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Peter Robinson | 22 Mar 2013 13:59
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Plans for SoaS v9

Hi All,

I'm trying to get a little bit more organised for this cycle than I
have been over the last couple.

The plans for SoaS v9 are going to be somewhat simple. We're going to
stick with the 0.98.x release of Sugar and focusing on polish.

I would like to see more people testing and using it during the dev
cycle so I don't get the "My Activity is broken" post release or five
minutes before release when we're generating final images and pushing
them out to the Fedora mirrors.

I would also like to remove sugar-presence-service but that would mean
either dropping eToys or the developers stepping up to actually fix
the dependency that they've only been promising to do for 2 or so
years.

Is there anything in particular that people would like to contribute
during this cycle? Anything I can help someone achieve? Does anyone
want to dig into the documentation on the web site to improve the
process?

I'd also love marketing to get involved since we've not had any
publicity for a number of releases and after all Walter was telling me
some time back that it's the biggest single driver in the wiki.

Finally there's a Test Compose for the alpha available in the
following link. I've used it briefly in a VM and it boots and seems to
mostly work.
(Continue reading)

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Eddie Rozen | 8 Feb 2013 13:44
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Help with creating a bootable usb stick

 I used the Fedora Live USB Creator program, and the Fedora -18-I686 Live Soas iso. I received an error message vesamenu -32 not a com 32r image. Google search suggested changing the first line of the syslinux.cfg to default live. I received an error message live image not found.
I also tried creating an bootable usb image using the sugar creation kit, I expanded the ISO and used the fedora - 13 I686 ISO and then received an erro message could not find kernal image default Live. Google search suggested placing a tab after the word default and live and pressing enter in the syslinux.cfg. I also noted that other suggested that some desktop would not work, so I switch to a newer notebook and received the same message.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
 
Eddie
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edyrozen-PkbjNfxxIARBDgjK7y7TUQ@public.gmane.org | 7 Feb 2013 16:29
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Looking for tablets that boot on usb (please help)

Im looking for a list of tablets that would boot on an USB drive. I have tried a couple and have had no luck so far.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Eddie

Sent from my Verizon Wireless Droid 
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SoaS@...
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Peter Robinson | 5 Feb 2013 11:49
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Re: [Marketing] links from homepage to Downloads page

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez@...> wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> thanks for taking the time to answer in detail!
>
> I think most of your points can be summarized as: it would be cool but
> it has never been done before and so it's too hard. Well, first of all
> I'm happy you find some of these things would be nice to have. Second,
> I think they are possible and I hope to prove you wrong on the too
> hard part whenever I find time to hack on them.

NO! You have me completely wrong with the "it has never been done
before and so it's too hard" so please don't summarise me with a
completely bullshit marketing statement. It has been attempted a
number of times before, go and read the archives, and each time they
come back to the current status quo because of the problems with it.

I look forward to you attempts though. I think there's better ways to
be dealing with making it simpler though. Bootloaders are hard and
Fedora has some of the brightest people in the world working on those.
Just go and read the recent stuff with SecureBoot...

Peter
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Peter Robinson | 5 Feb 2013 11:29
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Re: [Marketing] links from homepage to Downloads page

>> We already have that as you can boot the ISO off both virtual and
>> physical platforms and it has the same installer. It would be cool if
>> someone could do a patch that gives the install and icon either on the
>> wheel or in the control panel that says "install me".
>
> What I'm aiming for is an application with some text, a progress bar
> and a single button. People do not RTFM and they shouldn't have to.

Yea, I'd love that too, I think you'll find most distributions would
love that and would already have that if it was possible. Generally
and unfortunately this isn't the case (and if you know of a platform
that offers that do let me know) adding in virtualisation and ARM
technologies will only make this worse. This is why we've never
officially supported VM images because people don't understand the
differences. We generally even just make the 32 bit the default option
too because of this.

Ultimately we should be offering a "buy a usb key with SoaS ready to
go" option for the people that don't RTFM so that they can just let
their credit card do their thinking because a single click option will
unfortunately cause as many problems as it fixes.

>>>     * Single click application which download and writes the latest sugar image
>>>         * On a USB stick
>>>         * On a SD for the Raspberry
>>
>> There's live USB creator here which does the USB stick quite well, it
>> wouldn't be hard to add support for the RPi but someone would need to
>> add the support.
>>
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB
>
> I know about live USB creator but, as above, I'm aiming for a single
> click application.

See my description above, it doesn't currently exist.

>>> * Setup a web site which allows to access a sugar instance via novnc,
>>> for evaluation.
>>
>> Who's going to pay for the hosting of that?
>
> I guess it depends on the number of "seats" we will require for this
> to be useful (if it's always busy it would just be frustrating). If
> it's matter of a few seats, I think it's worth for sugarlabs to
> provide it on the servers we are already running.

Look at the thread on marketing between Sean and Bernie about shutting
down the google apps instance due to lack of time. If the infra team
don't have time to deal with something like that it's extremely
unlikely they'll have the time, interest or infrastructure to run what
is essentially a VDI platform.

>> What about platform security?
>
> Are you thinking of any issue in particular? I can think of a few but
> nothing unsolvable.

I can think of a lot. My day job is for enterprise hosting and I deal
with this sort of thing every day. What you're requesting is
essentially a VDI platform and there's a lot of things that need to be
dealt with. Every single platform of this type I've ever deployed (and
we're talking in the 100s of thousands of seats) sits behind VPN
platforms.... if you think selecting a few options to create a USB
stick is too hard for users getting them to setup a vpn will make that
look like a walk in the park!

>>> * Make a list of linux distributions with recent/well working
>>> packages, which can be installed from the official repos.
>>
>> Fedora does and it's the same package set used on the OLPCs
>
> Yup, I actually fear Fedora might be the only distro we can put on
> that list but we need to find out. Anyway the point is that the
> current downloads page seems to try to list the best way to install
> sugar on any distribution. I think we should actually list only
> distributions which has reliable packages in their official repos,
> Fedora being certainly one of them.

Have you been to this page which is in fact the official SoaS page? It
needs some updating but I think ultimately we should just offer a list
and then redirect to the appropriate distro specific page rather than
try to document them all in the one location.

http://spins.fedoraproject.org/soas/

>>> I don't see all of these happening over night but they are not rocket
>>> science either.
>>
>> Most of the above is already there on the Fedora/SoaS images, could do
>> with a little polish but for someone that knows their way around
>> python it would be easy.
>
> Yes, I think the hardest parts are all there. We just need to
> streamline the user experience to lower the barrier.

I welcome patches and absolutely welcome discussion on this, I've been
working on Fedora and SoaS for 4 years now and struggle with the lack
of help the sugar community offers here even though it's the only
stable platform for sugar that receives any form of active
development.

>>> With these in place I think it would be possible to write a sane
>>> download page. I don't think it should be on a wiki, or anyway any
>>> change to it should be reviewed and tested by the marketing team +
>>> someone with technical inclination. Anything more advanced should go
>>> somewhere on the wiki, for technical people to edit and use.
>>
>> I'm open to improvements, I'm not open to VM virtual images especially
>> for proprietary platforms especially when we're suppose to be
>> promoting open source.
>
> Well, I think there are two different issues here.
> One is to decide if we want to support running sugar on proprietary
> platforms. My feeling is that supporting to run an open source OS
> inside an open source VM, on a proprietary platform is still a way to
> promote open source.

I don't disagree on the above statement but ultimately we can do that
just fine with the existing ISO.

> But I don't want to get too ideological about that, my main point is
> that if decide it's a good idea then we should should support it in
> the best possible way. And *if* that requires VM virtual images than
> we should provide those.

But to support all VM platforms with one image the only way to do that
simply is an ISO. That is why upstream Fedora only supports ISOs as it
works with ALL VM platforms out there including VMware (vSphere,
Workstation, Fusion), Xen (Xen Desktop, Server, the various Citrix
options), VirtualBox, Parallels and all the various open source
derivatives of KVM. The reason we do it like that is so that we don't
confuse people with 100s of images to download. And if you mention an
OVF image you'll have to excuse me while pick myself up as I'll laugh
so hard that I will fall off my chair.

We've had this discussion many times before if you want to get all the
details please go and read the list archives.

Again if you thing this is so easy why aren't all the other distros
distributing the various virtual images..... because they cause more
problems than they've every fixed. This is one of the many advantages
we get by being involved in the upstream Fedora process..... the wide
advantage of experience of 100s of people involved in shipping and
supporting a widely used distribution.

> So, if we want to support this use case, let's do it with a single
> click application. Otherwise let's just not list it in the downloads
> page.

As stated before the single image download is the ISO.

>>> Right now it's difficult even for me to get sugar running outside
>>> linux (and even there I have to use sugar-build on most distributions
>>> because the packages are often old and broken). So I don't see how we
>>> can hope educators would do it.
>>
>> It doesn't run outside of linux unless you mean a VM in which means
>> it's still running within Linux.
>
> I meant in a VM of course. I think it would be possible to build sugar
> at least for OS X, but it's probably more work than we can afford.

It won't work on OSX. There's a lot of issues with GTK on OSX. GTK3
improves on that so maybe it might be possible one day soon but
there's a lot of underlying issues there because we use core bits that
only ship on Linux to implement a lot of things like networking (to
begin with).

Peter
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Peter Robinson | 4 Feb 2013 00:41
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Re: [Marketing] links from homepage to Downloads page

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez@...> wrote:
> IMO we need a radical simplification of the downloads page.
>
> I investigated a bit the technical possibilities and I think we should
>
> * For both windows and OS X
>     * Write a single installer which takes care of
>         * Installing virtualbox if not already installed
>         * Download the latest image
>         * Set it up with virtualbox and create some kind of launcher for it

We already have that as you can boot the ISO off both virtual and
physical platforms and it has the same installer. It would be cool if
someone could do a patch that gives the install and icon either on the
wheel or in the control panel that says "install me".

>     * Single click application which download and writes the latest sugar image
>         * On a USB stick
>         * On a SD for the Raspberry

There's live USB creator here which does the USB stick quite well, it
wouldn't be hard to add support for the RPi but someone would need to
add the support.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB

> * Setup a web site which allows to access a sugar instance via novnc,
> for evaluation.

Who's going to pay for the hosting of that? What about platform security?

> * Make a list of linux distributions with recent/well working
> packages, which can be installed from the official repos.

Fedora does and it's the same package set used on the OLPCs

> I don't see all of these happening over night but they are not rocket
> science either.

Most of the above is already there on the Fedora/SoaS images, could do
with a little polish but for someone that knows their way around
python it would be easy.

> With these in place I think it would be possible to write a sane
> download page. I don't think it should be on a wiki, or anyway any
> change to it should be reviewed and tested by the marketing team +
> someone with technical inclination. Anything more advanced should go
> somewhere on the wiki, for technical people to edit and use.

I'm open to improvements, I'm not open to VM virtual images especially
for proprietary platforms especially when we're suppose to be
promoting open source.

> Right now it's difficult even for me to get sugar running outside
> linux (and even there I have to use sugar-build on most distributions
> because the packages are often old and broken). So I don't see how we
> can hope educators would do it.

It doesn't run outside of linux unless you mean a VM in which means
it's still running within Linux.

Peter
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Walter Bender | 3 Feb 2013 15:32
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Re: [Marketing] links from homepage to Downloads page

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 9:25 AM, Gerald Ardito <gmanb5@...> wrote:
> Sean,
>
> I appreciate your comments about teachers.
> As a teacher who has used Sugar and the XOs extensively, and has trained
> other teachers to do so as well, I can say that things can sometimes be very
> difficult.
>
> I sometimes feels like there is a middle layer missing in the process, a
> layer that would  let teachers be able to get some support with their
> intentions, but that doesn't necessary involve development.

It is somewhat apples and oranges, but when I was in Amazonas and
asked where the teachers hung out, they all say, with out hesitation,
Facebook. I didn't ask them to join the #sugar IRC channel to help
them over the inevitable bumps in the road, or to navigate the wiki,
but rather, we set up a Facebook page where they could get help with
those "middle" things. I'm 100% certain that US teachers use Facebook,
so we should too, if we want to engage them.

-walter
>
> Gerald
>
> On Sunday, February 3, 2013 at 8:29 AM, Sean DALY wrote:
>
> It's clear that anything other than pre-installed raises a barrier
> most teachers don't want to deal with. However, getting Sugar
> referenced with an OEM is far easier said than done. And Apple is not
> particularly motivated to encourage others to boot non-Apple OSes on
> their hardware.
>
> In the meantime, we have to make the difficult as simple as possible.
> This includes installers and documentation including videos.
>
> I don't want to underestimate teachers' motivation to find software
> for their students, either. I have found that Sugar's unbeatable price
> and nonprofit orientation are consistently appreciated by teachers.
>
> Sean
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 2:06 PM, DancesWithCars <danceswithcars@...>
> wrote:
>
> do you all think installing a VM is easier than
> making a LiveCD, or SOAS and rebooting?
>
> Most Macs these days are Intel,
> it's the hardware compatibility to get something
> to boot from BIOS, and other issues, AFAICT...
>
> Of the kids and adults I've talked to, over the years
> (realizing most people here have more experience)
> they don't bother unless an XO-1.x or better is put
> before them... They fall in love with the hardware,
> the cuteness factor, and if it's on a regular machine
> (even the RPi I've tried a few on), it's a no go,
> generally...
>
> Not that it's not worth having, jhbuild, sweets, VMs, etc
> are all good, but most non technical people won't
> try it, AFAICT...
>
> ---
> odd nonstandard keyboard so who knows what I intended to type...
>
> On Feb 3, 2013 7:21 AM, "Thomas Gilliard" <satellit@...>
> wrote:
>
>
> Sean;
>
> I just did a cleanup of the wiki pages covering Virtual Box and Importable
> appliances
> deleted a lot of obsolete information and their links [5]
>
> I updated:
> Downloads [1] [2]; Fedora_18 [3]; and Sugar_on_a_Stick [4] wiki pages
>
> Tom Gilliard
> satellit on #sugar freenode IRC
>
> [1]
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Downloads#Virtual_Machines_on_all_platforms
> Links to Virtual Box Appliances :
> [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Creation_Kit/VirtualBox
> Links to Soas-v8:
> [3]
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Fedora_18#Sugar_on_a_Stick_v8_.CA.BB.C5.8Chelo_.CA.BBai
> [4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick
> This page is still not updated, you have to scroll down to find SoaS-v8
> [5] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Special:RecentChanges
>
>
>
> On 02/02/2013 04:14 PM, Sean DALY wrote:
>
>
> For the past couple of years, our homepage has linked the Sugar on a
> Stick (SoaS) badge to the SoaS page [1] and the "download" menu item
> and "Try it with a child today" link to the Downloads page [2].
>
> The downloads page rightly in my view orients visitors by platform,
> but the two largest market share desktop/laptop OSes (Windows & MacOS,
> 96% or so of market) only give instructions for Sugar on a Stick and
> the "Do you use a virtual machine?" link misses the excellent VMs
> available (in particular the VMs of... SoaS!).
>
> I think teachers will self-classify by OS and virtually none of them
> will self-classify as virtual machine users.
>
> Teachers will also expect pancake button 1-click installers (this was
> confirmed by Sloan Marketlab study), problematic with SoaS due to
> necessary USB stick manipulation and still a bit hairy on a Mac.
>
> I think Windows section and Mac section should both propose choice of
> SoaS and using VirtualBox with a SoaS VM, explaining benefits of each
> method in layman's terms.
>
> VMs are far less disruptive for trying Sugar, as a teacher can
> download to hard disk, install and run, keeping usual apps going
> (mail, browser, word processing) while experiencing Sugar.
>
> The downside is of course massive files to download, but that could be
> mitigated with torrents and/or mirrors.
>
> Comment please before we get into wiki editing of this crucial page
> thanks
>
> Sean
>
>
> [1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick
> [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DocumentationTeam/Try_Sugar
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> SoaS mailing list
> SoaS@...
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas
>
> _______________________________________________
> Marketing mailing list
> Marketing@...
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Marketing mailing list
> Marketing@...
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/marketing
>

--

-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org
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Sean DALY | 3 Feb 2013 01:14
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links from homepage to Downloads page

For the past couple of years, our homepage has linked the Sugar on a
Stick (SoaS) badge to the SoaS page [1] and the "download" menu item
and "Try it with a child today" link to the Downloads page [2].

The downloads page rightly in my view orients visitors by platform,
but the two largest market share desktop/laptop OSes (Windows & MacOS,
96% or so of market) only give instructions for Sugar on a Stick and
the "Do you use a virtual machine?" link misses the excellent VMs
available (in particular the VMs of... SoaS!).

I think teachers will self-classify by OS and virtually none of them
will self-classify as virtual machine users.

Teachers will also expect pancake button 1-click installers (this was
confirmed by Sloan Marketlab study), problematic with SoaS due to
necessary USB stick manipulation and still a bit hairy on a Mac.

I think Windows section and Mac section should both propose choice of
SoaS and using VirtualBox with a SoaS VM, explaining benefits of each
method in layman's terms.

VMs are far less disruptive for trying Sugar, as a teacher can
download to hard disk, install and run, keeping usual apps going
(mail, browser, word processing) while experiencing Sugar.

The downside is of course massive files to download, but that could be
mitigated with torrents and/or mirrors.

Comment please before we get into wiki editing of this crucial page thanks

Sean

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick
[2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/DocumentationTeam/Try_Sugar
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Peter Robinson | 10 Dec 2012 18:19
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SoaS v8 Test Candidate release

Hi All,

The final release of SoaS v8 is due soon (likely January 8th).

There's a test candidate available below which should be pretty close
to the final product that I would like to get final testing and
feedback from. You can download the iso images for both 32 and 64 bit
below and you can follow this link to find out how to create a live
usb key http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB

Peter

http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-TC1/Live/i386/Fedora-18-TC1-i686-Live-SoaS.iso
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/18-TC1/Live/x86_64/Fedora-18-TC1-x86_64-Live-SoaS.iso
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Bernie Innocenti | 18 Sep 2012 23:34
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Outdated Fedora wiki page

Hello, I stumbled upon this page which looks outdated:

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Sugar_on_a_Stick

Shall we replace it with a redirect to the SoaS home page on the SL
wiki, or maybe to the Fedora SoaS spin page?

--

-- 
Bernie Innocenti
Sugar Labs Infrastructure Team
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team
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Peter Robinson | 15 Jul 2012 20:39
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Re: Packaging Castle Activity for Fedora

On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Danishka Navin <danishka@...> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I am going to package one of sugar activity, 'Castle' [1] for Fedora.
>
> I want to know whether it comes under Fructose Activities or Honey
> Activities ?
>
> [1] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4397

It will be honey. Fructose activities are only those in this list.

Please send the query to the mailing list in the future.

Peter

[1] http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/sucrose/fructose/
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