[SoaS] Planning towards SoaS v3

[Walter Bender]

On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 3:50 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 3:28 AM, Caroline Meeks <solutiongrove at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Can you say more about how and why the boot helper is going to be buried?
>>
>> I've got a ton of older hardware that works just fine once its booted,
>> some of it zips, but doesn't have the capability to boot from USB.
>>
>
> When was the hardware released? What's the details of the hardware? Just
> about anything released in the last 10 years should be bootable using USB
> although it might need a Bios upgrade. The lowest level of hardware CPU
> support in Fedora is i686 and the vast majority of that hardware supports
> booting usb. Upstream supports a much wider variety of hardware with a whole
> lot less of the issues we see.

In theory this may be true. In practice, it is not reasonable to
expect that (a) a child or teacher will be able to update the BIOS or
(b) the child or teacher would have permission to update the BIOS.
Most machines in schools, libraries, cafes, etc. are locked down. One
of the beauties of SoaS is that it lets the learner/teacher do an end
run around such controls.

>
> So in short its not going to disappear but as it seems to cause so many
> support issues on the sugar lists I would like to see a concerted effort to
> find out why its needed, fix those problems and to generally de-emphasize
> the boot helper CD as the fix to every boot problem.

Is that really true? I would love to see some data to back that up.
Not being able to boot causes "so many support issues", but what
percentage of those issues are due to the CD?

We need to also consider it if (a) there aren't going to be new
support issues that arise due to the BIOS problems people will
experience and (b) whether the CD support problem isn't primarily due
to a mismatch between the CD image and the USB image, which could be
perhaps remedied in some other way, or at least more readily
identifiable as the problem to the end user.

Maybe a few years from now, once the MS campaign in support of LiveUSB
boots takes off, there will be more industry/marketing support for
updating the BIOS, but for now, to the average user, it is not
something that they are comfortable with.

> For example I've seen you have issues booting Apple devices with the SoaS.
> Every single Intel based Mac uses EFI to boot and hence should work out of
> the box with SoaS and shouldn't require the helper CD. If it doesn't work we
> need to work out why and fix the bug, not plaster it over with an ugly hack.

+1

> In general it makes people's experience of using Sugar on a Stick less
> pleasant and hence less likely to keep on using it. Its a constant confusion
> and problem on the lists as well.

Not being able to boot does make the experience less pleasant. But
removing boot options is not the obvious fix, IMHO.

-walter

> Peter
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Caroline
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 7:00 PM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I'm sure Sebastian has already emailed about this subject but with SoaS 3
>>> been approved as a Fedora 13 feature and myself being a co-maintainer with
>>> Sebastian I thought I'd put my point forward as to what I would like to see
>>> happening and what I'll be working towards in the next release. So the major
>>> things I can see for SoaS3 are as follows:
>>> 1) all upstream in Fedora
>>> 2) rpm packaged activities
>>> 3) Sugar 0.88
>>> 4) boot helper is dead and buried
>>>
>>> So 1 and 3 aren't overly controversial. 1 is a requirement of being able
>>> to use all the lovely upstream Fedora infrastructure and will generally make
>>> life easier for the SoaS maintainers. 3 is a given :-D 2 has various
>>> opinions but that's not part of this discussion.
>>>
>>> The last point I think will get a mixed response from what I've seen on
>>> various sugar/olpc lists of late but the more I read about it the more I
>>> believe its bugs that cause the majority of the problems rather than
>>> hardware issues. For example all modern Mac's should boot SoaS fine (there
>>> are a few issues [1]). Fedora on which SoaS is based doesn't have a lot of
>>> the problems we see and they have a lot of different hardware and use cases
>>> than the relatively focused SoaS so we should be able to fix most of the
>>> issues
>>>
>>> So I'd like to see some testing before the final release comes out for
>>> both boot issues and others. For this I'm proposing we do something similar
>>> to the Fedora Test Days. The way this will vary slightly is by doing "SoaS
>>> test weeks" where we pick a number of test points to focus upon but do it
>>> both on the mailing list and IRC to allow as many people as possible to get
>>> involved and to ensure we have the best possibly release by doing as much
>>> testing before the release rather than having discussions 6 weeks after the
>>> release with threads like "Blah doesn't work".
>>>
>>> So I'd like to hear from others what they'd like to see in SoaS 3, what
>>> they can work on and suggestions for test weeks. You already know the topic
>>> of the first week is going to be. I'd like to see SoaS moving to more
>>> proactional releases where we do more testing before hand rather than people
>>> running it up after its been releases so that we get a decent release from
>>> the go get as. It makes the user experience better for the beginning for all
>>> involved.
>>>
>>> Discuss!
>>>
>>> Have a good weekend!
>>> Regards,
>>> Peter
>>>
>>> [1] Mac boot bugs
>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=528232
>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=533824
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> SoaS mailing list
>>> SoaS at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Caroline Meeks
>> Solution Grove
>> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>>
>> 617-500-3488 - Office
>> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>
>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org