[SoaS] Sugar on a Stick Changing Engineering Direction (Test results of a 2GB Live USB of soas-i386-20100319.17.iso)

Thomas C Gilliard satellit at bendbroadband.com
Sat Mar 20 23:00:12 EDT 2010



Sebastian Dziallas wrote:
> Some of you may have overheard activity in #sugar-meeting today 
> discussing the upcoming beta freeze for SoaS, and the engineering 
> capacity we have to work on things for the upcoming release (in May, 
> since as a Fedora Spin we are tied to the Fedora release schedule).
>
> The short version is that we'd like to try something pretty drastic - 
> prior SoaS versions have included large numbers of Activities, which 
> weren't always maintained and didn't always work, so we propose shipping 
> a slimmed down version of SoaS with a small number of known-to-work 
> Activities with active upstream maintainers (that we'll have the 
> bandwidth to thoroughly test between now and May's release, and the 
> bandwidth to relay deployment feedback back up to) and creating 
> resources on how to find other excellent material at 
> http://activities.sugarlabs.org.
>
> Here's a draft kickstart file of what a slimmed-down SoaS release might 
> look like. It includes a few core Activities that will help you get, 
> debug, and ask questions about more Activities (Browse, Log, and IRC), 
> as well as a few well-tested Activities with active upstreams that we 
> think tend to "demo well" for a variety of audiences and contexts 
> (young/adult audience, large/small audience, dev/user/teacher audience, 
> hands-on-lab/demo-on-projector audience, etc).
>
> http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/soas/repos/mainline/blobs/master/fedora-livecd-soas.ks
>
> And here's the image it produces - we haven't had time to download and 
> test it yet, but are working on that right now, so you may beat us to 
> finding out whether it works or not. ;-)
>
> http://download.sugarlabs.org/soas/snapshots/3/soas-3-20100319.iso
>   
03/20/2010

Sebastian:

I decided to make a 2 GB USB to test the current state of the soas 
nightly compose .iso
This was to augment  our discussions of mirabelle v2.5 on fedora 13

==Test of nightly compose soas-i386-20100319.17.iso==

Created in usb HD install of f12 with all updates using liveusb-creator 
2GB USB Sandisk Micro (cheap at local discount store)


Control Panel:
Fedora release 13 (Rawide)

Control Panel Update done:
read         78-86
flipsticks     2-4
get IA Books     3-5
TA         83-84

NOTE: I could not test sharing as jabber.sugarlabs.org  was down.

sugar terminal :
 su -
 rm _R of /usr/share/sugar/activities/IRC.activity  ( all files and 
directory)
* I knew from previous work this had to be done to make IRC work.

in Browse: activities Download  IRC 5.xo

Test of activities

Activity      Version    Work/no work      remarks
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
record                64            +    pictures work on EeePC900
terminal            31              +
*speak               14               -     hangs with pulse (no stop popup)
Visual match     21              +
Browse            114              +
Etoys               113              +
Calculate            30             +
*Typing Turtle    29              -
Finance                3             +
Log                     23             +
Memorize           33             +
implode                9              +
Connect             22               +
Image Viewer    14              +     opened picture I took with record
Chat                  66              +
*write                68              -    writes in top panel turns 
panel white
Maze                   6               -    pop up failed to start
Infoslicer            6              +
Jukebox               18           +
Moon                  10            +
PlayGo                  5           +
Clock                    5          +    Talks       
Physics                  4          +
Pippy                    34         +
Analyze                   8        +
*TamTamMini        51       -    popup wont start
*TamTamEdit         51        -
*TamTamSynthLab  52      -
*TamTamJam          52        -
Turtle Art                84        +
Get Ia Books            5         +
FlipSticks                4          +
Read                        86        -    opened but failed to open the 
picture I took with record in journal


I hope this advances our discussions

Tom Gilliard
satellit

sorry for collumn alignment : )

FYI: I have attached a screen shot of Partition Manager looking at this  
USB to show how full it is, and it's structure

> In comparison, here's the old kickstart file with a large number of 
> Activities, and the image it produced - if you try it out, you'll find 
> that many of the Activities don't work, the quality of experience is 
> inconsistent, and... well, we hope you'll see why we'd like to narrow 
> the scope of this release's features to the amount of work we can 
> comfortably maintain.
>
> http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/spin-kickstarts?p=spin-kickstarts.git;a=blob;f=fedora-livecd-soas.ks
> http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/soas/soas-i386-20100318.17.iso
>
> The rationale behind this is as follows:
>
> 1. Our ultimate goal is to produce a rock-solid deployment image with a 
> wide variety of many Activities with active upstream maintainers, plus 
> resources to engage users with those upstream communities and with 
> communities of other learners. This was clarified in the earlier Sugar 
> on a Stick Mission Statement: 
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-September/008322.html
>
> 2. Since we don't currently have the resources to do this, we think a 
> good intermediate step is to produce a rock-solid deployment image with 
> a SMALL variety of many Activities with active upstream maintainers, 
> plus resources to engage users with those upstream communities and with 
> communities of other learners. This sets the bar for both the quality of 
> the Activity and maintenance, and the level of interaction that Activity 
> upstreams can expect from users.
>
> 3. Saving a good number of known-to-be-awesome Activities for 
> http://activities.sugarlabs.org and creating (kid-tested and 
> teacher-tested) resources on how to get stuff from ASLO sets a dynamic 
> of experimentation, trying-stuff-out, and user community engagement that 
> we want to see.
>
> We don't know if this is a good idea or not. We think so, and we don't 
> have much time to decide as Beta Freeze is this upcoming Tuesday, March 
> 23. Feedback? Questions? Comments? Firestorm?
>
> We'll be tinkering further on this over the weekend - we can do another 
> kickstart on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, so we have 3 drafts left to 
> figure this out with. Please join us (sdziallas & mchua on #sugar) and 
> ask questions if you have any, or join in and help if you have ideas on 
> how to improve this.
>
> Thanks!
>
> --Mel and Sebastian
>
> PS: We're going to ask more specific questions on the marketing and 
> activities lists about this in a moment, for those of you following 
> those sections of SL as well - and send a general iaep notification that 
> these conversation threads are going on. One second...
> _______________________________________________
> SoaS mailing list
> SoaS at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas
>
>   
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