheat network connectivity
On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 12:41 PM, David Van Assche dvanass...@gmail.com wrote: So, this Sunday marks a special day for us openSUSE folks, as we've now managed to get pretty much every activity behaving, including the underlying journaling and collaboration. We've got more than 50 activities packaged and included in the live cd/usb/dvd/virtual appliance. By using the incredible flexibility and power that oBS gives us, with just 2 people working on this project, we've managed move forwards fast and efficiently. So we are proud to announce that you can download the latest releases here: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Education/images/ As you can see, the main directory contains .vmdk virtual appliances which have been tested to run on both Vitualbox (Sun's free virtual container system) as well as vmware and its host of virtualisation software. Very Cool! Although Sugar on Sugar on Suse in VirtualBox on my netbook got a little slow But, it still seemed snappier than XP on the same machine once I set up an anti-virus package. Advantages to running an appliance include bypassing wireless/wired network card drivers as the host can really be running pretty much anything from OSX to Windows. Yep, let the parent OS worry about the hardware, let the VM worry about the container, and let Sugar worry about helping kids learn. This will also be a way to get Sugar running on any Mac regardless, and pretty much and hardware. Its also a good way to run sugar on ed/ubuntu and debian based systems. Though a tad slower than on a native system (running without virtualisation), the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages. In the iso subdirectory you can find pure sugar or the full openSUSE-edu suite, containing a good 2.4 gigs of educational material including an icon to launch sugar directly from the desktop, a live LTSP system, iTalc, and a host of other interesting software. For more information on virtualisation, vmware, virtualbox and how to get sugar working within these environments have a look here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VMware Can you or one of the Sugar on Suse team update the rest of the download links on wiki.sl.org thanks david Currently the only application not running is Read, which requires some updated GDK stuff from gnome 2.26, which is currently not entirely working with Sugar on openSUSE, but within the next weeks we should be able to resolve this. We are searching for more activities to include, as well as, seeing what we can do artistically at the different stages such as booting up, session manager, etc. Currently we automatically get the system to join the sugarlabs ejabberd server for collaboration, and after testing quite a few applications we can confidently say this works quite well. So its nice to see openSUSE being one of the more advanced Sugar environments now... seeing as a couple of weeks ago we had a very broken environment kind Regards, David Van Assche www.nubae.com ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) i...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] [RELEASE] Labyrinth-7
Hi folks, Latest version of Labyrinth, fresh out of the oven. == Source == http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/honey/Labyrinth/Labyrinth-7.tar.bz2 == Bundle == http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4078/ == Wiki page == http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Labyrinth == News == * Now supports Keep to PDF (Keep to PDF can be found under the Keep button), so you can now upload PDFs of your maps for non-Sugar users to view, or transfer them for easy printing. * Includes all the latest available language files, that covers at least Spanish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Kinyarwanda, Tamil, and I'm sure many more (it's hard to see the full list). Happy mind-mapping (tested on both XO-1 with 0.82, and sugar-jhbuild 0.84)! Regards, --Gary ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] HTML Canvas performance in the Browse activity
On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 9:12 PM, Mihai Sucan mihai.su...@gmail.com wrote: - which version(s) of Sugar targets your project? I am not intimate with the development cycle and work-flow of the OLPC XO. I learned sufficiently to see it's Fedora Core-based, and that Sugar is becoming distro agnostic. Thus, my answer is simply limited to my current usage of the XO. I want PaintWeb to work well on the OLPC XO-1 laptop, with the latest stable OS release (that's 8.2.1). That's a F-9 + Sugar 0.82. Tomeu is currently working on Sugar 0.84, which is being build polished into Sugar-on-a-Stick (F-11+Sugar 0.84.x). Sugar-on-a-Stick can boot (slowly) from a USB stick on an XO. It'd be interesting to see what performance it gets. My guess is that xulrunner isn't patched in SoaS, but Hulahop probably is the mostly the same as on XO OS 8.2.1. - already have an idea about how are going to be deployed any modifications that result from this? The modifications resulting from this work are already deployed into PaintWeb. You can try the last working SVN trunk snapshot at: http://www.robodesign.ro/paintweb/trunk/src/paintweb.html And PaintWeb will be deployed as part of Moodle in the the XS. I've asked Mihai to make sure that PW can work with XO OS 8.2.1 as it is. If future Sugar or XO OS improve the behaviour of gecko in this area, fantastic. But for now, it has a workaround that works great. Hopefully these notes will help (a) get a better fix for the scaling issue and (b) implement workarounds in webapps that want to run with 8.2.1 :-) cheers, m -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] Collaborative game using Etoys
On 31.05.2009, at 19:40, Martin Bleichner wrote: Hello, I am trying to implement a (kind of) social science experiment, and would like to do that in squeak/etoys. For that I would like to connect four computers. On each computer you see a shared screen. Each user can manipulate one aspect on that screen. More specifically: There is one ball in the center of the screen. Each of the users can move the ball in only one direction (up, down, left or right). They control the ball together. I was pointed to this mailinglist for help. Is something like this possible? What would I need for it? I would really appreciate some help. Put it simple, I use etoys for a reason :) Thanks. If you only intend to run this under Sugar (which was not clear when you asked on the squeak-dev list) then the Telepathy D-Bus Tubes using the Squeak DBus bindings should be the simplest way to implement collaboration: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Almanac/Shared_Sugar_Activities - Bert - ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Status Report Remaining Items
Hi folks, I thought it might be a good idea to summarize where we're now regarding the upcoming SoaS for LinuxTag in June. So what are the remaining issues for this release? * All activities need to be updated and working (#607). Those which don't work by June 10 will be taken out from release. - Currently, there seem to be sound issues with TamTam - Develop is reported to return a keep error when closing Here is the list of included activities in the wiki: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Roadmap#Activities This is important: Some activities also need to be updated by their Fedora Package Maintainer. A reminder has been sent out earlier: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-olpc-list/2009-May/msg00087.html * The boot screens needs to be updated (#709). Christian, Eben, Gary and Sean had already some great discussion on this. Progress is being tracked here: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Marketing_Team/Boot_Logo * We need to get a keyboard panel in the control panel (#720). Martin has committed code for that, which now needs to be picked for Sugar. * The mouse pointer seems to be disappearing on some VIA hardware (#730). This has been reported (RHBZ #491083) and also been fixed upstream. A new RPM will be included once being pushed. * If we're lucky, we can even brand the boot helper, but that's probably not a blocker (#741). All tickets for LinuxTag (even though some of them might need to be moved around) can be seen here: http://www.tinyurl.com/soas-linuxtag And for all bugs filed against SoaS: http://www.tinyurl.com/soas-tickets Most of the listed issues have already been assigned, so it looks like we're in rather good shape. If you've any feature or package you want to get in for this release, please request it immediately. Let's make this an awesome release! Thanks for all the work testing, --Sebastian ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] modifications to schoolserver.py and ds-backup.py
Hello, I have been testing SoaS and implemented a couple of modificaitons to schoolserver.py and ds-backup.py that basically .. - enable an SoaS to register with an XS - read the registration info in order to allow backup/restore with the XS the SoaS is registered with I would like to kindly ask how I can get the modifications reviewed by the group and into the release build. Should I open a ticket with the files attached ? Thanks, Hamilton Chua ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
[Sugar-devel] Unbootable machine
Hello Peter Jeremy, I've found an ordinary desktop PC (with Phoenix Award BIOS 6.00PG) that won't boot off a USB stick created by livecd-tools-024 with syslinux (tested both versions 3.75 and 3.81). The boot process drops to the boot: prompt with an error message: could not find kernel image: linux The same USB stick boots fine on any other computer I could find. Does it seem like a syslinux bug? And if turns out to be a known BIOS bug, is there a good workaround? -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
