[IAEP] Initial tests of Sugar on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Tony Anderson
tony_anderson at usa.net
Mon Apr 30 07:43:45 EDT 2018
On April 27, 2018 I downloaded the ubuntu-18.04-desktop-amd64.iso. I
generated a boot usb drive with dd. The usb stick was used to install
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS alongside Windows 10. Sugar was installed using sudo
apt-get install sucrose.
From http://activities.sugarlabs.org/activities, I scraped a list of
the most recent versions of each activity. This list contained 714
entries. However a number turned out to be empty or duplicates. These
reduced the list to 516 activities.
I them matched each item against the repostories in
'http://github.com/sugarlabs'. There were corresponding repositories for
222 of the 516 activities. All of these repositories (.zip) were
downloaded to the Positivo. One turned out to be empty:
lybniz_graph_plotter.
The 221 repositories were unzipped and an attempt was made to build a
bundle with 'python setup.py dist_xo'. This process failed with
activities which included 'from sugar.activity import activity'. These
have not yet been ported to GTK3. This reduced the number of activities
to 106. Each of these activities was launched from the Home View on the
Positivo. Of these 91 executed as expected. The others failed to start
for various reasons.
The details are in the attached spreadsheet - all normal disclaimers
apply. The comment 'help' means I didn't really understand how to work
the activity.
Some general comments. The availability of Sugar on an LTS version of a
major distribution is an opportunity to demonstrate that the value of
Sugar is not limited to the XO. Unfortunately, the method to launch
Sugar is not obvious. You must click on your user panel to show the
password entry. Below, there is a 'gear' icon. You must click on that to
choose Sugar. Then you need to enter your Ubuntu password.
On the first run, you are asked about colors, gender and age. In this
age with every site collecting private information for sale - this does
not make a good first impression.
Sugar on Ubuntu launches to the (empty) Journal View! Ubuntu itself
provides a built-in set of welcome slides to introduce its new features.
Sadly, Sugar launches to a brick wall. The user needs to know to display
the Home View (using F3 or the Frame - F6).
The Sugar install is minimal compared to what we have become used to.
The Home View has 5 activities: Browse, Calculate, Chat, Pippy, and
Write. Installed but not favorites are ImageViewer, Jukebox, Log, Read,
and Terminal. Presumably users are expected to install additional
activities from the 91 tested above. However, in general, these bundles
are not available on activities.sugarlabs.org and require some technical
expertise to install from github.
On a positive note: connection to the internet and to the schoolserver
was smooth. The Neighborhood View worked as expected. Downloads from the
school server to the Journal worked as normal. As far as I could tell,
the working activities showed normal screen coverage.
On Sugar with Ubuntu, you are your Ubuntu user - not olpc. Activities
available to all Sugar users on a laptop are in
/usr/share/sugar/activities. Activities installed by
sugar-install-bundle are in /home/yourusername/Activities and are only
available to you. With some technical expertise you can copy an activity
to the /usr/share/sugar/Activities directory to share it with other users.
Tony
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