[IAEP] Sugar distributions for teachers and volunteers [WAS: Congratulations to OLPC Australia!]

[Sridhar Dhanapalan]

On 1 April 2010 08:42, Martin Sevior <msevior at gmail.com> wrote:
> I came across this article in the mainstream Australian National
> Newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
>
> http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/joy-as-computer-power-comes-to-yirrkala/story-e6frg6nf-1225848236378
>
> A massive congratulations to OLPC Australia for this. Those are 3 very
> powerful heavy hitters you have in your corner!
> (And normally companies Australians are very cynical of.)
>
> Congratulations!
>
> Martin

A belated thanks, Martin!

Our deployments are really hotting up, and we could use some
assistance from the Sugar community. We are looking at better ways to
distribute Sugar, as a means of making people more comfortable with
the software found on the XOs.

We have a two main use cases:

  1. a teacher who is using or intends to use XOs in their classroom
  2. any random person who wants to try Sugar

The version of Sugar used should reflect what is available on the
XO-1.5 units (we will no longer deploy XO-1s), to provide consistency.
This will mean that we will not be distributing the latest version of
Sugar. We want to be able to hand out media with Sugar already
installed, so that it can be easy to get involved. On top of that, we
want to provide:

  1. documentation for using Sugar and XOs for educational purposes
  2. tools and files to create more of the media (e.g. ISO file and USB creator)

Some considerations:

  1. it should be as easy to use as possible
  2. it should be cross-platform in terms of hardware and OS

At the moment, I have three ideas in mind:

  1. Sugar on a Stick, on a USB stick with some persistent storage
  2. a virtual machine image (e.g. for VirtualBox)
  3. a LiveCD

The First idea is for the teachers we will be training to use XOs in
the classroom. This will allow them to use Sugar even before they have
an XO. It also lets them use the VGA port on their laptops to project
the Sugar UI so that they whole class can see. The Second idea lets
people test-drive Sugar without going through the trouble of
rebooting. The Third idea is useful simply because it is cheap: we can
press CDs in the hundreds and give them away whenever we want.

We'll take care of the production of the media. The end result should
be a professionally-looking USB stick or CD.

A challenge I have found is that there appear to be many ways to
acquire and use Sugar, scattered across multiple pages on
wiki.sugarlabs.org. I'm somewhat confused as to which are the best
paths to take.

I'd appreciate the Sugar community's assistance with this.

Thanks!
Sridhar


Sridhar Dhanapalan
Technical Co-ordinator
OLPC Australia
p: +61 425 239 701
w: http://laptop.org.au