[Sugar-devel] [IAEP] A Virtual Box solution that works with Sticks

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Caroline,

On 23 Sep 2009, at 20:10, Caroline Meeks wrote:

> The current status of the GPA is:
>
> The 4th grade classroom has a bank of 6 machines that can boot Sugar  
> on a Stick.
> The 4th grade specialist has one used laptop that can boot Sugar on  
> a Stick.
>
> Access to the PCs in the computer lab is problematic and likely not  
> to happen very much.
>
> There are two laptop carts of 25 bought last year Macbooks but  
> booting Sugar on a Stick is problematic. See https://answers.launchpad.net/soas/+question/81566 
>  for gory details.
>
> The teachers are enthusiastic!  The goal is to be able to use the  
> classroom bank of computers for "Center Work" that is time in the  
> day when students break into groups and work on different things in  
> different parts of the room. Sugar would become one center.  We also  
> want to be able to do whole class instruction by signing out a  
> laptop cart of Macbooks.
>
> We have sufficient privileges to install Virtual Box on the laptop  
> cart Macbooks.
>
> Can anyone think of way to use Virtual Box that would allow students  
> to use the info on their sticks so they can at another point in time  
> use a classroom computer and not always need to use the same MacBook?

Sure, you could just link the ~/default/datastore directory on the VM  
to the matching location on the stick. I'm not sure how the pretty way  
to do this would be (likely at this moment in time would be just  
tweaking the VMs to assume the stick was there). Pop stick in, then  
run the VM would be the workflow once set-up. From a future stand  
point, you'd likely want to push upstream for a feature where Sugar  
checked for valid (and correct version) data-stores on start-up  
(perhaps with a UI if more than one valid data-store was found), so  
any external media device, or perhaps even mounted network volume  
could become the default data-store for that session.

Regards,
--Gary