[SoaS] [realness] Re: [realness] Sugar On A Stick for Macintosh

[Bernie Innocenti]

El Sat, 24-07-2010 a las 13:50 -0400, Carlos Rabassa escribió:
> Thanks Bernie,  Thanks Bert,  Thanks Pato,
>
> What a community!
>
> Three answers complementing and confirming each other in the same
> morning!
>
> (Deleted the copy to SoaS; I´m not a member.)
>
> Now I believe I have a very clear picture.
>
>
> If I have to reboot the computer from the usb drive,  I believe it is
> very easy,  I have no problem with that.
>
> It was a frequently used emergency procedure in the days where it was
> common to try to start the computer the usual way and finding there
> was a problem.
>
> But,  it is extremely inconvenient,  you lose the use of the computer
> for all other applications until you shut down and start again.
>
> Many of the emulators we found when we started learning the XO without
> having one,  worked like that.

Emulators and virtual machines are definitely more convenient than
bootable USB systems, but there's a cost involved: they generally
require more memory and a faster processor to run two operating systems
stacked one on top of the other.

For production use with old school computers or cheap netbooks, one is
better off booting directly into Sugar.

I think we should provide virtual machine images for the purpose of
easily demoing Sugar on computers like yours.


> One thing I still don´t understand:
>
> Cannot Etoys To Go be expanded to offer the rest of the applications
> in the XO,  not just Etoys?

Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Etoys is entirely based on Squeak, a
virtual machine that has been already ported to Windows and MacOS.

Other Sugar activities are written in a variety of programming languages
and are not as isolated from the system as Etoys is, making them a lot
harder to port to other platforms. (The statement of years ago that
Sugar was being ported to Windows was technical nonsense).

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/