[Sugar-devel] Maintaining the sugar-live-build

[Martin Guy]

On 26/10/2020, Chihurumnaya Ibiam <ibiamchihurumnaya at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Fedora Soas boots into a lightdm login screen without ever telling you
>> that the required username is "liveuser".
> Yes there's a discussion for the bug here [...]

Thanks for that

> I don't know how to build SOAS images yet but you
> can find F29 SOAS here
> <https://archive.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora-secondary/releases/29/Spins/i386/iso/>,
> which supports 32-bit as you said Fedora no longer supports 32-bit.

Yes, mandating 64 bit systems is a disappointing trend. Ubuntu's
last32-bit LTS was in 2016, Redhat in
Me, I think the CPu manufacturers are bribing the distro maintainers
to make old hardware unusable to encourage people to buy new, but then
I'm old and cynical :) It's more likely that frontline developers are
surrounded by monster machines and don't believe anyone has crappy old
rubbish any more.
  I had similar battles with the Debian ARM crowd, who were anxious to
srop support of armv4 in favour of armv5, just to be able to use the
Count Leading Zeros instruction, but thereby wiping out the cheapest
and most needy target machines. Similarly, the first Debian ARM
hard-float port targetted VFPv7, and as a result the Raspberry Pi
project had to no option but to make an entire new Debian repository
and recompile everything for VFPv6, a huge waste of time caused by one
silly decision... and this from developers of the "Universal Operating
System"!
  In the case of Sugar, enabling the widest deployment on the cheapest
machines with the least user effort seems to achieve its goals more
than giving a few percent of extra speed to power users.
  However, providing both 32- and 64- bit images is an acceptable compromise.

> I think that if you want to make 32-bit images it'll be for your own use

See above. When *you* live in a poor area and people keep bringing you
ancient laptops that they've found in the rubbish, maybe you'll think
differently.

I'm a seasoned developer and building my own images is fairly
straightforward, but most people don't know how to write an ISO image
to a USB stick; maybe to a CD if they are techies.

> I agree with James re [not, I presume] including more activities

Yes, SLB is written by and for developers and for advanced users, it
seems to me; instead of being a distro ni itself but a meta-distro: a
kit for creating custom distributions. In this light, keeping it
minimal does make sense.

What I was looking for was the easiest way to put a well-furnished
Sugar on an old laptop with the least effort, to be able to evaluate
it as a solution to offer to normal people, to make the luminary work
of Papert, Negroponte et al more of a social reality instead of having
every UI be, essentially, a worse version of Xerox PARC in the 70's.

What I found is that nothing works. I'd expected something of the
quality of the Morphix Combined Gamer live CD (2004!); instead I found
only one that had promise, and that needed more effort from me than I
had expected. Imagine the experience of a normal user trying to
achieve my goal: disappointment and abandon of Sugar as unusable,
which goes against the goal of its diffusion.

However, making available well.furnished images worldwide with the
publicity for them that sugarlabs has in this field accomplished my
goal, not in my area but worldwide, and that's worth the relatively
small amount of work that seems necessary to achieve that.

As well as the honour, of course!

Does that make any sense?

   M