scratch team mailing list archive

[Bert Freudenberg <bert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10.02.2010, at 14:55, Derek O'Connell wrote

> On 10/02/2010 19:31, Amos Blanton wrote:
>> Re: other distros. I have heard a few requests for a Red Hat compatible
>> version. I think the next generation OLPC will have a RH based OS?

Even the current OLPC generation is based on that. The VM Scratch is using comes from an RPM.

>>  I was
>> thinking of trying "Alien" package converter (from deb -> rpm) to see if
>> that would be a good solution. I asked a few community members to try it but
>> haven't heard back.

Not a solution for OLPC running Sugar, which requires its activities to be packaged as a ".xo" bundle. You would only need an RPM if you want to run this under a different UI than Sugar (e.g. Gnome, which the XO 1.5 supports in addition to Sugar).

> Alien should work but it's a long time since I touched Red Hat or
> derivatives so I'm not sure what is included in their std distribution
> or if they follow the Linux Standards Base (for file locations at least,
> probably do). The low dependency of the Squeak VM means problems on RH
> should be relatively easy to fix.

See above. Squeak VM is packaged already.

> More generally, wouldn't targeting Debian itself have the best chance of
> being pushed to a wider audience since most distro's are derivatives of
> Debian?

I was surprised you targeted Ubuntu, indeed. 
> 
>> To sum up, supporting other Linux distros would be great, but the primary
>> goal is plain old Ubuntu. But if Gstreamer made it possible to hook into
>> lots of other options, so much the better.
>> 
> 
> GStreamer is on the top of my list for alternatives with the caveat that
> it may not avoid PA/ALSA problems (but as we agree looks better
> maintained and hopefully will). I have not looked very deep yet but it
> looks like other alternatives, such as libao, mainly only deal with
> playback not recording. Ideally any viable alternative comes as
> standard, in Ubuntu at least. Not sure if libSDL satisfies that criteria
> but I will check that also. I don't suppose adding a dependency will be
> a big deal if it eradicates sounds issues once and for all... well at
> least for my lifetime ;-)

For Etoys we use PA's OSS emulation which works much better than using PA itself.

GStreamer is not really meant to be used for generated sound. It's more of a media decoding framework. That's what John McIntosh's GStreamer plugin for Squeak does.

As for DBus, I made a changeset that makes it work in current Scratch. It's part of my sugarization work. What would you need it for though?

> You mentioned previously about utilising mainstream VM, is there any
> progress or plan for that? Is the Scratch plug-in going to be pushed
> upstream?

You need to communicate with the VM maintainers about that. Also read this thread:

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2009-September/003182.html

- Bert -