WikipediaHI: Offline Wikipedia in Hindi !!

Last week I spent some time working on WikipediaHI activity for Sugar Desktop Environment. I must say it is one of the awesome activities I have come across. The best part is that it can serve you with data in offline mode. That is even if don't have internet connection which is otherwise required to access Wikipedia online, then also your WikipediaHI activity will serve your purpose.

There are lot many developers and contributors who are working in collaborative form on such awesome stuff who continuously inspire you to take up new things and create something that can be used by others in the world. Sugar developers and contributors are epitome of such group.

I came across few of such developers, Anish Mangal and Gonzalo Odiard, two of them whose contributions are significant for Sugar. I took up the task of creating WikipediaHI using Wikipedia dump for Hindi available for free. I followed the steps specified on this page[ hosted by Gonzalo] for creating Wikipedia activity in your own language.

I will quickly explain the steps I took to create WikipediaHI:

1) Downloaded the Wikipedia dump file for Hindi:
http://dumps.wikimedia.org/hiwiki/20121225/hiwiki-20121225-pages-articles.xml.bz2
NOTE: [ Make sure you pick the valid latest file from here : http://dumps.wikimedia.org/hiwiki/   this location will show you listing as per dates. Pick the latest dump and proceed further.]

and downloaded WikipediaBase from this link

2) Created "hi" directory for HINDI under WikipediaBase directory and moved the downloaded dump to this folder.

3) Extracted contents of this file using:
bzip2 -d hiwiki-20121225-pages-articles.xml.bz2

4) Processed the dump using page parser:
../tools2/pages_parser.py

The result of this operation will generate these files:
hiwiki-20121225-pages-articles.xml.links
hiwiki-20121225-pages-articles.xml.page_templates
hiwiki-20121225-pages-articles.redirects
hiwiki-20121225-pages-articles.templates

5) Then you can include selective articles or all articles from this dump to your activity by using this command:
../tools2/make_selection.py
* Make sure you have favorites.txt and blacklist.txt filled with appropriate keywords.

Now if you want to include all articles use this command:
../tools2/make_selection.py --all

6) Then proceed to create the index for these articles:
../tools2/create_index.py

7) In order to test the index created in previous step you can use this command:
../tools2/test_index.py

8) Next step is to expand the templates of articles :
cd ..
./tools2/expandtemplates.py hi

9) Go back to hi directory and re-create the index :
cd hi
mv hiwiki-20121225-pages-articles.xml.processed_expanded hiwiki-20121225-pages-articles.xml.processed
../tools2/create_index.py --delete_all

10) Download the images for the articles you selected:
cd hi
../tools2/download_images.py

if you want to download the images for pages you selected in previous step:
../tools2/download_images.py --all

11) Create files specific to language:
(a)activity/activity.info.lang : activity info file for you language activity
(b)activity/activity-wikipedia-lang.svg : activity icon for your language
(c)activity_lang.py : activity file for your language
(d)static/about_lang.html : about page for wikipedia in your language.
(e)static/index_lang.html : index page for wikipedia in your language. This is the page displayed when activity is launched. So its important for you to know the articles included in the search.db ( generated when index is created) for you to create the index page.


12) Create the XO file for wikipedia in your language:
./setup_new_wiki.py hi/hiwiki-20121225-pages-articles.xml

I went through the search.db file to identify the articles present in it and create the index page accordingly.
This gave me an idea to write some script that can generate index page(part or whole) to be used as home page for activity using search.db[ Stay tuned for next blog on this idea]

Here you go.. you can see WikipediaHI

On launching this, you can see the index page listing the articles you can view offline using WikipediaHI

If you want to play with WikipediaHI, you can download it : WikipediaHI-35.xo

I must thank Gonzalo for his amazing help and guidance in getting this done. I have to mention here that Wikipedia
changed its XML format in their dumps which resulted in error when I was creating the index. I took Gonzalo's help to get it resolved.
Thanks to Anish, who motivated me to pick this up and guided me to complete it.

Thanks guys !! :D

gtk.Notebook widget within Sugar Activity !

This post describes how to use gtk.Notebook widget within a Sugar Activity.
In this blog you can find how to use gtk.Notebook widget to create PyGTK application native to GNOME. Now we will consider how sugar shell understands this Notebook widget and renders it for Sugar Desktop Environment.


Consider we have sugar activity DevelopWeb with following directory structure:

 

Here we have created weblib.py to include class WebToolBox that renders a toolbox on left hand side pane and tabbed container, i.e. Notebook on right side pane. Note that we are using HBox to hold this WebToolbox and Notebook widgets. Since there are only two widgets added to HBox we are using terms left side pane and right side pane.

weblib.py looks like this:

Here you can observe that we have added all the widgets in the constructor of WebToolbox class. We have used HBox as parent container. Then we have used a VBox as elementBox or  toolbox for this activity to hold the web elements. Then we set few properties for scrollable window inside elementBox. We add the buttons in this elementbox with appropriate properties. Then we add the Notebook widget with gtk.POS_TOP ( i.e. tabs will be visible on top).

Now we add the pages to this notebook instance using a custom method "addPage"(Refer to image below). You can see in the definition that a page is a container HBox as immediate child of Notebook within a page. Each page requires a Label widget as page label:

The basic activity file looks like :

Here within constructor of DevelopWeb class you can observe that we have use instance of WebToolBox class which inturn uses Notebook widget. we have used this WebToolBox instance to be placed as viewport of the activity. You can create a setup.py file required for activity.

Now when you create symbolic link for this activity using : python setup.py dev the Sugar Desktop Environment can use this activity.
When you start Sugar session you can see DevelopWeb activity:

When you launch this activity you can see elementBox on left side and Notebook on right side with two tabs or pages in it:

This example shows how you can use Notebook, the tabbed container in your sugar activity. I hope this post helps you.

Stay tuned for more Sugar Action !

Notebook: Tabbed container in PyGTK

Hi,

I am writing this post to share my experience with Notebook, the tabbed container in PyGTK. If you are planning to develop your application in platform independent form, I would prefer you should go for PyGTK.

GTK+, or the GIMP Toolkit, is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites. This consists of toolkit which runs on Windows based and Linux based system. Thus you can write your application using GTK+ and run on any OS. Python bindings for GTK+ is known as PyGTK.  PyGTK lets you to easily create programs with a graphical user interface using the Python programming language.

Another prominent OS or Desktop Environment or Shell which used across XO Laptops as part of OLPC project that can run applications developed in PyGTK is Sugar. Few days ago I was looking for Tabbed container in PyGTK for a Sugar Activity I am working on. I came across Notebook.  It is similar to TabControl in .Net framework but with few dissimilarities.

Lets dive into code:
1. Import required modules: In order to use GTK modules in your python program you need to include gtk and pygtk modules.

Apart  from modules you can import specific widgets like Window, Label or Button and Notebook. Otherwise you need to use gtk.Window, gtk.Notebook.

2. Now lets write a class KartikNoteBookExample. You can see the constructor __init__(self) where we have created an instance of Window[line 13]. Then we set the title and default size for window in next two lines. In line 16, we have linked a callback function that will be invoked when when destroy signal will be sent by window widget. you can observe that we have defined a destroy method which inturn calls gtk's main_quit() method to close the main thread which was initially started using the main() method.

We now proceed by creating an instance(i.e. mynb) of Notebook [line 18]. In line 19, you can see we are using method set_tab_pos which is used to set the position of tabs. It can take one of the following values:
gtk.POS_LEFT, gtk.POS_RIGHT, gtk.POS_TOP or gtk.POS_BOTTOM. In line 20, we have connected a method to be called on "switch-page" event of Notebook. Whenever the page is changed in Notebook this event is fired. Since now you have connected "self.pageChanged" method on this event, it will be fired whenever page is switched. After that we have called a method "addPage" to add the page in Notebook. In below code, you can see we have created a HBox widget and a Label widget. Label widget is required to add label for tab whereas HBox is used as child for that page. We have added page in Notebook using "append_page" method which takes childWidget and Label as parameters. In line 24, we have added notebook instance as child of window widget.

In line 26, we have defined a method "showall" to show all widgets added so far.
From line 45 to 49, we have added a method "pageChanged" to detect the page switch event or signal for Notebook. The widget passes following parameters to the callback function : notebook instance, page instance and page number instance. We get the selected page using the method "get_nth_page" and passing the page number as  parameter[line 47]. We get the label associated with page using method get_tab_label and passing the immediate child of the Notebook as parameter[line 48]. Now using the "get_text" method of label we can get the text in it and print it.

From line 52 onwards, we are checking if the program is invoked using "python" i.e not imported we create an instance of the KartikNoteBookExample class and invoke its main method.

After saving this if it is invoked like: python .py

You will see a window with two tabs, Tab1 and Tab2.

As you click on Tab pages you can see in terminal that which page has been selected based on page number as clickedMe is called for page switch event.

So we saw how we use Notebook in PyGTK in your application. You may download the source file here.
Stay tuned to see how to create tabbed Notebook for a Sugar Activity.

Writing Your First Sugar Activity !

The best open source project to work with is "Sugar" primarily developed by SugarLabs and developers, contributors around the world. As a  Sugar Evangelist, I take this opportunity to share this post that describes on how you can get started with your first Sugar activity. The program that runs on Sugar Desktop environment is called as an Activity.





Prerequisites:

• Familiarity with Python and PyGTK(Python interface for GUI programming using GTK+)
• Sugar Desktop environment( installed, build or emulator on qemu)
• GTK+ packages installed on you Linux flavor.

The example Activity shared in the following section has been tested on Fedora 17( Beefy Miracle).

1. Create a directory structure :

mkdir -p KartikActivity.activity/activity

2.Create activity.info :

Create a file inside the "activity" sub directory with name "activity.info" to describe your bundle in the activity sub-directory. The Activity Bundles specification explain in detail the meaning of each field.Write downs attribute names and corresponding values in this file as :

[Activity]
name = Kartik
bundle_id = org.laptop.Kartik
exec = sugar-activity Kartik.KartikActivity
icon = myicon
activity_version = 1.0
show_launcher = yes

example :

3. Activity Icon:

Design an icon for your activity by following the instructions on making icons for Sugar and place it in the activity sub-directory. The file name should match the icon file name specified in the info file (e.g. myicon.svg).

I used the same icon as is used in paint :

4. Create setup.py:

Write the setup.py script in the top level directory (e.g. KartikActivity.activity/setup.py). The content should be like:

from sugar.activity import bundlebuilder
bundlebuilder.start()

A more advanced version, which supports building activity bundles without Sugar installed, looks like this:

 #!/usr/bin/env python
 try:
     from sugar.activity import bundlebuilder
     bundlebuilder.start()
 except ImportError:
     import os
     os.system("find ./ | sed 's,^./,KartikActivity.activity/,g' > MANIFEST")
     os.system('rm KartikActivity.xo')
     os.chdir('..')
     os.system('zip -r KartikActivity.xo KartikActivity.activity')
     os.system('mv KartikActivity.xo ./KartikActivity.activity')
     os.chdir('KartikActivity.activity')

5. Code your activity in Python:

The name you specified in the .info file as "class" is the name of the class which runs your code. For the activity.info file above, we specify a top-level module named KartikActivity.Kartik

The content in Katik.py file :

from sugar.activity import activity
import logging

import sys, os
import gtk

class KartikActivity(activity.Activity):
    def hello(self, widget, data=None):
        logging.info('Hello Kartik')      

    def __init__(self, handle):
        print "running activity init", handle
        activity.Activity.__init__(self, handle)
        print "activity running"

        # Creates the Toolbox. It contains the Activity Toolbar, which is the
        # bar that appears on every Sugar window and contains essential
        # functionalities, such as the 'Collaborate' and 'Close' buttons.
        toolbox = activity.ActivityToolbox(self)
        self.set_toolbox(toolbox)
        toolbox.show()

        # Creates a new button with the label "Hello Kartik".
        self.button = gtk.Button("Hello Kartik")

        # When the button receives the "clicked" signal, it will call the
        # function hello() passing it None as its argument.  The hello()
        # function is defined above.
        self.button.connect("clicked", self.hello, None)

        # Set the button to be our canvas. The canvas is the main section of
        # every Sugar Window. It fills all the area below the toolbox.
        self.set_canvas(self.button)

        # The final step is to display this newly created widget.
        self.button.show()

        print "AT END OF THE CLASS"

6. Create a MANIFEST:

(e.g. KartikActivity.activity/MANIFEST), containing the list of the files (relative to the directory that the MANIFEST is in) to include in the package. (Note: Be sure not to leave blank lines at the end of the file.) This script does that in linux (run it from within the KartikActivity.activity directory):

cd KartikActivity.activity
find . -type f | sed 's,^./,,g' > MANIFEST

Content of MANIFEST should look like this:

activity/myicon.svg
activity/activity.info
MANIFEST
Kartik.py
setup.py

7. Give permissions:

Make sure that all your python files have the required permissions to be used.

chmod a+x setup.py
chmod a+x Kartik.py

8. Bundle your Activity:

Setup your bundle for development (must be user olpc when you do this) to become user olpc, type: su - olpc

If you are prompted for a password, trying using: su

python setup.py dev

This just creates a symlink to your activity folder in ~/Activities, so that Sugar can find your activity.

9. Run your Activity !:

Restart Sugar using Ctrl-Alt-Erase and your activity will appear in the interface! (NOTE: By default, the Home view shows only the favorite activities. You should press Ctrl+2 or go the right-upper corner and change to the List View)

Now you can see your activity is visible within Journal:

Sugar-build: an alternative to Sugar-JHbuild for Fedora 17

We have seen a complex process involved in building sugar on fedora 14 using JHBuild. Now we have an easy way out to build and run sugar by using sugar-build.

sugar-build it is an alternative of sugar-jhbuild developed by Daniel Narvaez that allow us to get a development version of Sugar easier than with sugar-jhbuild. Also, it works on Fedora 16, 17 and Ubuntu 12.

 Yesterday, I was able to build sugar on my Fedora release 17( Beefy Miracle). So here I am sharing my experience with sugar-build.

These are the steps to build and run sugar on the fly using sugar-build:

Get the source code

You need to get the latest repository of sugar using git

$ git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-build/sugar-build.git

Make

Then run the make command to build it( It usually takes 20-30 mins depending on processor and RAM)
$ make

you will see such message once make is complete:

Run
Once the make process is complete you should be able to run your sugar environment
$ make run


and here you go....your sugar is up and running!
You can switch between your fedora environment and sugar by Ctrl+Alt+F1 and Ctrl+Alt+F3

Journal in Sugar

Activity List view in Sugar

Pippy Activity in Sugar

Building Sugar using JHBuild on Fedora 14

In this post I will describe the process of building Sugar using JHBuild. You can use Debain, Fedora or Ubuntu for this process. Fedora is suggested to avoid conflicts of you want to share your code with community.

• Make sure you don't follow the following process as root to avoid any unpredictable results that can affect your system.
• Make sure you have these installed in your system before starting the build process:
• python: The sugar-jhbuild command is a Python script, so you need the Python interpreter.
• git: To get the source code of sugar-jhbuild itself and many other Sugar packages you need the git command-line tool from the distributed version control system of the same name. In many distributions the minimal package you need to install is "git-core". 
• subversion: A few packages (as of January 2010, only squeak and part of etoys) do not use git, and you need the svn command-line tool from the Subversion version control system to get their source code. 

There are basically two ways to do: one is to git clone the sugar base and build it( This will bring out  latest code base from git) and other approach is to download the jhbuild zipped file, extract it and start building it.

 First approach: git clone the sugar base and build it( This will bring out  latest code base from git repository

The first approach gives issues most of the times. Let's dive in details and see what error it gives and what is the root cause for it ?

Check out sugar-JHBuild

Create a directory within your home directory:

So I will be checking out sugar-jhbuild within:/home/kartik/Sugar_Repository

Execute this command to checkout:

git clone git://git.sugarlabs.org/sugar-jhbuild/mainline.git sugar-jhbuild

You will such output if checkout is successful:

Update Sugar base system and dependencies

Change directory :

cd sugar-jhbuild

Now update the sugar base system by executing this command:

./sugar-jhbuild update

In case you get such error : "ERROR: Could not run lsb_release. Is it installed ?"

It means your systems does not have redhat-lsb package( for Fedora 14)( for Fedora 17 the missing package  is redhat-lsb-core)

You can install this package executing yum command:

yum install redhat-lsb

This will install missing package:

Now rerun the update command:

This time it won't give any error and you see it will check 27 packages and update each of them is required.

After this check for any dependencies the sugar base system has by executing this command:

./sugar-jhbuild depscheck

It will list down list of packages the sugar base system is dependent on:

You can install these dependency packages by executing yum command( you need to use su command for this to go into root mode and then execute yum):

yum install

Once install is complete you can recheck if there is any dependency package left that is not yet installed. This time you get this message if all dependent packages are installed:

"All dependencies are installed"

Build Sugar

Now we can start building this by executing this command:

./sugar-jhbuild build

You will see the progress as :

this goes smooth till package 7. It throws error when building phase 8: telepathy-python:

Now even if we try to install librsvg package using yum, it will ask for gobject-introspection with version>=1.3.0:

checking for gobject-introspection... configure: error: You need to have gobject-introspection >= 1.30.0 installed to build sugar-toolkit-gtk3

you can try to resolve this by yum :
[root@fedora sugar-jhbuild]# yum install gobject-introspection-devel
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Adding en_US to language list
Setting up Install Process
Package gobject-introspection-devel-0.

9.3-1.fc14.i686 already installed and latest version
Nothing to do

 But fedora 14 can have gobject-introspection with version 0.

9.3. which can't be updated.

So this is roadblock in this approach while building sugar using latest JHbuild

Second approach : Download the jhbuild zipped file, extract it and start building it.

Lets dig into another approach where you download the JHBuild version specific to Fedora 14 and then build sugar.

Download the JHBuild zipped file from http://people.sugarlabs.org/

anish/sugar-jhbuild-dx3-0.92.
4dx3-20110725.tar.gz

Then extract the zipped file by executing this command:

 tar -xvf sugar-jhbuild-dx3-0.92.4dx3-20110725.tar.gz

Get into JHBuild directory:

cd sugar-jhbuild-dx3/

Install all packages specified by result of this command( This list down packages on which sugar base is dependent):

./sugar-jhbuild depscheck

Install the packages:

sudo rm -r install/

Build the sugar base:

./sugar-jhbuild build -n -a --clean

Once the build process is complete, you can start the sugar emulator with latest sugar base which you just build:

./sugar-jhbuild run sugar-emulator 

 and there you go ...your sugar desktop environment is up and running!

Courtesy: Anish Mangal for the second approach :)

Happy Hacking !

Sugar Desktop Environment

To all free software distribution evangelists !! You'll love it :D

This time I am sharing my experience with Sugar. Sugar is an open source desktop environment designed with the goal of being used by children for interactive learning. Developed as part of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, it is the default interface on OLPC XO-1 family of laptop computers, but also runs on most computers' hardware. It is available as a LiveCD, as LiveUSB, a package installable through several GNU/Linux distributions, or on Mac OS with virtualization.

Sugar is now developed under the umbrella of Sugar Labs, a nonprofit spin-off of OLPC. Unlike most other desktop environments, Sugar does not use the "desktop", "folder" and "window" metaphors. Instead, Sugar's default full-screen activities require users to focus on only one program at a time. Sugar implements a novel file-handling metaphor (the Journal), which automatically saves the user's running program session and allows him or her to later use an interface to pull up their past works by date, activity used or file type.

The best part of any open source project is that anyone can get involved in it and contribute to it at anytime :). You can checkout the code, go through it, fix the bugs, make changes to code, share the updates as patch with the sugar community. You can become volunteer, Donate online, become a translator, provide support, use your technical knowledge and skills to develop software for SugarLabs.

Sneak Peak into Sugar

This is the home screen for Sugar. Here all the icons you see are links to activities. The user is allowed to run single activity at a time.You will find activities like pippy, browse, calculate, read, chat, turtle art,etc which have been developed/under development for interactive learning. Each activity has been developed by taking into consideration a definite set of factors that ensures good usability design principle. 

An activity is easy to use program developed mainly in python and GTK+. GTK+ (GIMP toolkit) is the native GUI library used for developing cross platform applications. The cross platform nature of Sugar makes it available for Linux distributions, within VM on windows,Mac OS X. It is also available as USB-bootable Linux distribution("Sugar on a Stick")-using this you can install on your hard disk and start using it. Apart from these, it is available for OLPC XO-1.

The awesomeness of sugar is that simplicity is the prime concern in development which is supported by variety of developers across the globe and it is used within a noble project, OLPC.

Are you willing to contribute to this project visit SugarLabs now !

So start contributing today :)

Happy Hacking !