[sugar] Greetings from New Hampsire

[Tomeu Vizoso]

[sorry about the late reply]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 2:02 AM, Marco Pesenti Gritti
<mpgritti at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 9:25 PM, Brendan R. Powers <brendan at resara.com> wrote:
>
>> On larger installations, schools will want sugar to integrate with there existing file and print servers, as well as some centralized administration of the sugar interface. Ideally, the journal and datastore would be stored on the file server in such a way as to allow teachers to access the saved activities from a normal Windows or Linux computer.
>
> The next generation of the Journal will have much better POSIX
> compatibility, which should help this use case. Even with the current
> implementation though, I think it's possible to display the journal
> contents through a web server, that people could browse from a
> Windows/Linux computer. (Tomeu, in cc, should have more details about
> this.)

Yes, in the last stable Sugar release, files in the journal are stored
along a JSON file that contains all its metadata (title, icon, tags,
description, etc). It would be quite simple for the server to contain
a small webapp that reads the metadata and presents a nice interface
for browsing and accessing all the user's work.

I understand that OLPC's Marting Langhoff has already done some
related work on the XS, for accessing the backups of XOs via a web
interface running on the XS (XO Server).

>> Also, local media attached to thin client may pose a challenge, as the normal ways to search for and mount media are not available.
>
> Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure to understand what's the use
> case exactly.

Yes, if the journal/DS is really running on the server, we cannot
listen for notifications about devices plugged-in in the same way as
on a laptop. AFAIK, Sugar is in exactly in the same position as GNOME
here. In fact, the journal uses the same mechanism as GNOME's
Nautilus, so a solution that worked for one should work for the other.

>> We are very excited about the possibilities that sugar provides. We look forward to contributing to this project, and we are interested in your thoughts about these issues.
>
> I'm excited as well! Please keep posting us about any question or idea
> you come up with it. Either through the mailing list, the irc channel
> or the weekly meetings!

Same here, keep them coming!

Regards,

Tomeu