Re: [Gnash-dev] Re: Gnash + OLPC

[Rob Savoye]

Carlos Nazareno wrote:

> a strong leaning towards the use of Gnash. It's just that with the
> line that was crossed when OLPC & MS partnered up, I guess the
> agreement that only FOSS be used with the XO is not there anymore.

  Don't forget Nicholas's rant about "free software fundamentalists"
holding back his project... He even mentioned the X0 had no flash
support at all... All of that can discourages volunteers (at least this
one) from being active contributors.

> build 8.20 which will come shipped in the upcoming XO units that will
> ship in the new Give 1 Get 1 program that's going to run this
> November).

  Most of the Gnash problems on the X0 have to do with the version of
Gnash shipped on the X0, and other X0 specific build issues with
gstreamer. My own X0 builds of Gnash have none of these issues
unfortunately, and I've been building Gnash for the X0 since before
there was real X0 hardware. For a long time, the shipped version of
Gnash was ancient. which was part of the problem.

  There has been a considerable amount of Gstreamer hacking lately, so
it'd be nice if the upcoming 0.8.4 release was in the X0 builds. I'm
actually testing Gnash trunk on an X0 today, I just fixed it from brick
status yesterday (a b4). :-)

  The other big problem is of course with codecs. The proprietary player
of course comes with MP3 and FLV support, but the X0 does not. For most
GNU/Linux or BSD distributions users load the ffmpeg-gstreamer plugin,
which is where the support for MP3 and FLV is. For regular Fedora users
this is easy, as the packages from livna work just fine. But on the X0,
it's got some odd distribution specific issues with versions of
libraries, so it doesn't usually work. So of course the easy solution is
to build the ffmpeg-gstreamer plugin as part of the X0 builds, and make
that available to make video and most sound work for existing content.
Unfortunately, as a US based non-profit, the OLPC foundation can't ship
that plugin. :-(

> Also, there's the issue of AS3/AVM2. Having done tests with a
> benchmarking app we made to test AS2 vs AS3 performance (both
> published for Flash 9, using nearly identical algorithms), the AVM2
> (AS3) version definitely trumps the AVM1 (AS2)'s performance. And this
> is extremely relevant because we need to squeeze every bit of juice
> out of the XO's limited memory & CPU.

  AS3/AVM2 work is ongoing. While it won't be in this next release, many
simple swf v9 files play fine in Gnash. Much like a large majority of
the software on the X0 is incomplete, Gnash too is a work in progress.

> Not really. All that work being thrown out the window is far from the
> reality. Despite the looming invasion of Windows XP on the XO, almost
> all of the dev work being done is still for Fedora-Sugar-XO and with a
> strong leaning towards FOSS projects.

  Countries are then installing winXP on them after the machines arrive...

> As such, it would be really fantastic if some of you guys could also
> sit in at OLPC's developer mailing list at
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel (address@hidden)

  Which is way too busy these days... I spent much time on that list
myself till a few months ago and decided to focus on Gnash on other
hardware. It'd be much more efficient to have an OLPC developer or
support person (not me) on the Gnash-dev list. We'd also love to see an
OLPC person at our Hackathon next week, right after the EduDebian
conference.

        - rob -