[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] Sugar on suse and virtualised appliances to cheat network connectivity

[David Farning]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 12:41 PM, David Van Assche <dvanassche at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, this Sunday marks a special day for us openSUSE folks, as we've now
> managed to get pretty much every activity behaving, including the underlying
> journaling and collaboration. We've got more than 50 activities packaged and
> included in the live cd/usb/dvd/virtual appliance. By using the incredible
> flexibility and power that oBS gives us, with just 2 people working on this
> project, we've managed move forwards fast and efficiently. So we are proud
> to announce that you can download the latest releases here:
> http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Education/images/
>
> As you can see, the main directory contains .vmdk virtual appliances which
> have been tested to run on both Vitualbox (Sun's free virtual container
> system) as well as vmware and its host of virtualisation software.

Very Cool! Although Sugar on Sugar on Suse in VirtualBox on my netbook
got a little slow.... But, it still seemed snappier than XP on the
same machine once I set up an anti-virus package.

> Advantages to running an appliance include bypassing wireless/wired network
> card drivers as the host can really be running pretty much anything from OSX
> to Windows.

Yep, let the parent OS worry about the hardware, let the VM worry
about the container, and let Sugar worry about helping kids learn.

 This will also be a way to get Sugar running on any Mac
> regardless, and pretty much and hardware. Its also a good way to run sugar
> on ed/ubuntu and debian based systems. Though a tad slower than on a native
> system (running without virtualisation), the advantages clearly outweigh the
> disadvantages. In the iso subdirectory you can find pure sugar or the full
> openSUSE-edu suite, containing a good 2.4 gigs of educational material
> including an icon to launch sugar directly from the desktop, a live LTSP
> system, iTalc, and a host of other interesting software. For more
> information on virtualisation, vmware, virtualbox and how to get sugar
> working within these environments have a look here:
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/VMware

Can you or one of the Sugar on Suse team update the rest of the
download links on wiki.sl.org

thanks
david

> Currently the only application not running is Read, which requires some
> updated GDK stuff from gnome 2.26, which is currently not entirely working
> with Sugar on openSUSE, but within the next weeks we should be able to
> resolve this. We are searching for more activities to include, as well as,
> seeing what we can do artistically at the different stages such as booting
> up, session manager, etc. Currently we automatically get the system to join
> the sugarlabs ejabberd server for collaboration, and after testing quite a
> few applications we can confidently say this works quite well. So its nice
> to see openSUSE being one of the more advanced Sugar environments now...
> seeing as a couple of weeks ago we had a very broken environment
>
> kind Regards,
> David Van Assche
> www.nubae.com
>
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