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

[Jeff Elkner]

Thanks, Walter.  It wasn't that I ever really left the fold (at least
not in spirit), it was just that I wasn't teaching much programming
for the last several years.  That is changing in a big way now.  My
school is now offering high school students a dual-enrolled (high
school and community college credits at the same time) Associates
degree in CS concurrent with their high school diploma.  With
Virginia's fairly new K-12 mandatory CS standards, combined with the
effective victory of Python in the "Which programming language should
we use in our high school programming classes?" battle, I'm now in a
good place to resume work developing an educational program that uses
Python. Sugar, naturally, is a great fit for that.

Cheers,
Jeff


Let's work together to create a just and sustainable world!

On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 7:09 PM Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 2:58 PM James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
>>
>> 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/
>> _______________________________________________
>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>
>
> Sorry to be late on this thread. Busy work week.
>
> Jeff, great to have you back in the fold.
>
> James, I may have a patch (if I can find it) to the WeDo activity that I used to maintain with a major speed up. I'll try to dig it up. Or were you using the WeDo plugin?
>
> regards.
>
> -walter
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
>