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I have been using my laptop for a while now for development on Empathy. Since my laptop is running Fedora 16, there is less libraries that need compiling in order to run the latest git empathy. But like any project dependencies are updated on occasion. It just so happens that the GTK+ dependency for Emapthy got updated fairly recently, so when I pulled the latest code, my GTK+ library needed recompiling. Eh, didn't seem like a big deal, compiled fine 1 minor version ago, so I figured it would be easy peasy to recompile the next version. Well, I was wrong.

So, now that I have been hacking away, here is what I am working on.

The first aspect of setting up a Sugar App is parsing some command line arguments. The arguments help configure the app so that the Sugar Framework can properly interface between the App and the X server. Or something like that. These arguments are:


-b, --bundle-id
Identifier of the activity bundle. Must be made available as window property.
-a, --activity-id
Unique identifier of the activity instance. Must be made available as window property, and is used to create the D-Bus service.


A patch for Empathy

Looks like the best course of action is to add support to Empathy or Sugar to properly interface a video chat app into sugar. How exactly this will be done is not completely clear to me yet but here are the possibilities I have seen.

Modify And Add To The Empathy Code Base

Whats Going On?

There have been more than a few attempts at making a Sugar compatible video chat application. As it stands right now there are at least 4 or 5 that work to varying degrees. Empathy is probably the most functional app that I am aware of, however, Empathy is not Sugarized (as far as I know). So after signing up for a bunch of different mailing lists and asking a bunch of questions here is what I have learned.

Build a Completely New Program

Telepathy-glib

Finally... Its spring quarter and I have some time to get a native video chat app running on an XO. There is a lot of talk about the OVC application created by a couple of RIT students: http://foss.rit.edu/projects/ovc. While they work on the python implementation, I am going to detail my progress towards building a native C application.