[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] [Sur] Sugar oversight board meeting

[Peter Robinson]

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 2:14 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 7:42 PM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 4 November 2013 22:53, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> * It's not clear to me where we are going. The OLPC/Sugar development
>>> ecosystem seems to be at a crossroads. I am encouraged by the web activity
>>> work, but don't understand the path of transposing the value proposition of
>>> Sugar (interface, Journal, collaboration, Activities) to handheld tactile
>>> devices (tablets to smartphones). PCs (of any size) with keyboards are no
>>> longer competitive with tablets for grade-school classroom use. Perhaps the
>>> XO-4 could still be in the running; there is no clear message from OLPC.
>>
>>
>>
>> I'll try to express briefly my feelings about the directions the project
>> could take. Note that I might be missing a lot of what is going on above the
>> technical level.
>>
>> * The XO is not a viable hardware platform other than for existing
>> deployments. OLPC is pretty clearly going in a different direction.
>
> I may be alone in thinking that there will be some runway left with
> the XO. But deployments need alternatives regardless.
>
>> * Sugar web activities on the top of a full Android loses too much of the
>> Sugar value proposition. It's great to have it in addition to Sugar-the-OS,
>> but it's not enough alone.
>
> I agree.
>
>> * From the technical point of view there are several ways to get
>> Sugar-the-OS running on tactile devices. Unfortunately it's not clear to me
>> that any of these devices is open enough to be viable for deployments or
>> "ordinary" users.
>
> We looked at ChromeOS a few years back, but at the time it was too
> heavy for our hardware. Today, it is a different story. Might be a
> viable option. Certainly running GNU/Linux/Sugar on a ChromeBook is
> not a bad starting point.

Given that ChromeOS is locked down I don't believe it's viable to ask
a School to have to break/hack the HW to get it working OOTB.

Having been involved in the OLPC OS side of things I believe you would
be much better taking the work done by OLPC with things like
olpc-os-builder and the work upstream with Fedora to use it to build
out OS images that will work in a similar way across both XOs and
other HW be it x86 netbook or cheap ARM devices rather than
reinventing the wheel!

Peter