Carlos Rabassa wrote on Sat, 24 Jul 2010 13:50:17 -0400
Cannot Etoys To Go be expanded to offer the rest of the applications in the XO, not just Etoys?
Squeak (and any systems built on top of it such as Etoys, Scratch, Seaside, Croquet...) does not actually run on your computer and operating system, but on an imaginary computer we call the Virtual Machine. If you have a simulator for this VM which runs on your computer and operating system, then you can have Squeak on it and all Squeak applications. Etoys-to-go includes not only all the Squeak stuff, but also three VM implementations: one for Windows, another for Mac OS X and a third for Linux machines. So it won't work if you use OS/2 or Solaris as your operating systems, but it would be trivial to include these options in Etoys-to-go.
To have the equivalent funcionality for Sugar, you could have a simulator for the PC (Qemu, Boochs and VirtualBox are a few of the options) and include a file simulating a disk with Linux, Sugar and any Sugar applications you might want as well as versions of the selected simulator that run on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. I don't see any problems, but am not aware of anybody doing this now (early Sugar releases did have disk images for Qemu, but you had to install and configure the simulator yourself).
Sugar-on-a-stick means actually rebooting your computer to use Linux, Sugar and the applications. This has several complications since there is a lot of variation on how systems can boot and what hardware drivers Linux needs to have (for the simulated PC route, the drivers only need to understand the simulated peripheral devices, not the ones in the actual computer). In the Squeak world we have a project called SqueakNOS which can boot directly on bare PC hardware (though it still needs to simulate the different processor of the VM) and it has all the complications of Sugar-on-a-stick (even more - at least Linux has been around for 18 years and lots of people have added drivers to it).
I hope I have not made things even more confusing. There are several ways to combine Squeak, Sugar, the various operating systems and simulators. But the Squeak specific solution of Etoys-to-go can't be used directly for any other Sugar application.
-- Jecel