I created this for the RIT Linux User’s Group (a.k.a. RITlug). RITlug welcomes student-led projects for members to work on together. RITlug executive board members want to better encourage students to share and join projects for collaboration with the community (in the spirit of FOSS). To do this, the executive board members will create and offer both a template website and template documentation tools to introduce students to project development process. Then, students are better able to sustain a more diverse community around their projects.

“Start writing ReStructuredText already!” 🔗

The philosophy with this small project is: “Start writing ReStructuredText already!” I use Sphinx with ReadTheDocs as a deployment option across different organizations. I want a common base to later customize for a specific project’s needs.

The whole point of this project is to save time kicking off a new project’s recently-established documentation effort.

Sphinx Travis CI testing configuration included 🔗

Complex documentation tool chains need simple validation of successful builds. This avoids long periods where documentation may not build and the public docs are out of date. It also better engages core contributors to monitor and take care of their documentation.

A Travis CI configuration is included. Fork this repository and enable the repo on travis-ci.org to start running builds.

Add a star on GitHub 🔗

Does this sound helpful? Check it out and add a star at justwheel/sphinx-docs-opinionated-quickstart. The project is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License; feel free to fork it and form your own opinions too.

Photo by Jānis Skribāns on Unsplash.

For the next homework assignment in my Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Development (HFOSS) course, we were tasked with running a smoke test of the XO laptops we are assigned for class. Some of the laptops are notoriously more broken than others. Seeing as how some of these date to around ten years ago, it’s easy to understand how they have been become more defunct over the years.

Part of my assignment was to run some basic tests and practices on my XO laptop to make sure it would be capable for most core functionalities. This article will serve as my step-by-step smoke test report on my XO laptop, which I have affectionately named Hedron.

Beginning the smoke test: Start up 🔗

The first part of the one hour smoke test guide is to make sure the laptop starts up as expected and functions correctly while starting up. This part of the smoke test took the shortest amount of time.

• Does the XO start up? Yes
• Do the power LED and backlight work? Yes
• Does the activity ring show after booting? Yes
• Does it automatically connect to a known WiFi network? Yes

In short, the bare minimum requirement (i.e. “does it work?”) was met.

Running activities in the smoke test 🔗

For the most part, every activity I ran had the expected behavior that the smoke test walk-through gave. Since there were more things working than there was not, I have a short list of the things that weren’t working below.

• eToys Activity: Not installed
• Read Activity:
  • Cannot scroll through PDFs (scroll bar non-responsive)
  • Cannot close and open a new document
  • Terminal Activity doesn’t parse anywhere near readable
• TurtleArt Activity: Not installed
• Wikipedia Activity: Cannot search for articles

Transfer files to USB 🔗

Transferring files between the XO and a USB drive worked well. However, I didn’t actually do this from the SoaS interface, but I switched over to the GNOME2 environment to accomplish this. Perhaps this was cheating, but it was the most effective way to easily move media between flash media and the XO.

My use case was trying to put a yum-utils RPM file on the machine. Oddly enough, the XO doesn’t come with yum-utils prepackaged, which makes it difficult to navigate when it comes to updating the XOs to new repository locations.

Smoke Test Collaboration 🔗

On Friday, a group of us met in the Simone Center lobby to work on testing some of the group activities on the XOs. We hit three different activities, and the process we used is documented below.

To begin, we all connected to the same WiFi network (rit) since the WPA2 Enterprise network on RIT’s campus didn’t play nicely with some of the XOs. There were four of us, so we split into pairs to try the activities since they didn’t work well with more than one other person.

The four of us that met were:

• Stephen
• Wilfried
• Bobby

Chat 🔗

We were able to successfully open a chat room and talk with each other on our local connection. There were a few inconsistencies like messages being delivered late and other minor mishaps, but overall, the functionality behaved as expected.

Distance 🔗

Wilfried and Stephen were able to successfully get the Distance activity to work between their XOs. However, Bobby and I were unable to get them to initiate with each other in the time that we were working on this. We weren’t sure if this was a network hiccup or an actual deficiency on the XO.

Write 🔗

We were able to use the Write activity to write in the same notepad as another user. Despite being slow and lackadaisical, it did actually work as expected.

Suspension 🔗

The final test I ran on the XO was shutting the laptop and seeing if it would resume from its former point when I reopened the XO. It was able to do this as expected.

In short, I think I lucked out and received one of the most functional devices in the class. After comparing the class inventory to mine, it seems like Hedron the XO is in pretty good shape.