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Our mission is to provide the Sugar community with high quality documentation, including user manuals, programming references, and tutorials.

BookSprint August 2008

FLOSS Manuals is planning a BookSprint for the last week of August in Austin, TX, to put together separate but combinable (remixable) manuals for Sugar and the hardware it may run on, such as the XO.

Attendee listing (fluid and changing) is at http://flossmanuals.net/donate.

Arrival/Departure plans

   Brian Jordan (activities/sugar/Pygame hacker, OLPC intern exploring 3rd World deployment)
     Arr AUS 12:25PM TUE Aug 26
     Dep AUS 5:05PM THU Aug 28

   Adam Holt (100-person support gang founder & coordinator)
     Arr AUS 11:10AM SAT Aug 23
     Dep AUS 6:35AM SAT Aug 30

   Walter Bender (former president of software and content at OLPC, writer of Getting Started at laptop.org/start, Sugar Labs affiliate)
     Arr AUS morning Sun Aug 24
     Dep AUS morning Fri Aug 29

   Adam Hyde (founder of FLOSS Manuals)
     Arr AUS 10:30AM Sat, Aug 23 
     Dep AUS Sun, Aug 30

   David Farning (Sugar Labs affiliate and community builder)
     Arr AUS 7:21pm Sat, Aug 23, 2008
     Dep AUS 6:00am Sat, Aug 30, 2008

Accomodations

The venue has changed from Outernet to Motive - their address is: 12515 Research Blvd Austin, TX 78759 www.motive.com

There's a hotel within walking distance, Extended Stay America, at 12424 Research Blvd, Austin, TX, (512) 219-6500 where attendees are staying. There is breakfast served at the hotel.

Since I'm not having much luck convincing Austinites that picking people up at the airport is great fun with many benefits, it looks likely that you all should use the Super Shuttle (www.supershuttle.com) or Capital Metro's airport routes (www.capmetro.org/riding/airport.asp) rather than get picked up. Taking or sharing a cab is also an option.

Using FLOSS Manuals

If you're not familiar with the FLOSS Manuals interface, you might want to take a look at this screencast for an overview/starter guide http://www.screencast.com/t/wHSXac3b43.

XO Hardware for the Sprint

I've got a spreadsheet set up with the names of all the XOs we can use at the BookSprint. I have 8 now and Mikus will do the updates (I already requested dev keys on all of them.) Here's the published version: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pjAQh2AGJq8cooRMaUwKlWg. I can add everyone as collaborators next week once we get all the data filled in, so when updates are done to a machine, the writer can just update the spreadsheet.

Schedule

Sunday 11:00 AM Goal setting session at the hotel (Changed from 3:00 because Adam Holt has a prior meeting that afternoon.)

Sunday 7:00 PM Mozart's meetup with the XO-Austin user group

Monday 9:00 AM Anne meeting in the hotel lobby to walk over to Motive

Tuesday lunch Riata Bar & Grill - Austinites welcome

Noon CST daily con call for status updates

Typical daily schedule will be approximately 9:30am - 6:00pm CST but we are allowed to stay later if needed.

Remote participation

We're going to do our best to allow remote participants to take part in the event. We will be holding a daily phonecall in the afternoon for all participants. Seth will be available at OLPC's office as a direct contact for unanswered questions, or if one of the (Cambridge) development team needs to be reached.

Noon CST daily con call for status updates

Remote contributors:

• Seth
• Greg Dek
• Christoph
• David Cramer
• Emily Kaplan

Unconfirmed:

• Faisal Anwar (tentative)
• Robert Nagle
• Scott Nesbitt
• Belinda Lopez

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

• http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_Factory
• http://www.catmoran.com/olpc/#sugxterm

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

Glossary

Glossary