[SoaS] [Marketing] links from homepage to Downloads page

[Peter Robinson]

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Daniel Narvaez <dwnarvaez at gmail.com> wrote:
> IMO we need a radical simplification of the downloads page.
>
> I investigated a bit the technical possibilities and I think we should
>
> * For both windows and OS X
>     * Write a single installer which takes care of
>         * Installing virtualbox if not already installed
>         * Download the latest image
>         * Set it up with virtualbox and create some kind of launcher for it

We already have that as you can boot the ISO off both virtual and
physical platforms and it has the same installer. It would be cool if
someone could do a patch that gives the install and icon either on the
wheel or in the control panel that says "install me".

>     * Single click application which download and writes the latest sugar image
>         * On a USB stick
>         * On a SD for the Raspberry

There's live USB creator here which does the USB stick quite well, it
wouldn't be hard to add support for the RPi but someone would need to
add the support.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB

> * Setup a web site which allows to access a sugar instance via novnc,
> for evaluation.

Who's going to pay for the hosting of that? What about platform security?

> * Make a list of linux distributions with recent/well working
> packages, which can be installed from the official repos.

Fedora does and it's the same package set used on the OLPCs

> I don't see all of these happening over night but they are not rocket
> science either.

Most of the above is already there on the Fedora/SoaS images, could do
with a little polish but for someone that knows their way around
python it would be easy.

> With these in place I think it would be possible to write a sane
> download page. I don't think it should be on a wiki, or anyway any
> change to it should be reviewed and tested by the marketing team +
> someone with technical inclination. Anything more advanced should go
> somewhere on the wiki, for technical people to edit and use.

I'm open to improvements, I'm not open to VM virtual images especially
for proprietary platforms especially when we're suppose to be
promoting open source.

> Right now it's difficult even for me to get sugar running outside
> linux (and even there I have to use sugar-build on most distributions
> because the packages are often old and broken). So I don't see how we
> can hope educators would do it.

It doesn't run outside of linux unless you mean a VM in which means
it's still running within Linux.

Peter