Thursday, December 20, 2007

xochat.org Up

I'm having a feeling I'll regret having done this, but xochat.org is now up and running. If you've got an XO you can point it at my Jabber server by popping open a terminal and typing this:

sugar-control-panel -s jabber xochat.org

Then hit ctrl+alt+erase to restart Sugar. You should then see the other people logged in to the server in the "Neighborhood" view. That is essentially the widest view. You should be able to see other users and shared activities, and share your own activities with them, including video.

This is, however, the bleeding edge of the bleeding edge, so don't expect perfection.

Also, this is a cheap shared server account, so I have a feeling it will fall over pretty quickly. Please don't trumpet this on your blog; if I get 1000 users tomorrow I'll probably just have to turn the whole thing off and start over by invitation only, but we'll see. I have no idea, really.

And, while you can connect to the server with a regular Jabber client, it doesn't appear that you can talk to XO users with it. Also, it seems like you should be able to connect with an emulator, but it didn't work for me.

19 comments:

Bill Fitzgerald said...

Hello, Tom,

This is great -- when your logged in to the jabber server, you can do a search and it will gray out elements in the neighborhood that don't match the search string --

Very cool, and very useful for finding folks in a "crowd" --

Thanks for setting this up --

Cheers,

Bill

Sean O'Steen said...

Very Cool Tom!

If the data load starts to hurt financially, consider setting up a tip jar on this site. I know I'll toss in a few!

Cheers,
Sean

Scott McLeod said...

Tom, if I do this, will my XO still be able to find, via Neighborhood, other XOs that are physically nearby?

As a non-Linux user, I guess I don't really understand what I'm doing if I implement your code. I'm not a programmer like you are. I don't want to reset Neighborhood to look globally and then not be able to set it back and/or not be able to find other XOs that are close by. I'm eventually going to give to this to my kids and don't want to impair their functionality too much! Thanks.

Tom Hoffman said...

Scott,

I'll address this question in more detail in a subsequent post, but basically, changing the Jabber server is easily undone, and the assumption is that all shipping XO's will be set to their school's server.

On the other hand, in the development builds I'm using, at least, configuring the laptop to work with xochat.org does seem to affect how my XO's find each other on the local network, although this is probably a bug more than the intended functionality.

On the third hand, I don't think setting up xochat.org for your kids XO's is going to be particularly useful for them (I think it is mostly grownup geeks on there at this point) so you can probably just skip it for now.

Scott McLeod said...

Thanks, Tom. This is helpful.

Laura said...

Tom - thank you so much for setting this server up. I've been having a blast meeting folk! Yesterday I started a Write document asking anyone to leave me messages and got lots of replies; last night I saw more people were posting other surveys along the same lines. ^_^ This connectivity through your server is greatly appreciated. I agree - if the server load gets a bit expensive do set up some sort of "tip jar." The hardest part will be finding a way to notify everyone on the server about it...

Best wishes-
~Laura (Yuka-Boston on OLPC)

ThomasHan said...

hi Tom,

Thanks for this. I'm trying this out now...

ThomasHan said...

Tom,

Thanks! Just got it to work and just took a photo of all the little XOs and this page in background.

Thanks!!!

http://flickr.com/photos/thomashan/2152576476/

kevix said...

I didn't realize this was not setup by OLPC. I just saw a post and thought it was the setting for the G1G1 users. I was running an emulator on Gutsy/Ubuntu and it worked for me. Thanks for it. I see about 150 in the room!
happy year++

Keith Hopper said...

For us noobs, making modifications to sugar-control-panel is explained well here.

Brian C. Smith said...

Tom, this is great. Bud Hunt and I used the XOchat.org server to play/explore some of the Activities on the XO. This is a very useful server for those looking to learn more about the XO laptop.
Thanks for setting this up!

Unknown said...

Hey Tom,

I can't tell how much your server has encouraged my exploration of my XO's.

Thank You,Thank You!

While I didn't see your note and blasted it on my blog it's not like I have a big audience. I have modified my post to discourage new registration.

Thanks again,
Bill Pytlovany

VC said...

Tom,

thank you so much for setting this up. It's a wonderful enhancement to my xO experience and very much in the spirit of XO.

I think i speak for most of us who are using your server that if you need some financial support for more hardware etc please let us know.

vicky

Unknown said...

Is the server down? I changed the jabber server and restarted sugar but still don't see anyone else in neighborhood view

Tom Hoffman said...

Evan,

Yes, it was down. Don't expect it to be very reliable until we move it, which will happen real soon now...

VC said...

The server seems to go down frequently. Just keep checking back.

Unknown said...

Tom, I get an error when I try to set my jabber to xochat on my new XO computer.
I use the command:
sugar-control-panel -s jabber xochat.org
and I get the error that these two files are missing from /root/.sugar/default
They are:
owner.key
owner.key.pub

Checking that directory, sure enough the files don't exist.

Any suggestions?

WaveJumper said...

I didn't get any install errors or anything, but it doesn't seem to be working, either. Nothing different in the neighborhood view. Any clues, anyone?

Tom Hoffman said...

Overall, consider xochat.org unreliable until further notice.