A Server for building and testing NVDA

Over the last week or so, I have been busily setting up the new testing/development server that was kindly donated to NV Access. This server is going to be used as a server for the organization: hosting a virtual private network, allowing for the collaboration of business-related work and access to NVAccess's printer/copier/scanner/fax (bought through an Australian government grant). But more importantly it will be used as a testing/development server. Once its finally set up, this server will be able to automatically build daily snapshots of NVDA (if the source code changes), and also hopefully run some automated tests on the snapshots, to make sure that changes made don't break any previous changes.

Hardware-wise, the server has a Pentium 4, 3.20 GHz processor, and 1 gig of ram. Previously it did have 2 gigs, but the second chip seemed to be not very healthy, and after taxing the memory quite a bit the other day, we were getting all sorts of fun errors, so for now that chip has been removed. It has two hard drives, one 40 gig for the main Operating System and applications, and an 80 gig for files and Virtual machines for building/testing. It also has no shortage of USB sockets, in fact I already took out one card that had four on it. It has a floppy drive, sound card, and two network cards (one for access to the internet and my home network, and one purely for NV Access, to access the printer, and any other NV Access specific devices).

I have installed Ubuntu Linux 7.10 as the server's Operating System. We chose this OS because a: both Jamie and I are used to using Debian Linux (which Ubuntu is based on) and B: Ubuntu's accessibility seems to be growing all the time. And as NV Access, this is something we'd like to keep an eye on.

For testing and building NVDA, we are going to run MS Windows inside VMWare. For those who don't know, VMWare is software that emulates an entire computer system, so you can run one operating system, inside another. There is a free version of VMWare for Linux, which suits our needs, and I have successfully installed it and its running quite nicely on the server now.

Although the server is pretty much all set up, we're still a little way off from complete automated building/testing of NVDA. One thing that needs to be completed is the re-writing of the build scripts Jamie currently uses to build NVDA snapshots on his laptop. The plan is that we'd no longer like to keep compiled copies of eSpeak, charHook, keyHook and the virtual buffer library in subversion, but instead build them along with the snapshots, and have them all included in the snapshots, and also as a separate download so that people can still run from source. However the most important part holding us back is getting access to the MS Windows Operating System, so we can install it in the virtual machines on the server. I have tested virtual machines with some other free operating systems such as Ubuntu and Gentoo Linux so I know they work, but over the next little while NV Access would like to investigate how to acquire licensed copies of the needed Windows versions. We plan to build the snapshots in Windows XP, though we would much like to be able to test NVDA with Windows 2000, Windows Vista, possibly Windows 98/ME. Of course testing MS Office would be also very useful.

Many thanks go to the donator of the server, already we are seeing just how useful it is, plus we believe it really will change the way NVDA development happens in the future.

One other advantage of the server running Ubuntu is that I'm able to run Orca (a Gnome X-Windows screen reader for Linux / Solaris). Both the Orca and NVDA projects do have many things in common (as they are both free and open-source screen readers), and even though they are written for two entirely different operating systems, there should be much the projects can learn from each other, both in coding and user experience. I recently tested Orca with Firefox 3, and it is very clear that orca's web support is coming in leaps and bounds.

Other than server stuff, I of course have been working on the new virtual buffer library for NVDA. Work is slow but I'm definitely getting there. Design decisions need to be made very carefully as we need to make sure the code is as efficient as possible, but also make sure it will be compatible with lots of different web content.