[SoaS] links from homepage to Downloads page

[Peter Robinson]

Hi Sean,

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 12:14 AM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> For the past couple of years, our homepage has linked the Sugar on a
> Stick (SoaS) badge to the SoaS page [1] and the "download" menu item
> and "Try it with a child today" link to the Downloads page [2].

That's correct, it's because we don't officially support VM images,
having lots of images is some what confusing, and you can boot an ISO
on all virtual platforms.

> The downloads page rightly in my view orients visitors by platform,
> but the two largest market share desktop/laptop OSes (Windows & MacOS,
> 96% or so of market) only give instructions for Sugar on a Stick and
> the "Do you use a virtual machine?" link misses the excellent VMs
> available (in particular the VMs of... SoaS!).

See point above.

> I think teachers will self-classify by OS and virtually none of them
> will self-classify as virtual machine users.

They can run the SoaS image on all virtual platforms and physical as
well! One download for all platforms! Maybe we could improve the
wording rather than adding more images that can only lead to
confusion.

> Teachers will also expect pancake button 1-click installers (this was
> confirmed by Sloan Marketlab study), problematic with SoaS due to
> necessary USB stick manipulation and still a bit hairy on a Mac.

Please provide links to the study.

> I think Windows section and Mac section should both propose choice of
> SoaS and using VirtualBox with a SoaS VM, explaining benefits of each
> method in layman's terms.

See above.

> VMs are far less disruptive for trying Sugar, as a teacher can
> download to hard disk, install and run, keeping usual apps going
> (mail, browser, word processing) while experiencing Sugar.

Have you got proof of this? Please link me to the details. I think
we're better off improving the documentation.

> The downside is of course massive files to download, but that could be
> mitigated with torrents and/or mirrors.

Torrents are blocked on most school networks, we already provide
torrents of the existing images as well as mirrors, and we can use a
single image on all virtual and physical x86 platforms.  We are not
going to start supporting VM images as we have too few people actually
doing the technical work now and we don't need to add any more load to
their workload.

Peter
The SoaS maintainer.