[sugar] Sugar on conventional laptops and desktops

[drew einhorn]

XO laptops are a scarce resource.  Probably I should have dug
deeper into my pocket for several hundred more dollars and
bought a few more G1G1 laptops when I had the chance.  But
it's too late now.

We have more folks who would like to participate in our learning
community than we have XOs.

There are several techniques for running sugar on desktops, but
they are based on the needs of developers.  They tend to result in
stale bleeding versions of sugar and the activities.  My guess is
that there are many other folks in the G1G1 community, like me
who need/want to run stable versions of sugar and the activities.
Ship.2 or soon Update.1.

This does match one use case for the LiveCD that is currently low
on the official OLPC agenda.

  It is also possible to use this type of LiveCD to create a "virtual
Sugar lab"
  for a school, where a traditional computer lab's computers are booted into
  a Sugar environment, storing their data on a networked or other storage
  device, without changing the lab's installed software.

What is the best approach for the short term?

Is there a Ship.2 LiveCD image.  So far, all I have found are bleeding
edge unstable images, or worse yet stale, bleeding edge images,
all the instablility, and out of date, too.

A long time ago, not long after PyCon 2007 I built sugar once on a Fedora
Core N box using jbuild. I don't remember what N was.  It was fragile and
the activities were not yet useful.  When I tried again, git retrieved newer,
broken, bleeding edge versions of the dependencies from the head of the
development trees, and I never got it working again.  I assume this has
gotten better since then, but I expect it will still be problematic getting a
good version (for most G1G1 participants) using jhbuild.

Stable Ship.2 or Update.1 images would be great.  But as
Matt Price points out getting the working VMware/QEMU, etc.
infrastructure is a challenge that may be too much for most G1G1
participants.

Probably the best solution for G1G1 folks would be stable versions of
packages from jani's  personal archive matching Ship.2, Update.1, etc.
It would be even better if there were .rpm versions of these
repositories for folks not on debian based distributions.

Before I put too much effort in finding my own solution to these problems,
I need to be sure I'm not heading off in the wrong direction.

-- 
Drew Einhorn