[Sugar-devel] Feedback on Actual SoaS Beta 1

[James Simmons]

I tried the latest beta over the weekend.  I created the stick I used 
last time without overlaying home, so I kept the stuff I had on there 
before.  My comments:

1).  It looks like the evince djvu plugin was included this time.  I 
installed it using yum last week, but I would have expected it to be 
overlaid in the process of updating the stick, so I assume that the 
plugin is now part of the SoaS image.  It works well.

2).  Read Etexts still has the issue when using highlighted speech that 
the highlighted text lags behind the words spoken on some machines.  On 
others it works fine.  I would say that the more powerful the machine 
the less likely this lag is to occur, but it seems to be more 
complicated than that.  For instance, it works great on an HP Vectra but 
not on an IBM NetVista which I would have thought was as good as or 
better than the Vectra.  This seems to be an issue with the gstreamer 
espeak plugin.

3).  I tried installing the Tam Tam activities.  Tam Tam Mini would not 
start, and when I looked at the log it reported a missing source file 
that should have been in the Tam Tam Mini bundle.  I also tried Hablar 
Con Sara and got a syntax error in the voice.py file.

As a sanity check I installed both Activities in my Sugar test 
environment, the one included with Fedora 10.  Both started up OK.  So 
it seems to be something with SoaS.

Other Tam Tam Activities seemed to work OK, but sluggishly.

4).  I liked the improvements to the Journal, especially the "Open With" 
menu that you can now get without viewing the Journal entry details 
window.  I'm also pleased that meta data now persists across reboots.

5).  I fooled around with InfoSlicer and liked it.  It took me awhile to 
figure out what it was for and how to use it.  Maybe in addition to the 
articles on animals it ships with it could include a brief tutorial?

OT, while I couldn't get Hablar Con Sara to work on SoaS I did try it on 
my Fedora 10 Sugar environment.  To me it looked like Speak with fewer 
features.  The activities.sugarlabs.org site recommends this Activity 
but doesn't tell you why.  There isn't a even good description of what 
it does.

James Simmons