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

[David Van Assche]

hey there sean.... essentially there is no difference between SoaS and
cd.... the problem comes from the distro specific intricacies, which
can be many more than devs care to admit... I agree.. this is not a
usable product unless it alll works... saying.... oh welll speak
doesnt work because of x or y, is no excuse. bios has nothing to do
with this, this is purely distro related... for example... on fedora
we have 80% workage, on ubuntu 40 maybe 50% workage... but for those
of us in the field selling this tech, this is not accpetable... I say
it again.... I know its an open source project but it doesnt help
funding if we cant even get the damn thing to run.... a cd, btw, is
worse than a stick at this point..... at least for ubuntu.... goood
luck and lets work this shit out so we finally have a solution that
works in schoosl

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 9:50 AM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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>