Mono on OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) device update

Hi guys,

several months went by without any post, but I didn't remain idle.
During this time I made a lots of things but now I'm glad to post an update to sugar-sharp.

This update will let you to use the datastore service that Sugar makes available to store your data.
The datastore data are used by the Journal and can be integrated with the school server.
This version is a very low-level API because it's a one-to-one mapping with the DBUS services. In the next version I will create a new class to allow you an easier way to access to the data on the datastore.

Any suggestions are welcomed.

You can find the instruction about compilation of mono here, and here you can find the source code.


Happy hacking to all

GBrainy for OLPC v0.50

Hi everyone,

my little contribution to the OLPC and Mono is not finished yet, so in the last days I tried to port the new version of GBrainy to the OLPC Device. GBrainy is so nice that the OLPC version needs to be updated.
You can find it here.

The original web page can be found here.

Thanks to Jordy Mas for the original code.

Mono on OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) device

After a lot of time I'm finally releasing the first version of Sugar assembly to "sugarize" a Mono application. This assembly is needed to integrate a Mono application with the Sugar environment so it can run on an OLPC device. This version allows creating applications that use GTK# forms created programmatically or by a Glade resource file.

Additional work remains to be done to support new widgets and integrate with Journal/Datastore to enable using all of the OLPC resource.

A specific wiki page has been created on laptop.org wiki at this address.

I have ported two applications to the OLPC device: GBrainy and MonkeysMemory. The first application is an interesting application to "improve" your brain, while the second one is a simple "Memory" game that I wrote to play with my children.

Again I created some specific wiki page on laptop.org wiki, one for MonkeysMemory and one for GBrainy.

Here are some screenshots to see these applications (oops, activities) in action:

How to write a standalone program (part 3)?

When I was deciding which library to use for developing my application, I was in doubt between GTK and WinForm. Back then, the WinForm was not so good, so I tried to use the GTK# for both the Win32 and Linux platforms. I had a lot of problems because I had to put a widget in a specific position and I needed to make a lot of experimentation to understand how to layout the GTK widgets.

In the next project I did, the WinForm API became more stable, so I decided to use it. Again, I found a lot of problems but the program is now finished.

The difference between the two class libraries?

Personally, I prefer GTK# because is very powerful and flexible. Unfortunaly, on the Windows platform the look is not so good as on the Linux platform, and the need to include the GTK library for Windows increases the space requirements and the startup time on the CD-ROM media. Using WinForm, the application requires less disk space, but under Linux the interface looks alien.

How to write a standalone program (part 2)?

Hi, now you can look on some screenshot taken from linux and windows system.

The first sequence of image is taken from Linux system.







This other sequence of images is taken from Windows System

How to write a standalone program?

Several years ago I write some program to be run on Windows machine.
This programs need to be run from CD so no installation program can be used.

At this time the mail solution are two: use Visual Basic or Director. I am mainly like to have the full control of my program so prefer to use Visual Basic. Several month ago e new customer ask to me to realize a CD to put in a book. Now, which development tool use this time?

In fact in the last year I'm developing web application using mainly PHP and JSP on linux platform.

Again, which development tool I can use to do this?

So I give a look about the old Visual Basic plaftorm.
Ok the old Visual Basic is dead, and it evolve to VB.NET while Director I never use before so why use it now?
So give a look to VB.NET. Ok, seems to be very interesting and powerful .... but there is a LITTLE problem ...... to run the program the virtual machine need to be installed on machine and this is not a good thing for this type of application ....
So, no solution?

No, of course. From several month I start to look inside MONO, an open source reimplementation of .NET Virtual Machine. In this environment I can create a standalone program using mkbundle utility shipped with mono. Using this solution you have a program that can be run where mono runtime is supported (almost everywhere) and can be transformed on a standalone program for the target that you need. In my case only windows.
This utility generate a C program that include all the library needed to start the mono runtime without need to install on the computer.

I listen you, and to get the data used by the application? In the past you can store you data inside the program as resource or use a MDB file. Obviously this solution is not portable so I make some test using sqlite to manage the data. This solution is high portable because sqlite is available everywhere.

But, it works? Sure, after I post some snapshot taken from Windows and Linux.