Installing Subversion

As with everything else in Linux, installing subversion was an adventure.
Here's the process (compiled from different sources) I used in case anyone else needs it and for when I have to install it on my other computer later.


Set up users and groups (Ubuntu Help Docs for Subversion):
Had to modify the users and groups directions because they seem out of date, added from the command line instead.
sudo addgroup subversion
sudo adduser <USERNAME> subversion
sudo adduser www-data subversion

Must log out here!

Create repos:
sudo mkdir /home/svn
cd /home/svn
sudo mkdir myproject
sudo svnadmin create /home/svn/myproject

Edit file permissions:
sudo chown -R www-data:subversion myproject
sudo chmod -R g+rws myproject

Install Rabbitcvs:
Integrates nicely into Nautilus
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rabbitvcs/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rabbitvcs-core rabbitvcs-nautilus rabbitvcs-gedit rabbitvcs-cli

Server setup? (subversionary.org)
Still need to figure out if ssh starts at boot, and if not how to start it manually or automatically.
sudo apt-get install openssh-server
svn co svn+ssh://jaime@asus/home/svn/myproject

To checkout: 
svn co <address>

To check-in:
Do stuff with document
svn add <document>
svn commit -m "<comments go here>"


Success: 
I was able to log into the playground. Checking stuff out downloaded it onto my local drive. I created a test folder and file, added, and committed them, and they surprisingly showed up in the playground, so I must've done something right.
I still don't know how well the server part works, or the best way to go about testing that. 


Sugar News:
Still haven't had time to figure out how to install actual Activities in Sugar (due by Tuesday, plenty of time left), but our updated wiki is looking very nice!

Day Five - Team Reports

Math4 History: Each member of our team contributed something about the history or the people of the Math4 Project to the wiki. Most of the information was gathered straight from Math4's wiki. It's a relatively new project so there isn't much history to really go over, and only a few main contributers are mentioned. The correspondence from the mailing list is a little more encouraging, and we receive pretty frequent updates, especially about ideas for contributing. I think ideally our group would be able to make our own Activity based on one of the yet-to-be-addressed curriculum goals on their site, but that could easily put us in over our heads, so it's probably better to try to contribute to an existing project (with easily-accessible and knowledgeable developers) first.

Presentations: All the other groups' presentations were interesting. I think our class is covering a wide variety of projects though the Flux Capacitors is most relevant to our own. Since we aren't focusing on Sugar Labs specifically, we didn't really look into its history, but the other team definitely gave us some good background information. We will also be addressing the same issues when installing the source code for the main Sugar Labs component so it might be a good idea for all of us to stay in touch during that process.

Other news: I successfully installed the Sugar Desktop Remix using Ubuntu 10.10 following simple instructions here, though the other SugarLabs team pointed out that a different installation method might be better for development purposes, but I guess we'll be finding out very soon. Installing specific Math4 Activities proved to be a bit more difficult since most do not have final releases. Most of the Activities seemed to be located in the git repositories, but I haven't had enough time to do a lot of the "diving in" that's so regularly encouraged.

Day Four - Homework

IRC: I had already set up an IRC nickname for last semester's project Exaile, though I never really used it. I use Pidgin for all my instant-messaging needs and it allows easy setup of IRC stuff. I joined both the channels listed on the Math4Team wiki: #sugar and #fedora-olpc, but there's not much going on tonight. It doesn't look like the #sugar channel regularly logs its chats, so no history there, and the #fedora-olpc looks like it only logs meetings. The Math4Team indicates to use the mailing list for most conversations anyway.

Mailing List: Apparently the forwarding of our group gmail account worked (I hope) because I received multiple messages from the mailing list, mostly about new contributers joining, and what we have to offer to the project. I'm not sure how I feel about Brittany's response that we're all "pretty good programmers", but I know we'll each be able to find something valuable to contribute.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Eric Steven Raymond compares Linux to nuclear explosions (page 11) in this piece of work. I've never considered that analogy before, but I like it and I think it fits. He describes Linus Torvalds' development process and how it was so different from the earlier ones he had used that he didn't think it would work, but obviously it did (and pretty well). Raymond also stresses the importance of source being open, especially in the development and debugging processes because letting more people see the code (who actually WANT to see the code) greatly benefits the software and its users. Most of his ideas make a lot of sense, and you'd think a lot more people would follow them, but that could just be my biased opinion because I like his pro-Linux viewpoint.

Other news: I tried to install the Sugar desktop while running Ubuntu 10.04. Although successful and I could log in and even connect to the network, there was nothing usable in it, which is actually noted on the wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Sugar. Next steps are to either install the "appliances" from a USB stick as indicated or set up a virtual machine to run the environment. Or to just do the much simpler install on my other machine running Ubuntu 10.10. Either way, it will be nice to play around with the software first and get a better idea of where we're going with our involvement in this project.

Day Three

Today we presented and chose our team projects. We are doing Sugar Labs, more specifically Math4Team, which designs activities for 4th grade students to learn math. We created a dedicated team email account (after many tries with the image verification) to join the mailing list, but still need to figure out how to get the email to forward to all of our individual accounts.

Day Two

Today was our second day of class and we did light research on possible projects to participate in for the semester. We decided to look further into three educational projects and hopefully find something we are all interested in and to which we can provide valuable contributions. These include One Laptop per Child, Sugar Labs, and Open Office for Kids.

I also registered for POSSCON today and should be attending Friday, March 25. Looking forward to some free food.