[SoaS] Blueberry SoaS Mac feedback

[Gary C Martin]

Getting bored and answering some of my own email (I can't sleep)...

On 17 Dec 2009, at 08:21, Gary C Martin wrote:

> Hi Wade,
> 
> On 13 Dec 2009, at 22:23, Wade Brainerd wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
>>> Fab, thanks. Just given it a quick run though and it's booting fine here in a VM on the Mac. Some quick notes (not aimed at you Wade, just of use to other that may try this route):
>>> 
>>> - Sound quality is more than a little crusty, but I think that is already a known distro issue.
>> 
>> I managed to fix it in my F11 VM by tweaking a config file.  I'll see
>> if the same fix applies to the VM.
> 
> Cool, happy to give it a test here as well if you have any luck.
> 
>>> - Default collaboration server is set to jabber.sugarlabs.org, but not sure how maintained it is, or what version it is running. The neighbourhood shows many buddies with identical colours to me, indicating something is broken (your owner colours are used by default on icons that are not getting the correct colour information).
>> 
>> Is there a better server to use?  I think we would just need to throw
>> a gconf line in the kickstart file.
> 
> FWIW: Lately I've just been blanking it out and testing locally via Salut, the server has just been too unpredictable for me (sorry folks).
> 
>>> - Without some VM hacking, VirtualBox displays Sugar in an 800x600 window. The interface scales reasonably well, all things considered, but toolbars often have missing widgets, or widgets in drop down overflow menus. Fonts are also very large for an 800x600 view.
>> 
>> Anyone know how to bake in the VirtualBox Guest Tools?  Is there an
>> RPM I can just add in?  In my experience, they have to be compiled
>> locally against whatever kernel you're running.
> 
> No, I've always had to follow the VB documentation to compile them each time.
> 
> However, I did stumble over a VirtualBox trick today I didn't think would work (well it didn't quite, but...). If you hit F12 you can get to fiddle with the kernel boot parameters, in my ignorance I tried adding vga=0x117 hoping to get a 1024x768x16. It came back with an error about unknown video mode, and then provided me an option to see a list of them to choose from. I managed to boot it into a 1024x768x32 display (with no guest additions). It booted all the way to X starting, at which point it switched itself back to 800x600. So I'm guessing there is some other X setting, or some trick to tell X to use the current resolution. On stopping Sugar the display resized back up to 1024x768x32 just before closing, so pretty sure it's something X.

I really don't know what I'm doing here, so this is likely not the right way, but after booting with the kernel parameters set to vga=0x345 for a 1280x1024 display (a choice close to the XO default of 1200x900), I then did:

 sudo Xorg -configure :1
 cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

[there's no xorg.conf by default, and I couldn't fathom how else to get X to use a higher resolution]

...and rebooted. On subsequent boots (I'm still manually hitting F12 and adding a kernel vga parameter) Sugar now shows up in 1200x900, all without installing any VB guest additions :-) I'm fiddling with the ~/.Xresources dpi value to try and get the font size right for this resolution; I also needed to bump SUGAR_SCALING up from 72 to 100 so that the frames/widget layouts are a decent size (hacking /usr/bin/sugar just now as I can't find what is launching it forcing a "--scaling 72" value).

Regards,
--Gary

> No idea how to add the vga without going through the 12 boot menu each time, but I'm sure that's just my kernel parameter ignorance :-)
> 
>>> So, it is usable and testable for Sugar geeks/hackers with Macs, but I'd not recommend it for real use by children as is.
>> 
>> Yeah, definitely.  I'll keep working on it though and hopefully these
>> issues can be resolved.
> 
> FWIW, there's lots of VBoxManage Terminal commands that are installed on the host operating system. I made a quick Applescript earlier this year to use one of them to launch a named VM so that Mac folks just had a nice shiny Sugar icon to click. Technically you could have an Applescript bundle containing the Sugar VM; on double click the script could check if VB is installed, then check if VB is already set-up with the image, and if not auto configure VB using VBoxManage commands. If the script finds the VM already set-up, or after the auto configure, it can simply start the guest VM. That would give Mac users a single 'file' to download and run just like any other application they use. The VM image would be inside the bundle, so they could delete it or move it to their application folder (or where ever) as needed. The only pre-requisit would be for them to download VirtualBox first (and we could have a dialogue pointing them there, if it's missing).
> 
> It would be a fair chunk of work and testing, but would be a reusable wrapper that new VMs could be dropped in for each new release. Are there enough Mac users to make this worth taking a shot at?
> 
> Regards,
> --Gary
> 
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