Thanks to the great documentation on the wiki (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Jhbuild), this assignment was not too difficult, once I had Ubuntu set up on my computer. I had Ubuntu at one point, but I uninstalled it because the Sugar Emulator (that is available in the Ubuntu Software Center), messed up my mouse functionality. When I tried to re-install Ubuntu, I kept getting an error message that I did not have permission to download the file. I was at the CofC Computer Science Lab at that time (Saturday afternoon), and eventually realized that the network there was blocking the install. When Ubuntu wouldn't work, I tried to install Fedora instead, thinking that might be a better match for Sugar anyway, since Sugar on a Stick is based on Fedora. What I learned is that Ubuntu is much easier for beginners to install. Fedora requires you to set up your partitions manually for the dual boot mode. I was hesitant about this, not wanting to erase all my Windows files, and I eventually gave up because I couldn't get it to work.
I have learned a valuable lesson with these projects (projects in which I don't really know what I'm doing, and I'm just learning what I can along the way). When I get to the point of extreme frustration and irritability, it's best to leave the project for a little while and come back to it later when I'm in a better frame of mind. And so I left the project alone for the rest of the evening and decided to tackle it on Sunday.
In the meantime, I was thinking about the different posts I had read on the wiki. I remembered reading about sugar-jhbuild in the FLOSS Manual for creating activities. At the time, I didn't think much about it because the author did not recommend using this method. In thinking about it further, though, he wasn't recommending it because his audience was wanting to run a version of sugar in which they could test their activities. Our goal at this point was not to simply run sugar, but to get the source, build it and then run it.
So I found the instructions on the wiki (above) for using sugar-jhbuild. The instructions were straightforward (all executed from command line) but took a while to execute (at least a half hour). I have Ubuntu version 10.04, and the instructions point out that only version 9.10 is supported. I didn't want to uninstall and re-install Ubuntu again (that would be 4 times, actually), so I decided to try it on my version (hoping that maybe the wiki just hadn't been updated recently). The build seemed to work fine, except there were many errors that I chose to ignore when given the option. (I assume these had something to do with using the unsupprted Ubuntu version.) When I ran the program, it seemed to work fine, except that none of the activities worked (probably because of the errors I ignored).
There's also a package called "sweets" that is used for developing the core of Sugar. We'd like to look into that a little more to see if that will be a better route for us.
I am pleased with our progress so far. The bug that we are considering has to do with the user's login, and I think we have what we need to work on that. We would still like to get the activities working so we can explore those source packages as well.
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