[SoaS] [IAEP] A proposal from Trisquel (Was Re: [DP] Announcing the creation of a SoaS Decision Panel)

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Rubén,

Feedback after testing trisquel-sugar_3.0RC_i686 on a recent MacBook  
Pro:

1). Live CD boots and runs fine on a MacBook Pro (though has no  
wireless network, or camera support, and screen redraw was a little  
slow in some activities so I guess no or little use of gfx hardware  
acceleration).

2). Using the Live CD to install trisquel-sugar to a USB stick (my  
main test goal). WARNING DATA LOSS: Targeting a USB stick for the  
install process worked smoothly, but right at the very end I spotted  
it saying "installing grub to hd0". This renders the primary internal  
hard disk on a Mac un-bootable. After much experimentation***, the  
only safe solution was a fresh re-patrition of the drive, and to  
perform a full restore from a back-up (thank goodness for Apple's Time  
Machine).

*** PRAM resets, Disk Utility volume recovery, re-setting start-up  
disk, blessing from command line, re-install of OS, couple of other  
3rd party recovery tools. If someone is unfortunate enough not to have  
a recent back-up, I think the disk data may be still recoverable as I  
did eventually manage to access the original data. If I had more time  
to faff, I think I could have experimented using the diskutil command  
line tool. The default install of an Intel Mac HD is a GUID partition  
scheme, with a small EFI partition, and then the rest of the disk as a  
bootable HFS+ partition (this looked fine but I didn't want to risk  
using the data there). FWIW, the visible symptom upon reboot was a  
grey screen for perhaps 30 sec, eventually a blinking grey folder icon  
with a question mark – the Mac basically can't find a bootable HD (but  
will happily boot off other media, say your original OS install DVD).

3). The resulting USB Stick failed to boot on a MacBook (but might  
work on other hardware, need to test).

Regards,
--Gary

On 1 Oct 2009, at 21:47, Rubén Rodríguez Pérez wrote:

>>> I have no illusions about the difficulty of jumpstarting an
>>> ecosystem, but since that is necessary to the success of Sugar, we
>>> need to make it happen.  I have ideas for plans for that too
>>> [...other ideas for plans]
>>
>> That's all great but it boils down to what I said: we can't do it  
>> now,
>> where "we" is Sugar Labs and "it" is: create better distro than
>> Fedora-ish and service that distro with distro-vendor-quality support
>> and infrastructure.
>>
>> So I propose we come up with some way to do it (ibid.)  to propose to
>> SLOB or we get real should say we're not going to do it (for now).
>> Either is better than the status quo of not doing it and pretend that
>> we are
>
> I'm still a newbie here, but let me propose an idea. Feel free to
> discard it if it's inappropriate.
>
> In the project Trisquel we've just made our own -still unnamed as a
> project- version of a "distro for Sugar", and it has all the features
> you were talking about in the last days, including a disk installer,
> live cd with persistence, live usb with persistence, live usb  
> graphical
> creator, Sugar style artwork, LTSP support, unattended installation...
> Coming soon we will have unattended distributed installation using  
> pxe.
>
> We are going to maintain this project no matter if it is used by SL or
> not. And as an important feature, Trisquel is fully libre and endorsed
> by the FSF. We are open -and looking forward- to collaboration with  
> SL.
>
> We don't want to compete with other projects like SoaS -we will not  
> use
> that name either-, in fact I'd like to thank the SoaS authors, as I'm
> sure their work made it easier for us to make our version.
>
> My only intention with this message is for you to know our  
> alternative.
> We are distro hackers -I don't like the "vendors" moniker-, so we have
> the skills and resources required, allowing you to focus on the Sugar
> development. Now that the initial tasks of our project are done, the
> maintenance will be easy. In fact, we will start publishing nightly
> builds with the latest Trisquel updates and the latest version of the
> Sugar components. We hope it will be a tool for developers and  
> testers.
>
> You can find more info here: http://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-sugar
>
> Rubén
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