[IAEP] [Sugar-devel] Planning for the future (Samuel Greenfeld)

[Nick Doiron]

I've worked with the project for some time, as a developer, teacher, and
teacher-trainer.

There have been triumphs and setbacks in the past, but I can't escape this
observation: when people have a choice, they choose not to use Sugar.  For
many schools, they have what was donated and there is no choice. When OLPC
started, Android was an independent concept for a feature phone and not a
choice for anyone. But if members of our community are talking about a
major project in today's world, examine why the wider world isn't using
Sugar at the same level that they adopt other edu-tech, like Scratch. Time
and time again, local teachers are doing everything we ask, and our true
limit is the technology and UX.

As a developer, I have lost track of which of my activities might run on
modern Sugar. I've seen simple UIs and browser-based activities stop
working, not because of shaky code, but because dropdown menus got
deprecated, or browser embedding was switched out with a different library.
There are reasons behind these code changes, like touch-enabled UI, but
were these reasons so real?  At the end of all this continuing development,
when I use an XO-1 in Haiti, I see the same Sugar that we used in 2011, but
with fewer working activities.

I am interested in the future of Sugar in the same way that I'm interested
in the future of television. The next big thing is not a revision of the
old, but something very new, something more attuned to the web and open
source ecosystem as it exists today.

-- Nick Doiron

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 3:33 PM, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 03:19:18PM -0500, Sora Edwards-Thro wrote:
> > Here's a table Martin Dluhos generated of the start-up times on
> > XO-1s for different OS versions. It influenced our decision-making
> > in Haiti (we have a customized version of 12.1.0); I don't know
> > what they decided in Nepal, where he was based.
> >
> >
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0As_jQJX0Me6XdDI2clFpX1FFRHhKMHVFZGkyakdST2c&usp=sharing
>
> No, that table was prepared by Gonzalo Odiard in July 2013, and
> discussed on devel@ at the time, and sugar-devel@ mailing list in
> November 2013.
>
> The results are all because of memory contention, and the fixes are to
> either:
>
> 1.  run the operating system from SD card, (which releases a lot of
> memory), or
>
> 2.  add swap partition on SD card, (which moves little used memory to
> the card).
>
> --
> James Cameron
> http://quozl.linux.org.au/
> _______________________________________________
> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
> IAEP at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
>
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