[Sugar-devel] Sugar-devel Digest, Vol 11, Issue 89

[Bill Bogstad]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 4:29 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 10:17, Elena of Valhalla
> <elena.valhalla at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 4:51 PM, Jim Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> [...] Fedora 11
>>> with the included Sugar environment, [...]
>>> This does not give the child all the advantages of SoaS, but it's
>>> probably far from useless.
>>
>> I wonder how hard would it be to configure such fedora to look for an
>> USB key with SoaS on it and mount its home partition at login time:
>> this would help keeping some of the advantages of SoaS (the ability to
>> work from any computer anywhere while keeping your journal, for one)
>> with the added convenience of being able to use older hardware.
>
> Shouldn't be too hard, this has been proposed in the past but nobody
> never got to implement it. I think it will be useful in some use
> cases, including thin clients.

Writing the code/scripts to do this is moderately easy.  IF the
version of the base OS and Sugar on the stick is identical to the one
on the hard drive.  Anything else is a potential headache.  For
example:

Sugar has already gone through at least one  journal format change
which was not compatible.  I think the journal format was auto
upgraded the first time you ran the new software.  Which is fine, IF
you are going to stick with that version of Sugar.  Very bad, if you
plan to take your stick home (or just boot from  it) and end run the
previous version of Sugar.

There are also potential problems with system supplied (fructose?)
activities, being different on the stick vs. what is on the hard
drive.

Then there is honey (home directory activities) vs. glucose (core
sugar environment) compatibility issues.

Place some limits on what has to be supported and what scenarios you
are willing to have cause
disaster and maybe something will happen.  Would enough people be
happy with "Sucrose + Ribose must be identical for this to work" to
make it worth spending time on?  Is there someplace
obvious that one could look at in a user's home directory to figure
out what version of Sugar is
on the stick in order to refuse to run if versions are different?

What should happen when a stick is  not installed?  Do you want this
to be a 'normal' Fedora workstation when the Sugar stick isn't
installed?  Or a hard drive based SoaS install?  Or a Fedora with
Sugar install on the hard drive?  I can probably come up with a half
dozen other
possible use cases.  Clarify your desires/use cases and maybe someone
(maybe even me) will
spend some time on it.

Bill Bogstad