[IAEP] Sunflower for Science on XO

[Danny Kodicek]

Hi there

I just wanted to write to let people know we've been experimenting with some
success with getting our Sunflower for Science product
(www.sunflowerlearning.com) running on an XO. It's a Windows/Mac product but
I've got it running through SugaredWine and it's looking very promising.

I have a few questions that I wondered if anyone might be able to help with:

1) Screen resolution
The biggest problem we have is that the screen res of the XO seems
unnecessarily high and can't be changed. This leads to two big problems, one
of readibility (which we can fix with a bit of work) and one of performance.
Given the low spec of the machines, running full-screen animations, some of
them in 3d, is pretty hard work for them at that resolution. Does anyone
have any suggestions for ways to get round this issue? For example, I've
been thinking about whether we could run the software at half-res and then
use a screen magnifier app to bring it back to fullscreen

2) Launching and packaging
Although SugaredWine is great, it would seem that a more sensible option
would be to package the software together with Wine as a single activity
that can be launched directly from a stick or installed as a .xo. Our
product doesn't have an installer, although it does write to the Registry -
anyone tried anything like this?

I'm afraid I'm a total Linux novice, so any advice would be welcome, but if
you could talk to me like a small child that would be very helpful :)

Thanks
Danny