[Marketing] [SoaS] links from homepage to Downloads page

[Daniel Narvaez]

On 4 February 2013 00:41, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com> wrote:
>> IMO we need a radical simplification of the downloads page.
>>
>> I investigated a bit the technical possibilities and I think we should
>>
>> * For both windows and OS X
>>     * Write a single installer which takes care of
>>         * Installing virtualbox if not already installed
>>         * Download the latest image
>>         * Set it up with virtualbox and create some kind of launcher for it
>
> We already have that as you can boot the ISO off both virtual and
> physical platforms and it has the same installer. It would be cool if
> someone could do a patch that gives the install and icon either on the
> wheel or in the control panel that says "install me".

What I'm aiming for is an application with some text, a progress bar
and a single button. People do not RTFM and they shouldn't have to.

>>     * Single click application which download and writes the latest sugar image
>>         * On a USB stick
>>         * On a SD for the Raspberry
>
> There's live USB creator here which does the USB stick quite well, it
> wouldn't be hard to add support for the RPi but someone would need to
> add the support.
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB

I know about live USB creator but, as above, I'm aiming for a single
click application.

>> * Setup a web site which allows to access a sugar instance via novnc,
>> for evaluation.
>
> Who's going to pay for the hosting of that?

I guess it depends on the number of "seats" we will require for this
to be useful (if it's always busy it would just be frustrating). If
it's matter of a few seats, I think it's worth for sugarlabs to
provide it on the servers we are already running.

> What about platform security?

Are you thinking of any issue in particular? I can think of a few but
nothing unsolvable.

>> * Make a list of linux distributions with recent/well working
>> packages, which can be installed from the official repos.
>
> Fedora does and it's the same package set used on the OLPCs

Yup, I actually fear Fedora might be the only distro we can put on
that list but we need to find out. Anyway the point is that the
current downloads page seems to try to list the best way to install
sugar on any distribution. I think we should actually list only
distributions which has reliable packages in their official repos,
Fedora being certainly one of them.

>> I don't see all of these happening over night but they are not rocket
>> science either.
>
> Most of the above is already there on the Fedora/SoaS images, could do
> with a little polish but for someone that knows their way around
> python it would be easy.

Yes, I think the hardest parts are all there. We just need to
streamline the user experience to lower the barrier.

>> With these in place I think it would be possible to write a sane
>> download page. I don't think it should be on a wiki, or anyway any
>> change to it should be reviewed and tested by the marketing team +
>> someone with technical inclination. Anything more advanced should go
>> somewhere on the wiki, for technical people to edit and use.
>
> I'm open to improvements, I'm not open to VM virtual images especially
> for proprietary platforms especially when we're suppose to be
> promoting open source.

Well, I think there are two different issues here.
One is to decide if we want to support running sugar on proprietary
platforms. My feeling is that supporting to run an open source OS
inside an open source VM, on a proprietary platform is still a way to
promote open source.
But I don't want to get too ideological about that, my main point is
that if decide it's a good idea then we should should support it in
the best possible way. And *if* that requires VM virtual images than
we should provide those.

So, if we want to support this use case, let's do it with a single
click application. Otherwise let's just not list it in the downloads
page.

>> Right now it's difficult even for me to get sugar running outside
>> linux (and even there I have to use sugar-build on most distributions
>> because the packages are often old and broken). So I don't see how we
>> can hope educators would do it.
>
> It doesn't run outside of linux unless you mean a VM in which means
> it's still running within Linux.

I meant in a VM of course. I think it would be possible to build sugar
at least for OS X, but it's probably more work than we can afford.