[IAEP] Need Live CD to take to Argentina

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Caryl,

On 4 Jan 2010, at 19:33, Caryl Bigenho wrote:

> Hi Gary, (a fellow Mac person... yea!)
> 
> I really want to do the Live CD rather than the USB version of SoaS... due to the difference in cost.  I can take them 20 CDs for what one usb stick would cost!
> 
> Can I just do it with a live CD?  The usb would be just for storing work and they can get their own.

You can certainly burn the Blueberry SoaS .iso onto a CD and boot from and use it (just use DiskUtility on the Mac). It will obviously forget everything once you reboot, though there's nothing stopping you from copying some of your work over to a USB stick before you reboot – not a very good workflow, and misses the whole 'Journal auto keeps your work for you' concept. You will also likely run into some issues as metadata related to a journal entry is no longer stored once you copy an entry onto a USB. This is great for interoperability with other operating systems (e.g. draw a PNG with paint or use Write to generate an .odt file, other OS's can edit the files just fine), but it can be a problem for many activities** without correct MIME and file extensions defined correctly as Sugar no longer recognises the file type at a later date.

** i.e. even my own Labyrinth work seems to fail on this test, even though I spent quite some time setting up a valid MIME type and file extension and custom svg icon; the file extension seems to go missing once an entry is transferred to a USB stick and haven't sussed that issue out yet :-( Walter seems to have Turtle Art working now, so I should go poke through his code to see what I am missing.

Sugar Journal workflow to/from USB has taken quite a usability hit since 0.84, though it is _much_ more reliable as long as you are using standard file formats (i.e great for cross-platform interoperability). Perhaps Journal metadata could be stored a some type of .sugar_metadata directory or file for each entry? This might not be elegant to some, but it's how most other OSs have dealt with extra metadata content.

Regards,
--Gary