[IAEP] adding or updating an Activity: two typical teacher scenarios, let's lower barrier to installation

[Sean DALY]

Scenario 1:

Let's say I'm a teacher reading about Sugar in a magazine. I consider
myself comfortable with computers, visit the web every day, but have
never used the command line. I've succeeded in downloading SoaS,
loading it onto a stick with the Fedora LiveUSB Creator and booting my
PC with it. I've tried a few Activities and am wondering what other
Activities are available. Later, back in Windows, I've visited
www.sugarlabs.org and found the Activities section. Browsing by
section, I find a couple of Activities that seem interesting. I've
clicked the pancake buttons and downloaded two .xo files and put them
on my hard disk where I usually store the attachments friends and
colleagues send me.


Scenario 2:

A colleague has mentioned Sugar to me, talking about the OLPC project.
I have a Mac for ease of use and I never see a text screen. I visit
www.sugarlabs.org and after reading the "teachers" section with
interest, I return to the homepage and click on "Try Sugar with a
child today", arriving on the page that advises how to install for
each system; I click on the Apple icon. The boot helper instructions
seem complicated, but I find the VirtualBox OSX installation
instructions and get Sugar running. I'm intrigued by the Activities
and want to know if there are more, so I switch to my browser in the
other window, return to the Sugar Labs site and find a very
interesting-looking Activity in the website's Activities section. I
click the pancake button and download the .xo file to the Mac's
desktop.


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Questions:

1) what are the teachers' next step? Would the procedures be different
for these two scenarii?
* No instructions I could locate on activities.sugarlabs.org :-(
* In the wiki section, I eventually located Activity Library and found
a page called End Users, but two of the three pages are blank and the
other one talks about a sandbox...
* The search engine doesn't help either, there are lots of documents
found but none give advice about how to add an Activity or update to a
more recent one.

2) I think we are assuming Activity installation from within Browse
under Sugar, but that method may be too much to assume for a newbie or
for someone with no net connectivity with Sugar... "automatic" if
connected though I don't remember if a new Activity arrives in the
list view or is a favorite... we need to communicate what to expect in
that case

3) Someone told me how to add an Activity by placing the .xo bundle in
a directory... but I can't find the mail :-( and CLI manipulations
daunting for many ordinary users

4) If I remember correctly, a collaborative Activity set to public
sharing is pushed out over the network to other Sugar machines. Are
those machines permanently updated with more recent versions, or
installed if new versions, or merely "borrowed" during the session?

5) if there is a problem, is it possible to roll back to the previous
version of an Activity?

******************************

any info appreciated.

The Marketing Team can help write installation tips copy if necessary.

thanks

Sean