[Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 94

[Jim Simmons]

Jonas,

As an Activity developer I want to have my stuff run well for as many
children as possible.  As an XO owner I want my XO set up as much as
possible like the XOs out in the field, so I can be sure that children
with XOs have the best experience possible.  .82 has some serious
deficiencies: no saving of custom metadata across reboots (so the Read
Activity is unable to remember what page you left off on), no support
for epub texts and poor support for DJVU texts, etc.  So I definitely
want to upgrade, but not to get to a place where my Activity users
cannot easily follow.

I did try SoaS on my XO awhile back.  Sound didn't work at that time.
I didn't bother to report it as a bug because I figured that the XO is
a known quantity and anyone testing SoaS on the XO will have exactly
the same problems I have, for the same reasons.

So the real answer to your question is, how will the other kids
upgrade and when will they be able to do it?

James Simmons

> Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:03:17 +0200
> From: Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk>
> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] SLOBs Position on SoaS
> To: sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> Message-ID: <20090916150317.GE23106 at jones.dk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Hi Jim,
>
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 09:31:19AM -0500, Jim Simmons wrote:
>>I have a similar question.  What I want to know is, when I am finally
>>able to upgrade my XO from .82 to something better, will I use SoaS to
>>do it?  Or will I be able to do upgrades over the network as I have
>>done in the past?
>
> I believe the answer depends on your definition of "something better".
>
> ".82" most probably means a release of the distribution created and
> still maintained by the OLPC project, targeted specifically for the XO
> laptops.
>
> The "better" thing might be the official successor to that release, done
> by same organisation.
>
> The "better" thing might be to abandon that distribution and switch to
> some alternative.  The "better" alternative might be SoaS, it might be
> Debian, it might be Ubuntu, it might be...
>
>
> Did you already decide that SoaS is your preferred successor, and all
> you ask is _when_ SoaS will be stable enough for you (perhaps you then
> need to clarify what parts you depend on and what you can let go of)?
>
> Or do you ask the SoaS developers if their system is "better" than those
> of their competitors (a somewhat rhetorical question, I believe)?
>
> Or did you ask _all_ distributors of Sugar which is considered the
> "better" alternative to the dated ".82" provided by OLPC?
>
>
> Regards,
>
>  - Jonas