Documentation Team
Our mission is to provide the Sugar community with high quality documentation, including user manuals, programming references, and tutorials.
BookSprint August 2008
FLOSS Manuals held a BookSprint during the last week of August in Austin, TX; together, we wrote separate but combinable (remixable) manuals for Sugar, individual Sugar Activities and the hardware it may run on, such as the XO.
Please see the Sugar Manual.
The manuals for a number of Sugar Activities are now published (including manuals for Write, Terminal, Chat, Browse, Record, and TurtleArt). Please help us improve these manuals by going to http://en.flossmanuals.net/write where the editable versions reside. Note that we are including tutorials and notes to parents and teachers as part of the documentation effort. Helping expanding these sections would be greatly appreciated.
Those who participated include: Adam Hyde, Anne Gentle, David Farning, Mikus Grinbergs, Brian Jordan, Adam Holt, Janet Swisher, Morgan Collett, Yama Ploskonka, David Cramer, Emily Kaplan, Faisal Anwar, Christoph Derndorfer, Sandy Culver, Aaron Konstam, and the Sugar community.
Many thanks also to www.motive.com, our hosts in Austin.
User Manuals
We will be working with FLOSS manuals to create our end user documentation. Their excellent getting started guide is at OLPC simple. Repurposing the best from these 20 pre-existing documents will be key. Works in progress are listed in the DocumentationTeam/KnowledgeBase .
Here are rough working outlines:
Sugar Manual
Connecting to the network
Installing and configuring
Personalizing Sugar
Updating the version
Installing New Activities
Interface
Neighborhood View
Group View
Home View
Activity View
Joining Activities
Switching Activities
Exiting Activities
Troubleshooting Sugar
XO Manual
Getting started with the XO
About computers
Opening the XO
Starting the XO
Keyboard Shortcuts
Conserving Disk Space
Maintenance
Backing Up
Caring for Your XO
Charging the Battery
Replacing the Battery
Screen
Safety
Repairing Your XO
Avoiding Loss of Your XO
Hardware Specifications
Getting Support
See also
- OLPC Publications in the OLPC Wiki.
- OLPC Austria's Activity Handbook
Topic Ideas
- Setup a development environment. With and without jhbuild.
- "Write your activity" tutorial. It should include:
- graphic controls,
- datastore,
- collaboration.
Programming References
API
The API guide explains how to get started documenting api.
References
- http://wiki.laptop.org/go/API_reference?
- Probably we should document the datastore dbus API. I'm not sure what's the best way to generate documentation for it. It's so small that a wiki page might be the simpler solution for now.
- Existing collaboration documentation is at Collaboration.
- Morgs, my impression after a 3 minutes look over the available documentation is that there is little written with activity authors in mind, and that it's dispersed in several pages and mixed with implementation docs. Is that impression correct? I would like to have a couple of things: 1 complete documentation of the API which interest activity authors (with good links to dbus documentation since it's used so heavily) 2 A complete tutorial as part of the "manual". One of the Tubes pages looks like a pretty good start in this respect. Does it make sense to you? Can we make it happen? -- Marcopg
- Yes we can! --Morgs 13:50, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
- Hey, I came up with an alternate "reference" implementation for collaboration when I wrote Colors!, I think it's a lot easier to understand and could be the basis for a good tutorial. The only weird thing is, I wanted my activity class to receive DBus signals directly, so I subclassed ExportedGObject but initialized late - hacky, I know. It would be nice if this were not needed! [1] Wade 18:49, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
- Low level API (non-python activities). We should just move bert document on this wiki.
- this is the page http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Low-level_Activity_API but it must be complemented with
Tutorials
- Probably good to have a pygame tutorial, it's probably the best thing we have at the moment to do free form graphics stuff.
- Etoys based activity tutorial?
- Ideally, each Activity will have a tutorial within a manual on FLOSS Manuals. Here's a rough outline for each Activity Manual:
Introduction
Getting Started
Tutorials
Reference