[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] activites known not to either work at all or not on certin platforms

[Sean DALY]

It is absolutely vital that SoaS boot/install work in a reliable way.
Any nongeek user who can't use it will not bother reporting precise
bug information, and moreover will lose motivation to try it again. In
the case of branded USB sticks boot/install failures will make Sugar
Labs appear as a cruddy product. Branded sticks will need to work
every time.

OK that said I ask you to bear with me since I don't know enough about
the (surely formidable) technical hurdles in succeeding boot/install.
Can anyone brief me on the importance/difficulty of the following
factors? Perhaps there is a page which enumerates these factors?

* User difficulty configuring BIOS boot from USB
* Underlying distribution
* Recognizing hardware
* Dependencies
* Network (LAN, Internet) connectivity: configuration, absence thereof
* USB key locked in read-only mode
* Missing or buggy activities


Please forgive my ignorance but does SoaS generate a log at
boot/install? Are there error codes specific to Sugar? I would imagine
that's distribution-dependent... The user feedback rate could be
improved if we communicate a super-simple procedure on boot/install
failure, e.g. an e-mail address to send a boot/install log file to. As
well (perhaps this happens already?), on successful boot/install and
with Internet connnectivity, ideally the stick should phone home with
the boot log which would indicate successful SoaS/hardware
combinations and provide some statistics on how many sticks make it to
screens. Of course, per privacy concerns there should be no
user-identifiable information, or rather any such info should be
immediately anonymized. Is there a way to trap errors in each
activity, in case of error can the boot/install log be appended to,
can a user feedback agent return the updated log to us if the Net is
available?

One more (maybe silly) question, is there a fundamental difference
between Sugar on a CD and Sugar on a Stick?

If this has been dealt with, any pointers to resources would be appreciated.

thank you

Sean


On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 8:34 AM, David Van Assche <dvanassche at gmail.com> wrote:
> well this entire conversation was really brought about because I
> couldnt practice speech with my 2 nephews... Im sorry if I crossed the
> line a bit, but I think what I said needed to be said... SoaS is
> indeed the best plqtform right now  and the kids not only loved it
> (one 9 the other 3) they needed no explanation for the interface... to
> them it was as natural as eating a piece of bread.
>
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 6:04 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:36 PM, Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 9:14 PM, David Van Assche <dvanassche at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Im gonna try and make this easy:
>>>>
>>>> SoaS - the latest fedora core based
>>>> I tried to impress my 9 year old gescwister... (related one)
>>>> Speak - it will not even launch.... why is it then on a disitributed
>>>> stick?
>>>
>>> Aleksey Lim recently took over this orphaned package.  Can you get in touch
>>> with him (alsroot on IRC) and help work it out?  I have yet to even try SoaS
>>> but information on what activities do and don't work should be posted to
>>> http://sugarlabs.org/go/ActivityTeam/ActivityStatus so we can triage them.
>>> We are watching that page.  Thus far most of our work has been migrating
>>> activities over to SL.org but hopefully we can start actually getting them
>>> to work on SoaS soon.
>>
>> On a sidenote: some of the most exciting work for me last summer was
>> Hemant's text-to-speech work, which would have real impact if its
>> integration into Sugar were completed.  How close is that to being
>> possible?
>>
>>> http://dev.laptop.org/~wadeb/TypingTurtle-9.xo is the latest release but I
>>> can't guarantee it works on anything but XO.
>>
>> [Getting pretty hot...]
>>
>> SJ
>>
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