[Sugar-devel] GSoC projects

[Iain Brown Douglas]

On Fri, 2015-03-20 at 11:49 +1100, James Cameron wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 10:25:55PM +0000, Iain Brown Douglas wrote:
> > Thank you for taking the time to make a thoughtful contribution.
> > Perhaps you will forgive me if I brainstorm this a bit.
> 
> Yep, no worries.  Interesting, but you went off into areas I didn't
> have any comment on.
> 
> I do have a comment on the accessibility of Sugar for new users ......
> 
> Because of this complexity you are trying to solve, bootable USB
> drives are more trouble than they are worth.  Bootable media is more
> of a purists approach for reasons of Sugar performance, and ease of
> production by developers.
> 
> A different approach would be to provide a virtual machine _and_
> virtualisation software _and_ all the necessary configuration files so
> that the user is not exposed to the virtualisation.

I agree this would be ideal for a committed potential user, and I would
love to see it.

However, (and I believe I am more of an old git than a purist) the CD =>
USB stick has some human merits.

Many people can afford the time to have-a-go at downloading a CD.

You can give it to people, to use or demo.

If you like it, zap-it-to-a-stick, has attractions, *if* a 3 minute
video might cover it.

Giving a child a physical stick is nice. Constructionist.

Regards

Iain
> 
> Then it would be one big download in .exe format for Windows, and .dmg
> format for Mac OS X.  The user would click on it and it would show
> them Sugar after a short delay.
> 
> I know Thomas Gilliard has worked on some of the components of this,
> in particular manually prepared virtual machine images, but it would
> need to be a complete packaged solution, not a series of complex
> fragments as it is now.
>