[SoaS] Madison Elementary Sugar Project

[Sascha Silbe]

Excerpts from Brooks, Kevin's message of Thu Jan 27 23:36:39 +0100 2011:

> The two of us are trying to help a near-by elementary school explore the value of Sugar. The school is working towards a OLPC ratio, and they just got a shipment of netbooks plus Sugar on a Stick.  Initial exploration with the Tech Team has been fun, but we have some questions.

Nice! Welcome to the world of Sugar!


> 1. USB capacity. Madison Elementary used a 4GB USB drive, but after imagining, the stick had less than 500 MBs left for expansion.

What method did you use exactly?
If you used some "Live" method, make sure you're maxing out the slider
configuring the size of the "persistence" layer. If you already did,
you might be hitting bug #1800 [1]; in this case, try _reducing_ the
size of the persistence layer. However, for reasons explained below,
you should switch to a "regular" install anyway.


> 2. USB reliability. We aren’t optimistic about the sticks lasting for a whole semester, let alone a whole year.

If you're currently using the "Live" setup, I strongly recommend to
switch to a regular installation instead; it's known [2] to break
horribly after some time.

If OTOH you're using a "regular" installation you should be perfectly
fine. I've been using SD cards (which are backed by the same technology)
in my XOs for two years now, and that included compiling software,
storing mails (huge number of small files) and similar "heavy duty"
tasks. The only data loss I've encountered so far was due to
experimental file systems, not worn-out flash cells.

Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence. With the current situation
on the flash storage market, there's no way to ensure you can replicate
my results - even identically looking products hanging side-by-side in
the store can use totally different technology on the inside, with no
way for a consumer (including skilled techies) to distinguish between
them.

Like with any other storage medium, you should make regular backups. You
can use my Backup [3] and Restore [4] activities with a single additional
USB stick for the whole class to backup the Journal (the activities are
still a bit rough on the UI side, but should be rock stable). While you
would loose data stored outside the Journal, most of that can usually be
recovered easily (mostly settings like name and chosen colours). The
actual user data is supposed to be stored exclusively in the Journal.

Alternate ways are setting up a School Server [5] or using low-level
backup solutions for either the entire stick (easier, but less efficient)
or the home directory (less storage overhead, but trickier to set up).
IIRC I've once done a tool for Mel that stores images of entire sticks
for backup purposes. Don't have experience with the School Server yet.


> 3. Neighborhood issues: who are all those people? And how did they manage to start a chat session with our 4th graders?

The default setting for the Jabber server in SoaS probably is
jabber.sugarlabs.org. You (and "your" kids) will be able to see and
collaborate with anyone who is using that server. N.B.: this server
is provided for testing and convenience and may go down at any time
for any reason (maintenance, overload, mistake, ...). Please don't rely
on it.

You can set up and use your own server if you want collaboration to be
restricted to your class. Alternatively you can remove the Jabber server
setting, making Sugar fall back to link-local multicast communication.
My limited experience with this has been frustrating, but that was
mostly with ancient OLPC builds. Nevertheless, I recommend to do
careful on-site testing before you go down this route.

BTW: You should use Sugar 0.88 and avoid 0.90 (which is probably
included with the most recent SoaS release). Collaboration is still
kind-of-broken in the latter version, I'm afraid.

> 4. Groups: can a teacher easily establish a group at the start of a semester and have it be persistent? Can groups be quickly and easily reconfigured?

The Group View currently shows the contacts that were marked as "friend"
in the Neighborhood View. The School Server supports configuring groups
for classes etc. AFAIK, but I'm not sure what if any effect this has on
the Neighborhood view. If you repeat that question on sugar-devel,
someone with knowledge of the School Server might chime in.

> 5. File sharing: can any of the work done in Sugar be exported? We think the answer for Write is "yes" but we haven't tried it yet.

Yes, it can. For Sugar<->Sugar there are still a few rough spots, but
it should work at least as well as with a non-Sugar system (which is
a start ;) ). You can send Journal entries via Jabber / link-local
collaboration ("Send To" palette entry in the Journal) or save them
to a USB stick / SD card / hard disk / whatever.

> I don’t know what else to ask developers, but we have lots of questions about curriculum integration, activity application, and would appreciate any kind of suggestion / directions.

IAEP [6] ("It's An Education Project") would be best suited for that
kind of question.

Sascha

[1] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1800
[2] http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1798
[3] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4326
[4] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4327
[5] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS
[6] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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