[IAEP] 0.84 doc updates

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Anne,

On 15 Mar 2009, at 20:22, Anne Gentle wrote:

> Hi all -
> Thanks to those of you who did updates on the Sugar guide for 0.84.  
> We're close but need a couple more items in order to complete the  
> updates.
>
> Also, I can't currently export to HTML or PDF to update the Help  
> Activity. I'm in touch with the FM tech team to get a resolution.
>
> I have a few additional questions, after poking around this week.
>
> 1. Can you update an XO-1 to the 0.84 build? I can't find a method  
> for doing that.

I think the short answer is, not in a user friendly or reliable way,  
and certainly some way from real deployments. I have an XO-1 here  
running a build with Sugar 0.84.0 for testing – a number of important  
XO-1 hardware features are not yet supported (power management, sound,  
camera, correct keyboard mapping/languages, etc). The Sugar desktop  
can live on top of various OS distributions; the software OLPC ship on  
XOs has a number of customisations to what is now an old version of  
Fedora, those customisations haven't yet (all) made it into current  
Fedora builds that Soas (and fedora-xo) use.

> 2. I'm using SoaS to get my screenshots and then emailing them to  
> myself using Gmail in the Browse Activity. How else could I copy  
> files from the Journal (on SoaS) to another location?

Couple of options:

- Open the Terminal activity and use the command copy-from-journal to  
easily get at the PNG file; you could then scp or ftp them to another  
machine (this is what I usually do); you can probably also copy them  
somewhere else on your USB stick that you know you can easily find  
later on your main OS, this depends a little on how you made your  
stick, but the ones I've made so far are just basic fat32, so I can  
still access files of it from my main OS.

- Pop in another regular USB stick and use the Journal to transfer the  
screen-shots over.

> 3. In the 0.84 control panel aka My Settings, I don't see the  
> Software Update button. How can we update the Help Activity contents  
> or other Activities? The answer to this will help with updates to http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Sugar/8_4/Updating 
> .

This is a bit of politics I'm afraid, the Software Update panel was an  
OLPC thing and there was strong resistance to adopting it as part of  
Sugar. That may be water under the bridge now as I'm sure I read there  
was some movement and may be coming.

All the Soas and fedora-xo images I've tested so far do really nasty  
horrid things with activity storage that will currently break most  
users expectations. I think this is just part of the development  
process, but I'm not sure where it's going to end up. Right now the  
activities installed are all over the place, /usr/share/activities, / 
usr/share/bundles, and some misc symbolic links in /home/liveuser/ 
Activities; all of which are owned by root, so no user will be able to  
delete or upgrade any of them without hacking about in a terminal.

Manually installing new activities (and then deleting or upgrading  
them) does seem to work fine as Sugar writes these into /hone/liveuser/ 
Activities with the correct permissions. By manually installing, I  
mean using the Browse activity to visit http:// 
activities.sugarlabs.org or the http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities  
and clicking and downloading .xo bundles.

Sorry this is quite so nasty still :-(

Regards,
--Gary

> 4. I have written info on using SoaS for Windows and started the  
> Grannies Guide to Sugar here: http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/GranniesGuideSugar/WebHome 
> . I would love for someone to write the SoaS chapters for Linux  
> (Ed?). I will include that content in the Sugar Guide once the  
> manual index arrangement works again.
>
> Thanks,
> Anne
>
>
>
> -- 
> Anne Gentle
> email: annegentle at justwriteclick.com
> blog: www.justwriteclick.com
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