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

[Caroline Meeks]

Thanks Gary,

This was a fun email to wake up to. :)

Good luck and let us know how it goes!

Caroline

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 11:32 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




-- 
Caroline Meeks
Solution Grove
Caroline at SolutionGrove.com

617-500-3488 - Office
505-213-3268 - Fax
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