User talk:Twarz

Quick Introduction

After receiving the XOs, Kidd and myself will be able to engage into the most interesting part of our training period: adapting OOo4Kids on Sugar, and being able to run it on the XO laptops. We will basically proceed as follow: experiment, locate, correct, meaning we will spend a lot of time on merely using OOo4Kids, trying to find bugs and / or feature to optimize, then use the tools at our disposition (gdb, valgrind, callgrind...) to locate it precisely in the code, then with Eric Bachard's and Pierre Pasteau's help do our best to correct and suggest a working patch that will be submitted to the next version of OOo4Kids and maybe even OOo. Our objectives are as follow:

-submit at least 2 visible performance improvement (one per student, possibly more if time allows it);

-submit at least 2 UI improvement (just as above, at least one per student);

Direct Work on XOs

Improving Performance

Memory

XOs are laptops with a really low amount of RAM. Therefore, one of the major objectives will be to make sure that the memory leaks are close to none. If not, OOo4Kids might be unusable on the laptops. We will probably be using mainly valgrind in order to locate and correct the biggest leaks. Many tests will be carried out:

• letting the program run for a long time, with a huge amount of

information provided;

• filling an Impress wizard with a lot of information, then cancel (this test

has been proved positive on the current version of OOo4Kids and will require special attention);

• deleting figures, text, drawings... during a session, and make sure the

memory that was used is correctly freed;

• Check previews and slideshows (Impress' wizard);
• checking the limit of the documents and try to expand it by suppressing unused

memory;

• simply checking a normal, basic usage of the different applications
• secondary: location and termination of evenntuals invalid frees/delete

CPU

Just as for the memory, the XOs laptops have limited ressources in term of CPU. This will be our second important objective: globally optimize OOo4Kids and get rid of any situation that could lead to a 100% use of the CPU.As for the memory leaks, many tests will be made:

• opening a high number of documents at once, filled with informations
• letting the program run alone during different phases of it's execution
• fill the dialogue boxes in the wizards (positive on the current version in

the Impress wizard) and try to fix the huge slowdown that might result of it;

• give a special attention to the Impress application which seems to be

prone to crashing and is globally under-optimized;

Improving UI

As precised in the introduction, one of the goal of this training period is to make us develop improvements and new elements in the UI. For example, a new wizard is planned, and will be implemented with the writer application.

Promoting the XO

Receiving the XO will also allow us to assist Eric Bachard during a conference that will take place in october. Many points will be presented during this conference: the Education project, in order to make OOo4Kids more known of the public, our own project of contributing to the source code, and of course a presentation of the XO, their capacities, their goal, and an overall view of the OLPC fundation.

What has been done - how to check our progress

For now, the work on the XOs hasn't begun because we lack the laptops, that should be coming soon. Everything related to our own project as student is available on the OOo wiki at this page: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Education_Project/Effort/Various_adaptations_on_Sugar/Work_In_Progress. A second media has been put in place, and will be used mainly to share our progress on the XOs: http://ooo4kids-xo.blogspot.com/. Few documentation about the use of GDB and Valgrind is available on this page: http://wiki.ooo4kids.org/index.php/User_talk:Twarz .

Twarz 11:38, 26 August 2009 (UTC)