[IAEP] Sugar oversight board meeting

[Walter Bender]

On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 8:40 AM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com> wrote:
> Going a bit off topic, but a pretty major issue I see in our workflow with
> Fedora is that we don't have a good way to develop unstable Sugar on a
> stable Fedora. Rawhide is, or at least is perceived as, unstable. And I'm
> not sure what would be a good way to, for example, produce and distribute
> 0.100 rpms for Fedora 19. We can setup our custom automated build system and
> repository of course, but I'm not sure that's a good approach? Part of the
> problem here is that upstream tends to depend strongly on very recent
> libraries which are not yet available in the stable fedora, though maybe now
> that the gi conversion is over we can avoid that.

I think it is doable. The more difficult part is getting the Fedora
bits to run properly on the XO hardware -- something OLPC had spent
lots of time on. So while I think we can make Fedora releases -- and
probably should -- they probably won't do much good directly for our
major user community.

-walter

>
>
> On Tuesday, 5 November 2013, Peter Robinson wrote:
>>
>> 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
>
>
>
> --
> Daniel Narvaez
>



-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org