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

[Bobby Powers]

On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Rob Savoye <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.

where can we find details of the hackathon?

bobby

>        - rob -
>
>