I've been working on getting Sugar installed on my laptop for development all night (since around 8pm or so). Was given a free copy of VMWare Workstation 5.5 (yay), but the image I have doesn't have the driver required for VMWare's network driver to work, Nor does it have gcc to install it. I gather the network driver is new in 5.5 or something like that. Have burned hours and hours on that problem.

Qemu still won't build on my gcc 4.x-only laptop.

I finally got networkmanager to build (unmasking quite a few hard-masked packages in order to get it done). Then had to upgrade the laptop to Python 2.5 (which, given the number of libraries I use meant hours of recompilation). jhbuild is finally running, but it has 141 packages to build and the connection here is capped at 15Kbps, so it's taking forever and a day.

The idea was that I was going to sit down this evening, install the image, set up an environment in which I could start hacking up applications, and learn enough to give a quick introduction tomorrow. Instead I'm basically at exactly the same point as I was 8 hours ago, I'm just far more tired and frustrated. On the plus side, I seem to have identified a number of problems:

• We need to have VMWare images available and tested to work
• We probably need some way to chroot into a build environment so that we can compile needed modules/software, that is, an image of the system used to build sugar, not just the product of the build

I'm downloading the clean (old) vmware images for sugar now. Only another 2 hours or so for that to complete. Ian is actually sitting in the hall outside chatting... we may not be right on time for the 9:00 start tomorrow as a result. Okay, he's off to bed now and I probably should head up to sleep as well.

Jhbuild is now on item 12 of 141 and I'm not actually sure that I'm doing the right thing there, the documentation just pointed me at jhbuild and told me to install it, the jhbuild document said to configure it to build "what I wanted"... which I don't know. I'm guessing it's doing something stupid like building all of GTK/Gnome.