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/
SoaS mailing list SoaS@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas
Thanks Bernie, Thanks Bert, Thanks Pato,
What a community!
Three answers complementing and confirming each other in the same morning!
(Deleted the copy to SoaS; I´m not a member.)
Now I believe I have a very clear picture.
If I have to reboot the computer from the usb drive, I believe it is very easy, I have no problem with that.
It was a frequently used emergency procedure in the days where it was common to try to start the computer the usual way and finding there was a problem.
But, it is extremely inconvenient, you lose the use of the computer for all other applications until you shut down and start again.
Many of the emulators we found when we started learning the XO without having one, worked like that.
One thing I still don´t understand:
Cannot Etoys To Go be expanded to offer the rest of the applications in the XO, not just Etoys?
Thank you all again,
Carlos Rabassa
On Jul 24, 2010, at 1:16 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
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/
SoaS mailing list SoaS@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas
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
squeakland@lists.squeakfoundation.org
-
Bert Freudenberg -
Carlos Rabassa -
Jecel Assumpcao Jr.