[Sugar-devel] Initial tests of Sugar on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

[James Cameron]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 11:52:34PM +0000, Walter Bender wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 7:44 AM Tony Anderson <[1]tony_anderson at usa.net> wrote:
> 
>     On April 27, 2018 I downloaded the ubuntu-18.04-desktop-amd64.iso. I
>     generated a boot usb drive with dd. The usb stick was used to install
>     Ubuntu 18.04 LTS alongside Windows 10. Sugar was installed using sudo
>     apt-get install sucrose.
> 
>      From [2]http://activities.sugarlabs.org/activities, I scraped a list of
>     the most recent versions of each activity. This list contained 714
>     entries. However a number turned out to be empty or duplicates. These
>     reduced the list to 516 activities.
> 
>     I them matched each item against the repostories in
>     '[3]http://github.com/sugarlabs'. There were corresponding repositories for
>     222 of the 516 activities. All of these repositories (.zip) were
>     downloaded to the Positivo. One turned out to be empty:
>     lybniz_graph_plotter.
> 
>     The 221 repositories were unzipped and an attempt was made to build a
>     bundle with 'python setup.py dist_xo'. This process failed with
>     activities which included 'from sugar.activity import activity'. These
>     have not yet been ported to GTK3. This reduced the number of activities
>     to 106. Each of these activities was launched from the Home View on the
>     Positivo. Of these 91 executed as expected. The others failed to start
>     for various reasons.
> 
> Did you try installing the GTK2 toolkit packages? I would think that the GTK2
> activities would still run with the toolkit installed. 

You can do this, but not from the Ubuntu 18.04 archive.  Custom packages.

Here's what happened; Rsvg upstream dropped GTK+ 2 support, this
cascaded to Debian then Ubuntu dropping Sugar Toolkit for GTK+ 2.

https://bugs.debian.org/790156 (Calculate)
https://bugs.debian.org/790157 (Record)
https://bugs.debian.org/790158 (Sugar Toolkit for GTK+ 2)

Previous package names are python-rsvg and python-sugar-toolkit, and
they were last included in Ubuntu 17.10.

Also GStreamer 0.10 is no longer maintained upstream, and has been
removed from Ubuntu, so any GTK+ 2 activity that uses "import gst"
won't work without custom packages.

I'm yet to decide if my OLPC OS build will have these custom packages.

Storage cost of Sugar Toolkit for GTK+ 2 and all these custom
dependencies is trivial compared to the eMMC and SSD design sizes
available in factory.

>     The details are in the attached spreadsheet - all normal disclaimers
>     apply. The comment 'help' means I didn't really understand how to work
>     the activity.
> 
>     Some general comments. The availability of Sugar on an LTS version of a
>     major distribution is an opportunity to demonstrate that the value of
>     Sugar is not limited to the XO. Unfortunately, the method to launch
>     Sugar is not obvious. You must click on your user panel to show the
>     password entry. Below, there is a 'gear' icon. You must click on that to
>     choose Sugar. Then you need to enter your Ubuntu password.
> 
>     On the first run, you are asked about colors, gender and age. In this
>     age with every site collecting private information for sale - this does
>     not make a good first impression.
> 
>     Sugar on Ubuntu launches to the (empty) Journal View! Ubuntu itself
>     provides a built-in set of welcome slides to introduce its new features.
>     Sadly, Sugar launches to a brick wall. The user needs to know to display
>     the Home View (using F3 or the Frame - F6).
> 
>     The Sugar install is minimal compared to what we have become used to.
>     The Home View has 5 activities: Browse, Calculate, Chat, Pippy, and
>     Write. Installed but not favorites are ImageViewer, Jukebox, Log, Read,
>     and Terminal. Presumably users are expected to install additional
>     activities from the 91 tested above. However, in general, these bundles
>     are not available on [4]activities.sugarlabs.org and require some technical
>     expertise to install from github.
> 
>     On a positive note: connection to the internet and to the schoolserver
>     was smooth. The Neighborhood View worked as expected. Downloads from the
>     school server to the Journal worked as normal. As far as I could tell,
>     the working activities showed normal screen coverage.
> 
>     On Sugar with Ubuntu, you are your Ubuntu user - not olpc. Activities
>     available to all Sugar users on a laptop are in
>     /usr/share/sugar/activities. Activities installed by
>     sugar-install-bundle are in /home/yourusername/Activities and are only
>     available to you. With some technical expertise you can copy an activity
>     to the /usr/share/sugar/Activities directory to share it with other users.
> 
>     Tony
> 
>     _______________________________________________
>     Sugar-devel mailing list
>     [5]Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>     [6]http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
> 
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> [7]http://www.sugarlabs.org
> [8]
> 
> References:
> 
> [1] mailto:tony_anderson at usa.net
> [2] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/activities
> [3] http://github.com/sugarlabs
> [4] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/
> [5] mailto:Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> [6] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
> [7] http://www.sugarlabs.org/
> [8] http://www.sugarlabs.org/

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-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/