[Sugar-devel] feedback from a teacher in Uruguay

[Tomeu Vizoso]

2009/8/13 Gabriel Eirea <geirea at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm sending below the original text (in Spanish) of a teacher friend's
> request. I'll try to translate her main concerns.
>
> 1) Mesh network doesn't work. Very few kids can get in the same
> "network". She claims it got worse with the latest update in Ceibal.

Not sure we can debug this remotely :/

Andrés, do you know about any work in the Ceibal plan to determine the
reliability of the mesh network?

> 2) She saves Write documents in the pendrive, then she opens them at
> home with KUbuntu and OpenOffice, then she saves the modified document
> in the pendrive and tries to open it in the XO with Write. She claims
> she can't open it even if the document was not modified.
>
> 3) Same scenario as 2), she saves it from KUbuntu as a pdf in a
> pendrive. She can't open it back in the XO (she gets a "blank page").
>
> 4) The previous cases are frustrating because she wants to be able to
> move back and forth between the XO and her (convenitonal) laptop.

I understand the frustration, do you think we could get copies of
those files and more details about the workflow?

About usb sticks, in versions earlier than 0.84 we are using a scheme
that is quite fragile, specially when using the same stick with
non-sugar computers.

I would recommend deleting the .olpc.store in the usb stick after
every usage in a non-sugar computer and see if weird things stop
happening. If this helps somehow, then we should find a way to
publicize this trick. Note that from Sugar 0.84 this is not needed.

> 5) SocialCalc save and restore doesn't work. After saving, there is a
> Journal entry but when they open it the information is not there.

Manu, know anything about it? I guess having a ticket with the
activity logs would help here.

> 6) She claims that files dissappear for no reason. This probably needs
> to be clarified. She discards the possibility of kids deleting files
> by accident.

Yes, this deserves further clarification. It's a very wide issue, so
we'll need a way to track all the different circumstances in which
data reliability can happen. The journal data store was rewritten in
0.84 with increasing reliability on mind, but I guess it will take a
while to update all machines to that or later versions of Sugar.

> Now the question is, how can we get these questions in reasonable
> shape so it is useful information for debugging?

That's the Million Laptops Question ;)

We are doing nice progress on this, but it's a really big task.

Thanks a lot,

Tomeu

> Thanks,
>
> Gabriel
>
>
> ---------- Mensaje reenviado ----------
>
> Quisiera que supieras que tenemos algunos problemas con varias cosas
> en la xo y me parece que son puntos importantes para que podamos
> trabajar mejor con la máquina. te paso algunos, y vos ves si pueden
> hacer algo al respecto.
> Las redes malla siguen funcionando mal, y desde que se actualizaron
> las máquinas es peor, son muy pocos los niños que logran entrar en la
> misma red.
> He tenido dificultades cuando guardo en el pen drive textos realizados
> en write, los leo con el open office y luego vuelvo a cargarlo en sus
>  máquinas y no me los lee, aún cuando no les realizo ninguna
> modificación. Probé cambiándole el formato a pdf, que sé que las xo lo
> leen, y no pude, cuando abro el pen en la xo y hago clic en el
> archivo, ahí puedo ver que está el texto (no lo abrió aún) y hago clic
> en retomar y qqueda la hoja en blanco. no tengo idea como voy  a hacer
> para que reparen el texto si ellos no lo bajan en la xo.
> yo no entiendo, pensé que al tener kubuntu y el open office podría
> trabajar igual que los niños, pasando de una máquina a la otra sin
> problemas. Necesito saber más para poder manejarme mejor.
> otra dificultad que encontré es que en el social calc, la planilla
> electrónica, a la mitad de los chicos se les borra la información al
> guardar, es decir, queda en el journal como guardada, pero los datos
> no aparecen en pantalla cuando abrís.
> Pasa mucho que les desaparecen los archivos, se les borran solos.
> Antes creía que eran ellos que los borraban sin querer, pero ahora me
> doy cuenta que es así.
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