[Sugar-devel] Sugar on Debian 10 (Buster)?

[James Cameron]

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 11:00:07AM -0400, Jeff Elkner wrote:
> Thanks for the quick responses,  Chihurumnaya and James!  Yes,
> pressing F3 did the trick.

Yay!

> I should have remembered that from my OLPC days, but it has been so
> long since I've used Sugar.  Incidentally, I had forgotten that I
> lent my last two XO4's to a former student so that he could
> experiment with mesh networking.  He is finished with them and is
> returning them to me.  A quick look at:
> 
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/18.04.0
> 
> reveals that the latest Sugar update for my XO's will be running
> Ubuntu 18.04,

No, it's not for your XOs.

> but also that it has the same issues I'm seeing in the
> Debian Sid VM with Metacity, I guess?

No, I fixed it.

> James, I can't agree with you from personal experience that "Rasbian
> has a very high barrier to entry unless the microSD card is
> purchased already loaded (e.g. NOOBS)."  On the contrary, the
> website instructions for creating your own microSD card are super
> easy using etcher (https://www.balena.io/etcher/).  When you first
> boot from the resulting microSD, it automatically runs a script that
> expands the file system to fill the card, so the steps are really
> just:
> 
> 1. Install Etcher.
> 2. Download the Raspian image file.
> 3. Write it to the microSD card.
> 4. Put it in your Raspberry Pi, turn it on, and follow directions.
> 5. Enjoy your new operating system!
> 
> That's precisely what I mean by a "user friendly recipe", since it
> is cross platform, does not even require knowledge of the Unix CLI,
> and works like a charm.

You most likely have more skills than the people I've trained in this
recipe.  We must think of the people who are prevented by disadvantage
from gaining these skills.

But my question was answered, thanks.  I now know what level of skill
you are aiming for, and that means we can collaborate further.

It's a how long is a piece of string argument.

Given that level of skill, a *truly* beginner friendly installation
recipe that you have as a goal should be (a) install Raspbian, (b)
install Sugar.

Step (a) is already well documented by the Raspberry Pi Foundation,
and many Raspberry Pi are purchased with preloaded Raspbian.

Step (b) recipe is here;
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/blob/master/docs/debian.md

It works now for Debian Stretch, and when Debian Buster is released it
should be the same.

Step (b) could be improved by writing a script to do the install, and
fix any of the bugs that haven't been fixed in the Debian packages.
Or the bugs might be reported to Debian instead.  I prefer the latter,
because the rising tide lifts all boats.

If you begin to do this, you'll probably be the first person doing it
for years.  Thank you!

> Last thing to report -- After Chihurumnaya so kindly and patiently
> reminded my about F3 (which I really should have remembered :-(, I
> was able to get to the main activity window and see the four
> activities.  Three of them worked, but the browse activity did not.

Also test the hidden activities.  You can see these with F3 Ctrl-2.

> I think is is really important to fix the Metacity problem so that
> you see the proper welcome screen when you launch Sugar.  I'm not
> going to try to push things onto Debian stretch.

Reporting the problems against Debian Stretch can still be useful, as
the problem may not yet be fixed in Debian Buster, and the problem may
end up being fixed in Debian Stretch updates if it is sufficiently
severe or security related.

But you are correct that reporting against Debian Buster is a good
thing to do as well.

> Buster is looking like it will become the stable distro sometime
> this Summer.  After that settles would be a good time to talk about
> a deployment recipe for buster.  Since I'm a school teacher and
> won't have students during June, July and August, I'm really hoping
> to ramp this up next September in any case.

Great.  Looking forward to it.

I spent a few hours yesterday in a volunteer teaching team applying
prior Turtle Blocks learning to Lego WeDo kits.  Mixed class of three
different grades, in a remote school.  The class teacher stayed
involved, so we've got useful knowledge transfer happening.  Being in
the southern hemisphere, I'll have students during those months, but
it's only part time.

> Thanks!
> Jeff

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