[Sugar-devel] Had a chance to try SoaS in anger...

[David Farning]

Gary,

Didn't you know everything done in anger works out better then expected:)

david

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 10:32 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> ... and it worked :-)
>
> Just back from a 3hr+ meeting with a potential school deployment,
> they'd contacted me a few weeks back regarding the desire for a 50 XO
> initial trial to improve e-learning skills (looking at about 100
> total). Email Q/A with him were good until OLPC dropped the 'change
> the world' program last week (killed off any new 100 laptop size
> deployments)...
>
> Any way, seeing as I do have 3 OLPC development XOs here, and he was
> also interested when I mentioned the possibility of SoaS as an
> alternative for running Sugar, I went ahead with the demo. I took a
> chance and took a Soas-200902061045.iso USB SoaS, and also a live CD
> of it. Flying blind as neither of which can I actually test myself –
> I'm all PPC Mac – the CD I burnt with Disk Utility on the Mac, and the
> USB stick I danced a magic Fedora based XO dance (pleased to see no
> USB re-format was necessary).
>
> He had 2 oldish laptops for the SoaS test, one could not boot from USB
> (so we used the CD on it), the other had a BIOS option for USB
> Harddisk which turned out to work great. CD booting was quite slow (as
> expected) perhaps twice as slow as booting a real XO. USB booting was
> real fast (perhaps two or three times faster than a real XO - but I
> didn't time it).
>
> - Both machines ran Sugar very quickly to what I'm used to (vs. the XOs)
> - The neighborhood showed lots of wireless APs, but unfortunately
> would not associate with any (just pulsed for a bit, no password
> dialogue)
> - No sound support (was trying to demo eToys car honking code at one
> point)
> - Laptop displays both correctly auto powered off after usual idle time
> - Both seemed to be showing the correct battery level status in their
> device frames
> - Write would have been nice to show on the larger laptop screens, but
> doesn't launch (known missing libraries)
> - Turtle Art looks great on the big screen :-)
> - Tried to resume some journal entries during the demo (USB booted
> machine) but the Journal entries just vanished from the journal as
> they were clicked
> - Both machines had sporadic semi-corrupt graphics on seemingly random
> icons/widgets, I assumed some low level gfx drive issue. Not many
> glitches, just a few.
> - No crashes for either machine, both were running for at least
> several hours.
> - Fonts were not quite large enough, but were at least readable :-)
>
> PC Laptop specs were:
>
>        Compaq nx9030 HP
>        Intel pentium M 1.73Ghz
>        1.2Gb ram
>
>        Compaq nx6110 HP
>        Intel pentium M 1.73Ghz
>        512Mb ram
>
> He knew that SoaS was very much a work in development, but was very
> pleased to see it working (and has taken a copy of the .iso to demo to
> others involved).
>
> Most time was spent on the XO's showing off the mesh collaboration
> features (write, maze, colors!, distance are great for this), music,
> speech etc, and going through most of the activities I'd had installed
> (~20-30) – so he got to see a stable Sugar with 'all the bits' working
> as well as the pre-release SoaS taster.
>
> Just thought I should post,
> --Gary
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