[Marketing] adding or updating an Activity: two typical teacher scenarios, let's lower barrier to installation

[Walter Bender]

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> Scenario 1:
>
> Let's say I'm a teacher reading about Sugar in a magazine. I consider
> myself comfortable with computers, visit the web every day, but have
> never used the command line. I've succeeded in downloading SoaS,
> loading it onto a stick with the Fedora LiveUSB Creator and booting my
> PC with it. I've tried a few Activities and am wondering what other
> Activities are available. Later, back in Windows, I've visited
> www.sugarlabs.org and found the Activities section. Browsing by
> section, I find a couple of Activities that seem interesting. I've
> clicked the pancake buttons and downloaded two .xo files and put them
> on my hard disk where I usually store the attachments friends and
> colleagues send me.
>
>
> Scenario 2:
>
> A colleague has mentioned Sugar to me, talking about the OLPC project.
> I have a Mac for ease of use and I never see a text screen. I visit
> www.sugarlabs.org and after reading the "teachers" section with
> interest, I return to the homepage and click on "Try Sugar with a
> child today", arriving on the page that advises how to install for
> each system; I click on the Apple icon. The boot helper instructions
> seem complicated, but I find the VirtualBox OSX installation
> instructions and get Sugar running. I'm intrigued by the Activities
> and want to know if there are more, so I switch to my browser in the
> other window, return to the Sugar Labs site and find a very
> interesting-looking Activity in the website's Activities section. I
> click the pancake button and download the .xo file to the Mac's
> desktop.
>
>
> ******************************
> Questions:
>
> 1) what are the teachers' next step? Would the procedures be different
> for these two scenarii?
> * No instructions I could locate on activities.sugarlabs.org :-(
> * In the wiki section, I eventually located Activity Library and found
> a page called End Users, but two of the three pages are blank and the
> other one talks about a sandbox...
> * The search engine doesn't help either, there are lots of documents
> found but none give advice about how to add an Activity or update to a
> more recent one.
>
> 2) I think we are assuming Activity installation from within Browse
> under Sugar, but that method may be too much to assume for a newbie or
> for someone with no net connectivity with Sugar... "automatic" if
> connected though I don't remember if a new Activity arrives in the
> list view or is a favorite... we need to communicate what to expect in
> that case
>
> 3) Someone told me how to add an Activity by placing the .xo bundle in
> a directory... but I can't find the mail :-( and CLI manipulations
> daunting for many ordinary users
>
> 4) If I remember correctly, a collaborative Activity set to public
> sharing is pushed out over the network to other Sugar machines. Are
> those machines permanently updated with more recent versions, or
> installed if new versions, or merely "borrowed" during the session?
>
> 5) if there is a problem, is it possible to roll back to the previous
> version of an Activity?
>
> ******************************
>
> any info appreciated.

I think the easiest thing to do is to (1) copy the .xo files onto a
USB; (2) insert the USB into a system running Sugar; (3) open the USB
in the Journal (tab at bottom of the page); and (4) click on the .xo
file--it should autoinstall from there.

-walter


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