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

David Van Assche dvanassche at gmail.com
Wed Feb 11 04:16:38 EST 2009


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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>


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