[IAEP] How to navigate sugar-desktop (actually the Journal activity?) in my vanilla F29

[Kevin]

Hi all, and thanks for making and sharing sugar. It looks like wonderful
software.

I'd like to introduce my 8yo kid to sugar, so I installed vanilla F29 on
an old MacBook Pro, updated all installed software via yum (no apparent
problems with that much), and then I followed the instructions I found
here <https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/blob/master/docs/fedora.md>:

==============

Using Sugar as a Desktop Environment

Install Fedora. Then, in a Terminal, type:

sudo dnf groupinstall sugar-desktop

Then restart your computer. At the Sign in select the Sugar desktop.

==============

I did that, and after having done so, I don't have the same experience
that I see when I go to https://try.sugarizer.org.

When I visit https://try.sugarizer.org I see two options to click: "New
user" and "Login", so I chose the former. Then I see "Choose name" and I
type a trial name in to the text field and click "Next". Then I see
"Choose at least 4 images:" and I click on "a", "b", "c", and "d" and
then click "Next". And now I see "Click to change color:", and here is
where there is one page that has some common features with my F29/Sugar
desktop environment. So I click until I like a color combination for my
trial XO character and then click "Done." Then I see a spinny icon and
shortly afterwards I see my XO character at the center of a spiral of
Activity icons that I suspect is very familiar to everyone here (what I
think of as the Sugar desktop).

But this differs in some important ways from what I see in my F29/Sugar
desktop environment.

When I enter my kid's username and password at the gnome display manager
in F29 and select the Sugar desktop, I do see the "Click to change
color:" screen. After I click "Next" on this screen, then I see a screen
to choose gender. After I click "Next" on this screen, then I see a
screen to choose a grade. After I click "Done" on this screen, I don't
see my XO character at the center of a spiral of Activity icons like I
do at https://try.sugarizer.org. I don't see anything like it at all. I
can't take a screenshot of it because the screen seems to have no
functionality for that at all. In the middle of a white screen I see a
gray icon of a three-ring binder and the phrase: "Your Journal is
empty". In the black top bar or "title bar", I see a small gray
magnifying glass search icon in a white text box that reads "Search in
Journal" on the far left, and then proceeding from left to right, I see
a white star, then a white box icon with its four top flaps open, then
two drop-down menus that read "Anything" (entitled "Select filter") and
"Anytime" (also entitled "Select filter" with date options like "Today"
and "Since yesterday"), respectively, then lastly I see an icon of a
pencil writing on a piece of paper with upward and downward pointing
triangles (another drop-down menu entitled "Sort view").

I get the impression that in my F29/Sugar desktop described above, I'm
looking at the Journal Activity, not the spiral collection of Activity
icons that I see at https://try.sugarizer.org.

In https://try.sugarizer.org, I see the same three-ring binder icon just
below the XO character, and when I click on it at
https://try.sugarizer.org, I'm taken to a screen that is similar to my
desktop in my F29/Sugar desktop ("Search in journal", white star,
"Anything" and "Anytime" drop-down menus, a question mark inside a
circle, and finally a dot inside a circle on the far right; and the same
three-ring binder icon in the center of the screen above the words "Your
journal is empty"). But I can exit this screen and return to the spiral
of Activity icons by clicking the dot-in-circle icon. There is no way I
can find to exit the Journal activity in my F29/Sugar desktop.

When I burned the SoaS iso to a DVD-R and booted into that on this old
MacBook Pro, I had the exact same experience as I described above when
logging into this vanilla F29 OS and selecting the Sugar desktop within
the gnome display manager.

So my question is, how do I make my F29/Sugar desktop (apparently just
the Journal activity) look something like what I see at
https://try.sugarizer.org (which I think is what I'm supposed to be
seeing: the Sugar desktop)?

As it is now, the only thing I can really do in my F29/Sugar desktop is
to kill -9 the only running process that I see owned by my kid's account
when I issue the "[alpha at localhost ~]$ w" command
(/usr/libexec/gdm-x-session --run-script sugar). I do this while logged
into F29 as another user in either a virtual console or in the gnome
desktop environment running a terminal window. Then I can login as my
kid again and go through the same stuck-in-journal-activity loop. How do
I break out of this loop?

I asked about this yesterday in IRC as Nick dr02020, and walterbender
suggested that I try the F29 vanilla installation that I have now done.
Thanks for the suggestion, Walter, but I have the same problems in F29 too.

Thanks for any suggestions on this dilemma. I'm excited to see how my
kid does in sugar and hope I can do so in our own computer rather than
strictly at https://try.sugarizer.org.

Best,

Kevin

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