[sugar] Sugar on conventional laptops and desktops

[dthornburg at aol.com]

 Dear Drew,

You are on the mark!? Sugar has rich potential independent of the OLPC.? As one of the first 25 people at Xerox PARC in the 1970's I was there when the "desktop" metaphor was developed.? Since Xerox is the "document" company, there is little surprise that the desktop metaphor is document centric.? Some of us who cared about kids also thought about other interfaces.? Alan Kay surely falls into this category and his lengthy devotion to Smalltalkish environments attests to his dedication.

What I like about Sugar is that it is (like many kids) verb-centric, not noun-centric.? I'm currently developing a conference presentation on this topic and want to give (good) live CD's to all attendants so they can experience Sugar themselves on whatever hardware they have.? I haven't experimented with the Xubuntu version yet, but will look at it in the next day or so.

The fact is that, at long last, Sugar provides an opportunity for Seymour Papert's visions to reach critical mass.? The hardware used should not be an issue.

Warm regards,

David Thornburg, PhD


 


 

-----Original Message-----
From: drew einhorn <drew.einhorn at gmail.com>
To: Sugar List <Sugar at laptop.org>
Sent: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 12:34 pm
Subject: [sugar] Sugar on conventional laptops and desktops










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
_______________________________________________
Sugar mailing list
Sugar at lists.laptop.org
http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar



 


________________________________________________________________________
More new features than ever.  Check out the new AOL Mail ! - http://webmail.aol.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/attachments/20080101/53d0d5ac/attachment.htm