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

[Gary C Martin]

On 27 May 2009, at 15:35, Sean DALY wrote:

> 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.
>
>
> ******************************
> 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

Currently, installation of new Activities (via a GUI) is only via  
Browse on the system in question.

> 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

If you are at the Sugar Terminal and have a .xo bundle accessible some  
place (perhaps you used the Terminal to scp/curl/wget/ftp the file  
from somewhere, or you are running Sugar in a Virtual Machine and are  
sharing some disk space with the host operating system where you've  
already downloaded an .xo bundle), the command you are after is:

	sugar-install-bundle <the_activity.xo>

This will install and place the Activity icon in the home favourite  
view (though unlike downloading via Browse, there will be no record of  
this new bundle in your Journal).

> 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?

No unfortunately not. I had high hopes of this when I first read of  
the idea in the early Sugar days, a great way to virally spread/ 
distribute an Activity organically via peer to peer collaboration. But  
the feature has never been implemented (only sane to do in a world  
with Rainbow or some similar security blanket). It's worth noting that  
currently you only see shared Activities in the neighbourhood for  
Activities you already have installed.

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

If you have the previous Activity version as a bundle in your Journal  
still, I think so... (but will need to retest as it's been a while  
since I last tried this and things may have changed).

Regards,
--Gary

> ******************************
>
> any info appreciated.
>
> The Marketing Team can help write installation tips copy if necessary.
>
> thanks
>
> Sean
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