[squeakland] [SoaS] [realness] Sugar On A Stick for Macintosh

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 24.07.2010, at 12:11, Bernie Innocenti wrote:

> (cc'ing the soas list)
> 
> El Sat, 24-07-2010 a las 10:07 -0400, Carlos Rabassa escribió:
>> Thanks, Bernie,
>> 
>> Hope my request was clear.
>> 
>> I would like to hear in plain English,  suitable for retired old
>> engineers like me,  teachers, relatives and volunteers whether or not
>> Sugar On A Stick is ready to be used by the general public without any
>> special knowledge or precautions.
> 
> I'm not sure about it because I've not yet tested the latest release
> SoaS-3 Mirabelle. This question would be better answered by the SoaS
> folks.
> 
> 
>> If the answer is yes,  I would like to know if it is OK to use Windows
>> and if it is OK to use MacOS10.
> 
> I'm even less sure about this. I know there were problems *booting*
> SoaS-2 on Intel Macs. Maybe these have been solved now.

I don't think so. Or it has been silently fixed and not advertised. But Mac support would be a major achievement so I think it would have been mentioned. The only way I was ever able to run Sugar on a Mac was using a PC emulator. Personally I still wouldn't boot my Mac into SoaS even if it worked. I find VMs much more convenient.

>> As I mentioned to you when we met in person,  I used many times Etoys
>> To Go.
>> 
>> I am very impressed with how easy it is to use and how well it works.
>> 
>> You may start an Etoys project in Windows or in Mac and switch many
>> times in the middle of the project to different computers.
> 
>> Some may be using Windows and some MacOS.
>> 
>> You may store the projects in the same pendrive.
>> 
>> Everything is seamless and leaves no traces in the finished project
>> about its origin,  created in multiple machines with different
>> operating systems.
> 
> 
> If SoaS is not yet as easy to use as Etoys To Go, maybe the SoaS team
> could look at how it's done and take inspiration.
> 
> I'd be very interested in the technical details myself, but I'm focusing
> on Dextrose and I have no time now.

For those who do not know Etoys-To-Go, it differs from SoaS in that you do not need to boot your machine from it. Instead, it packs virtual machines for Mac, Windows, and Linux, which all run the same system image and save to the same directory. You just double-click.

Get it from
	http://squeakland.org/download/
and unzip onto a USB stick (or anywhere really).

It would be cool if SoaS had VMs, too (e.g. Qemu or VirtualBox), maybe like
	http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/qemupuppy/
which allows booting and emulation using the same disk image. Though emulation-only would be simpler to set up. Is anyone still preparing emulator disk images like there were for OLPC builds?

- Bert -

>> May I expect something similar with the added advantage of being able
>> to use all the programs distributed for the XO?
> 
> I think that's the stated goal, but I don't know for sure how close to
> it SoaS-3 got.
> 
> Since SoaS-3 ships the same version of Sugar used in Dextrose, I would
> expect compatibility with anything from activities.sugarlabs.org to be
> very high. During our testing, we've found just 2-3 obscure activities
> that were misbehaving on Sugar 0.88 and we're already working to fix
> them.
> 
> -- 
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
> \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
> 
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