While preparing my OLPC laptop for LinuxTag, I noticed some glitches in the OLPC build of Tinymail. These have now all been fixed and the demo-ui will run and work as-is. You will of course need to edit your $HOME/.xinitrc to override the “exec sugar” with an “exec xterm”, start matchbox-windowmanager and then the Tinymail demoui binary.
You can also try to use the development console which is accessible when typing the [alt]+[=] key combination. But I found it quite hard to make the application usable this way (it gets pushed to the back by the Sugar window manager or something).
The demoui is indeed not suitable nor has already been made suitable as a typical Sugar application. I would of course welcome attempts at this.
To compile do this on any typical x86 computer:
./autogen.sh --with-platform=olpc --prefix=/opt/tinymail-olpc make && sudo make install
Now tar /opt/tinymail-olpc and untar it into the same directory on your device’s root filesystem.
After deployment follow these instructions for creating an account and in the xterm just launch /opt/tinymail-olpc/bin/demoui.
It’ll ask you for the password each time. I haven’t yet found which password storage API is going to be used on the laptop, so the platform specific implementation is just going to call a GtkDialog box that will each time ask you for the password.